[Illustration]




In the Cage

by Henry James


Contents

 I.
 II.
 III.
 IV.
 V.
 VI.
 VII.
 VIII.
 IX.
 X.
 XI.
 XII.
 XIII.
 XIV.
 XV.
 XVI.
 XVII.
 XVIII.
 XIX.
 XX.
 XXI.
 XXII.
 XXIII.
 XXIV.
 XXV.
 XXVI.
 XXVII.




CHAPTER I.


It had occurred to her early that in her position—that of a young
person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a
guinea-pig or a magpie—she should know a great many persons without
their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more
lively—though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity
still very much smothered—to see any one come in whom she knew outside,
as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her
function. Her function was to sit there with two young men—the other
telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the “sounder,” which was
always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters,
answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything
else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of
the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in
the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached
with rubbing. This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in,
according to the side of the narrow counter on which the human lot was
cast, the duskiest corner of a shop pervaded not a little, in winter,
by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by the presence of
hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and other solids and
fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells without
consenting to know them by their names.

The barrier that divided the little post-and-telegraph-office from the
grocery was a frail structure of wood and wire; but the social, the
professional separation was a gulf that fortune, by a stroke quite
remarkable, had spared her the necessity of contributing at all
publicly to bridge. When Mr. Cocker’s young men stepped over from
behind the other counter to change a five-pound note—and Mr. Cocker’s
situation, with the cream of the “Court Guide” and the dearest
furnished apartments, Simpkin’s, Ladle’s, Thrupp’s, just round the
corner, was so select that his place was quite pervaded by the crisp
rustle of these emblems—she pushed out the sovereigns as if the
applicant were no more to her than one of the momentary, the
practically featureless, appearances in the great procession; and this
perhaps all the more from the very fact of the connexion (only
recognised outside indeed) to which she had lent herself with
ridiculous inconsequence. She recognised the others the less because
she had at last so unreservedly, so irredeemably, recognised Mr. Mudge.
However that might be, she was a little ashamed of having to admit to
herself that Mr. Mudge’s removal to a higher sphere—to a more
commanding position, that is, though to a much lower
neighbourhood—would have been described still better as a luxury than
as the mere simplification, the corrected awkwardness, that she
contented herself with calling it. He had at any rate ceased to be all
day long in her eyes, and this left something a little fresh for them
to rest on of a Sunday. During the three months of his happy survival
at Cocker’s after her consent to their engagement she had often asked
herself what it was marriage would be able to add to a familiarity that
seemed already to have scraped the platter so clean. Opposite there,
behind the counter of which his superior stature, his whiter apron, his
more clustering curls and more present, too present, _h_’s had been for
a couple of years the principal ornament, he had moved to and fro
before her as on the small sanded floor of their contracted future. She
was conscious now of the improvement of not having to take her present
and her future at once. They were about as much as she could manage
when taken separate.

She had, none the less, to give her mind steadily to what Mr. Mudge had
again written her about, the idea of her applying for a transfer to an
office quite similar—she couldn’t yet hope for a place in a
bigger—under the very roof where he was foreman, so that, dangled
before her every minute of the day, he should see her, as he called it,
“hourly,” and in a part, the far N.W. district, where, with her mother,
she would save on their two rooms alone nearly three shillings. It
would be far from dazzling to exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it
wore upon her much that he could never drop a subject; still, it didn’t
wear as things _had_ worn, the worries of the early times of their
great misery, her own, her mother’s and her elder sister’s—the last of
whom had succumbed to all but absolute want when, as conscious and
incredulous ladies, suddenly bereft, betrayed, overwhelmed, they had
slipped faster and faster down the steep slope at the bottom of which
she alone had rebounded. Her mother had never rebounded any more at the
bottom than on the way; had only rumbled and grumbled down and down,
making, in respect of caps, topics and “habits,” no effort
whatever—which simply meant smelling much of the time of whiskey.




CHAPTER II.


It was always rather quiet at Cocker’s while the contingent from
Ladle’s and Thrupp’s and all the other great places were at luncheon,
or, as the young men used vulgarly to say, while the animals were
feeding. She had forty minutes in advance of this to go home for her
own dinner; and when she came back and one of the young men took his
turn there was often half an hour during which she could pull out a bit
of work or a book—a book from the place where she borrowed novels, very
greasy, in fine print and all about fine folks, at a ha’penny a day.
This sacred pause was one of the numerous ways in which the
establishment kept its finger on the pulse of fashion and fell into the
rhythm of the larger life. It had something to do, one day, with the
particular flare of importance of an arriving customer, a lady whose
meals were apparently irregular, yet whom she was destined, she
afterwards found, not to forget. The girl was _blasée;_ nothing could
belong more, as she perfectly knew, to the intense publicity of her
profession; but she had a whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was
subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red
gleams in the grey, fitful needs to notice and to “care,” odd caprices
of curiosity. She had a friend who had invented a new career for
women—that of being in and out of people’s houses to look after the
flowers. Mrs. Jordan had a manner of her own of sounding this allusion;
“the flowers,” on her lips, were, in fantastic places, in happy homes,
as usual as the coals or the daily papers. She took charge of them, at
any rate, in all the rooms, at so much a month, and people were quickly
finding out what it was to make over this strange burden of the
pampered to the widow of a clergyman. The widow, on her side, dilating
on the initiations thus opened up to her, had been splendid to her
young friend, over the way she was made free of the greatest houses—the
way, especially when she did the dinner-tables, set out so often for
twenty, she felt that a single step more would transform her whole
social position. On its being asked of her then if she circulated only
in a sort of tropical solitude, with the upper servants for picturesque
natives, and on her having to assent to this glance at her limitations,
she had found a reply to the girl’s invidious question. “You’ve no
imagination, my dear!”—that was because a door more than half open to
the higher life couldn’t be called anything but a thin partition. Mrs.
Jordan’s imagination quite did away with the thickness.

