Chapter XXV…

Chapter XXV

ABOUT SIX MONTHS, AND HOW A CABMAN SAW A GHOST. OF SALLY'S AND THE DOCTOR'S "MODUS VIVENDI," AND THE SHOOSMITH FAMILY. HOW SALLY MADE TEA FOR BUDDHA, AND HOW BUDDHA FORESAW A STEPDAUGHTER. DELIRIUM TREMENS

It may make this story easier to read at this point if we tell our reader that this twenty-fifth chapter contains little of vital import--is, in fact, only a passing reference to one or two by-incidents that came about in the half-year that followed. He cannot complain that they are superfluous if we give him fair warning of their triviality, and enable him to skip them without remorse. But they register, to our thinking, what little progress events made in six very nice months--a period Time may be said to have skipped. And whoso will may follow his example, and lose but little in the doing of it.

Very nice months they were--only one cloud worth mention in the blue; only one phrase in a minor key. The old familiar figure of "the Major"--intermittent, certainly, but none the less invariable; making the house his own, or letting it appropriate him, hard to say which--was no longer to be seen; but the old sword had been hung in a place of honour near a portrait of Paul Nightingale, Mrs. Fenwick's stepfather--its old owner's school-friend of seventy years ago. At her death it was to be offered to the school; no surviving relative was named in the will, if any existed. Everything was left unconditionally "to my dear daughter by adoption, Rosalind Nightingale."

Some redistributions of furniture were involved in the importation of the movables from the two rooms in Ball Street. The black cabinet, or cellaret, with the eagle-talons, found a place in the dining-room in the basement into which Fenwick--only it seems so odd to go back to it now--was brought on the afternoon of his electrocution. Sally always thought of this cabinet as "Major Roper's cabinet," because she got the whiskey from it for him before he went off in the fog. If only she had made him drunk that evening! Who knows but it might have enabled him to fight against that terrible heart-failure that was not the result of atmospheric conditions. She never looked at this cabinet but the thought passed through her mind.

Her mother certainly told her nothing at this time about her last conversation with the Colonel, or almost nothing. Certainly she mentioned more than once what she thought a curious circumstance--that the invalid, who was utterly ignorant of Old Jack's death, had persisted so strongly that he was present in the room when he must have been dead some hours. Every one of us has his little bit of Psychical Research, which he demands respect for from others, whose own cherished private instances he dismisses without investigation. This example became Mrs. Fenwick's; who, to be just, had not set herself up with one previously, in spite of the temptation the Anglo-Indian is always under to espouse Mahatmas and buried Faquirs and the like. There seemed a good prospect that it would become an article of faith with her; her first verdict--that it was an hallucination--having been undermined by a certain contradictiousness, produced in her by an undeserved discredit poured on it by pretenders to a superior ghost-insight; who, after all, tried to utilise it afterward as a peg to hang their own particular ghosts on. Which wasn't researching fair.

Sally was no better than the rest of them; if anything, she was a little worse. And Rosalind was far from sure that her husband wouldn't have been much more reasonable if he hadn't had Sally there to encourage him. As it was, the league became, pro hac vice, a league of Incredulity, a syndicate of Materialists. Rosalind got no quarter for the half-belief she had in what the old Colonel had said on his death-bed. Her report of his evident earnestness and the self-possession of his voice carried no weight; failing powers, delirium, effects of opiates, and ten degrees above normal had it all their own way. Besides, her superstition was weak-kneed. It only went the length of suggesting that it really was very curious when you came to think of it, and she couldn't make it out.

That the incident received such very superficial recognition must be accounted for by the fact that Krakatoa Villa was not a villa of the speculative-thinker class. We have known such villas elsewhere, but we are bound to say we have known none where speculative thought has tackled the troublesome questions of death-bed appearances, haunted houses, et id genus omne, with the result of coming to any but very speculative conclusions. The male head of this household may have felt that he himself, as a problem for the Psychical Researcher, was ill-fitted to discuss the subject. He certainly shied off expressing any decided opinions.

"What do you really think about ghosts?" said his wife to him one day, when Sally wasn't there to come in with her chaff.

"Ghosts belong in titled families. Middle-class ghosts are a poor lot. Those in the army and navy cut the best figure, on the whole--Junior United Service ghosts...."

"Gerry, be serious, or I'll have a divorce!" This was a powerful grip on a stinging-nettle. Rosalind felt braced by the effort. "Did you ever see a ghost, old man?"

"Not in the present era, sweetheart. I can't say about B.C." He used to speak of his life in this way, but his wife always felt sorry when he alluded to it. It seldom happened. "No, I have never seen one to my knowledge. I've been seen as a ghost, though, which is very unpleasant, I assure you."

Rosalind's mind went back to the fat Baron at Sonnenberg. She supposed this to be another case of the same sort. "When was that?" she said.

"Monday. I took a hansom from Cornhill to our bonded warehouse. It's under a mile, and I asked the driver to change half-a-crown; I hadn't a shilling. He got out a handful of silver, and when he had picked out the two shillings and sixpence he looked at me for the first time, and started and stared as if I was a ghost in good earnest."

"Oh, Gerry, he must have seen you before--before it happened!" Remember that this was, in the spirit of it, a fib, seeing that the tone of voice was that of welcome to a possible revelation. To our thinking, the more honour to her who spoke it, considering the motives. Gerry continued:

"So I thought at first. But listen to what followed. As soon as his surprise, whatever caused it, had toned down to mere recognition point, he spoke with equanimity. 'I've driven you afore now, mister,' said he. 'You won't call me to mind. Parties don't, not when fares; when drivers, quite otherwise. I'm by way of taking notice myself. You'll excuse me?' Then he said, 'War-r-r-p,' to the horse, who was trying to eat himself and dig the road up. When they were friends again, I asked, Where had he seen me? Might I happen to call to mind Livermore's Rents, and that turn-up?--that was his reply. I said I mightn't; or didn't, at any rate. I had never been near Livermore's Rents, nor any one else's rents, that I could recall the name of. 'Try again, guv'nor,' said he. 'You'll recall if you try hard enough. He recollects it, I'll go bail. My Goard! you did let him have it!' Was it a fight? I asked. Well, do you know, darling, that cabby addressed me seriously; took me to task for want of candour. 'That ain't worthy of a guv'nor like you,' he said. 'Why make any concealments? Why not treat me open?' I gave him my most solemn honour that I was utterly at a loss to guess what he was talking about, on which he put me through a sort of retrospective catechism, broken by reminders to the horse. 'You don't rec'lect goin' easy over the bridge for to see the shipping? Nor yet the little narrer court right-hand side of the road, with an iron post under an arch and parties hollerin' murder at the far end? Nor yet the way you held him in hand and played him? Nor yet what you sampled him out at the finish? My Goard!' He slapped the top of the cab in a sort of ecstasy. 'Never saw a neater thing in my life. No unnecessary violence, no agitation! And him carried off the ground as good as dead! Ah! I made inquiry after, and that was so.' I then said it must have been some one else very like me, and held out my half-crown. He slipped back his change into his own pocket, and when he had buttoned it over ostentatiously addressed me again with what seemed a last appeal. 'I take it, guv'nor,' said he, 'you may have such a powerful list of fighting fixtures in the week that you don't easy recollect one out from the other. But now, do, you, mean to say your memory don't serve you in this?--I drove you over to Bishopsgate, 'cross London Bridge. Very well! Then you bought a hat--white Panama--and took change, seein' your own was lost. And you was going to pay me, and I drove off, refusin' to accept a farden under the circumstances. Don't you rec'lect that?' I said I didn't. 'Well, I did,' said he. 'And, with your leave, I'll do the same thing now. I'll drive you most anywhere you'd like to name in reason, but I won't take a farden.' And, do you know, he was off before my surprise allowed me to say a word."

"Now, Gerry, was it that made you so glum on Monday when you came back? I recollect quite well. So would Sally."

"Oh no; it was uncomfortable at first, but I soon forgot all about it. I recollect what it was put me in the dumps quite well. It was a long time after the cabby."

"What was it?"

"Well, it was as I walked to the station. I went a little way round, and passed through an anonymous sort of a churchyard. I saw a box in a wall with 'Contributions' on it, and remembering that I really had no right to the cabby's shilling or eighteenpence, I dropped a florin in. And then, Rosey dear, I had the most horrible recurrence I've had for a long time--something about the same place and the same box, and some one else putting three shillings in it. And it was all mixed up with a bottle of champagne and a bank. I can't explain why these things are so painful, but they are. You know, Rosey!"

"I know, dear." His wife's knowledge seemed to make her quite silent and absent. She may have seen that the recovery of this cabman would supply a clue to her husband's story. Had he taken the number of the cab? No, he hadn't. Very stupid of him! But he had no pencil, or he could have written it on his shirt-sleeve. He couldn't trust his memory. Rosalind didn't feel very sorry the clue was lost. As for him, did he, we wonder, really exert himself to remember the cab's number?

But when the story was told afterwards to Sally, the moment the Panama hat came on the tapis, she struck in with, "Jeremiah! you know quite well you had a Panama hat on the day you were electrocuted. And, what's more, it was brand new! And, what's more, it's outside in the hall!"

It was brought in, and produced a spurious sense of being detectives on the way to a discovery. But nothing came of it.

All through the discussion of this odd cab-incident the fact that Fenwick "would have written down the cab-driver's number on his shirt-sleeve," was on the watch for a recollection by one of the three that a something had been found written on the shirt-cuff Fenwick was electrocuted in. The ill-starred shrewdness of Scotland Yard, by detecting a mere date in that something, had quite thrown it out of gear as an item of evidence. By the way, did no one ever ask why should any man, being of sound mind, write the current date on his shirt-sleeve? It really is a thing that can look after its own interests for twenty-four hours. The fact is that, no sooner do coincidences come into court, than sane investigation flies out at the skylight.

There was much discussion of this incident, you may be sure; but that is all we need to know about it.

* * * * *

Our other chance gleanings of the half-year are in quite another part of the field. They relate to Sally and Dr. Vereker's relation to one another. If this relation had anything lover-like in it, they certainly were not taking Europe into their confidence on the subject. Whether their attitude was a spontaneous expression of respectful indifference, or a parti-pris to mislead and hoodwink her, of course Europe couldn't tell. All that that continent, or the subdivision of it known as Shepherd's Bush, could see was a parade of callousness and studied civility on the part of both. The only circumstance that impaired its integrity or made the bystander doubt the good faith of its performers was the fact that one of them was a girl, and an attractive one--so attractive that elderly ladies jumped meanly at the supposed privileges of their age and sex, and kissed her a great deal more than was at all fair or honourable.

The ostentatious exclusion of Cupid from the relationship of these two demanded a certain mechanism. Every meeting had to be accounted for, or there was no knowing what match-making busybodies wouldn't say; or, rather, what they would say would be easily guessable by the lowest human insight. Not that either of them ever mentioned precaution to the other; all its advantages would have vanished with open acknowledgment of its necessity. These arrangements were instinctive on the part of both, and each credited the other with a mole-like blindness to their existence.

For instance, each was graciously pleased to believe--or, at least, to believe that the other believed--in a certain institution that called for a vast amount of checking of totals, comparisons of counterfoils, inspection of certificates, verification of data--everything, in short, of which an institute is capable that could make incessant correspondence necessary and frequent personal interviews advisable. It could boast of Heaven knows how many titled Patrons and Patronesses, Committees and Sub-committees, Referees and Auditors. No doubt the mere mention of such an institution was enough to render gossip speechless about any single lady and gentleman whom it accidentally made known one to another. Its firm of Solicitors alone, with a line all to itself in its prospectuses, was enough to put a host of Loves to flight.

On which account Ann, at Krakatoa Villa, when she announced, "A person for you, Miss Sally," was able to add, "from Dr. Vereker, I think, miss," without the faintest shade of humorous reserve, as of one who sees, and does not need to be told.

And when Sally had interviewed a hopeless and lopsided female, who appeared to be precariously held together by pins, and to have an almost superhuman power of evading practical issues, she (fortified by this institution) was able to return to the drawing-room and say, without a particle of shame, that she supposed she should have to go and see Old Prosy about Mrs. Shoosmith to-morrow afternoon. And when she called at the doctor's at teatime--because that didn't take him from his patients, as he made a point of his tea, because of his mother, if it was only ten minutes--both he and she believed religiously in Mrs. Shoosmith, and Dr. Vereker filled out her form (we believe we have the phrase right) with the most business-like gravity at the little table where he wrote his letters.

Mrs. Shoosmith's form called for filling out in more senses than one. The doctor's mother's form would not have borne anything further in that direction; except, indeed, she had been provided with hooks to go over her chair back, and keep her from rolling along the floor, as a sphere might if asked to sit down.

A suggestion of the exceptional character of all visits from Sally to Dr. Vereker, and vice-versa, was fostered by the domestics at his house as well as at Krakatoa Villa. The maid Craddock, who responded to Sally's knock on this Shoosmith occasion, threw doubt on the possibility of the doctor ever being visible again, and kept the door mentally on the jar while she spoke through a moral gap an inch wide. Of course, that is only our nonsense. Sally was really in the house when Craddock heroically, as a forlorn hope in a lost cause, offered to "go and see"; and going, said, "Miss Nightingale; and is Dr. Vereker expected in to tea?" without varnish of style, or redundance of wording. But Sally lent herself to this insincere performance, and remained in the hall until she was called on to decide whether she would mind coming in and waiting, and Dr. Vereker would perhaps be back in a few minutes. All this was part of the system of insincerity we have hinted at.

So was the tenor of Sally's remarks, while she waited the few minutes, to the effect that it was a burning shame that she should take up Mrs. Vereker's time, a crying scandal that she should interrupt her knitting, and a matter of penitential reflection that she hadn't written instead of coming, which would have done just as well. To which Mrs. Vereker, with a certain parade of pretended insincerity (to make the real article underneath seem bona fides), replied with mock-incredible statements about the pleasure she always had in seeing Sally, and the rare good fortune which had prompted a visit at this time, when, in addition to being unable to knit, owing to her eyes, she had been absorbed in longing for news of a current event that Sally was sure to know about. She particularised it.

"Oh, it isn't true, Mrs. Vereker! You don't mean to say you believed that nonsense? The idea! Tishy--just fancy!" Goody Vereker (the name Sally thought of her by) couldn't shake her head, the fulness at the neck forbade it; but she moved it cosily from side to side continuously, much as a practicable image of Buddha might have done.

"My child, I've quite given up believing and disbelieving things. I wait to be told, and then I ask if it's true. Now you've told me. It isn't true, and that settles the matter."

"But whoever could tell you such nonsense, Mrs. Vereker?"

"A little bird, my dear." The image of Buddha left off the movement of incredulity, and began a very gentle, slow nod. "A little bird tells me these things--all sorts of things. But now I know this one's untrue I should never dream of believing it. Not for one moment."

Sally felt inclined to pinch, bite, or otherwise maltreat the speaker, so very worthless did her offer of optional disbelief seem, and, indeed, so very offensive. But her inclination only went the length of wondering how she could get at a vulnerable point through so much fat.

"Tishy quarrels with her mother, I know," said she. "But as to her doing anything like that! Besides, she never told me. Besides, I should have been asked to the wedding. Besides," etcetera.

For, you see, what this elderly lady had asked the truth about was, had or had not Lætitia Wilson and Julius Bradshaw been privately married six months ago? Probably, during æons and epochs of knitting, she had dreamed that some one had told her this. Or, even more probably, she had invented it on the spot, to see what change she could get out of Sally. She knew that Sally, prudently exasperated, would give tongue; whereas conciliatory, cosy inquisition--the right way to approach the elderly gossip--would only make her reticent. Now it was only necessary to knit, and Sally would be sure to develop the subject. The line she appeared to take was that it was a horrible shame of people to say such things, in view of the fact that it was only yesterday that Tishy had quite settled that rash matrimony in defiance of her parents would not only be inexcusable but wrong. Sally laid a fiery emphasis on the only-ness of yesterday, and seemed to imply that, had it been a week ago, there would have been much more plausibility in the story of this secret nuptial of six months back.

"Besides," she went on, accumulating items of refutation, "Julius has only his salary, and Tishy has nothing--though, of course, she could teach. Besides, Julius has his mother and sister, and they have only a hundred and fifty a year. It does as long as they all live together. But it wouldn't do if Julius married." On which the old Goody (Sally told her mother after) embarked on a long analysis of how joint housekeeping could be managed if Tishy would consent to be absorbed into the Bradshaw household. She made rather a grievance of it that Sally could not supply data of the sleeping accommodation at Georgiana Terrace, Bayswater. If she had known that, she could have got them all billeted on different rooms. As it was, she had to be content to enlarge on the many economies the family could achieve if they consented to be guided by a person of experience--e.g., herself.

"Of course, dinner would have to be late," she said, "because of Mr. Bradshaw not getting home till nearly eight. They would have to make it supper. And it might be cold; it's a great saving, and makes it so easy where there's one servant." Sally shuddered with horror at this implied British household. Poor Tishy!

"But they're not going to marry till they see their way," she exclaimed in despair. She felt that Tishy and Julius were being involved, entangled, immeshed by an old matrimonial octopus in gilt-rimmed spectacles--like Professor Wilson's--who could knit tranquilly all the while, while she herself could do nothing to save them. "It might be cold!!" Every evening, perhaps--who knows?

"Very proper, my dear." Thus the Octopus. "I felt sure such a nice, sensible girl as Miss Wilson never would. That is Conrad." It really was a sound of a latch-key, but speech is no mere slave to fact.

"And I was really quite glad when Dr. Prosy came in--the way the Goody was going on about Tishy!" So Sally said to her mother when she had completed her report of the portion of this visit she chose to tell about. On which her mother said, "What a dear little humbug you are, kitten," and she replied, as we have heard her reply before, "We-e-ell, there's nothing in that!" and posed as one who has been misrepresented. But her mother stuck to her point, which was that Sally knew she was quite glad when Dr. Vereker came in, Tishy or no.

Whatever the reason was that Sally was quite glad at the appearance of Dr. Prosy, there could be no doubt about the fact. Her laugh reached the cook in the kitchen, who denounced Craddock the parlourmaid for not telling her it was Miss Nightingale, when it might have been a visitor, seeing no noise come of it. Cook remarked she knew how it would be--there was the doctor picking up like--and hadn't she told Craddock so? But Craddock said no!

"Mrs. Shoosmith again--the everlasting Mrs. Shoosmith!" exclaimed the doctor. It was very unfeeling of them to laugh so over this unhappy woman, who was the survivor of two husbands and the proprietor of one, and the mother of seven daughters and five sons, each of whom was a typical "case," and all of whom sought admission to Institutes on their merits. The lives of the whole family were passed in applications for testimonials and certificates, alike bearing witness to their chronic qualifications for it. Sally was mysteriously hardhearted about them, while fully admitting their claims on the public.

"That's right, Dr. Conrad"--Sally had inaugurated this name for herself--"Honoria Purvis Shoosmith. Mind you put in the Purvis right. Now write down lots of diseases for her to have." Sally is leaning over the doctor's chair to see him write as she says this. There is something in the atmosphere of the situation that seems to clash with the actual business in hand. The doctor endeavours, not seriously enough, perhaps, to infuse a flavour of responsibility.

"My professional dignity, Miss Nightingale, will not permit of the scheme of diagnosis you indicate. If any disorders entirely without symptoms were known to exist, I should be delighted to ascribe the whole of them to Mrs. Shoosmith...."

"Don't be prosy, Dr. Conrad. Fire away! You told me lots--you know you did! Rheumatic arthritis--gout--pyæmia...."

"Come, I say, Miss Sally, draw it mild. I never said pyæmia. _An_æmia, perhaps...."

"Very well, Anne, then! We can let it go at that. Fire away!" The doctor looks round his own corner at the rows of pearls and the laugh that frames them, the merry eyebrows and the scintillating eyes they accentuate. A perilous intoxication, not to be too freely indulged in by a serious professional man at any time--in business hours certainly not. But if the doctor were quite in earnest over a sort of Spartan declaration of policy his heart feels the prudence of, would that responsive twinkle flutter in his face behind its mock gravity? He is all but head over ears in love with Sally--so why pretend? Really, we don't know--and that's the truth.

