Chapter XV: Part III: The Cut-Out (1)

I

"But won't you find it a little cold?"

"Cold!" Julia laughed. "If Jennie can I can; why, it's a heavenly day! But are you quite warm? You're the one we have to coddle."

"Oh, I'm quite all right. Well, that's your tent, the green-striped one. I'll walk along to the rocks."

She took the escholtzia-hued robe and other fripperies from my arm, nodded smilingly, and passed up the beach.

The Airds and their set bathed, not from the crowded plage of Dinard proper, but in the quieter bay of St Enogat. The beach glistened with minute particles of mica, deposited in moire patterns as the wavelets had left them, and to touch that sand with your hand was to withdraw it again all infinitesimally spangled. It sparkled like gun-metal in the rocks, floated in suspension in the green water. You would have said that the whole shore had been sown with that metallic powder with which children used to tinsel themselves at Christmas parties.

I crossed the tent-bordered plage towards the rocks. Already a dozen bathers splashed and played. Every contour of wet limb reflected the warm gold, every rubber-capped head had its piercing little flash of sunlight. I looked for Jennie's yellow cap, but did not see it; she was still in the tent whither she had preceded Julia five minutes before. But I saw the Beverley girls, of whose mutual sufficiency Madge so strongly disapproved. Jennie was not to be brought up on those lines....

I lay down on a purple-weeded rock and watched the fruit salad of the bathers. Scattered over the beach where they had dropped them lay their bright wraps, the prints of their sandals patterned the mica. Tank Beverley's head could be seen, a dark dot a quarter of a mile out, and in the green marge two little French children splashed, brown as nuts and innocent of any garment whatever. Their barefooted mother knitted a few yards from where I sat, their father lay by her side with his panama over his face. The sun shone honey-yellow through the wings of the gulls, and far out a little launch crept among the rocks and sent its soft "thut-thut" over the water.

Jennie and Julia were taking rather a long time to get ready, I thought, and I hoped all was well. For Jennie, if the truth must be told, was behaving abominably. She was far, far too submissive and sweet and self-effacing before the older woman--altogether too good to be true--and I happened to know that Madge had taken her to task about it a couple of days before.

"I don't see why you can't call her just Julia if it comes to that," she had rebuked her. "She isn't a hundred, anyway. I do wish you'd stop saying 'Aunt Julia.'"

"I'm very sorry, mother darling. Shall I call her Miss Oliphant?"

As a matter of fact I had not since heard her use any form of address whatever.

It was the third day after Julia's arrival, and my own longest walk since my touch of illness. Without even changing her travelling-things, Julia had come straight up into my room the moment of her arrival at Ker Annic, and, kneeling down by my bed, had taken both my hands into hers.

"You poor old George!" she had laughed. "So this is what you've been and gone and done to yourself! Well, we must see what an extra nurse can do."

"Had you a good crossing?"

"Well--crowded wasn't the word; but two nice dear men looked after me. I'd a scandalous flirtation with one of them; oh, I 'got off'; he was putting my collar round my neck for me before we passed the Needles. And may I solemnly assure you, George, that in Buckingham where I've been staying a male man wanted to marry me? Fact. And when I said No-could-do he accused me of encouraging him and left the house the next day. Such is human life so gliding on. Have you fallen in love with a Frenchwoman yet?"

"Not yet."

"Oh, but they're so wonderful! They walk like lines of poetry. There was one on the boat coming over; I suppose my cavalier didn't speak French very well, or he'd never have looked at me with her about. I don't know though--it gives you a lot of confidence when you've been proposed to.... Well, I must go and have a bath and change. I only peeped in to see you. 'Apres le bain,' as the Salon pictures say--be good."

And with a nod over the collar of her terra-cotta blanket-coat she had left me.

Of our subsequent talk about Derwent Rose I will speak presently.

They appeared together from behind the green-striped bathing-tent. The wind-blown wrap of escholtzia-orange and the green turban were Julia's; Jennie wore her white towelling gathered closely about her, and the yellow cap was pulled as low as her eyebrows. Julia is only slightly taller than Jennie. A good four feet separated the orange and the white as they advanced towards me. Julia saw me and waved her hand; Jennie made no gesture. Julia looked freely about her; Jennie gazed straight ahead. The blowing aside of Julia's wrap showed a short-skirted bright green costume with ribboned sandals; Jennie bathed in her plain navy-blue "Club" and her feet were bare. I rose to take their wraps.

Except for one piece of advice she offered, Jennie did not speak to Julia.

"I don't think I'd go beyond the point there," she said as her towelling fell to her feet. "There's rather a rip."

She ran down to the water. Julia turned to me.

"You all right?" she asked. "Here"--laughingly she took the vivid wrap from my arm and put it about my shoulders. "There! Now you're all comfy. That'll keep both you and it warm for when I come out again."

She nodded and followed Jennie. Julia Oliphant has very little to learn about walking from any woman, French or not. With her robe about me I sat down on the rock again.

