Chapter V (2)

Owen's head was whirling. It was as though suddenly the little crystal rings of the pagoda had given out a sportive, significant tinkle. This, then, was what it meant? It was a jest, a game; but it was also a trap. For whom? Chislebridge, on old Mrs. Waterlow's lips, could mean only Gwendolen. He did not know quite what he hoped or feared, but he knew that he must conceal from old Mrs. Waterlow his recognition of her meaning.

"I felt from the first moment that I saw her in the curiosity-shop that Mrs. Waterlow was the sort of person who would always find the white pagodas," he said, smiling above his perturbation; "but I shouldn't have supposed that Chislebridge was intelligent enough, let us put it, to realise it, too, and to follow her lead."

"It's not that they realise it," the old lady interpreted, salting her scone; "it's something deeper than realisation. It's instinct--the instinct of the insignificant for aping the significant. They would probably be annoyed if they were told that they aped Cicely. They hardly know they do it, I will say that for them, if it's anything to their credit. And then since she is poor and they--some of them--rich, their copies are seen by a hundred to the one who sees her original, and Cicely, to some people, I've no doubt of it, seems the ape. It has very much vexed me," Mrs. Waterlow repeated.

Owen, for all his loyal feint of unconsciousness, was growing rather angry with Gwendolen.

"I don't wonder that it should," he said. "It vexes me to hear about it. Has it gone on for long?"

"Ever since we came to live here after my son's death. People at that time had draped, crowded drawing-rooms,--you remember the dreadful epoch. The more pots and pans and patterns and palms they could squeeze into them, the better they were pleased. Cicely had simple furniture and quiet spaces and plain green wall-paper when no one else in Chislebridge had. She fell in love with Japanese prints in Paris and bought them when no one else in Chislebridge thought of doing so.--It's wrong, now, I hear, to like them. Chinese paintings are the correct thing.--Chislebridge stared at them and at her empty room, and wondered how she could care for those hideous women. They stared only for a year or two. When they saw that she was quite indifferent to their opinion and intended to remain in the ditch, they jumped in after her. I was amused when I first saw Japanese prints on some one else's green walls and heard the Goncourts and Whistler being quoted to Cicely. Then by degrees Cicely got tired of green paper, especially since everybody in Chislebridge by then had it, and she put, with her white walls, the red lacquer and the glass and that beautiful old set of cane-seated furniture that you saw; and no one else in Chislebridge at that time had white walls or a scrap of lacquer. She shifted and rearranged like a bird building its nest, and Chislebridge stared again and said that the white walls were like a workhouse; and then they began to look for lacquer and to put up white paper. Her very grouping has been copied, the smallest points of adjustment. It's not," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, "that I mind people imitating, if they do it frankly and own themselves plagiarists. We must all see the things we like for the first time. But it's not because they like the things that they have them; they have them because some one else likes them. They dress themselves in other people's tastes and make a fine figure as originators." The vexation of years was crystallized in the lightness and crispness of her voice.

Poor, stupid Gwendolen! After all, one must not be too hard on her. He felt Mrs. Waterlow to be so hard that he reacted to something approaching pitying tolerance, Gwendolen could be stupid in such good faith. There was nothing, when he came to think of it, surprising in this revelation of her stupidity, nothing painful, as there had been in suspecting Cicely Waterlow of stupidity. Gwendolen was so sincerely unaware of having no ideas of her own. He wondered, as he said good-bye to old Mrs. Waterlow and told her that he felt convinced that she had at last reached a haven, whether she guessed that she had made him happy rather than unhappy.

She had made him so happy, with his recovered ideal, that as he drove away it was with a definite thrust of fear that he suddenly remembered Gwendolen's kindly criticism of old Mrs. Waterlow. Was it not possible, after all, that she had been indulging in sheer malice at Gwendolen's expense? Wasn't it possible that Gwendolen and Cicely Waterlow had had the same inspirations independently? But no two people could stumble at once on such a drawing-room as that he had just left. Horrid thought--what if Gwendolen's drawing-room at this moment showed just such a singular reversion to ugliness? After his delicious relief, he could not bear the doubt.

He drove to Gwendolen's. Yes, the old housekeeper, who knew him, said he could of course go up and look at the red lacquer. The red lacquer! He could almost have embraced her for the joy her words gave him. Gwendolen would not have retained red lacquer with a black satin suite. And on the threshold of Gwendolen's drawing-room he received full reassurance. The lovely room was intact. The blacks and whites and reds and golds were all there, unchanged, not a breath of the ambiguous discipline upon them. And in the midst of them all it was not Gwendolen, but Cicely Waterlow, whom he seemed to see smiling upon him, merry, tired, and tolerant. She had, as it were, demonstrated her claim not only to her present, but to her past. For if she had not copied Gwendolen in the mid-Victorian backwater, why should she have copied her in this? She had been first in both, and in her backwater she was now safe.