Our young lady had not taken up the charge, had dealt with it
good-humouredly, just because she knew so well what to think of it. It
was at once one of her most cherished complaints and most secret
supports that people didn’t understand her, and it was accordingly a
matter of indifference to her that Mrs. Jordan shouldn’t; even though
Mrs. Jordan, handed down from their early twilight of gentility and
also the victim of reverses, was the only member of her circle in whom
she recognised an equal. She was perfectly aware that her imaginative
life was the life in which she spent most of her time; and she would
have been ready, had it been at all worth while, to contend that, since
her outward occupation didn’t kill it, it must be strong indeed.
Combinations of flowers and green-stuff, forsooth! What _she_ could
handle freely, she said to herself, was combinations of men and women.
The only weakness in her faculty came from the positive abundance of
her contact with the human herd; this was so constant, it had so the
effect of cheapening her privilege, that there were long stretches in
which inspiration, divination and interest quite dropped. The great
thing was the flashes, the quick revivals, absolute accidents all, and
neither to be counted on nor to be resisted. Some one had only
sometimes to put in a penny for a stamp and the whole thing was upon
her. She was so absurdly constructed that these were literally the
moments that made up—made up for the long stiffness of sitting there in
the stocks, made up for the cunning hostility of Mr. Buckton and the
importunate sympathy of the counter-clerk, made up for the daily deadly
flourishy letter from Mr. Mudge, made up even for the most haunting of
her worries, the rage at moments of not knowing how her mother did “get
it.”

She had surrendered herself moreover of late to a certain expansion of
her consciousness; something that seemed perhaps vulgarly accounted for
by the fact that, as the blast of the season roared louder and the
waves of fashion tossed their spray further over the counter, there
were more impressions to be gathered and really—for it came to
that—more life to be led. Definite at any rate it was that by the time
May was well started the kind of company she kept at Cocker’s had begun
to strike her as a reason—a reason she might almost put forward for a
policy of procrastination. It sounded silly, of course, as yet, to
plead such a motive, especially as the fascination of the place was
after all a sort of torment. But she liked her torment; it was a
torment she should miss at Chalk Farm. She was ingenious and uncandid,
therefore, about leaving the breadth of London a little longer between
herself and that austerity. If she hadn’t quite the courage in short to
say to Mr. Mudge that her actual chance for a play of mind was worth
any week the three shillings he desired to help her to save, she yet
saw something happen in the course of the month that in her heart of
hearts at least answered the subtle question. This was connected
precisely with the appearance of the memorable lady.




CHAPTER III.


She pushed in three bescribbled forms which the girl’s hand was quick
to appropriate, Mr. Buckton having so frequent a perverse instinct for
catching first any eye that promised the sort of entertainment with
which she had her peculiar affinity. The amusements of captives are
full of a desperate contrivance, and one of our young friend’s
ha’pennyworths had been the charming tale of _Picciola_. It was of
course the law of the place that they were never to take no notice, as
Mr. Buckton said, whom they served; but this also never prevented,
certainly on the same gentleman’s own part, what he was fond of
describing as the underhand game. Both her companions, for that matter,
made no secret of the number of favourites they had among the ladies;
sweet familiarities in spite of which she had repeatedly caught each of
them in stupidities and mistakes, confusions of identity and lapses of
observation that never failed to remind her how the cleverness of men
ends where the cleverness of women begins. “Marguerite, Regent Street.
Try on at six. All Spanish lace. Pearls. The full length.” That was the
first; it had no signature. “Lady Agnes Orme, Hyde Park Place.
Impossible to-night, dining Haddon. Opera to-morrow, promised Fritz,
but could do play Wednesday. Will try Haddon for Savoy, and anything in
the world you like, if you can get Gussy. Sunday Montenero. Sit Mason
Monday, Tuesday. Marguerite awful. Cissy.” That was the second. The
third, the girl noted when she took it, was on a foreign form:
“Everard, Hôtel Brighton, Paris. Only understand and believe. 22nd to
26th, and certainly 8th and 9th. Perhaps others. Come. Mary.”

Mary was very handsome, the handsomest woman, she felt in a moment, she
had ever seen—or perhaps it was only Cissy. Perhaps it was both, for
she had seen stranger things than that—ladies wiring to different
persons under different names. She had seen all sorts of things and
pieced together all sorts of mysteries. There had once been one—not
long before—who, without winking, sent off five over five different
signatures. Perhaps these represented five different friends who had
asked her—all women, just as perhaps now Mary and Cissy, or one or
other of them, were wiring by deputy. Sometimes she put in too much—too
much of her own sense; sometimes she put in too little; and in either
case this often came round to her afterwards, for she had an
extraordinary way of keeping clues. When she noticed she noticed; that
was what it came to. There were days and days, there were weeks
sometimes, of vacancy. This arose often from Mr. Buckton’s devilish and
successful subterfuges for keeping her at the sounder whenever it
looked as if anything might arouse; the sounder, which it was equally
his business to mind, being the innermost cell of captivity, a cage
within the cage, fenced oft from the rest by a frame of ground glass.
The counter-clerk would have played into her hands; but the
counter-clerk was really reduced to idiocy by the effect of his passion
for her. She flattered herself moreover, nobly, that with the
unpleasant conspicuity of this passion she would never have consented
to be obliged to him. The most she would ever do would be always to
shove off on him whenever she could the registration of letters, a job
she happened particularly to loathe. After the long stupors, at all
events, there almost always suddenly would come a sharp taste of
something; it was in her mouth before she knew it; it was in her mouth
now.