Atrociously Jennie was behaving. She had been told by Madge in plain words that she was expected to bathe with Julia that afternoon, and she intended that Julia should be quite aware of the quality of her obedience. Even in her little warning about the rip at the point there had been a delicately-measured ungeniality, and their attitude as they had walked from the tent together had been--well, polite. She had now joined the Beverley girls in the water, and if Miss Oliphant cared to go beyond the point after being warned not to that was her look-out. She did not fail of a single attention to the older woman; but every time she vacated a chair or asked Julia whether she could fetch her book she had the air of saying to herself, "There, I did that and mother can't say I didn't."

And I suppose it does make you a little cross when you are sent to bathe when you want to be off somewhere on a bicycle.

Julia Oliphant had not bathed during that week-end she had spent in my house in Surrey. It had been Derry who had done the swimming. But I fancied it would have been different had she had that week-end to live over again. She had remarkably little to be ashamed of in the water. The long arm she threw out thickened, rather surprisingly and very beautifully, up to its pit; and the man on the boat who had shown the solicitude about the collar of her blanket-coat had been quite a good judge of necks. Jennie's glistening dark-blue shape seemed still coltish and nubile by comparison with Julia's ampler mould. But the twenty-odd years that separated them were Jennie's stored and untouched riches, not Julia's. It was Jennie, not Julia, who could stay half a day in that water and come out without as much as the numbing of a finger-tip. And the difference between Jennie's navy-blue "skin" and that other smart and tricky green was the difference between the young leaf-bundle in its sticky sheath and the broad opened palms of the chestnut in midsummer.

As I sat there on the rocks, forgetting that escholtzia-yellow thing about my shoulders as the seniors forget their tissue-paper caps at a children's party, I pondered a resolve I had taken. Between Julia Oliphant and myself there had not hitherto been a single secret in anything that concerned Derwent Rose. But a secret there must now be. She might find out about Derry and Jennie for herself, but from me she should never hear it. Jennie was hardly likely to confide in her. Derry himself--who knew?--might. Him she had not yet seen.

But we had spoken of him, and almost my first question had been to ask her whether she had been staying on in England in the expectation of his return. Her reply had been curiously, smilingly nonchalant.

"No, I don't think so; not altogether, that is. What does it matter whether I see him there or here?"

"But you weren't seeing him, either there or here."

"Oh, there wasn't any hurry. It's only three weeks. That isn't very long."

"That depends. Three weeks with him might be a very long time indeed."

"Oh, but if _that_ happened again you'd have told me," she had said, with the same off-handedness.

"I might not have done so. You left it entirely to me."

"Well, no news is usually good news. And I wasn't wasting my time. I did get a proposal."

"About that. And forgive me, because I don't mean it rudely. But is that a joke?"

"Not a bit of a joke. He did want to marry me. So you see that's Derry's too."

"What is?"

"_That_ is. The more--let's say desirable I am, if I don't scandalise you, the more I have for him. And anyhow I'm here now."

"Did you ask Madge to ask you?"

"Yes. In the end I thought I would. There was no hurry, but there was no sense in positively wasting time. You say he's at St Briac. Where's that? I don't know this coast."

"Six or seven miles. A tram takes you all the way."

"Then we'll look him up. But I want to do a bit of shopping with Madge first. Must have a couple of hats. I hardly bought a single thing to come away with."

And her manner ever since had been for all the world as if something was inevitable, would come of itself, in its own good time, whether she lifted a finger to further it or not.

It may sound fantastic to you, but I could almost have believed that when she had taken that yellow thing from her own shoulders and had put it over mine, she had invested me with something more than a garment, something almost of herself. I had seen Jennie's disdainful glance at the coquetry with which she had cast it about me; almost insolently she had allowed her own towelling to drop where it would; and Julia now enveloped me in a double sense. Cloak or no cloak, she claimed all my thoughts, all my gazing. For I and I only knew why she was in France. Her errand was the deadlier the less haste she made. I had sought to interpose between him and Jennie because Jennie was too young; could I now step between him and Julia because Julia was too old? Moreover, both women now knew his terrific secret. The exquisite complication I had dreaded to entertain was upon us in its perfection. What, between the three of them, was to happen now?

For Julia he was on his way For Jennie he hoped to go
back to sixteen. forward again.

Julia's influence over him had But I could guess what calm
been to rob him of eleven and healing had brooded over
years in a single night. him as he stood with
Jennie in the Tower.

Julia had strangely made herself Jennie knew nothing of this,
his scapegoat and had and yet had an instinct that
left him lighthearted, innocent, Julia Oliphant was a person
free. to be kept at arm's length.

Julia was still unaware that Jennie, his partial confession
apparently his years had in the Tower notwithstanding,
ceased to ebb. was unaware that the
matter had any great seriousness.

Julia had her knowledge of his Jennie was in possession of
former youth. his present one.

Julia would walk through Jennie would do no less to keep
flame to find him. him.

One drop of comfort I found in the whole extravaganza, and one only. Jennie's naughtiness might reach extremes of civility, but so far at any rate Julia was tolerantly good-humoured about it. For she could hardly be unconscious of the--well, the bracing temperature of the atmosphere. But how long was that likely to last? Once more Derry seemed to have us all entangled in the web of his unique condition. Already my own surreptitious visits to him had made me feel little better than a slinking conspirator; the presence of Jennie's bicycle in that St Briac kitchen did not improve matters; and now, to cap all, Julia and I were to seek him out.