* * * * *

Many months passed before he saw Gwendolen's drawing-room again. He was felled early in the winter by a long and dangerous illness. When he was able to crawl about, he went to the south of France and stayed there for over a year. He was so ill, so tired, and so weak that, if Gwendolen and the boys hadn't joined him, if she hadn't nursed and amused and encouraged him from day to day, he felt that he should probably have died and made an end of it. Gwendolen was more than kind. She was at once tender and tactful, and the only claim she made was that of her long-standing solicitude on his account. Upon this, as upon a comfortable, impersonal cushion that she adjusted for his weary head, she invited him to lean, and upon it for months of dazed invalidism and dubious convalescence he did lean. Lapped round by this fundamental kindness, the flaws and absurdities of Gwendolen's character disappeared. The long pearl ear-rings dangled now over the most delicious beef-teas, which she herself made for him; the graceful hands could perform efficient tasks. Of how very little importance it was that a woman should not show originality in her drawing-room when she could show in taxing daily intercourse such wisdom and resource and sweetness! Life had contracted about them, and on these simple and elementary terms he found that Gwendolen neither bored nor ruffled him. When she at last left him he knew that the bond between them, unspoken as it remained, was stronger than it had ever yet been, and that when he next saw her he would probably find it the most natural of things to ask her to marry him, and to take care of him for ever. Poor, good, kind Gwendolen! It was with a pensive humility and mirth that he resigned himself to the thought of the bad bargain she would make.

He came back to England in the spring following that in which he had left it, and went at once to Chislebridge. It was late afternoon when he drove, in a twilight like his own mood of meditative acceptance, to the well-known house. Ample and benignant it stood behind its walls and lawns and trees, and seemed to look upon him with eyes of unresentful patience.

He limped in and Gwendolen met him in the hall.

"My dear, dear Owen, how are you? Yes, I had your wire this morning. Good; I see that the journey has done you no harm. But you are tired, aren't you? Will you go to your own room or have tea with me at once? It's just been brought in."

He said that he would have tea with her. She did not actually help him up the stairs, but as, with skill impaired, he swung himself from step to step, the touch of her tactful and ready hand was upon his arm, a caress rather than a sustainment. Passing the hand through his arm, she led him into the drawing-room.

Owen looked about him. He stood for a long moment in the door and looked. He then allowed himself a cautious, side-long glance at Gwendolen. Her eyes, unaware in their bland complacency, had followed his and rested upon her room.

"Oh, yes, I'd forgotten that you hadn't seen my new drawing-room," she said. "We've had great changes."

Even in his horror, for it was hardly less, he was touched to realize that Gwendolen was thinking far less of her drawing-room than of him. She might have forgotten that it had changed, had he not so helplessly displayed his amazement.

"Yes, indeed," he said. He limped to the fire and sank heavily into the deep, black satin easy-chair drawn before it. He leaned his elbow on his knee and rested his head on his hand, and as he did so he observed that before the fire stood a mahogany footstool with a bead-worked top.

"You are tired, dear Owen. Do you feel ill?" Gwendolen hovered above his chair.

"I do feel a little giddy," he confessed. "I'm not all right yet, I see."

He raised his head. It was to face the mantelpiece, with its oval, gilt mirror and crystal lustres and gilt-and-marble clock. No, there were not doves and a nest upon it. This was a finer clock than the one with the doves, and the lustres were larger, and the flowers that stood between were mauve orchids. Gwendolen always went astray over her flowers.

"Here is tea," she said, seating herself at a little mahogany table with bowed and decorated legs. "Of course you're bound to feel tired, dear Owen, after your journey. Tea will be the very thing for you."

He turned now a furtive eye along the wall. Flower-pieces, dim, flat, old flower-pieces and arid steel-engravings and tall pieces of mahogany furniture with marble vases upon them--no mistakes had been made here, for if the vases were not urns, they were of marble and in their places.

"How do you like it in this phase?" Gwendolen asked him, tactfully turning from the question of his weakness. "I love it myself, I own, though of course Chislebridge thinks I've lost my wits. To tell you the truth, Owen, I was tired of beauty. One may come to that. One may feel," said Gwendolen, pouring out the tea, "that one needs a discipline. This room is my discipline, and after it I know that I shall find self-indulgence almost vulgar."

No; his mind was working to and fro between the present and the past with the rapidity and accuracy of a shuttle threading an intricate pattern--no, he had never mentioned to Gwendolen that late autumnal visit of his to Chislebridge eighteen months ago. Had that been because to mention it and the transformation he had been the first to witness in Mrs. Waterlow's drawing-room would have been, in a sense, to give Gwendolen a warning? And had he not, in his deepening affection for her, conceived her to be above the need of such warnings? Yes; for though he had been glad to recover his ideal of young Mrs. Waterlow, though he had been more than willing that Gwendolen should occupy the slightly ridiculous and humiliating position that he had imagined to be Mrs. Waterlow's, he had never for a moment imagined that Gwendolen's disingenuous docility would go as far as this. So many people might love red lacquer and old glass with a clear conscience, once they had been brought to see them; but who, with a clear conscience, could love black satin furniture and marble vases?

"It is a very singular room," he found at last, in comment upon her information. "How--and when--did you come to think of it?" He heard the hollow sound of his own voice; but Gwendolen remained unaware. The fact of her stupidity cast a merciful veil of pitifulness over her.

