Chapter XX…

Chapter XX

MRS. ELDRIDGE IN FULL BLOW. THE IMPROPER STUDY OF MANKIND. NOTHING REALLY WRONG! AN IDENTIFICATION WITH A VENGEANCE. HOW CHALLIS CAME HOME LATE

Be good enough to note that none of the characters in this story are picturesque or heroic--only chance samples of folk such as you may see pass your window now, this moment, if you will only lay your book down and look out. They are passing--passing all day long--each with a story. And some little thing you see, a meeting, a parting, a quickened step, a hesitation and return, may make the next hour the turning-point of an existence. For it is of such little things the great ones are made; and this is a tale made up of trifles--trifles touching human souls that, for aught we know to the contrary, may last for ever.

* * * * *

It is the share Marianne had in a thousand little things like the triviality with which our last chapter ended that makes us say that she gave her husband no help against himself. Many a time a word of concession from her, in answer to any of his unspoken appeals for help--for the plain truth is, he made many such appeals--might have led to a rushed embrace of reconciliation, and a flood of not altogether uncontrite tears from her, and even some from him; for though one may pity him, he cannot be held absolutely blameless. The fact is, Alfred Challis had loved this Marianne even better than ever he did her sister, Bob's mother--loved her, that is, as men love what is called beauté de diable, and a kind of rough, good-natured manner. Besides, see how good she was with the boy!

If there had been no core of jealous reserve born of overstrained self-respect inside this rosy-seeming apple--if the girl would have obligingly matured without change--she would always have remained Polly Anne, as of old. But the core was there, and there Challis was to find it, after a pleasant year or so of experience of the outside of the fruit--the best part. Hence she came to be Marianne rather than Polly Anne to him, oftener and oftener; Mrs. Challis rather than Marianne to friends; and "your mother" rather than "mamma" to the children.

She was not the woman for the position in which she found herself. There was really only one chance of steady sailing for the domestic ship, and that was that she should go everywhere with her husband, brave the snubs of the scornful toff, laugh at her own inferiorities, and, above all, rejoice publicly at every new success of her husband. Inwardly she may have done the last; all the other conditions she failed in. The one chance was not caught at, and this man found himself alternately in the brilliant world of Imperial London, made much of, looked up to as an authority and quoted, refusing from sheer plenitude welcomes to one rich house after another--all these on the one hand, and on the other--suppose we put it briefly--Mrs. Steptoe.

If Marianne had only had a friend who would have pointed out the exaggerated nature of her impressions about the motley crew we owe so much to Sir Bernard Burke for telling the likes of us about! A friend, even, who would have said to her, "Don't give way to jealous pride, stupid; but go and observe the ways of the human toff, and come home and tell me, ici bas. I'll do your hair for you." But there was none such!--only Charlotte Eldridge!

Mrs. Eldridge certainly got some satisfaction out of the concern; it would have been a sad pity if no one had got any. It was all in the way of her own specialty, the proper--or improper--study of her kind. It may as well be admitted that the conversation the children overheard part of had run thus:

"I don't think, dear, that my feeling uneasy whenever John is out of my sight ought to count. John is a fool. Besides, girls that apply for situations are very mixed, whether telegraph or sorters. The most dangerous class of girl may apply. The safeguard in his case is that there is so little reserve in his nature. When his admiration is excited he always makes grimaces about them, and then I know who, at once. If taxed with them he always whistles popular airs and shuts one eye. 'Pop goes the Weasel' or 'Tarara-boomdeay.' But I try to believe he knows where to draw the line. This case is different."

"I don't see the difference."

"The girls are different. This Miss Sibyl What's-her-name...."

"The one Titus admires so much is Judith. Sibyl's the Art Coiffure one, that wanted to do my hair like a picture of Titian's...."

"Titian's mistress, I suppose. They did, then. Well!--I meant Judith. Don't you see how entirely different the cases are? Judith's position!--the publicity, dear!--the whole thing!..."

"No!--I see no difference."

"My dear!--what nonsense! Do you mean to say ... why, only look how he 'Miss Arkroyds' and 'Miss Sibyls' them! One judges from little things."

"When we're here, Titus does. But when they're alone...?"

"Well, of course! When they're alone, Mr. Challis may call her Judith. I don't say he does, but suppose he does, what does it all amount to?... Now don't be unreasonable, Marianne dear!"

"I am not unreasonable, Charlotte.... Nonsense! I'm not crying about it. I wouldn't be such a fool. But all I can say is, if Titus wants to go away to his Judith, let him go? I don't want to keep him, against his will.... What are those children at, in there?" At which point the conversation may stop.

Incidentally, it helps us to see that Sibyl had lent herself to an effort, which seemed to her--as to us--a politic one, to induce Mrs. Alfred Challis to be a little more coming and tractable. She quite appreciated that friendship between her sister and Challis, if Marianne was included in it, would be a very different thing from the same thing, conditioned otherwise. And when she called at the Hermitage with her sister, she was strongly impressed that scandal, if any arose, would be the more dangerous unless Marianne could be induced to change her attitude, which suggested that of a civil tigress, with a grievance against the jungle.

* * * * *

"You needn't make a fuss about me," said Mrs. Challis to her husband, just departing for the Acropolis Club. He always went through an apologetic phase, partly real, every time he deserted the domestic hearth. This time his remorse was superficial; for surely Marianne might just as well have accompanied him to this entertainment. You know the Acropolis Club, no doubt?--a cock-and-hen club of the purest water, with about the proportion of hens one sees in farmyards. He would have preferred her coming. However, he wasn't to make a fuss about her; that was settled. It was fine, she said; and Charlotte had said she would come in if it was fine. Challis became aware that Charlotte must have said she would come in, sometime before he himself had been reminded of his engagement to go out. His remorse vanished all the quicker, and he was beginning to enjoy his clean shirt-front--a phrase his mind put by for his next story on any light social subject--before his hansom landed him at Wimbledon Station. The Acropolis, you remember, is barely ten minutes cab from Waterloo, so this way did perfectly.

* * * * *

"John finds it do better," said Mrs. Eldridge, arriving in due course. "Only when he wants a walk he goes by East Putney, because the District saves him at the other end. Eight o'clock dinner, I suppose. Besides, they won't be punctual. They never are, nowadays." This was said to show how thoroughly au fait the speaker was of the ways of fashionable life. It was mere talk by the way, unspiced by direct reference to any Eros, respectable or otherwise.

"I know nothing about them," said Marianne damningly--that is, so far as a suggestion that she was none the worse thereby could condemn. Another, that it was best to know little of the class referred to, was latent. It rankled though, all the more that Mrs. Eldridge's expressive silence recognized its existence better than words. A garrulous person's silence may have all the force of a pause in a symphony. When the bâton of Mrs. Eldridge's conductor, Mischief, allowed the music to steal gently in again, it came on tiptoe, with subtle finished skill; a pianissimo flute-phrase in the stillness, harbinger perhaps of a volume of sound.

"Couldn't you--Marianne dear--couldn't you...?"

"Couldn't I what?" It may be unfair to use the adjective grumpy to describe this question. When a lady beds her chin in both hands, with her elbows on her knees, and gazes at a slow-combustion stove doing its best, while she speaks, her words may have an altogether false effect.

"Ah--well! Perhaps I oughtn't to say.... Never mind, dear! Let's talk of something else. How's Mrs. Steptoe getting on with her soups?" A brisk rally of the orchestra--a rousing thrill on the drum. But too artificial!

"Elizabeth Barclay's been here to-day, to show her about blotting-paper. Greasy, and then Titus grumbles. But what did you mean to say?"

The conductor hushes the orchestra--gives gentle permission again to the flute. "No, dear, I oughtn't to say. Because I know how you feel about it, exactly. But what I thought of saying was...."

"Yes. Do go on, Charlotte!"

"Couldn't you have made up your mind to go--just this once? Because you were asked, this time."

"I shouldn't have enjoyed myself."

"Of course not, dear! Neither should I. But you know what I think. It all turns on a question of prudence. Anything is better than an esclandre." The other instruments come in again, and the conductor is warming to his work.

"I don't see why we want anything French in it. There's nothing of that sort, so far as I know."

"Of course not, with the people!" Given, that is, this character cast, Parisian laxities have no chance. But distinctions must be made. "Nobody's the least likely to do, but people will say, exactly the same as if they did do." Better expressed by Hamlet, in the plague he offered poor Ophelia as a dowry! Who shall escape calumny?

Marianne mutters something her friend takes to be, "I don't care what people say." The orchestra--pursuing our strained musical metaphor--sees a crescendo phrase ahead, and the conductor interprets it as accelerando.

"That's where you're so wrong, dear--do forgive me for saying it! But you are wrong. Pure and honest natures like yours always make that mistake. Of course you know, and I know--we all know--that to speak of anything really wrong in the same breath with your husband would be absurd, and even this fashionable girl for that matter. I mean, you know, really wrong." A nod-supported whisper--the music goes to pianissimo quite suddenly; consider the sharp ears of Mrs. Steptoe, and Harmood, in the kitchen! But enough of that. Our text calls for no secrecies; brush them aside, and resume without pedals, but con espressione. "But everyone is not like you, dear! So many people take pleasure in putting--well! the most horrid constructions on the most _inno_cent.... What?" For Mrs. Charlotte had stopped to gloat so long over the first syllable of innocent--she did not enjoy the "horrid constructions" half so much--that she had not heard what Marianne said. Who, on request, repeated it:

"I didn't say I didn't care what people said ... oh well!--I've forgotten what I did say now, and it doesn't matter. Anyhow, I consider I've done my duty, and now I simply won't go to any of their dinners, come what may, Acropolis Club or no! So there!" This is a stronger ground than a plea of simple non-enjoyment as a cause of abstention, and Charlotte makes no protest. Her mind, too, is attracted by another point. She speaks dreamily to express that it is feeling its way, as through a mist, to illumination.

"What was it ... oh, don't you know? Lewis Smithson heard it ... oh dear!--what was the name of the club now? One of these mixed clubs ... oh no!--of course, I know what the story itself was--you needn't tell me that!... I mean what was the name of the club?" But Marianne cannot help, and conversation can't stop for it. At any rate, it wasn't the Acropolis. Which Mrs. Eldridge repeats more than once confirmatorily, to make the Acropolis safe before resuming the general question. She dismisses the legend itself--what it was does not matter here--as quite unworthy of credence. "I believe Lewis Smithson made it himself," she says. "Anyhow, it's nonsense. For my part, I should say they were much more likely to be stiff and straight up, for fear of its getting about. Besides, who was it you said was coming to this party? Lord and Lady Who?"

"Some name like Albatross."

"Ross Tarbet. Why, my dear, they're the pink! Corstrechan Castle in Banffshire. Oh no!--it's all right enough as far as that goes. But still I do think, if you ask me, it would have been just as well if you hadn't refused."

"Why? I do wish you would speak plainly, Charlotte, and not go round and round."

Mrs. Eldridge won't commit herself to a statement without passing through a period of reflection. It is consistent with the contemplation of the shadow of her free hand, held beyond it, on the screen she is interposing between her face and the fire. Its silhouette of outspread fingers seems to satisfy her, and not to interfere with the thoughts that her drooped eyelids and fixed look are grave about. After quite enough cogitation, she says abruptly: "I wasn't thinking of at the dinner. Nor the rest of the evening. But seeing home comes in. However, if you think of it, she would be with the Ross Tarbets, and they would drive her home. Let's see! The club's in Jermyn Street. Her family are in Grosvenor Square. I fancy the Ross Tarbets are in Park Lane. It's all in the way."

Such talk ought to have had a soothing, reassuring influence. Miss Arkroyd under the wing of a live Countess, safe of an escort to the paternal mansion, what more could be asked? Nevertheless, there is an hysterical sound--to Mrs. Eldridge's experienced ear--in the laugh with which Marianne says: "What silly nonsense! As if it made any difference to me if Titus saw the girl home in twenty cabs!"

"Because you have such confidence in Titus, my dear. And that is right! I wouldn't trust John myself. But he's different."

If Marianne had been in the least a humorist, the image of Mr. Eldridge, in danger from an aristocratic enchantress, seeking to unsettle his devotion to the stylish female he could now call his own, would have drawn from her a more genuine laugh than her last. But she was in no mood for laughing, and the greatest booby in Christendom might have passed muster with her as a parallel to her husband. We are not prepared to say he had not done so in the present case.

Marianne got up uneasily from the low chair she sat on before the fire; took another, but did not keep it long; rose again, and walked restlessly about the room. Unlike her!--so thought her companion, glancing up at her keenly, but furtively. Mrs. Eldridge had no definite plan of mischief; she only wanted the luxury of caressing her favourite subject. She felt a little alarmed, and rather wished the disquieted one would sit down again. But Marianne showed no tendency to do so. On the contrary, she said suddenly: "I forgot to tell Martha those underthings must not go to the wash. That woman always shrinks them," and left the room. Mrs. Eldridge heard her bedroom door close above, but no sound of colloquy with Martha. Then her attention was taken off by a tap at the door, whose executant she gave leave to come in.

It was Mrs. Steptoe, meek and creditable as an evening-cook; to wit, one that has done her washing-up. A sense of chapel hangs upon her, and the cough she gives as preface to speech seems conscious of its indebtedness to a pause in some sort of devotional service undefined. Her widowhood and the distinction of her sudden loss have given Aunt Stingy a chastened identity. But though in the ascendant, she will not obtrude herself. Mrs. Challis--servants seem lately to have left off saying missis and master--not being to the fore, she will retire and remain in abeyance, exceptin' rang for. It was only to remind about ordering Huntley and Palmer, Mr. Challis being that particular. But Mrs. Challis would be back directly, said Mrs. Eldridge. Aunt Stingy, nothing loth, would remain to chat.

Interrogated, Lizarann's aunt is finding the place comfortable. The ketching chemley draws a little imperfect, certainly; but the boiler full up, if hot over-night, lastis on the next day, and any quantity. A great convenience! It is noticeable about Mrs. Steptoe's speech that it does not improve when she tries to talk up to her company. When she spoke to her equals in Tallack Street, without desire to impress, she was provincial and unpolished, but seldom Cockney. Now, her attempts to be classical and win respect from Mrs. Eldridge are failures.

"What sort of a place was Mrs. Fossett's!"

"Miss!--excusin' my makin' bold to correct. But not in a place there. Only as a reference."

"Where was your last place, then?" But Mrs. Steptoe explained, with many reserves and sidelights, that she had never been truly in service; having led, broadly speaking, a regal life, until she married beneath her, but, nevertheless, into a respectable trade connection. The suggestion that her husband's brain had been affected rounded off a tale that hinted at ancestry and a pursuing evil destiny--the race of Laius! "But you used to cook, wherever you were, once," said Mrs. Eldridge, wedded to practical issues.

"Oh, there, now!--cook, indeed! Why, I was sayin', only today, to Miss Harmood, 'If you could have seen the table they kep' at Sea View, soups and jellies and made-up dishes and the whole attention left to me, in the manner of speakin'.' Owing, ma'am, you see, to uncertain health, my aunt's sister--in charge of the establishment--suffering with a complication, and terminated fatally eleven years this Easter Day. Coming back to me, naturally, with the season." A retrospective sigh, over life's changes, came well in here.

"Was it a sort of private hotel, or boarding-house?" Mrs. Eldridge thought she saw light.

Mrs. Steptoe conveyed general assent, without close definition. "But very select!" she added. And Mrs. Eldridge said, "Of course," entirely without reason.

Aunt Stingy felt encouraged, and made up her mind to resume in full all particulars of the banquet we have heard about. After all, she is not the only person that ever dwelt overmuch on scanty incidents of slight importance in themselves; but oases, for all that, in the arid stretches of an eventless life. Besides--as her tale showed after Mrs. Eldridge had heard all about the splendid cooking accommodation of this establishment at Ramsgate, and full particulars almost of every dish on the table--there was revealed a curious sequel to this seaside dissipation, which no doubt would have been communicated to Mrs. Challis, if that lady had been as inquisitive as her friend. For Mrs. Charlotte hearing of an occasion--fifteen years ago!--when six or eight persons of either sex had dined together, forthwith smelt rats, and made for their places of concealment with the alacrity of a Dandie Dinmont.

"You seem to remember them all very well, Mrs. Steptoe."

"Along of what followed, no doubt, ma'am." The speaker appeared to become suddenly reserved, but awaiting catechism for all that.

Mrs. Eldridge's shrewd intelligence reached the issue promptly. "Perhaps you promised not to tell it. Don't tell me!" This would have disappointed Aunt Stingy, if she had believed it genuine. But she didn't, and confirmation of her disbelief came. "Only really, it's so long ago! It's almost ridiculous." The catechumen still awaited pressure. "But do just as you feel, Mrs. Steptoe. Of course, it's no affair of mine."

Aunt Stingy laughed slightingly, to remove the matter from among grave responsibilities. "Ho, as for that," she said, "I was never under any promise--only Mr. and Mrs. Hallock wished no reference made. Only, as you was sayin', such a many years after.... Is that Mrs. Challis coming?" But it wasn't.

"She's speaking to Martha upstairs. She won't come yet." Mrs. Eldridge betrays her curiosity--is very transparent. So urged, Aunt Stingy gives, not at all obscurely, a narrative some ten minutes long, which, for all purposes of this story, may be condensed as follows:--

The Mr. and Mrs. Hallock who figure in it had, for some not very evident reasons, felt justified in abetting the marriage of their nursery-governess with a man supposed to be of good means and antecedents, with the full knowledge that this marriage was concealed from her family, and was to remain so for a term. The dinner that was Aunt Stingy's culinary triumph was a festivity to welcome this happy couple on their return from a short honeymoon. The young gentleman named as Harris among the guests was a friend of the bridegroom. So far, nothing very criminal. But there was a sequel. The Hallocks, returning next season to the same apartments, where it seemed they spent every summer, frequently referred to the affair, but always with surprise that no news had reached them of the wedded couple, and this in spite of inquiries by letter. "Ungrateful girl!" was their verdict. One morning towards the end of their stay they were dumbfounded by an advertisement of a wedding, in the Telegraph. The bride actually bore the name of their ex-governess--her maiden name, that is--while the bridegroom's was, to their nearest recollection, that of the friend who had been introduced to them as Mr. Harris the year before. That was the substance of Mrs. Steptoe's story.

"They were that surprised," she said, "you might have knocked either of 'em down with an electric shock. 'My word,' says Mr. Hallock, 'to think of that!' he says. 'Then Horne must be dead, and that girl married to his friend already! And not so much as a letter!'... Oh yes! Mr. Hallock, he was resentful like, but Mrs. Hallock, she leans across to him, and she says: 'My dear, it's a coincidence! Kate never would--never! I knew the girl,' she says. So she talked him down, and they put it at a coincidence, and let it go."

"But did you hear no more?"

"They heard--not me! Or only remarks fell by chance. There come a letter next day, and they was a-talking and she a-crying over it. Little scraps they let drop, loud enough to reach. 'Ho, the miscreant!' and 'The licensual scoundrel!' And then Mrs. Hallock she says: 'Whatever could possess us, Edwin, not to make more certain about the ceremony?' Then they see me, and dropped to a whisper. Only saying to me after, not to repeat anything I'd heard, which I made the promise, as requested."

"There's Mrs. Challis coming. I wish you could have been more sure of the names, because it's interesting. Couldn't you think them up a little?"

Mrs. Steptoe cogitated. Hallock, of course, she said. Because she knew them a long time. But the other names hardly, to be any surer. Except it was the young lady's single name. Because that she see in the newspaper, when she come to look at the advertisement. Then she must have seen the bridegroom's name, said her interrogator. It seemed not; the glance was a hurried one. But she was sure about the girl's. It was Catherine Verrall.

This story has only had occasion once to refer to the name of Challis's first wife, Marianne's half-sister. And though Mrs. Eldridge had often talked with her friend about this half-sister, dead five or six years before the families became acquainted, it was always about "Kate"--no other name--or "my sister" when Marianne was the speaker. It is quite an open question whether she would at once have felt the name familiar, if it had not been for Bob's full name. Her knowledge that it was Robert Verrall Challis was perhaps what made her say, "What?--what's that?--did you say Verrall?" with stimulated interest. Mrs. Steptoe repeated "Catherine Verrall" quite distinctly, just as her mistress, returning, opened the door. Mrs. Eldridge hoped, without having had time to make up her mind why, that Marianne had not heard the name. For a few moments she thought she had not. The whole thing happened very rapidly.

Mrs. Steptoe delivered her reminder about Huntley and Palmer's Oatmeal Biscuits, to be ordered with the stores. Mrs. Challis had not forgotten them. One or two other small matters were referred to, and then Mrs. Steptoe said good-night with due humility, and departed. She was instructed not to sit up for Master Bob, who had gone to a neighbour's to assist in acting charades. Marianne would let him in. She did not resume her seat by the fire, but lay down on the sofa, away from it. She had a flushed, turbulent look, and a smell of eau-de-Cologne, backed by ruffled hair over the forehead, conveyed the idea that she had been putting it on her face, to cool it. Mrs. Eldridge felt uneasy. Had she gone too far?

"Was it all right about the flannels?" she asked.

"I think so. I don't know. I didn't see Martha. I felt sick, and lay down.... Oh yes!--I'm all right now."

"No, you're not, dear! You look very flushed. Shan't I get something? A little brandy-and-water?"

"Oh heavens, no!--make me sick! Like on the steamer--the very idea makes me ill! There's nothing the matter."

Mrs. Eldridge wasn't convinced. Should she open the window to let a little air in? She was one of those plaguing people that will remedy, whether you like it or no. Mrs. Challis repulsed her open-window movement with some asperity; reduced her to fiddling with her screen with a fixed gaze of solicitude, fraught with ultimatums about medical advice, failing prompt improvement in the patient.

Marianne remained still on the sofa, with her eyes closed for a few minutes. Then she said suddenly, rather as one who turns to an offered relief: "What were you and Steptoe saying about my sister when I came in?"

Her hearer started; grasped the coincidence of name fully for the first time probably. "Your sister, Marianne.... Why, how?" And then, with a complete perplexity: "How could that be?"

"My sister was Catherine Verrall--my sister Kate, that died. Why were you talking about her?"

"It must have been another Catherine Verral--must have been."