To Cissy, to Mary, whichever it was, she found her curiosity going out
with a rush, a mute effusion that floated back to her, like a returning
tide, the living colour and splendour of the beautiful head, the light
of eyes that seemed to reflect such utterly other things than the mean
things actually before them; and, above all, the high curt
consideration of a manner that even at bad moments was a magnificent
habit and of the very essence of the innumerable things—her beauty, her
birth, her father and mother, her cousins and all her ancestors—that
its possessor couldn’t have got rid of even had she wished. How did our
obscure little public servant know that for the lady of the telegrams
this was a bad moment? How did she guess all sorts of impossible
things, such as, almost on the very spot, the presence of drama at a
critical stage and the nature of the tie with the gentleman at the
Hôtel Brighton? More than ever before it floated to her through the
bars of the cage that this at last was the high reality, the bristling
truth that she had hitherto only patched up and eked out—one of the
creatures, in fine, in whom all the conditions for happiness actually
met, and who, in the air they made, bloomed with an unwitting
insolence. What came home to the girl was the way the insolence was
tempered by something that was equally a part of the distinguished
life, the custom of a flowerlike bend to the less fortunate—a dropped
fragrance, a mere quick breath, but which in fact pervaded and
lingered. The apparition was very young, but certainly married, and our
fatigued friend had a sufficient store of mythological comparison to
recognise the port of Juno. Marguerite might be “awful,” but she knew
how to dress a goddess.

Pearls and Spanish lace—she herself, with assurance, could see them,
and the “full length” too, and also red velvet bows, which, disposed on
the lace in a particular manner (she could have placed them with the
turn of a hand) were of course to adorn the front of a black brocade
that would be like a dress in a picture. However, neither Marguerite
nor Lady Agnes nor Haddon nor Fritz nor Gussy was what the wearer of
this garment had really come in for. She had come in for Everard—and
that was doubtless not his true name either. If our young lady had
never taken such jumps before it was simply that she had never before
been so affected. She went all the way. Mary and Cissy had been round
together, in their single superb person, to see him—he must live round
the corner; they had found that, in consequence of something they had
come, precisely, to make up for or to have another scene about, he had
gone off—gone off just on purpose to make them feel it; on which they
had come together to Cocker’s as to the nearest place; where they had
put in the three forms partly in order not to put in the one alone. The
two others in a manner, covered it, muffled it, passed it off. Oh yes,
she went all the way, and this was a specimen of how she often went.
She would know the hand again any time. It was as handsome and as
everything else as the woman herself. The woman herself had, on
learning his flight, pushed past Everard’s servant and into his room;
she had written her missive at his table and with his pen. All this,
every inch of it, came in the waft that she blew through and left
behind her, the influence that, as I have said, lingered. And among the
things the girl was sure of, happily, was that she should see her
again.




CHAPTER IV.


She saw her in fact, and only ten days later; but this time not alone,
and that was exactly a part of the luck of it. Not unaware—as how could
her observation have left her so?—of the possibilities through which it
could range, our young lady had ever since had in her mind a dozen
conflicting theories about Everard’s type; as to which, the instant
they came into the place, she felt the point settled with a thump that
seemed somehow addressed straight to her heart. That organ literally
beat faster at the approach of the gentleman who was this time with
Cissy, and who, as seen from within the cage, became on the spot the
happiest of the happy circumstances with which her mind had invested
the friend of Fritz and Gussy. He was a very happy circumstance indeed
as, with his cigarette in his lips and his broken familiar talk caught
by his companion, he put down the half-dozen telegrams it would take
them together several minutes to dispatch. And here it occurred, oddly
enough, that if, shortly before the girl’s interest in his companion
had sharpened her sense for the messages then transmitted, her
immediate vision of himself had the effect, while she counted his
seventy words, of preventing intelligibility. _His_ words were mere
numbers, they told her nothing whatever; and after he had gone she was
in possession of no name, of no address, of no meaning, of nothing but
a vague sweet sound and an immense impression. He had been there but
five minutes, he had smoked in her face, and, busy with his telegrams,
with the tapping pencil and the conscious danger, the odious betrayal
that would come from a mistake, she had had no wandering glances nor
roundabout arts to spare. Yet she had taken him in; she knew
everything; she had made up her mind.

He had come back from Paris; everything was re-arranged; the pair were
again shoulder to shoulder in their high encounter with life, their
large and complicated game. The fine soundless pulse of this game was
in the air for our young woman while they remained in the shop. While
they remained? They remained all day; their presence continued and
abode with her, was in everything she did till nightfall, in the
thousands of other words she counted, she transmitted, in all the
stamps she detached and the letters she weighed and the change she
gave, equally unconscious and unerring in each of these particulars,
and not, as the run on the little office thickened with the afternoon
hours, looking up at a single ugly face in the long sequence, nor
really hearing the stupid questions that she patiently and perfectly
answered. All patience was possible now, all questions were stupid
after his, all faces were ugly. She had been sure she should see the
lady again; and even now she should perhaps, she should probably, see
her often. But for him it was totally different; she should never never
see him. She wanted it too much. There was a kind of wanting that
helped—she had arrived, with her rich experience, at that
generalisation; and there was another kind that was fatal. It was this
time the fatal kind; it would prevent.