"I hardly know," she said, handing him his tea and happy in her theme. "These things are in the air at a given time--reactions, repulsions, wearinesses--I think. It grew bit by bit; I've brought it to this state only since my return from the Riviera. The idea came to me, oh, long ago--long before your illness. Alec Chambers is perfectly entranced with it, and vows it is the most beautiful--yes, beautiful--room in existence. It is witty as well as beautiful, he says, and he is going to paint it for the New English Art Club. Rooms have a curious influence upon me, you know, Owen. I really do feel," said Gwendolen busying herself hospitably with his little plate and hot, buttered toast, "that I've grown cleverer since living in this one."

Owen, while she talked and while he drank his tea, had been more frankly looking about him. Flagrant as was the plagiarism, Gwendolen, as before, had protected herself by a more illustrious achievement. It was a stately, not a staid room; it carried the idea higher, and thereby missed it. It was not an amusing room, nor witty, to any one who had seen the original. It was impressive, oppressive, almost forbidding. Gwendolen, for one thing, had had more space to fill. The naivete of mere flower-pieces would not furnish her walls, and she had lapsed into sheer ugliness with the large and admirably accurate steel-engravings. Caution, too, had been mistakenly exercised here and there; the black satin furniture had no antimacassars and the centre-table no ornament except a vase of orchids and calf-bound books.

Owen felt no indignation; he would always remain too fond of Gwendolen, too tolerant of her folly, to feel indignant with her; it was with a mild but final irony that he brought his eyes back at last to his unconscious and hapless cousin. And he wondered how far Gwendolen had gone, how far she could be made to go. "There's only one thing that it lacks," he said. "Shall I tell you?"

"Oh, _do_" she urged, beaming over her tea. "You know how much I value your taste."

"Oh, I haven't much taste," said Owen, "I've never gone in for having taste. And doesn't your room prove that taste is a mistake if indulged too far? It's more a sense of literary fitness I allude to. Yours is meant to be a soulless room, isn't it? That's your intention?"

"Exactly," said Gwendolen, with eager apprehension; "that is just it--a soulless room. One is sick of souls, just as one is sick of beauty."

"Exactly," Owen echoed her. "But, since you have here a travesty of beauty, what you need to complete your idea is a travesty of soul. You need a centre that draws it all into focus. You need something that, alas! you might have had, and have lost for ever. The white pagoda, Gwendolen, that Mrs. Waterlow found. Your room needs that, and only that, to make it perfect."

He spoke in his flat, weak invalid's voice, but he was wondering, almost with ardour, if Gwendolen, this touchstone applied, would suspect or remember and, from penitence or caution, redeem herself by a confession. For a moment, only a moment, she looked at him very earnestly; and he was aware that he hoped that she was going to redeem herself--hoped it almost ardently, not for his own sake--those sober hopes were dead for ever--but for the sake of the past and what it had really held of fondness and sympathy and essential respect.

Gwendolen looked at him earnestly; it was as though a dim suspicion crossed her; and then, poor thing! she put it aside. Yes, he was very sorry for her as he listened to her.

"Owen, that is clever of you," she said, "but very, very clever. That is precisely what I've been saying to myself ever since the idea came to me. I can't forgive myself for that piece of stupidity--my only one, I will say, in regard to such recognitions and perceptions. I may be a stupid woman about a great many things, but I'm not stupid about rooms. The horror of Aunt Pickthorne's room dulled my eyes so that in all truth I can say that I never saw that pagoda. And from the moment I've had my idea I've moaned--but literally moaned--over having lost it. Of course it is what the room needs, and all that it needs--the travesty of a soul standing on that mahogany table."

"Yes, the centre-table is the place for it," said Owen.

"It _is_ clever of you to feel it just as I do, Owen, dear," she went on. "The pagoda was meant for this room and for this room only; for, you know, I didn't think Cicely Waterlow at all happily inspired in placing it as she had."

"As she had?" He rapped the question out with irrepressible quickness.

"Yes, among all that rather trashy lacquer and glass in that rather gimcrackery little drawing-room of hers. The pagoda looked there, what it had always looked in Aunt Pickthorne's room--a gimcrack itself."

"Looked?" he repeated. "How does it look now? How has she placed it now?"

And, for the first time in all their intercourse, he saw that Gwendolen was suddenly confused. He had hardly trapped her. She had set the trap herself, and inadvertently had walked into it. A faint colour rose to her cheek. She dropped for a moment her eyes upon the fire. Then, covering her self-consciousness with a show of smiling vivacity, she knelt to poke the logs, saying:

"I don't know, I really don't know, Owen. Cicely is always changing her room, you know. She is very quick at feeling what's in the air--as quick as I am really--and I haven't seen her for ages. She has gone to live in London--oh, yes, didn't you know? Yes, she came into a little money over a year ago, and she and old Mrs. Waterlow have taken a house in Chelsea, and are coming back to Chislebridge only for two or three months in every year. They are very fond of Chislebridge. So I haven't an idea of what her drawing-room is like now."

"Perhaps it's like yours," Owen suggested. "The one I saw was rather like yours, I remember."

Gwendolen opened kind and repudiating eyes.

"Do you think so, Owen? Like mine? Oh, only in one or two superficial little things. She hadn't a Chinese screen or a lacquer cabinet or a piece of Chinese painting to bless herself with, poor little Cicely! No, indeed, Owen; I don't think it would be at all fair to say that Cicely copied me. These things are in the air."

