Chapter III: The Kind Companions (1)

I

Agatha would have called Hubert’s proposal of marriage a thoroughly British affair. Discarding all superficial eloquence, he told his tale of love in the baldest, most colloquial terms. Lois was profoundly impressed. This lapse from fluency was exactly calculated to convince her of his earnestness. The emotion must be strong indeed before which Hubert could be dumb. She searched about in her memory for the speech which she had prepared for the occasion.

“I think,” she said, “that my feelings toward you are all that you could wish.”

Her candour charmed him. He caught her to his heart with but a passing fear that she would find him deficient in originality. Then, invaded for a few moments by a genuine emotion of self-forgetfulness, he kissed her a second time with no misgivings at all. They were truly happy.

A strange noise, a pervading, humming throb, at length shook them out of their preoccupation. The whole air seemed full of it.

Lois exclaimed:

“What can that be? Is it a threshing machine?”

They were in the library, a room which they habitually frequented since the epoch of the Dante paper. Moving to one of the windows they looked down into the avenue. John and the head gardener stood together gazing upward. Other gardeners were seen running in the distance; they also stared at the sky. Lois and Hubert threw up the sash and leaned far out of the window just in time to see the tail of an airship disappear over the house. It was the first Lois had seen and she nearly fell out of the window in her excitement. Hubert, after a second’s consideration, decided that he must be excited too. Earlier in his courtship it would have been more impressive to remain calm, but just now he had better fall in with his lady’s mood.

“We can see it from the terrace,” she cried, and flew down to the south side of the house.

Gerald and Agatha were discovered there, gaping intelligently, while Cynthia and Sir Thomas were seen advancing from the rose garden at a pace which, in any other couple, might have been a run. Lady Clewer and Miss Barrington hung out of a window on the first floor, and everyone enjoined everyone else to look at the airship. The elusive machine turned suddenly north, however, and disappeared behind some trees. A short discussion was held as to the best vantage point from which to see it again. Lois suggested James’s studio, which had a window looking that way. She ran indoors again, up the main staircase, down a long gallery, through a baize door into the kitchen wing, up more stairs, noisy and uncarpeted, through a corridor and up a narrow garret ladder into a spacious loft running the whole length of the wing. The company panted at her heels.

The loft was not entirely given over to James. The darker end of it was used as a box room, and old luggage, gay with the labels of continental hotels, was piled there. Here also was Cynthia’s bassinette, a high nursery chair, bed tables, and other less sightly appliances for nursing the sick. Everything, in fact, which the household did not normally require. At the farther end of the room, by the large window, many canvases were stacked, and a small table was covered with rags and brushes. There was an easel and a moulting armchair, condemned in the Lyndon nurseries. Here sat James, looking more peculiar than usual, in a strange chintz pinafore which his stepmother had forced him to assume while painting. He spoilt his clothes so. He was peacefully smoking a pipe, and at their incursion he rose and retreated as far as possible, eyeing them suspiciously.

“May we come in, James?” asked Lois, tapping the door after she had entered the room. “We want to see the airship.”

He looked in alarm at the furniture by the door and asked:

“What airship?”

“We don’t accuse you of having one here,” said Cynthia, pushing her way in. “It happens to be outside in the sky. I don’t suppose you noticed it.”

“No, I didn’t,” he agreed, glancing out of the window.

“My dear James,” remonstrated Marian, as she toiled up the last of the garret stairs, “how unobservant you are! It’s making a tremendous noise.”

James paid no attention to this, but moved to the door and looked anxiously down the stairs demanding:

“How many more people are going to come up?”

Agatha, who never hurried, was achieving the taxing ascent under the escort of Hubert, John, Gerald, and Sir Thomas Bragge. Their voices floated up beyond the well of the narrow stairs. Sir Thomas could be heard remarking sententiously:

“The future of the world lies in the air, Lady Clewer.”

“Yes, but . . .” panted Agatha, “I don’t see how it can ever be really safe . . .”

“From the military point of view, Agatha, safety isn’t always the first consideration. In the next big war . . .”

“Oh, come, Blair! Isn’t that rather an exploded idea? Just consider! It would be almost impossible to use the things without endangering the lives and property of non-combatants. . . .”

Agatha appeared in the doorway, a little flushed with so much unusual exertion, and began at once to apologize to James for their intrusion.

“I do hope you weren’t working very hard and that we are not interrupting you,” she said. “But there is this airship outside, which we want to see. Come and look at it.”

She caught his arm and drew him to the window where the others were already gathered. They stood watching the marvel until it disappeared behind the low, wooded hills on the horizon. Whereupon, without more ado, the majority of the group prepared to depart. But Agatha was determined that for once a modicum of civility should be paid to James. She asked him, with her most engaging smile, if he would not show them some of his pictures. She assured him that it would give them all great pleasure, ignoring tranquilly the furtive signals whereby Marian sought to prevent such a catastrophe. James looked surprised but not ill pleased. He took a canvas from the pile and set it on the easel in a good light.

The party viewed it in silent embarrassment and nobody ventured upon comment until Sir Thomas rushed into the breach.

“Well, Mr. Clewer, and what is this supposed to be?” he inquired with uneasy geniality.

Cynthia tittered and James explained that it was a bit of country beyond Boar’s Hill.

“I didn’t know you painted landscapes,” said Agatha. “I . . . I rather like all those telegraph posts going up and down.”