Well, she saw him the very next day, and on this second occasion it was
quite different; the sense of every syllable he paid for was fiercely
distinct; she indeed felt her progressive pencil, dabbing as if with a
quick caress the marks of his own, put life into every stroke. He was
there a long time—had not brought his forms filled out but worked them
off in a nook on the counter; and there were other people as well—a
changing pushing cluster, with every one to mind at once and endless
right change to make and information to produce. But she kept hold of
him throughout; she continued, for herself, in a relation with him as
close as that in which, behind the hated ground glass, Mr. Buckton
luckily continued with the sounder. This morning everything changed,
but rather to dreariness; she had to swallow the rebuff to her theory
about fatal desires, which she did without confusion and indeed with
absolute levity; yet if it was now flagrant that he did live close at
hand—at Park Chambers—and belonged supremely to the class that wired
everything, even their expensive feelings (so that, as he never wrote,
his correspondence cost him weekly pounds and pounds, and he might be
in and out five times a day) there was, all the same, involved in the
prospect, and by reason of its positive excess of light, a perverse
melancholy, a gratuitous misery. This was at once to give it a place in
an order of feelings on which I shall presently touch.

Meanwhile, for a month, he was very constant. Cissy, Mary, never
re-appeared with him; he was always either alone or accompanied only by
some gentleman who was lost in the blaze of his glory. There was
another sense, however—and indeed there was more than one—in which she
mostly found herself counting in the splendid creature with whom she
had originally connected him. He addressed this correspondent neither
as Mary nor as Cissy; but the girl was sure of whom it was, in Eaten
Square, that he was perpetually wiring to—and all so irreproachably!—as
Lady Bradeen. Lady Bradeen was Cissy, Lady Bradeen was Mary, Lady
Bradeen was the friend of Fritz and of Gussy, the customer of
Marguerite, and the close ally in short (as was ideally right, only the
girl had not yet found a descriptive term that was) of the most
magnificent of men. Nothing could equal the frequency and variety of
his communications to her ladyship but their extraordinary, their
abysmal propriety. It was just the talk—so profuse sometimes that she
wondered what was left for their real meetings—of the very happiest
people. Their real meetings must have been constant, for half of it was
appointments and allusions, all swimming in a sea of other allusions
still, tangled in a complexity of questions that gave a wondrous image
of their life. If Lady Bradeen was Juno it was all certainly Olympian.
If the girl, missing the answers, her ladyship’s own outpourings,
vainly reflected that Cocker’s should have been one of the bigger
offices where telegrams arrived as well as departed, there were yet
ways in which, on the whole, she pressed the romance closer by reason
of the very quantity of imagination it demanded and consumed. The days
and hours of this new friend, as she came to account him, were at all
events unrolled, and however much more she might have known she would
still have wished to go beyond. In fact she did go beyond; she went
quite far enough.

But she could none the less, even after a month, scarce have told if
the gentlemen who came in with him recurred or changed; and this in
spite of the fact that they too were always posting and wiring, smoking
in her face and signing or not signing. The gentlemen who came in with
him were nothing when he was there. They turned up alone at other
times—then only perhaps with a dim richness of reference. He himself,
absent as well as present, was all. He was very tall, very fair, and
had, in spite of his thick preoccupations, a good-humour that was
exquisite, particularly as it so often had the effect of keeping him
on. He could have reached over anybody, and anybody—no matter who—would
have let him; but he was so extraordinarily kind that he quite
pathetically waited, never waggling things at her out of his turn nor
saying “Here!” with horrid sharpness. He waited for pottering old
ladies, for gaping slaveys, for the perpetual Buttonses from Thrupp’s;
and the thing in all this that she would have liked most unspeakably to
put to the test was the possibility of her having for him a personal
identity that might in a particular way appeal. There were moments when
he actually struck her as on her side, as arranging to help, to
support, to spare her.

But such was the singular spirit of our young friend that she could
remind herself with a pang that when people had awfully good
manners—people of that class,—you couldn’t tell. These manners were for
everybody, and it might be drearily unavailing for any poor particular
body to be overworked and unusual. What he did take for granted was all
sorts of facility; and his high pleasantness, his relighting of
cigarettes while he waited, his unconscious bestowal of opportunities,
of boons, of blessings, were all a part of his splendid security, the
instinct that told him there was nothing such an existence as his could
ever lose by. He was somehow all at once very bright and very grave,
very young and immensely complete; and whatever he was at any moment it
was always as much as all the rest the mere bloom of his beatitude. He
was sometimes Everard, as he had been at the Hôtel Brighton, and he was
sometimes Captain Everard. He was sometimes Philip with his surname and
sometimes Philip without it. In some directions he was merely Phil, in
others he was merely Captain. There were relations in which he was none
of these things, but a quite different person—“the Count.” There were
several friends for whom he was William. There were several for whom,
in allusion perhaps to his complexion, he was “the Pink ‘Un.” Once,
once only by good luck, he had, coinciding comically, quite
miraculously, with another person also near to her, been “Mudge.” Yes,
whatever he was, it was a part of his happiness—whatever he was and
probably whatever he wasn’t. And his happiness was a part—it became so
little by little—of something that, almost from the first of her being
at Cocker’s, had been deeply with the girl.