Again I found myself weakly wishing that I could wash my hands of him. And again I knew that I could not. It seemed to me that there was nothing to do, not even anything to refrain from doing. The whole thing ran itself. It ran itself independently of any of us, as it had run itself with equal smoothness and efficiency whether Julia had stayed in England or had come over here.

And I sat contemplating it, wrapped in her vivid cloak, wrapped in her lurid thoughts, my looks alternately seeing and avoiding her shape in the water, while the sun flashed on the grapes and apricots and oranges of that fruit-salad in the waves of St Enogat's plage.

II

They came out again, dripping, gleaming, Julia laughing, Jennie without a smile.

"I'll wait here for you," I said to Julia as I replaced her wrap on her shoulders.

"Right you are. Ten minutes. Come along, Jennie----"

The billowing escholtzia-yellow and the closely-gathered white retreated up the beach again.

In a quarter of an hour Julia returned alone. She sat down by my side.

"Jennie wouldn't come. She's taken the things in. George," she suddenly demanded, "is that child in love?"

I parried. "Is that a thing I should be very likely to know?"

"Then I'll tell you. She is. All the signs--every one. She can't sit still in one place for five minutes. Poor little darling!" she smiled. "I remember _so_ well...."

"Wouldn't it be better if you were to take a walk after your bathe?"

"What about you? Sure it wouldn't be too much for you?"

"I should like a walk."

"Come along then. I suppose I did stay in as long as was good for me."

A steep stone staircase descends between the villas, in the chinks of which hawkweed and poppies and pimpernel have seeded themselves. At the top of it a winding lane leads to the church, and from this there branches off the Port Blanc road. In that direction we walked, and in ten minutes were among cornfields and hedges, clumps of elms and coppices of oak. Ploughs and chain-harrows lay by the footpaths, and the sea might have been a hundred miles away.

"Sure you're not overdoing it?" she asked as we took a little path under a convolvulus-starred hedge.

"Quite all right, thanks."

"Oh, smell the air! This is a jolly place! Which way is St Briac from here?"

"Over that way."

The dark eyes sent a message. "Well, now tell me what his painting's like. I expect it's as wonderful as his writing was."

"It rather struck me--I don't know much about it--but I fancied it was on somewhat similar lines."

"What sort of lines?"

"The old story--starting anew from the very beginning of everything--nothing to do with anything else, past, present or to come."

"Of course he would be the same.... But now tell me--we've hardly had ten words yet, what with Madge and shopping and your silly illness and one thing and another. You say he's got to twenty?"

"Thereabouts."

"And he hasn't moved since--you know what I mean?"

"That isn't quite clear."

"What isn't there clear about it?"

"He thinks he's moving--he hopes to move--forward again."

She stopped to stare at me. Already the few days' sun had softly browned her natural milky pallor.

"He _what_!" she gasped.... "But that's wilder than all the rest put together!"

"It's what he thinks. There's simply his word for it. He can't explain it. But he's staking everything on it."

"Everything? What?"

"His future course, I suppose, whatever that is. By the way, has Madge said anything to you about him?"

She stared harder than ever. "Madge! Does Madge know him?"

"She doesn't know Derry. But she knows Arnaud. He's been to the house."

"He's been ... Oh-h-h-h!"

You may call me if you will the most dunderheaded fellow who ever meddled in things he did not understand. I deserve it all and more. All the same I must ask you to believe me when I say that it was not until that "Oh-h-h-h!" broke in an interminable contralto whisper from her lips that I saw what I had done. I had resolved that not one word of Jennie Aird's affairs should she learn from me. As much for her own sake as for Jennie's I had determined to spare her that.

And now I had gone and told her that very thing!

For the knowledge of it leaped full-blown out of that long record of her own heart. Jennie was in love; Arnaud had been to Ker Annic; therefore--she knew it, she knew it--Jennie was in love with Derry. How should anybody, seeing him as Julia Oliphant had seen him at his former twenty, not fall in love with him? Young, sunbrowned, beautiful, grave--only to see him, only to have him at the house for tea, was to be in love with him during the whole of the remaining days. Who knew this if Julia Oliphant did not? Jennie thenceforward would love him as she herself had loved him through the unbroken past. And if he thought his turning-point had now come, forward into the future again he and Jennie would go together.

That and nothing else was what I had told her.

"Oh-h-h-h!" she said again. "I _see_!" And yet once more, "Oh-h-h-h! I _see_!"

And, losing my head once, in that very same moment a wilder thing still rose up in my heart to crown it with folly. I forgot that between Julia Oliphant and myself there could never be any question of love. Little difference it made that I now loved her, knew now that I had long loved her. For me she could never care. Yet I forgot that. It seemed to me in that overwrought moment that if Derry really was right, and on the point of living normally forward again, in one way the field of the future could be left to him and to Jennie Aird. Julia and I together could leave it to them. She in my arms (I was distracted enough to think), Jennie in his, would at least cut the knot it passed our wits to untie. In any case Derry would never again look at Julia Oliphant. He never had looked at her. But I looked and found her desirable, as other men had found her desirable. And why should not I too have whatever of good the remaining years could give me?

So, under that convolvulus-starred hedge, with that sweet air in our nostrils and the whispering of the corn in our ears, I asked Julia Oliphant to marry me.