“Oh, but James,” exclaimed the stepmother, “you have done nicer ones than that. Do show us one of your portraits.”

“I will in a minute,” said James. “You can’t have finished looking at this yet.”

They stared for a little longer at the mustard fields and ploughed furrows beyond Boar’s Hill. Lois glanced at Hubert in extreme anxiety. She had staked much upon his first view of James’s work, for she had hinted more than once that she thought it might have merit. Hubert’s face was perfectly expressionless, and her heart sank. At last they were permitted to see something else. James put up a picture of a man driving a traction engine, explaining:

“That’s old Jellybelly.”

“Old what?” demanded Gerald, who was looking happier than he had done since he came to Lyndon.

“He used to drive the traction engine when they were making the new road across the park,” explained the artist. “His real name was Jellifew, but the men in his gang called him Jellybelly because of the shape of his stomach.”

John gave a shout of laughter.

“Lord, yes, I remember him! This is uncommonly good, James! Best thing you ever did in your life.”

“Do you think so?” said James seriously. “Now I don’t think it is, myself. But it’s one of the best I’ve done.”

“But you ought to have seen this old man,” said Agatha to the others. “He was like somebody out of a Russian novel. And with this head like Samuel Johnson. I’d forgotten how impressive he was.”

“I don’t remember him,” said Marian coldly.

“A most striking portrait,” murmured Gerald. “What do you make of it, Ervine? You know about these things, and I don’t.”

“It’s . . . well observed . . .” said Hubert after a pause.

“The composition is rather unusual, don’t you think?” queried Lois hopefully.

“Possibly,” rejoined Hubert, bland and enigmatic.

Marian, who found the whole subject of Jellybelly a little coarse, now determined that they must not disturb James any longer and swept them all from the room. She was more than annoyed with Agatha for exhibiting him in this way; it had been perfectly unnecessary and very embarrassing for everyone. James took himself much too seriously already, without any encouragement from his sister-in-law. She pursued Agatha and Gerald out on to the terrace in order to tell them so.

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” she began, “I really do think it’s a pity to take too much notice of James’s pictures. You must know, with all your experience, Mr. Blair, how difficult these cases are. They are so liable to get a tremendous opinion of themselves.”

“What cases?” asked Gerald in surprise. “Is there anything the matter with him?”

Marian raised her eyebrows as though she had expected more perception from a London specialist.

“Well—he’s queer,” she said, pursing her lips.

“How do you mean? Neurotic? He doesn’t look it.”

“Not neurotic. Not that. No!” Marian shook her head sadly. “But we’ve always had a great deal of trouble with poor James. Mentally, you know, he has never been quite like other people.”

“Really? Well, that mightn’t be altogether a disadvantage. I don’t think I should expect the man who painted those pictures to have a mind quite like other people. But hasn’t he been off, studying in Paris, like any other lad?”

“Oh, yes. He was in Paris. But not alone. He was very carefully looked after, poor boy. It was necessary. He can’t really look after himself. He made no friends of his own age, for instance, as any other young man would have done.”

“He had very little chance,” said Agatha.

“My dear Agatha! He could have made friends perfectly well if he had wished. What was there to stop him?”

“Everything, I should have thought. His peculiar position. The supervision under which he lived. His own eccentric manner. . . .”

“There you are,” said Marian triumphantly. “That’s what I said. It was his own fault that he did not make friends. His queer ways put them off, and no wonder.”

“He looks extraordinary,” observed Gerald thoughtfully. “But that doesn’t prove him to be without ability at his own job. Many men of very exceptional powers have been rather strange looking.”

“I’m afraid,” sighed Marian, “that long experience has taught me not to hope too much. It isn’t exceptional ability that ails poor James.”

She hastened off to dictate letters to Miss Barrington.

“Who says that fellow is mentally deficient?” inquired Gerald testily.

“Oh, nobody of any consequence,” replied his cousin. “No doctor has, of that I am convinced. It was an established family legend when I first met him, and it probably has as much truth as most family legends. He certainly was very much more peculiar when he was younger. What do you think of him, Gerald?”

“I like him. Really very much. There’s no sort of temperamental humbug about him, is there?”

“There isn’t, certainly.”

“A little direct at times, perhaps. But it’s a good fault. You like him, don’t you?”

“I do,” she confessed. “I find him a very restful companion. But I cannot understand how he comes to be John’s brother.”

Gerald said nothing to this, an issue which disappointed her. Irritably aware of his unspoken disapproval she was always seeking to entrap him into some criticism of her house or her husband which could be challenged and resented. But he would not give her an opening. Only from his silences did she guess his hostility to Lyndon and its proprietor. She had in consequence no chance of telling him that he was impertinent, a thing which she was longing to do.

Their estrangement had grieved her sharply and she was truly anxious to punish him for all the disquiet he was causing her. She had never supposed that four years could bring no changes. She was steeled against the shock of hearing that he loved another, although she would hardly have been surprised to discover that he still loved herself. But for this mute, melancholy condemnation she had not been prepared. At one moment he would treat her with all the old friendliness; on the next he would harden and draw away. She was most desirous of an open dispute in which she could tax him with intolerance. Such an encounter would relieve them both. She would demand whether he expected her to remain seventeen all her life. She would force him to blame John, to blame Lyndon, for the changes which he thus condemned. Then she would hurl at him all the dignified wrath of a loyal wife. She began to compose some very scathing sentences as they paced side by side toward the Dutch garden.