* * * * *

Before he left Chislebridge he asked Gwendolen for Mrs. Waterlow's London address, and observed that she did not flinch in giving it to him. He inferred from this that Mrs. Waterlow's black satin suite had not left Chislebridge and that Gwendolen knew that she had nothing to fear from a London visit. Would she indeed fear anything from any visit? Her placid self-deception was so profound that it would be difficult to draw a line fairly between skilful fraud and instinctive self-protection. Gwendolen, without doubt, conceived herself completely protected. She would never suspect him of suspecting her.

He felt, when he got back to London, a certain reluctance in going to see Mrs. Waterlow. It was not only that he shrank from reading in old Mrs. Waterlow's malicious eyes the recognition of his discovery; in regard to young Mrs. Waterlow there was another shrinking that was almost one of shyness. She had been wronged, grossly wronged, by some one to whom he must show the semblance of loyalty, and the consciousness of her wrongs affected him deeply. A fortnight passed before he made his way one afternoon to Chelsea, a fortnight in which the main consciousness that filled his sense of renewal was that of his merciful escape. Mrs. Waterlow's house was in St. Leonard's Terrace, one of the narrow, old houses that face the expanse of the Royal Hospital Gardens. The spring sun, as he limped along, was shining upon their facades--dull, old brick and dim, white paint-like slabs of ancient wedding-cake with frosted edging.

After all the expense of his illness, he was very poor in these days, and had come with difficulty in a 'bus. As he opened the gate and went into the flagged garden, where white tulips grew, he glanced up and saw young Mrs. Waterlow standing looking out at the drawing-room window. Her eyes met his in surprise, they had not seen each other for so long a time; then, as lifting his hat he smiled at her, he thought he saw in them a sudden pity and gravity. He did of course look so much more battered than when she had last seen him. The nice, middle-aged maid let him in--he was glad of that--and, as he followed her up the narrow staircase, with its white, panelled walls, he wondered which drawing-room it was to be, and felt his heart sink strangely at the thought that perhaps, after all, Mrs. Waterlow had transplanted her discipline to London.

But, no; like a soft gush of sunlight, like bells and clear, running water, the first room greeted him in a medley of untraceable associations. It was the first room, with the delicate cane-seated chairs and settees, the red lacquer and the glass, all looking lovelier than ever against the panelled white, all brighter, sweeter, happier than in the rather dim room on the ground floor in Chislebridge. And touches of green, like tiny flakes of vivid flame, went through it in the leaves of the white azaleas that filled the jars and vases. He saw it all, and he saw, as Mrs. Waterlow came toward him, that the white pagoda stood on its former little black lacquer table in one of the windows.

Mrs. Waterlow shook his hand and her eyes examined him.

"You have been ill. I was so sorry to hear," she said.

"Yes, I've been wretchedly ill; for years now, it seems," he replied.

They sat down before the fire. Old Mrs. Waterlow, she told him, was away on a visit to Chislebridge, from which she was to return that evening at six o'clock. It was only four. He had two hours before him, and he felt that in them he was to be very happy. They talked and talked. He saw that she liked him and expected him to stay on and talk. All the magic and elation and sense of discovery and adventure was with him as on their first encounter. She knew him, he found, so much better than he could have guessed. She had read everything he had written. She appreciated so finely; she even, with a further advance to acknowledged friendship, criticized, with the precision and delicacy expressed in all that she did. And the fact that she liked him so much, that she was already so much his friend, gave him his right to let her see how much he liked her. The two hours were not only happy; they were the happiest he had ever known.

The clock had hardly struck six when old Mrs. Waterlow's cab drove up.

"Don't go; mamma will so like to see you," said Mrs. Waterlow. "She so enjoyed that little visit you paid her over a year ago, you know."

This was the first reference that had been made to the visit. He wondered if she guessed what it had done for their friendship.

Old Mrs. Waterlow came in, wearing just such a delightful, flowing black satin cloak and deep black satin bonnet as he would have expected her to wear. And seeing him there with her daughter-in-law, she paused, as if arrested, on the threshold. Then, her eyes passing from the tea-table and its intimacy of grouping with the two chairs they had risen from, and resting brightly on her daughter's face, where she must read the reflection of his happiness, Owen saw that she cast off a scruple, came to a decision, and renewed the impulse that had brought her up the stairs, he now realised, at an uncharacteristic speed.

"My dear Cicely," she exclaimed, after she had greeted him, "you've lost your wager!"

Cicely Waterlow gazed at her for a moment and then she flushed deeply.

"Have I, mamma?" she said, busying herself with the kettle. "Well, that pleases you, and doesn't displease me. You'll want some tea, won't you?"

"Yes, indeed, I want some tea. But you'll not put me off with tea, my dear. I want to talk about my wager, too; and Mr. Stacpole will want to hear about it, for it was his wager as well. You did say that you felt convinced that I was safe in my haven, didn't you, Mr. Stacpole? Well, I've lost it, and I'm not at all pleased to have lost it. I'm triumphant, if you will, but savage, too. You'll forgive me, I know, Mr. Stacpole, if I'm savage with your cousin when I tell you that she has been inspired with a black satin suite and mahogany furniture and bead-work since seeing Cicely's new drawing-room in Chislebridge."