"Wouldn't it be a good way to consider what it is that is really the matter, and make out the statement accordingly?" He goes on looking at Sally, scratches himself under the chin with his pen, and waits for an answer.

"Good, sensible, general practitioner! See how practical he is! Now, I should never have thought of that!"

"Well, what shall we put her down as? Chronic arthritis--spinal curvature--tuberculosis of the cervical vertebræ?"

"Those all sound very nice. But I don't think it matters which you choose. If she hasn't got it now, she'll develop it if I describe it. When I told her mother couldn't get rid of her neuritis, she immediately asked to know the symptoms, and forthwith claimed them as her own. 'Well, there now, and to think what I was just a-sayin' to Shoosmith, this very morning! Just in the crick of the thumb-joint, you can't 'ardly abear yourself!' And then she told how she said to Shoosmith frequent, where was the use of his getting impatient, and exclaimin' the worst expressions? Because his language went beyond a quart, and no reasonable excuse."

"Mr. Shoosmith doesn't seem a very promising sort? He's a tailor, isn't he?"

"No; he's a messenger. He runs on errands and does odd jobs. But he can't run--I've seen him!--he can only shamble. And his voice is hoarse and inaudible. And he has a drawback--two drawbacks, in fact. He is no sooner giv' coppers on a job than he drinks them."

"What's the other?"

"His susceptibility to intoxicants. His 'ed is that weak that 'most anythink upsets him. So you see."

"Poor chap! He's handicapped in the race of life. As for his wife, when I saw her she was suffering with acute rheumatism and bad feeling--and, I may add, defective reasoning power. However...." The doctor fills in blanks, adds a signature, says "There we are!" and Mrs. Shoosmith is disposed of as an applicant to the institution, and will no doubt reap some benefits we need not know the particulars of. But she remains as a subject for the student of human life--also, tea comes--also, which is interesting, Sally proceeds to make it.

Now, if the reserves this young lady had made about this visit, if her pretence that it was a necessity arising from a charitable organization, if the colour that was given to that pretence by her interview with the servant Craddock--if any of these things had been more or less than the grossest hypocrisy, would it, we ask you, have been accepted as a matter of course that she should pull off her gloves and sit down to make tea with a mature knowledge of how to get the little lynch-pin out of the spirit-lamp, and of how many spoonfuls? No; the fact is, Sally was a more frequent visitor to the image of Buddha than she chose to admit; and as for the doctor, he seized every legitimate opportunity of 'cello practice at Krakatoa Villa. But G.P.'s cannot call their time their own.

"The funny part of Mrs. Shoosmith," said Sally, when the pot was full up and the lid shut, "is that the moment she is brought into contact with warm soapy water and scrubbing-brushes, she seems to renew her youth. She brings large pins out of her mouth and secures her apron. And then she scrubs. Now you may blow the methylated out and make yourself useful, Dr. Conrad."

"Does she put back the pins when she's done scrubbing?" the doctor asks, when he has made himself useful.

"She puts them back against another time, so I have understood. I suppose they live in her mouth. That's yours with two lumps. That is your mother's--no, I won't pour it yet. She's asleep."

For the fact is that the Goody, anxious to invest herself with an appearance of forbearance towards the frivolities of youth, readiness to forego (from amiability) any share in the conversation, insight into the rapports of others (especially male and female rapports), and general superiority to human weakness, had endeavoured to express all these things by laying down her knitting, folding her hands on her circumference, and looking as if she knew and could speak if she chose. But if you do this, even the maintenance of an attentive hypodermic smile is not enough to keep you awake--and off you go! The Goody did, and the smile died slowly off into a snore. Never mind! She was in want of rest, so she said. It was curious, too, for she seldom got anything else.

It would have been unfeeling to wake her, so Dr. Vereker went and sat a good deal nearer Sally, not to make more noise than was necessary. This reacted, an outsider might have inferred, on the subject-matter of the conversation, making it more serious in tone. And as Sally put the little Turk's cap over the pot to keep it warm, and the doctor knew perfectly well that the blacker the tea was the better his mother liked it, this lasted until that lady woke up with a start a long time after, and said she must have been asleep. Then, as Cook was aware in the kitchen, some more noise came of it, and Sally carried off Mrs. Shoosmith's certificate.

"You know, Dr. Conrad, it makes you look like a real medical man," she said at the gate, referring to the detention of the doctor's pill-box, which awaited him, and he replied that it didn't matter. King, the driver, looked as if he thought it did, and appeared morose. Is it because coachmen always keep their appointments with society and society never keeps its appointments with coachmen that a settled melancholy seems to brood over them, and their souls seem cankered with misanthropy?

The doctor had rather a rough time that evening. For among the patients he was going to try to see and get back to dinner (thus ran current speech of those concerned) there was a young man from the West Indies, who had come into something considerable. But he was afflicted with a disorder he called the "jumps," and the doctor's diagnosis, if correct, showed that the vera causa of this aptly-named disease was alcohol of sp. gr. something, to which the patient was in the habit of adding very few atoms of water indeed. The doctor was doing all he could to change the regimen, but only succeeded on making his patient weak and promise amendment. On this particular evening the latter quite unexpectedly went for the doctor's throat, shouting, "I see your plans!" and King had to be summoned from his box to help restrain him. So Dr. Vereker was tired when he got home late to dinner, and would have felt miserable, only he could always shut his eyes and think of Sally's hands that had come over his shoulder to discriminate points in Mrs. Shoosmith's magna-charta. They had come so near him that he could smell the fresh sweet dressing of the new kid gloves--six and a half, we believe.

But although he liked his Goody mother to talk to him about the girl who had christened her so, he was tired enough this evening to wish that her talk had flowed in a less pebbly channel. For she chose this opportunity to enlarge upon the duties of young married women towards their husbands' parents, their mothers especially. Her conclusion was a little unexpected:

"I have said nothing throughout, my dear. I should not dream of doing so. But if I had I trust I should have made it clearly understood how I regarded Miss Lætitia Wilson's conduct."

"But there wasn't any. Nobody contracted a private marriage."

"My dear Conrad! Have I said that any one has done so? Have I used the expression 'private marriage'?"

"Why--no. I don't think you have. Not to-day, at least."

"When have I done so? Have I not, on the contrary, from the very beginning told you I should take the first opportunity of disbelieving so absurd and mischievous a story? And have I lost a moment? Was it not the first word I said to Sally Nightingale before you came in, and without a soul in the room to hear? I only ask for justice. But if my son misrepresents me, what can I expect from others?" At this point patient toleration only.

"But, mother dear, I don't want to misrepresent you. Only I'll be hanged if I see why Tishy Wilson is to be hauled over the coals?"

A suggestion of a proper spirit showed itself. "I am accustomed to your language, and will say nothing. But, my dear Conrad, for you are always my son, and will remain so, whatever your language may be, do you, my dear Conrad, do you really sanction the attitude of a young lady who refuses to marry--public and private don't come into the matter--because of a groundless antipathy? For it is admitted on all hands that Mrs. Julius Bradshaw is a person of rather superior class."

"She's Mrs. Bradshaw--not Mrs. Julius. But what makes you suppose Tishy Wilson objects to her?"

"My dear Conrad, you know as well as I do that is a mere prevarication. Why evade the point? But in my opinion you do wisely not to attempt any defence of Lætitia Wilson. It may be true that she has not laid herself open to misconstruction in this case, but the lack of good feeling is to all intents and purposes the same as if she had; and I must say, my dear Conrad, I am surprised that a professional man with your qualifications should undertake to justify her."

"But Miss Wilson hasn't done anything! What are you wigging away at her for, mother dear?"

"Have I not expressly said that she has done nothing whatever? Of course she has not, and, I hope, never will. But it is easy for you, Conrad, to take refuge in a fact which I have been scrupulously careful to admit from the very beginning. And 'wigging away!' What language!"

"Never mind the language, mother darling! Tell me what it's all about." Tired as he is, he gets up from the chair he has not been smoking in (because this is the drawing-room) to go round and kiss what is probably the fatty integument of a very selfish old woman, but which he believes to be that of an affectionate mother. "What's it all about?" he repeats.

"My dear Conrad! Is it not a little unfeeling to ask me what it is all about when you know?"

"I don't know, mother dear. I can do any amount of guessing, but I don't know."

"I think, my dear, if you will light my candle and ring for Craddock to shut up, that I had better go to bed." Which her son does, but perversely abstains from giving the old lady any assistance to saying what is in her mind to say.

But she did not intend to be baffled. For when he had piloted her to her state apartment, carrying her candle, under injunctions on no account to spill the grease, and a magazine of wraps and wools and unintelligible sundries, she contrived to invest an elucidation of her ideas with an appearance of benevolence by working in a readiness to sacrifice herself to her son's selfish longing for tobacco.

"Only just hear me to the end, my dear, and then you can get away to your pipe. What I did not say--for you interrupted me--did not relate so much to Miss Lætitia Wilson as to Sally Nightingale. She, I am sure, would never come between any man she married and his mother. I am making no reference to any one whatever, although, however old I am, I have eyes in my head and can see. But I can read character, and that is my interpretation of Sally Nightingale's."

"Sally Nightingale and I are not going to make it up, if that's what you mean, mother. She wouldn't have me, for one thing----"

"My dear, I am not going to argue the point. It is nearly eleven, and unless I get to bed I shan't sleep. Now go away to your pipe, and think of what I have said. And don't slam your door and wake me when you come up." She offered him a selection to kiss, shutting her eyes tight. And he gave place to Craddock, and went away to his unwholesome, smelly habit, as his mamma had more than once called it. His face was perplexed and uncomfortable; however, it got ease after a few puffs of pale returns and a welcome minute of memory of the bouquet of those sixes.

But his little happy oasis was a very small one. For a messenger came with a furious pull at the night-bell and a summons for the doctor. His delirium-tremens case had very nearly qualified its brain for a P.M.--at least, if there were any of it left--by getting at a pistol and taking a bad aim at it. The unhappy dipsomaniac was half-shot, and prompt medical attendance was necessary to prevent the something considerable being claimed by his heir-at-law.

Whether this came to pass or not does not concern us. This much is certain, that at the end of six months which this chapter represents, and which you have probably skipped, he was as much forgotten by the doctor as the pipe his patient's suicidal escapade had interrupted, or the semi-vexation with his mother he was using it as an anodyne for.

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Chapter XXVI

MORNING AT LADBROKE GROVE ROAD, AND FAMILY DISSENSION. FACCIOLATI, AND A LEGACY. THE LAST CONCERT THIS SEASON. THE GOODY WILL COME TO IGGULDEN'S. BUT FANCY PROSY IN LOVE!

Towards the end of the July that very quickly followed Rosalind noticed an intensification of what might be called the Ladbroke Grove Road Row Chronicle--a record transmitted by Sally to her real and adopted parent in the instalments in which she received it from Tishy.

This record on one occasion depicted a battle-royal at breakfast, "over the marmalade," Sally said. She added that the Dragon might just as well have let the Professor alone. "He was reading," she said, "'The Classification of Roots in Prehistoric Dialects,' because I saw the back; and Tacitus was on the butter. But the Dragon likes the grease to spoil the bindings, and she knows it."

A vision of priceless Groliers soaking passed through Rosalind's mind. "Wasn't that what this row was about, then?" she asked.

"I don't think so," said Sally, who had gone home to breakfast with Tishy after an early swim. "It's difficult to say what it was about. Really, the Professor had hardly said anything at all, and the Dragon said she thought he was forgetting the servants. Fossett wasn't even in the room. And then the Dragon said, 'Yes, shut it,' to Athene. Fancy saying 'Yes, shut it,' in a confidential semitone! Really, I can't see that it was so very wrong of Egerton, although he is a booby, to say there was no fun in having a row before breakfast. He didn't mean them to think he meant them to hear."

"But how did it get from the marmalade to Tishy's haberdasher?" asked Fenwick.

"Can't say, Jeremiah. It all came in a buzz, like a wopses nest. And then Egerton said it was rows, rows, rows all day long, and he should hook it off and get a situation. It is rows, rows, rows, so it's no use pretending it isn't. But it always comes round to the haberdasher grievance in the end. This time Tishy went to her father in the library, and confessed up about Kensington Gardens."

Both hearers said, "Oh, I see!" and then Sally transmitted the report of this interview. It had not been stormy, and may be looked at by the light of the Professor's last remark. "The upshot is, Tish, that you can marry Julius against your mother's consent right off, and never lose a penny of your aunt's legacy."

"Legacy is good, very excellent good," said Fenwick. "How much was it, Sarah?"

"Oh, I don't know. Lots--a good lot--a thousand pounds! The Dragon wanted to make out that it was conditional on her consent to Tishy's marriage. That was fibs. But what I don't see is that Gaffer Wilson ever said a word to Tishy about his own objections to her marrying Julius, if he has any!"

"Perhaps," Rosalind suggested, "she hasn't told you all he said." But to this Sally replied that Tishy had told her over and over and over again, only she said over so often that her adopted parent said for Heaven's sake stop, or he should write the word into his letters. However, the end of the last despatch was at hand, and he himself took up the conversation on signing it.

"Yours faithfully, Algernon Fenwick. That's the lot! I agree with the kitten."

"What about?"

"About if he has any. I believe he'd be glad if Miss Wilson took the bit in her teeth and bolted."

"You agree with Prosy?" As Sally says this, without a thought in a thoughtful face but what belongs to the subject, her mother is conscious that she herself is quite prepared to infer that Prosy already knows all about it. She has got into the habit of hearing that he knows about things.

"What does Vereker say?" Thus Fenwick.

"He'll be here in a minute, and you can ask him. That's him! I mean that's his ring."

"It's just like any other ring, chick." It is her mother who speaks. But Sally says: "Nonsense! as if I didn't know Prosy's ring!" And Dr. Vereker appears, quartet bound, for this was the weekly musical evening at Krakatoa Villa.

"Jeremiah wants to know whether you don't think Tishy's male parent would be jolly glad if she and Julius took the bit in their teeth and bolted?" "I shouldn't be the least surprised if they did," is the doctor's reply. But it does not strike Sally as rising to the height of her Draconic summary.

"You're not shining, Dr. Conrad," she says; "you're evading the point. What do you think Gaffer Bristles thinks, that's the point?" Dr. Conrad appears greatly exhilarated and refreshed by Sally, whose mother seems to share his feeling, but she enjoins caution, for all that.

"Do take care, kitten," she says. "They're on the stairs." But Sally considers "they" are miles off, and will take ages getting upstairs. "They've only just met at the door," is her explanatory comment, showing appreciation of one human weakness.

"Suppose we were to get it put in more official form!" Fenwick suggests. "Would Professor Sales Wilson be very much shocked if his daughter and Paganini made a runaway match of it?" The name Paganini has somehow leaked out of Cattley's counting-house, and become common property.

"I think, if you ask me," says Vereker, speaking to Fenwick, but never taking his eyes off Sally, on whom they feed, "that Professor Sales Wilson would be very much relieved."

"That's right!" says Sally, speaking as to a pupil who has profited. "Now you're being a good little General Practitioner." And then, the ages having elapsed with some alacrity, the door opens and the two subjects of discussion make their appearance.

The anomalous cousin did not come with them, having subsided. Mrs. Fenwick herself had taken the pianoforte parts lately. She had always been a fair pianist, and application had made her passable--a good make-shift, anyhow. So you may fill out the programme to your liking--it really doesn't matter what they played--and consider that this musical evening was one of their best that season. It was just as well it should be so, as it was their last till the autumn. Sally and her mother were going to the seaside all August and some of September, and Fenwick was coming with them for a week at first, and after that for short week-end spells. He had become a partner in the wine-business, and was not so much tied to the desk.

* * * * *

"Well, then, it's good-bye, I suppose?" The speaker is Rosalind herself, as the Stradivarius is being put to bed. But she hasn't the heart to let the verdict stand--at least, as far as the doctor is concerned. She softens it, adds a recommendation to mercy. "Unless you'll come down and pay us a visit. We'll put you up somewhere."

"I'm afraid it isn't possible," is the answer. But the doctor can't get his eyes really off Sally. Even as a small boy might strain at the leash to get back to a source of cake against the grasp of an iron nurse, even so Dr. Conrad rebels against the grip of professional engagements, which is the name of his cold, remorseless tyrant. But Sally is harnessing up a coach-and-six to drive through human obligations. Her manner of addressing the doctor suggests previous talk on the subject.

"You must get the locum, and come. You know you can, and it's all nonsense about can't." What would be effrontery in another character makes Sally speak through and across the company. A secret confidence between herself and the doctor, that you are welcome to the full knowledge of, and be hanged to you! is what the manner of the two implies.

"I spoke to Neckitt about it, and he can't manage it," says the doctor in the same manner. But the first and second violin are waiting to take leave.

"We'll say good-night, then--or good-bye, if it's for six weeks." Tishy is perfectly unblushing about the we. She might be conveying Mr. Tishy away. They go, and get away from Dr. Vereker, by-the-bye. An awkward third isn't wanted.

"There's plenty more Neckitts where he comes from," pursues Sally, as the "other two"--for that is how Fenwick thinks of them--get themselves and their instruments out of the house. "So don't be nonsensical, Dr. Conrad.... Stop a moment. I must speak to Tishy." And Sally gives chase, and overtakes the other two just by the fire-alarm, where Fenwick came to a standstill. Do you remember? It certainly has been a record effort to "get away first." You know this experience yourself at parties? Sally speaks to Tishy in the glorious summer night, and the three talk together earnestly under innumerable constellations, and one gas-lamp that elbows the starry heavens out of the way--a self-asserting, cheeky gas-lamp.

The doctor organizes tactics rapidly. He can hear that Sally's step goes up the street, and then the voices at a distance. If he can say good-bye and rush away just as Sally does the same, why then they will meet outside, don't you see?

Rosalind and her husband seem to have wireless telegrams passing. For when Sally vanishes there is a ring as of instruction received in the tone of Fenwick's voice as he addresses the doctor:

"Couldn't you manage to get your mother to come too, Vereker? She must be terribly in want of a change."

"So I tell her; but she's so difficult to move."

"Have a sedan-chair thing----"

"I don't mean that--not physically difficult. I mean she's got so anchored no one can persuade her to move. She hasn't been away for ages."

"Sally must go and persuade her." It is Rosalind who says this. "I'm sure Sally will manage it."

"She will if any one can," says the doctor. "Of course, I could soon get a locum if there was a chance of mother." And then the conversation supports itself on the possible impossibility of finding a lodging at St. Sennans-on-Sea, and consoles itself with its intense improbability till the doctor finds it necessary to depart with the promptitude of a fire-engine suddenly rung up.

He had calculated his time to a nicety, for he met Sally just as "the other two" got safe round the corner.

* * * * *

"Oh no," said Fenwick, replying to a query; "he doesn't mean to carry it all the way. He'll pick up a cab at the corner." The query was about the violoncello, and Fenwick was coming back to the room where his wife was closing the piano in anticipation of Ann. He had discreetly launched the instrument and its owner under the stars, and left the street door standing wide open--a shallow pretence that he believed Sally already in touch with it.

"They are a funny couple," Rosalind said. "Just fancy! They've known each other two years, and there they are! But I do like him. It's all his mother, you know ... what is?... why, goose--of course I mean he would speak at once if it wasn't for that obese mother of his."

"But she's so fond of Sally." In reply to this his wife kisses his cheeks, forehead, and chin consecutively, and he says it was right that time, only the other way round. This refers to a system founded on the crossing incident at Rheims.

"Of course she is, darling; or pretends she is. But he can neither divorce his mamma nor ask the kitten to marry her. You see?"

"I see--in fact, I've thought so myself. In confidence, you know. But is no compromise possible?" Rosalind shakes a slow, regretful, negative head, and her lips form a silent "No!"

"Not with her. The woman has her own share of selfishness, and her son's, too. He has none."

"But Sally."

"I see what you mean. Sally goes to the wall one way if she doesn't the other. So he works out selfish, poor dear fellow! in the end. But, Gerry darling, let me tell you this: you have no idea how impossible that young man thinks it that a girl should love him. If he thought it possible the kitten really cared about, or could care about him, he'd go clean off his head. Indeed, I am right."