Sheltered amid its clipped hedges another pair of kind companions wandered in close conversation.

“A queer chap, your younger brother, what?” quoth Sir Thomas. “I understand from your mother that he’s a little . . .”

He tapped his forehead and Cynthia laughed. She made no attempt to deny the inference.

“Well, now,” he continued. “Those pictures, y’know! A bit thick! What?”

“Lois admires them like anything.”

“Does she now? Really! Well!”

“But then she’s clever, you know. I’m afraid I’m not clever like that.”

The golden eyelashes flickered over the dark eyes. It was quite obvious that Cynthia had no particular wish to be clever.

“Quite right too,” approved Sir Thomas. “Personally I’ve no use for clever women. Bluestockings! No reflection intended upon little Miss Lois, though. But what’s a woman want brains for?”

“They don’t need them like men do.”

“That’s right. They don’t. What I always say is, let the women leave the brain work to the men. What, after all, are brains for? To make money, ain’t they? Well, and that’s a man’s job. What’s a woman’s job, you’ll say? Why, to spend it! No need of brains to do that, eh, Miss Cynthia?”

“Rather not,” agreed the maiden earnestly.

“That’s what a man needs,” continued Sir Thomas with unction. “A wife who can enjoy spending what he’s made. It gives him something to work for. It’s a lonely game, you know. Piling up cash and no one to spend it on. Yes! Very lonely! A little girl like you would never guess how lonely an old chap like me can feel.”

He looked almost pathetic as he said this, for he was really coming to believe that business successes are an empty triumph for a single man.

“It’s very harrowing,” said Cynthia thoughtfully.

If her dark eyes held a hint of derision, he could not know it, for she kept them modestly upon the ground.

“If I had a wife now, that’s what I’d want,” said he. “A girl who could turn herself out properly. Who’d make every other woman look green. But a lady, mind you! A girl who could hold her own in any society. I’d be proud to foot her bills, I tell you. But then, I don’t suppose any nice girl would look at me. Not an old chap like me.”

“Are you old?”

This was evidently a surprise to Cynthia, and Sir Thomas beamed.

“Well, not so very old when you come to think of it. But old, I daresay, compared to the young fellows you’re accustomed to.”

“I’m not out,” said Cynthia primly. “I don’t know any young men except James and John.”

“Really? Now is that so? I could hardly have believed it.”

Sir Thomas was thinking how very accomplished she was if this were true. He could have sworn that hers was no prentice hand in the tender game.

“Of course I’m not out. My hair isn’t up.”

She shook the shining, honey-coloured mane upon her white neck. They paused in their walk and Sir Thomas delicately picked up a silky tress between a stubby red thumb and forefinger.

“I see that,” he said. “No, I knew you weren’t out. But don’t tell me you haven’t got a fancy boy for all that.”

“Oh, no. Think of Mother!”

He thought of Marian. She was indeed an indefatigable duenna. It might really be that this damsel was as flawless as she seemed. Her complacence was all the more gratifying to him on account of a recent rebuff which he had received from another quarter. This wound seemed to smart less as he fingered Cynthia’s yellow hair.

“Well,” he suggested, “I suppose you’ll soon come out? Be presented and all that? You’re just longing for it, eh?”

“I’m not quite sure,” said Cynthia doubtfully. “I don’t want to come out if it means going about with Mother. Lois has been out four years and I don’t think she gets much fun. She has no freedom.”

“A girl gets a better time once she’s married,” he observed.

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“Little girl——” he began, and paused, at a loss.

He had slipped an arm round her shoulders and she permitted the embrace with an indifference admirably calculated to encourage him. He was on the point of further demonstrations when Agatha and Gerald came round the corner of the hedge. Sir Thomas removed his arm. As he met the cool, speculative gaze of Lady Clewer the slow purple mounted to his bald brow. The two couples passed each other with brief civilities. Sir Thomas, once out of sight and hearing, hinted that Blair and his cousin seemed to be very fond of each other’s company. Cynthia assented, and he was about to say that he wouldn’t be in Sir John’s shoes. But he desisted. It wouldn’t do for his companion to think that he sympathized with jealous husbands. A very little might still be sufficient to scare her.

Agatha laughed at the encounter.

“These yew walks are dangerous,” she said.

“He’s an old horror,” said Gerald. “How can you allow it?”

“I’m not responsible for Cynthia. She isn’t my daughter.”

“No. But this is your house.”

“And you feel that our escutcheon is blotted?”

Gerald said nothing.

“You mustn’t worry about Cynthia,” she urged. “She’s perfectly able to look after herself.”

“I’ve no doubt of it.”

“You used not to be so censorious.”

“You used not to be so——”

“So what?” she demanded quickly.

“So tolerant.”

“Well? Do you object to my being tolerant?”

“Oh, no!” he said politely. “I wouldn’t dream of questioning your right to be anything you like.”

“I should hope not! But for all that you are growing rather critical, don’t you think? You’re always making me feel it.”

He did not deny it, but said:

“We’ve got into different galleys, my dear. We’ve drifted apart, as the sentimental songs say.”

“I know. But I’m sorry. I don’t like it.”

There was an accent of genuine distress in her voice which touched him. He had not supposed that she could be hurt by anything he said or did.

“I was very sorry myself when first I realized it,” he told her. “But I saw that it was inevitable, so I resigned myself.”