"Who must have been?"

"This girl. Stop, and I'll tell you!... But, really, the coincidence!" And, indeed, Mrs. Charlotte seems almost knocked silly by it, as the pugilists say. Marianne is roused and interested at her perplexity--sits up on the sofa fanning herself with her pocket-handkerchief--seems half inclined to laugh.

"What's it all about, Charlotte?" she says, and then adds--a little passing tribute to the memory abruptly revived--"Poor Kate!"

"Oh, my dear, of course it's nothing to do with poor Kate. Just an odd coincidence of a girl Mrs. Steptoe knew at Ramsgate, I think--years ago!"

"Kate was at Ramsgate, though, when I was a child. She taught music to some people's children. What was their name now?" But the name would not come back, on any terms. Marianne gave it up. Her friend felt actually glad, for the puzzle was too incisive to be pleasant.

"Very likely she was at Ramsgate. Why not? But she hadn't been twice a widow when she married your Titus, at any rate. Come, Marianne!"

"Certainly not! She wasn't nineteen, for one thing. Was this coincidence-lady a widow?"

"Perhaps I had better tell you the story?"

"Much better, I should say." On which Mrs. Eldridge repeats Mrs. Steptoe's tale, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, but with a tendency--very common in narratives we pass on to others, but ourselves have no part in--to substitute descriptions or epithets for names. Thus the Mr. and Mrs. Hallock of the original narrative appeared as "this lady and gentleman" until Mrs. Challis, whose puzzled look was on the increase, asked a question about them:

"What were they--this lady and gentleman? What was their name?"

"I fancy he was a coal merchant or dealer in something. Mrs. Steptoe didn't say. The name was Hallock." Mrs. Challis sprang up from the sofa excitedly.

"Charlotte!--what did you say? Hallock?"

"Yes--Hallock. Why not?"

Marianne's breath is quite taken away. "But that is the name I had forgotten--Hallock," she says, as soon as she can speak. "They're in one of those photographs in the old book--the one I brought from mother's." Her speech is rapid and frightened. The strangeness of the story is getting its mastery, and she feels, without imaging them, the ambushes in wait for her. "Oh dear!" she gasps, sinking back again on the sofa, "all this--it's so odd! Charlotte, I'm afraid to look at the photograph."

Charlotte's nerves are stronger, and she, recovered from the momentary alarm her friend had given her, is ready, one might say, to be in mischief again. "Don't be a goose, Marianne," she says. "You're frightened of everything. Do let's get the thing explained, dear, instead of going dotty over it. Which photograph book is it?... left-hand chiffonier?... no?--right-hand ... top shelf?... No!--I won't make a mess.... I expect it's this."

It was, and it exactly confirmed Mrs. Eldridge's anticipation of a coal merchant and his wife, two young daughters, and a governess a few years older than themselves. A stupid seaside photographer's group, but with well-marked face-features. The artist's address in a little oval underneath, conspicuously Ramsgate.

"Of course it's all some confusion of Mrs. Steptoe's," says Mrs. Eldridge. She knows she is talking nonsense, but she wants to calm all troubled waters while she gets her curiosity satisfied. "You'll see she won't recognize any of these--unless you give her hints, Marianne."

This is unprovoked, and Marianne resents it. "Show them to her when I'm not there if you like. Show her now and I'll go. Only I'm afraid they're gone to bed." If they have, no harm in ringing the bell! It is rung, and evolves Harmood, apologetic for not having gone up yet. And then Mrs. Steptoe, even more so.

Marianne does not go, but then that was mere talk. Mrs. Eldridge wants Steptoe--so she tells her--to see if she recognizes a photograph. Aunt Stingy is not dissatisfied to be consulted about anything. Mrs. Eldridge shows diplomacy, astutely getting her to identify Mrs. Challis at different ages. Having put the witness on a false scent, she shows the group, and asks: "Now which of those is Mrs. Challis?"

The witness tried to find an excuse for identification, but failed. But having admitted failure, why hold so tightly to the photo-album?

"Well, Mrs. Steptoe?" Mrs. Eldridge speaks.

"Nothing, ma'am. Oh no!--only what unaccountably caught my eye. Nothing to detain. What would be termed an impression." She relinquished the album slowly with a vaguely constructed "Excusin' the liberty I took, I'm sure!"

"You noticed something, Mrs. Steptoe?"

"In the manner of speaking, yes! But not to detain. It just cut across me like ... yes, ma'am, thank you, just a minute!" For Mrs. Eldridge had said, "Look at it again," and handed the open book back.

Aunt Stingy looked and looked, in more and more visible bewilderment. Pressed to explain it, she at last said: "I can't make no less of it, put it how you may. That's Mr. and Mrs. Hallock I was telling of, just now half-an-hour gone. And that is the young lady."

Iterations, stimulated by an incredulity Mrs. Eldridge affects in order to procure them, are interrupted by a knock at the front door. Mrs. Steptoe departs to open it. It is Mr. Eldridge, to accompany his wife home. He is not, she says, to hurry and fuss, but to sit down and wait, and not knock things over. He makes the remark, "Somethin' up! Easy does it!" implying, perhaps, readiness to wait for enlightenment, and becomes seated, but knocks nothing over. His wife throws him a gleam, to live on. "We are discussing the identity of a photograph," she says.

An occurrence interposes, Master Bob's arrival; the toleration for a few brief moments of exultation over the evening's successes, and his dismissal to bed, rather disgusted at Europe's want of appreciation. Then Mrs. Steptoe, who had retired to admit him, re-enters and resumes.

"Those are the parties I told you, ma'am," says she, in an undertone of confidence brought forward from the previous conversation, rather definitely exclusive of the newcomer, who had overlapped it. But he has his ideas, and as soon as he has thoroughly polished with his wrist the bridge of a nose he has just blown, he offers counsel:

"No name on 'em? Look on the back. Look on the edges where they tuck in. Nothin' like lookin'!" His wife accepts the suggestion without tribute to his sagacity; and when the photo is slipped from the passepartout, there on the back is plainly written: "Mr. and Mrs. Hallock, Nelly, Totty, and self. June, 1888."

* * * * *

"She'll be all right," said Mrs. Eldridge, returning to her husband in the drawing-room a quarter of an hour later. For Mrs. Challis, already upset by her previous interview with her friend, had been in no condition to have it burst upon her suddenly that important events--which she could not the least understand, so far--relating to her sister's life, and perhaps to his own, had been concealed from her by this husband whom she was now called upon to have so much faith in. She had completely broken down; had left the room white as ashes, having been previously flushed and feverish; and had nearly fainted away on the stairs. She had been got safely to bed, and had so far recovered as to be able to say that she should go to sleep soon. Perhaps her chief wish was to be let alone. She wanted to think to the bottom of this photograph story. What was it all about?

But Mr. Eldridge perceived that this sort of weather was trying to some constitutions, and suggested drastic treatment. His wife said, "Be quiet while I write this," and ignored his suggestions. She wrote a brief note to Mr. Challis, and left it in his bedroom candlestick on the hall-table outside. He was sure to see it. She then asked her husband whether he was coming, or was going to go on mooning there indefinitely. He chose the former course without insisting on closer definition of the latter.

A couple of hours later Alfred Challis paid a cabman a shilling too much, to avoid discussion, through his confessional guichet overhead, and escaped from a guillotine--thanks to its momentary forbearance--in a steady shower of rain that had heard that the wind had fallen, and caught at the opportunity to come down. It was lucky he had a waterproof on, though he had only to negotiate the garden's length to reach shelter and discover his latchkey.

He was not in the best of humours; all the more so that Miss Arkroyd, who was to have accompanied the Ross Tarbets, had been unable to do so on account of a sprained ankle--a trifle in itself, but warranted to become serious if walked on.

Seeing the envelope after lighting his candle, he opened it and read the note. His comments, in their order, were a "Hm--hm!" of concern and apprehension, another with some impatience in it, a grunt with nothing else, and a suppressed "Damn the woman!" He read it twice, and again, and went upstairs noiselessly.

Marianne was not asleep. She was wide awake, and wholesomely disposed to trust her husband, and tell the events of the evening at whatever risk. It would have to come out some time. Besides, the relief of knowing, either way! However, to tell him as natural sequence to an enquiry how things had gone with her was one thing; to rush the position another. She could not bring herself to call out to him--so little concerned about her as to make no such enquiry, and still scintillating, as it were, with sparks from the brilliancies of his evening's entertainment--to come into her room and hear the story. No, let him go--him and his Grosvenor Squares and Countesses!

Meanwhile he, however little weight he attached to anything Charlotte Eldridge said, conceived that he was on the safe side in paying attention to what she enjoined about a patient whom she had seen, and he had not. She might have been more definite about the nature of the attack. It was just like her to make a mystery of it. But it was evidently better to take her hint not to disturb his wife--now at near one in the morning! Challis made as little noise as possible, and got to bed in his own room, next to hers, without opening the door between lest he should wake her.

This was the text of Mrs. Charlotte's letter:

"She is much better, and will sleep. John and I both think you need not be the least alarmed. She has been too much excited lately, but will be all right now. Be very careful not to disturb her when you go up. I will try to come round in the morning. C. E."

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Chapter XXI

HOW JIM RETURNED HOME, ALL BUT ONE LEG, AND LIZARANN CALLED ON HIM. HAD THE DEVIL GOT UNCLE BOB? HOW BRIDGETTICKS HAD HEARD OF A SCHEME FOR LIZARANN'S BENEFIT

Lizarann's deferred hopes of being allowed to rejoin her Daddy made her heart sick, but they never ceased to be hopes. No undercurrent of despair made itself felt. If Teacher's reassuring tones had not been sufficient, were there not the gentleman's, known to Lizarann's direct simplicity as Mr. Yorick--a designation remaining uncontradicted in his laughing acceptance of it. But he was going back to his own Rectory, in order that Gus should be once more in harness at St. Vulgate's--his own proper field of labour--during the approaching Holy Week. The invalid was enormously better; so he himself said.

However, Mr. Yorick was destined before his departure to put the crowning corner-stone on the fabric of Lizarann's affection for himself.

"Now, Miss Coupland," said he, "you sit still! And don't kick! And then tell me where you suppose you are going to be taken to-day."

Lizarann was cautious--wouldn't commit herself. "Who's a-going to tight me?" she asked, to get a clue.

"Me," said Mr. Yorick, falling to the grammatical level of his company. "I'm going to take you, as soon as ever you've guessed where. But only one guess, mind!"

Lizarann thought this shabby. But then, after all, when there is only one guess worth making, you may just as well use it up and have done with it. She looked from one of the faces that was watching to the other, and back; then risked her guess. "To Daddy in the Sospital!" she fairly shouted. But, alas!--disappointment was in store for her.

"No! Not Daddy in the Sospital. Guess again."

"Oh, Yorick, how can you? Playing with the child! I shouldn't have thought you could be so wicked. No, Lizarann dear, don't you believe him! Daddy's out of the Hospital, and you're to go and see him. There!... I'm telling the truth, child!" For Lizarann, bewildered, still glances from one to the other.

"That's it, Lizarann. Not Daddy in the Sospital, but Daddy out of the Sospital. Now wrap up warm, and we'll go at once." A wild shriek of delight, an "undue subordination" of limbs, as in pictures of a debased period, and a rush for wraps, is followed, we are sorry to say, by some coughing. There is no such thing as flawless event anywhere.

"Oh no!--it won't do her any harm to go out," says Teacher. "Dr. Ferris said it might do her good if it got mild. Now, Lizarann!--Mr. Yorick's ready." For this Monday, known to the Rev. Gus as "Annunciation," and to most of his flock as Lady Day--a dreadful day when your rent isn't ready--had come as a herald of early spring, and a belief in violets was in the air.

* * * * *

"How far mustn't we go to the Sospital?" Lizarann speaks obscurely, but the meaning is clear to her conductor. How long is the road we are not going to the Hospital on?--surely that's clear.

"How far is it to Daddy? Daddy's at home." And, surely enough, when Mr. Yorick comes to Tallack Street he turns the corner. This bewilders Lizarann.

"But Aunt Stingy, she's took a place," she says. She is not certain of the exact sense of her words. The place might be Badajoz; or a Chancellorship of something, with a portfolio. But it doesn't matter! In either case, Aunt Stingy has left her home desolate--cookless! Again Lizarann is sympathetically understood.

"Your Daddy's being seen to, Miss Coupland. So he won't starve. Here we are!" And it is actually true! Lizarann is back in the home she has been eight weeks away from. For although of late the child had been allowed out, cautiously, no expedition had covered the half-mile between the school and Tallack Street. It is actually true that she is back there now, and wild with delight on the knee her Daddy still has left for her--in a rapture of tears and laughter that can just allow--but only just--the moderation of deportment called for when knees but lately the subjects of comminuted fractures are sat upon, even by very light weights.

Jim was garrulous about the Hospital, and the kindness and attention he had received there. "Yes, master, I was main sorry to come away, one side o' lookin' at it. I'll carry the doctor-gentleman and Nurse Lucy in my mind a long day on. Many's the time I said to myself what I'd be tellin' of 'em to the little lass, home again. There was a bit o' sameness, as might be, when you think of it, and I got fixed uneasy-like about the lass. But, dear Lard bless you!--there was a many there worse off than me. Why, there was that pore chap you see, next bed off on the right! How might you suppose he come there?"

"Don't know, Jim; give it up! How was it?" Mr. Yorick does all the conversation. Lizarann will find her tongue presently, when she and Daddy are alone. At present she merely nestles to him, speechless, but blissful. Jim pursues his topic:

"As I made it out, master, it was this sort o' way: It was a kind o' small-arms factory, and there was two young wenches in the finishin' shop o' one mind about him. So it came to making ch'ice, for him. And one o' them, by name Clara, she warns him if she catches him sweethearting with her shopmate, she'd just mark him. Both decent girls, ye see! And she was all as good as her word, with a little pot of vitrol, right in his eyes! And he run, roaring mad with pain, and was caught in the machinery, and made a spoiled man of, as I reckon, all his days. Name of Linklater."

"What a terrible business! And it may have been he wasn't to blame, either."

"No--pore chap! He'd just no consolation, as you might say. I count myself a well-off man, set against him. Just wait a bit, master, and see me when I'm clear of them crutches. Once I get to use my stick again, anybody'll say, to see me: 'Why, there's a man ain't got anything the matter with him!' Nor yet I shan't have, to speak of!"

Athelstan Taylor could not help comparing Jim's resolute optimism--poor crushed wreck that he was!--with his sister's aggressive meekness and its pious claim to resignation or uncomplaining acquiescence in what was really a most happy release, though paraded as a cruel blow of Fate. But he could not stay to chat. He had to get back to St. Vulgate's; have a talk about the local flock, chiefly goats, with his friend, who had come home the evening before; pack his trunk, and get to Euston by one-thirty, with or without lunch. So he had only a few more hurried words with Jim.

"You'll think of what I was saying to you, Jim?"

"Sure, master!"

"And the lassie will just trot back to Miss Fossett, before it's dark. She'd better; the house might be cold here. Won't you, Lizarann?" Lizarann will, honour bright! "And how about those kisses I'm to take to my own little girls?" Payable on demand, three crossed to the account of Phoebe, three to Joan; both names being now familiar to drawer. They are very loud--those kisses! Mr. Yorick says farewell and goes. Lizarann and her Daddy are again alone together. Eight whole weeks!

Oh, the hours that had seemed weeks, and the days that had seemed years, of waiting--waiting for this moment. And here it was! Daddy himself--come back out of that mysterious Hospital, where Lizarann had never been to see him! No wonder Lizarann did not know where to begin!

"Well, then, little lass! They haven't cut the little lass's tongue out amongst 'em?" A vehement headshake of denial precedes the first of the many things Lizarann can select, at random, from the multitude she has been resolving to tell Daddy all through this dreary period of privation.

"Teacher's new cat's black all over, only white on the stomach. Yass! And four of the kittens was drownded." Jim's sympathies are all ready for Teacher's cat's kittens. But he is not further called on to show them, for the child deserts the kittens almost instantly with "Oh, Daddy!--they took you to the Sospital."

"Coorse they did! How many policeman was there, lassie?"

"There was free I see first. And one he turned back down the road. Only there was men, as well as policemen."

"Chaps?"

"Yass! And there was the boys. And there was a woman. And there was another woman. Only not sober." So she didn't count, that one; was civilly disqualified, as it were. But was the sober one making herself of use?--Jim inquires. "She wasn't finding any fault," is all the testimony Lizarann can give. It seems to imply that the drunken one was indicting the executive. Lizarann finishes up her report: "Then there was Mother Groves, and the 'ot-chestnut stall at the corner, and the Young Varmint." For this is the name--no less--by which Frederick Hawkins is known to Lizarann and her Daddy.

"So there they all was, the biling of 'em," said Jim. "And there was Daddy, he'd got himself under a cart, and was a bit the worse by it. And his little lass, she come and kissed him, for to cheer him up--hay, lassie? Nor never cried, nor made no noise, like he told her not to."

Lizarann felt proud and happy. But she could not endure a position with the slightest false pretence in it. "I did cried, too," she said, "when I got so far as Dartley Street. And the boy, he says not to water-cart."

"The Young Varmint?"

"Yass! He toldited me his nime, he did. Hawkins--Frederick--Hawkins." Lizarann gives the exact words the boy had said. "And he says not to water-cart because of his aunt and uncle. Took to the Sospital quite flat they was, and begun singing a fortnight after!" Jim made concession to the Young Varmint--went so far as to say that he would not warm his hide for him this time, pr'aps! But he spoke without confidence of the like abstention being justified in the future.

"And then the lassie come home," said he. "And who come to the door?"

"Only me, Daddy!"

"Ah!--but t'other side--who come?"

"Uncle Bob didn't come to the door, only he set it just on the jar for me to push." Clearly "coming to a door" involves opening it wide for friends, or conferring with strangers to learn their reason for knocking or ringing. He who takes letters from a letter-box does not go to the door, even if he rushes downstairs like a madman when the postman's knock comes.

You may be sure that Lizarann's narrative that followed was full of little niceties of language, as spoken in Tallack Street. But you have had all the substance, and it need not be repeated in a new form.

Jim interspersed the story of the suppression of his delirious brother-in-law with exclamations of applause. Lizarann deserved what the players call "a hand" now and again for the vivacity of her descriptive report of the knife scene, with its dramatic ending of the application of the spent lucifer-match to Uncle Bob's hand. "He just give one scroatch, and there he was!" The introduction of a new self-explanatory word into the language alone deserved recognition. But Jim was not concerned with this. The conduct of Athelstan Taylor in a difficult position took his attention off minor points.

"I could have named the sart of man he was," said he, speaking half to himself, "from the feel of his hand, and maybe no more than just a 'Good-marning, mate!' by the way. And--but to think of it!--him a parson!" Jim couldn't get over this at all. He dwelt on the unfitness of the arrangement: "Now, if they'd 'a made pore Bob a parson, it might 'a broke him of his habit, and we'd not have had a bad miss of him on our side." He seemed to go on thinking of the subject in all its aspects--possibly of the utilization of ecclesiastical preferments as an antidote to drunkenness. But his fingers kept wandering about his little girl's face and head, as if to detect the change eight weeks had made in it.

"Uncle Bob's dead," said she, getting closer to say it, in a dropped, awe-struck voice.

"Ah--he's dead! He might have turned over a better day's work, mayhap! But Lard!--if you come to that, what a many of us mightn't! Poor Bob!"

"Does it hurt, Daddy?"

"Does what hurt, lassie?"

"Being dead."

"I reckoned you might mean my old leg.... No--it don't hurt, bless you!--not good little lassies, like mine. Other folks' I couldn't say about. They do say the Devil gets some on 'em, now and again. But he ain't a sartainty, himself. Though in coorse he manages all he can see his way to." That is to say that, unless handicapped by absolute non-existence, Satan might be trusted to do his best to get all bad little lassies.

Lizarann knew her catechism, and all that was necessary for her salvation, as school-knowledge. But she could not help being curious about these things as actual facts--knowledge-knowledge, one might say. Daddy could be relied on. Why not go straight to the point? So after some mere conversation-making about whether Mr. Winkleson had ever actually seen the Devil, Lizarann did so. "Has he got Uncle Bob?" she asked.

Her father's answer was not consistent with his previous expressions of opinion. "Never you fear for him, lass! The Devil don't take a poor chap for making mistakes with his grog. And as for his handling that knife a bit too free, I doubt the liquor had just got the mastery of him. And then, you know, lass, a man ain't himself when that happens. Ye may make your mind easy about Bob."

So Lizarann felt no further disquiet. Perhaps she was unconsciously soothed by observing the differences of opinion among her seniors--Mr. Winkleson, Teacher, and Daddy. The last was most likely to know, and gave the pleasantest answer to the problem.

"And there was my little lass out in the snow in her night-shimmee. To think of that! And her Daddy all the while no more use than a turned turtle!" This had to be explained; and the continuity of the conversation was risked, owing to Lizarann's womanly pity for turtles on their backs and helpless. However, this very pity caused reaction towards the previous questions, as Jim's situation had been no better than that of the turtles. Lizarann had to cry a little over this, and then renewed her petition--previous applications having been met by evasion or postponement--to actually see the wooden substitute for a limb that, in spite of its boasted efficacy, compelled her Daddy to sit on a chair with more or less disguise of coat or blanket over it, both limbs being preferably kept horizontal for the present. But she might look at it, sure, might Lizarann; and, indeed, anyone would have thought, to see Jim exhibiting the business-end of a very new wooden leg, that some great improvement on a previous unsatisfactory condition had been attained. The little woman was incredulous about this; and, suspecting guile, put her Daddy through a severe cross-examination.

"'Sposin' you was obliged to it, Daddy; 'sposin' you had to walk all the way up Tallack Street, and all the way acrost Cazenove Street, and all the way acrost Trott Street to Blading Street where the cart was...?"

"Lard, lassie!--I could do it on my head, as the saying is, any minute o' the week!" But Jim demurs to an actual performance--says the doctor don't allow any tricks to be played. Lizarann gives the point up; but, oh dear!--how dreadfully afraid she feels that she is being practised on, and that in reality this shiny, well-turned, clean-leather-strapped contraption is, after all, no better--even perhaps worse--than an ordinary human foot. She will--she must!--elicit the truth somehow.