"Perhaps you are. There she is."

Sally ran straight upstairs, leaving Ann to close the door. She at once discharged her mind of its burden, more suo.

"Prosy thinks so, too!"

"Thinks what?"

"Thinks they'll go and get married one fine morning, whether or no!"

But she seemed to be the only one much excited about this. Something was preoccupying the other two minds, and our Sally had not the remotest notion what.

* * * * *

Nevertheless, it came about that before the next Monday--the day of Sally's departure with her mother to St. Sennans-on-Sea--that young person paid a farewell visit to the obese mother of her medical adviser, and found her knitting.

"That, my dear, is what I am constantly saying to Conrad," was her reply to a suggestion of Sally's that she wanted change and rest. "Only this very morning, when he came into my room to see that I had fresh-made toast--because you know, my dear, how tiresome servants are about toast--they make it overnight, and warm it up in the morning. Cook is no exception, and I have complained till I'm tired. I should be sorry to change, she's been here so long, but I did hear the other day of such a nice respectable person...."

Sally interrupted, catching at a slight pause: "But when Dr. Conrad came into your room, what did he say?"

"My dear, I was going to tell you." She paused, with closed eyes and folded hands of aggressive patience, for all trace of human interruption to die down; then resumed: "I said to Conrad: 'I think you might have thought of that before.' And then he was sorry. I will do him that justice. My dear boy has his faults, as I know too well, but he is always ready to admit he is wrong."

"We can get you lodgings, you know," said Sally, from sheer intuition, for she had not a particle of information, so far, about what passed over the toast. The old lady seemed to think the conversation had been sufficiently well filled out, for she merely said, "Facing the sea," and went on knitting.

Sally and her mother knew St. Sennan well--had been at his watering-place twice before--so she was able, as it were, to forecast lodgings on the spot. "I dare say Mrs. Iggulden's is vacant," she said. "I wish you could have hers, she's such a nice old body. Her husband was a pilot, and she has one son a coastguard and another in the navy. And one daughter has no legs, but can do shell-work; and the other's married a tax-collector."

But Goody Vereker was not going to be beguiled into making herself agreeable. She took up the attitude that Sally was young, and easily deceived. She threw a wet blanket over her narrative of the Iggulden family, and ignored any murmurs that came from beneath it. "Sea-faring folk are all alike," so she said. "When I was your age, my dear, I simply worshipped them. My father and all his brothers were devoted to the sea, and my Uncle David published an account of his visit to the Brazils. But you will learn by experience. At any rate, I trust there are no vermin. That is always my terror in these lodging-houses, and ill-aired beds."

Was it fair, Sally thought to herself, to expose that dear old Mrs. Iggulden, who lived in a wooden dwelling covered with tar, between two houses built of black shiny bricks, but consisting chiefly of bay-windows with elderly visitors in them looking through telescopes at the shipping, and telling the credulous it was brigs or schooners--was it fair to expose Mrs. Iggulden to this gilt-spectacled lob-worm? Sally didn't know that Mrs. Iggulden could show a proper spirit, because in her own case the conditions had never been favourable. They had practised no incantations.

"Very well, then, Mrs. Vereker. As soon as ever mamma and I have shaken down, we'll see about Iggulden's; and if they can't take you somebody else will."

"I am in your hands," said the Goody, smiling faintly and submissively. She leaned back with her eyes closed, and was afraid she had done too much. She used to have periodical convictions to that effect.

Sally had an appointment with Lætitia Wilson at the swimming bath, so the Goody, in an access of altruism, perceived that she mustn't keep her. She herself would try to rest a little.

* * * * *

All people, as we suppose, lead two lives, more or less--their outer life, that of the world and action, and an inner life they have all to themselves. But how different is the proportion of the two lives in different subjects! And how much less painful the latter life is when we feel we could tell it all if we chose. Only we don't choose, because it's no concern of yours or any one else's.

This was Sally's frame of mind. She would not have felt the ghost of a reserve of an inmost thought (from her mother, for instance) in the face of questions asked, though she kept her own counsel about many points whose elucidation was not called for. It may easily be that Rosalind asked no questions about some things, because she had no wish that her daughter should formulate their answers too decisively. Her relation with Conrad Vereker, for example. Was it love, or what? If there was to be marrying, and families, and that sort of thing, and possible interference with swimming-matches and athletics, and so on, would she as soon choose this man for her accomplice as any other she knew? Suppose she was to hear to-morrow that Dr. Vereker was engaged to Sylvia Peplow, would she be glad or sorry?

Rosalind certainly did ask no such questions. If she had, the answers to the first two would have been, we surmise, very clear and decisive. What nonsense! Fancy Prosy being in love with anybody, or anybody being in love with Prosy! And as for marrying, the great beauty of it all was that there was to be no marrying. Did he understand that? Oh dear, yes! Prosy understood quite well. But we wonder, is the image our mind forms of Sally's answer to the third question correct or incorrect? It presents her to us as answering rather petulantly: "Why shouldn't Dr. Conrad marry Miss Peplow, if he likes, and she likes? I dare say she'd be ready enough, though!" and then pretending to look out of the window. And shortly afterwards: "I suppose Prosy has a right to his private affairs, as much as I have to mine." But with lips that tighten over her speech, without a smile. Note that this is all pure hypothesis.

But she had nothing to conceal that she knew of, had Sally. What a difference there was between her inner world and her mother's, who could not breathe a syllable of that world's history to any living soul!

Rosalind acknowledged to herself now how great the relief had been when, during the few hours that passed between her communication to her old friend on his deathbed and the last state of insensibility from which he never rallied, there had actually been on this earth one other than herself who knew all her story and its strange outcome. For those few hours she had not been alone, and the memory of it helped her to bear her present loneliness. She could hear again, when she woke in the stillness of the night, the voice of the old man, a whisper struggling through his half-choked respiration, that said again and again: "Oh, Rosey darling! can it be true? Thank God! thank God!" And the fact that what she had then feared had never come to pass--the fact that, contrary to her expectations, he had been strangely able to look the wonder in the face, and never flinch from it, seeing nothing in it but a priceless boon--this fact seemed to give her now the fortitude to bear without help the burden of her knowledge--the knowledge of who he was, this man that was beside her in the stillness, this man whose steady breathing she could hear, whose heart-beats she could count. And her heart dwelt on the old soldier's last words, strangely, almost incredibly, resonant, a hard-won victory in his dying fight for speech, "Evil has turned to good. God be praised!" It had almost seemed as if the parting soul, on the verge of the strangest chance man has to face, lost all measure of the strangeness of any earthly thing, and was sensible of nothing but the wonderment of the great cause of all.

But one thing that she knew (and could not explain) was that this secret knowledge, burdensome in itself, relieved the oppression of one still more burdensome, and helped her to drive it from her thoughts. We speak of the collision of the record in her mind of what her daughter was, and whence, with the fact that Sally was winding herself more and more, daughterwise, round the heart of the man whose bond with her mother she, small and unconscious, had had so large a share in rending asunder twenty years ago. It was to her, in its victory over crude physical fact, even while it oppressed her, a bewildering triumph of spirit over matter, of soul over sense, this firm consolidating growth of an affection such as Nature means, but often fails to reach, between child and parent. And as it grew and grew, her child's actual paternity shrank and dwindled, until it might easily have been held a matter for laughter, but for the black cloud of Devildom that hung about it, and stamped her as the infant of a Nativity in the Venusberg, whose growing after-life had gone far to shroud the horror of its lurid caverns with a veil of oblivion.

We say all these things quite seriously of our Sally, in spite of her incorrigible slanginess and vulgarity. We can now go on to St. Sennans-on-Sea, where we shall find her in full blow, but very sticky with the salt water she passes really too much of her time in, even for a merpussy.

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Chapter XXVII

ST. SENNANS-ON-SEA. MISS GWENDOLEN ARKWRIGHT. WOULD ANY OTHER CHILD HAVE BEEN SALLY? HOW MRS. IGGULDEN'S COUSIN SOLOMON SURRENDERED HIS COUCH

St. Sennans-on-Sea consists of two parts--the new and the old. The old part is a dear little old place, and the new part is beastly. So Sally says, and she must know, because this is her third visit.

The old part consists of Mrs. Iggulden's and the houses we have described on either side of her, and maybe two dozen more wooden or black-brick dwellings of the same sort; also of the beach and its interesting lines of breakwater that are so very jolly to jump off or to lie down and read novels under in the sea smell. Only not too near the drains, if you know it. If you don't know it, it doesn't matter so much, because the smell reminds you of the seaside, and seems right and fitting. You must take care how you jump, though, off these breakwaters, because where they are not washed inconceivably clean, and all their edges smoothed away beyond belief by the tides that come and go for ever, they are slippery with green sea-ribbons that cling close to them, and green sea-fringes that cling closer still, and brown sea-ramifications that are studded with pods that pop if you tread on them, but are not quite so slippery; only you may just as well be careful, even with them. And we should recommend you, before you jump, to be sure you are not hooked over a bolt, not merely because you may get caught, and fall over a secluded reading-public on the other side, but because the red rust comes off on you and soils your white petticoat.

If you don't mind jumping off these breakwaters--and it really is rather a lark--you may tramp along the sea front quite near up to where the fishing-luggers lie, each with a capstan all to itself, under the little extra old town the red-tanned fishing-nets live in, in houses that are like sailless windmill-tops whose plank walls have almost merged their outlines in innumerable coats of tar, laid by long generations back of the forefathers of the men in oil-cloth head-and-shoulder hats who repair their nets for ever in the Channel wind, unless you want a boat to-day, in which case they will scull you about, while you absolutely ache sympathetically with their efforts, of which they themselves remain serenely unaware, till you've been out long enough. Then they beach you cleverly on the top of a wave, and their family circle seizes you, boat and all, and runs you up the shingle before the following wave can catch you and splash you, which it wants to do.

There is an aroma of the Norman Conquest and of Domesday Book about the old town. Research will soon find out, if she looks sharp, that there is nothing Norman in the place except the old arch in the amorphous church-tower, and a castle at a distance on the flats. But the flavour of the past is stronger in the scattered memories of bygone sea-battles not a century ago, and the names of streets that do not antedate the Georges, than in these mere scraps that are always open to the reproach of mediævalism, and are separated from us by a great gulf. And it doesn't much matter to us whether the memories are of victory or defeat, or the names those of sweeps or heroes. All's one to us--we glow; perhaps rashly, for, you see, we really know very little about them. And he who has read no history to speak of, if he glows about the past on the strength of his imperfect data, may easily break his molasses-jug.

So, whether our blood is stirred by Nelson and Trafalgar, whereof we have read, or by the Duke of York and Walcheren, whereof we haven't--or mighty little--we feel in touch with both these heroes, for they are modern. Both have columns, anyhow; and we can dwell upon their triumph or defeat almost as if it wasn't history at all, but something that really happened, without running any risk of being accused of archaism or of deciphering musty tomes. And we can enjoy our expedition all the same to the ruined keep in the level pastures, where the long-horned black cattle stand and think and flap their tails still, just as they did in the days when the basement dungeons, now choked up, held real prisoners with real broken hearts.

But there is modern life, too, at St. Sennans--institutions that keep abreast of the century. Half the previous century ago, when we went there first, the Circulating Library consisted, so far as we can recollect it, of a net containing bright leather balls, a collection of wooden spades and wheelbarrows, a glass jar with powder-puffs, another with tooth-brushes, a rocking-horse--rashly stocked in the first heated impulse of an over-confident founder--a few other trifles, and, most important of all, a book-case that supplied the title-rôle to the performance. That book-case contained (we are confident) editiones principes of Mrs. Ratcliff, Sir Walter Scott, Bulwer Lytton, Currer Bell ... well, even Fanny Burney, if you come to that. There certainly was a copy of "Frankenstein," and fifty years ago our flesh was so compliant as to creep during its perusal. It wouldn't now.

But even fifty years ago there was never a volume that had not been defaced out of all knowledge by crooked marks of the most inquisitive interrogation, and straight marks of the most indignant astonishment, by the reading-public in the shadows of the breakwaters. It really read, that public did; and, what's more, it often tore out the interesting bits to take away. I remember great exasperation when a sudden veil was drawn over the future of two lovers just as the young gentleman had flung himself into the arms of the young lady. An unhallowed fiend had cut off the sequel with scissors and boned it!

That was done, or much of it, when the books were new, and the railway-station was miles away; when the church wasn't new, but old, which was better. It has been made new since, and has chairs in it, and memorial windows by Stick and Co. In those days its Sunday-folk were fisherfolk mostly, and a few local magnates or parvates--squirophants, they might be called--and a percentage of the visitors.

Was St. Sennan glad or sorry, we wonder, when the last two sorts subscribed and restored him? If we had been he, one of us would have had to have the temper of a saint to keep cool about it. Anyhow, it's done now, and can't be undone.

But the bathing-machines are not restored, at any rate. Those indescribables yonder, half rabbit-hutch, half dry-dock--a long row for ladies and a short one for gentlemen, three hundred yards apart--couldn't trust 'em any nearer, bless you!--these superannuated God-knows-whats, struggling against disintegration from automatic plunges down a rugged beach, and creaking journeys back you are asked to hold on through--it's no use going on drying!--these tributes to public decorum you can find no room in, and probably swear at--no sacrilegious restorer has laid his hand on these. They evidently contemplate going on for ever; for though their axes grow more and more oblique every day, their self-confidence remains unshaken. But then they think they are St. Sennans, and that the wooden houses are subordinate accidents, and the church a mere tributary that was a little premature--got there first, in its hurry to show respect for them. And no great wonder, seeing what a figure they cut, seen from a boat when you have a row! Or, rather, used to cut; for now the new town (which is beastly) has come on the cliff above, and looks for all the world as if it was St. Sennans, and speaks contemptuously of the real town as the Beach Houses.

The new town can only be described as a tidy nightmare; yet it is a successful creation of the brains that conceived it--a successful creation of ground-rents. As a development of land ripe for building, with more yards of frontage to the main-road than at first sight geometry seems able to accommodate, it has been taking advantage of unrivalled opportunities for a quarter of a century, backed by advances on mortgage. It is the envy of the neighbouring proprietors east and west along the coast, who have developed their own eligible sites past all remedy and our endurance, and now have to drain their purses to meet the obligations to the professional mortgagee, who is biding his hour in peace, waiting for the fruit to fall into his mouth and murderously sure of his prey. But at St. Sennans a mysterious silence reigns behind a local office that yields keys on application, and answers all inquiries, and asks ridiculous rents. And this silence, or its keeper, is said to have become enormously rich over the new town.

The shareholders in the St. Sennans Hotel, Limited, cannot have become rich. If they had, surely they would provide something better for a hungry paying supplicant than a scorched greasy chop, inflamed at the core, and glass bottles containing a little pellucid liquid that parts with its carbon dioxide before you can effect a compromise with the cork, which pushes in, but not so as to attain its ideal. So your Seltzer water doesn't pour fast enough to fizz outside the bottle, and your heart is sad. Of course, you can have wine, if you come to that, for look at the wine-list! Only the company's ideas of the value of wine are not limited, and if you decide not to be sordid, and order a three-shilling bottle of Médoc, you will find its contents to be very limited indeed. But why say more than that it is an enormous hotel at the seaside? You know all about them, and what it feels like in rainy weather, when the fat gentleman has got to-day's "Times," and means to read all through the advertisement-column before he gives up the leaders, and you have to spend your time turning over thick and shiny snap-shot journals with a surfeit of pictures in them; or the Real Lady, or the Ladylike Lady, or the Titled Lady, the portraits of whom--one or other of them--sweep in curves about their folio pages; and, while they fascinate you, make you feel that you would falter on the threshold of matrimony if only because they couldn't possibly take nourishment. Would not the discomfort of meals eaten with a companion who could swallow nothing justify a divorce a mensa?

A six-shilling volume might be written about the New Hotel, with an execration on every page. Don't let us have anything to do with it, but keep as much as possible at the Sea Houses under the cliff, which constitute the only St. Sennans necessary to this story. We shall be able to do so, because when Mrs. and Mr. Fenwick and their daughter went for a walk they always went up the cliff-pathway, which had steps cut in the chalk, past the boat upside down, where new-laid eggs could be bought from a coastguard's wife. And this path avoided the New Town altogether, and took them straight to the cliff-track that skirted growing wheat and blazing poppies till you began to climb the smooth hill-pasture the foolish wheat had encroached upon in the Protection days, when it was worth more than South Down mutton. And now every ear of it would have been repenting in sackcloth and ashes if it had been qualified by Nature to know how little it would fetch per bushel. But it wasn't. And when, the day after their arrival, Rosalind and her husband were on the beach talking of taking a walk up that way when Sally came out, it could have heard, if it would only have stood still, the sheep-bells on the slopes above reproaching it, and taunting it with its usurpation and its fruitless end. Perhaps it was because it felt ashamed that it stooped before the wind that carried the reproachful music, and drowned it in a silvery rustle. The barley succeeded the best. You listen to the next July barley-field you happen on, and hear what it can do when a breeze comes with no noise of its own.

Down below on the shingle the sun was hot, and the tide was high, and the water was clear and green close to the shore, and jelly-fish abounded. You could look down into the green from the last steep ridge at high-water mark, and if you looked sharp you might see one abound. Only you had to be on the alert to jump back if a heave of the green transparency surged across the little pebbles that could gobble it up before it was all over your feet--but didn't this time. Oh dear!--how hot it was! Sally had the best of it. For the allusion to Sally's "coming out" referred to her coming out of the water, and she was staying in a long time.

"That child's been twenty-four minutes already," said her mother, consulting her watch. "Just look at her out there on the horizon. What on earth are they doing?"

It was a little inexplicable. At that moment Sally and her friend--it was one Fräulein Braun, who had learned swimming in the baths on the Rhone at Geneva and in Paris--appeared to be nothing but two heads, one close behind the other, moving slowly on the water. Then the heads parted company, and apparently their owners lay on their backs in the water, and kicked up the British Channel.

"They're saving each other's lives," said Gerry. He got up from a nice intaglio he had made to lie in, and after shaking off a good bushel of small pebbles a new-made beach-acquaintance of four had heaped upon him, resorted to a double opera-glass to see them better. "The kitten wanted me to get out of my depth for her to tow me in. But I didn't fancy it. Besides, a sensitive British public would have been scandalised."

"You never learned to swim, then, Gerry----?" She just stopped herself in time. The words "after all" were on her lips. Without them her speech was mere chat; with them it would have been a match to a mine. She sometimes wished in these days that the mine might explode of itself, and give her peace.

"I suppose I never did," replied her husband, as a matter of course. "At least, I couldn't do it when I tried in the water just now. I should imagine I must have tried B.C., or I shouldn't have known how to try. It's not a thing one forgets, so they say." He paused a few seconds, and then added: "Anyhow, it's quite certain I couldn't do it." There was not a trace of consciousness on his part of anything in her mind beyond what her words implied. But she felt in peril of fire, so close to him, with a resurrection of an image in it--a vivid one--of the lawn-tennis garden of twenty years ago, and the speech of his friend, the real Fenwick, about his inability to swim.

This sense of peril did not diminish as he continued: "I've found out a lot of things I can do in the way of athletics, though; I seem to know how to wrestle, which is very funny. I wonder where I learned. And you saw how I could ride at Sir Mountmassingham's last month?" This referred to a country visit, which has not come into our story. "And that was very funny about the boxing. Such a peaceful old fogey as your husband! Wasn't it, Rosey darling?"

"Why won't you call the Bart. by his proper name, Gerry? Wasn't what?"

"Funny about the gloves. You know that square fellow? He was a well-known prizefighter that young Sales Wilson had picked up and brought down to teach the boys. You remember him? He went to church, and was very devout...."

"I remember."

"Well, it was in the billiard-room, after dinner. He said quite suddenly, 'This gentleman now can make use of his daddles. I can see it in him'--meaning me. 'What makes you think that, Mr. Macmorrough?' said I. 'We of the fancy, sir,' says he, 'see these things, without referrin' to no books, by the light of Nature.' And next day we had a set-to with the gloves, and his verdict was 'Only just short of professional.' Those boys were delighted. I wonder how and when I became such a dab at it?"