CHAPTER V.


This was neither more nor less than the queer extension of her
experience, the double life that, in the cage, she grew at last to
lead. As the weeks went on there she lived more and more into the world
of whiffs and glimpses, she found her divinations work faster and
stretch further. It was a prodigious view as the pressure heightened, a
panorama fed with facts and figures, flushed with a torrent of colour
and accompanied with wondrous world-music. What it mainly came to at
this period was a picture of how London could amuse itself; and that,
with the running commentary of a witness so exclusively a witness,
turned for the most part to a hardening of the heart. The nose of this
observer was brushed by the bouquet, yet she could never really pluck
even a daisy. What could still remain fresh in her daily grind was the
immense disparity, the difference and contrast, from class to class, of
every instant and every motion. There were times when all the wires in
the country seemed to start from the little hole-and-corner where she
plied for a livelihood, and where, in the shuffle of feet, the flutter
of “forms,” the straying of stamps and the ring of change over the
counter, the people she had fallen into the habit of remembering and
fitting together with others, and of having her theories and
interpretations of, kept up before her their long procession and
rotation. What twisted the knife in her vitals was the way the
profligate rich scattered about them, in extravagant chatter over their
extravagant pleasures and sins, an amount of money that would have held
the stricken household of her frightened childhood, her poor pinched
mother and tormented father and lost brother and starved sister,
together for a lifetime. During her first weeks she had often gasped at
the sums people were willing to pay for the stuff they transmitted—the
“much love”s, the “awful” regrets, the compliments and wonderments and
vain vague gestures that cost the price of a new pair of boots. She had
had a way then of glancing at the people’s faces, but she had early
learnt that if you became a telegraphist you soon ceased to be
astonished. Her eye for types amounted nevertheless to genius, and
there were those she liked and those she hated, her feeling for the
latter of which grew to a positive possession, an instinct of
observation and detection. There were the brazen women, as she called
them, of the higher and the lower fashion, whose squanderings and
graspings, whose struggles and secrets and love-affairs and lies, she
tracked and stored up against them till she had at moments, in private,
a triumphant vicious feeling of mastery and ease, a sense of carrying
their silly guilty secrets in her pocket, her small retentive brain,
and thereby knowing so much more about them than they suspected or
would care to think. There were those she would have liked to betray,
to trip up, to bring down with words altered and fatal; and all through
a personal hostility provoked by the lightest signs, by their accidents
of tone and manner, by the particular kind of relation she always
happened instantly to feel.

There were impulses of various kinds, alternately soft and severe, to
which she was constitutionally accessible and which were determined by
the smallest accidents. She was rigid in general on the article of
making the public itself affix its stamps, and found a special
enjoyment in dealing to that end with some of the ladies who were too
grand to touch them. She had thus a play of refinement and subtlety
greater, she flattered herself, than any of which she could be made the
subject; and though most people were too stupid to be conscious of this
it brought her endless small consolations and revenges. She recognised
quite as much those of her sex whom she would have liked to help, to
warn, to rescue, to see more of; and that alternative as well operated
exactly through the hazard of personal sympathy, her vision for silver
threads and moonbeams and her gift for keeping the clues and finding
her way in the tangle. The moonbeams and silver threads presented at
moments all the vision of what poor _she_ might have made of happiness.
Blurred and blank as the whole thing often inevitably, or mercifully,
became, she could still, through crevices and crannies, be stupefied,
especially by what, in spite of all seasoning, touched the sorest place
in her consciousness, the revelation of the golden shower flying about
without a gleam of gold for herself. It remained prodigious to the end,
the money her fine friends were able to spend to get still more, or
even to complain to fine friends of their own that they were in want.
The pleasures they proposed were equalled only by those they declined,
and they made their appointments often so expensively that she was left
wondering at the nature of the delights to which the mere approaches
were so paved with shillings. She quivered on occasion into the
perception of this and that one whom she would on the chance have just
simply liked to _be_. Her conceit, her baffled vanity, was possibly
monstrous; she certainly often threw herself into a defiant conviction
that she would have done the whole thing much better. But her greatest
comfort, mostly, was her comparative vision of the men; by whom I mean
the unmistakeable gentlemen, for she had no interest in the spurious or
the shabby and no mercy at all for the poor. She could have found a
sixpence, outside, for an appearance of want; but her fancy, in some
directions so alert, had never a throb of response for any sign of the
sordid. The men she did track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one
relation, the relation as to which the cage convinced her, she
believed, more than anything else could have done, that it was quite
the most diffused.