Before coming out she had picked up and put on her head one of Alec's panamas. For the rest she wore a sort of rough creamy crape, with a wide-open collar, elbow-length sleeves, a cord round her waist, grey silk stockings and suede shoes. Little wisps of her dark hair were still damp from her bathe, and her skirt was dusted with particles of mica from the sands. Since uttering that "Oh-h-h-h!" she had not moved.

"I see," she said again. "I see."

"Then, Julia----"

"Oh, I see! I ought to have known the very first moment!"

"Then----"

She turned towards me, but only for an instant. Then she looked away again. "What were you saying?" she asked.

"Very humbly, I asked you to marry me, Julia."

"Queer," she murmured.

"Is it so very queer?"

She gave a tremulous little laugh. "The way everything happens at once, I mean. Get yourself proposed to once and you go on. I shall know quite a lot about it soon.... I say, George----"

"What, Julia?"

"How long ago was that--when he came to the house, I mean?"

"About ten days ago."

"And you there! What nerve! Did he let himself be introduced to you, or what?"

"He came up and shook hands with me. In fact he carried everything off very competently."

"Carried everything off ..." she repeated, looking away over the corn. "And has he been since then?"

"We had tea with him in his garden one afternoon."

"One afternoon ..." she murmured again. "How does Jennie spend most of her time?"

"I've been laid up in bed."

"Of course," she nodded. Apparently she passed it as a good man's answer, as men's answers go.

But my own question she did not appear to dream of answering. Except to compare it with another man's similar question she might not have heard it. Nor had I asked that question only as the solution of an otherwise insoluble problem. Happy I, could I have taken her into my arms there and then. So I waited, my eyes in the shadow of her panama, while she continued to look far away.

Then, "I see," she said yet once more. "Of course I ought to have known in the tent."

"In the tent?"

"The bathing-tent. She could hardly bear to share it with me. But she let me have the little stool, and untied a knot for me, and carried my wet things home."

"Madge Aird's daughter wouldn't behave altogether too unlike a lady."

"Madge Aird's daughter's a woman," she replied.

Then her whole tone changed. She confronted me.

"That that you've just been saying is all nonsense, of course," she said abruptly. "You know it is. What happened in July puts that out of the question once for all. How can you possibly ask that woman to marry you?"

"I have asked her."

"She isn't her own to marry anybody. And I don't see how Derry can marry anybody either. What's he going to do--forge papers, or impersonate somebody?... No, George; my way was the only way--take what you can while you can."

"Marry me, come right away, and have done with it."

She gave me a slow sidelong look.

"Is _that_ the idea--just a way out for everybody?"

"Don't think it. I didn't begin to love you this afternoon."

"Proposals pour in--once they start!" she admired. "Oh, how little we know when we're young, and how much when it's too late to make any difference!"

"Julia," I said abruptly, "what do you intend to do about him?"

She smiled, but without speaking.

"Are you going to see him?"

"That's a silly question. Of course I am."

"Is it wise?"

"I'm not wise. I suppose I should be Lady Coverham if I were wise."

"What are you going to do about Jennie?"

"Oh, I shan't fly out at her."

"Marry me and come away."

She shook her head. "That's the one thing I _am_ sure about."

"Then don't marry me, but come back to England."

"And leave the field clear? I see that too. Of course you want to give her to him."

"If you only knew how I've striven to prevent it!"

Her hand touched my sleeve for a moment. "Poor old George--always trying to prevent somebody from doing something! Has it ever occurred to you that that's sometimes the way to bring it about?" Then, imperiously, "Has he told you he's in love with her?"

"If he is in love with her, and has no eyes for any other woman living, and never will have, will you marry me then?"

"Oh, we had all that years ago. Has he told you he's in love with her?"

"Since you must know, he has."

"Now we're getting at it. I thought you'd something up your sleeve. Now just one more question. Do you happen to know whether he's told _her_ that?"

You see what I was in her hands. She cut clean through my web of speculations as scissors go through cloth. I had resolved to tell her this, not to tell her that. The end of it was that I told her precisely what she wished to know.

"I've reason for thinking he hasn't," I said. "For one thing, he made me a promise."

But she flicked his promise aside as she flicked the convolvulus with her nail. She laughed a little.

"Anyway I don't suppose he has the least idea what's the matter with him. He never did know anything about women."

But ah, Julia Oliphant, whatever mistakes you made in your life, you never made a greater one than that! Me you might turn this way and that round your finger, but here was something beyond your knowledge and control. I knew what you did not know. I knew what had happened by those softly-illumined cars, by that earth-wall at Le Port gap, and that other night when Frehel had bidden the Crucifix move and come to life. It was not now he who knew nothing about women, but you who knew nothing about him. I grant you all your other rightness; I grant you that I had drifted and bungled as men do drift and bungle in these things; but here I was right and you hopelessly and irretrievably wrong. He did know about women. Books he had flung aside, pictures he would fling aside, for these were but the dust out of which that loveliest flower bloomed. He did know about women, and all the beauty of his strange destiny had now swung over to Jennie. He had passed with her into the Tower of Oblivion, and Julia and I and the rest of the world for him and her were not.