"Daddy!"

"Lassie!"

"When you was out on the yard-arm, and the wind was a-freshenin' up from the south...."

"To be sure, lass! Freshening to a three-quarter gale, and none too little canvas on her.... Easy ahead, lassie!" Jim is only helping the memory of the well-worn story, and the child accepts the prompting.

"... None too little canvas on her. And Peter Cortright and Marmaduke Flyn, they was both on the mainyard reefin' alongside. And Peter Cortright he sings out to look...."

"Ah!--and your Daddy, he looked, and there he see her, the Dutchman, carrying all sail afore the wind.... Well, little lass, and what o' that?"

"When you was then, 'sposin' you'd only had a wooden leg!"

Jim's big laugh comes; and so lost is he in his little lass, so free from all thought of his own great privation, even in the face of the bygone time, that he can make it a heart-whole laugh and never flinch.

"'Sposin' I'd only had a wooden leg? Well--as I reckon it--I shouldn't have taken much notice. Not for one such! If you'd 'a named two wooden legs now, lassie! That might have constitooted a poor kind of holt on a slippery yard. But I might have made a shift to do, even at that."

Lizarann was silenced, but not convinced. She resolved to thresh the subject out with Bridgetticks, whom she had secretly resolved to call upon on her way home. Bridget might know nothing about wooden legs, but she could cite a parallel experience, having herself walked on her brother's stelts, what he made out of two broomsticks and the foot'old nyled on, and mide syfe with a scrop of narrer iron hooping. She would refer it to Bridgetticks whether her brother--or a Circus, for that matter--could walk upon a bare yard, of which her own image was akin to a yard-measure, with a pair of stelts. If she, Bridget, felt confident of her brother's powers, no doubt Jim's assurance of his own might have been well grounded.

"Doesn't Aunt Stingy come to see to you, Daddy?" she asked anxiously. For she couldn't see no sign neither of breakfast, nor yet of dinner, nor yet of supper.

"No--lassie! Your aunt, she's got to 'tend on somebody else, away off to Wimbledon Common; and these here Simses--or Groombridges; I didn't catch the name right--she's got a short let to, are mostly away on a job. So she's packed together her bit of furniture, like you see it, and Mrs. Hacker, she's so obliging as to give me her time and attention; 'cos the master, ye see, he put the matter in trim for me. One don't look for hospital fare all the days of one's life."

Lizarann had heard where her aunt's "place" was, but her experience of places was of such as could be got to by half-past seven in the morning and come back to sleep at home. She thought now that she saw her way to enlightenment.

"Is where Aunt Stingy's gone where Mr. Winkleson lives?"

"Never a bit of it, lassie! He's by name Wilkins--Wilkinson Wilkins. This here's Wimbledon, a place with a Common to it. I went there once, for to see a review. I wouldn't mind going to see one again, and take the little lass." Perhaps he meant that his child's sight would serve for both; but more probably it was an instance of the strange way blind folk forget their own blindness. "Your aunty, she's come over once or twice, to pack up her traps and make straight, but I've got to put my dependence on Mrs. Hacker, so far as I can't shift for myself."

Lizarann derived from this and what followed one broad impression that the history of No. 27, Tallack Street had reached the end of a chapter--the one that contained her own biography to date. Another, that Aunt Stingy would be much less in evidence for the future. Another, that a new force had come into her life and Daddy's--a welcome one, connected with Miss Fossett and Mr. Yorick. She had a happy guardian-angel sensation about this, and took it to her bosom with only one slight misgiving--that they were too easily duped by that ridiculous little pipe of Dr. Ferris's, that would hold up like a candlestick certainly, and you could blow through if he let you, but that was impotent for every other purpose.

If this story could ask its reader a question at this point, it would be: "Have you not noticed that Lizarann has scarcely coughed, all through this long interview with her Daddy?" It was the case, anyhow, and rather points to the truth of what a physician once said to ourself, the writer: "If in the early stages of lung-disease doses of unalloyed joy, of perfect happiness, could be administered three times a day to the patient, the later stages would be much rarer than they are at present." Certainly Lizarann's happiness had almost touched rapture, doubts about the wooden leg being the only alloy in the pure gold. And she certainly had coughed mighty little. Perhaps Dr. Ferris would have known what claim Lizarann had to be considered a case of the kind referred to.

The delightful time had to come to an end, and Lizarann found herself compelled to say good-bye. Daddy would have it so, although darkness was a long way off yet awhile. So she departed, bidden first to go to Mrs. Hacker's, and say to that good lady, that she was on no account to be in any tirrit to come away from her own supper to attend to Jim's, for that he had got his pipe, Lizarann having helped him to light it,--a thing to rejoice at, after that one defective usage of an Institution otherwise perfect--and wasn't in any driving hurry. This message Lizarann gave fairly honestly, in an interview with Mrs. Hacker, which--being repeated to Jim--may be held responsible for some borrowed phrases used lately to describe impressions on her mind of his surroundings. But she was not uneasy about him; her faith in Mr. Yorick was too great for that.

Having given her message, it did not strike her as a serious transgression to pay a visit to Bridgetticks. The injunction to go straight home covered the line of road--did not deal with continuity of movement. That seemed to her a just interpretation of it. But of course not stopping only five minutes!

So she went to the door of Bridgetticks, and shouted through its keyhole, in preference to knocking or ringing. But Bridget was assisting her mother at the washtub, and up to her elbers in suds; so she sent an emissary to the door instead of going herself. He was very young, and was eating an apple; he was, in fact, too young and crude to be trusted to do like he was told; and he put a false construction on his mission, endeavouring to spit some of his apple through the keyhole, with a mistaken hospitality. His name was, as pronounced, Halexandericks. His bursts of laughter at each new failure of his attempts on the keyhole obscured the voice that was calling through it. He had a vacuous though not unpleasant laugh.

"I'll let you know directly, if you don't open that door," shouted his sister. She gave close particulars of the means she would resort to, but without effect. So she onsoapied the suds off of her arms, which she then placed akimbo, and went herself; not without a certain dancing effect, in consonance with a rhythmic utterance difficult to class as either song or recitation. Its words were certainly, "Waxy diddle-iddle-iddle, high-gee-wo!" ending in a pounce on Alexander, who spat his last piece of apple in his captor's face with a fiendish crow of delight. She wiped if off on his costume without comment.

"I seen my Daddy," said Lizarann, beaming, when the door was opened.

"I seen him afore ever you did," said Bridget, not to be outdone. "I seen him fetched along in a cab, last night just on seven-thirty. I seen him holped into the house."

"You story!" said Lizarann, hurt. "He can help himself, he can. He don't call for no help. Who was helping him?"

"Clapham Church Parsing--same as see your uncle Mr. Steptoe drownded--and rilewye-stytion cabman with rilings for trunks atop. Three thousand six hundred and thirty-two. Got him indoors they did."

Lizarann felt inclined to cry; this was a throw-back! But she wasn't one to give in easily. "My Daddy says he could swarm up the rigging as soon as not," said she. "Only the doctor he says for to keep quiet a bit, owing to prudence." When Lizarann repeated phrases lately heard, you would have thought, to listen to her, she was quite a big girl.

Now, it must not be supposed that Lizarann and Bridgetticks had not met during the past eight weeks. On the contrary, visits had been arranged, by request, even before Lizarann had been thought plenty well enough for school, only not to fret herself. These were the terms in which Miss Fossett's Anne confirmed that lady's opinion, and sanctioned a continued study of arithmetic and calligraphy. But intercourse during school-hours is fettered by formula; and when there's carpets and the bed made and all, you have to set quiet, and it's not the same thing. So when these two found themselves once more in their old haunt, it was as though a ceremonial padlock had been removed from their tongues. Lizarann's improved exterior--for Teacher and Anne had reconstructed it--clashed a little with Bridgetticks; but the principle held good. Here, on Mr. 'Icks's doorstep, when an imputation of falsehood as an exordium to any reply seemed natural and genial, neither speaker felt bound to check her inspirations. Lizarann and Bridgetticks were themselves again.

They sat on the doorstep, cloze or no!--this referred to Lizarann's frock--and Bridget retained her younger brother, perhaps for slight rehearsals of the vengeance she had in store for him; he was that troublesome! Bridget smelt of soap and warm steam.

"You wented on stelts, and wooden legs is better than stelts!" Lizarann's uneasiness rankles, and she longs for public acknowledgment of her Daddy's prospects of rehabilitation.

"I shouldn't 'a said so," Bridget answered. "Stelts you catches hold atop. Wooden legs is balancin'. Stelts is your hands as well as your legs. Wooden legs you're stood-on-end and pitches yourself over, just as like as not. Not onlest you have crutches. Your Daddy he 's crutches, he has. I see 'em myself!" Lizarann could say nothing about Job's comforters, if only because, on the one occasion when she had heard them mentioned--by Mr. Winkleson--she had supposed them to be woollen ones. Besides, she was interested on another point.

"My Daddy hasn't no scrutches," said she. She had caught their name, without understanding it, when her father used it; and now decided on denying them provisionally, pending inquiry into their nature. "What's a scrutch?"

"Oh, you little ignorance!" said Bridget. "Never to know what a crutch is, at your age!" She appealed to her infant brother to say, directly minute, what a crutch was, or she would take advantage of his unprotected youth to smack him. His reply, needing interpretation, was that it was a penny-farden. Halexandericks had evidently a turn for negotiation. His sister cast him off, telling him to go and ply by himself on the pivement, and then resumed: "If you'd 'a knowed 'em when you seed 'em, you might have kep' your eye open, and took note."

Lizarann, skipping the unnecessary, immediately replied: "Daddy said they was second-hand, and to go back when done with."

Bridget skipped some more. "Very well, then!--you see them cross-pieces for the 'ands?... Very well, then!--there's a lather pad for under the shoulder-j'int, and they're n'isy going down the street. Now don't you go to say I never told you." There was nothing really unkind or overbearing in Bridget's peculiar manner; it was only the strong working of a leading mind. She was, in fact, a very clever child, being less than two years her friend's senior.

She saw that Lizarann was downcast by hearing of the crutches, never having rightly appreciated the position, and set herself good-naturedly to consolation. "It's always tender where your leg's took off," said she, "and you want something to ketch the weight, walking." She spoke as if she had often had legs off. "But my father, he says it's nothing to get the hump about, with a little accommodatin'. And I seen a man with one leg and one crutch took two coppers to tike him to the stytion." Lizarann brightened visibly. "You see what your Daddy he'll look like when he's been a month in the country!"

Obviously this was repetition of something said by an older mouth. "Who toldited anything about the country?" said Lizarann.

"Clapham Church Parsing. Him as see Mr. Steptoe drownded. I heard him telling. 'You see,'--he says to your Daddy--'you see what you'll feel like when you've been a month in the country,' he says. 'You do just as I tell you,' he says, 'and I'll make it all square for you,' he says. And then he says you to go too."

"Me!" Lizarann exclaimed, open-mouthed with amazement. And then Bridgetticks gave more particulars of what really was a bout of careful eavesdropping on her part, she having succeeded in overhearing a good deal of conversation between Jim and the Rector of Royd, who had accompanied him from the Hospital the night before. It pointed to a scheme by which Lizarann was to be taken in at the Rectory, and carefully nurtured--treated, in fact, for a disease which had existence only on the authority of that lying little stethoscope of Dr. Ferris's! However, as long as no project involved a new separation from Daddy, what did Lizarann care?

Besides, look at the new experience of a world she had been so little in--it was glorious to think of! She was not so much dazzled as she might have been had every minute of her life been passed--for instance--in Drury Lane. She and Bridget had both benefited by school-treats. "I've been in the country," she said. "It's at Dorking."

But Bridget had a larger horizon. "There's more sorts than that," said she, "without taking count of foring parts. Like you'll find when you done some more geography." Lizarann felt awe-struck.

But it was getting along towards six, and she knew she ought to be reporting herself to Teacher. Perhaps she would have delayed still later, if she had not become anxious to ask that lady point-blank about this fascinating bucolic scheme. As it was, she was received with some displeasure--on her own behalf entirely--and decided to postpone investigations. We, for our part, have never believed that that extra half-hour of exposure to the evening air made in the long run the slightest difference.

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Chapter XXII

THE EXACT STORY OF CHALLIS'S FIRST WIFE'S FIRST MARRIAGE. HOW HE AND MARIANNE MISSED THEIR EXPLANATION. CHARLOTTE THE DETECTIVE. CHALLIS'S SECOND COURTSHIP, IN A NUTSHELL

If there had been no cause of irritation between Alfred Challis and his wife about his relations with Grosvenor Square, it would have mattered much less what he kept back from her of his previous history. And if he had taken her fully into his confidence about the story of his early marriage with her sister, his relations with Grosvenor Square would have been much less capable of embitterment and misinterpretation. But his palpable concealment of Heaven-knew-what from one who conceived she had of all others the fullest right to know it, played the part, in this domestic misunderstanding, of poor Desdemona's bad faith towards her father. "She has deceived her father, and may thee," said Brabantio.

Could Marianne have known what Heaven knew, she would probably have held her husband blameless, if ill-judging; though she might have felt very little leniency towards her sister for contracting a marriage unknown to her family. But the ground was not in order for the sowing of a crop of explanation, to be reaped as a harvest of reconciliation. It was cumbered with the clover her husband was supposed to be enjoying at the Acropolis Club and elsewhere, and choked with a creeping weed of Jealousy unacknowledged. And as the trivial things of life are always the ones that play the biggest parts, so that unfortunate resolution not to disturb his wife, when Alfred Challis came home from the Club dinner, had to answer for quite ten times its fair share of the events that followed. No doubt her silence was a little vindictive--it would have been so easy to give a hint that she was awake--but the truth is it had very little to do with the matter. What had a great deal to do with it was the fact that Mr. Challis had not been enjoying himself. Had it been otherwise, he would have felt apologetic; the monitor he would not admit was his conscience would have prescribed amends to Marianne for contriving to be so jolly without her. But she had no guess that her Grosvenor Square enemy was laid up with a sprained ankle, any more than he had that the new cook had been the means of bringing to light a great deal--the worst half in disjointed fragments--of a story his good if mistaken intentions had concealed. For, needless to say, the actual story was still very obscure to her; and Mrs. Eldridge, though clever enough, was a biassed assistant in its elucidation.

Lest it should still be equally obscure to the reader, let him note its broad facts as follows: Edward Keith Horne married, or went through a marriage ceremony, with Kate Verrall, a governess at the house of a coal-merchant named Hallock. Six weeks later he went away to New York, promising an early return; there was some pretence of winding up a relative's affairs. He repudiated his wife shortly after; as she became convinced, and as Challis, his friend, also believed, on legally good grounds. As we have already said, Challis may have met conviction half-way, being in love with the girl himself. Of course, it was he whose name Mrs. Steptoe had remembered wrongly as Harris. And, equally of course, the miserable reprobate of Athelstan Taylor's painful experience at St. Brides was Horne, who succeeded with what was left of his mouth in nearly articulating his true name rightly. "Kay Thorne" was close to the truth, considering the circumstances. This story is fortunate in having very little to do with this man; as his young wife, or victim, may also have been in having for her only adviser a youth with a strong interest in urging her passive acceptance of her position. If only half the betrayed girls in the world could have such an adviser ready to hand! Alas!--how seldom is one found with the courage to say, "Think yourself at least in luck, silly girl, that you are not fettered for life to this lout or devil! Hug to your heart this one consolation, that though you have bought your experience of him, and what he calls love, dear, you have escaped scot-free of the blessed sacrament of marriage!" Too often the poor thing finds herself alone in the desert--the desert where correct expressions grow--sin, and shame, and penitence, and so on--and where marriage-lines and marriage-settlements make oases, from which she is excluded, for the Grundy family to breed in.

Perhaps Challis had a concealed motive for his decision when, at the time he married Kate's sister, he made up his mind to treat the whole story as a sealed book. But, even with none, was he wrong, knowing that his wife elect was quite convinced that no belonging of hers had ever set foot outside her particular Grundy oasis? Remember, too, that he was only pursuing the course he would have held it a point of honour to pursue if he had never married Marianne at all. Why should his marriage with her make it incumbent on him to dig up a story that his wife had already passed years in ignorance of, without any living creature being perceptibly the worse? No doubt Mrs. Eldridge would have said, with a portentous gush of deep conviction, "She ought to have been told." But why?

At least, the story shows that Challis himself had nothing disgraceful to conceal, and that all his actions were dictated by consideration for others. It is more than likely that an explanation, had the position favoured it, would have ended--if not by placing him in the position of a hero--at least by a discharge with a first-class certificate from the high court of Morality. But the atmosphere teemed with suggestions of malpractice undefined, and the master-hand of Mrs. Eldridge made the most of them.

No explanation took place between Challis and Marianne at the only time when it was easily possible--on the morning after we saw them last. Explanations are like strawberries--bottled up, they spoil. Now, whatever chance there would have been of Challis hearing of the photograph mystery and Mrs. Steptoe's memories was cancelled by the malign arrival on the scene of Mrs. Eldridge and her John, bound for his daily toil at St. Martin's-le-Grand. So, you see, it was early in the morning.

Charlotte had been so uneasy about dear Marianne that she felt she must come over to find out. It was so entirely unexpected. She had been laughing and joking the minute before. So Charlotte thought fit to say, and Challis, to whom it was said privately, detected a flavour of an unasked-for assurance that Marianne was cheerful in his absence. "It" had come quite suddenly, when Marianne went away to speak to Martha. Challis had no means of guessing what "it" had been, except Mrs. Eldridge's note, and a certain demeanour of his wife's, which no doubt had to answer for an expression of Master Bob's, in secret conclave with his sister Cat. According to him, his mater was savage, if you liked, this morning. Challis had gone to his wife's room to ask about "it" as soon as he heard that the servant had abated; and had been told, coldly, that nothing had been the matter that Marianne knew of. His production of Mrs. Eldridge's note was met by, "That's just like Charlotte!" He waited a few moments for counter-inquiry about himself, rather anxious to tell what a failure the Acropolis had turned out; but no curiosity was shown, and he went back to his own room to dress, saying nothing further. Had he been wise, he would have sat on the bed in his pyjamas, and said he meant to stop there until the mystery was accounted for.

Matters got definitely worse when Mrs. Eldridge, whose invasion occurred just at the end of breakfast, took advantage of a chance exit of Marianne's, in connection with housekeeping matters, to follow her and contrive a sympathetic interview within hearing of the two gentlemen. Not that a word was audible, but anyone with the slightest knowledge of human nature would have discerned that one of the speakers, the tone of whose voice was mellow with the opposite sexes of the persons she was speaking of, was recognizing the patience and forbearance of the other under trials, and exhorting her to renewed efforts in the same direction.

"What do you suppose was the matter?" Challis was filling his pipe, as he asked this question of Mr. Eldridge.

"Mean to say you don't know?"

"I certainly don't. Nobody has told me."

"I ain't any help. Don't ask me--that's all! Don't put it on me to say!" Mr. Eldridge, however, implies that his attitude is one of Discretion, not Ignorance. For he closes one eye, an action that can bear no other interpretation. He also shakes his head continuously and gently, as one who would convey to an interviewer the hopelessness of cross-examination.

"I suppose it was nothing but an upset. The weather's trying." It had really been unusually normal. But Mr. Challis was talking as gentlemen do when they are lighting a pipe, and thinking more about whether that's enough than about the topic in hand.

"Stomach!" said Mr. Eldridge, as nearly in a monosyllable as spelling permits. He repeated the word just half-a-dozen times in a run; then added this rider: "Say nervous system, when a lady. Puts it better."

"Something of that sort!" The pipe draws, and the smoker ought to look happy. He doesn't. But, then, the sympathetic murmur, with its unguessed import, of Mrs. Eldridge afar, is reaching his ears. Sudden appreciative gushes, and the firm tone of sound advice, are very unsettling when inarticulate. Cannot that fool John be made to throw a light on the mystery? Try again! "Charlotte told you all about it, John; you know she did!" The Christian names give cordiality. But John is not to be cajoled.

"Tellin's is tellin's," says he; and goes so far as to place a finger against one side of his nose, in token of perspicuity. "Put it at stomach!... Got the right time?"

"That clock's right."

"Then Greenwich is fast. Must see about gettin' off! Gettin' off--gettin' off--gettin' off!" Mr. Eldridge's repetitions no doubt have some bearing on his relations with his fellow-man, but it is not easy to say what. They seem to sanction concurrent event; that is the most one can say. He continued his last repetition even after he had taken his leave, saying he wouldn't wait for Lotty, because she was going the other way, and seeming quite content with his speech-work.

Hence, when Lotty reappeared hurriedly, and was surprised at his departure, having something she must say to him before he went, Challis got very little speech of the lady. All her limited time allowed her to say was that she had had a long talk with dear Marianne, and she was quite sure "it" would be all right now. Only she was convinced it would be so much better to say nothing to her--just to take no notice of "it" and let "it" drop. However, rush she must, or she would never catch John! And rush she did. And Challis grunted, but retired to his own room, and was soon absorbed in the Ostrogoths.

A stand-up fight between Titus and his wife at this period might have saved the situation. It would not have mattered one straw whether it had turned on Grosvenor Square or on the unsolved mystery of the photograph. Anything that led to fiery out-speech would have been a precursor of reconciliation.

* * * * *

It is difficult to tell anything with certainty about any love-affairs. Nobody ever knows anything at all about them; even the two constituents, if called on to explain and analyze themselves, make but a poor show. We know pretty well what the Poet is good for at a pinch. And as for the Man of the World and the Man in the Street--well!--all we can say is, give us the Woman of the World or the Woman in the Street; preferably the latter. But the duty of the story, in reference to the psychology of Challis's two marriages, is to tell what has come to light, or seems most probable--what it thinks or believes, not knows, about the depths of an unfathomable ocean.