"Mamma!" Cicely protested. "Two people can perfectly well have the same idea at the same time! There's no reason in the world why Gwendolen shouldn't feel just my fancy for funny, old, ugly things."

"She didn't show any fancy for them when she saw them a year ago, did she, dear?" said the intractable old lady, seating herself at the tea-table. "She was very guarded, very mute, though very observant. Yes; people may have the same idea, but they'll hardly have the same black satin furniture and the same beaded footstools, will they?"

Seeing the deep embarrassment in which his friend was plunged, Owen now interposed.

"Don't try to defend Gwendolen on my account," he said. "She really can't be defended. I know it, for I've seen her drawing-room."

"You have seen it? And what do you think of it?" asked old Mrs. Waterlow.

"I thought, as I told her," said Owen, "that it lacked but one thing, and that was the travesty of a soul. It lacked the white pagoda."

"You told her that? It was what she told me. She told me that she could not forgive herself for having parted with the pagoda, for it was the travesty of a soul that her room still needed. 'You mean,' I said, 'the pagoda placed as Cicely placed it on the centre-table in her new room?' She gazed at me and laid her hand on my arm and asked: 'But, dear Mrs. Waterlow, how had Cicely placed the pagoda? I really don't remember. I really don't remember at all what Cicely's new room was like, except that it was mid-Victorian, and had old water-colours on the walls. Surely you don't think that I've copied Cicely?'

"'My dear Mrs. Conyers,' I said to her, 'I don't think, but know, that you've done nothing else since you came to Chislebridge. But in this case you are farther from success than usual, for Cicely's drawing-room is gay, and yours is _grand serieux_.'"

Mrs. Waterlow's bomb seemed to fill the air with a silvery explosion, and, as its echoes died, in the ensuing stillness, the eyes of Cicely and Owen met beneath the triumphant gaze of the merciless old lady. It was from his eyes that hers caught the infection. To remain grave now was to be _grand serieux_, and helpless gaiety was in the air. Owen broke into peals of laughter.

"Oh--but--" Cicely Waterlow protested, laughing, too, but still flushed and almost tearful--"it isn't fair. It's as if we had taken her in. She doesn't know she does it, really she doesn't; she is so well-meaning--so kind."

"She knows now," said old Mrs. Waterlow, who remained unsmiling, but with a placidity full of satisfaction; "and she'll hardly be able to forget."

"I'm quite sure," said Cicely, "that she really believes that she cares for the new drawing-room. People can persuade themselves so easily of new tastes. And why shouldn't they have them? I believe that Gwendolen does like it."

"Yes, she does indeed," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "She says so. She says she never cared for any room so much and that she intends to live and die with it. Her only refuge now is to go on faithfully loving it. So there she is, buttoned into her black satin for ever!"

* * * * *

Until now Mrs. Conyers has remained faithful, and her consistency is still made good to her; for none of her drawing-rooms has brought her such appreciation. Chislebridge has never dared to emulate it; Mr. Chambers and his friends have often painted it, and Mrs. Waterlow's original, like a gay jest, uttered and then gone for ever, is no longer in existence to vex and perplex her with its mocking smile. Moreover, her own drawing-room no longer lacks its travesty of a soul. Owen married Cicely Waterlow in the autumn, and Gwendolen, magnanimous, and burning her bridges behind her, sent them for their wedding-present her two lovely and unique red lacquer cabinets. One stands in the front, and one in the back drawing-room in the little house in St. Leonard's Terrace, and Cicely said to Owen on the day they arrived that any wrong of the past, if wrong there had been, was now atoned for. And when they married and went round the world for their wedding-trip, they found in China a white pagoda, unflawed, larger, more sublimely elegant than the old one. This they brought back to Gwendolen, and with unfaltering courage she has placed it upon her mahogany centre table.

THE SUICIDE

A COMEDY

She took the bottle from its wrappings and looked at it--at its apparent insignificance and the huge significance of the glaring word "Poison" printed across it. She looked resolutely, and as resolutely went with it to the other side of the room, and locked it away in the drawer of her dressing-table. She paused here, and her eyes met her mirrored eyes. The expression of her face arrested her attention. Did people who were going to die usually look so calm, so placid? Really, it was a sort of placidity that gazed back at her, so unlike the disfigured, tear-blinded reflection that had been there that morning--when she had read the paper. After the tempest of despair, the frozen decision, the nightmare securing of the means of death (if any one should guess! stop her!) it was indeed a sort of apathy that drenched her being, as if already the drug had gone through it. The face in the mirror was very young and very helpless and very charming. It was like the face of a little wind-blown ghost, with its tossed-back hair and wide, empty, gazing eyes. The sweetness of the wasted cheeks and soft, parted lips suddenly smote on the apathy, and tears came. She pressed her hands over her eyes, struggled, and mastered herself again. Her own pathos must not unnerve, and her unbearable sorrow must nerve, her.

She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Just three. She could give herself ample time for writing the letter; then she must go and post it. Before five she would be back here--locked in her room. Before six--

She went to the writing-table, unlocked a drawer,--the key hung on a ribbon around her neck, under her bodice,--and took out a thick packet of closely written papers. Sitting there, hesitating a moment, she wondered if she would look back at those records of hope and suffering--more than a whole year of beautiful suffering, beautiful hope. The rising of tears again warned her that such a retrospect would make her more unfit for writing the last letter as it must be written--with full possession of her best and deepest meaning. She must be her most courageous self to write now. The writer of those past records seemed a little sister half playing with her grief, beside the self that sat here now, stricken and determined.