The Tower of Oblivion! It was his own name for it. Jennie had not understood him; the name had merely sounded sweet to her because it was his; but what apter emblem of his own life? To find this new and smiling love in the place so hauntingly whispering with memories of the old! There, in the very middle of the busyness of life, with a threshing-gin droning and the lad's whip cracking among the walking horses and man's simple bread making as it was made in the beginning, he had shut himself in with her and the blue heaven overhead. They had not kissed, but--only to be there with her, only to be rid of the lie he lived to the rest of the world and to be all truth to her!... Julia Oliphant would but bruise her heart against the stones of that Tower, thrice-strong outside but impregnably strong within. God or gland, it vanquished us all. He had found what he had so long sought, and the sooner Julia became Lady Coverham the better.

I forget the precise words in which I reminded Miss Oliphant that I was still waiting for her answer. She turned on me with eyes that so kindled that for a moment I thought she had reconsidered it.

"George, tell me one thing. Do you really believe it--that his clock's really set forward again?"

I answered slowly. "I don't know. I won't say that I don't. Sometimes I almost have believed it. One has his word for the age he feels, and there's nothing else to go by. After all, going forward seems somehow more natural than going back. I've no other grounds for my belief."

Somehow my words had not in the least the effect I intended. Everything I said or did seemed to work contrary to my intention. I saw her making a swift mental calculation. She was a woman to be desired--very thoroughly she had made it her business to be so. If I wanted her, if other men wanted her, so (I read her thought) might he be made to want her. What stood in her way? A chit of seventeen in turkey-towelling! What was a trifle like that to daunt a ripe woman who knew coquetries with escholtzia-yellow bathing-wraps? If it only lasted a year ... six months ... the rest of the summer ... the rest of the summer of her life....

"Young and beautiful," she said softly with a quickening of her breath. "I remember--I remember----"

"Then forget. He'll never look at you."

"Ah, he thought that once before----"

"You brought him to the verge of ruin last July----"

"You say he's young and beautiful--that's what I brought him to--youth and beauty----"

"Unless he goes forward now--if he begins to slip back again--you know what he said his climacteric was--sixteen----"

She threw up the white-panama'd head on the long throat. My eyes dropped before hers, my question was blown to the winds that set the corn a-rustling. I told you at the beginning of this story that I had never married.

"And how," she said proudly, "if he had it in my arms?"

III

Whether Madge and Julia were friends because of, or in spite of, the differences in their nature, I will not attempt to say. In the situation now in course of development at Ker Annic, however, they struck me as not so much different as opposite. Madge's bark is always infinitely more terrifying than her bite; but the more mischief Julia meditated the stiller she always became, except for a little dancing play deep-drowned in her eyes. She had risk-taking eyes, and the expression in them, if you looked at her as if you wondered whether she had counted the cost, was one of detached surprise that you should pause to weigh chances with the gorgeous adventure plain before you.

And what a risk she now contemplated, certainly for him, perhaps more for herself! What the penalty of failure--or of success--might be to herself I cannot tell you, since I am not in the habit of speculating about what responsibilities ladies incur who love a man all their lives, grow up alongside him as a "jolly good sort," violently assail him when he clings as it were to a loop amid the dizzy curves of his life's track, and then, when he comes to rest and again begins slowly to revolve on the turn-table at the terminus, put out their hands to the lever once more. What she had taken from him, what she had given him in return, were mysteries beyond me. I merely realised that, if she undertook this in the spirit of adventure, it was adventure on a well-nigh apocalyptic scale.

But what about him? For him it was not a question, as it was for her, of a few weeks' madness and then a folding of the hands, the Nunc Dimittis and darkness. She would merely be putting the seal on a life that already anticipated its close; but he would be asked to cut one off in the very moment of its re-flowering. He saw ahead of him that boon for which humanity has cried out ever since another woman gave her man the Knowledge in the Garden. "Ah, might I live again knowing what I know now!" ... _Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait!..._ He did know, he was able; and Julia Oliphant, discovering that she had done all for Jennie Aird, now sought to take it back again. For should ruin supervene, it would be Jennie, not Julia, who would now be robbed and wronged. I could hardly look at Julia, standing there by the hedge, without re-living those anguished moments in which I had ascended his stairs and knocked at his door, hardly daring to hope for an answer. He knew not that ultimately it was from Julia that he now had this manna and honey, this healing oil and wine. He only knew that he received them at Jennie's hands, and with this soft nourishment he had victualled his Tower.

So what disaster might not befall if Julia were to introduce that yeasty fermenting element of herself all over again?

Slowly we returned together across the cornfields, I and the woman who had hardly deigned to refuse me. Since our final rapid exchange, that had ended with her demand "How if he had it in my arms?" not a word had passed between us. In that one insolent sentence she had not merely put my pretensions out of existence: she had made them as if they had never been. That they could never be again I knew only too well. Therefore, in silence we passed under the shadow of St Enogat Church, crossed the little space opposite the Cafe de la Mer, and entered the winding lanes to Ker Annic.

At the gate of the villa Madge met us with a peremptory question.

"Where's Jennie? Isn't she with you?" she demanded. She gave a quick glance behind her as she spoke. Obviously she wasn't. Madge glanced over her shoulder again.