"I wonder!" Rosalind doesn't seem keen on the subject. "I wish those crazy girls would begin to think of coming in. If it's going to be like this every day I shall go home to London, Gerry."

"Perhaps when Vereker comes down on Monday he'll be able to influence. Medical authority!"

Here the beach-acquaintance, who had kept up a musical undercurrent of disjointed comment, perceived an opportunity for joining more actively in the conversation.

"My mummar says--my mummar says--my mummar says...."

"Yes--little pet--what does she say?" Thus Rosalind.

"Yes--Miss Gwendolen Arkwright--what does she say?" Thus Fenwick, on whom Miss Arkwright is seated.

"My mummar says se wissus us not to paggle Tundy when the tideses goed out. But my mummar says--my mummar says...."

"Yes, darling."

"My mummar says we must paggle Monday up to here." Miss Arkwright indicates the exact high-water mark sanctioned, candidly. "Wiv no sooze, and no stottins!" She then becomes diffuse. "And my bid sister Totey's doll came out in my bed, and Dane dusted her out wiv a duster. And I can do thums. And they make free...." At this point Miss Arkwright's copy runs short, and she seizes the opportunity for a sort of seated dance of satisfaction at her own eloquence--a kind of subjective horsemanship.

"I wish I never had to do any sums that made more than three," is the putative horse's comment. "But there are only two possible, alas! And the totals are stale, as you might say."

"I'm afraid my little girl's being troublesome." Thus the mamma, looking round a huge groin of breakwater a few yards off.

"Troublesome, madame?" exclaims Fenwick, using French unexpectedly. "She's the best company in Sussex." But Miss Arkwright's nurse Jane domineers into the peaceful circle with a clairvoyance that Miss Gwendolen is giving trouble, and bears her away rebellious.

"What a shame!" says Gerry sotto voce. "But I wonder why I said 'madame'!"

"I remember you said it once before." And she means to add "the first time you saw me," but dubs it, in thought, a needless lie, and substitutes, "that day when you were electrocuted." And then imagines she has flinched, and adds her original text boldly. She isn't sorry when her husband merely says, "That was queer too!" and remains looking through his telescope at the swimmers.

"They're coming at last--a couple of young monkeys!" is her comment. And, sure enough, after a very short spell of stylish sidestrokes Sally's voice and laugh are within hearing ahead of her companion's more guttural intonation. Her mother draws a long breath of relief as the merpussy vanishes under her awning, and is shouted and tapped at to hold tight, while capstan-power tugs and strains to bring her dressing-room up a sharp slope out of reach of the sea.

"Well, Jeremiah, and what have you got to say for yourself?" said the merpussy soon after, just out of her machine, with a huge mass of briny black hair spread out to dry. The tails had to be split and sorted and shaken out at intervals to give the air a chance. Sally was blue and sticky all over, and her finger-tips and nails all one colour. But her spirits were boisterous.

"What about?"

"What about, indeed? About not coming into the water to be pulled out. You promised you would, you know you did!"

"I did; but subject to a reasonable interpretation of the compact. I should have been out of my depth ever so long before you could reach me. Why didn't you come closer?"

"How could I, with a fat, pink party drying himself next door? You wouldn't have, if it had been you, and him Goody Vereker...."

"Sal-ly! Darling!" Her mother remonstrates.

"We-ell, there's nothing in that! As if we didn't all know what the Goody would look like...."

Rosalind is really afraid that the strict mamma of her husband's recent incubus will overhear, and sit at another breakwater next day. "Come along!" she says, dispersively and emphatically. "We shall have the shoulder of mutton spoiled."

"No, we shan't! Shall we, Jeremiah? We've talked it over, me and Jeremiah. Haven't we, Gaffer Fenwick?" She is splitting up the salt congestions of his mane as she sits by him on the shingle. He confirms her statement.

"We have. And we have decided that if we are two hours late it may be done enough. But that in any case the so-called gravy will be grey hot water."

"Get up and come along, and don't be a mad kitten! I shall go and leave you two behind. So now you know." And Rosalind goes away up the shingle.

"What makes mother look so serious sometimes, kitten? She did just now."

"She's jealous of you and me flirting like we do. Don't put your hat on; let the sun dry you up a bit. Does she really look serious though? Do you mean it?"

"Yes, I mean it. It comes and goes. But when I ask her she only laughs at me." A painful thought crosses Sally's mind. Is it possible that some of her reckless escapades have froissé'd her mother? She goes off into a moment's contemplation, then suddenly jumps up with, "Come along, Jeremiah," and follows her up the beach.

But the gravity on the face of the latter, by now half-way to the house, had nothing to do with any of Sally's shocking vulgarities and outrageous utterances. No, nor even with the green-eyed monster Jealousy her unscrupulous effrontery had not hesitated to impute. She allowed it to dominate her expression, as there was no one there to see, until the girl overtook her. Then she wrenched her face and her thoughts apart with a smile. "You are a mad little goose," said she.

But the thing that weighted her mind--oppressed or puzzled her, as might be--what was it?

Had she been obliged to answer the question off-hand she herself might have been at a loss to word it, though she knew quite well what it was. It was the old clash between the cause of Sally and its result. It was the thought that, but for a memory that every year seemed to call for a stronger forgetfulness, a more effective oblivion, this little warm star that had shone upon and thawed a frozen life, this salve for the wound it sprang from, would have remained unborn--a nonentity! Yes, she might have had another child--true! But would that child have been Sally?

She was so engrossed with her husband, and he with her, that she felt she could, as it were, have trusted him with his own identity. But, then, how about Sally? Though she might with time show him the need for concealment, how be sure that nothing should come out in the very confusion of the springing of the mine? She could trust him with his identity--yes! Not Sally with hers. Her great surpassing terror was--do you see?--not the effect on him of learning about Sally's strange provenance, but for Sally herself. The terrible knowledge she could not grasp the facts without would cast a shadow over her whole life.

So she thought and turned and looked down on the beach. There below her was this unsolved mystery sitting in the sun beside the man whose life it had rent asunder from its mother's twenty years ago. And as Rosalind looked at her she saw her capture and detain his hat. "To let his mane dry, I suppose," said Rosalind. "I hope he won't get a sunstroke." She watched them coming up the shingle, and decided that they were going on like a couple of school-children. They were, rather.

* * * * *

Perhaps the image in Sally's profane mind of "hers affectionately, Rebecca Vereker," before or after an elderly bathe, would not have appeared there if she had not received that morning a letter so signed, announcing that, subject to a variety of fulfilments--among which the Will of God had quite a conspicuous place--she and her son would make their appearance next Monday, as our text has already hinted. On which day the immature legs of Miss Gwendolen Arkwright were to be released from a seclusion by which some religious object, undefined, had been attained the day before.

But the conditions which had to be complied with by the lodgings it would be possible for this lady to occupy were such as have rarely been complied with, even in houses built specially to meet their requirements. Each window had to confront, not a particular quarter, but a particular ninetieth, of the compass. A full view of the sea had to be achieved from a sitting-room not exposed to its glare, an attribute destructive of human eyesight, and fraught with curious effects on the nerves. But the bedrooms had to look in directions foreign to human experience--directions from which no wind ever came at night. A house of which every story rotated on an independent vertical axis might have answered--nothing else would. Even then space would have called for modification, and astronomy and meteorology would have had to be patched up. Then with regard to the different levels of the floors, concession was implied to "a flat"; but, stairways granted, the risers were to be at zero, and the treads at boiling-point--a strained simile! As to cookery, the services of a chef with great powers of self-subordination seemed to be pointed at, a cordon-bleu ready to work in harness. Hygienic precautions, such as might have been insisted on by an Athanasian sanitary inspector on the premises of an Arian householder, were made a sine qua non. Freedom from vibration from vehicles was so firmly stipulated for that nothing short of a balloon from Shepherd's Bush could possibly have met the case. The only relaxation in favour of the possible was a diseased readiness to accept shakedowns, sandwiches standing, cuts off the cold mutton, and snacks generally on behalf of her son.

Mrs. Iggulden, who was empty both sets on Monday, didn't answer in any one particular to any of these requisitions. But a spirit of overgrown compromise crept in, making a sufficient number of reasons why no one of them could be complied with an equivalent of compliance itself. Only in respect of certain racks and tortures for the doctor was Mrs. Iggulden induced to lend herself to dangerous innovation. "I can't have poor Prosy put to sleep in a bed like this," said Sally, punching in the centre of one, and finding a hideous cross-bar. Either Mrs. Iggulden's nephew must saw it out, and tighten up the sacking from end to end, or she must get a Christian bed. Poor Prosy! Whereon Mrs. Iggulden explained that her nephew had by an act of self-sacrifice surrendered this bed as a luxury for lodgers in the season, having himself a strong congenital love of bisection. He hadn't slept nigh so sound two months past, and the crossbar would soothe his slumbers.

So it was finally settled that the Goody and her son should come to Iggulden's. The question of which set she should occupy being left open until she should have inspected the stairs. Thereon Mrs. Iggulden's nephew, whose name was Solomon, contrived a chair to carry the good lady up them; which she, though faint, declined to avail herself of when she arrived, perhaps seeing her way to greater embarrassment for her species by being supported slowly upstairs with a gasp at each step, and a moan at intervals. However, she was got up in the end, and thought she could take a little milk with a teaspoonful of brandy in it.

But as to giving any conception of the difficulties that arose at this point in determining the choice between above and below, that must be left to your imagination. A conclusion was arrived at in time--in a great deal of it--and the Goody was actually settled on the ground floor at Mrs. Iggulden's, and contriving to battle against collapse from exhaustion with an implication that she had no personal interest in reviving, but would do it for the sake of others.

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Chapter XXVIII

HOW SALLY PUT THE FINISHING TOUCH ON THE DOCTOR, WHO COULDN'T SLEEP. OF THE GRAND DUKE OF HESSE-JUNKERSTADT. AND OF AN INTERVIEW OVERHEARD

Fenwick was not a witness of this advent, as the Monday on which it happened had seen his return to town. He had had his preliminary week, and his desk was crying aloud for him. He departed, renewing a solemn promise to write every day as the train came into the little station at Egbert's Road, for St. Sennans and Growborough. It is only a single line, even now, to St. Sennans from here, but as soon as it was done it was good-bye to all peace and quiet for St. Sennan.

Rosalind and her daughter came back in the omnibus--not the one for the hotel, but the one usually spoken of as Padlock's--the one that lived at the Admiral Collingwood, the nearest approach to an inn in the old town. The word "omnibus" applied to it was not meant literally by Padlock, but only as a declaration of his indifference as to which four of the planet's teeming millions rode in it. This time there was no one else except a nice old farmer's wife, who spoke to each of the ladies as "my dear," and of each of them as "your sister." Rosalind was looking wonderfully young and handsome, certainly. They secured all the old lady's new-laid eggs, because there would be Mrs. Vereker in the evening. We like adhering to these ellipses of daily life.

Next morning Sally took Dr. Vereker for a walk round to show him the place. Try to fancy the condition of a young man of about thirty, who had scarcely taken his hand from the plough of general practice for four years--for his holidays had been mighty insignificant--suddenly inaugurating three weeks of paradise in the society man most covets--of delicious seclusion remote from patients, a happy valley where stethoscopes might be forgotten, and carbolic acid was unknown, where diagnosis ceased from troubling, and prognosis was at rest. He got so intoxicated with Sally that he quite forgot to care if the cases he had left to Mr. Neckitt (who had been secured as a substitute after all) survived or got terminated fatally. Bother them and their moist râles and cardiac symptoms, and effusions of blood on the brain!

Dr. Conrad was a young man of an honest and credulous nature, with a turn for music naturally, and an artificial bias towards medicine infused into him by his father, who had died while he was yet a boy. His honesty had shown itself in the loyalty with which he carried out his father's wishes, and his credulity in the readiness with which he accepted his mother's self-interested versions of his duty towards herself. She had given him to understand from his earliest years that she was an unselfish person, and entitled to be ministered unto, and that it was the business of every one else to see that she did not become the victim of her own self-sacrifice. At the date of this writing her son was passing through a stage of perplexity about his duty to her in its relation to his possible duty to a wife undefined. That he might not be embarrassed by too many puzzles at once, he waived the question of who this wife was to be, and ignored the fact that would have been palpable to any true reading of his mind, that if it had not been for Miss Sally Nightingale this perplexity might never have existed. He satisfied his conscience on the point by a pretext that Sally was a thing on a pinnacle out of his reach--not for the likes of him! He made believe that he was at a loss to find a foothold on his greasy pole, but was seeking one in complete ignorance of what would be found at the top of it.

This shallow piece of self-deception was ripe for disillusionment when Sally took its victim out for a walk round to show him the place. It had the feeblest hold on existence during the remainder of the day, throughout which our medical friend went on dram-drinking, knowing the dangers of his nectar-draughts, but as helpless against them as any other dram-drinker. It broke down completely and finally between moonrise and midnight--a period that began with Sally calling under Iggulden's window, "Come out, Dr. Conrad, and see the phosphorescence in the water; it's going to be quite bright presently," and ended with, "Good gracious, how late it is! Shan't we catch it?" an exclamation both contributed to. For it was certainly past eleven o'clock.

But in that little space it had broken down, that delusion; and the doctor knew perfectly well, before ten o'clock, certainly, that all the abstract possible wives of his perplexity meant Sally, and Sally only. And, further, that Sally was at every point of the compass--that she was in the phosphorescence of the sea, and the still golden colour of the rising moon. That space was full of her, and that each little wave-splash at their feet said "Sally," and then gave place to another that said "Sally" again. Poor Prosy!

But what did they say, the two of them? Little enough--mere merry chat. But on his part so rigid a self-constraint underlying it that we are not sure some of the little waves didn't say--not Sally at all, but--Miss Nightingale! And a persistent sense of a thought that was only waiting to be thought as soon as he should be alone--that was going to run somewhat thus: "How could it come about? That this girl, whom I idolize till my idolatry is almost pain; this girl who has been my universe this year past, though I would not confess it; this wonder whom I judge no man worthy of, myself least of all--that she should be cancelled, made naught of, hushed down, to be the mate of a poor G.P.; to visit his patients and leave cards, make up his little accounts, perhaps! Certainly to live with his mother...." But he knew under the skin that he would be even with that disloyal thought, and would stop it off at this point in time to believe he hadn't thought it.

Still, for all that this disturbing serpent would creep into his Eden, for all that he would have given worlds to dare a little more--that moment in the moonlight, with a glow-flecked water at his feet and hers, and the musical shingle below, and a sense of Christy Minstrels singing about Billy Pattison somewhere in the warm night-air above, and the flash of the great revolving light along the coast answering the French lights across the great, dark silent sea--that moment was the record moment of his life till then. It would never do to say so to Sally, that was all! But it was true for all that. For his life had been a dull one, and the only comfort he could get out of the story of it so far was that at least there was no black page in it he would like to cut out. Sally might read them all, and welcome. Their relation to her had become the point to consider. You see, at heart he was a slow-coach, a milksop, nothing of the man of the world about him. Well, her race had had a dose of the other sort in the last generation. Had the breed wearied of it? Was that Sally's unconscious reason for liking him?

"How very young Prosy has got all of a sudden!" was Sally's postscript to this interview, as she walked back to their own lodgings with her mother, who had been relieving guard with the selfless one while the doctor went out to see the phosphorescence.

"He's like a boy out for a holiday," her mother answered. "I had no idea Dr. Conrad could manage such a colour as that; I thought he was pallid and studious."

"Poor dear. We should be pallid and studious if it was cases all day long, and his ma at intervals."

"Do you know, kitten darling, I can't help thinking perhaps we do that poor woman an injustice...."

"--Can't you?" Thus Sally in a parenthetic voice--

"... and that she really isn't such a very great humbug after all!"

"Why not?"

"Because she would be such a very great humbug, don't you see, chick?"

"Why shouldn't she? Somebody must, or there'd be no such thing."

"Why should there be any such thing?"

"Because of the word. Somebody must, or there'd be no one to hook it to.... Have they stopped, I wonder, or are they going to begin again?" This referred to the Ethiopian banjos afar. "I do declare they're going to sing Pesky Jane, and it's nearly twelve o'clock!"

"Never mind them! How came you to know all the vulgar nigger-songs?... I was going to say. It's very difficult to believe it's quite all humbug when one hears her talk about her son and his welfare, and his prospects and...."

"I know what she talked about. When her dear son marries, she's going to devote herself to him and her dear daughter that will be. Wasn't that it?"

"Yes; but then she couldn't say more than that all she had would be theirs, and she would take her to her bosom, etcetera. Could she?"

"She'll have to pull a long way!" The vulgar child's mind has flown straight to the Goody's outline in profile. She is quite incorrigible. "But wasn't that what old Mr. Turveydrop said, or very nearly? Of course, one has to consider the parties and make allowance."

"Sallykin, what a madcap you are! You don't care what you say."

"We-e-ell! there's nothing in that.... But look here, mammy darling. Did that good woman in all she said to-night--all the time she was jawing--did she once lose sight of her meritorious attitude?"

"It may only be a façon de parler--a sort of habit."

"But it isn't. Jeremiah says so. We've talked it over, us two. He says he wouldn't like his daughter--meaning me--to marry poor Prosy, because of the Goody."

"Are you sure he meant you? Did you ask him?"

"No, because I wasn't going to twit Jeremiah with being only step. We kept it dark who was what. But, of course, he meant me. Like a submarine telegraph." Sally stopped a moment in gravity. Then she said: "Mother dear!"

"What, kitten?"

"What a pity it is Jeremiah is only step! Just think how nice if he'd been real. Now, if you'd only met twenty years sooner...."

A nettle to grasp presented itself--a bad one. Rosalind seized it bodily. "I shouldn't have had my kitten," she said.

"I see. I should have been somebody else. But that wouldn't have mattered to me."

"It would have--to me!" But this is the most she can do in the way of nettle-grasping. She is glad when St. Sennan, from his tower with the undoubted piece of Norman, begins to count twelve, and gives her an excuse for a recall to duty. "Do think how we're keeping poor Mrs. Lobjoit up, you unfeeling child!" is her appeal on behalf of their own fisherman's wife. Sally is just taking note of a finale of the Ethiop choir. "They've done Pesky Jane, and they're going away to bed," she says. "How the black must come off on the sheets!" And then they hurried home to sleep sound.

But there was little sleep for the doctor that night, perhaps because he had got so young all of a sudden. So it didn't matter much that his mother countermanded his proposal that bed should be gone to, on the ground that it was so late now that she wouldn't be able to sleep a wink. If she could have gone an hour ago it would have been different. Now it was too late. An aggressive submissiveness was utilized by the good lady to the end of his discomfort and that of Mrs. Iggulden, who--perhaps from some memories of the Norman Conquest hanging about the neighbourhood--would never go to bed as long as a light was burning in the house.

"It is very strange and most unusual, I know," she continued saying after she had scarified a place to scratch on. "Your great-uncle Everett Gayler did not scruple to call it phenomenal, and that when I was the merest child. After eleven no sleep!" She continued her knitting with tenacity to illustrate her wakefulness. "But I am glad, dear Conrad, that you forgot about me. You were in pleasanter society than your old mother's. No one shall have any excuse for saying I am a burden on my son. No, my dear boy, my wish is that you shall feel free." She laid aside the knitting needles, and folding her hands across the outline Sally was to be dragged up, or along, dropped her eyelids over a meek glare, and sat with a fixed, submissive undersmile slightly turned towards her son.

"But I thought, mother, as Mrs. Fenwick was here...." Slow, slight, acquiescent nods stopped him; they were enough to derail any speech except the multiplication-table or the House-that-Jack-built! But she waited with exemplary patience for certainty that the train had stopped. Then spoke as one that gives a commission to speech, and observes its execution at a distance. Her expression remained immutable. "She is a well-meaning person," said she.

"I didn't know how late it was." Poor Dr. Conrad gives up self-defence--climbs down. "The time ran away." It had done so, there was no doubt about that.

"And you forgot your mother. But Mrs. Fenwick is a well-meaning person. We will say no more about it."