“I don’t resign myself to things so easily,” she said sombrely.

“Oh, you’d better!”

He stopped and looked at her in consternation. All his peace of mind was based upon a belief that she was happy, and in harmony with the life she had chosen. He was frightened by the restiveness of her tone.

“You’d better,” he repeated.

“Oh, Gerald!”

He wished that she would not look at him so sorrowfully. Too intolerably reminiscent, she was, of the woman he had lost. He must either fly from her or challenge her. If he held his ground an instant longer he must attempt some master word which would bring this ghost to life.

“Agatha! Do you remember Canverley Fair?”

Rooks, cawing loudly in the elm trees behind the house, seemed to echo his own dismay at what he had said. She was reflecting and he jogged her memory in spite of himself.

“We went on swing-boats . . . and we saw a fat lady . . . and you were . . .”

“Sick! Oh, yes, Gerald! I do remember. Oh, of course! How funny that was! What funny little things we were!”

“We managed to enjoy ourselves.”

“Did we? I suppose so. Fancy my forgetting! But do you know, I believe I made myself forget about it deliberately. I think I used to be very ashamed of it. And now it seems just funny! It’s strange how one outgrows one’s follies! One does at least leave off blushing for them.”

“Thank Heaven!”

“But that was a very pretty fair,” she exclaimed, delving further into the past.

“Was it?”

“Well, wasn’t it? I seem to remember it as very pretty. All the colours were nice. Bright colours . . .”

She stood looking at him: looking beyond him into that resplendent memory; And it seemed to him that she could never have changed at all. Her eyes, innocent and candid, were the eyes of his early love. She had been restored to him, and he knew that his hard-won peace was gone for ever.

They walked on again. He followed her toward the house, confused and sad. His dislike of her surroundings, their luxury, materialism, and sensuality, deepened to a sharp horror. He was so certain now that she would one day see them with his eyes. It seemed to him that endless suffering was in store for her.

Lois, observing their lugubrious approach, remarked to Hubert that Agatha and Mr. Blair seemed to spend their time in walking about the garden in silence. Considering how old was their friendship, she said, they had uncommonly little to say to each other.

“Not like us,” exulted Hubert.

This was very true. Lois and Hubert had an eternity of things to say to each other. It was as if the whole of their united future, now spread so gloriously before them, could scarcely suffice for all the wagging their tongues would have to do. But first of all she wanted to know what he thought of James’s pictures. He was unwilling to tell her, for he believed her to be fond of James.

“Of course, the ones he showed us weren’t his best,” she said wistfully.

“One would hope not.”

“Oh, Hubert! Were they so very bad?”

“Oh, no! The boy can paint all right. But they weren’t the kind of thing that appeals to me. My taste isn’t infallible, you know. Now, Lois. What am I to say to your mother? And when and where?”

Lois considered and then decided:

“You will have to be careful. She will think, you see, that you should have spoken to her first. Not that she objects to you. I don’t see how she can do that. But she will pretend to at first, just to show how careful she is. And you must get her leave to speak to me, and then allow her to arrange an opportunity for you. She won’t do that for a day or two, but eventually she will. Then, when we’ve been shut up in the drawing room, or sent out in the punt, or whatever it is, for a suitable length of time, we will emerge and say we are engaged. She will think about it for a week and then put it in the _Morning Post_. It honestly will save trouble for her to think she has managed it all. I used to fight over things, but it isn’t worth while, really. Now I use guile, as Agatha does, or did, with her mother, and life is much calmer.”

“Well, it all seems rather complicated to me, but you know her best. I’ll follow any plan you recommend. Shall I go now?”

“Yes, you’d better. She’ll be with Miss Barrington in her sitting room. You know where it is? Opening out of the long gallery. Ask to see her alone for a moment. Rather mysteriously. She loves being asked to see people alone.”

“Right, my angel.”

Hubert went, and she decided that she could not spend the palpitating interval better than in scolding James. It would relieve her spirits, and he needed it. Mounting again to the loft she discovered the artist plunged in contemplation before the portrait of Jellybelly.

“James, I’m furious with you,” she began.

“Why?” he asked mildly.

“Why on earth did you show those pictures to Hu—to Mr. Ervine? Why couldn’t you have shown him the portrait you did of me, or that thing you got the prize for in Brussels?”

“These are better.”

“You think so? Nobody else does. I was so ashamed, seeing you make such a fool of yourself in front of Mr. Ervine. Any one could see what he thought. I’ll never praise your work again.”

“No. I expect you’d better not.”

“I was never so humiliated in my life.”

“Yes. I expect you felt a pretty good fool,” said James in an interested voice.

“I don’t believe you are one bit sorry.”

“Not a bit. Why should I be?”

“When I’ve always backed you up, I really do think—— However, you suffer for it. I don’t.”

He thought this over and then asked:

“Where does it hit me?”

“Only that everyone laughs at you. You could have impressed him if you’d tried. As it is, it’s easy to see that he thinks your work isn’t worth his attention.”

“Well?”

“Well, that’s your loss. You really are very dense, James. He is a thoroughly artistic person. He could be a lot of use to you.”

“How?”

“Let me tell you that you are getting altogether too conceited. Since you came back from Paris you seem to think you know everything. Other people have been to Paris. Mr. Ervine has. He’s a more experienced man than you are. He’s been everywhere and knows everyone. You might profit considerably by his advice.”