"Then don't for goodness sake say she hasn't been. Alec's stamping up and down the garden--says she's been seen with young Arnaud somewhere at the back of beyond on a bicycle. I sent her to bathe with you, Julia."

"She did," said Julia quickly.

"Then just tell him that and say she must have gone into town or something. I know she has been back, because I looked into her room and saw her half-dried costume. You quieten Alec down, George. Have you had tea?"

But in spite of my efforts to placate Alec, I found the fat badly in the fire at Ker Annic. Alec raged up and down the pergola as if he had been caged within it.

"Exactly what I said would happen! I knew it all along!" he stormed. "Noble saw 'em--no mistake possible, he says--pedalling all over Brittany with Tom, Dick and Harry.... Where did she get that bicycle? I haven't seen any bicycle about here! First I've heard of a bicycle!"

"Simmer down, Alec. There's no great harm in a bicycle ride after all."

"If she's been for one she's been for a dozen for all I know. She was sent off to bathe."

"Well, she did bathe."

"Were you there? Did you see her?" he challenged me, now suspicious at every point.

"Yes. She bathed with Julia. I waited for them."

"You waited for Julia, you mean. Nipped in and out so as to be able to say she'd been and then dashed off with this fellow, I suppose. Look here, he appears to be a protege of yours, but I want to know more about him before there's any more of this. What does he go about in that rig for? Why does he talk French like that?" (This last headed the list of his offences in Alec's eyes.) "There's something fishy about the whole thing. Jennie sees him sketching, evidently doesn't know any more than the man in the moon who he is, and goes up to him and speaks to him in French and he answers in English! Then he says he's a level-time man, but touched in the bellows. He's about as much touched in the bellows as I am!... Who is he? Did he really stay with you? How did you get to know him?"

"He did stay with me. He's perfectly straight. Don't make such a fuss."

"Well, I expect Jennie's as much to blame as he is. They generally are. If I've told Madge once ... anyway it's got to stop. Of course if he's a friend of yours that's another matter, but gadding about all over the place has got to stop. Is she back yet? I want to see her when she does come in."

And so on. I left him in his cage, angrily knocking out his pipe against the lattice.

The worst of it was that Alec was so very much righter than he knew. I had ventured to assure him that our young French-speaker was perfectly straight, and you know how far that was true. In the wider sense who was crookeder, whose life more devious? Not one straight step did his circumstances permit him to take. Why, the only satisfactory way he had been able to hit on to provide himself with money had been his fantastic idea of fighting Georges Carpentier, the simplest way he had found of crossing the Channel had been to swim it! Straight? Too straight altogether. The world is not accustomed to people so straight that they go straight plumb into the heart of things like that.... And, merely as straightness, how was he now to acquire even an ordinary identity? Had he _been_ anybody, had he in the past once possessed an identity he was able to acknowledge, ways might have been found. He would then have had a starting point. He might have invested himself with a name and place in the world by means of the French equivalent of a deed poll. He might have got himself cited by name in a civil court, have snatched a social existence even out of the formalities of registration attendant on a State Lottery. But not one of these ways was open to him. Nothing short of an act of creation could establish him. Nothing comes out of nothing, nothing can be made out of nothing. Stronger even than that Tower of stone is this other invisible Tower in which we all live, each stone an ego, its mortar the whole complicated everyday nexus of the social fabric. All that he was able to do was to make assertion that he was Arnaud, and let us take it or leave it at that. How Alec would take it there was very little doubt.

Nor was there much doubt in Madge's case either. She might talk family histories and hidden scandals till the cows came home, but, in the end, the Airds' would be the last household into which any suitor would penetrate without the strictest investigation. Derry might palm off his Somerset Trehernes upon us during a casual tea-hour, but Alec would now dive into the last pigeon-hole in Somerset House but he would know exactly who it was who aspired to become his son-in-law.

Jennie appeared at about half-past six, and Alec's first demand was to be told where that bicycle was.

"What bicycle?" she asked.

"Haven't you come home on a bicycle?"

"No, I came home by the tram, father."

"Where from?"

"From St Briac."

"Haven't you been out with that fellow on a bicycle, or has a mistake been made?"

The game was up. "I did go for a bicycle ride."

"With that fellow Arnaud?"

"Yes, father."

"You went immediately after your bathe?"

"Yes."

"Where's the bicycle now?"

"I left it at St Briac."

"Where in St Briac?"

"At his hotel, where mother and Uncle George and I went that day."

"Where did the bicycle come from?"

"I hired it, father."

"In St Briac?"

"No, in Dinard."

"And you keep it in St Briac?"

"Yes."

"Why there instead of here?"

No reply.

"Why in St Briac instead of here?"

Still no reply.

"How often have you been for these rides?"

"About eight or ten times, father."

"Did mother know about it?"

"No, father."

"Then that means that you've been practically every day for a fortnight?"

No reply.

"Very well, Jennie. Now listen to what I have to say."

Enough. You see the style of it. Alec is an affectionate father, but, his grumbling indulgence to Madge notwithstanding, there are no two ways about his being master in his own house. The upshot of it was that a maid was to be sent to fetch that bicycle first thing in the morning, and back it was to go to the shop where it had come from. Further, if Jennie wished to see this M. Arnaud again, it must only be by express permission from himself. There was plenty of amusement at the Tennis Club among young fellows they knew something about, and--not another word. It ought never to have begun, but anyway it was done with now and need not be referred to again. She had better go and have some tea if she hadn't had any, and as for _the dansant_ to-morrow afternoon, if she wanted a new frock for it she might have one. Now run along, and don't be late for dinner.