She found her ladies, in short, almost always in communication with her
gentlemen, and her gentlemen with her ladies, and she read into the
immensity of their intercourse stories and meanings without end.
Incontestably she grew to think that the men cut the best figure; and
in this particular, as in many others, she arrived at a philosophy of
her own, all made up of her private notations and cynicisms. It was a
striking part of the business, for example, that it was much more the
women, on the whole, who were after the men than the men who were after
the women: it was literally visible that the general attitude of the
one sex was that of the object pursued and defensive, apologetic and
attenuating, while the light of her own nature helped her more or less
to conclude as to the attitude of the other. Perhaps she herself a
little even fell into the custom of pursuit in occasionally deviating
only for gentlemen from her high rigour about the stamps. She had early
in the day made up her mind, in fine, that they had the best manners;
and if there were none of them she noticed when Captain Everard was
there, there were plenty she could place and trace and name at other
times, plenty who, with their way of being “nice” to her, and of
handling, as if their pockets were private tills loose mixed masses of
silver and gold, were such pleasant appearances that she could envy
them without dislike. _They_ never had to give change—they only had to
get it. They ranged through every suggestion, every shade of fortune,
which evidently included indeed lots of bad luck as well as of good,
declining even toward Mr. Mudge and his bland firm thrift, and
ascending, in wild signals and rocket-flights, almost to within hail of
her highest standard. So from month to month she went on with them all,
through a thousand ups and downs and a thousand pangs and
indifferences. What virtually happened was that in the shuffling herd
that passed before her by far the greater part only passed—a proportion
but just appreciable stayed. Most of the elements swam straight away,
lost themselves in the bottomless common, and by so doing really kept
the page clear. On the clearness therefore what she did retain stood
sharply out; she nipped and caught it, turned it over and interwove it.




CHAPTER VI.


She met Mrs. Jordan when she could, and learned from her more and more
how the great people, under her gentle shake and after going through
everything with the mere shops, were waking up to the gain of putting
into the hands of a person of real refinement the question that the
shop-people spoke of so vulgarly as that of the floral decorations. The
regular dealers in these decorations were all very well; but there was
a peculiar magic in the play of taste of a lady who had only to
remember, through whatever intervening dusk, all her own little tables,
little bowls and little jars and little other arrangements, and the
wonderful thing she had made of the garden of the vicarage. This small
domain, which her young friend had never seen, bloomed in Mrs. Jordan’s
discourse like a new Eden, and she converted the past into a bank of
violets by the tone in which she said “Of course you always knew my one
passion!” She obviously met now, at any rate, a big contemporary need,
measured what it was rapidly becoming for people to feel they could
trust her without a tremor. It brought them a peace that—during the
quarter of an hour before dinner in especial—was worth more to them
than mere payment could express. Mere payment, none the less, was
tolerably prompt; she engaged by the month, taking over the whole
thing; and there was an evening on which, in respect to our heroine,
she at last returned to the charge. “It’s growing and growing, and I
see that I must really divide the work. One wants an associate—of one’s
own kind, don’t you know? You know the look they want it all to
have?—of having come, not from a florist, but from one of themselves.
Well, I’m sure _you_ could give it—because you _are_ one. Then we
_should_ win. Therefore just come in with me.”

“And leave the P.O.?”

“Let the P.O. simply bring you your letters. It would bring you lots,
you’d see: orders, after a bit, by the score.” It was on this, in due
course, that the great advantage again came up: “One seems to live
again with one’s own people.” It had taken some little time (after
their having parted company in the tempest of their troubles and then,
in the glimmering dawn, finally sighted each other again) for each to
admit that the other was, in her private circle, her only equal, but
the admission came, when it did come, with an honest groan; and since
equality was named, each found much personal profit in exaggerating the
other’s original grandeur. Mrs. Jordan was ten years the older, but her
young friend was struck with the smaller difference this now made: it
had counted otherwise at the time when, much more as a friend of her
mother’s, the bereaved lady, without a penny of provision and with
stopgaps, like their own, all gone, had, across the sordid landing on
which the opposite doors of the pair of scared miseries opened and to
which they were bewilderedly bolted, borrowed coals and umbrellas that
were repaid in potatoes and postage-stamps. It had been a questionable
help, at that time, to ladies submerged, floundering, panting, swimming
for their lives, that they were ladies; but such an advantage could
come up again in proportion as others vanished, and it had grown very
great by the time it was the only ghost of one they possessed. They had
literally watched it take to itself a portion of the substance of each
that had departed; and it became prodigious now, when they could talk
of it together, when they could look back at it across a desert of
accepted derogation, and when, above all, they could together work up a
credulity about it that neither could otherwise work up. Nothing was
really so marked as that they felt the need to cultivate this legend
much more after having found their feet and stayed their stomachs in
the ultimate obscure than they had done in the upper air of mere
frequent shocks. The thing they could now oftenest say to each other
was that they knew what they meant; and the sentiment with which, all
round, they knew it was known had well-nigh amounted to a promise not
again to fall apart.

Mrs. Jordan was at present fairly dazzling on the subject of the way
that, in the practice of her fairy art, as she called it, she more than
peeped in—she penetrated. There was not a house of the great kind—and
it was of course only a question of those, real homes of luxury—in
which she was not, at the rate such people now had things, all over the
place. The girl felt before the picture the cold breath of
disinheritance as much as she had ever felt it in the cage; she knew
moreover how much she betrayed this, for the experience of poverty had
begun, in her life, too early, and her ignorance of the requirements of
homes of luxury had grown, with other active knowledge, a depth of
simplification. She had accordingly at first often found that in these
colloquies she could only pretend she understood. Educated as she had
rapidly been by her chances at Cocker’s, there were still strange gaps
in her learning—she could never, like Mrs. Jordan, have found her way
about one of the “homes.” Little by little, however, she had caught on,
above all in the light of what Mrs. Jordan’s redemption had materially
made of that lady, giving her, though the years and the struggles had
naturally not straightened a feature, an almost super-eminent air.
There were women in and out of Cocker’s who were quite nice and who yet
didn’t look well; whereas Mrs. Jordan looked well and yet, with her
extraordinarily protrusive teeth, was by no means quite nice. It would
seem, mystifyingly, that it might really come from all the greatness
she could live with. It was fine to hear her talk so often of dinners
of twenty and of her doing, as she said, exactly as she liked with
them. She spoke as if, for that matter, she invited the company. “They
simply give me the table—all the rest, all the other effects, come
afterwards.”