Challis, then, being a young man irreligiously brought up--that is to say, made to understand that he was responsible for his behaviour, and that no attempt to shift his sins off on other shoulders would be held fair play--found himself at five-and-twenty in a position that would have been a sore trial to the strongest fortitude. He was, if not actually left in charge of a friend's recently married wife, at any rate in her close confidence; and, after her return to a home and friends from whom her marriage was a secret, the sole depository of that secret. He might never have fallen in love with Kate had they met on fair ground. But a youth unfamiliar with girl-kind that is not of his own belongings--sisters, to wit, and cousins earmarked as sisters--is always in danger if even a moderately pretty or attractive outsider takes him into her confidence. Challis's danger was all the greater owing to his terror of being treacherous to his friend. Perhaps, if the avowal of his passion had been legitimately possible, he might never have suspected himself of any passion to avow. But when you believe your conscience will brand you as a traitor to all eternity if you pursue a particular course, you naturally want to pursue it.

So it was a great relief to him when a letter, shown to him alone by the terrified girl, disclosed the atrocious deception that had been practised on her, and the miserable position in which she was placed. No wonder the avowal came. Our own belief is that it would have come, exactly the same, to a girl of almost any personality. Nothing could have averted it, short of a hare-lip, an isolated projecting tusk, or--suppose we say--onions. And this girl had pretty lips, and the interview occurred after tea.

Information is scanty about what followed. But no serious inquiry can have been made into the truth of Mr. Home's accusation against himself. The exact nature of it--the particular illegality he appealed to in support of his case--does not come to light. There really was no one to inquire, except Challis, unless the whole story had come out. It did not. A twelvemonth later Kate exchanged the name of Verrall--whether rightly or wrongly borne--for that of Challis, and two years later Master Bob was born, and his poor little mother had died of him. He showed no compunction, but kicked and made a horrible noise.

His father was only reasonably overwhelmed by his loss. It may be that, like many another inexperienced youth, he had not reckoned with the difficulties this world's Bobs and their like are apt to inflict on their family before they are formally enrolled in it, especially when the mothers they select have nervous temperaments. Challis felt, when he was left alone with the baby, that he had had a fierce tussle with Fate, and had come out of it severely punished. Probably, if his wife had survived, and Bob had lived to be a year old, without alarms about another brother or sister, his father would have been much less easily reconciled to his widowerhood. He would then have had a short draught of the nectar of life at its best; that is, if--as we suppose--a tempestuous excitability, which appeared two or three months after marriage, was entirely due to Master Bob. Mental unsoundness seems to have been denied; but, then, surely someone must have affirmed it?

As it was, Bob did a good deal--the best he could--to make up for the mischief he had done. He was a satisfaction to his father; and, being taken in hand by his Aunt Marianne, then a girl of eighteen, and in a sense adopted by her, became a strong connecting link between the two, and was really the agency that brought about Challis's second marriage four or five years later. It would have happened sooner, no doubt, but for the anomalous and grotesque condition of English Law, which, till a year or so since, made certain marriages diversely legal in different portions of the British Empire. The Angels might weep, but if they cried their eyes out it would still remain impossible for a man to wed with his deceased wife's sister on certain square yards of it. He had to be domiciled in a special portion of the Empire on which the sun never sets to do that, and yet live ungrundied. Marianne was slow to give in on the point. She had, in common with many of her countrywomen, a religious conviction--a belief in the plenary inspiration of any book in a religious binding--you know the sort. She may have had others, but the qualifications of her intelligence were not such as to enable bystanders to discover their exact nature. Alfred Challis certainly never did so. And this religious conviction did not give way until her brother-in-law deliberately wrote formal proposals to a Miss Bax, with elbows, whom she hated; to a fascinating young Jewish widow, who had lawlessly said she would just as soon marry a Gentile as a Jew; and to the daughter of a Unitarian minister. He took the three letters to her, and said, "Now, Polly Anne, which is it to be? You may burn two of these; the other one I post." Polly Anne promptly destroyed the two last; her brother-in-law was blasphemous and impious enough already without that, she said. But Emma Bax!--no, when she came to think of it, it was impossible! However, Challis directed the letter and, as it were, invested a postage-stamp in intimidation; so there was nothing for it but to throw her arms around his neck and surrender at discretion. Anything rather than Emma Bax! He kissed her tears away and said: "You know, Polly Anne, after all, you're only poor Kate's half-sister, when all's said and done!" This she found very consolatory.

It was a pity, at this juncture, that the girl's mother was a fool. Had she been a reasonably good guardian for her daughter, she would at least have insisted on the nuptials being celebrated in a land where the marriage would have been held lawful. But she contented herself with condemning the union in the abstract, and flinging Holy Writ--also in the abstract--at its perpetrators. The Bench of Bishops would have done the same, no doubt; but that Bench would have forbidden the banns, to a certainty. As she remained silent, and no outsider could be expected to screw himself up to prohibition-point in the case of a half-sister, the pair were wedded by a priest who knew nothing of them beyond their bare names, and never really became man and wife, as they would have done if they had been married sixty-odd years before; unless, indeed, some busybody had obtained a decree annulling the marriage--as the Law, with a keen sense of fun, directed in the days of our great-grandfathers.

The notable point in the psychology of these two marriages surely is that in neither case was the bride the free selection of the bridegroom, except in the sense that he was absolutely free to take or leave either. He never, strictly speaking, fell in love at all. He found himself in a well, and love trickled in. But even in this metaphor he never was over head and ears. He never wished to be a glove on any hand, to press any cheek. To call him passionately in love with either of the two sisters would have been just as absurd as to say that Romeo "got very fond" of Rosaline and Juliet. Exchange the phrases, and each fits its place. Challis got very fond of both his wives, being an affectionate sort of chap. But he remained a stranger to the divine intoxication which is known in its fulness only to Romeo and his like, and which some men never know at all.

Short of this last sort may often be found men who have escaped Romeo's experience early in life, yet whom some cunning context of circumstance may just upset, and convert for the moment into idiots as infatuated as the young Montague and Capulet we have cried over so many a time. For our own part, we count none quite safe from what is really an ennobling phase of sheer madness; except it be, for instance, a Charles the Second, a Rochester, a Tiberius, or a Joe Smith. Id genus omne is safe enough.

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Chapter XXIII

HOW CHALLIS CALLED ON MISS ARKROYD IN GROSVENOR SQUARE. A SPRAINED ANKLE. ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE. KING SOLOMON AND HIS DJINN BOTTLE

Mr. Elphinstone, responsible for No. 101, Grosvenor Square, and the morals and dignity of the family that dwelt in it, was not without uneasiness about the literary and artistic circles that his two young ladies had elected to move in. This description is superficial; it judges from externals. Say that Mr. Elphinstone's appearance conveyed that he, like Atlas, had the whole house on his shoulders--was practically answerable for the honourable repute of all his subordinates, and morally for that of his superiors. That was the construction Alfred Challis felt obliged to put on such flawless shaving; such a weighty deference to the slightest personalities--his own, for instance--on production of adequate credentials; such a hypnotic suggestion of having foregone an episcopate elsewhere to take service with a beloved family whose interests he had at heart. It was a construction not free from the derision Mr. Challis was in the habit of meting out to dignitaries of all sorts. In this case he may not have been free from personal feeling; for he must have been aware that Elphinstone regarded him as an interloper--one who outraged the sacred traditions of the household, calling at unearthly hours in a soft felt hat, and smoking on the doorstep until compelled to throw away too much cigar by hearing that the family was at home.

This is substantially what was happening about two hours after Mr. Eldridge had declined to shed any light on anything at all, and his wife had departed enjoining silence about Heaven-knows-what. Challis, désoeuvré by the mystification, had found himself unable to invent any single thing a Scythian mercenary would have been likely to say in English blank verse, and an approach towards Marianne of a conciliatory sort was met by, "I must see Steptoe now about the dinner." Unfortunately, this speech was absolutely passionless; if it had only been tempersome, there might have been a row. And a row--as the Press delights to phrase it--might have spelt salvation. But Challis could see in it nothing that justified more than a languid "All right!" on his part. And he had departed to the banks of the Danube again, with no better success than before.

Presently his wife knocked at his door in an excluded, ostracised sort of way, and he got up to open it. She was dressed for going out. "I won't disturb you," she said. "Don't come out. I only wanted to say that if the man comes about the gas you had better see him, because he won't believe Steptoe, and the meter is certainly out of order. That's all."

It was one of those queer little turning-points of existence. Challis was not ready with any reply that would have caused a moment's delay and saved the situation. Before he could manage more than general assent, Marianne was gone, too far for anything short of demonstrative recall. He did not see his way to this, and the chance was lost.

He was unable to work, and wanted to go out. But he had been, as it were, put in bond on account of the gas-man, who wouldn't believe. He failed to console himself by an accusation of Sadduceeism against that functionary, and repeated Blake--

"The bat that flits at close of eve Comes from the brain that won't believe"

--without benefit to his ill-temper. Then he impatiently wrote a note about the meter to leave with Steptoe, to whom he said with immovable gravity: "Is it a Sapphic or an Alcaic meter, do you know?" Aunt Stingy's reply, without a shadow of suspicion in her voice, "I could not say, myself, sir, but The Man would be sure to know," put him in a much better humour. He actually chuckled as soon as he was sure the good woman was out of hearing.

He wanted a book from the London Library, and could get it easily and come back to lunch. He really did not admit to himself, when he left home, that he had any good grounds for suspecting that he meant to call in Grosvenor Square to inquire about that sprained ankle. He took pains to disbelieve in any such intention till he had got the volume he was in want of from the Library, and then it occurred to him that it would be unfeeling not to inquire after the victim of an accident which might prove serious, after all. His image of the injury done became very bad as he told his cabman to drive to 101, Grosvenor Square. Was he aware that he welcomed this solicitude about the sprained ankle because it disguised, for the comfort of his conscience, his disposition to call upon its owner?

The only palliative to the disgust of that doorstep in Grosvenor Square--to which it is time to return--was that this time Mr. Challis was not actually smoking on its brink; as, when his cab pulled up, he was descried, before he had time to descend, by Mr. Elphinstone himself, who had come out tentatively into the Universe to look round at it, with a sense upon him of possible sudden retractation through the open door, like a hermit-crab. A Piccadilly hansom, equal to bespoke for Royalty, had in this case levelled its occupant up. Even so a growler of the deepest dye, lurching, springless, effluvial, knacker-destined as to its horse, drags down the noblest blood that dares to ride in it--yes! even a Duke's; but who can cite a case in point? Only, when Mr. Elphinstone crossed the pavement, he did it to confer with the contents of the cab, as such; not with Mr. Alfred Challis, thank you!

He was reassuring about the ankle; a slight strain that with care--his own and Sir Rhyscombe Edison's--would disappear in a day or two. Oh no!--in answer to inquiry--Miss Arkroyd had not been compelled to keep her bed; a phrase that entered a respectful protest against "stop in bed," the coarse, familiar expression Mr. Challis had made use of. But he was, after all, a married man with a family, so it might be overlooked, this once. He went on to say that Miss Arkroyd, he believed, was up, though nursing the injured limb on a sofa. He arrived, after responsible doubts, at the conclusion that he might send Mr. Challis's card up, in case of any message. Delicacy dictating a female emissary, Samuel was despatched with it to Miss Arkroyd's maid; who presently, being an unpolished sample from the dairy at Royd, came down and said briefly that Mr. Challis was to come up. Mr. Elphinstone's expression was well-restrained protest.

But it may not have been so much the little dairy-maiden's bluntness that provoked it, as an indescribably small shade of demeanour of Mr. Challis's. As the girl came along the passage, and before she spoke, Challis threw his cigar away, or the two-thirds that was left of it. Such a little matter! But unless he had known what she was going to say, he surely would have kept it till he did, to finish at leisure. How came he to be so positive?

Anyhow, there it was!--the cigar--not half smoked, on the pavement when the house door closed. And the cabman's eye rested on it. And he spoke thus to a butcher's boy, who appeared from an area: "Wipe your fingers on your apron, young dripping, and just hand me up that cigar, and I'll see if I'll smoke it. I ain't proud. Only don't you discharge off any of your natural grease upon it!"

To be addressed, even in disparaging terms, by such a hansom, was flattering to this butcher-boy's vanity, and he did not resent it. "Licked, but not busted, that I can see!" was his comment as he handed the cigar up to the cabman, who went on with it, contentedly.

It is two months of the story since it saw, or rather heard of, Miss Arkroyd and Mr. Challis driving up to this door after midnight in another hansom. All that it said, or implied, at that time amounted to little more than that a not very strait-laced lady and gentleman had been rather free and easy over some theatrical schemes interesting to both, and that the lady's sister, being less free or less easy, had intimated that the conduct of the two might be laced a little more straitly, with advantage. It is over six months of the story since they discussed "The Spendthrift's Legacy" and "Ziz" in the garden at Royd. If Charlotte Eldridge, as an authority, had been asked, "On which of these two occasions, madam, should you suppose the chances were best of this gentleman and lady supplying you with a story made to your hand, akin to the one Robert Browning never went on with?" what would her answer have been?

Our own impression is that at this present date of writing, when Challis, smelling rather strongly of tobacco, is following the little ex-dairymaid up the second flight of stairs to what is known as the young ladies' sitting-room--at this very moment, with the cabman making the most of his inherited Havana, and Judith forming to receive visitors, the position would have been much less likely to supply copy for Mrs. Eldridge than the previous one, but for one thing. Challis's relations with Marianne were, at the moment--say--of the parroquets, intact. What were they now?...

They were something, or Challis's last unspoken speech to himself on the stairs would not have been, "At any rate, it isn't my fault!" It needed the atmosphere of Judith--amused, if irritated, at her absurdity in getting a sprained ankle--to enable him to shake free--though always under protest--of the Hermitage.

"Wasn't it ridiculous of me!... No!--don't sit there; I can't see you.... Wasn't it ridiculous of me to do this--just now of all times in the year?"

"I thought you were a passive agent. I mean I didn't know that you did do anything."

"No more I did! No more than one does. You know what I mean?"

"Couldn't be better expressed! Like when one chokes and thinks one could have helped it, and what a fool one is! But how did it happen?"

"Perfectly simple! I was getting down out of the carriage, and forgot to think about my feet. Fenton Arkroyd was passing, and if he's not taken notice of he's sensitive, because he married a laundress, or something. So I forgot to think about my feet. It might have been so easily avoided--with a little common-sense."

"So might so many things." Challis isn't the least clear how the common-sense would act in the cases he is talking at--the plagues that beset his own path. But what a capital thing to say!--on general grounds, of course, with a little esoteric meaning all to oneself.

Judith, perhaps, thinks it too early in the morning for ethics, as she changes the conversation. "How did you like my little maid?" she says, keeping her eyes closed; which seems absurd after stipulating for visibility on Challis's part. But it all belongs to a certain imperious humour in the grain of her character. And rights of translation are reserved. She can open them if she pleases.

"She's new, isn't she? Jolly little party!" Thus Challis.

"You're not warm enough! Didn't you want to kiss her?"

"Yes, badly--when she gave your message--half-way up...."

Judith opened her eyes. You can't laugh with your eyes shut; you snigger. "She really gave it? Do tell me exactly! What did she say?" she asks delightedly, keeping her eyes open to hear the answer.

"She turned round on the landing, and became for the moment a mere mass of blooming conscience...."

"Is that--excuse me!--to be taken as language, or how?"

"No, no!--literally.... Blown flowers of intense truthfulness, and buds on the burst.... Well!--she said, as near as I remember: 'Miss Arkroyd said if Mr. Challis didn't smell too strong of smoke, only Mr. Elphinstone wasn't to hear.' And then she got away up the second flight with some alacrity. I thought she was afraid I might propose investigation, and Elphinstone was still in the neighbourhood."

Judith is intensely amused. "I shall have to give that child one of Sibyl's bead necklaces. Turquoise. It goes with her eyes exactly--they have just the violet tinge." She closed her own again on the slight subject, but it has suggested a weightier one. "Couldn't you give Estrild a little Visigoth ingénue--I mean Ostrogoth--to wait upon her?"

"What!--and train the little Rankshire beauty to the part? Think of her parents--the stage!--merciful Heaven!..." But Challis stops suddenly, discomposed by a discomposure in his hearer.

"Never mind," says she, shaking it off. "You didn't mean it. You're forgiven! Go on."

"I naturally didn't think of it from that point of view. The cases are so entirely different."

"Never mind!" Judith repeats her words with more emphasis. "You are forgiven. Now go on about the Ostrogoths."

"I could put the little beauty in; she would be very useful as a set-off to Estrild. Besides, I want to get rid of Isarnes the Cappadocian, and she would work in...."

Judith interrupts him, calling to the little attendant, who comes in answer from somewhere within hearing. "Child!" she says--"bring me that hand-mirror off my dressing-table," and when it comes, continues, interrupting a recommencement of the Cappadocian, "That's right!--give it me. Now put your face over my shoulder and look in."

The order is complied with, but an inexplicable apology follows: "Please, miss, I know. Because I looked. And I've tried monkey-soap, and it won't wash out." The seriousness of the young voice is heart-rending. Judith bursts out laughing, but consoles: "It wasn't that, child! But I like you to be a funny little goose, so don't stop! Now take away the glass, and let the monkey-soap alone, for Heaven's sake!... You got a good view, Mr. Dramatist?... Well!--you saw what I mean. Now, tell me what you were saying about the Cappadocian."

"Why, you see, he ought to make a showy end, after dyeing his hands in the blood of so many inoffensive persons, and killing a Sarmatian bison with a single blow in the arena. He might be just giving a hideous laugh of triumph, and his innocent victim might be struggling vainly in the grasp of a giant--it would be Jack Potter; you know what a biceps he has--and a sudden arrow would be shot from across the Danube and pierce his brain through the eye...."

"Of course--shot by What's-his-name?--the man that wouldn't embrace Christianity, but does heroic deeds. You know, Challis, you'll have to make him embrace Christianity. What is the use of being unpopular?"

"Of course he embraces Christianity in the end. The high-priest or bishop elevates a crucifix. I've been trying to think of a good name for him. Ingomar or Anthrax...."

"That won't do. It's what the sheep die of. How would Zero do?"

"Something between Zeno and Nero. Very good name, only the thermometer's been beforehand with us...." And so the conversation ran on for a little, throwing an interesting light on the human drama in its connection with Gibbon. But it was a conversation that murmured continually: "You know you did not allow me to go my own way because you thought I was going to be disagreeable. Finish me piecemeal as I arise, or take the consequence--misgiving on either part about what the other did or didn't think." Judith, who, after all, was the one responsible for the discontinuity, gave in to these murmurs first, and harked back.

"I know you think, Challis, that I am keeping the madre and papa in the dark about what I mean to do. But I'm not, because Sibyl knows, and they can know perfectly well if they like; it's only that they don't choose to know. Besides, what on earth is the use of making scenes, when I've made up my mind? I'll confess when the time comes."

The levity or laxity of Challis's voice is gone from it in his reply, scarcely a sequel to the words just spoken: "When I said that about your little maid, I had no thought that it could possibly apply in your case. The child, remember, is under the legal control of parents. How old is she?--sixteen?..."

"Yes, perhaps--not more, certainly. You mean that I'm...."

"Over twenty-one. I don't say you would assert a legal independence against the wishes of your family. But it separates the two cases. I wouldn't have any hand in getting a very young girl on the stage in any case. And I think I should avail myself of the existing legal ... well!--call it pretext, if you will ... to excuse myself from doing so."

"That's just like you, Challis! You really are a disciple of Mr. Brownrigg's Groschenbauer--what's his name? You deride every existing usage, merely because it exists, and then you make use of it for your own purposes! You're just the same about the parsons, and all religion! You tolerate it, or pose as tolerating it, because you dislike wickedness on the whole, and can't see your way to a substitute--not even to a Metaphysical Check."

Challis's laugh left his face twinkling with paradoxical intention. "I believe I am the only known example," said he deliberately, "of a person apparently of sound mind who has never once succeeded in justifying a single position he has taken up...."

"Don't talk like Felixthorpe! At any rate, you can justify the position you have taken up that I'm more than twenty-one."

"Because you told me!"

"Yes--the day after my birthday. I was twenty-six the day you came to Royd. I remember telling you the day we went to the Rectory. Six months ago! Oh dear!--how the time does run away!"

In obedience to a mysterious law, which dictates that no speech of any good-looking woman to any passable man shall mean to him nothing beyond its obvious meaning, this little reminiscence of Judith assumed an identity. It reminded Challis of the existence of that soul-brush, which had become--it is useless to deny it--so much a part of his relation with Judith that he had ceased to hear the machinery. He denied it, mind you!--denied it systematically. Yet he was indignant with anything that reminded him that it was time to deny it. Plague take this necessity for walking guardedly! How acceptable it would have been to be able to say, "How we enjoyed that walk back through the sunset!" Another type of man--the type that says, "Let Charlotte Eldridge do her worst, and be blowed!"--would have had no scruples on the subject. But Challis was a nervous person, and his Self was perplexing him--very especially now, with poor, dear, stupid Polly Anne making life a weariness, with her tempers and her fancies.

Was Judith Arkroyd aware, all the time, that this man's bark was in troubled waters, while she was floating in a secure haven--secure, at least, for now? Did she ask herself any questions?

Or was Challis just a shade priggish to show a stony front to such a very meek little reminiscence? His actual reply was: "I thought it was a good deal more, since my visit to Royd, I mean."

"I hope you'll pay us another visit." Judith thought to herself that two could play that game. And Challis immediately felt chilly, illogically; rather as though the soul-brush had slacked off. He would have to say something serious now, to merge this little fault in the stratification of their conversation.

"I hope to, certainly. Well!--what were we saying?... Oh yes!--you told me your age, you know. But even then I had misgivings about Aminta Torrington. I can't say I wasn't glad when old Magnus put his foot down. It's an odious part, and it wouldn't have suited you. Thyrza Schreckenbaum won't look so well on the stage, but it's more her part than yours."

"I should have thought Estrild was wicked enough for anything."

"So she is. But it's mediæval--good, honest, outrageous atrocity. It's almost Scriptural. Suppose, now, you had to apologize to the papa of your little tire-maiden for putting her on the stage, think how much easier it would be if she was only to play Messalina or Lucrezia Borgia than if it was Frou-frou, for instance!"

"That little sugar-plum--just fancy! No, I shouldn't like her to play Frou-frou at all. The atmosphere is purer in the other cases. How ridiculous one is! But point your moral, Mr. Dramatist."