Of the five of us, Alec was easily the most cheerful at that evening's meal. His duty done--kindly, he hoped, but anyway done--he talked about anything but that afternoon's unpleasantness. Then, rather to my surprise, about half-way through dinner Julia began to second his efforts. We sat round the Ganymede, two men and three women, Alec between Julia and his wife, Jennie between Madge and myself. Everybody, Alec included, was kindness itself to the silent child, and _the dansant_ was talked of. The Beverleys were giving it. They had engaged a room at one of the hotels, and Madge had been helping to decorate that afternoon.

"Those were the Beverley girls bathing with us this afternoon, weren't they, Jennie?" Julia asked across me.

"Yes."

"Aren't they just a little--stand-offish?"

"I don't know. I didn't notice. Are they?" said Jennie dully.

"They're----" Alec began, but checked himself. In the circumstances the upbringing of the Beverley girls was not the happiest of subjects, and Madge struck hastily in.

"One gets almost sick of the hydrangeas here, Julia, but they're really most extraordinarily effective. We've put four great tubs of them, ice-blue almost, in the corners, as big as this table nearly, and against all that cream-and-gold.... Oh, Jennie! You know father says you can have whichever of those frocks you like. I should say the voile. Which do you think?"

"I don't care which, mother. My last one's all right. I don't want another."

Again across the table from Julia: "That's a darling one you're wearing now!"

"Do you like it, Aunt Julia?"

"Sweet!"

"And oh, Julia," suddenly in a little outburst from Madge, "honestly, now! Do you think I could wear those sleeves, or those not-any-sleeves-at-all rather--you know--the quite new ones, that show your arm from the very top of your shoulder? You _must_, of course, with your arms--it's your duty--but I'm not so sure about me----"

"Stuff and nonsense, of course you can. And I'm certainly going to," Julia declared.

"Bit French, aren't they?" said Alec over his canape. "I've seen 'em."

"He's seen 'em, Julia!" Madge laughed. "Don't tell me after that that a man doesn't notice what a woman has on--at any rate if there's as little of it as there is of those sleeves! But let's settle Jennie's frock first. _I_ think the voile. And you can wear a hat with it or not, just as you like."

"Would you very much mind if I didn't go, mother?" said Jennie dejectedly.

"Frightfully," was Madge's cheerful reply. "Of course you're coming. And all to-morrow morning we'll try-on, all three of us. So that's the voile for Jennie--and most decidedly those no-sleeves for you, Julia, with your arms----"

IV

The rest of the evening was the same: slightly false, slightly tremulous, a little off the note. I honestly believe that that "Aunt" Julia of Jennie's was a pure inadvertence, for she was far too low-spirited to be interested in anything but herself, her mood and her troubles. After dinner she went out into the garden alone, and Madge gave us a quick inclusive look.

"Don't worry her, poor darling," she said with soft sympathy. "Let her have a good cry and she'll be all right to-morrow."

"Let me go to her," said Julia.

"I really wouldn't."

"Very well if you think not. What about a rubber?"

So Alec and Julia took fifteen shillings from Madge and myself while Jennie got over it in the garden.

But I found difficulty in understanding Julia's new attitude towards Jennie. There had been nothing in the least degree hypocritical in her sweetness at dinner; quite simply she had been nice and gentle with her. She had even interposed very quickly indeed when, for a brief moment, there had seemed a doubt as to whether Jennie had bathed that afternoon at all. But that she would hold unswervingly to her private purpose I was entirely convinced. Was her confidence, then, so insolently fixed that she had pity left over and to spare for this unhappy child who was to all intents and purposes forbidden to leave the house without permission? Could she toss her an alms out of her superfluity? Would her gentleness have been quite the same had she not known that that bicycle was being fetched back from St Briac to-morrow? Or would she, had Madge not stopped her, have gone to Jennie in the garden with some such words as these: "Cheer up, Jennie; you'll have forgotten all about this in ten days. When I was your age I had these fancies, but I forgot all about them in ten days. You'll be in love with scores of young men yet; nobody ever remembers any of them for long. Why, I've forgotten the very name of the boy I thought I was in love with when I was a girl. I can't even remember what he looked like. It seems hard for the moment, but it's over in no time. Cheer up, Jennie. There are lots of nice boys at the Tennis Club. Go and flirt with one of them, and forget about M. Arnaud. We all do."

Would she have said something like that? She was fully capable of it. At any rate I am fully capable of thinking she was.

But, whatever the circumstances may be, a man can hardly ask a woman to be his wife in the afternoon, have his suit treated as if it had scarcely been heard, and finish the evening with Auction as contentedly as though nothing had happened. Even poor George Coverham has his private affairs, and it was I more than any of them who should have found myself by Jennie's side. Indeed, as Alec and Julia divided their winnings I rose and walked to the window. It was dark, but not too dark to distinguish that she was still there, a dim white figure leaning up against one of the pillars of the pergola. A half-moon had southed, and the ironwork of the roof-ridge of Ker Annic showed sharp against the silvery blueness as I stepped out. It had suddenly come upon me that if she needed my comfort, I needed hers hardly less. She was seventeen and I fifty, but that day had separated both of us from our desires.