CHAPTER VII.


“Then you _do_ see them?” the girl again asked.

Mrs. Jordan hesitated, and indeed the point had been ambiguous before.
“Do you mean the guests?”

Her young friend, cautious about an undue exposure of innocence, was
not quite sure. “Well—the people who live there.”

“Lady Ventnor? Mrs. Bubb? Lord Rye? Dear, yes. Why they _like_ one.”

“But does one personally _know_ them?” our young lady went on, since
that was the way to speak. “I mean socially, don’t you know?—as you
know _me_.”

“They’re not so nice as you!” Mrs. Jordan charmingly cried. “But I
_shall_ see more and more of them.”

Ah this was the old story. “But how soon?”

“Why almost any day. Of course,” Mrs. Jordan honestly added, “they’re
nearly always out.”

“Then why do they want flowers all over?”

“Oh that doesn’t make any difference.” Mrs. Jordan was not philosophic;
she was just evidently determined it _shouldn’t_ make any. “They’re
awfully interested in my ideas, and it’s inevitable they should meet me
over them.”

Her interlocutress was sturdy enough. “What do you call your ideas?”

Mrs. Jordan’s reply was fine. “If you were to see me some day with a
thousand tulips you’d discover.”

“A thousand?”—the girl gaped at such a revelation of the scale of it;
she felt for the instant fairly planted out. “Well, but if in fact they
never do meet you?” she none the less pessimistically insisted.

“Never? They _often_ do—and evidently quite on purpose. We have grand
long talks.”

There was something in our young lady that could still stay her from
asking for a personal description of these apparitions; that showed too
starved a state. But while she considered she took in afresh the whole
of the clergyman’s widow. Mrs. Jordan couldn’t help her teeth, and her
sleeves were a distinct rise in the world. A thousand tulips at a
shilling clearly took one further than a thousand words at a penny; and
the betrothed of Mr. Mudge, in whom the sense of the race for life was
always acute, found herself wondering, with a twinge of her easy
jealousy, if it mightn’t after all then, for _her_ also, be
better—better than where she was—to follow some such scent. Where she
was was where Mr. Buckton’s elbow could freely enter her right side and
the counter-clerk’s breathing—he had something the matter with his
nose—pervade her left ear. It was something to fill an office under
Government, and she knew but too well there were places commoner still
than Cocker’s; but it needed no great range of taste to bring home to
her the picture of servitude and promiscuity she couldn’t but offer to
the eye of comparative freedom. She was so boxed up with her young men,
and anything like a margin so absent, that it needed more art than she
should ever possess to pretend in the least to compass, with any one in
the nature of an acquaintance—say with Mrs. Jordan herself, flying in,
as it might happen, to wire sympathetically to Mrs. Bubb—an approach to
a relation of elegant privacy. She remembered the day when Mrs. Jordan
_had_, in fact, by the greatest chance, come in with fifty-three words
for Lord Rye and a five-pound note to change. This had been the
dramatic manner of their reunion—their mutual recognition was so great
an event. The girl could at first only see her from the waist up,
besides making but little of her long telegram to his lordship. It was
a strange whirligig that had converted the clergyman’s widow into such
a specimen of the class that went beyond the sixpence.

Nothing of the occasion, all the more, had ever become dim; least of
all the way that, as her recovered friend looked up from counting, Mrs.
Jordan had just blown, in explanation, through her teeth and through
the bars of the cage: “I _do_ flowers, you know.” Our young woman had
always, with her little finger crooked out, a pretty movement for
counting; and she had not forgotten the small secret advantage, a
sharpness of triumph it might even have been called, that fell upon her
at this moment and avenged her for the incoherence of the message, an
unintelligible enumeration of numbers, colours, days, hours. The
correspondence of people she didn’t know was one thing; but the
correspondence of people she did had an aspect of its own for her even
when she couldn’t understand it. The speech in which Mrs. Jordan had
defined a position and announced a profession was like a tinkle of
bluebells; but for herself her one idea about flowers was that people
had them at funerals, and her present sole gleam of light was that
lords probably had them most. When she watched, a minute later, through
the cage, the swing of her visitor’s departing petticoats, she saw the
sight from the waist down; and when the counter-clerk, after a mere
male glance, remarked, with an intention unmistakeably low, “Handsome
woman!” she had for him the finest of her chills: “She’s the widow of a
bishop.” She always felt, with the counter-clerk, that it was
impossible sufficiently to put it on; for what she wished to express to
him was the maximum of her contempt, and that element in her nature was
confusedly stored. “A bishop” was putting it on, but the
counter-clerk’s approaches were vile. The night, after this, when, in
the fulness of time, Mrs. Jordan mentioned the grand long talks, the
girl at last brought out: “Should _I_ see them?—I mean if I _were_ to
give up everything for you.”

Mrs. Jordan at this became most arch. “I’d send you to all the
bachelors!”

Our young lady could be reminded by such a remark that she usually
struck her friend as pretty. “Do _they_ have their flowers?”

“Oceans. And they’re the most particular.” Oh it was a wonderful world.
“You should see Lord Rye’s.”

“His flowers?”