“I don’t want his advice. I’ve no doubt he talks. You all do. Like a lot of rooks cawing.” He stared at the elm trees beyond the stable roof. “Worse than any rooks. I’d sooner hear rooks any day. What’s he done? Show me that. These talking people make me sick.”

“It wouldn’t do you any harm to listen to us occasionally. You only make us all laugh at you, giving yourself such airs. I can assure you that your pictures were not admired this morning.”

James turned round suddenly and, angry as she was, she quailed before the whiteness of his face. She recognized the onset of one of those rare but terrific rages which had been a legendary terror in the Lyndon nurseries. It had always been accepted that, when James did lose his temper, he might do anything.

“Get out!” he muttered, advancing toward her. “Get out! Or I’ll throw you out of the window.”

“Nonsense, James,” she scolded. “Don’t dare to talk like that.”

But her voice shook a little and she took a step back.

“I will,” he said, coming quite close to her. “And I’ll throw out the next of you that comes up here without being asked.”

He picked her up and carried her toward the window. She screamed loudly and tugged at his hair, but the grip of his long arms never slackened. She experienced, for the only time in her life, all the humiliations of weakness before violence. Her sharp heels drummed against his shins. She told Hubert afterward that it was like being carried off by a gorilla. He steadied himself with one knee against the low sash, held her out over the void, and spoke:

“Will you keep out of here after this?”

“Yes, James. Oh, you are a brute!”

“You’d better be careful. Will you leave off telling me whose advice I’m to take?”

“Yes.”

“Will you keep your opinions to yourself? And your friends’ opinions, too, if you can?”

“Yes. Do you call yourself a gentleman?”

“No. But if you’ll promise you may come in again.”

He spoke too late. Before he could lift her back into safety she had slipped from his arms. She fell six feet on to a sloping roof and slithered down the slates. A leaden gutter-pipe at the extreme end of the roof checked her descent. She lay still on the slope, too frightened to move, while below her there was a clear drop of three stories into the paved kitchen yard. James, his passion evaporated, leant out of the studio window and looked at her. His eyes were popping out of his head with horror.

“Are you hurt?” he called.

“No. But I shall fall if I move. Oh, you shall pay for this, James!”

“Could you get along a little that way and jump into that tree, do you think?”

“No, I couldn’t. I shall fall if I move, I tell you.”

“I’ll get a ladder. I won’t be long.”

He ran down and met Marian and Hubert emerging into the long gallery from Marian’s sitting room.

“Lois is on the roof,” he announced. “She can’t get down.”

“On the roof,” cried Marian. “How did she get there?”

“From my studio window. I dropped her out. She is on the sloping bit. She says she will fall if she moves.”

“Good heavens!” Marian turned pale. “But how dangerous!”

Hubert bounded up to the studio and looked out of the window at his love on the slates below. She lay there sobbing to herself.

“Lois!” he called. “Are you all right?”

“How can I be all right?” she replied with some irritation. “Look at me!”

“Don’t look downward whatever you do. You might get giddy.”

“I won’t.”

“They are getting a ladder. I can see them bringing it through the kitchen garden.”

“I do hope, after this, you’ll have James shut up in a lunatic asylum.”

“Is it his fault?”

“Of course it is. He put me here.”

“But not on purpose?”

“Oh, yes. He simply picked me up and threw me out.”

“Good God! The brute! It’s incredible. He must be mad.”

“He is.”

“But what did he do it for?”

“Oh—he was annoyed.”

“What about?”

“Well, it was something I said.”

“But what did you say?”

Lois felt suddenly very reluctant to tell Hubert what she had said. It did not lend itself to repetition in cold blood.

“What were you quarrelling about?” he asked again.

“Well—you, for one thing.”

“Me?”

“Yes. I’ll tell you after.”

A crowd had now collected in the kitchen yard. Marian and Miss Barrington, Agatha and Gerald, Cynthia and Sir Thomas, James and John, all the gardeners and most of the servants stood gazing up at Lois on the roof much as they had gazed at the airship earlier in the morning. Ladders were collected and tied together but still fell short of the required height. Hubert, at the window, swore at the general stupidity and encouraged Lois in such endearing terms as should have left no doubt, in the mind of a less preoccupied audience, as to the relations between them.

“They are sending into Oxford for the man who cleans the gutters,” he told her. “His ladder is longer.”

Lois burst into fresh sobs.

“I can’t possibly wait here till then,” she wailed. “I shall move, and then I shall fall off.”

James, John, and Gerald consulted together in the yard; they shouted to the gardeners for a strong rope and ran into the house. Joining Hubert in the studio, shortly afterward, they explained that James was going down after her.

“It’s his idea,” explained John. “He thinks he can take the rope with him and tie it round her waist. Then we can pull her up. When we’ve got her safe we can send it down again for him.”

“Doesn’t look too safe,” said Hubert, frowning.

“It isn’t. But that gutter isn’t strong and I’m uncommonly afraid of it breaking under her. That’s why I don’t want to wait for this man from Oxford. I don’t think the thing will hold; you can see it bulging from the yard, and if it broke she would shoot straight off the roof.”

“Look! Let me go!” said the gallant Hubert, a little uncertainly.

“No. James must go. He’s the lightest of us. And I don’t want to put any extra strain on that gutter. You’re too heavy.”

“Clewer thinks he can manage it?” asked Hubert sourly.

“He’s got a good head for heights. Are you ready, James?”