Drawing pen and paper to her, she wrote:

MY DEAREST--MY BEST BELOVED: This is the last of the letters. I
am going to send them all to you now, so that you may know all.
I read this morning in the paper that you were to be married.
And now there is nothing left for me but to die. When you read
this I shall be dead.

You must not blame me, or think me too cowardly. I am a fragile
person, I know, and my life hung on you. Without hope it can't
go on; it's too feeble to find anything else to live for. And
you could never, never blame yourself. How could you have
helped it? How could you have dreamed that I loved you? If you
had you could have done nothing but be sorry--and irked. But it
comforts me in dying to let you know how I have loved you; it
is like a dying gift I make you,--do you see?--all the love
that I have hidden. If I had lived I could never have made the
gift. Had you guessed, or had I told you, it would have been a
burden, a ludicrous burden. But as you read this, knowing that
I am dead, my love must come to you as a blessing; you must
feel it as something, in its little way beautiful, and care for
it; for any love that only gives and makes no claim is
beautiful, is it not? I think I find dying so much easier than
living because in dying I can give you the gift.

All these letters, written from the first day I met you, almost
a year and a half ago, will tell you step by step what I have
felt. Don't let the hopes that flickered up sometimes hurt you;
the strength of my feeling made the flame, nothing that you
ever said or did.

How I remember that first day, in the country, at the
Ashwells', when mamma and I came on to the lawn where you were
all sitting, and mamma laughed at me for stumbling over a
chair--and you smiled at me. From the moment I saw you then, I
loved you. You were like some dream come true. You never knew
what joy it gave me (only joy; the pain was in not being with
you) when we walked together and talked; the letters will tell
you that. But to-day it all comes back, even the little things
that I hardly knew I was seeing or hearing--the late white
roses in the garden; and the robin sitting on the garden wall
(we stopped to look at it, and it sat still, looking at us: I
wonder if you remember the robin); and the distant song some
labourers were singing in the fields far away.

And here in London, the dinners we met at, the teas you came
to, the one or two books you gave me and that we wrote
about--what I felt about it all, these meteors through my gray
life, I have written it all down. Did I not act well? You could
never have guessed, under my composure and cheerfulness, could
you? I am a little proud of myself when I think of it.

And that this is no sudden rocking of my reason you will see,
too, from the growing hopelessness, of emptiness in the last
months, when I have not seen you. In the bottom of my heart I
had always the little hope that some day I might give you these
myself, that we might read them together, you and I, smiling
over my past sorrow. And if I had died, and you had not loved
me, you were to have had them, as I told you, for I wanted to
give you my love; I could not bear that it should go out and
that you should never know.

I wish that I could have died, and need not have killed myself;
I am so afraid that that may give you pain, though it ought not
to, if you think justly of it all.

Of course you will be sorry for me--I am afraid that I want you
to be _sorry_; but don't be too sad. I am so much happier in
dying than I could have been in living; and in loving you I
have felt so much, I have lived so much--more perhaps than many
people in a whole lifetime.

See the gift you have given _me_, dearest one. Good-bye.
Good-bye.

ALLIDA.

It was over,--the last link with life, her last word spoken or written,--and the echo of it seemed to come to her already as across a great abyss that separated her from the world of the living.

With the signing of her name she had drawn the shroud over her face.

Only the mechanical things now remained to be done: dying was really over; she really was dead.

She wrapped this last letter around all the others, kissed it, and sealed it in a large envelope; then, putting on her hat and coat and holding the letter in her ulster pocket, she left her room and went down the stairs.

The house was a typically smart, flimsy London house, of the cheaper Mayfair sort--a narrow box set on end and fitted with chintz and gilt and white mouldings; a trap to Allida's imagination--an imagination that no longer shrank from the contemplation of the facts of her life; for they, too, were seen from across that abyss.

In the drawing-room, among shaded lamps, cushions, and swarming bric-a-brac, her mother had flirted and allured--unsuccessfully--for how many years? She had felt, since the time when, as a very little girl, she had gone by the room every day coming in from her walk at tea-time with her governess, and heard inside the high, smiling, artificial voice, with its odd appealing quality, its vague, waiting pauses, the shrinking from her mother and her mother's aims. Later on the aims had been for her, too, and their determination had been partly, Allida felt, hardened by the fact of a grown-up daughter being such a deterrent--so in the way of a desperate, fading beauty who had never made the brilliant match she hoped for. That she had never, either, made even a moderate match for her, Allida, the girl felt, with a firmer closing of her hand on the letter, she perhaps owed to _him_. What might her weakness and her hatred of her home not have urged her into had not that ideal--that seen and recognized ideal--armed her? The vision of old Captain Defflin, his bruised-plum face and tight, pale eyes, rose before her, and the vacuous, unwholesome countenance of young Sir Alfred Cutts. How often had she been dexterously left alone with them in the drawing-room! Thank God! all that was far, far behind her. Death was dignified, sweet-smelling in its peace, when she thought of all that the gilt-and-chintz drawing-room stood for in her memories. Death was sweet when life was so ugly.