Whereupon her son, feeling that silence is golden, said nothing. But he went and kissed her for all that. She said inscrutably: "You might have kissed me." But whether she was or wasn't referring to the fact that she had succeeded in negotiating his kiss on the rim of her spectacles, Conrad couldn't tell. Probably she meant he might have kissed her before.

There was no doubt, however, about her intention of knitting till past one in the morning. She did it enlarging on the medical status of her illustrious uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, who had just crept into the conversation. Her son wasn't so sorry for this as Mrs. Iggulden, who dozed and waked with starts, on principle, outside in the passage unseen. He could stand at the wide-open window, and hear the little waves plash "Sally" in the moonlight, and the counter-music of the down-drawn shingle echo "Sally" back. Sometimes the pebbles and the water gave place for a moment to the tread of two persistent walkers up and down--men who smoked cigars, and became a little audible and died again at every time of passing.

One time the doctor caught a rise of voice--though they did not pass so very near--that said: "My idea is to stay here till...."

Then at the next turn the same voice grew from inaudibility to ... "So I arranged with the parson here for to-morrow, and we shall get...." and died again. At this moment Dr. Everett Gayler was at the climax of his fame, having just performed tracheotomy on the Grand Duke of Hesse-Junkerstadt, and been created Knight-Commander of some Order whose name Mrs. Vereker wasn't sure about.

Next time the men returned, the same voice that seemed to do all the talking said: "... Expensive, of course, but she hates the idea of a registry-office." They paused, and the listener heard that the other voice had said something to which the first replied: "No, not Grundy. But she had some friends cooked at one, and they said it was stuffy, and they would sooner have endured twenty short homilies...."

A wax vesta scratched, blazed, lighted another cigar, and the second voice said, "Oh--ah!" and both grew inaudible again.

Dr. Everett Gayler had just pronounced the Grand Duchess's disease--they were an afflicted family--a disease his narrator couldn't pronounce at all. Most of her bones, in a state of necrosis, had been skilfully removed by the time the smokers had passed back. But so much more was Dr. Conrad listening to what the waves said to the shingle and the shingle answered back, than to either the Grand Duchess or the registry-office, that it never crossed his mind whose the voice was who lit the vesta. He heard it say good-night--its owner would get back to the hotel--and the other make due response. And then nothing was left but the coastguard.

But the Grand Duke's family were not quite done with. It had to be recorded how many of his distinguished ancestors had suffered from Plica polonica. Still, the end did come at last, and the worthy lady thought perhaps if she could lie down now she might drop off. So Mrs. Iggulden got her release and slept.

Dr. Conrad didn't, not a wink. The whole place was full of Sally. The flashlight at intervals, in couplets, seemed to say "Sally" twice when it came, and then to leave a blank for him to think about her in. The great slow steamer far out to sea showed a green eye of jealousy or a red one of anger because it could not come ashore where Sally was, but had perforce to go on wherever it was navigated. The millions of black sea-elves--did you ever discriminate them?--that the slight observer fancies are the interstices of the moonlight on the water, were all busy about Sally, though it was hard to follow their movements. And every time St. Sennan said what o'clock it was, he added, "One hour nearer to Sally to-morrow!"

Poor Prosy!

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Chapter XXIX

OF A MARRIAGE BY SPECIAL LICENCE. ROSALIND'S COMPARISONS. OF THE THREE BRIDESMAIDS, AND HOW THE BRIDE WAS A GOOD SAILOR

But it never occurred to Dr. Vereker that the voice of the smoking gentleman, whose "she" knew a couple that had been cooked at a registry office, was a voice quite familiar to him. The only effect it had on his Sally-dazed mind was to make him wonder four hours after what it was that kept putting Julius Bradshaw into his head. If a brain-molecule could have been found not preoccupied with Sally he might have been able to give her next day a suggestive hint about a possibility ahead. But never a word said he to Sally; and when, on her return from bathing the following morning, Mrs. Lobjoit, the fisherman's wife, surprised her with the news that "the young lady" had come and had left her luggage, but would be back in half-an-hour, she was first taken aback, and thought it was a mistake next. But no--no chance of that! The young lady had asked for Mrs. Algernon Fenwick, or, in default, for Miss Sally, quite distinctly. She hadn't said any name, but there was a gentleman with her. Mrs. Lobjoit seemed to imply that had there been no gentleman she might have been nameless. Padlock's omnibus they came in.

So Sally went on being taken aback where she had left off, and was still pondering over the phenomenon when her mother followed her through the little yard paved with round flints bedded in mortar--all except the flower-beds, which were in this case marigold-beds and fuschia-beds and tamarisk-shakedowns--and the street door which always stood open, and it was very little use ringing, the bell being broken. But you could pass through, and there would always be old Mr. Lobjoit in the kitchen, even if Mrs. Lobjoit was not there herself.

"Why not look on the boxes, you stupid kitten? There's a name on them, or ought to be." Thus Rosalind, after facts told.

"What a thing it is to have a practical maternal parent!" Thus Sally. And Mrs. Lobjoit put on record with an amiable smile that that is what she kept saying to Miss Nightingale, "Why not look?" Whereas the fact is Mrs. Lobjoit never said anything of the sort.

"Here's a go!" says Sally, who gets at the label-side of the trunk first. "If it isn't Tishy!" And the mother and daughter look at each other's faces, each watching the other's theory forming of what this sudden apparition means.

"What do you think, mother?"

"What do you think, kitten?" But the truth is, both wanted time to know what to think. And they hadn't got much forwarder with the solution of the problem when a light was thrown upon it by the sudden apparition of Lætitia herself, accompanied by the young gentleman whom Sally did not scruple to speak of--but not in his presence--as her counter-jumper. She did this, she said, to "pay Tishy out" for what she had said about him before she made his acquaintance.

The couple were in a mixed state of exaltation and confusion--Tishy half laughing, a third crying, and a sixth keeping up her dignity. Both were saying might they come in, and doing it without waiting for an answer.

Rosalind's remark was one of those nonsequences often met with in real life: "There's enough lunch--or we can send out." Sally's was: "But are you the Julius Bradshaws, or are you not? That's what I want to know." Sally won't be trifled with, not she!

"Well, Sally dear, no,--we're not--not just yet." Tishy hesitates. Julius shows firmness.

"But we want to be at two o'clock this afternoon, if you'll come...."

"Both of us?"

"Why--of course, both of you."

"Then Mrs. Lobjoit will have to be in time with lunch." It does not really matter who were the speakers, nor what the share of each was in the following aggregate:

"How did you manage to get it arranged?" "Why now? Have you quarrelled with your mother?" "How long can you be away? I hate a stingy honeymoon!" "You've got no things." "Do you think they'll know at home where you are?" "Where are you going afterwards?" "What do you think your father will say?" "What I want to know is, what put it into your head now, more than any other time?"

Responses to the whole of which, much at random, are incorporated in what follows: "Julius isn't wanted for three weeks." "I'm sure the Professor's on our side, really." "I left a letter to tell them, anyhow." "Calais. We shan't be sick, in weather like this. We'll cross by the night boat." "I've got a new dress to be married in, and a new umbrella--oh yes, and other things." "I'll tell you the whole story, Sally dear, as soon as I've had time to turn round." "No--not quarrelled--at least, no more than usual." "Special licence, of course."

What time Vereker, who had been to the post-office, which sold all sorts of things, to inquire if they had a packet of chemical oatmeal (the only thing his mother could digest this morning), and was coming back baffled, called in on his way to Mrs. Iggulden's. Not to see Sally, but only to take counsel with the family about chemical oatmeal. By a curious coincident, the moment he heard of Miss Sales Wilson's arrival, he used Sally's expression, and said that there was "a go!" Perhaps there was, and that accounted for it.

"Here's Dr. Conrad--he'll have to come too." Thus Sally explicitly. To which he replied, "All right. Where?" Sally replied with gravity: "To see these two married by special licence." And Julius added: "You must come, doctor, to be my bottle-holder."

A small undercurrent of thought in the doctor's mind, in which he can still accommodate passing events and the world's trivialities, begins to receive impressions of the facts of the case. The great river called Sally flows steadily on, on its own account, and makes and meddles not. It despises other folk's petty affairs. Dr. Conrad masters the position, and goes on to draw inferences.

"Then that must have been you last night, Bradshaw?"

"I dare say it was. When?"

"Walking up and down with another fellow in front here. Smoking cigars, both of you."

"Why didn't you sing out?"

"Well, now--why didn't I?" He seems a little unable to account for himself, and no wonder. "I think I recollected it was like you after you had gone."

"Don't be a brain-case, Dr. Conrad. What would your patients say if they heard you go on like that?" Sally said this, of course. Her mother thought to herself that perhaps the patients would send for a married doctor.

But her mind was taking no strong hold on the current of events, considering what a very vital human interest was afloat on them. It was wandering back to another wedding-day--her own first wedding-day of twenty years ago. As she looked at this bridegroom--all his upspring of hope making light of such fears as needs must be in like case all the world over--he brought back to her vividly, for all he was so unlike him, the face of the much younger man who had met her that day at Umballa, whose utter freedom from suspicion as he welcomed her almost made her able to forget the weeks gone by--the more so that they were like a dream in Hell, and their sequel like an awakening in Paradise. Well, at any rate, she had recaptured this man from Chaos, and he was hers again. And she had Sally. But at the word the whole world reeled and her feet were on quicksands. What and whence was Sally?

At least this was true--there was no taint of her father there! Sally wasn't an angel--not a bit of it--no such embarrassment to a merely human family. But her mother could see her truth, honour, purity--call it what you will--in every feature, every movement. As she stood there, giving injunctions to Vereker to look alive or he'd be late, her huge coil of sea-soaked black hair making her white neck look whiter, and her white hands reestablishing hair-pins in the depths of it, she seemed the very incarnation of non-inheritance. Not a trace of the sire her mother shuddered to think of in the music of her voice, in the laughter all who knew her felt in the mirth of her eyebrows and the sparkle of her pearly teeth. All her identity was her own. If only it could have been known then that she was going to be Sally!... But how fruitless all speculation was!

"Perhaps mother knows. Chemical oatmeal, mother, for invalids and persons of delicate digestion? They haven't got it at Pemberton's." The eyes and the teeth flash round on her mother, and in a twinkling the unhallowed shadow of the past is gone. It was only a moment in all, though it takes more to record it. Rosalind came back to the life of the present, but she knew nothing about chemical oatmeal. Never mind. The doctor would find out. And he would be sure to be in time.

He was in time--plenty of time, said public opinion. And the couple were duly married, and went away in Padlock's omnibus to catch the train for Dover in time for the boat. And Dr. Conrad's eyes were on the eldest bridesmaid. For, after all, two others were obtained--jury-bridesmaids they might be called--in the persons of Miss Gwendolen Arkwright and an even smaller sister, who were somehow commandeered by Sally's enterprise, and bribed with promises of refreshment. But the smaller sister was an erring sister, for having been told she was on no account to speak during the service, she was suddenly struck with the unfairness of the whole thing, and, pointing at St. Sennans' arch-priest, said very audibly that he was "peatin'," so why wasn't she to "peat"? However, it was a very good wedding, and there was no doubt the principals had really become the Julius Bradshaws. They started from Dover on a sea that looked like a mill-pond; but Tishy's husband afterwards reported that the bride sat with her eyes shut the last half of the trajet, and said, "Don't speak to me, and I shall be all right."

* * * * *

That summer night Rosalind and her daughter were looking out over the reputed mill-pond at the silver dazzle with the elves in it. The moon had come to the scratch later than last night, from a feeling of what was due to the almanac, which may (or must) account for an otherwise enigmatical remark of Sally's, who, when her mother wondered what time it was, replied: "I don't know--it's later than it was yesterday." But did that matter, when it was the sort of night you stopped out all night on, according to Sally. They came to an anchor on a seat facing the sea, and adjourned human obligation sine die.

"I wonder if they've done wisely." Rosalind represents married thoughtfulness.

Sally shelves misgivings of this sort by reflections on the common lot of humanity, and considers that it will be the same for them as every one else.

"They'll be all right," she says, with cheerful optimism. "I wonder what's become of Prosy."

"He's up there with his mother. I saw him at the window. But I didn't mean that: they'll be happy enough together, I've no doubt. I mean, has Lætitia done wisely to quarrel with her family?"

"She hasn't; it's only the she-dragon. Tishy told me all about it going to church."

* * * * *

And, oh dear, how poor Prosy, who was up there with his mother, did long to come out to the voices he could hear plain enough, even as far off as that! But then he had been so long away to-day, and he knew his excellent parent always liked to finish the tale of her own wedding-day when she began it--as she often did. So he listened again to the story of the wedding, which was celebrated in the severest thunderstorm experienced in these islands since the days of Queen Elizabeth, by a heroic clergyman who was suffering from pleuro-pneumonia, which made his voice inaudible till a miraculous chance produced one of Squilby's cough lozenges (which are not to be had now for love or money), and cured him on the spot. And how the bridesmaids all had mumps, more or less. And much concerning the amazingly dignified appearance of her own father and mother, which was proverbial, and therefore no matter of surprise to any one, the proverb being no doubt well known to Europe.

But there, it didn't matter! Sally would be there to-morrow.

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Chapter XXX

HOW A FORTNIGHT PASSED, AND THE HONEYMOONERS RETURNED. OF A CHAT ON THE BEACH, AND MISS ARKWRIGHT'S SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE. ALMOST THE LAST, LAST, LAST--MAN'S HEAD!

Sally to-morrow--and to-morrow--and to-morrow. Sally for fourteen morrows. And the moon that had lighted the devoted young man to his fate--whatever it was to be--had waned and left the sky clear for a new one, on no account to be seen through glass.

They were morrows of inextinguishable, indescribable delight for their victims or victim--for how shall we classify Sally? Who shall tread the inner temple of a girl's mind? How shall it be known that she herself has the key to the Holy of Holies?--that she is not dwelling in the outer court, unconscious of her function of priestess, its privileges and responsibilities? Or, in plainer language, metaphors having been blowed in obedience to a probable wish of the reader's, how do we know Sally was not falling in love with the doctor? How do we know she was not in love with him already? How did she know?

All we know is that the morrows went on, each one sweeter than the last, and all the little incidents went on that were such nothings at the time, but were so sure to be borne in mind for ever! You know all about it, you who read. Like enough you can remember now, old as you are, how you and she (or he, according as your sex is) got lost in the wood, and never found where the picnic had come to an anchor till all the wings of chicken were gone and only legs left; or how there was a bull somewhere; or how next day the cat got caught on the shoulder of one of you and had to be detached, hooking horribly, by the other; or how you felt hurt (not jealous, but hurt) because she (or he) was decently civil to some new he (or she), and how relieved you were when you heard it was Mr. or Mrs. Some-name-you've-forgotten. Why, if you were to ask now, of that grey man or woman whose life was linked with yours, maybe now sixty years agone, did he or she have a drumstick, or go on to ham-sandwiches?--or, was it really a bull, after all?--or, had that cat's claws passed out of memory?--or, what was the name of that lady (or gentleman) at the So-and-so's?--if you asked any of these things, she or he might want a repeat into a deaf ear but would answer clear enough in the end, and recall the drumsticks and the equivocal bull, the cat's claws, and the unequivocal married person. And then you would turn over all the little things of old, and wrangle a bit over details here and there; and all the while you would be the very selfsame two that were young and were lost in the wood and trampled down the fern and saw the squirrels overhead all those long years ago.

Many a little thing of a like nature--perhaps some identical--made up hours that became days in that fortnight we have to skip, and then the end was drawing near; and Dr. Conrad would have to go back and write prescriptions with nothing that could possibly do any harm in them, and abstain with difficulty from telling young ladies with cultivated waists they were liars when they said you could get a loaf of bread between all round, and it was sheer nonsense. And other little enjoyments of a G.P.'s life. Yes, the end was very near. But Sally's resolute optimism thrust regrets for the coming chill aside, and decided to be jolly while we could, and acted up to its decision.

Besides, an exciting variation gave an interest to the last week of the doctor's stay at St. Sennans. The wandering honeymooners, in gratitude to that saint, proposed to pay him a visit on their way back to London. Perhaps they would stop a week. So the smallest possible accommodation worthy of the name was found for them over a brandyball and bull's-eye shop in a house that had no back rooms, being laid like a vertical plaster against the cliff behind, and having an exit on a flat roof where you might bask in the sun and see the bright red poppies growing in the chalk, and contribute your share towards a settlement of the vexed question of which are brigs. There wasn't another room to be had in the real St. Sennans, and it came to that or the hotel (which was beastly), and you might just as well be in London. Thus Sally, and settled the question.

And this is how it comes to pass that at the beginning of this chapter--which we have only just got to, after all this circumlocution!--Sally and one of the Julius Bradshaws were sitting talking on the beach in the shadow of a breakwater, while the other Julius Bradshaw (the original one) was being taken for a walk to the extremely white lighthouse three miles off, or nearly five if you went by the road, by Dr. Conrad, who by this time knew all the walks in the neighbourhood exactly as well as Sally did, neither more nor less. And both knew them very well.

The tide had come up quite as far as it had contemplated, and seemed to have made up its mind this time not to go back in too great a hurry. It was so nice there on the beach, with Tishy and Sally and Miss Gwendolen Arkwright, the late bridesmaid, who was having an independent chat all to herself about the many glories of the pier-end, and the sights to be seen there by visitors for a penny. And it--we are speaking of the tide--had got a delightful tangle of floating weed (Fucus Vesiculosus) and well-washed scraps of wood from long-forgotten wrecks--who knows?--and was turning it gently to and fro, and over and over, with intermittent musical caresses, against the shingle-bank, whose counter-music spoke to the sea of the ages it had toiled in vain to grind it down to sand. And the tide said, wait, we shall see. The day will come, it said, when not a pebble of you all but shall be scattered drifting sand, unless you have the luck to be carted up at a shilling a load by permission of the authorities, to be made into a concrete of a proper consistency according to the local by-laws. But the pebbles said, please, no; we will bide our time down here, and you shall have us for your own--play with us in the sun at the feet of these two ladies, or make the whirling shoals of us, beaten to madness, thunder back your voice when it shouts in the storm to the seaman's wife, who stops her ears in the dark night alone that she may not hear you heralding her husband's death. And the tide said very good; but a day would come when the pebbles would be sand, for all that. And even the authority would be gone, and the local by-laws. But it would sound upon some shore for ever. So it kept on saying. Probably it was mistaken.

This has nothing to do with our story except that it is approximately the substance of a statement made by Sally to Miss Arkwright, who was interested, and had been promised it all over again to-morrow. For the present she could talk about the pier and take her audience for granted.

"But was it that Kensington Gardens business that did the job?" asked Sally, in the shadow of the breakwater, getting the black hair dry after three-quarters of an hour in the sea; because caps, you know, are all nonsense as far as keeping water out goes. So Sally had to sit ever so long with it out to dry. And the very tiny pebbles you can almost see into stick to your hands, as you know, and come off in your hair when you run them through it, and have to be combed out. At least, Sally's had. But she kept on running the pebbles through her still blue fingers for all that as she half lay, half sat by Tishy on the beach.

"'Did the job!'" repeats the bride on her honeymoon with some indignation. "Sally dear, when will you learn to be more refined in your ways of speech? I'm not a précieuse, but--'did the job!' Really, Sally!..."

"Observe the effect of three weeks in France. The Julius Bradshaws can parlay like anything! No, Tishy darling, don't be a stuck-upper, but tell me again about Kensington Gardens."

"I told you. It was just like that. Julius and I were walking up the avenue--you know...."

"The one that goes up and across, and comes straight like this?" Tishy, helped by a demonstration of blue finger-tips, recognises this, strange to say.

"No, not that one. It doesn't matter. We didn't see mamma coming till she was ever so close, because of the Speke Monument in the way. And what could possess her to come home that way from Hertford Street, Mayfair, I cannot imagine!"

"Never mind, Tishy dear! It's no use crying over spilled milk. What did she say?"

"Nothing, dear. She turned purple, and bowed civilly. To Julius, of course. But it included me, whether or no."

"But was that what did the job?... We-ell, I do not see anything to object to in that expression. Was it?"