James dropped over the edge of the window, fell heavily on to the slates, and slipped down to Lois’s side. Leaning upon one elbow he knotted the rope round her waist. As they writhed distressfully together upon the sloping roof they reminded the distracted Hubert of the figures on the Medici tomb. James gave the signal to the men above to pull, and the gutter cracked.

“Hurry up!” commanded John. “The thing’s going.”

Lois was hoisted into safety as the gutter broke and fell into the yard below. James saved himself by wriggling along the roof to where a drain-pipe gave him a little extra purchase. But he was now out of reach of the window and the rope. Beneath him a large chestnut tree shaded the kitchen court. He eyed it meditatively for a second or two, balanced himself, sprang, and landed in the branches.

“He really is like a monkey,” cried Lois, struck by the resemblance for the second time in half an hour.

But his agility failed him at the critical moment. He crashed through the leaves and fell to the ground with a heavy thud. John and Gerald silently hastened from the studio.

“The branches broke his fall,” said Hubert reassuringly, as the group in the yard closed round the motionless figure at the foot of the tree.

He and Lois stood alone together at the window. Both were rather pale.

“I hope he isn’t much hurt,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I was so angry with him.”

“But what was it all about?”

She reflected how best she could narrate to him this rather discreditable affair.

“Poor James,” she began, “. . . you know we used to be great friends. And it’s naturally rather a shock to him now to find that I think more of your opinion than his.”

Hubert remembered a hint that Marian had just given him and saw light.

“You mean he doesn’t like being cut out?”

Lois had not quite meant that, but she left it uncontradicted. It was, on the whole, a nicer explanation than the real one. And it might have some truth, when she came to think of it. Such fury does not arise from ordinary pique, but a disappointed lover will do anything. A roar of pain, as Gerald stooped to examine James, caused the pair at the window to exclaim in relief:

“Then he isn’t dead!”

Hubert began to be indignant again.

“All the same, you know, it’s no excuse for throwing you out of the window.”

“No, I know. With any one else it wouldn’t be. But he, you know—well, he can’t be judged quite like other people.”

“I suppose not, poor chap. Anyhow, he took some risk getting you up again.”

“Don’t tell any one. I think we’ll say it was an accident.”

“Oh! All right! Perhaps it would be best.”

Gerald put both his hands to his mouth and shouted up to them:

“A broken collar-bone!”

“But that isn’t at all serious!” said Lois, in some disappointment.

2

Immediately after breakfast it was generally a cardinal object with Gerald and Hubert to escape from Sir Thomas Bragge. At this time of day he was most dangerous, for the ladies were seldom on the scene so early. But the young men considered that it was John’s duty to entertain him since John had, presumably, invited him. They did not like hearing about his successful business career, and the constant recital of the glories of the house he meant to build disgusted them both, though on different grounds. Gerald thought it stank of money. Hubert, who did not on principle object to dividends, jibbed at the implied scheme of decoration. They shared a hearty sympathy for the unfortunate architect, who was regarded by Sir Thomas as a kind of stone-mason and bullied abominably.

Gerald thought the garden a safer place than the house, and fled to a concealed walk, under a rose-covered pergola, in which to smoke a morning pipe. From this shelter he observed with immense satisfaction the buttonholing of Hubert. Sir Thomas got his victim on the terrace and began to tell him funny stories. Up and down they walked and Hubert seemed to get sadder and sadder. Gerald could not help being a little compassionate, for Sir Thomas’s stories, though almost always improper, were so long and punctuated by so many guffaws that people generally forgot the beginning before he reached the end. It was not quite as bad for Hubert, however, as it would have been for Gerald, since he was studying Sir Thomas and needed to collect more copy. He had already “Bragged” a little for Lois’s entertainment.

Gerald, in delicious security, took his ease under the roses. In a very few days he was hoping to be out of this demoralizing place and back at his work. Lyndon was altogether too full of ladies for his liking. He had shut women out of his life on the day that he learnt of Agatha’s desertion. He took no interest in them, and except in his consulting room, saw as little of them as a religious in a monastery. His friends were men and he worked with men.

This newly awakened preoccupation with his cousin was, therefore, wholly undesirable and must be shaken off. But he did not believe that it would trouble him long when once he had got away from her. His broken heart had been mended very quickly before; sooner indeed than he quite liked. His profession had absorbed him and he was able to see how disastrous marriage might have been. His particular field was, as yet, almost uncharted. He was one of the pioneers in a new branch of medical science. He possessed enough means to support himself if he did not marry, and he intended to devote his life to experimental research; to use to the full his peculiar opportunities.

He had scarcely thought of Agatha since the first despairing weeks. They had not met until she had been married some two and a half years, for she lay ill at Lyndon when he returned from his sojourn in Paris. He had heard of the death of her baby with detached compassion. Soon afterward he went to Austria and thence to Italy. Now he was returned to London, was working sixteen hours a day, and accomplishing a third as much as he could wish.

He should not have allowed himself to be entrapped into this visit. But his relatives pestered him and he resented their intimations that he avoided Lyndon for a particular reason. All that was over and done with; he was immune. If a spark of the old feeling had been left he could never have criticized her so coolly. A man must be genuinely out of love who can condemn as he condemned. But he should have distrusted this inclination to protest too much. He now suffered for his over-confidence. He had discovered that she could still command his unreasoned pity. Criticism, as strong as ever, could not kill it. And his conviction that she was destined to pain was the more agonizing to him since he could not leave off condemning her.