"Let me see!--what are we talking about?" For Challis had forgotten. "I believe I'm on a line of self-justification. Didn't I tell you I never succeeded? I believe I'm creeping round to a sneaking apology for having offered you Aminta Torrington at all. I wouldn't have written the part for you--even then. But there it was, and you asked for the chance, and it was the only thing I had to offer."

Judith's laugh rang out. She had a capital stage laugh, musical but penetrating. "Nobody's finding fault with you, stupid man! But why 'even then'? It's not four months since. Where is the difference?" She had opened her eyes full on him to laugh at him, and now closed them again to wait for an answer. Had Challis been at his best, observing nature with a view to copy, he would have noticed that last time she laughed--about the sugar-plum's message--she had left her eyes open, full flash on him.

But he was too busy with a difficulty to do his duty by human nature, that it behoved him to know, like Peter Ronsard. That unfortunate "even then" that he had blundered out had brought him face to face with a fact that--so it struck him now--he had never felt properly ashamed of. How came it that, up to this moment, he had scarcely seen in it a matter to be ashamed of at all; and now, almost involuntarily, he had drawn a distinction between now and then that seemed to place Judith Arkroyd then on a lower level? It was actually true that three months ago he was trying for all he was worth to negotiate this girl into the good graces of his stage Jupiter; to get her on the boards to represent a woman whose wickedness he had specially invented, thereby to fall into the fashion of a time that he himself accounted an age of stark fools. For he had never come across an Aminta Torrington; but he conceived, for all that, when he put her on the stage, and set Mr. Guppy and Dick Swiveller off being up-to-date about her, that he was performing his part in the dance--the dance of fools! He felt he was in difficulties, and even for a moment contemplated an appeal to the Artist's Love for His Work, as an excuse for his own attempt to get the help of Judith's beauty for his corps dramatique. He hesitated, negatived it, and said to himself uncandidly that--thank God!--he had not fallen as low as that. But he never suspected, as this story has begun to do, that his sense of shame was due to the fact that this lady had become less cheap to him in these three months--dangerously less.

But he could not leave that "Why even then?" unanswered, with his questioner waiting there behind her closed eyelids for whatever excuse he might see his way to. Why even then? He felt he was flushing a little, and hoped she would not open her eyes. But his speech hung fire too long; and when they turned on him suddenly to see what it was going to be, he was caught, and could only see his way out through frankness. "I know," he said--"I know. Of course, I was wrong to suggest it. Still, it was the only thing that came to hand. It was either that or nothing. And you wished it ... and besides...."

"I am not blaming you. Go on ... 'and besides'...." The beautiful eyes that were to make so much mischief on the Danube were almost cruel in the way they waited for what Challis felt he had better not have begun to say.

But there was no help for it now. He had to continue, and did so: "... And besides, I did not know you so well as I do now.... I mean, I saw the thing differently...." He was getting deeper and deeper in the mire, and the eyes showed no signs of letting him off. "No; it's no use," he said abruptly. "I did wrong. But then, can you understand me?--how could I know it was you?" Then he made a weak attempt to dispersonalize his words. "No one of us remains the same." And then, feeling he wasn't shining, settled to hold his tongue. But he did not look Judith in the face over it.

She, for her part, being perfectly collected and thoroughly mistress of herself, only saw in his confusion a clear token that she was also mistress of the situation. She had done this sort of thing before--love of power being always her chief incentive--and had come out scathless. If a doubt now crossed her mind that she might be playing with edged tools, it was not strong enough to stop her.

"How true that is! Do you know, Challis"--please note this habit of address; it has somehow become natural to Judith--"I was thinking only just now, before you came in, how completely you have changed your identity since those days. Do you remember when we played chess?... Well, I'm almost ashamed to tell you how I thought of you then...."

"You owe it me. See how I've been at the confessional myself!" Challis submits to the soul-brush without protest. It is no use. Why resist?

"You were merely an author whose works I hadn't read--yes!--that's true; authors never have any idea what a lot of people haven't read their books. I thought you would just come and go, like the rest of them. But I fancied you seemed at a loose end, and I would take pity on you. I never thought...."

"Never thought what?"

"Don't look so empressé over it, Challis!" Really, this woman's faculty for going close to precipices, foot-sure, is something perfectly marvellous. Tenderness outright seemed the only natural sequel just now. But she will get back to safety, after gazing coolly over the edge. Trust her! "I couldn't say it all in one word, you see.... Never thought that in six months you would be writing a tragedy for me to play in. That's all that it comes to. At any rate, you seemed quite a different person then." Had she recoiled too abruptly from the precipice? Is there slight concession, just to accommodate a working equilibrium, in her last words? Her own working equilibrium, mind you;--in which to dangle her victim over that precipice at leisure, and yet to keep able to deny its proximity undisturbed, or pooh-pooh it altogether, at choice. For a thorough-paced female flirt enjoys driving her quarry mad best, when she knows she has plausible innocent unconsciousness enough left in the cellar to quench any fever of self-accusation of her own. "Who ever said a word, or thought a thought, about love-making?..." Don't we know the sort of thing?

Challis's own frame of mind--for the story must needs try to define it, however difficult it is to deal with--was one of a sort of thankfulness that he had perturbation of feeling all to himself. Therein lay his safety; he could keep it secret. He could and would pay for it by additional tenderness to poor dear Polly Anne--who was Polly Anne, after all, mind you!--when this last stupid bit of purposeless quarrelsomeness should have cleared away. But he wanted security that the conflagration whose smouldering he could not disguise from himself would be local. He had just, only just, stamped out a spark that might have become a flame at that precipice-edge, now a moment since. He was willing to go great lengths in persuading himself that there were no fires smouldering elsewhere; for to what end, in Heaven's name, should he recognize them?

But suppose he should be forced to! Suppose he should find one day that he could no longer parade before his mind this creed that was his security--this impossibility that he was ever present in his absence to this woman; as he had to confess perforce, struggle as he might against growing conviction, she was so often--nearly always--present to him. He built this faith upon a rock of friendship, genial and firm, but always cold, that an exaggerated respect for her character--which really did him honour--chose to assign as the only leasehold her heart could accommodate him with. Perhaps unfounded hallucinations about the beauty of Judith's character were the most dangerous features of the disease Alfred Challis was sickening for, if it had not developed already.

All this may seem too many words about a simple thing. Perhaps Sibyl's way of disposing of the subject was more intelligible--saved trouble, certainly. "That man admires you too much, Judith, for it to be safe to play tricks with him. You'll do this sort of thing once too often. And then you'll be sorry." However, it was clear that there could be no real danger as long as the lady remained detached, and very little as long as the gentleman was convinced that she was so.

And he may have been so convinced--one would have said--when he found himself able to answer Judith with a philosophical, "Have you ever known a new acquaintance not to change completely in the first six months?" And she may have thought he was running too much to abstractions when she said, "I did not say you had changed completely"; as though she would not have him suppose her too unconcerned. He was not to slip from the web she was weaving round him by a device of gossipy discussion. Her remark just met the case; and the soul-brush, which had got a little out of gear, got to work again.

They went back to the tragedy, and talked of it so long that at length it came to measuring the minutes by his watch. Then Judith said to him, as though she had but just recollected it: "You found my letter, I suppose?" No, he had not--had she written? Oh yes!--it was posted last thing last night. There was nothing in it, or she would have spoken about it. The fact that she had written lubricated that soul-brush. But he must go, or he would be late. A few more words, mostly about how last night's entertainment had missed her presence, and the lady the Ross Tarbets had brought in her stead had proved a failure, and then Challis was standing beside her to say adieu--her hand in his. Really inevitable, if you think of it, on the supposition that the forms of civilization are to continue to hold good.

It was a perversity of Fate that chose this very moment for the only other frequenter of that room to open the door unheard. Judith could not see her sister through Challis as he stood there. He turned to go.

"Oh, Mr. Challis. I did not see it was you. Perhaps you are talking business. Don't let me disturb you."

"Not at all. I am just going."

"Stop one minute, Mr. Challis." Thus Judith. "Never mind Sibyl! You must try to persuade Mrs. Challis to come and see us. Now promise you will!" She had not referred to Marianne before, by the way.

"I'll try what I can do. But my wife goes her own way. Good-bye! Good-bye, Miss Sibyl!"

* * * * *

"How long had he been here?"

"Over an hour. I can't say exactly. You must ask Elphinstone when he came, if you want to know."

"It doesn't matter to me when he came."

"You asked." Sibyl made no reply. A lunch-gong sounded below, and she vanished, but presently returned.

"You are not coming down to lunch?" she said. "At least, are you? Or not?"

"Of course not! How could I, without flying in Sir Rhyscombe's face?"

But Sibyl's question had been mere conversation-making, or skirmish-seeking. She said what she meant directly after. "I suppose it's perfectly useless my saying anything. But you know what I think."

"I know what you think, dear! Go to lunch."

"Very well, Judith!" And Sibyl departed for lunch as Judith sounded her bell for her little handmaid, the reputed sugar-plum.

* * * * *

"How long will it take you to get to Wimbledon?" Challis asked the driver of the waiting cab.

"A tidy long time, the rate I'm going now!" was the reply. "Jump in!" Challis, feeling he was in the hands of a master-mind, obeyed without question, and the cab was off, at speed. Presently the master-mind said briefly, through his orifice above--as King Solomon may have spoken to the evil djinn he bottled--"Within the hour," and closed it on his fare for that period. The djinn was in for a lifer, and was immortal; so thought Challis to himself. That was too long, but short of that, something over an hour would not be unwelcome--just to think things over a little!

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Chapter XXIV

HOW MARIANNE WENT TO TULSE HILL. OF BOB'S PHONOGRAPH, AND HOW HE POSTED A LETTER TO JUDITH. OF MARIANNE'S RETURN, AND MORE MISUNDERSTANDINGS. BUT IT WOULD BE ALL RIGHT IN THE MORNING

If King Solomon's captive had gone on scheming conciliatory attitudes through all eternity, he would probably have failed to hit upon the right one at the end of it, from mere want of presence of mind. Even the short "Within the hour" of Challis's cabman was a little too long for his fare to think things over in safety, without a risk of the things tripping one another up. He conceived a very good deportment to suit his return, based on sorrow for being so late, and then began to complicate it with considerations whether he should at once inquire more particulars about Marianne's alleged--and denied--indisposition of last night, or let it alone. Also, should he confess up at once where he had spent most of the morning, or let that alone! Perhaps that letter of Judith's that he would find on arriving would help matters. Yes, it would! He pictured himself to himself--as an actor in the concurrent drama of Life that he always made notes of by the way--saying, "Oh yes! That's nothing!--only about the play. I saw Miss Arkroyd for a few minutes this morning. You know, she was kept away last night by a sprained ankle, so I went to inquire. Hm-hm-hm!" He went the length of supplying the sound of reading a letter to himself, and threw the imaginary pieces he had torn it up into, to show how unimportant it was, into an image of a waste-paper basket. Then he turned round, that actor, and kissed his wife, who had recovered her temper. And then all went well in that play, and that actor told himself not to be a damned idiot about a fashionable beauty, who knew he was a married man with a family, and hadn't the slightest idea that--well?--that anything!

That was the play. The reality did not work out so comfortably. Challis was in time for lunch, as the cabman was as good as his word. "Fifty-six and a half," said he, looking at his watch; and added, in a comfortable sort of way, "Make it up eight shillings," as one who felt he really deserved the extra half-crown or so. He had a pleasant, engaging manner with the opposite sex, this cabman, saying to Harmood, when she brought him his money out: "Don't you get married without letting me know, my dear! My old woman, she might get sick of me any minute!" But Miss Harmood was accustomed to admiration.

Mrs. Challis had left word not to wait lunch, said the young lady, returning undisturbed. Also, there was a note to say with the letters--that is, to wit, with the postal accumulations. Challis, opening it, found a bald and severe statement that the writer was going to Tulse Hill, and might be late. Marianne's mother's domicile was always spoken of as Tulse Hill. Challis knew that this mother and daughter were seldom on cordial terms except when he was in disgrace with both, and it did not tend to allay the feeling of irritated mystification that came back now to Challis, with quickened memory of the events of the morning, that his wife should have pitched on this particular moment for a visit to Tulse Hill. She really seldom went to see her mother, for she was very lazy. But--and this was a big but--she always went to see her when there had been dissensions. So much so that when at any time Challis found that she had gone to Tulse Hill his tendency was to look back through the last twenty-four hours to discover what skirmish was responsible for the visit.

This time he was completely baffled. His wife knew perfectly well that she had been invited--cordially invited--to this last night's entertainment. Did all this mean that in the end he would have to give up associating with the outer world, and restrict himself to John Eldridge and Lewis Smithson? That seemed the only programme compatible with the enjoyment of a comfortable home. Only for God's sake let it be formulated! Let him know what he had to expect, and Challis would put his sign-manual to any reasonable treaty.... He stopped suddenly, yet asked himself--why stop? Then, knowing well that he dared not answer his own question, flinched off the subject.

This phase of reflection did not come immediately on opening Marianne's note. He had passed through a brief epoch of lunch for himself and dinner for Bob and Cat and Emmie since then. It had been a riotous but not unpleasant experience, and Challis was grateful for it. Bob's greeting to him had been, exactly transcribed: "Mater's gone to Tulse Hill. I say!--if you were to give me five shillings, I could buy a phonograph, because I've saved up fifteen. Tommy Eldridge has got one that does a menagerie, and you can hear a man having his head bit off." This felt jolly and cheerful, especially as the two little girls jumped with eagerness to hear the subsidy voted. Imitations of insubordinate wild beasts, and the sounds incidental to detaching a Bengal tiger from his prey with red-hot irons, made lunch pass pleasantly, and Challis felt much happier. He granted the five shillings on condition that no operatic records should be purchased. He had heard "Voi che sapete" through a gramophone once, and he knew!

He was in his study, and Bob had probably nearly arrived at the phonograph local plague-centre in Putney, when he got to speculation, acknowledged as such, about a modus vivendi for himself and the mother of those two little wenches. He denied Judith any place in the problem, preferring to recognize, as the sole difficulty he had to fight against, the attitude of Marianne towards what he summed up as "Grosvenor Square" compendiously. He refused to admit that the class of feelings he entertained towards that lady--or might have entertained; he wouldn't quite admit them--could possibly come under discussion so long as he kept them to himself. Why, if every trifling vibration of personal feeling, every grain of salt on the dish of a man's friendship for a woman, was to be made the foundation of an indictment of faithlessness to his wife, where would matrimony be? But he nearly lost the thread of his reflections in the obligation to define what the feelings were that he was refusing to admit.

He would not allow for a moment that these feelings could possibly interfere with his affection for his wife. In fact, he actually shouted "Nonsense!" aloud in answer to some accusation to that effect for which he was not responsible. So loud, in fact, that Harmood came, and said, "Did you call, sir?" and disbelieved the "No, I didn't!" that she was met with. He would not have felt foolish on hearing his own voice getting out of bounds, but he did when it came home to him that Harmood must have heard him two rooms off at least. This would never do. He would get back to the Ostrogoths. How about Estrild's little handmaiden?--a good name for her?--something ending in illa? Favilla?--Scintilla?--Yes, that would do, without the S; otherwise, like Law Courts and tittles of evidence! Yes--certainly Cintilla! But he got no further.

Because the little sugar-plum brought back his interview of the morning. There was Judith again--he had nearly given up thinking of her as Miss Arkroyd--holding the mirror at arm's-length to make it include both faces easily, watching the ensemble with a slightly Ostrogothic effect, sympathetically resumed from some passage in the play she had half read, and knew the purport of; eyelids thrown up as per instructions of stage-trainer, to secure the glare which seems to have come so freely on the faces of all our forbears whom the Stage has thought worthy of portrayal; just a hint of what upper lip and nostrils could do, if they tried, in the way of callousness towards tortured prisoners. For Judith had been thinking over the part. And how grand her eyes were, too!--something of the dark colour of sapphires by artificial light. And the little chick's face had come so well! That episode of the monkey-soap had produced a nuance of terror-stroke; exactly how Cintilla would have looked over a Christian martyrdom; a penalty deserved by a Dissenter, but alarming, for all that. He would tell Judith next time he wrote.... Well!--he would write, of course. But it was all in the way of business. What of that?... He would tell her he had christened the child Cintilla. She would call her Cintilla now; he was sure of it.... Now he must get to work! This would never do.

He actually did get to work this time. He wrote blank verse, or prose abstract to turn into blank verse, or other blank verse that was better than the first blank verse; or, if worse, could be rejected when found wanting. But the worst was when alternatives turned out equal--impossible to make choice of. After a while, he found himself with two such samples to choose between. Which speech of the two would come best from the lips of Estrild? He had to acknowledge that he was puzzled.

And yet a good deal might depend on it. He was wavering between two courses in the plot of the play. Each of these speeches seemed to point to one. Suppose he chose the one that, afterwards, Judith liked least, and followed on the line of plot that suited it! He would not feel happy over it, that way. Obviously, Judith was the proper person to decide. Master Bob might just as well carry the speeches to a handy typewriter at Putney, wait for them to be executed, and bring them back. Or stop! Challis knew he could rely on the accuracy of this typist, at a pinch. Why not write to Judith, leaving the envelope open, and let Master Bob put the typed copy in and post it? It would save a deal of time. Then he would be able to get on with the play first thing in the morning, if an answer came by the early post, as it might. He could mention Cintilla, too.

So said, so done! Master Bob was off like a shot, though reluctant to leave his phono, whose hideous din had been audible from afar since its arrival an hour ago. No sooner was he past recall than Challis remembered that if he had decided the question himself, it never would have been necessary to show the rejected version to Judith at all! But the fact is he had got rather into the way of consulting her. Anyhow, it couldn't matter much, either way. He went back to his writing, and found something else to go on with. He went on with it peacefully until a cab arrived, and he looked out, expecting that it was Marianne. It was not, and he had an odd sensation of being glad he was sorry it was not. He saw who the visitor was, and retired.

Confound that woman! Why on earth need Charlotte Eldridge come bothering in when Marianne was away? A confirmatory announcement is followed by, "Oh, Mrs. Eldridge!--Did you tell her your mistress wasn't here?" Thus Challis to Harmood, who checks the incorrectness of his speech. "I said Mrs. Challis was not at home, sir. Mrs. Eldridge said she would come in and wait." On which Challis's comment--too much to himself to rank as an answer--is, "She'll have to wait."

"Am I to tell her so, sir?" Harmood, docile and well-bred, awaits instructions.

"No!--don't tell her anything. Perhaps your mistress will be in soon."

Challis made a show, for his own satisfaction, of going on with his work--but not for very long. As tea-time drew near, he looked at his watch, and decided not to have tea in the drawing-room with his visitor, but to go out. So, when he looked in on Charlotte for a moment, he was in walking trim, and merely shook hands hurriedly, and said: "Marianne must be in soon. She'll never stay to dine at Tulse Hill. I have to go. Ring the bell for tea, and make Harmood attend to you properly. Ta-ta!" and departed, affecting haste.

Mrs. Eldridge was not quite ready for tea, and also hoped Mrs. Challis would reappear shortly. So she postponed summoning the handmaiden, and took Challis's old novel, "The Spendthrift's Legacy," from the bookshelves, wishing to compare the portrait of his first wife, which she knew it contained, with current events. As she speculated over this and that, an unmistakable boy's head--that first wife's boy's--came in at the door, and said "Hullo!" in a very uncompromising way. It was merely greeting--no more!

"Well, Master Bob, where have you been? Come in and talk, and shut the door."

"Haven't got much time for talk. I say! I wonder if you can hear up here. We've got such a ripping phonograph."

"I can hear beautifully." Indeed, a woe-begone and God-forgotten croak has been audible for some minutes, rendering patter-songs. Bob warms to his subject: "Isn't it awfully jolly? You're really sure you can hear, though? I say, though, isn't it a pity? I got 'Movement in A flat,' and I might have had 'The White-Eyed Musical Kaffir,' and it's such rot. Harmood says she's sure it's only music--like pianos."

"Why don't you open it and see?"

"Because then they won't change it. I might have changed it when I was out, if I'd known. But I thought it was a row in a house, and furniture getting broke, don't you know?" He gives further particulars of his misapprehension, but it will be as clear as it needs to be without them.

"Where did you go when you were out?" Mrs. Eldridge seems strangely unconcerned about the phonograph. But Bob is too high in the seventh heaven about it to conceive it possible that such indifference should exist. He takes his hearer's sympathy for granted, and as for suspecting any non-phonographic motives in his questioner--impossible!

"Putney. I could have gone to the shop twice over in the time I was waiting."

"What were you waiting for?"

"Typewriter. For the governor. Oh--quite half an hour!"

"What a shame! And you wasted all that time waiting. But you got what you went for? I mean your father got his type-writing?"

"No fear!" This with scorn. Then, to keep the heaven of veracity spotless: "He didn't get it, you know. I shoved it in her envelope, and shoved it in the pillar-box in High Street. Not the one near the tobacconist's."

"Whose envelope?"

"It was all right. There wasn't any other. Judith's. I say--are you quite sure you can hear up here? Hadn't I better bring it up, while you have tea?" For tea is coming of its own accord, audibly, outside the door.

"No--after tea. I shall listen better. Whose letter did you say you put in? Judith's--who's Judith?"

"Oh--you know! Me and Cat always call her Judith. Miss _Ark_royd." There is a trace of contempt, quite unexplained, in the accent on the first syllable. But Bob will be lenient, adding, "But she gave me my skates." Then, for he cannot honestly conceal a defect, "She's duchessy, for all that. A hundred-and-one, Grosvenor Square, W." And leaves her, classified.

Should Harmood make the tea? Not on Mrs. Eldridge's account, certainly! Mrs. Challis was sure to be back. Too probably, in practice, for either speaker to say "D.V." about it. But no atheism was meant--far from it! Harmood attended to the fire; enough just to keep it in, although if it went on like this we should soon be able to do without. And the water couldn't go off the boil as long as there was ever so little methylated. Mrs. Eldridge was beginning to fear that there was ever so little, and that the boil's hour was come; and was questioning whether it would not be better on the whole to make tea in order that its getting cold should favour Marianne's return, when a cab-sound recommended itself to her notice for some unexplained reason, and she began making the tea. She really wished to see Mrs. Challis, having a card in her hand she wanted to play. One fights against a misdeal when one has seen the ace of trumps in one's hand. But let us be just to Mrs. Charlotte. Of course, it was well understood, between her and her conscience, that her motive was to make sure that no mischief came of that letter to Miss Arkroyd. Suppose that young monkey were to say he posted the letter, and say nothing about the palliative typewriting! And then suppose Alfred never thought it worth mentioning that he had written at all. Quite a case for a judicious friend, etc., etc. Oh, these meddlers!