"If you mean, dear, was it that that made us, me and Julius, feel that matters would get no better by waiting, I think perhaps it was.... Well, when it comes to meeting one's mother in Kensington Gardens, near the Speke Monument, and being bowed civilly to, it seems to me it's high time.... Now, isn't it, Sally?"

Sally evaded giving testimony by raising other questions: "What did your father say?" "Did the Dragon tell him about the meeting in the park?" "What do you think he'll say now?"

"Now? Well, you know, I've got his letter. He's all right--and rather dear, I think. What do you think, Sally?"

"I think very."

"Perhaps I should say very. But with papa you never know. He really does love us all, after a fashion, except Egerton, only I'm never sure he doesn't do it to contradict mamma."

"Why don't they chuck each other and have done with it?" The vulgar child lets fly straight into the bull's-eye; then adds thoughtfully: "I should, only, then, I'm not a married couple."

Tishy elided the absurd figure of speech and ignored it. The chance of patronising was not to be lost.

"You are not married, dear. When you are, you may feel things differently. But, of course, papa and mamma are very odd. I used to hear them through my door between the rooms at L.B.G. Road. It was wrangle, wrangle, wrangle; fight, fight, fight; all through the night--till two o'clock sometimes. Oh dear!"

"You're sure they always were quarrelling?"

"Oh dear, yes. I used to catch all the regular words--settlement and principal and prevaricate. All that sort of thing, you know. But there they are, and there they'll be ten years hence, that's my belief, living together, sleeping together, and dining at opposite ends of the same table, and never communicating in the daytime except through me or Theeny, but quarrelling like cat and dog."

"What shall you do when you go back? Go straight there?"

"I think so. Julius thinks so. After all, papa's the master of the house--legally, at any rate."

"Shall you write and say you're coming?"

"Oh, no! Just go and take our chance. We shan't be any nearer if we give mamma an opportunity of miffing away somewhere when we come. What is that little maid talking about there?" The ex-bridesmaid is three or four yards away, and is discoursing eloquently, a word in the above conversation having reminded her of a tragic event she has mentioned before in this story. "I seeps with my bid sister Totey's dolly," is what she appears to be saying.

"Never mind the little poppet, Tishy, till you've told me more about it." Sally is full of curiosity. "Did that do the job or did it not? That's what I want to know."

"I suppose it did, dear, indirectly. That was on Saturday afternoon. Next morning we breakfasted under a thundercloud with Egerton grinning inside his skin, and looking like 'Won't you catch it, that's all!' at me out of the corner of his eye. That was bad enough, without one's married sister up from the country taking one aside to say that she wasn't going to interfere, and calling one to witness that she had said nothing so far. All she said was, 'Me and mamma settle it between us.' 'Settle what?' said I; and she didn't answer, and went away to the first celebration."

"She's not bad, your married sister," Sally decided thoughtfully.

"Oh no, Clarissa's not bad. Only she wants to run with the hare and explain to the hounds when they come up.... What happened next? Why, as I went upstairs past papa's room, out comes mamma scarlet with anger, and restraining herself in the most offensive way for me to go past. I took no notice, and when she was gone I went down and walked straight into the library. I said, 'What is it, papa?' I saw he was chuckling internally, as if he'd made a hit."

"Wasn't he angry? What did he say?"

"Oh no, he wasn't angry. Let's see ... oh!... what he said was, 'That depends so entirely on what it is, my dear. But, broadly speaking, I should say it was your mother.' 'What has she been saying to you?' I asked. And he answered, 'I can only give her exact words without pledging myself to their meaning. She stated that she "supposed I was going to tell my daughter I approved of her walking about Kensington Gardens with that man's arm around her waist." I replied--reasonably, as it seems to me--that I supposed that man was there himself. Otherwise, it certainly did seem to me a most objectionable arrangement, and I hope you'll promise your mother not to do it again.'"

"What on earth did he mean?"

"You don't understand papa. He quibbles to irritate mamma. He meant like a waistband--separate--don't you see?"

"I see. But it wouldn't bend right." Sally's truthful nature postpones laughing at the Professor's absurdity; looks at the case on its merits. When she has done justice to this point, she laughs and adds: "What did you say, Tishy?"

"Oh, I said what nonsense, and it wasn't tight round like all that; only a symptom. And we didn't even know mamma was there because of Speke and Grant's obelisk. There wasn't a soul! Papa saw it quite as I did, and was most reasonable. So I thought I would feel my way to developing an idea we had been broaching, Julius and I, just that very time by the obelisk. I asked papa flatly what he would do if I married Julius straight off. 'I believe, my dear,' said he, 'that I should be bound to disapprove most highly of your conduct and his.' 'But should you, papa?' I said. 'I should be bound to, my dear,' said he. 'But should you turn us out of the house?' I asked. 'Most certainly not,' said he emphatically. 'But I should disapprove.' I said I should be awfully sorry for that. 'Of course you would,' said he. 'Any dutiful daughter would. But I don't exactly see what harm it would do you.' And you see how his letter begins--that he is bound, as a parent, to feel the strongest disapprobation, and so on. No, I don't think we need be frightened of papa. As for mamma, of course it wouldn't be reasonable to expect her to...."

"To expect her to what?"

"Well, I was going to say keep her hair on. The expression is Egerton's, and I'm sorry to say his expressions are not always ladylike, however telling they are! So I hesitated. Now what is that baby talking about down there?"

For through the whole of Tishy's interesting tale that baby had been dwelling on the shocking occurrence of her sister's doll as before recorded. Her powers of narrative--giving a dramatic form to all things, and stimulated by Sally's statements of what the beach said to the sea, and the sea said back--had, it seemed, attracted shoals of fish from the ocean depths to hear her recital of the tragedy.

"Suppose, now, you come and tell it us up here, Gwenny," says the bride to the bridesmaid. And Sally adds: "Yes, delicious little Miss Arkwright, come and tell us all about it too." Whereupon Miss Arkwright's musical tones are suddenly silent, and her eyes, that are so nearly the colour of the sea behind her, remain fixed on her two petitioners, their owner not seeming quite sure whether she shall acquiesce, or coquette, or possibly even burst into tears. She decides, however, on compliance, coming suddenly up the beach on all fours, and exclaiming, "Tate me!" flings herself bodily on Sally, who welcomes her with, "You sweet little darling!" while Mrs. Julius Bradshaw, anticipating requisition, looks in her bag for another chocolate. They will spoil that child between them.

"Now tell us about the fisses and dolly," says Sally. But the narrator, all the artist rising in her soul, will have everything in order.

"I told ze fisses," she says, reproach in her voice.

"I see, ducky. You told the fishes, and now you'll tell us all about dolly."

"I seeps wiv dolly, because my bid sister Totey said 'Yes.' Dolly seeps in her fings. I seep in my nightgown. Kean from the wass----"

"How nice you must be! Well, then, what next?" Sally may be said to imbibe the narrator at intervals. Tishy calls her a selfish girl. "You've got her all to yourself," she says. The story goes on:

"I seep vethy thound. Papa seeps vethy thound. Dolly got between the theets and the blangticks, and came out. It was a dood dob. Dane said it was--a dood dob!"

"What did Jane say was a good job? Poor dolly coming out?" A long, grave headshake denies this. The constructive difficulties of the tale are beyond the young narrator's skill. She has to resort to ellipsis.

"Or I sood have been all over brang and sawduss. Dane said so."

"Don't you see, Sally," says Tishy, "dolly was in another compartment--the other side of the sheet." But Sally says, of course, she understands, perhaps even suspects Tishy of claiming more acquaintance with children than herself because she has been married three weeks. This isn't fair patronising.

"Dolly came out at ve stisses"--so the sad tale goes on--"and tyed, dolly did. Dane put her head on to ty wiv my pocket-hanshtiff!"

"I see, you little ducky, of course her head had come off, and she couldn't cry till it was put on, was that it? Don't dance, but say yes or no." This referred to a seated triumphal dance the chronicler indulged in at having put so much safely on record. Having subsided, she decided on zass as the proper thing to say, but it took time. Then she added suddenly: "But I told ze fisses." Sally took a good long draught, and said: "Of course you did, darling. You shan't be done out of that!" But an addendum or appendix was forthcoming.

"My mummar says I must tate dolly to be socked for a penny where the man is wiv buttons--and the man let Totey look froo his pyglass, and see all ve long sips, sits miles long--and I shall see when I'm a glowed-up little girl, like Totey."

"Coastguard's telescope, evidently," says Sally. "The man up at the flagstaff. Six miles long is how far off they were, not the length of the ships at all."

"I saw that. But what on earth were the socks? Does his wife sell doll's clothes?"

"We must try to find that out." And Sally sets herself to the task. But it's none so easy. Some mystery shrouds the approach to this passage in dolly's future life. It is connected with "kymin up," and "tandin' on a tep," and when it began it went wizzy, wizzy, wizz, and e-e-e-e, and never stopped. But Gwendolen had not been alarmed whatever it was, because her "puppar" was there. But it was exhausting to the intellect to tell of, for the description ended with a musical, if vacuous, laugh, and a plunge into Sally's bosom, where the narrator remained chuckling, but quite welcome.

"So Gwenny wasn't pitened! What a courageous little poppet! I wonder what on earth it was, Sally."

Thus Tishy, at a loss. But Sally is sharper, for in a moment the solution dawns upon her.

"What a couple of fools we are, Tishy dear! It wasn't socks--it was shocks. It was the galvanic battery at the end of the pier. A penny a time, and you mustn't have it on full up, or you howl. Why on earth didn't we think of that before?"

But Nurse Jane comes in on the top of the laughter that follows, which Miss Gwendolen is joining in, rather claiming it as a triumph for her own dramatic power. She demurs to removal, but goes in the end on condition that all present shall come and see dolly galvanised at an early date. Jane agrees to replace dolly's vitals and sew her up to qualify her for this experience. And so they depart.

"What a dear little mite!" says Mrs. Julius; and then they let the mite lapse, and go back to the previous question.

"No, Sally dear, mamma will be mamma to the end of the time. But I didn't tell you all papa said, did I?"

"How on earth can I tell, Tishy dear? You had got to 'any dutiful daughter would,' etcetera. Cut along! Comes of being in love, I suppose." This last is a reflection on the low state of Tishy's reasoning powers.

"Well, just after that, when I was going to kiss him and go, papa stopped me, and said he had something to say, only he mustn't be too long because he had to finish a paper on, I think, 'Some Technical Terms in use in Cnidos in the Sixth Century, B.C.' Or was it...?"

"That was it. That one'll do beautifully. Go ahead!"

"Well--of course it doesn't matter. It was like papa, anyhow.... Oh, yes--what he said then! It was about Aunt Priscilla's thousand pounds. He wanted to repeat that the interest would be paid to me half-yearly if by chance I married Julius or any other man without his consent. 'I wish it to be distinctly understood that if you marry Bradshaw it will be against my consent. But I only ask you to promise me this, Lætitia, that you won't marry any other man against my consent at present.' I promised, and he said I was a dutiful daughter. There won't be any trouble with papa."

"Don't look like it! I say, Tishy, that thousand pounds is very nice. How much will you have? Forty pounds a year?"

"It's more than that. It's gone up, somehow--sums of money do--or down. They're never the same as at first. I'm so glad about it. It's not as if I brought Julius absolutely nothing."

"How much is it?" Sally is under the impression that sums of money that exist on the word of signed documents only, and whose materialisation can only be witnessed by bankers, are like fourpence, one of whose properties is that it is fourpence. They are not analogous, and Lætitia is being initiated into the higher knowledge.

"Well, dear, you see the stock has gone up, and it's at six three-quarters. You must ask Julius. He can do the arithmetic."

"Does that mean it's sixty-seven pounds ten?"

"You'd better ask Julius. Then, you know, there's the interest." Sally asked what interest. "Why, you see, Aunt Priscilla left it to me eleven years ago, so there's more." But a vendor of mauve and magenta woollen goods, known to Sally as "the beach-woman," was working up towards them.

"That woman never goes when she comes," said Sally. "Let's get up and go!"

* * * * *

We like lingering over this pleasant little time. It helps on but little, if at all, with our story. But in years to come this young couple, who only slip into it by a side-chance, having really little more to do with it than any of the thousand and one collaterals that interest the lives of all of us, and come and go and are forgotten--this Julius and Lætitia will talk of the pleasant three days or so they had at St. Sennans when they came back from France. And we, too, having choice of how much we shall tell of those three or four days, are in little haste to leave them. Those hours of unblushing idleness under a glorious sun--idleness fostered and encouraged until it seems one great exertion to call a fly, and another to subside into it--idleness on matchless moonlight nights, on land or on water--idleness with an affectation of astronomical study, just up to speculating on the identity of Aldebaran or Arcturus, but scarcely equal to metaphysics--idleness that lends itself readily to turning tables and automatic writing, and gets some convincing phenomena, and finds out that so-and-so is an extraordinary medium--idleness that says that letter will do just as well to-morrow, and Smith must wait--such hours as these disintegrate the moral fibre and anæsthetize our sense of responsibility, and make us so oblivious of musical criticism that we accept brass bands and inexplicable serenaders, white or black, and even accordions and hurdy-gurdies, as intrinsic features of the ensemble--the fengshui of the time and place--and give them a penny if we've got one.

That is and will be Mr. and Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's memory of those three days or so, when they have grown quite old together, as we hope they may. And if you add memory of an intoxicated delirium of love--of love that was on no account to be shown or declared or even hinted at--and of a tiresome hitch or qualification, an unselfish parent in full blow, you will have the record that is to remain in the mind of Conrad Vereker.

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Chapter XXXI

HOW SALLY DIDN'T CONFESS ABOUT THE DOCTOR, AND JEREMIAH CAME TO ST. SENNANS ONCE MORE

That evening Sally sat with her mother on the very uncomfortable seat they affected on what was known as the Parade, a stone's throw from the house for a good stone-thrower. It had a little platform of pebbles to stand on, and tamarisks to tickle you from behind when the wind was northerly. It was a corrugated and painful seat, and had a strange power of finding out your tender vertebræ and pulverising them, whatever your stature might be. It fell forward when its occupants, goaded to madness, bore too hard on its front bar, and convinced them they would do well, henceforward, to hold it artificially in its place. But Rosalind and her daughter forgave it all these defects--perhaps because they were really too lazy to protest even against torture. It was the sea air. Anyhow, there they sat that evening, waiting for Padlock's omnibus to come, bringing Fenwick from the station. Just at the moment at which the story overtakes them, Rosalind was looking wonderfully handsome in the sunset light, and Sally was thinking to herself what a beautiful mother she had; and how, when the after-glow dies, it will leave its memory in the red gold that is somewhere in the rich brown her eyes are resting on. Sally was fond of dwelling on her mother's beauty. Perhaps doing so satisfied her personal vanity by deputy. She was content with her own self, but had no admiration for it.

"You are a dear good mammy. Fancy your losing all the best time of the morning indoors!"

"How the best time of the morning, chick?"

"Sitting with that old cat upstairs.... Well, I can't help it. She is an old cat."

"You're a perverse little monkey, kitten; that's what you are!" Rosalind laughed with an excuse--or caress, it may be--in her laugh. "No," she continued, "we are much too hard on that old lady, both of us. Do you know, to-day she was quite entertaining--told me all about her own wedding-day, and how all the bridesmaids had the mumps."

"Has she never told you that before?"

"Only once. Then she told me about the late-lamented, and what a respect he had for her judgment, and how he referred to her at every crisis. I didn't think her at all bad company."

"Because you're a darling. I suppose you had it all about how Prosy, when he was a boy, wanted to study music, and how his pa said that the turning-point in the career of youth lay in the choice of a profession."

"Oh yes! And how his strong musical turn came from her side of the family. In herself it was dormant. But her Aunt Sophia had never once put her finger on a false note of the piano. This was confirmed by the authority of her eminent uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, himself no mean musician."

"Poor Prosy! I know."

"And how musical faculty--amounting to genius--often remained absolutely unsuspected owing to its professor having no inheritance. But it would come out in the children. Then, and not till then, tardy justice was done.... Well, I don't know exactly how she worked it out, but she managed to suggest that she was Handel and Mozart in abeyance. Her son's fair complexion clinched matters. It was the true prototype of her own. A thoroughly musical complexion, bespeaking German ancestry."

"Isn't that the omnibus?" says Sally. But, no, it isn't. She continues: "I don't believe in musical complexions. Look at Julius Bradshaw--dark, with high cheek-bones, and a thin olive hand with blue veins in it. I say, mother...."

"What, chick?"

"He's changed his identity--Julius Bradshaw has. I can't believe he was that spooney boy that used to come hankering after me at church." And the amusement this memory makes hangs about Sally's lips as the two sit on into a pause of silence.

The face of the mother does not catch the amusement, but remains grave and thoughtful. She does not speak; but the handsome eyes that rest so lovingly on the speaker are full of something from the past--some record that it would be an utter bewilderment to Sally to read--a bewilderment far beyond that crux of the moment which maybe has struck her young mind for the first time--the old familiar puzzle of the change that comes to all of us in our transition from first to last experience of the strange phenomenon we call a friend. Sally can't make it out--the way a silly lad, love-struck about her indifferent self so short a while back, has become a totally altered person, the husband of her schoolmate, an actual identity of life and thought and feeling; he who was in those early days little more than a suit of clothes and a new prayer-book.

But if that is so strange to Sally, how measurelessly stranger is she herself to her mother beside her! And the man they are waiting and watching for, who is somewhere between this and St. Egbert's station in Padlock's venerable 'bus, what a crux is he, compared now to that intoxicated young lover of two-and-twenty years ago, in that lawn-tennis garden that has passed so utterly from his memory! And a moment's doubt, "But--has it?" is caught and absorbed by what seemed to Rosalind now an almost absurd fact--that, a week before, he had been nothing but a fidus Achates of that other young man provided to make up the lawn-tennis set, and that it was that other young man at first, not he, that belonged to her. And he had changed away so easily to--who was it? Jessie Nairn, to be sure--and left the coast clear for his friend. Whatever now was his name? Oh dear, what a fool was Rosalind! said she to herself, to have half let slip that it was he that was Fenwick, and not Gerry at all. All this compares itself with Sally's experience of Bradshaw's metamorphosis, and her own seems the stranger.

Then a moment of sharp pain that she cannot talk to Sally of these things, but must lead a secret life in her own silent heart. And then she comes back into the living world, and finds Sally well on with the development of another topic.

"Of course, poor dears! They've not played a note together since the row. It's been nothing but Kensington Gardens or the Albert Hall. But I'm afraid he's no better. If only he could be, it would make all the difference."

"What's that, darling? Who could be...? Not your father?" For, as often as not, Rosalind would speak of her husband as Sally's father.

"Not Jeremiah--no. I was talking about Julius B. and his nervous system. Wouldn't it?"

"Wouldn't it what?"

"Make all the difference? I mean that he could get his violin-playing back. I told you about that letter?"

"No--what letter?"

"From an agent in Paris. Rateau, I think, was the name. Had heard Signor Carissimi had recovered his health completely, and was playing. Hoped he might be honoured with his instructions to make his arrangements in Paris, as he had done so four years ago. Wasn't it aggravating?"

"Does it make any difference?"

"Why, of course it does, mother darling. The aggravation! Just think now! Suppose he could rely on ten pounds a night, fancy that!"

"Suppose he could!... Yes, that would be nice." But there is a preoccupation in her tone, and Sally wants sympathy to be drawn with a vigorous outline.

"What's my maternal parent thinking about, as grave as a judge? Jeremiah's all right, mammy darling! He's not killed in a railway accident. Catch him!" This is part of a systematized relationship between the two. Each always discredits the possibility of mishap to the other. It might be described as chronic reciprocal Christian Science.

"I wasn't thinking of Gerry." Which is true in a sense, as she does not think of the Gerry her daughter knows. And the partial untruth does not cross her mind--a tacit recognition of the powers of change. "I was wool-gathering."

"No--what was she thinking of?" For some reason the third person is thought more persuasive than the second.

"Thinking of her kitten." And this is true enough, as Rosalind is really always thinking of Sally, more or less.

"We-ell, I'm all right. What's the matter with me?"