For his own sake he must immediately put an end to this state of things. He told himself that it would never do. That it was no concern of his whether she were happy or not: That hers was no isolated case and not to be compared with the pain and sorrow which he encountered daily among his patients. He must get the thought of her out of his head. And he smiled as he thought how he would lecture a patient who had thus lost his sense of proportion. But few physicians can heal themselves.

The path where he walked ended in a low brick wall enclosing part of the kitchen garden. Upon the other side of this wall he heard a voice which startled him into instant attention. A rather peculiar duologue was going on.

“Really, Kell . . . you can’t manage it alone. I oughtn’t to let you.”

“Oh, that’s all right, my lady. It’s not heavy really. Only a bit awkward.”

“It would be much better if I were to take the other end. Just wait a minute. . . . Oh, I’m sorry! Did it catch your elbow?”

“Not at all, my lady.”

“It’s just till I get used to the weight . . .”

Staggering steps ensued, and then:

“Surely it’s much too large! Couldn’t you find a smaller one?”

“This was the one Mr. Higgins gave me, my lady.”

“He should have brought it himself. It’s too heavy for a woman. Wait till I call one of the men. Two men. . . .”

Gerald brushed aside the larkspurs in the border, stepped up to the wall, and looked over it. He saw Agatha and the pretty housemaid who had attended the Dante lecture; they were struggling with a large step-ladder. Both were very pink.

“Where do you want it taken?” he called.

Agatha pointed to a brick building at the end of the enclosure. Swinging himself over the wall he picked up the ladder for them and set off between the raspberry canes and onion beds. Agatha, following, explained in a distressed voice:

“It’s so silly. It’s to get some cherries for James. It seems that he has a passion for those little dark morello cherries against the potting-shed wall. They are rather hard to get, they grew so high, and are not very good when you’ve got them. At least, most people don’t care for them. But James likes them better than anything else. Of course, I ordered fruit and flowers to be sent up to him while he was in bed, but Kell tells me it hasn’t been done. She has asked twice for the cherries, but Higgins wouldn’t take the trouble. So to-day she went and got a ladder, intending to get them herself. I saw her dragging this heavy ladder along. You really shouldn’t, you know, Kell.”

Kell smiled respectfully and helped Gerald to place the ladder against the potting-shed wall. She then produced a little basket which hung from her arm and looked doubtfully from it to the top of the ladder. She was evidently wondering which of the three should climb up and fill it.

“We will get the cherries and take them up to Mr. James,” said Agatha. “You must be very busy at this time of the morning. It was most kind of you to take all this trouble.”

The housemaid murmured a word of thanks and departed, walking sedately up the box-edged path.

Gerald climbed the ladder and began to fill the basket, glancing down from time to time at his cousin as she sat in the sun upon an upturned rhubarb pot. He picked the cherries very slowly, prolonging as far as possible this moment of satisfaction and contentment. He had become aware that it was better to suffer in her company than to be tranquil in her absence. She appeared to him perfect. Nothing she said or did could make the slightest difference to his feeling for her. He could find no fault, and her words and thoughts were beyond reproof simply because they were hers. He had been overtaken unawares by that overpowering need of one individual for another which defies reason and shapes our ends. This final stage of his subjugation had been so sudden and so surprising that he almost fell off the ladder.

At last the basket was full and he descended to her side. Together they strolled away through the vegetables. She was pensive, reflecting upon the strangeness of a lover. She knew him to be that and was just a little triumphant at having won him again. But she could not tell what she had done to bring him back. She asked him to come with her on a charitable visit to James, and they mounted to the sick room.

James’s bedroom gave no clue to his tastes. The furniture was that which Marian had provided when he had been promoted from the night nursery to a room of his own. Only the bed had been changed in deference to his added inches. There were no memorials of the past, no photographs of school groups, no relics of obsolete, boyish collections, nothing that could throw light on the essential James. His hairbrushes and a couple of ties lay forlornly upon the dressing table, while on the mantelpiece was a china money box in the shape of a bathing machine which had been there since his eighth birthday. Pictures had formed part of Marian’s scheme: “The Boyhood of Raleigh,” “Nelson in the Cockpit of the _Victory_,” and “When Did You Last See Your Father?” had hung on the walls for seventeen years. To remove them now would have revealed large, brilliant squares on the trellised paper. The whole room was suggestive of a little boy recently deported to a preparatory school with all his more intimate possessions. James, sitting upright in bed and badly needing a shave, did not seem to belong to it at all.

Gerald, used as he was to the study of abnormal mentalities, was struck anew by the baffling qualities of this one. He divined a degree of contra-suggestibility beyond any he had previously encountered. It was impossible to make any impression upon James. He lived in a strange world of his own, developing character, as it were, in spite of his surroundings. Agatha put the basket of cherries on his bed and asked him how he did.

“I had thought,” he said very seriously, “that I must be extremely ill. But Doctor Crosbie tells me that this kind of injury, though always painful, is seldom serious.”

“I sent up flowers,” she said, glancing round the room with dissatisfaction. “Didn’t they come?”

“Dolly took them. We don’t think flowers are healthy in a bedroom.”

“Not healthy? How funny of you, James! What makes you think so?”

“Well, Dolly has a married friend at Brixton who was a trained nurse. And she told Dolly that flowers in bedrooms give people cancer.”