The cab was Mrs. Challis--not literally; only household patois--and Mrs. Challis was sorry she was so late, Charlotte. Why had that lady not had tea? Marianne's manner was dry and hard. No--she was not the least tired, she said. She would go up and take her things off and come down immediately. She threw out a skirmisher to stop that horrible noise on her way up; and when she returned, if peace did not exactly reign where Bob was, somewhere below, at any rate the sounds that continued were human, not diabolical.

"Well?" Mrs. Eldridge spoke first.

"Wait till I've had some tea, and I'll tell you." A cup apiece elapsed, and then Marianne said briefly: "Says it's a parcel of lies. If poor Kate had been married, she must have known."

Charlotte considered. The detective character asserted itself. "How does she account for Mrs. Steptoe knowing the name of these Hallock people?"

"She doesn't account for it."

"What does she suppose her motive to be?"

"She doesn't suppose."

"Even if she knew the name, it's impossible to believe she would trump up such a story! With nothing to gain by it, Marianne dear, with nothing to gain by it!"

"I didn't say I did believe it. I only told you what mamma said."

A conversation that flags from lack of any visible step forward welcomes another cup of tea, to pause on. After a measure of silence, so filled out, consciousness of the impasse brought in a new element, as stimulus.

"I talked to John about it."

"Why must you talk to John?"

"My dear Marianne! Well! John's a fool, I know, but I have a great respect for his judgment, sometimes. I shouldn't have begun about it myself. But he was there when Mrs. Steptoe was looking at the photographs, and he spoke of it to me.... What did he speak of? Oh--the whole thing!"

"What did he say?"

"It wasn't so much what he said. You know his way. He only said that a party he knew in the City knew a man in a Private Inquiry Office, and that sort of thing always ran into money. So his idea was--you know how funnily he phrases things?--his idea was that 'keep it snug' was the word. In fact, he repeated it several times. John's habit of repetition gets rather irritating, now and then."

"Did he say nothing else?"

"I don't think he did ... oh yes!--he exonerated your husband. At least, he said that that sort of trap wasn't the sort of trap anyone would suspect Titus of being up to. It was a little obscure, but John is obscure."

Marianne showed no disposition to take an interest in John's opinions, even assuming them to be capable of recasting in an intelligible form. She sat holding her teacup, as one anxious not to break with a pleasant memory. But her face was not pleasant for all that. It might be unfair to say it had a set jaw and a scowl, because that suggests a prizefighter without a prize. But accept as much of the description as leaves an image of a comely woman with dark hair--plenty of it--in a plait, and rather embonpoint for thirty. Put in the mole we have spoken of, just on the cheekbone; but don't run away with the idea that there must be a stye in the eye on the other side, that you are not looking at. Let Marianne have all that is left of a bonny robust girlhood that was in its day rather more acceptable--consciously so--to her brother-in-law than the more delicate approach to beauty of his deceased wife. But Marianne had gone off, too; there was no doubt of it. Nevertheless--and in spite of occasional acerbity and frequent sullenness--her husband loyally cherished the idea that she was good with a deep-buried goodness, a quality that might be relied on when the hour of trial came, a rockbed of sound-heartedness, to build on even when appearances suggested earthquake.

Some such appearance may have made Mrs. Eldridge cautious about pursuing the thread of John's judgments, as she joined in her friend's silence beyond her usual habit--a loquacious one. Presently she said, to relieve the monotony, "Shall I put your cup down?" and took it with a well-formed hand she was vain of--indeed, it ran close to beauty--from one that was rather a defect in its owner; too chubby, too accented at the rings, to be redeemed by a mere addendum of filbert-nailed fingers.

Marianne then said, as she surrendered the cup: "You saw him before he went out?" She spoke as though she took her companion's knowledge of the contents of her own silence for granted.

Mrs. Eldridge seemed to acquiesce. "He looked in for a moment," she said.

"I suppose he got his letter." This was mainly thinking aloud, for how could Charlotte know anything about his letter? She could guess, though, and was not slow over it.

"I suppose so, because he answered it." Then she may have felt that her knowing so much without data might seem unwarranted; for she added: "At least, if it was a letter from her," and then explanatorily, in response to an inquiring look, "Yes!--Judith Arkroyd, of course." She probably had no definitely mischievous motive in the phrasing of this. The assumption that any "her" must be Miss Arkroyd only showed what she herself had been thinking of. But it teemed with suggestion of continuous correspondence between the lady and gentleman in hand. Marianne flushed angrily, far more moved by the way in which she heard of it than by the mere letter itself. It was only one of many letters, after all!

"How do you know? How can you tell?"

"Marianne dear--really!"

"Really what? No, Charlotte, you're nonsensical. Of course it was her! Why do you take a pleasure in mystifying me? Can't you tell me what you mean? How do you know he answered it?"

"Dear, if you'll be patient, I'll tell you. But, really, you do make so much out of nothing ... it's all about nothing." And, indeed, Mrs. Eldridge looked frightened, as a mischief-maker may whose hobby has got the bit in its teeth.

"If it's nothing, at least you can tell me what it is." And Marianne, who a moment since was red, now goes white, with hands just restless and a foot that taps uneasily. There had been nothing in antecedent circumstance to warrant so much excitement. So thinks Mrs. Charlotte, and would like to hark back, and make her mischief gradually, on congenial safe lines. A row would be premature, to her thinking.

"What what is, Marianne dear?" she says. But then makes concession: "Only, of course, dear, I know what you mean. How did I come to know about the letter he sent her? It's quite simple...."

"Well--go on!"

"... It was Bob. He was in here just now, and told me his father had sent him to post a letter to Judith--that's what the young monkey calls her--and then you asked if he had got his letter. Of course, I thought it must be from her."

"Why?"

"Oh, nonsense why, Marianne dear! How could it be anyone else?" And Mrs. Challis cannot answer this, naturally, as she knows quite well it was Judith's handwriting alone that attracted her attention to the letter, and that there were at least a dozen other items by the same post. Charlotte continued: "I can see nothing to make such a fuss about. With this play-acting going on, a letter might be anything."

"How do you know I thought it wasn't anything?"

"I dare say you didn't, dear. Of course, one takes for granted that one's husband ... well!--even if it was John, it would never occur to me. And look at the difference between my John and your Titus!"

As it is impossible to fathom Mrs. Eldridge's motive for ascribing the character of Lovelace to the chosen of her affections, the attempt shall not be made. Some things begin, exist, and cease, and none knows why. But one may conjecture. Was it that Charlotte wanted a certificate to her understanding--from experience--of Man the Baboon that she sometimes sketched St. Martin's-le-Grand and the Royal Exchange as a sort of ilex-groves furnished with Mænads and Bassarids, all for the delectation of respectable Satyrs with stove-pipe hats or billy-cocks, each in his degree? Like Nicholas Poussin, you know! Yes--that was it! John's character had to be sacrificed, to show through what slant or squint in a side-aisle his wife had got a glance at the mystic altar of the Bona Dea.

But Marianne was not prepared to accept the view suggested. "One man's the same as another," said she. Then, with an access of feeling that she was being entangled in something, she knew not what, that she was not clever enough to escape from, "I wish you wouldn't talk like this, Charlotte. I hate it!"

"Talk like what, dear?" says Charlotte, but adds illogically, "It wasn't me began talking like this. It was you said, how did I know he answered it? I could only tell you."

"I don't care what who said, or anyone. It's nothing to do with it. You know what you're trying to make out, so where is the use of pretending?" Mrs. Eldridge interjects, "What am I trying to make out?" But this is ignored, and Marianne continues, "And you know you're wrong and the thing's ridiculous." Through all this runs a tacit acceptance of the existence of "the thing." But it remains undefined, by mutual consent.

At this point Mrs. Eldridge began to suspect that Marianne was showing more tension of feeling than the case, as known to her, seemed to call for. She must find out, in the interests of the drama she wanted to enjoy--for, of course, true mischief-maker that she was, she never admitted that mischief was her motive--what had passed at Tulse Hill to account for her friend's accès of asperity. Because of course it was that! It was that horrid old woman.

"I suppose you talked it all over with your dear mother, Marianne?"

"There wasn't anything to talk over with my dear mother that I know of. Yes, I did--I talked over what you mean."

"And she agreed with me, I'm sure?"

"I don't know whether she did or didn't, and I don't know what 'agree' means. But I do know that I won't talk to mamma again, neither about this or anything else, unless...."

"Unless what?"

"If she talks as she does. She knows, because I told her."

"Don't tell me about it, dear, if you don't like." With which licence to silence Mrs. Eldridge settles down to the hearing of a good long tale, which she knows will have to be elicited by jerks, as Marianne is profoundly Anglo-Saxon--not a drop of Celtic blood in her veins. It comes, and, summed up, amounts to this:

Marianne had carefully avoided saying a single word at Tulse Hill about "it"--in fact, had wanted to keep Grosvenor Square out of the conversation altogether. She had really only spoken about Mrs. Steptoe's story and the photographs, and how "it" came in Heaven only knew. But there "it" was, and mamma had been very disagreeable about it, and said things. What things? Oh, of course the sort of things she always said ... well!--about her own marriage with Titus, and the Deceased Wife's Sister business. Just as if she, Marianne to wit, wasn't only poor Kate's half-sister--and it just made all the difference! But what did she say? Well, it seemed that she had up and denounced, in the most positive way, about how she had always said, and always should say: that the Blessing of God could never rest on an Unscriptural Union. And then, being pressed to develope this thesis, had fallen back feebly on the position that "we were told" it was Sinful, and that Marianne knew where just as well as she did; which was indeed true in a sense, for neither of them knew anything of theology, or divinity, or exegesis, except that the Bible was the Word of God, and contained everything necessary to Salvation, as well as to the fostering of all our little particular prejudices. In fact, it would have been difficult to light upon any two completer agnostics, etymologically, than this mother and daughter. So, though the former was happily unconscious of the whereabouts of any texts bearing on the question, she was convinced of their existence; only making this much concession to her daughter's position--that the marriage of a man with a half-sister-in-law was only half as bad as with the complete article. It was a Venial Sin, and a commodious one thus far, that it still permitted intercourse under protest between a daughter who had committed it and a mother who went to church.

On this occasion, when the admixture of foreign matter into the discussion had raised the question of possible nuptial infidelities, the old lady had embittered her criticism of her daughter's position by pointing out that Titus might do whatever he liked, and she would never be able to get a divorce, like a legally married woman. The knot that had never been tied could never be untied, clearly; and one of the great advantages of conformity to established usage was hopelessly lost. This view had fairly enraged Marianne, who had fought for her right to a divorce as the tigress fights for her young. Not to be a wife at all according to the law of the land was bad enough, but if you had to forego your birthright to be a legal divorcée or divorceuse, whatever were we coming to?

"I must ask John how that is," said John's wife, really to make talk, for she was at the moment weighing the question whether this item in Marianne's recent collision with her dear mother was enough to account for her ill-temper. "You would never suppose John knew anything at all, by his manner; but it's wonderful what he does know. There he is!" There he was, and there also was Mr. Challis, who had met him on his way from the station, and told him he believed Charlotte was at the Hermitage, and he had better come in. And there also was a Mrs. Parminter, or Westrop--Marianne wasn't sure which--who had really wanted to leave a card and cease, only Titus had gone and asked her in, and now Marianne supposed we should have to be civil.

Do not suppose this Mrs. Parminter or Westrop has nothing to do with the story. She will go out of it, certainly, very soon; because she has promised to be at the Spurrells' at six, and it takes a full quarter of an hour. But she has an influence on it, by the spell of her presence acting on the social rapports of the household. Briefly, we all know it's quite different when there are people; and this Mrs. Parminter or Westrop was quite as much people, ad hoc, as if she had been the Spurrells.

When there are people, you assume a genial smile, and affect a crisp alacrity of interest you do not feel in their loves or their sheep, or even their digestions. You shout; so do they. Then someone else shouts louder, and you try to finish what you were shouting. But you don't succeed, and perhaps you give in; and then your family--lady-wife, mother, sister, what not!--says afterwards, need you have been so glum, and couldn't you have exerted yourself to make things go a little? And you're sorry, because it's too late now, and the Mrs. Parminter or Westrop of your case, or your particular Spurrells, have trooped away with parting benedictions, and left the hush of daily life behind. And then your family lady looks at the cards the Mrs. Parminter or Westrop has deposited, and sees which of the two she is, and says she thought so.

All this happened in the present case, the Mrs. Parminter or Westrop having swept Mr. and Mrs. Eldridge away in her vortex, because they were going in the same direction; and having said to them what a delightful call she had had, and what delightful people the Challises were! To which Mr. Eldridge had appended a note to the effect that he had known Challis quite a long time, now you came to think of it. And the equivocal lady had said dear her!--how very interesting!

The genial wooden smile, as of the visited, on the faces of Marianne and her husband died abruptly as its cause became a distant shout. It gave place to a mere puzzled look on his, provoked, no doubt, by the expression of cold fatigue on hers and her silence. So far as he could recollect there was nothing to account for this--at least, at the date of their last parting. The interview about the gas-man was unleavened with tenderness, certainly, but then it was the merest household colloquy. But, to be sure, there had been Tulse Hill since then! That was it!--it was that horrid old woman! So it was just as well to say nothing. Challis said it, and went to get ready for dinner.

"Getting ready" amounted to little more than washing his face and hands. It could not interfere with mental schemes for approaching and conciliating his wife. He really wanted to do so, for he knew in his inmost heart that he had more than once this day turned angrily against suppositions that would present themselves--hypothetical readjustments of his life, always with Judith Arkroyd sooner or later working into them through a mist of the honour in which he held Marianne. Suppose--oh, suppose!--all his life had been different! Suppose he had known her in her girlhood, this Judith! He had let the image he had formed of the self he would have been, had all been otherwise--just for one moment he had let it hunger for the hand, the lips, the eyes of this hypothetical girlhood. It seemed so slight a wrong to grant himself that luxury, when by hypothesis he was then never to have seen or spoken to either of his wives of the time to come. But the moment he had recognized the nature of this supposition he had flung it from him, as he had others of a like sort. Just so the watcher, sworn not to sleep, believes himself awake even as the spell seizes him; then strikes hard to slay the coming dream, and is awake again. Alfred Challis had been secretly guilty of this particular dream, was angry with himself for it, and was scheming now to lay some stress on his affection for his living wife. He knew enough from long experience of Tulse Hill to ascribe to it powers of producing an even greater severity of deportment than Marianne's at this moment.

He judged it best "not to be too previous," and went from his own dressing-room straight to the drawing-room. That would make the best job. He felt obliged to John Eldridge for this expression of his.

Marianne followed in due course, and appeared in conflict with a preoccupying wrist-button. His proposed arrangement was to say, "Well, Polly Anne, now let's near all about it!" And she spoiled it with, "Stop one moment. I must get Harmood to do this for me."

A new departure became necessary. But it would not be half so dégagé. A certain amount of spontaneity would have to be surrendered. Try again!

"Got it right now?" Yes--that was best!--not to go outside current event.

"What--the button? Oh yes, it's right enough! At least, it'll do." And then dinner, according to Harmood, was on the table, and the button lapsed.

"Did you find your mother well?" This followed on the heels of soup, concluded. By this time Challis had given up all his little conciliations, and was drifting, a mere log on the current of matrimony. Oh yes!--Marianne had found mamma well--that is, just as usual. She wasn't going to help, evidently. However, he would try yet again, but presently. Presently did not come, apparently, till cigar-time. Then he made a more vigorous attempt. "Well, Polly Anne, I think you might ask me where I've been."

"Where have you been?" The amount of concession there was in this was just sufficient to make it impossible to indict the conversation as unendurable, and demand improvement or silence; but not enough to pave the way to cordiality.

Challis would probably not have ventured on his last attempt if he had had nothing to report but his visit to Grosvenor Square. But this afternoon excursion, later, had given him confidence. He was able to answer that he had looked in to tea at the Ponsonby-Smiths', or whatever the name was; and what did Polly Anne think? Celia Ponsonby-Smith had got twins.

"Celia Robinson, I suppose you mean," said Marianne coldly. "I saw it in the Telegraph. Did you go nowhere else?"

"In the morning--yes! I went for a book to the London Library, and made a call. Nowhere else this afternoon."

"I meant in the morning. Don't spill your coffee. The cup's too full."

"No--it's all right. There!" Challis reduced his coffee to safety-point, and was not ungrateful for the slight break in the conversation. He was able to affect a balked readiness to speak, as one whose swallowed coffee has left him free to say the words it interrupted.

"I called in at Grosvenor Square."

"I see." This is a simple speech enough, but if the I lasts a long time and the S even longer, it expresses diabolical insight. Yet one can say nothing. Challis could only ignore it, and continue:

"I told you Judith Arkroyd had had an accident. Or didn't I?" But he knew quite well; and Marianne knew he knew, and merely shook her head. He went on: "Well--she has. And she wasn't able to come to the Acropolis last night."

"A bad accident?" Marianne seems determined to keep her words at the fewest.

"Nothing very serious! A sprained ankle. She'll have to lay up for it. Not a hanging matter!"

"Of course you didn't see her?"

"I did. There is nothing to prevent her receiving visitors."

"Was she up?"

"My dear Marianne! Of course she was up. What do you suppose?"

"I don't know. I don't pretend to understand these sort of people. I suppose it's all right, either way." And this lady then withdrew from the conversation, leaving her husband half-nettled and half-apologetic, but quite unable to lay hold of any excuse for expressing either irritation or apology. Especially the latter, because why should he think confessions or apologies necessary?

Perhaps nothing could throw more light on the way the heads of this household quarrelled--for domestic bliss has many forms--than the internal comment made by its eldest son when he returned by contract at half-past ten from supping with his friend Tommy Eldridge. What Master Bob said to himself, after a short wait for sounds of human voices, was: "Row on, I expect. Pater and mater not talking!" He put his head in at the drawing-room door and made a statement. "I say. I'm not late." His father, who understood Master Bob down to the ground, attached the right meaning to "What are you?" which followed. He looked at his watch. "Ten-thirty-three," said he. "Three minutes late! Now go to bed, and leave the phonograph alone till to-morrow."

"What!--not only just one, in the breakfast-room, with the door shut?" But even so conditioned, it is too late for phonographs, and Bob goes to his couch a sadder boy but as great a goose as ever. Before doing so, he has to give securities that he will not pound about overhead and wake his sisters; and to note that his pater is reading and sorting letters, and his mater has settled down to a book.

You know what that means, especially when the book is bicolumnar, microtypical, and there's such a lot to read before it gets to where everyone says it's so improper. You read the first brisk spirt, till you get to the point at which the author's inventive power has flagged, and then you become strangely content to repose underneath that work, with your eyes closed and your hands peacefully folded over your foreground. But Bob was wrong. His mater had not settled down to her book in the true sense of the words, and Challis knew it by the speed at which the leaves turned. Marianne couldn't read at that rate, even without stopping to think of the meaning. And you must, sometimes.

Besides, Challis had glanced at that book himself, and knew his wife would never understand local Americanisms and Indian dialects in Kamschatka. It was an interesting book, though, and Challis remembered how the first chapter began: "Midnight in Nootka Sound, and the blood still dripped monotonously from the shelf above, etc." He was just thinking could he safely venture on asking the reader why this first chapter was called "Hello!" when she put the book aside, and said briefly: "I'm going to bed." She had not spoken a word since Bob's incursion.

Special effort is needed to keep in mind how little Marianne's husband knew of the causes of her perturbation. So far as he could see, the whole ground was covered by illogical resentment against a group of his friends, whose advances to herself--as it seemed to him--she had inexcusably rejected. Still, he could frame excuses for her; it was not for her as it was for him; he had the key of the position. It was a case for compromise, and Marianne was uncompromising. That was all! As for any conception that a new light thrown on his past had presented him to her as distrustful and secretive--certainly keeping back something she must have a right to know; possibly, though she hesitated over this, something disgraceful to himself--no such idea crossed his mind for a moment.

It would be all right in the morning! He had said that many a time overnight, in tiff-times, and peace had followed as predicted. Tulse Hill, considered as an incident, was too recent for any sort of conciliatory effort to be worth making--to-night, at any rate. Let it alone, and have a finishing smoke! Go back to the Ostrogoths!

Then, as he wondered whether, for all its slow combustion, the grate would not consume its coal before he got through his cigar, there came back to him an image of Judith Arkroyd in a dangerous form--an image in which physical beauty was subordinate to a subtle relationship of soul, which he had imperceptibly slipped into ascribing to his own and hers. A dangerous form, because Love played a new part in it for this man. His first wife had probably been--put it plainly--a mistake; his second ... well!--he was very fond of Marianne--very--and they had had many happy times together. But it wasn't quite the same thing as--oh, dear!--well, it couldn't be, you know! One can't have everything.

Much more dangerous, that sort of thing, to our thinking, than the primitive fascinations of Aphrodite herself! Indeed, we have sometimes thought that lady didn't go the right way to work in that affair with Adonis. She should have sympathized with him. All the same, mind you!--so Cynicism murmurs at our elbow--man has an extraordinary faculty for detecting companion-souls to his own, pulses preordained to beat in unison with his, in bodies of extraordinary beauty, of indisputable grace. He may squint, and his eyesight be defective, but his predestined She, the mate of his soul, will gaze on him through lustrous orbs of tender radiance. Her voice will reach him through the rosiest of lips, the pearliest of teeth, without so much as one gold stopping; and all the while there will he be, without a sound tooth in his head to boast of, unless he has the effrontery to make a parade of his crown-and-bridge treatment. He may even wear a wig, and brazen it out, in the same breath with a protest against a single false tress on the head of his other dearer life-in-life--this comes out of Poetry, somewhere--while as for a Venus Calva ... simply out of the question, thank you!