"Nothing at all that I know of, darling." But it does cross the speaker's mind that the context of circumstances might make this an opportunity for getting at some information she wants. For Sally has remained perfectly inscrutable about Conrad Vereker, and Rosalind has been asking herself whether it is possible that, after all, there is nothing. She doesn't know how to set about it, though. Perhaps the best thing would be to take a leaf out of Sally's own book, and go straight to the bull's-eye.

"Do you really want to know what I was thinking of, Sallykin?" But no sooner has she formulated the intention of asking a question, and allowed the intention to creep into her voice than Sally knows all about it.

"As if I don't know already. You mean me and Prosy."

"Of course. But how did you know?"

"Mammy dear! As if I was born yesterday! If you want people not to know things, you mustn't have delicate inflexions of voice. I knew you were going to catechize about Prosy the minute you got to 'did I really want to know.'"

"But I'm not going to catechize, chick. Only when you ask me what I'm thinking about, and really want to know, I tell you. I was thinking about you and Conrad Vereker." For some mysterious reason this mention of his name in full seems to mature the conversation, and make clearer definition necessary.

Our own private opinion is that any one who closely observes human communion will see that two-thirds of it runs on lines like the foregoing. Very rarely indeed does a human creature say what it means. Exhaustive definition, lucid statements, concise terminology--even plain English--are foreign to its nature. The congenial soil in which the fruit of Intelligence ripens is Suggestion, and the wireless telegraphs of the mind are the means by which it rejoices to communicate. Don't try to say what you mean--because you can't. You are not clever enough. Try to mean what you want to say, and leave the dictionary to take care of itself.

This little bit of philosophizing of ours has just given Sally time, pondering gravely with the eyebrows all at rest and lips at ease, to deal with the developed position created by the mere substitution of a name for a nickname.

"Ought there to be ... anything to think about?" Thus Sally; and her mother sees, or thinks she sees, a little new colour in the girl's cheeks. Or is it only the sunset? Then Rosalind says to herself that perhaps she has made a mistake, had better have left it alone. Perhaps. But it's done now. She is not one that goes back on her resolutions. It is best not to be too tugging and solemn over it. She speaks with a laugh.

"It's not my little daughter I'm afraid of, Sallykin. She's got the key of the position. It's that dear good boy."

"He's not a boy. He's thirty-one next February. Only he's not got a birthday, because it's not leap-year. Going by birthdays he's not quite half-past seven."

"Then it won't do to go by birthdays. Even at thirty-one, though, some boys are not old enough to know better. He's very inexperienced in some things."

"A babe unborn--only he can write prescriptions. Only they don't do you any good. ("Ungrateful child!"... "Well, they don't.") You see, he hasn't any one to go to to ask about things except me. Of course I can tell him, if you come to that!"

"There's his mother."

"His mother! That old dianthus! Oh, mammy darling, what different sorts of mothers do crop up when you think of it!" And Sally is so moved by this scientific marvel that she suddenly kisses her mother, there out on the public parade with a gentleman in check trousers and an eye-glass coming along!

"Why do you call the old lady a dianthus, chick? Really, the way you treat that poor old body!..."

"Not when Prosy's there. I know my place.... We-ell, you know what a dianthus's figure is like? When the tentacles are in, I mean."

But Rosalind tacitly condemns the analogy. Is she not herself a mother, and bound to take part with her kind, however obese? "What were you and the doctor talking about in the boat all that long time yesterday?" she asks, skipping an interval which might easily have contained a review of Mrs. Vereker inside-out like a sea-anemone. Sally is quite equal to it.

"Resuscitation after drowning. Prosy says death is really due to carbonic acid poisoning. Anybody would think it was choking, but it's nothing of the sort. The arterial blood is insufficiently fed with oxygen, and death ensues."

"How long did you talk about that?"

"Ever so long. Till I asked him what he should do if a visitor were drowned and couldn't be brought to. Not at the hotel; down here. Me, for instance."

"What did he say?"

"He was jolly solemn over it, Prosy was. Said he should try his best, and as soon as he was sure it was no go, put an end to his own existence. I said that would be wrong, and besides, he couldn't do it. He said, oh yes, he could--he could inject air into a vein, and lots of things. He went on a physiological tack, so I quoted Hamlet."

"What did he make of Hamlet?"

"Said the researches of modern science all tended to prove that extinction awaited us at death, and he would take his chance. He was quite serious over it."

"And then you said?..."

"I said, suppose it turned out that modern science was tommy-rot, wouldn't he feel like a fool when all was said and done? He admitted that he might, in that case. But he would take his chance, he said. And then we had a long argument, Prosy and I."

"Has he ever resuscitated a drowned person?"

"Oh yes, two or three. But he says he should like a little more practice, as it's a very interesting subject."

"You really are the most ridiculous little kitten there ever was! Talking like the President of the Royal College of Surgeons! Not a smile."

"We-ell, there's nothing in that." Slightly offended dignity on Miss Sally's part. "I say, the 'bus is very late; it's striking seven."

But just as St. Sennan ceases, and leaves the air clear for listening, Rosalind exclaims, "Isn't that it?" And this time it is it, and by ten minutes past seven Fenwick is in the arms of his family, who congratulate him on a beautiful new suit of navy-blue serge, in which he looks very handsome.

* * * * *

Often now when she looks back to those days can Rosalind see before her the grave young face in the sundown, and hear the tale of Dr. Conrad's materialism. And then she sees once more over the smooth purple sea of the day before the little boat sculled by Vereker, with Sally in the stern steering. And the white sails of the Grace Darling of St. Sennans, that had taken a large party out at sixpence each person three hours ago, and couldn't get back by herself for want of wind, and had to be towed by a row-boat, whose oars sounded rhythmically across the mile of intervening water. She was doing nothing to help, was Grace, but her sails flopped a little now and again, just enough to show how glad she would have been to do so with a little encouragement. Rosalind can see it all again quite plain, and the little white creamy cloud that had taken pity on the doctor sculling in the boat, and made a cool island of shadow, coloured imperial purple on the sea, for him and Sally to float in, and talk of how some unknown person, fool enough to get drowned, should one day be recalled from the gate of Death.

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Chapter XXXII

HOW SALLY DIVED OFF THE BOAT, AND SHOCKED THE BEACH. OF THE SENSITIVE DELICACY OF THE OCTOPUS. AND OF DR. EVERETT GAYLER'S OPINIONS

Fenwick had been granted, or had appropriated, another week's holiday, and the wine-trade was to lose some of his valuable services during that time. Not all, because in these days you can do so much by telegraph. Consequently the chimney-piece with the rabbits made of shells on each side, and the model of the Dreadnought--with real planks and a companion-ladder that went too far down, and almost serviceable brass carronades ready for action--and a sampler by Mercy Lobjoit (1763), showing David much too small for the stitches he was composed of, and even Goliath not big enough to have two lips--this chimney-piece soon become a magazine of yellow telegrams, which blew away when the window and door were open at the same time.

It was on the second of Fenwick's days on this visit that an unusual storm of telegrams, as he came in to breakfast after an early dip in the sea, confirmed the statement in the paper of the evening before that W. and S.W. breezes might be expected later. "Wind freshening," was the phrase in which the forecast threw doubts on the permanency of its recent references to a smooth Channel-passage. However, faith had already been undermined by current testimony to light easterly winds backing north, on the coast of Ireland. Sally was denouncing meteorology as imposture when the returning bather produced the effect recorded. It interrupted a question on his lips as he entered, and postponed it until the telegram papers had all been reinstated and the window closed, so that Mrs. Lobjoit might come in with the hot rolls and eggs and not have anything blown away. Then peace reigned and the question got asked.

"What are we going to do to-day?" said Sally, repeating it. "I know what I'm going to do first. I'm going to swim round the buoy."

"My dear, they'll never put the machines down to-day." This was her mother.

"They'll do it fast enough, if I tell 'em to. It's half the fun, having it a little rough."

"Well, kitten, I suppose you'll go your own way; only I shall be very glad when you're back in your machine. Coffee, Gerry?"

"Yes, coffee--in the big cup with the chip, and lots of milk. You're a dangerous young monkey, Sarah; and I shall get old Benjamin's boat, and hang about. And then you'll be happy, Rosey, eh?"

"No, I shan't! We shall have you getting capsized, too. (I put in three lumps of sugar.... No, not little ones--big ones!) What a thing it is to be connected with aquatic characters!"

"Never you mind the mother, Jeremiah. You get the boat. I should like it to dive off."

"All right, I'll get Vereker, and we'll row out. The doctor's not bad as an oarsman. Bradshaw doesn't make much of it. (Yes, thanks; another egg. The brown one preferred; don't know why!) Yes, I'll get Dr. Conrad, and you shall come and dive off."

All which was duly done, and Sally got into great disgrace by scrambling up into the boat with the help of a looped rope hung over the side, and was thereafter known to more than one decorous family group frequenting the beach as that bold Miss Nightingale. But what did Sally care what those stuffy people thought about her, with such a set-off against their bad opinion as the glorious plunge down into the depths, and the rushing sea-murmur in her ears, the only sound in the strange green silence; and then the sudden magic of the change back to the dazzling sun on the moving foam, and some human voice that was speaking when she dived only just ending off? Surely, after so long a plunge down, down, that voice should have passed on to some new topic.

For that black and shining merpussy, during one deep dive into the under-world of trackless waters, had had time to recollect an appointment with a friend, and had settled in her mind that, as soon as she was once more in upper air, she would mention it to the crew of the boat she had dived from. She was long enough under for that. Then up she came into the rise and fall and ripple overhead like a sudden Loreley, and as soon as she could see where the boat had got to, and was free of a long stem of floating weed she had caught up in the foam, she found her voice. And in it, as it rang out in the morning air, was a world of youth and life and hope from which care was an outcast, flung to the winds and the waves.

"I say, Jeremiah, we've got to meet a friend of yours on the pier this afternoon."

"Time for you to come out of that water, Sarah." This name had become nearly invariable on Fenwick's part. "Who's your friend?"

"A young lady for you! She's going to bring her dolly to be electrified for a penny. She'll cry if we don't go; so will dolly."

"Then we must go, clearly. The doctor must come to see fair, or dolly may get electrocuted, like me." Fenwick very rarely spoke of his accident now; most likely would not have done so this time but for a motive akin to his wife's nettle-grasping. He knew Sally would think of it, and would not have her suppose he shirked speaking of it.

But the laugh goes for a moment out of the face down there in the water, and the pearls that glittered in the sun have vanished and the eyes are grave beneath their brows. Only for a moment; then all the Loreley is back in evidence again, and Sally is petitioning for only one more plunge, and then she really will swim in. The crew protests, but the Loreley has her way; her sort generally has.

"I always wonder," says Dr. Conrad, as they row to shore with studied slowness--one must, to keep down to the pace of the swiftest swimmer--"I always wonder whether they found that half-crown." Probably he, too, only says this to accentuate the not-necessarily-to-be-avoided character of the subject.

The reason Fenwick answered nothing, but remained thoughtfully silent, was, as Dr. Vereker perceived after he had spoken, that the half-crown was mere hearsay to him, and, as such, naturally enforced speculation on the strange "B.C." period of which he knew nothing. Time did but little to minimise the painful character of such speculations, although it seemed to make them less and less frequent. Vereker said no more, partly because he felt this, partly because he was so engrossed with the Loreley. He dropped the half-crown.

"You needn't row away yet," said the voice from the water. "The machines are miles off. Look here, I'm going to swim under the boat and come up on the other side!"

Said Fenwick: "You'll be drowned, Sarah, before you've done! Do consider your mother a little!"

Said the Loreley: "All right! good-bye!" and disappeared. She was so long under that it was quite a relief when she reappeared, well off the boat's counter; for, of course, there was some way on the boat, and Sally made none. The crew's eyes had been watching the wrong water over the beam.

"Didn't I do that nicely?... 'Beautifully?' Yes, I should rather think I did! Good-bye; I must go to my machine! They won't leave it down any longer."

Off went the swimmer in the highest spirits, and landed with some difficulty, so much had the south-west wind freshened; and the machine started up the beach at a brisk canter to rejoin its many unused companions on their higher level.

* * * * *

Dr. Conrad, with the exhilaration of the Loreley in his heart, was to meet with a damper administered to him by his affectionate parent, who had improved immensely in the sea air, and was getting quite an appetite.

"There is nothing, my dear, that I detest more cordially than interference," said she, after accepting, rather more easily than usual, her son's apologies for coming in late to lunch, and also being distinctly gracious to Mrs. Iggulden about the beefsteak-pudding. "Your father disapproved of it, and the whole of my family. The words 'never meddle' were on their lips from morning till night. Is it wonderful that I abstain from speaking, as I so often do? Whatever I see, I am silent." And accordingly was for a few illustrative seconds.

But her son, conceiving that the pause was one very common in cases of incipient beefsteak-pudding, and really due to kidneys, made an autopsy of the centre of Mrs. Iggulden's masterpiece; but when he had differentiated its contents and insulated kidneys beyond a doubt, he stood exposed and reproved by the tone in which his mother resumed:

"Not for me; I have oceans. I shall never eat what I have, and it is so wasteful!... No, my dear. You ask, 'What is it, then?' But I was going to tell you when you interrupted me." Here a pause for the Universe to settle down to attention. "There is always so much disturbance; but my meaning is plain. When I was a girl young women were different.... I dare say it is all right. I do not wish to lay myself open to ridicule for my old-fashioned opinions.... What is it? I came back early, certainly, because I found the sun so tiring; but surely, my dear, you cannot have failed to see that our front window commands a full view of the bathing-machines. But I am silent.... Mrs. Iggulden does not understand making mustard. Hers runs."

Dr. Conrad was not interested in the mustard. He was about the cryptic attack on Sally's swimming and diving, which he felt to have been dexterously conveyed in his parent's speech with scarcely a word really to the point. There was no lack of skill in the Goody's method. He flushed slightly, and made no immediate reply--even to a superhumanly meek, "I know I shall be told I am wrong"--until after he had complied with a requisition for a very little more--so small a quantity as to seem somehow to reduce the lady's previous total morally, though it added to it physically--and then he spoke, taking the indictment for granted:

"I can't see what you find fault with. Not Miss Sally's bathing-costume; nobody could!" Which was truth itself, for nothing more elegant could have been found in the annals of bathing. "And if she has a boat to dive off, somebody must row it. Besides, her mother would object if...." But the doctor is impatient and annoyed--a rare thing with him. He treats his beefsteak-pudding coldly, causing his mother to say: "Then you can ring the bell."

However, she did not intend her text to be spoiled by irruptions of Mrs. Iggulden, so she waited until the frequent rice-pudding had elapsed, and then resumed at an advantage:

"You were very snappish and peevish with me just now, Conrad, without waiting to hear what I had to say. But I overlook it. I am your mother. If you had waited, I should have told you that I have no fault whatever to find with Miss Nightingale's bathing-dress. It is, no doubt, strictly en règle. Nor can I say, in these days, what I think of girls practising exercises that in my day were thought unwomanly. All is changed now, and I am old-fashioned. But this I do say, that had your father, or your great-uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, been told forty years ago that a time would come when it would be thought no disgrace for an English girl to jump off a boat with an unmarried man in it.... My dear, I am sure the latter would have made one of those acrid and biting remarks for which he was celebrated in his own circle, and which have even, I believe, been repeated by Royalty. That is the only thing I have to say. I say nothing of girls learning to swim and dive. I say nothing of their bicycling. Possibly the young lady who passed the window this morning with a gentleman on the same bicycle was properly engaged to him; or his sister. Even about the practice of Sandow, or Japanese wrestling, I have nothing to say. But if they are to dive off boats in the open sea, in the face of all the beach, at least let the boats be rowed by married men. That is all I ask. It is very little."

What fools mothers sometimes are about their sons! They contrive that these sons shall pass through youth to early manhood without a suspicion that even mothers have human weaknesses. Then, all in a moment, just when love has ridden triumphant into the citadel of the boys' souls, they will sacrifice all--all they have won in a lifetime--to indulge some petty spleen against the new régime that threatens their dethronement. And there is no surer way of undermining a son's loyalty than to suggest a want of delicate feeling in the new Queen--nothing that can make him question the past so effectually as to force him to hold his nostrils in a smell of propriety, puffed into what seems to him a gale from heaven.

The contrast between the recent merpussy in the freshening seas, and this, as it seemed to him, perfectly gratuitous intrusion of moral carbolic acid, gave Dr. Conrad a sense of nausea, which his love for his mother enjoined ignorance of. His mind cast about, not for ways of excusing Sally--the idea!--but of whitewashing his mother, without seeming to suggest that her own mind had anything Fescennine about it. This is always the great difficulty skywardness has in dealing with the moral scavenger. Are not the motives of purity unimpeachable?

Goody Vereker, however, did not suspect herself of being a fool. On the contrary, she felt highly satisfied with her speech, and may be said to have hugged its peroration. Her son flushed slightly and bit his lip, giving the old lady time for a corollary in a subdued and chastened voice.

"Had I been asked--had you consulted me, my dear--I should certainly have advised that Mr. Fenwick should have been accompanied by another married man, certainly not by a young, single gentleman. The man himself--I am referring to the owner of the boat--would have done quite well, whether married or single. Boatmen are seldom unmarried, though frequently tattooed with ladies' names when they have been in the navy. You see something to laugh at, Conrad? In your mother! But I am used to it." The doctor's smile was in memory of two sun-browned arms that had pushed the boat off two hours ago. One had Elinor and Kate on it, the other Bessie and a Union Jack.

"Don't you think, mother dear," said the doctor at last, "that if Mrs. Fenwick, who knew all about it, had seen anything outrageous she would have spoken? She really only seemed anxious none of us should get drowned."

"Very likely, my dear; she would be. You will, I am sure, do me this justice, that I have throughout said, from the very beginning, that Mrs. Fenwick is a most excellent person, though I have sometimes found her tiring."

"I am sorry she has tired you. You must always tell her, you know, when you're tired, and then she'll come and fetch me." The doctor resisted a temptation to ask, "From the very beginning of what?" For the suggestion that materials for laceration were simmering was without foundation; was, in fact, only an example of the speaker's method. She followed it with another.

"It is so often the case with women who have passed a good deal of time in India."

"Are women tiring when they have passed a good deal of time in India?"

"My dear Conrad, is it likely I should talk such nonsense? You know perfectly well what I mean." But the doctor merely awaited natural development, which came. "Mind, I do not say I believe Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's story. But it would quite account for it--fully!"

What would account for what? Heaven only knew! However, the speaker was getting the bit in her teeth, and earth would know very soon. Dr. Conrad was conscious at this moment of the sensation which had once made Sally speak of his mamma as an Octopus. She threw out a tentacle.

"And, of course, Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's story may be nothing but idle talk. I am the last person to give credit to mere irresponsible gossip. Let us hope it is ill founded."

Whereupon her son, who knew another tentacle would come and entangle him if he slipped clear from this one, surrendered at discretion. What was Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's story? A most uncandid way of putting it, for the fact was he had heard it all from Sally in the strictest confidence. So the insincerity was compulsory, in a sense.

The Octopus, who was by this time anchored in her knitting-chair and awaiting her mixture--two tablespoonfuls after every meal--closed her eyes to pursue the subject, but warmed to the chace visibly.

"Are you going to tell me, my dear Conrad, that you do not know that it has been said--I vouch for nothing, remember--that Miss Nightingale's mother was divorced from her father twenty years ago in India?"

"I don't think it's any concern of yours or mine." But having said this, he would have liked to recall it and substitute something else. It was brusque, and he was not sure that it was a fair way of stating the case, especially as this matter had been freely discussed between them in the days of their first acquaintance with Sally and her mother. Dr. Conrad felt mean for renegading from his apparent admission at that time that the divorce was an affair they might properly speculate about. Mrs. Vereker knew well that her son would be hard on himself for the slightest unfairness, and forthwith climbed up to a pinnacle of flawless rectitude, for his confusion.

"My dear, it is absolutely none. Am I saying that it is? People's past lives are no affair of ours. Am I saying that they are?"

"Well, no!"