“Kell seems to look after you very nicely,” said Agatha, trying to hide her amusement. “Did she give you these to read?”

There was a pile of literature on James’s bed, including several numbers of _Home Chat_ and a Sunday-school prize called “Leonard’s Temptation.” James nodded but explained that the Bible was, in Dolly’s opinion, the best reading for an invalid. She had lent him hers, which had pictures in it, and a large number of pressed flowers and memorial cards of which he apparently knew the several histories.

It was always difficult to talk to James, even if he was, as now, in an expansive mood. His visitors were glad when Lois and Hubert appeared, inspired also to visit the sick. Under the pretext that the room must be crowded the cousins made off.

Agatha said, outside the door:

“Everyone seems to visit James in couples. I wonder if Cynthia and Sir Thomas have been yet.”

“That girl—Kell—is very good to him.”

“Isn’t she? I don’t know what he would do without her. Of course, she isn’t cut out for a housemaid really. She oughtn’t to be in service. She’s too rough and countrified ever to soar beyond being an under-servant; she doesn’t adapt herself like most of them do. She has too much in her. She ought to be a farmer’s wife or something like that. She’d run things splendidly if she were in a position of responsibility.”

Lois and Hubert found that conversation flagged. They were oppressed by the memory of the studio window. The accident which had led to James’s illness was always with them, and it tied their tongues. Lois had by now quite convinced herself that it was disappointed love which had caused him to throw her out of the window, and she was inclined to be very forgiving in consequence. But Hubert was not softened; he regarded the fellow as a homicidal lunatic. James was taciturn and made no attempt to help them out. At last they abandoned the effort of talking to him and diverted themselves by laughing at the pictures in Dolly’s Bible. It is to be hoped that they did not know it was hers, for they continued their merriment when she brought in James’s lunch.

“Who is this party contemplating a sort of astral butcher’s shop?” demanded Hubert.

“Oh, that’s Peter on Cornelius’s roof. It’s in Acts.”

“I never read Acts. It’s got shipwrecks and all sorts of excitements in it, hasn’t it?”

The luncheon tray reminded them of their own need for food and they departed. Dolly, her cheeks deeply flushed, gathered up the markers and pressed flowers, which had been scattered over the bed, and replaced them in the despised Book. James regarded her with sorrow and comprehension.

“Dolly,” he said gently, “I’m ever so sorry they laughed at your things. I couldn’t stop them.”

“Miss Lois ought to know better,” said Dolly. “She’s had enough education, I should think, to know it’s wrong to make a mock of sacred things.”

“He did it first.”

“More shame to him!” she cried hotly. “And then he comes and sets himself up to teach us! Education! If education makes people talk like ignorant heathen, I’m glad I haven’t got any.”

“Don’t think about them,” he urged.

“People like that call themselves ladies and gentlemen! I wonder they have the face! When they talk so bad that poor people are ashamed to hear them. Don’t you never want to teach them manners, James? I do.”

She bit her lip, realizing that she had called him by his name.

“They get taught sometimes,” said James, grinning reminiscently. “Do you know how Lois fell out of the window?”

“No. How?”

“I put her out.”

“You never didn’t! What for?”

“Bad manners.”

“My stars!” Dolly gasped. “You shouldn’t ought.”

“I know. I was very much frightened. I thought I’d killed her. But it’s done her no harm.”

“It hasn’t done her no good neither, seemingly.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“But you was really very wrong to do it. You have got a nerve! Whatever will you do next?”

“How should I know?”

He grew morose again.

“What do you live here for?” she asked suddenly. “I wouldn’t. Not when they treat you like they do. Haven’t you got any money of your own?”

“Yes. I’ve got about four hundred pounds a year.”

“What? As much as that? Why, it’s nearly eight pounds a week!”

“Do you think that much or little?”

“Depends on how you look at it. At my home we think a man gets good wages if he gets three pounds a week. Why! Lots of men marry on two pounds.”

“Marry?” said James. “Marry?”

“Have you finished your soup?”

She bent over him to take the bowl but with his free arm he caught her and forced her to sit on the bed beside him.

“Marry!” he exclaimed again. “I was a fool not to think of it! Look here, Dolly! I can marry you, can’t I?”

“Don’t talk silly. . . .”

“It’s not silly. Couldn’t we be married and have a house of our own? Would you like it?”

“What?”

“Why shouldn’t we? Don’t you think we’d be very happy?”

She perceived the gravity of his intention and began to reflect.

“I used to think I’d never marry any one,” she said at last, indecisively. “But you’re different somehow. I don’t believe you’d annoy me the way other men would.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. I don’t annoy you now, do I? Well, why should I then?”

“That’s right. That’s where it is. And then I believe you’d let me have my way about the house and everything. I like managing things.”

“Oh, yes, you can do what you like in the house as long as you don’t get telling me how to paint.”

“Tell you how to paint! Me? Not much! I can’t even draw. But listen while I explain. Will you come to chapel with me Sundays? That’s my trouble. I never felt I could marry a religious man, because my stepfather was religious. And the way he went on . . . well, it made you hate the name of God sometimes, if you know what I mean. But then, I couldn’t marry an unbeliever, because I’m religious myself, somehow, in spite of my stepfather. Divine worship I like; it’s only religious people I can’t bear. If you’ll come to chapel Sundays and hold your tongue about it other times, and not always be asking blessings, it will just suit me.”