Anyhow, the predestined mate of the soul was a much more kittle head of cattle to shoe behind when chosen for her beauty from among the daughters of an aristocracy not celebrated for ugliness, and manipulated by photographers into bestowing their eyes upon the readers of the shiniest print that ever lay on the table of an hotel reading-room.

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Chapter XXV

OF AN UNCALLED FAMILY ROW, AND HOW BOB'S BREAKFAST WAS POSTPONED. OF A LETTER FROM JUDITH THAT MADE MATTERS WORSE

The Mistake's son was the unfortunate means of causing the next day to begin badly. For he rose early, and hastened to the plague-centre at Putney whence Records flowed, to acquire in exchange for the condemned piece of mere music either "The White-Eyed Musical Kaffir" or something equally juicy. Naturally, he found the shop not open, at an hour when sparse milk and eggs were the only things procurable. "Won't open till ten," was the current opinion. Bob, disgusted, called on his friend Tommy Eldridge, and found sympathy and consolation. Tommy had had the "Musical Kaffir" for two days past, and the Kaffir had palled. He would swop him for the "mere music" record and twopence. Bob closed with the offer, but the bargain had taken time; and, as a consequence, he burst in upon breakfast at half-past eight o'clock, and announced his acquisition with an evident conviction that his hearers had been awaiting his return with suspended breaths. His step-mother--or aunt; either will do--confiscated his treasure promptly, and denounced Science within the home-circle. Lectures, she said truly, were one thing; houses another. Bob cited the indulgences shown to other fellows by their parents in respect of phonographs, and Cat said that Tommy Eldridge always had his till tea-time. Her mother told her not to speak with her mouth full, and met Master Bob's half-inaudible "I shall ask the Governor, anyhow!" with so harsh an enquiry, "What's that you're saying, sir? Don't mumble to yourself!" that Bob evacuated his position, and awaited reinforcements.

Marianne was making the common mistake of easing ill-temper by attacking objects blameless of provoking it--blowing off steam through wrong channels. At another time she would have been too lazy to open a campaign against a phonograph. Now she found it a relief to pitch in--Bob's phrase--and enlarged her scheme of operations. "If it wasn't for your father," she said, "you would all be breakfasting upstairs." Bob, who was afraid of her because she had boxed his ears for him before now--and not so very long ago--only muttered a sotto-voce "I'm a Rugby boy now, and that would be grandmother," expressing in his simple, limited way his sense of acquired status, and the folly of ignoring it. Marianne, who was not really the least angry with Bob, and certainly didn't care twopence about the "Musical Kaffir," saw in this suppressed defiance an outlet for her own high-pressure atmosphere, and jumped at its inaudibility as though it were the head and front of its offending. What was it he was mumbling?--she said again, with growing anger. He wouldn't mumble if his father was here. Bob denied this audibly, probably meaning that he had said nothing he would have scrupled to say to his father. He felt indignant and injured; having, indeed, meant no wrong, though his preoccupation about the glorious phonograph had no doubt made his speech appear careless.

As ill-luck would have it, Challis, coming down at this moment to breakfast, and not in a beaming good-humour himself, heard his wife's indictment, and quickened his descent of the stairs. He resolved at once on his usual policy whenever Marianne came to open warfare with any of the family--namely, to take her part at the moment, for discipline's sake, even supposing he had to make amends for it after by concessions.

"What is the matter?" said he magisterially, in the pause of silence his entry created. It was more impressive than any amount of excitement, and the younger little girl, Emmie, began to cry in a terrified way. Nothing creates the formidable like fear, even when it is only a small child's. The tension became full-blown, having--please observe!--all grown out of nothing.

"You must ask your boy what he means, Alfred, and find for yourself. All I can say is, that if I am to be spoken to so before the servants, I cannot go on."

"How dare you speak to your mother so--eh? What do you mean by it?" Challis's assumption of uncontrollable anger is affectation, merely from motives of policy. He knows he can make it up with Bob, any time.

"I didn't." Bob no more knows what he is denying than his father knows what he has accused him of. Never mind! Families don't quarrel by the book. Bob is scarlet, for all that, and warms to his subject. "She took my Record, and it cost a shilling, and twopence over. She wanted to prevent me...." But it remains untold, whatever it was, for Marianne interrupts:

"You can hear for yourself how he calls me she. But do as you like, Alfred!"--use of this name means a state of siege, observe!--"He is your boy." After which disclaimer of a parentage no one had accused her of, she repeats, "She, indeed!" to rub it in.

Challis at once perceived that he must either sacrifice poor Bob on the altar of Peace, or be entangled in a hopeless discussion of rights and wrongs with Marianne; how hopeless, only experience such as his could know! Action was necessary, and he pounced on Bob, seizing him by the collar of his coat. "How dare you speak so to your mother? How dare you...." But stop! He could never ask him how he dared say she to his mother! Even Marianne would suspect him of making game of her. So he had to pretend that his indignation had overwhelmed him. "Don't answer me, sir," he shouted, shaking the culprit with a severity probably more apparent than real. "Be off to your room directly, and stop there!" And the child that was crying broke into a roar, to do honour to the way the scene had climaxed. Bob vanished.

The roaring slowed down, and was gradually merged in bread-and-marmalade. An intermediate period of sobs and bites, overlapping, was filled out with public discomfort--an embarrassed silence in which Challis's visible vexation was unfairly taken advantage of by Marianne, to say, "You can't wonder at the child, when you're so violent." Challis closed his lips lest he should speak; but it came home to him, in some mysterious way, that he was in the wrong. Men are; or if they are not, it comes to the same thing. For a firm conviction in the mind of a woman with a strong will and a proper spirit has all the force of fact. But Challis's acquiescence in his guilt was accompanied by a growing resolution to take Bob to the play, coûte que coûte, before he went back to school on Monday. He had no misgivings about the boy's breakfast. He knew Harmood might be relied on, as Bob was a favourite in that quarter. Probably a compensation-breakfast was in store for Bob, later.

It was a bad moment for dealing with a female correspondent who is "always sincerely yours." Had Challis been confident that an unopened letter on the table was from one who was only "his faithfully"--though, indeed, Rebekah could not have been much more to Isaac--or even "his truly," he might have opened it confidently and made some excuse to throw it carelessly along the table to his wife while he went on to his last consignment of press-clippings. Or he might have done so equally, however "sincerely his" Judith Arkroyd's signature said she was, if only this stupid needless row had not been bred by Mrs. Challis's Short Temper out of Bob's Phonograph. But then, in addition to the sincerity with which Judith surrendered herself for ever, Challis knew the letter would contain a repeat of her invitation of the day before to his wife--probably to accompany him to Royd at Whitsuntide. So he postponed opening all his letters, and made the fatal mistake of hustling them together as though he valued them all alike. Marianne knew better. Had she not seen him pause half a second over that characteristic, unmistakable hand--a strong bold upright script that seemed to speak its contempt in every line for the scratchy Italicisms of its writer's ancestors? How was she to interpret its being packed away out of her sight in this way? However, she wished the jury in the court of her inner conscience to understand distinctly that she did not care one straw what Titus did or did not do in respect of Grosvenor Square--but within well-defined lines. For, apart from the degree to which she relied on the social safeguards of that Square's aristocratic pride, she had about her husband the feeling many students of nature ascribe to married folk who are not ripening for divorce--the feeling Geraint had about Enid, according to Tennyson. Marianne, for all her tempersomeness and jealousy, loved and reverenced Challis too much to dream he could be guilty of anything that would supply copy for a modern novel.

A more frank nature than Marianne's would have said to him when he pocketed his unopened letters, "What!--not read her letter? Well!--I wouldn't write again, if I were she!" or some such pleasantry. Her obdurate silence provoked him to say what might else have stopped on his tongue's tip. It came just after the children had vanished to the nursery. "I think, Marianne, considering that the boy is going back to school on Monday, you might have.... Well!--you might have been a little easier with him."

"I'm sorry he is going back to school; that is where he learns it all. But I expected to be found fault with."

"Learns all what? What does he learn?" But the lady simply bristles with silence in reply to this question, so intensely does it call for no answer. Titus continues, letting it lapse: "I don't think you remember that it was I that gave him the phonograph; at least, I gave him leave to buy it."

"I don't remember anything about it, and I'm not going to try to. Of course you gave it him, to encourage him against me. Very well, Alfred, you take his part! Oh, I know!--oh yes, I'm not his mother. But I know what poor Kate would have said, if she had been here now." This was rather a favourite position of Marianne's; only she never by any chance filled out her claim to knowledge of what would have happened under perfectly inconceivable circumstances. She kept details secret.

He thought of replying: "Poor Kate wouldn't be a fool, anyhow!" For he was vexed about Bob. But he was ashamed to find how Time had changed the face of things, that he should actually take exception to his own statement on its merits! Wouldn't she? He wasn't at all sure. He gave it up, and merely said: "We won't talk any more about it now. Where's Bob's Record?"

This was unfortunate. He had better have swept his letters into his pocket, with the hand that was waiting to do it, and carried them off to his study. Instead, he waited for the confiscated Musical Kaffir.

"No--Alfred--it's no use! I won't give it you if Bob's to have it. Horrible noise! Besides, look at the way he's been behaving!"

Challis gets visibly angry, or angrier. "You had much better give it me, Marianne," he says, reaching out his hand for it. But he just misses it, and it goes into Marianne's pocket; past recovery, without concession on her part or physical force on his. All might have been well if the dispute had not got to this point.

Things being thus, nothing remains for the story but to tell what actually took place. The lady persisted. No, she would not give it up! Nothing would induce her. Appeals on moderate lines, to come, to be reasonable, and so on, only made matters worse--tending, in fact, towards admission of weakness on Challis's part. He became more irritated, and in his annoyance at having to give up the point made an unfortunate speech. "Well--keep it, then, if you're so obstinate. I won't try to take it from you. But I tell you this, Marianne: there are many husbands that would." His only meaning was to lay a little stress on his own forbearance. He would not even try. But his speech sounded like an assertion of male power against female weakness, as well as of legal right.

The last was what stung Marianne. Her recent encounter with her mother had thrown doubts on her right to a divorce. How could they be reconciled with a husband's legal right to confiscate a White-Eyed Musical Kaffir, or any record, for that matter? Her eyes flashed, and she bit her lip as she turned to leave the room. A laugh that was no laugh came of it, but scarcely speech, to speak of. All she said was, "Because they could"--not very intelligibly. And then the nurse, Martha, with some appeal through the just opened door, cut off the interview, and imposed an every-day demeanour on both.

Challis went to his room to cool down. To him his wife's last words were inexplicable, unless they meant that his physique was not his strong point, and that he might not have recaptured the Musical Kaffir so very easily. But that did not seem to ring quite true, neither. Never mind!--he had to look at his letters. After all, it was not the first time Marianne had been unintelligible.

But her exclamation had no relation whatever to what Bob chose to call "vim." It was part of the new phase of thought connecting her mother's views about the legitimacy of her own marriage-knot with Challis's suggestion of a male domination that others--not he--might have legitimately claimed. If she was not to be Titus's lawful wife--if she was to be swindled by a trick of jurisdiction--at least let her have the advantages of her freedom. Let there be no rubbish about a man's right to rule, about a wife's duty to obey. Keep that sort of thing for authenticated marriage-lines, if hers were to be flawed.

It was the vaguest hint of an idea--no more! A gleam not worth a thought, except for what it grew to.

* * * * *

A human creature with an unopened letter in its hand is raw material for an Essay on the Past, Present, and Future. Rather dangerous things for a thoughtful scribbler to touch on rashly! Better say as little about them as possible.

That, or something like it, was Challis's thought as he stood in his writing sanctum, reasonlessly hanging fire over the opening of Judith Arkroyd's letter. Or was it that he wanted time to settle down after the recent émeute? Some nervous characters--like his--shrink from a clash of conditions, a discordance of consecutive surroundings, and are prone to let each association die down before another takes its place. Challis wanted to shake clear of his domesticities, maybe, before transferring his thoughts to Judith and the invitation to Royd that he knew her letter would repeat.

For whatever reason, he hung fire. And when in the end he opened the letter, he did it slowly. He took a broad view of it; then placed it on the table while he lighted a pipe, with a misgiving that there was a flaw in it that would prevent his showing it to Marianne. When he picked it up for deliberate revision, smoke-encircled, he found it read thus:

"DEAR MR. CHALLIS,

"Speech A. will suit me best--but never mind that if you feel like deciding on the other. Both enclosed back.

"Remember about Whitsuntide. Only please do succeed in persuading Mrs. Challis to come this time. Shall I come and go down on my knees to her? It does seem such a shame that she should keep so much in the background. Tell her she must come. I leave it to you--but do try!

"Sincerely yours, "J. A."

What the dickens possessed Judith--not Miss Arkroyd, please!--to use that unfortunate expression, "keep so much in the background"? Of course, Grosvenor Square is the foreground of the Universe--a little of Challis's style as an author outcropped here--but why not take it for granted? Why, in a communication that was to be shown to a fretful porcupine, need Grosvenor Square let the cat of its deep-rooted faith in its position out of the bag of its good-breeding? That was Challis's metaphorical standpoint. But really Judith very seldom sinned in this way; scarcely ever, so Challis persuaded himself, trespassed on Mr. Elphinstone's department.

Now, why need Mrs. Challis choose this exact moment to remind her husband that his Fire Insurance expired on the twenty-fifth, within fifteen days of which, et cetera? Why had he left his door on the jar, so that she should look in, unannounced, just as he was deciding that it would never do to show her this letter from Judith? He had no time to reflect--barely enough to replace it in its envelope. And that, after all, was the worst thing he could do. For Marianne knew the envelope by heart already. The only way of accounting for things of this sort is by imputing to Eblis a conscientious attention to detail. He reaps his reward, as we know, the smallest interventions often yielding a profit. This remark is suggested by Challis's decision, after his wife had left the room, that the Devil was in it.

* * * * *

Has all this incident of Bob's phonograph been worth recording? Certainly it has. Because, coming as it did on the top of Mrs. Steptoe's reminiscence, and Mrs. Challis's visit to Tulse Hill, it blocked explanations by supplying reasons for the attitude of that hill--reasons valid enough to throw dust in the eyes of Mrs. Challis. The phonograph ruction was an effect, not a cause of ill-temper, and poor Bob was really a victim, not a prime mover in it. It did not matter much to him, for his release was not long delayed, and reinstatement and compensation followed somehow. Besides, his father took him to hear the Barbiere di Siviglia before he went back to school. But he refused to admit that Melba was any better than her record would be, if he might only buy it for three bob.

By itself the Steptoe incident might have been explained. So might Challis's correspondence with Judith, or might never have attracted attention. It was the correlation of each to each, and the visit to Tulse Hill, with the subtle touch of Charlotte Eldridge at critical points, that provoked the dissension over the boy's harmless instrument of torture, and gave the Devil his opportunity.

Mrs. Steptoe had never recognized the young man whom she remembered as Harris, who, of course, was Challis himself. But the identification was in the air--bound to be made sooner or later. Although Mrs. Challis kept silence towards her husband, she lost no time in recurring to the subject with Mrs. Steptoe. Her own penetration had gone very little way, but Mrs. Eldridge had not been behindhand in finding out that either Kate Verrall had been thrice married, or that the second husband of the Brighton story was Challis himself. Charlotte would not have made a bad female detective. "Don't be a goose!" said she to her bewildered friend. "Don't give the woman any hints. Show her an old photograph of your husband, and see if she doesn't recognize it." Marianne did so, and it was straightway identified as that young Mr. Harris. "But," said she, "that is Mr. Challis, before we were married." Aunt Stingy, completely taken aback for a moment, recovered herself with great presence of mind and laid claim to having said many things she never had said the first minute she set eyes on Mr. Challis. In a very little while she persuaded herself she had known him at once. But she could not be induced to admit that she had got the name wrong; and as it was quite unimportant that she should do so, both ladies agreed to leave her unconvinced.

Mrs. Eldridge's suggestion was made at her own semi-detached residence, a quarter of an hour's walk from the Hermitage, where she and Marianne were reviewing the position some days after "it" occurred. The latter had been dwelling on a suggestion of her mother's, a very stupid old woman, that her husband had been, and still was, ignorant of poor Kate's first marriage.

"_Ab_solutely impossible, dear!" said the authority. "Thing couldn't be! Besides, she would have had to be twice a widow, in such a very short time, if this young man Harris wasn't your husband. He must have been." And then she added her detective suggestion, as recorded, and the result removed all chance of acquittal on this score.

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Chapter XXVI

AT ROYD AGAIN. THE BREAD OF IDLENESS. A GOOD PLAIN COOK. A DIALOGUE BETWEEN A PRIEST AND A PROFANE AUTHOR. THE RECTORY AND ITS GUEST, LIZARANN. HOW THE CARRIAGE DIDN'T STOP

That Whitsuntide the may-trees were thick with bloom at Royd when Marianne Challis once for all flatly decided not to accompany her husband there. As for him, he couldn't possibly refuse to go merely because she wouldn't. And when you particularly want to do anything, intrinsic impossibility to refuse to do it is always welcome. So on an early day in June Challis found himself again on the lawn at Royd; not exactly breathing freely because Marianne had refused to join the party, but distinctly glad that he was not called on to speculate as to what she would have said or done in this contingency or that, or which of the guests she would have fallen out with, or the extent to which he would have been bound to try to lubricate the situation, or the exact nature of the mess he would have made of it. Marianne had decided the matter, in spite of bona fide efforts on his part to reverse her decision. He had made them bona fide, in the interest of his conscience later on.

Anyhow, that was all settled, and he could inhale the aroma of the may-trees and the lilacs, and identify the note of the wood-pigeon--he was just bucolic enough for that--and pretend he meant blackbird when he said nightingale, and, in short, betray his Cockney origin ad libitum, while basking on the lawn in the first enjoyment of his escape from the hoots and shrieks and petroleum-stench of town. For even Wimbledon Common is not exempt. And nowhere can the music and the silence--strange compound!--of the world of growing trees go home more strongly to the jaded sense of a mere town-rat than in the charmed circle of a park-girt home, with centuries of repose behind and possible decades of conservation ahead. Not too many, because that would savour of sentimentalism; and it is always our duty to be prosaic in the interests of an advancing Civilization. Not too many, in this case of Royd, because that would imply too great a delay in the development of the wealth of coal that is known to exist below the beech and cedar of the three-mile drive, and the woods of ash and oak the deer and the keepers have pretty nearly kept to themselves since the days of William the Socialist. And when the coal comes, what that means in the end is--perhaps more people! Never mind what sort! Don't bother!

Don't bother! That was Alfred Challis's view of the Universe in two words as he settled down to the enjoyment of faultless afternoon tea, which would be a little stronger presently for those who waited; of the society of his hostess, the Rector, and two of the previous chits; of whom one, the young soldier's idol of last September, was drawling with sweetness, but without interest, to oblige. She was looking frequently towards the house. Challis said to himself that she need not be uneasy, because he would come, all right enough, in due time. He knew this, because they had ridden from Euston together, and talked about tobacco the whole way, that being their only topic in common. When the young man appeared, with the visible benediction on his head of two ivory-backed hair-brushes with no handles--which Challis had seen when a dressing-case was opened in the train for a moment--the young lady received him ceremoniously, almost distantly. Never mind!--thought the author to himself--they'll be romping like school-children the minute we oldsters are turned off.

There was no one else yet, of all a large house-party; nearly the same as in September, said Lady Arkroyd. She apologized for this to Mr. Challis, who replied that he, too, was nearly the same as in September, if not quite, and that it was a coincidence. He hoped his identity would be as welcome to the house-party as its would be to him. Lady Arkroyd smiled acquiescence without analysis. She remained gracefully on the surface of things, confident that all would go well below it in the hands, for instance, of an eminent, if sometimes puzzling novelist. Lady Arkroyd had not the insight of Judith, Challis perceived. He indulged a disposition to detect insight in Judith. Geist in that quarter made their relation--not that they had any, mind you!--plausible and warrantable.

There may have been concession to some such relativity in her ladyship's remark that Judith would not be back till dinner. Challis fell flat over it, not knowing whether he ought to say, "Cheer up!--I can wait," or shed tears. Athelstan Taylor relieved the position by saying that he hoped Miss Arkroyd had stopped on her way at the Rectory, as he wanted her to see the little girl. Then her ladyship bestowed on Challis, for a snack, as it were, the odd chit, who was at a loose end; devised her to him by name, and went back to a talk on local games at Providence with the Rector. The chit's name, however improbable it may seem, was Lady Henrietta Mounttullibardine, and she did not look as if she could live up to it. She coloured at intervals, and seemed hushed. Challis distinctly saw her want to say something several times, and give it up. He encouraged her tenderly, and in time she confessed that she really wanted to know whether it was Pepperstraw, in Challis's last novel, that hit upon the idea of using digitalis, or Bessie. He told her, and she retired on her information, in awe at having spoken to a live author. Challis could listen undisturbed to the conversation of the Parson and their hostess.

"There is something very engaging about the child," said the latter. "Of course, she has that defect. The mouth is too large for beauty. But she cossets up to you nicely, and opens her eyes wide. The eyes are fine in themselves, and remind me of ... oh dear!--what was that girl's name, now, in Somersetshire? I can't recollect the least." Athelstan Taylor felt helpless, and was wondering if it would be legitimate to say never mind, when her ladyship decided that it didn't matter, and continued: "Sir Murgatroyd is quite of our opinion, that it would never do to let the child lapse."

"Never do at all!" said the Rector. "Indeed, even if the child were not there, I should be very reluctant to lose sight of the father. I suspect, too, that the people at the cottage--where I put him to stay, you know--wouldn't thank me for taking him away. It's very curious to me how a man with such qualifications for being an encumbrance can manage to make himself welcome at all. But he's become very popular there, especially with old Margy. She says it's like a clock to hear him tell. I think she means that he goes on chatting in a pleasant, easy kind of way. Sea stories, you know--that sort of thing!"

"Didn't you say he was inclined to give trouble?--they are troublesome sometimes." She referred, no doubt, to the intransigeant pauper population, and their natural love of independence combined with outdoor relief.

"I didn't mean exactly troublesome in that sense. Troublesomely averse to giving trouble, perhaps I should have said. He never said anything to me, but old Margy is in his confidence. It seems that that sister of his--the Steptoe woman, you know? ... oh yes!--you know--the woman whose husband was drowned in the lock--the delirium tremens man...."