Now she was in the street, the door closed behind her, and no servant had seen her.

It was a foggy afternoon, and the soiled white houses opposite were dim. A thin, stray cat rubbed against the area railings and mewed as Allida stood, pausing for a moment, on the steps.

Which was the nearest pillar-box? At the end of the street, just round the corner. The plaintive, nasal cry of the cat caught her attention. Poor creature! She ought to spare some poison for it. The irony of the idea almost made her smile as she stooped and patted the dingy head. The cat, leaning like a ship in a stiff wind, walked to and fro across her dress, looking up at her as it still plaintively, interrogatively mewed. Its appeal put aside for a moment the decision as to which pillar-box. She picked up the cat and returned to the door. The maid answered her ring.

Allida was a little sorry that she must speak once more, after all, on this mundane plane. The finish of her tragedy seemed slightly marred by this episode. But she heard her calm voice telling the maid to feed the cat--"And keep it until you can find a home for it. Cook won't mind, will she?"

"Oh, no, miss; cook is fond of cats. Poor thing, then," said the maid, who was tender of heart.

Again the door was shut, and again the pillar-box was the last act but one of her drama.

She walked swiftly down the street, thinking, oddly, more about the cat than about her destination or the letter she held clutched in her pocket. The stripes on the cat's head, its rough, sooty fur, the sharp projection of its backbone and the grotesque grimace of its mew--her mind dwelt on these trivial details; and under all was a funny added contentment at this further proof of the mercilessness and ugliness of the world she was leaving.

The corner of the street was reached and turned. There, in the fog, stood the red shaft of the pillar-box. Beyond it a street lamp, already lighted, made a blur of light in the thick air and cast upward a long cone of shadow.

Allida's heart suddenly shrank and shuddered.

The lamp and the pillar-box looked horrible. Death was horrible. To see him no more was horrible. She felt only horror as mechanically she took out the letter and dropped it into the box.

The heavy sound of its fall turned her shuddering heart to ice.

She had felt horror, she had been prepared for horror, but not for such horror as this. It would all be like this now, she knew, until the end. Let her hurry through it, then; let her escape quickly; and, at all events, her own room, her familiar little room, with its fire, its books, its quiet white bed, would be a refuge after this terrible, empty street. She thought only of her room,--the thought blotting out what would happen in it,--knowing only that she longed to be there, with a longing like a wounded child's for its mother's arms. And yet she still stood staring at the slit in the pillar-box.

"Miss Fraser," a voice said beside her.

It was a voice of carefully quiet greeting, guarded interrogation, guarded expostulation.

She looked up, feeling something shatter in her, fearing that she was going to faint. It was almost like the crash of death and like a swooning into a new consciousness. She only dimly, through the swooning sense of change, recognized the face that looked at her, smiling, but so puzzled, so pained--so pained that she guessed that her own face must show some strange terror.

She had seen the face, in the chintz-and-gilt drawing-room,--it had seemed out of place there,--she had seen it often; but memory was blurred. Had he not taken her down to dinner somewhere only the other day? Yes; she knew him well; only she was dead, a ghost, and reality, familiar reality, looked different.

"Mr. Haldicott," she said, putting out her hand. Her voice was normal--she heard that; she felt that she could almost have smiled. Yet something was fearfully shattered, some power in herself that had directed her so resolutely till now. The cat had been disconcerting, but the appearance of this man, whom she knew quite well, who might talk, might question her, might walk back beside her, seemed fatally disconcerting. For could she act? Could she still speak on normally? And further delay, now that every link was broken, now that to all real intents and purposes she was dead, was a torture too fearful to be contemplated. Yet how evade it? She felt that her hand, which he still held, held very tightly, was trembling.

"You are ill," he said.

She shook her head.

"No; not at all. I only came out for a little walk. And I must go back to tea."

"Your mother is at home?"

"No; she is out of town. She doesn't get back till to-morrow."

"You are going to have tea all alone?"

Allida gazed at him. How should she evade him if he offered to come back?

"I haven't had my walk yet. I came out for a little walk," she repeated.

By the blurred light of the street lamp he still looked at her, still held her trembling hand. His face showed his perplexed indecision. Suddenly he drew the hand within his arm.

"Let us have the little walk, then," he said, "only you must let me come with you. You are in some great trouble. Don't bother to deny it. Don't say anything. Your face showed me that something dreadful was happening to you. Don't speak--I saw it as I was passing on the other side of the street. The lamp was just lighted, else I shouldn't have recognised you. Now walk quietly on like this. Don't even think. I'm not a meddling idiot; I know I'm not. You are desperate about something, and anything, any one, even a complete stranger, and I'm not that, who steps in between desperation and an act is justified--perhaps a Godsend."

He was walking beside her, half leading her, talking quickly, as if to give her time to recover, and glancing at her stricken, helpless face.

As they walked they heard behind them the rattling fall of letters into a postman's bag; the pillar-box had been emptied.

The youth of the face, its essential childishness, the web of soft hair that hung disarranged over her cheek, made her look like a very little girl, and was in strange contrast with the look of terror.

They walked on and on, down streets, across wide, phantasmal squares.