"Very well, then, my dear, listen to what I do say, and do not misrepresent me. What I say is this--(Are you sure Perkins has mixed this medicine the same as the last? The taste's different)--Now listen! What I say is, and I can repeat it any number of times, that it is useless to expect sensitiveness on such points under such circumstances. I am certain that your father, or your great-uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, would not have hesitated to endorse my opinion that on the broad question of whether a girl should or should not dive off a boat rowed by an unmarried man, no one is less likely to form a correct judgment than a lady who was divorced from her husband twenty years ago in India. But I say nothing against Mrs. Fenwick. She is, so far as she is known to me, an excellent person, and a good wife and mother. Now, my dear Conrad, I must rest, for I fear I have talked too much."

Poor Prosy! All the edge of his joy of the morning was taken off. But never mind! It would very soon be Sally herself again, and his thirsty soul would be drinking deep draughts of her at the pier-end, where the appointment was to be kept with the young lady and her dolly.

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Chapter XXXIII

OF AN INTERMITTENT CURRENT AT THE PIER-END, AND OF DOLLY'S FORTITUDE. HOW FENWICK PUT HIS HEAD IN THE JAWS OF THE FUTURE UNAWARES, AND PROSY DIDN'T COME. HOW SALLY AND HER STEP SAW PUNCH, AND OF A THIN END OF A FATAL WEDGE. BUT ROSALIND SAW NO COMING CLOUD

An iron pier, with a sense of lattice structure about it, is not to our old-fashioned minds nearly so fascinating as the wooden fabric of our early memories at more than one seaside resort of our boyhood. St. Sennan was of another school, or had become a convert or pervert, if a Saint may be judged by his pier. For this was iron or steel all through, barring the timber flooring whose planks were a quarter of an inch apart, so that you could kneel down to see the water through if you were too short to see over the advertisements a sordid spirit of commercialism had blocked the side-railings with. And if you were three or four, and there was nobody to hold you up (because they were carrying baby), you did so kneel, and as like as not got tar on your knees, and it wouldn't come off. Anyhow, Miss Gwendolen Arkwright did, on her way to the appointment, and was reproved therefore. On which she also reproved dolly in identical terms, dolly having had a look through as well, though, indeed, she can hardly be said to have knelt.

But to console us for the loss of the solid groins and bolted timbers of our youth, and to make it palatable to us that the great seas should follow each other for ever almost unopposed--instead of being broken into floods of drenching foam visitors get wet-through in--this unsubstantial-looking piece of cage-work expanded as soon as it was well out in the open channel, and almost provided John Bull with another "other island." And whereon the pier-company's sordid commercialism had suggested the construction of a Chinese joss-house, or Indian bungalow--our description is a random one--that lent itself, or was lent by the company, at really an almost nominal figure, for entertainments in the afternoon all through the season. And round this structure were things desirable by all mankind, and supposed to be desired by possessors of one penny willing to part with it. For a penny-in-the-slot you could learn your fate from a Sibyl, and repent of having spent your penny on it. For another you could scent your pocket-handkerchief, and be sorry you hadn't kept your penny for chocolate. For another you could have the chocolate, and wish you had waited and taken a cigarette. And for another you could take the cigarette, and realise how ill-assorted are the flavours of chocolate and the best Virginian tobacco.

But the pennyworth that seemed the worthiest of its penny was, no doubt, the old-fashioned galvanic battery, which shocked you for a sixth part of the smallest sum required by literature on first publication. It had brass handles you took hold of, and brass basins with unholy water in them that made you curl up, and anybody else would do so too. And there was a bunch of wires to push in, and agonize the victim who, from motives not easily understood, laid himself open to torture. And it certainly said "whizzy-wizzy-wizz." But Gwenny's description had been wrong in one point. For it was yourself, the investigator, not the machine, that said "e-e-e-e!"

Now this machine was in charge of a young woman, who was also the custodian of an invisible lady, who was to be seen for a penny each person, children half-price. This appeared to be a contradiction in terms, but public apathy accepted it without cavil. The taking of this phenomenon's gate-money seemed to be almost a sinecure. Not so the galvanic battery, which never disappointed any one. It might disgust, or repel, those who had had no occasion to study this branch of science, but it always acted up to its professions. Those investigators who declined to have any more never could go away and complain that they had not had enough. And no one had ever been discontented with its baneful results when all the bundle of wires was put in; indeed, the young person in charge said she had never known any one to drain this cup of scientific experience to the dregs. "Halfway in's enough for most," was her report of human endurance. It was a spirited little machine, though old-fashioned.

Miss Arkwright and her dolly, accompanied, as we have hinted, by her Nurse Jane and baby, whose violent temper had condemned his perambulator, and compelled his attendant to carry him--so she said--were beforehand at the place and hour named. For security against possible disappointment a fiction was resorted to that dolly wouldn't cry if her mamma talked seriously to her, and it was pointed out that Mr. Fenwick was coming, and Mrs. Fenwick was coming, and Miss Nightingale was coming, and Dr. Vereker was coming--advantage being taken of an infant's love of vain repetitions. But all these four events turned on dolly being good and not crying, and the reflex action of this stipulation produced goodness in dolly's mamma, with the effect that she didn't roar, as, it seemed, she might otherwise have done.

Miss Gwendolen was, however, that impatient that no dramatic subterfuge, however skilfully engineered, could be relied upon to last. Fortunately, a young lady she recognised, and a gentleman whom she did not personally know, but had seen on the beach, became interested in baby, who took no notice of them, and hiccupped. But, then, his eyes were too beady to have any human expression; perhaps it was more this than a contempt for vapid compliment that made him seem unsympathetic. The young lady, however, congratulated him on his personnel and on the variety of his attainments; and this interested Miss Gwendolen, who continued not to roar, and presently volunteered a statement on her own account.

"My mummar zis a-comin', and Miss Ninedale zis a-comin', and Miss Ninedale's mummar zis a-comin', and...." But Nurse Jane interposed, on the ground that the lady knew already who was coming. She had no reason for supposing this; but a general atmosphere of omniscience among grown-up classes is morally desirable. It was, however, limited to Clause 1. Miss Gwenny went on to the consideration of Clause 2 without taking a division.

"To see dolly danvalised for a penny. My mummar says--see--sall--div me a penny...."

"To galvanise dolly? How nice that will be!--Isn't she a dear little thing, Paggy?--And we're just in time to see it. Now, that is nice!" Observe Lætitia's family name for her husband, born of Cattley's.

"Isn't that them coming, Tish?" Yes, it is. They are conscientiously negotiating the turnstile at the pier-entrance, where one gets a ticket that lets you on all day, and you lose it. Conscientiously, because the pier-company often left its side-gate open, and relied on public spirit to acquiesce in its turnstile without dispute.

But Bradshaw has the misfortune to fall in Nurse's good opinion. For he asks who the important-looking party is, and is called to order.

"Sh-sh-iii-sh, love! Do take care! Gwenny's mamma--Mrs. Chesterfield Arkwright. They've a house at Boxley Heath--friends of the Hugh Jameses--those very high-flying people." This is not à pleine voix, and a well-disciplined Nurse knows better than to hear it.

Miss Gwenny and dolly consent to accompany the lady and gentleman to meet the party, the former undertaking to point out her mamma. "I sail sow you wiss," she says; and then gives descriptive particulars of the conduct of the galvanic battery, and forecasts its effect on dolly.

"There's that dear little pet," says Sally; and resumes the operation of spoiling the little pet on the spot. She isn't sorry to tally the pet (whose phonetics we employ) "dest wunced round the p on her soulders, only zis wunced." She is a little silent, is Sally, and preoccupied--perhaps won't object to a romp to divert her thoughts. Because she is afraid poor Prosy is in the tentacles of the Octopus. She evidently is not in love with him; if she were she would be feeling piqued at his not being in time to the appointment, not fidgeting about his losing the fun. She made some parade, at any rate, of her misgivings that poor Dr. Conrad had got hooked by his Goody, and would be late. If she was piqued she concealed it. Whichever it was, she found it congenial to "tally" Miss Arkwright on her "soulders" twiced round the pier-end before the party arrived within range of the battery. They meanwhile--that is to say, Rosalind and her husband, Lætitia and hers, with Sally and Gwenny's mamma--lingered slowly along the pier listening to the experiences of the latter, of men, women, and things among the right sort of people.

"You really never know, and one cannot be too careful. So much turns on the sort of people you let your daughter get mixed up with. I'm sure Mrs. Fenwick will agree with me that Mrs. Hugh James was right. You see, I've known her from a child, and a more unworldly creature never breathed. But she asked me, and I could only say what I did: 'Take the child at once to Paris and Ems and Wiesbaden--anywhere for a change. Even a tradesman is better than a professional man. In that case there may be money. But nowadays none of the professions pay. And their connexions are most undesirable.'"

"Now I should call that a brig." Thus Bradshaw, pursuing the great controversy. But Fenwick knows better, or thinks he does. She's a brigantine, and there are sprits'ls on both masts, and only one square sail on the foremast. He may be right, for anything we know. Anyhow, her sheets are white in the sun, as she tacks down channel against the west or south-west wind, which has freshened. And she is a glorious sight as she comes in quite close to the pier-head, and goes into stays--(is that right?)--and her great sails flap and swing, and a person to whom caution is unknown, and who cares for nothing in heaven or earth, sits unconcerned on a string underneath her bowsprit, and gets wet through every time she plunges, doing something nautical in connexion with her foresail overhead. And then she leans over in the breeze, and the white sheets catch it full--so near you can hear the boom click as it swings, and the rattle of the cordage as it runs through the blocks--and then she gets her way on her, and shoots off through a diamond-drench of broken seas, and we who can borrow the coastguard's telescope can know that she is the Mary of Penzance, but are none the wiser. And a man stripped to the waist, who is washing radishes on the poop, continues washing radishes unmoved, and ignores all things else.

"As far as the young man himself goes, I believe there is nothing to be said. But the mother is quite unpresentable, perfectly impossible. And the eldest sister is married to a Dissenting clergyman--a very worthy man, no doubt, but not exactly. And the girls are loud, etc., etc., etc." Miss Arkwright's mamma ripples on, even as persons of condition ripple; and Tishy, whose views in this direction have undergone expansion, manages to forget how she has done the same herself--not long ago, neither!--and decides that the woman is detestable.

Not so her daughter, who, with Sally as guardian and dolly as ward, is awaiting the arrival of the party at the galvanic battery. She is yearning for the great event; not for a promised land of jerks and spasms for herself, but for her putative offspring. She encourages the latter, telling her not to be pitened and kye. Dolly doesn't seem apprehensive--shows great self-command, in fact.

But this detestable mother of a lovable daughter and an untempting granddaughter is destined to become still more detestable in the eyes of the Julius Bradshaws before she exhausts her topic. For as the party draws near to the scene of scientific recreation--and progress is slow, as she is deliberate as well as detestable; and, of course, is the pace-maker--she climbs up to a higher platform, as it were, for the contemplation of a lower deep. She assumes, for purposes of temporary handling of the subject, the air of one too far removed to know more about its details than the seismograph at Greenwich knows about the earthquake in the Andes. A dim contemplation of a thing afar--to be forgotten on the spot, after record made.

"Luckily, it's not so bad in this case as--(Gwenny, you're tiring Miss Nightingale. Come down!)--not so bad in this case as--(no, my dear! you must wait for dolly to be galvanised. Come down at once, and don't make conditions.)"

"But I love having her dearly--do let me keep her!" from Sally.

And from the human creature on her shoulders, "Miss Ninedale says 'No!'"

"Not so bad, you were saying, as...?" Thus Rosalind, to divert the conversation from the child.

"Oh dear! What was I saying? That child! What plagues the little things are!" The lady closes her eyes for two seconds behind a horizontal gloved hand, a seclusion to recollect in; then continues: "Oh yes, when it's a shopman. I dare say you've heard of that very painful case--daughter of a well-known Greek Pr...."

But the speaker has tact enough to see her mistake from the simultaneous loud speech it provokes. Every one seems to have something vociferous to say, and all speak at once. Sally's contribution is a suggestion that before dolly is put to the torture we shall go into the downstairs place and see the gentleman who's fishing catch a big grey mullet. It is adopted. Rosalind only remains upstairs, and takes the opportunity to communicate the Julius Bradshaw epic to Gwenny's mamma, who will now be more careful than ever about the sort of people you pick up at the seaside and drop. She puts these words by in her mind, for Gwenny's papa, later on.

The gentleman who is to be seen catching the big grey mullet hadn't caught it, so far--not when the party arrived on the strange middle-deck of the pier the water reaches at high tide, and persuades occasional molluscs to grow on the floor of, with promises of a bath next month. The green reflected light from the endless rise and fall of the waves Gwenny could see (without getting down) through the floor-gaps, seemed to be urging the fisher-gentleman to give it up, and pointing out that the grey mullet was down here, and didn't mean to be caught. But he paid no attention, and only went on doing all the things that fishers do. He ascribed the fishes' reluctance to bite to the sort of sky, and not to common-sense on their part. He tried the other side instead. He lost his worm, and blamed him for going off the hook--which he would have done himself, and he knew it! He believed, honestly, that a fish of fabulous dimensions had thought seriously of biting, and would have bitten, only you got in the light, or made a noise.

But there was no noise to speak of, really, except the clunk-clunk of one or two moored rowboats down below, and the sh-r-r-r-r-p (if that spells it) of their corrugated plank-sides, as they dipped and dripped alternately. They were close to the bottom flight of stairs, whose lowest step was left forlorn in the air, and had to be jumped off when a real spring-tide came that knew its business.

Gwenny's remark, "Ze man is fissin'," seemed to point to an incubation of an idea, familiar to maturer life, that fishing is more truly a state than an action. But the addendum--that he didn't cass any fiss--betrayed her inexperience. Maturity does not call attention to ill-success; or, if it does, it lays it at the door of the fish.

"What a jolly header one could have from here! No railings or anything. No--ducky! I won't put you down to look over the edge. That's not a thing for little girls to do."

"You'd never get up again, Sarah. You'd have to swim ashore."

"One could swim round the steps, Jeremiah--at least, according to the tide. It's slack water now."

"I wish, Mr. Fenwick--(so does Julius)--that you would make that girl reasonable. She'll drown herself before she's done."

"I know she will, Mrs. Paganini. Sure and certain! Nobody can stop her. But Vereker's going to bring her to."

"Where is the doctor, Tish? Didn't he say he was coming?" This was Bradshaw. He usually says things to his wife, and leaves publication to her.

"Of course he said he was coming. I wonder if anything's the matter?"

"Oh, no! It's his ma! The Goody's put an embargo on him, and kept him at home. Poor Prosy!" Sally is vexed, too. But observe!--she knows perfectly well that nothing but the Goody would have kept Prosy from his appointment.

No one in particular, but every one more or less, supposes that now we must go back for dolly to be galvanised, Tishy rather reluctantly, for she does not share her husband's indifference about what the detestable one above says on the subject of shopmen; Miss Arkwright greedily, being reminded of a higher object in life than mere grey mullet catching. She, however, ascribes her avidity to dolly, calling on public credulity to believe that the latter has spoken to that effect.

The arrangement of dolly in connexion with the two brass handles offers difficulties, but a felicitous solution is discovered, for not only will dolly remain in contact with both if her arms are thrust inside them, but insomuch as her sleeves are stiff and expansive, and require a perceptible pull to withdraw them, will remain suspended in mid-air without further support, to enjoy the rapture or endure the torture of the current, as may prove to be the case. From this arises an advantage--namely, that her mamma will be able to give her attention to the regulator, and shift the wire bundle in and out, with a due regard to dolly's powers of endurance.

What little things the lives of the folk in this story have turned on! Now, suppose Gwenny had never been allowed to take charge of that regulator! However, this is anticipation.

When dolly had endured unmoved the worst that science could inflict, nothing would satisfy Miss Gwenny but that every one else should take hold in a circle, as on a previous occasion, and that she should retain control of the regulator. The experiment was tried as proposed, all present joining in it except Mrs. Arkwright, who excused herself owing to the trouble of taking her gloves off. Including nurse, there were six persons. However, as nurse couldn't abide it, almost before it had begun to say whizzy-wizzy-wizz, this number was reduced to five.

"Keep your eye on the kid, my dear," said Fenwick, addressing the presiding young lady in his easy-going way; "don't let her put it on all at once. Are you ready, Sarah? You ready, Mrs. Paganini? All right--fire away!"

The young lady in charge kept a careful hand near Miss Gwenny's, who was instructed or guided to increase the current gradually. Her attitude was docile and misleading.

"Go on--a little more--yes, a little more.... No, that's enough!... Oh, what nonsense! that's nothing!... Oh, Sally, do let go!... Oh, Tishy, what a goose you are! That's nothing.... E-ow! It's horrible. I won't have any more of it." The chorus of exclamations, which you may allot at choice, ended in laughter as the galvanised circle broke up.

"Well, you are a lot of weak-kneed ... conductivities," said Fenwick, feeling for the word. "That was nothing, as Sarah says."

"Look here," suggested Sally. "Me get between you two men, and Gwenny stick it in full up." This was done, and Sally heroically endured the "full up" current, which, as you doubtless are aware, increases in viciousness as it has fewer and fewer victims. But she wasn't sorry when it was over, for all that.

"You and I could take it full up," said Fenwick to Bradshaw, who assented. But Paganini evidently didn't like it when it came to three-quarters. Also, his wife said to him, "You'll spoil your fingering, Julius."

Fenwick seemed to think them all over-sensitive. "I could stand that by myself," said he, and took both handles.

But just at this moment a strange event happened. Somebody actually applied to see the invisible lady. The eyes of the damsel in charge were for one moment withdrawn from Miss Gwenny, who promptly seized the opportunity to thrust in the regulator "full up."

Fenwick wasn't going to cry for mercy--not he! But his lips clenched and his eyes glared, and his hands shook. "How can you be such a goose, Jeremiah?" said Sally, who was standing close by the battery, opposite to Gwenny. She thrust back the regulator, and put an end to Fenwick's excruciations.

He said, "What did you do that for, Sarah? I could have stood it for six months."

And Sally replied: "For shame, you wicked story! And after you'd been electrocuted once, too!"

Fenwick burst into a great laugh, and exclaimed, "What on earth are we all torturing ourselves for? Do let's go and get some tea." And then carried Gwenny on his shoulders to the pier-entrance, where he delivered her to her proprietors, and then they all sauntered teawards, laughing and chatting.

Rosalind thought she had never seen Gerry in such health and spirits. On their way up to the house they passed Punch, leaning over the footlights to rejoice in his iniquity. Few persons of healthy sympathies can pass Punch, and these only under the strongest temptation, such as tea. Rosalind and Lætitia and her husband belonged to the latter class, but Fenwick and Sally elected to see the immortal drama to a close. It lasted nearly through the remainder of Fenwick's cigar, and then they came away, reluctant, and wanting more of the same sort.

It was then that Sally's stepfather said a rather singular thing to her--a thing she remembered afterwards, though she noticed it but slightly at the time. She had said to him:

"Codling and Short will be quite rich men! What a lot of money you've given them, Jeremiah!"

And he had replied: "Don't they deserve it?"

They had then walked on together up the road, he taking her arm in his hand, as is the way nowadays, but saying nothing. Presently he said, as he threw away the very last end of the cigar:

"It was the first lesson of my early boyhood in retributive injustice. It's a poor heart that never rejoices at Punch."

It was the first time Sally had ever heard him speak of his boyhood except as a thing he had forgotten.

* * * * *

Much, so much, of this chapter is made up of matter so trifling. Was it worth recording? The chronicler might plead again as excuse his temptation to linger over the pleasant hours it tells of, the utter freedom of its actors from care, and his reluctance to record their sequel. But a better apology for his prolixity and detail would be found in the wonder felt by those actors when in after-life they looked back and recalled them one by one; and the way each memory linked itself, in a way unsuspected at the time, with an absolutely unanticipated future. For even Rosalind, with all her knowledge of the past, had no guess, for all her many misgivings and apprehensions, of the way that things would go. Never had she been freer from a sense of the shadow of a coming cloud than when she looked out from the window while the tea she had just made was mellowing, and saw her husband and daughter coming through the little garden gate, linked together and in the best of spirits.

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