"Delirium tremens man?" said her ladyship dimly. And then suddenly, "Oh yes, I know, of course," almost in one word. Challis listened with stimulated attention, and Mr. Taylor continued:

"Well!--she's Jim Coupland's sister, you see--and it seems that she used to twit him with eating the bread of idleness before he took to the retail match-trade. He considers that he is eating the bread of idleness now. Perhaps he is. But he is submitting, until he is strong on his legs again--that's his expression. Besides, we have made a composition, and half his keep is to be deducted from his savings. By-the-bye...." The Rector paused, with recollection on his face.

Lady Arkroyd's speech is apt to have a superseding character--to pass by lesser folks' unimportant remarks. "I liked the father at the Hospital," she says indifferently. "I hope the child isn't going to be delicate." Mr. Taylor was arrested long enough to say, oh dear no!--oh no, it was or would be all right as far as that went--and then left it, whatever it was, to finish his own beginning.

"I was just going to say what an odd chance it was that Mr. Challis's housekeeping should have absorbed Mrs. Steptoe. How does the woman answer, Challis?" For, as we have heard, these two gentlemen had become fairly well acquainted last September, in spite of the cloth of the one and the predisposition of the other--a better word for the case than "antipathies," which had almost crept into the text. One or two country-walk chats had ended in Challis giving the Rev. Athelstan practical absolution for his black stock and silk waistcoat, and the latter reflecting much on the figments of mediæval creed and formulary that make a gulf between so many intellects with concord at the root, and play into the hands of their common enemy, the Devil. Why was he glad that his friend Gus was safe in London dabbling in incense, coquetting with Holy Water, preaching Immaculate Conceptions, and not letting his left hand know that his right hand had renounced the Bishop of Rome--when a visitor like Challis might accrue at any moment at Royd Rectory, as per promise given eight months ago? Why?--simply because he felt that the bridge of his own liberality, however long the span of it, was not enough to cover the great gulf! And there was Ahriman, chuckling all the while!

"I am given to understand that Mrs. Steptoe is a good plain cook," was Challis's answer to the Rector's question. Something in the manner of it seemed to throw doubt on his good faith. Otherwise, why seek confirmatory evidence, as his hearers seemed to do?

"I suppose you dine at home?" said the Rector, going to the point.

"I don't judge so much by that. It wouldn't be fair to do so, because I gather that in our house the flues don't act, and the best kitchen-coal at twenty shillings has no burn in it, and goes to cender in no time. Also we have no saucepans the right size. Also our greengrocer supplies us with potatoes which on peeling turn out irregular polyhedrons. So it doesn't do to be biassed by what we get to eat. But I am convinced she is a good plain cook."

Lady Arkroyd was accepting all Challis said in the spirit of Bradshaw. A territorial lady knows nothing of the small domesticities of any middle class. The Rector, perceiving a danger ahead--a new-born interest in the peculiar potatoes obtaining in suburban villas--headed Lady Arkroyd off just as she had begun, "What very curious pota...!" without a smile.

"Challis isn't in earnest," said he. "It's only his chaff." Her ladyship said, "Oh!" and looked puzzled--awaited enlightenment. Challis laughed, admitting jurisdiction. But he pleaded in extenuation of his offence that it was difficult to fight against the conviction that Mrs. Steptoe was a good plain cook--whatever direct evidence there was to the contrary--in the face of her apron and the material of her dress, her punctual attendance at chapel, her handwriting and its blots, her arithmetic and its totals. She really had all the qualities of a good plain cook, except the bald and crude ability to do plain cookery--a thing no one who looks below the surface ever bothers over.

"I'm afraid the good woman's a bit of a humbug," was Athelstan Taylor's conclusion. It was welcomed by the lady, as a relief to the necessity for smiling in a well-bred way--a Debretticent way, call it--while queer arrivals from below uttered paradoxes on Olympus.

Judith might be late; she was at Thanes. Challis pretended he hadn't known this. But he knew well enough that the young lady had forgiven the Castle, because they were going to have theatricals; and she, with an imputed experience, had been petitioned to accept the principal part. All this was in her last letter, written to Challis at his club. It had also told him that William Rufus, her brother, would not be at Royd for a few days, as he was busy in town over the Great Idea, which was going to be a very great Idea indeed, as some men had come forward and were going to put a good deal of Capital into it. Challis had said, "Dear me!--how like!..." and had not finished the sentence.

A little thing occurred that amused the novelmonger's heart and stirred his sympathies. When he began talking with his hostess and the Rector, he had turned his back on the chit and the young soldier. When, as the Rector's departure provoked dispersal, he looked their way again--behold!--they had vanished, as by magic. "I think," said the second chit, "they have gone for a walk to Fern Hollow." And thenceforward there was a consciousness about this young couple and their destiny between Mr. Challis and the second chit. For had she not detected his thought about them, when his eyes looked for them and found them not?

The other visitors, some of whom were as identical with those of September as circumstance permits in such a case, were scattered about elsewhere, subject to well-grounded confidences that they would be back to dinner. And the only important variation of identity among these was that one had become a Confirmed Christian Scientist. Challis didn't know whether he was expected to be glad or sorry.

He became somehow aware that her ladyship was going to drive to Thanes Castle accompanied by the second chit, to bring Judith back. Also that he was not going to be asked to accompany her. "What is Mr. Challis going to do if we all forsake him?" spoken with a sweet smile, left no doubt on the point. Mr. Challis had a letter he must write; so that was settled.

"You haven't got a letter to write, Challis," said the Rector at the front gate, to which both had walked in company. "Come some of the way with me, and talk as profanely as you like. I won't go fast." For the resolute stride of a pedestrian had made Challis cry for mercy in September.

"Yes--it was a lie about the letter," said he. "But it was good and unselfish in me to tell it. Saved bother, in fact! Can you wait two minutes while I put on walking-boots?"

"I can wait five, luckily; which I take it is your meaning." He waited six, beguiling them by letting the gate swing to and fro, and noting what a long time it took to reach equilibrium. "Wait a second," said he to Challis, arriving booted at the end of the fourth experiment. "Let's see how long it means to go on!" And then, having settled the point, the two were walking along the great avenue through the murmur of the beeches, conscious of a dispute between the woodlands and the hay-fields as to which was adding the sweeter flavour to the air of heaven.

Neither spoke at first. Then Challis said, as though still thinking over recent words: "Why 'as profanely as I liked'? I am a Profane Author, certainly, in the old sense of the word. Was that what you meant?"

"Why--yes! That is, if that was the sense you used the word in the last time we talked together, in September. Do you remember? You said you always had diabolical promptings towards profanity in the presence of anything sacred. Then you said my cloth was conventionally sacred, and that made matters worse."

"I remember. We were getting very candid. You said you liked it."

"So I did. I said what I said just now because I wanted to go on where we left off. We were just going to quarrel healthily when Mr. Brownrigg pointed out that in the millennium of Graubosch the impious man would have no cause for despondency. The class of Insulated Ideas, evolved from the theory of Metaphysical Checks, will at once provide the Dogmatist with materials, and the Blasphemer with an object to give his attention to...."

"I remember. If I belonged to the latter class, I shouldn't be a Grauboschite. Too much like Temperance Drinks, that make you feel as if you were drunk...." Challis arrested his own speech, as if he had had enough of triviality, and spoke seriously. "I want you to tell me something, without any reserve."

"Go on. I will, if I can."

"You read one of my books, I know ... what!--two more since September!--fancy that!... Well--what was your impression? As to what we are speaking of, I mean. Did it strike you that I made light of subjects usually held sacred?"

"It struck me that you did not hold them sacred. I do not mean a syllable more than I say. Your writing, so far as I have read it, is negative."

"I have wished to keep it so. Why should any author try to disturb or unsettle beliefs that he cannot replace--even by a Metaphysical Check? You remember what I said to you last year, just the other side of where the brook runs across the road on its own account, by the little footbridge?... well!--it was quite true. I have no antipathy to any beliefs of other people, having none of my own. I merely take exception to the recitation of Creeds."

"Even when the reciter is free to choose silence."

"If he stands up it comes to the same thing."

"He needn't unless he likes. At least, in my Church."

"Then suppose he does believe some of it, is he to jump up and down? There must be what my Bob calls a good few persons who believe the first seven and the last four words of the Creed ... well!--the regular Creed--you know which one I mean ... and you could hardly expect them to sit still all through the business part of the recitation and cut in at the end."

"You're only half serious, Challis. Your inveterate propensity to quips of thought and paradox, as it is called, misleads you and spoils your talk. Surely a declaration of faith is an intrinsic necessity in a communion! How can it exist otherwise?"

"You must keep the disbelievers out--is that it?" Challis thought it time for a cigar. When he had got it lighted, he resumed: "Yes!--as a means of constructing communions, Creeds are invaluable. The communion that had none would be too big. As for me, I never can help thinking of those lines:

"'One all too sure of God to need That token to the world without Of homage paid by faith to doubt, The recitation of a Creed.'

... Where do they come from, did you say? 'In Memoriam,' I suppose."

"Can't recollect them!... I wish you would tell me what you understand by the word 'believe.'"

"I'm very doubtful. It just depends on how I use it. When I tell my wife that I believe her letter has gone to the Post, my meaning is clear. I mean that I didn't see it on the hall-table when I last looked. When I say that I believe I am engaged on Thursday, it is equally unmistakable. I mean that I don't want to meet the So-and-so's at your house, morning-dress. But when I say, as I am apt to do, that I believe in God Almighty, I do so with a misgiving that my meaning is not intelligible to myself. Perhaps I regard my speech as a civility to the absolutely Unknown--I really couldn't say. Or it may be I only use it in fulfilment of a convention which, so long as I comply with its conditions, binds all the other signatories not to bother."

"You always make me think you are going to be serious, and then you go off at a tangent. I never have any doubt what I mean by the word...."

"What, for instance?"

"Whatever my mind does not question, I believe."

"Then the Creed might be reworded, 'I don't and won't question the existence of God the Father,' and so on. Somehow it doesn't sound convincing."

"Because it seems to imply that the question is an open one."

"And saying you believe it doesn't? I'm agreeable, if you're satisfied. But, then, you see, I stop away from Church, by hypothesis. And I should do so just the same if the re-wording were made. Nokes and Stokes and Styles and Brown and Thompson in a row, shouting that they didn't and wouldn't question the existence of God Almighty, would keep me out just as much as if they said they 'believed' in Him."

They walked on a little in silence, the Rector very thoughtful. Presently he said, rather as one who comes to a sudden conclusion: "My definition of the word doesn't cover it. One means more...."

"And doesn't exactly know what," said Challis.

"Precisely. But isn't it possible that the common use of a word long received among many people may, from the habit of its usage, acquire a meaning to each and all alike, and yet continue to baffle definition?"

"Very possible indeed, and certain. I know a case in point. I went to a sort of spiritualistic séance once, and in the course of operations the audience was requested to will powerfully. To my surprise, all the habitués seemed prepared to comply as a matter of course. One young man said, 'How?' but was sat upon by public opinion. I heard him after ask a friend, 'How did you will'? And the reply was: 'I held my breath and caught firmly hold of four-and-sixpence in my breeches pocket. How did you?' He answered that he had shut his eyes tight and thought of his toes. But all the faithful--these two were outsiders, like myself--seemed to know what to do; and did it right, I suppose, because an accordion played. They had found out what willing meant, by habit and telepathic interchange. Probably believers know in the same way what is meant by belief. But it's no use outsiders holding their breath and thinking of their toes."

This sort of chat continued till the two reached the Rectory. It is given in the story to throw light on the friendship that sprang up between two such opposites, or seeming opposites.

When one walks part of the way home with a friend, Euclid's axioms get flawed sometimes, for the whole of the way is no greater than its part. Challis went all the way to the Rectory, of course; said he wouldn't come in, of course; said he mustn't sit down, of course; did so, of course; and kept his eye on his watch, of course. Having complied with all forms and precedents, he started to walk back.

His short visit had given him odds and ends of human things to think of. That was the Rector's sister-in-law, that dry lady who had made him feel tolerated; and that other one who had begged him not to throw his cigar away was only an old friend. Challis was sorry the reverse was not the case, for the Rector's sake. He felt that the old friend might be kissed with advantage to the kisser, while the officially permissible peck of the dry lady's cheek could not be a source of satisfaction to any connoisseur. It was a thought entirely on his friend's behalf--he himself was indifferent. However, he might be wrong. The dry lady seemed very congenial to the two little girls, her nieces, who, it appeared--hurriedly, for his visit was short--had engaged a nurse for their baby. Challis suspected that a dispute between the two children, which the dry lady peremptorily silenced, turned on a question of paternity. Which of them was to be the baby's papa? It seemed late in the day for considering the point, thought Challis. The oldest sister was always the papa, said that claimant; and confirmed it by adding, "Eliza Ann says so, and she knows." The colloquy was half-heard, but this seemed the upshot.

That little Eliza Ann in the blue cotton dress--the nurse in this drama--was, of course, the little girl whose mouth was too large for beauty; Mrs. Steptoe's brother's child. How small the world was! "So is the kid herself, for that matter," was Challis's reflection thereon; a typical instance of the whimsical way his mind twisted things. He would have said it aloud with perfect gravity to any hearer, had he had one.

She was a nice little wench, anyhow, the nurse, with her great big eyes and her Cockney-up-to-date accent. Also Challis had noted her quickness in repeating words just heard. "The biby is on no attount to be wyked," she had said, with an earnest sense of the reality of her part. "O si sic omnes!" Challis had thought to himself.

But the nurse forgot herself the moment after, saying: "I must sow this biby to my daddy, tomollow--maten't I?" However, she resumed her part at once, on assurance given. She was certainly to show that baby to her daddy. And he would feel it, and see how fat it was. Thereon Challis had remembered what had till then escaped his mind, that Mrs. Steptoe's brother was eyeless and half legless. Oh, what an indurated baby, for an appreciator dependent on touch alone! And, oh, the stony glare of its eyes fixed on the zenith, when roused from sleep by a practicable wire in its spine!

A man with a permanent source of disquiet always lights on something to remind him of it, go where he may. Challis had succeeded on his way from London in persuading himself that the warmth of his own farewell to Marianne had been more than skin-deep, whatever hers was; and had felt that he could justifiably stand his own self-reproaches over, and enjoy the day that was passing, without remorse. And then what must he needs come across, of all things in the world, but a sister-in-law! Not one certainly resembling in the least the sister-in-law of a decade past, whom she reminded him of! There was nothing in this one of the girl who then, in the language of Oliver, bestowed herself like a ripe sister, and was accepted with a sense that she more than made up for a too mature mother-in-law, and put the advantages of marriage outside all question. Nothing of Marianne then or now, for that matter, in the dry lady personally; but much to remind him of his own case in the way she had taken over the two little girls, much as Marianne had taken over Bob.

Was it his fault--the whole thing? For there was a "whole thing" by now. He could not disguise that whole thing from himself, and that it was a thing that had somehow grown, slowly and surely, since the first days when he and Marianne were rejoicing together in the dark front parlour of the Great Coram Street house over a letter just come from the publishers, Saxby's, Ltd., which accepted "The Spendthrift's Legacy," and named terms which led to a calculation that success, followed by a book per annum equally successful, would yield two thousand a year; and to castles in Spain, the building of which would have cost that sum twice over.

Or, if not from that hour exactly, it had grown since the days of the success that followed. It was hard to say when it began. Was he aware of it--of "the whole thing"--when Marianne refused to go with him to Lady Horse's because the Honourable Mrs. Diamonds had been rude to her first, and encouraged her after? These were not the ladies' real names, but everything else held good. Marianne had then said that once was quite enough, and she knew all along exactly how it was going to be, ever since that woman in skirts had given herself such airs--a reference to a previous delinquent. Oh dear!--now suppose the Honourable Diamonds had not "encouraged" her--how then? Anyhow, Challis could see now, too late, what he ought to have done. He ought to have taken bulls by the horns, and bits in his teeth, and opportunities by their forelocks, and said flatly that he wouldn't go to Lady Horse's unless Marianne came, too. It was his going that once without her that had done it! And all because of the confounded good-nature of that diamond woman, who must needs go encouraging her. That was what hurt the most, a thousandfold. The Diamonds might have stood on Marianne's lilac silk all day long, and broken that little crickly man's arm with her fan, if she chose, and her victim would have forgiven it. But when she came off, she scarcely apologized. And then, after that, to encourage her!

Still, in those days he was not aware of "the whole thing" that had "come about." Suspicion that something was amiss was followed by belief that the something had melted away. Intermittent phases succeeded, now and then with an appearance of concession to Society on Marianne's part; occasional acceptances of invitations to houses where Challis innocently hoped all had gone well, till he found himself driving home with a hurt and silent lady, and came to know that the very things he had fondly fancied almost angelic ebullitions of sweetness in their hostess were really only the woman's impertinence; and that what seemed to him good-humoured informality in her daughters was nothing but that sort of hoydenishness that seemed to be thought the proper thing nowadays. He could recall many incidents of this description, yet none that seemed to warrant the evolution of married discomfort--of disintegrated family life--that kept on gaining slowly, slowly on his resistance to it.

It had intensified, he knew, since his first visit to Royd in September. It was mixed up with his professional association with Judith Arkroyd. It was a professional relation, and nothing else. He called the ancestral beeches of the family to bear witness to the utter impossibility of its being anything else. If he, Alfred Challis, ex-accountant, ephemeral scribbler of an empty day, was conscious of a certain warmth in his admiration for that lady, that was his concern--not even the business of the beech-trees, or the new young fern he was treading underfoot. It would remain a buried secret, unknown to all men, most of all to Judith herself. He would even, as an act of discipline, never think of it but to question its reality, as he did now. It was to die, and should do so. At least he could keep his own counsel about this soul-quake, heart-quake, self-quake--call it what you will!--admitting that one existed. If he failed to do so successfully, would he be the first man that had ever loved two women, and been forced to hide away his love for one from the other and herself? But he was obliged to admit that this was the first time he had allowed the word "love" to be heard in his intercourse with himself on this subject, even as an hypothesis.

He was relieved to observe the pleasure he felt in the thought that, at any rate, Polly Anne need never know anything about it. She need never have any real cause for a moment's disquiet. Of course, any groundless suspicions she might choose to nourish were entirely her own look-out. He could only recognize those that had a warrant in reality. She should not be provided with materials for any such. Of course, Polly Anne was Polly Anne, after all, and her happiness must always be a first consideration with him. Think of all their old days together! Think of his hours of acute misery, when that young monkey Emmie, five years ago, must needs imperil her mother's life and her own by her indecent haste to see the World. Think, never too often, of his gratitude to her when she took him, a mere derelict, in tow, ten years since, and piloted him into safe waters. Think as much as possible of her many nursings of him--of the many pipes they had virtually had together, though he was the operative smoker--of the many welcomes he had looked forward to. And as little as possible of the shortness of temper that had certainly grown upon her, but was very likely only a phase of health that would one day pass away and be forgotten. Remember that confounded little monkey--bless her! of course--and be forbearing to her mother.

There was one thought about her that twisted and tortured this victim of over-self-examination beyond all reason. Look how utterly, how almost terribly, Polly Anne had replaced poor Kate! Surely the Great Unknown had made a record in cruelty when he created Love the Monopolist! Why feel shocked because, after Kate had ceased, her sister had taken over her inheritance so thoroughly? Besides, this entire supersession of poor Kate showed him how really devoted he was to Marianne, and how safe he and she were from intrusions from without. It never struck him as strange that he should be seeking for assurance that he loved his own wife.

It probably would have done so, in time, if his reflections had not been interrupted at this point. The sound of the carriage--with Judith in it, no doubt--returning from Thanes. Saladin, the huge boarhound, coming on the scene first, examined Mr. Challis without any sign of recognition, and seemed to decide that he had nothing contraband about him. Then he waited till the carriage he had charge of came in sight, and trotted on. The import of his demeanour was that an appointment awaited him at the house, but that he could find time to see that carriage and pair to the door--if only it wouldn't dawdle!

Whether it was from consideration for Saladin, or because it was haughty, that carriage hardly stopped. Its pause was barely long enough to say, through the mixed and hurried inspirations of its occupants, that it could bring itself to accommodate Mr. Challis on the front seat. Mr. Challis, alive to the importance of not sitting down on miscellanea, preferred walking; for all that the miscellanea professed readiness to be quite happy elsewhere. It was only a step to the house now. And Saladin was waiting. All right--go on!

Why should Challis feel something akin to pique because that carriage and pair took him at his word and went on, all right? Why need that unfortunate propensity of the foot-passenger beset him, the vice of mind that ascribes every action of a two-horse carriage to aristocratic pride? Perhaps he wanted to file an accusation against something or someone, and was not ready to admit that Judith's majestic smile and head-inclination had anything to do with it. Anyhow, the rest of his step to the house associated itself with a warm forgiving feeling towards Polly Anne the tiresome, the miffy; and an intensified sense of outsideness as to his own social whereabouts; the insidedness being that of a fold with Sir Bernard Burke for shepherd, and Rouge Dragon and Garter King-at-arms for collie dogs.

He arrived at the house to find the world flocking to dress for dinner, or doing it already, out of sight. Flying cordialities from members of the family, unseen till then, or visitors known to him previously, intercepted him in his flight up the great staircase; but innuendoes from well-informed contemporaries that dinner was at a quarter to eight justified abruptness and pointed to opportunities for explanation. Challis escaped to his room, and found his external self of the evening to come--all but the head and hands he had on--laid out upon the bed, waiting patiently to be scrambled into in a hurry, and have its studs and buttons sworn at.

But he was not destined to be the last in the drawing-room, although he thought it could not be otherwise. For when he arrived at the foot of the stairs, it was with a consciousness on him of having heard, as in a waking-dream, the sweetest possible drawl to the following effect: "It was awl yaw fault. It wawsn't mine one bit," and a male reply, with the climax of human contentment in every syllable, "I'm jolly glad--it lasted so much longer?" and then a headlong rush to a chaotic toilette.

And that young man's appearance seven minutes later, looking as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, would have done honour to a lightning transformationist. But the distant manner of the guilty couple was carried too far, as everybody guessed all about it, and would have done so even without the furtive looks they exchanged from either end of a long table.

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