She heard my step, but did not change her position. Anyway she had had a full hour to herself. It was she who spoke, and without preface.

"I wished you'd come," she said.

"We've been playing bridge."

"I very nearly didn't come home at all."

"Why, Jennie?"

"I knew I was going to catch it. Old Noble needn't think he's the only person with any eyes. I saw him too. I pretended not to, but I did."

"I was afraid it was only a question of time," I said with a head-shake. "Where was it?"

"The rottenest luck!" she answered softly and bitterly. "Nobody but that horrid old man on his motor-bike would have thought of going there! Right up a little lane, it was, and we'd put our bicycles under the hedge, and we were sitting against one of the stooks. That dark red stuff whatever they call it--six bundles together and then another like an umbrella on the top. He barged into one of the bicycles, clumsy thing, and then came to tell us that we oughtn't to leave them there in people's way. Derry shoved me behind the stook, but it was too late. I did think he might just possibly have the decency to keep his mouth shut, but I suppose that was too much to expect. So I knew there'd be a row."

"And of course Derry knew there'd be a row too?"

"Yes."

I sighed. "Well, the row's over now. Better let the whole thing drop. Your father's perfectly right, and you were bound to get found out sooner or later."

She made no reply.

But she returned to her luckless plaint a moment later. She struck the upright of the pergola softly and vindictively with her hand.

"It was all that beastly bathe and Miss Oliphant's being late! We should have been all right if she'd been there at the proper time!"

"I'm afraid that was my fault, Jennie. I walked rather slowly, and Miss Oliphant waited for me."

"I know; of course it had nothing to do with you at all.... Then she goes and gets her things into knots, and I have to untie them, and that costume of hers is as bad as getting into a ball-dress instead of just a skin like nearly everybody else! Anyway the sea's there if she wants to bathe, and she can swim as well as I can if she does get into a current, and it isn't as if she needed a chaperone----"

"Jennie, my dear, be reasonable!" I begged her. "You can hardly blame Miss Oliphant for--for what your father was told."

"Oh, I'm not blaming her! But it makes you angry when stupid little accidents like those----" She swallowed.

"I'm afraid stupid little accidents fill rather a large place in the world, Jennie."

"I hate them having anything to do with me anyhow. And with having to take the towels home I only just caught the tram----"

"What's that?" I took her up. "You _did_ catch the tram? Then it wasn't that that made you late at all. You'd have been waiting for the tram if you hadn't been waiting for Miss Oliphant."

"Well, I don't care. It's all--all---"

She did not say what, but hit the pergola with her hand again.

I was too sorry for her to be hurt by her words about Julia. That little slip about the tram had completely betrayed her, and it was against chance, and not against Julia, that she sought an occasion. Nevertheless the merciless mistrust of youth lay behind. The beginning and end of it was that she didn't like Julia, and her young heart had not yet learned the duplicity that makes us more rather than less sweet to those whom we dislike. She broke out again:

"And I _won't_ go to that dance to-morrow! I _won't_ be scolded and given a new frock and told I mustn't go out of the house! Mother and Miss Oliphant can go without me, and when I get back to London I shall earn my own living and I shall be able to do what I like then!"

"Very few people who earn their own living do what they like, Jennie."

"Well, it'll be a change anyway," she retorted.

A cheerful call of "Jen-nie-e-e!" came from the house. We all used a marked brightness in speaking to Jennie that evening.

"Yes, mother--I'm only with Uncle George."

"Don't be long, darling."

"I'll bring her in presently," I answered for her; and we continued to stand side by side.

I suppose that ordinarily a man of my years would keep such a dismissal as I had received that afternoon locked in his own breast, or would at any rate hesitate before sharing it with a young girl. And I did hesitate. But trouble is mysteriously lightened when it is merged in another trouble, and to cheer Jennie up was the aim of all of us that night. And I think that perhaps the Jennie I wanted to tell was Jennie the woman, not Jennie the child.

So "Jennie," I said quietly, "you're not the only one."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I've had my medicine too this afternoon."

"Your medicine?"

"Oh," I took myself up, "not that kind of medicine. I mean that you're not the only one who's had to go through it this afternoon."

"I don't understand you, Uncle George."

"While you went for a bicycle ride I went for a walk with somebody else."

"You went for a walk with Miss Oliphant, didn't you?"

"Yes. And I asked her not to remain Miss Oliphant any longer."

I felt the eager uprush of her solicitude. "Oh, Uncle George! Do you mean you asked Miss Oliphant to marry you?"

"Yes."

"So you're engaged?" The words jumped from her.

"No."

"Hasn't she decided yet?"

"Yes, she's decided."

"What!" A deep, deep breath. "You don't mean that she said No?"

"I'm afraid she did."

"_Oh!_"

She threw her arms about my waist and held me strongly.

"Oh! Poor Uncle George!"

"So you see we're in the cart together, Jennie. I thought I'd tell you. I don't suppose I shall ever tell anybody else."