Haldicott held the hand on his arm,--he did not speak,--and Allida felt herself moving with him through the fog like an Eurydice led by Orpheus, a shade among the shades. And all the while there hovered before her thoughts the vision of that quiet room, that white bed, still waiting for her. Suddenly she broke into sobs. She stopped. She leaned helplessly against his arm.

"Good heavens! you will tell me now," Haldicott exclaimed. "Cross the road here. Lean on me. We will go into the park. No one can see you."

She stumbled on blindly beside him, both hands clutching his arm.

All she knew was that she had left life behind her, and yet that she must go back to that room, and that the room now was more horrible than the pillar-box had been. She had left life behind her, and yet she still clung to it--here beside her. Life! life! warm, kind life!

In the park he led her into a deserted path. A bench stood beneath a tall, leafless tree, its branches stencilled flatly on the yellow-gray fog. Haldicott and Allida sat down side by side.

"Now tell me. You can trust me utterly. Tell me everything," said Haldicott.

His fine face, all competence and mastery, studied hers, its shattered loveliness. She leaned her head back against the bench. Life was there, and a great peace seemed to flow through her as the mere consciousness of its presence filled her. As long as he held her hand she could not be frightened; and since she was only a ghost, since all her past seemed to have dropped from her, she could look at it with him, she could tell him what he asked. As if exhausted, borne along by his will, she said, "I am going to commit suicide."

Haldicott made no ejaculation and no movement. Her eyes were closed, and he studied her face. Its innocent charm almost made him smile at her words; and yet the expression he had seen from across the street, as she dropped that letter into the box and stood frozen, had gone too well with such words. He reflected silently. He had long known Allida Fraser, never more than slightly; and yet from the frequency of slight knowledge he found that he had accumulated, quite unconsciously, an impression of her, distinct, sweet, appealing. He saw her, silent and gentle, in her tawdry mother's tawdry house; he heard her grave quiet voice. He had thought her, not knowing that he thought at all, charming. He had always been glad to talk to her, to make her gravity, the little air of chill composure that he had so understood, and liked, in the daughter of a desperate, faded flirt, warm into confident interest and smiles. Thinking of that quiet voice, that gentle smile, the poise and dignity of all the little personality, he could not connect them with hysterical shallowness. But he had, he now recognized, thought of her as older, more tempered to reality. There was a revelation of desperate youth, and youth's sense of the finality of desperation, on her face; and, with all the rigid resolve he had seen, he could guess in it youth's essential fluidity. She was resolved, and yet all resolves in a soul so young were only moods, unless circumstances let them stand still, stagnate, and finally freeze. She was not frozen yet. It was only a mood standing still; shake it, and it would fluctuate into surprising changes. Allida opened her eyes while he reflected, and many moments had gone by since her words.

"How amazing that I should tell you, calmly tell you, isn't it?" she said. "And yet I can't feel it as amazing. Nothing could amaze me. I seem to have passed beyond any feeling of that sort. But since I am so really dead already, that I can tell you, you must respect my confidence in you. You must not try to prevent me. I trust you."

"I shan't prevent you," said Haldicott.

Again she closed her eyes. "Thanks. It is almost a comfort to be able to tell some one. I know now how fearfully lonely I have been. And yet--I wish I hadn't met you--or I will wish it. Now I can wish nothing, and feel nothing--except that you are there, alive, and that I am going to die. But it will be harder to do now. Everything seems so vague, everything seems left behind. The very sorrow that makes me do it seems so far away--like a dream. I can't go through all the realization again, and when I do it now, it will seem to be for something unreal." Her voice trailed off.

"Are you sure you are going to do it?" Haldicott asked presently.

They spoke very slowly, with long pauses, as though a monotony of leisure were about them; as though, in some quiet, dim place of departed spirits, time had ceased.

"Yes; quite sure. I have bought it--the poison--I had a doctor's prescription--I have thought it all out carefully. It's in the top drawer of my dressing-table."

She would, he saw, tell him everything.

Again he paused.

"Is it an irremediable sorrow that makes life impossible, or is it life itself, in general, that you can't go on with?"

"Both--both," said Allida.

Again a long, long silence grew; every moment, Haldicott felt, a drop in the deep cup of oblivion that, unconsciously, she was drinking, that would make the past more and more unreal, until from oblivion she woke into the sane world of struggle and life.

"Yet you are so young," he said at last, "with everything before you--real joys as well as--forgive me!--realer sorrows; they would balance better if you would live a little longer. You know, if you waited for just one year, let us say, you would look back with wonder at this, with thankfulness that you hadn't."

"Perhaps," she said. "Only I don't want to live that year."

"And when were--when are you going to do it?"

"This evening. I had meant to do it long before this. Mamma is away. There could be no better time. Besides, it must be this evening. I've written."

"To her? To tell her?"

"No," Allida answered; "not to her." And she added, "I don't love her."

"Your mother?"

"This is my dying confession, so I will say the truth. No, I don't love her. She has made me so unhappy--made life so ugly."

"Then you wrote to some one whom you do love?"

"Yes," said Allida, after another pause. Her hat had loosened as she leaned her head back, and her disordered hair was about her face; she still kept her eyes closed with her expression of weary abandonment to the peace of confession.