“Yes, and his letters. He writes me pages on pages—with the most
adorable little drawings and plans. You should see his diagrams!”




CHAPTER VIII.


The girl had in course of time every opportunity to inspect these
documents, and they a little disappointed her; but in the mean while
there had been more talk, and it had led to her saying, as if her
friend’s guarantee of a life of elegance were not quite definite:
“Well, I see every one at _my_ place.”

“Every one?”

“Lots of swells. They flock. They live, you know, all round, and the
place is filled with all the smart people, all the fast people, those
whose names are in the papers—mamma has still The _Morning Post_—and
who come up for the season.”

Mrs. Jordan took this in with complete intelligence. “Yes, and I dare
say it’s some of your people that _I_ do.”

Her companion assented, but discriminated. “I doubt if you ‘do’ them as
much as I! Their affairs, their appointments and arrangements, their
little games and secrets and vices—those things all pass before me.”

This was a picture that could make a clergyman’s widow not
imperceptibly gasp; it was in intention moreover something of a retort
to the thousand tulips. “Their vices? Have they got vices?”

Our young critic even more overtly stared then with a touch of contempt
in her amusement: “Haven’t you found _that_ out?” The homes of luxury
then hadn’t so much to give. “_I_ find out everything.”

Mrs. Jordan, at bottom a very meek person, was visibly struck. “I see.
You do ‘have’ them.”

“Oh I don’t care! Much good it does me!”

Mrs. Jordan after an instant recovered her superiority. “No—it doesn’t
lead to much.” Her own initiations so clearly did. Still—after all; and
she was not jealous: “There must be a charm.”

“In seeing them?” At this the girl suddenly let herself go. “I hate
them. There’s that charm!”

Mrs. Jordan gaped again. “The _real_ ‘smarts’?”

“Is that what you call Mrs. Bubb? Yes—it comes to me; I’ve had Mrs.
Bubb. I don’t think she has been in herself, but there are things her
maid has brought. Well, my dear!”—and the young person from Cocker’s,
recalling these things and summing them up, seemed suddenly to have
much to say. She didn’t say it, however; she checked it; she only
brought out: “Her maid, who’s horrid—_she_ must have her!” Then she
went on with indifference: “They’re _too_ real! They’re selfish
brutes.”

Mrs. Jordan, turning it over, adopted at last the plan of treating it
with a smile. She wished to be liberal. “Well, of course, they do lay
it out.”

“They bore me to death,” her companion pursued with slightly more
temperance.

But this was going too far. “Ah that’s because you’ve no sympathy!”

The girl gave an ironic laugh, only retorting that nobody could have
any who had to count all day all the words in the dictionary; a
contention Mrs. Jordan quite granted, the more that she shuddered at
the notion of ever failing of the very gift to which she owed the
vogue—the rage she might call it—that had caught her up. Without
sympathy—or without imagination, for it came back again to that—how
should she get, for big dinners, down the middle and toward the far
corners at all? It wasn’t the combinations, which were easily managed:
the strain was over the ineffable simplicities, those that the
bachelors above all, and Lord Rye perhaps most of any, threw off—just
blew off like cigarette-puffs—such sketches of. The betrothed of Mr.
Mudge at all events accepted the explanation, which had the effect, as
almost any turn of their talk was now apt to have, of bringing her
round to the terrific question of that gentleman. She was tormented
with the desire to get out of Mrs. Jordan, on this subject, what she
was sure was at the back of Mrs. Jordan’s head; and to get it out of
her, queerly enough, if only to vent a certain irritation at it. She
knew that what her friend would already have risked if she hadn’t been
timid and tortuous was: “Give him up—yes, give him up: you’ll see that
with your sure chances you’ll be able to do much better.”

Our young woman had a sense that if that view could only be put before
her with a particular sniff for poor Mr. Mudge she should hate it as
much as she morally ought. She was conscious of not, as yet, hating it
quite so much as that. But she saw that Mrs. Jordan was conscious of
something too, and that there was a degree of confidence she was
waiting little by little to arrive at. The day came when the girl
caught a glimpse of what was still wanting to make her friend feel
strong; which was nothing less than the prospect of being able to
announce the climax of sundry private dreams. The associate of the
aristocracy had personal calculations—matter for brooding and dreaming,
even for peeping out not quite hopelessly from behind the
window-curtains of lonely lodgings. If she did the flowers for the
bachelors, in short, didn’t she expect that to have consequences very
different from such an outlook at Cocker’s as she had pronounced wholly
desperate? There seemed in very truth something auspicious in the
mixture of bachelors and flowers, though, when looked hard in the eye,
Mrs. Jordan was not quite prepared to say she had expected a positive
proposal from Lord Rye to pop out of it. Our young woman arrived at
last, none the less, at a definite vision of what was in her mind. This
was a vivid foreknowledge that the betrothed of Mr. Mudge would, unless
conciliated in advance by a successful rescue, almost hate her on the
day she should break a particular piece of news. How could that
unfortunate otherwise endure to hear of what, under the protection of
Lady Ventnor, was after all so possible.




CHAPTER IX.


Meanwhile, since irritation sometimes relieved her, the betrothed of
Mr. Mudge found herself indebted to that admirer for amounts of it
perfectly proportioned to her fidelity. She always walked with him on
Sundays, usually in the Regent’s Park, and quite often, once or twice a
month he took her, in the Strand or thereabouts, to see a piece that
was having a run. The productions he always preferred were the really
good ones—Shakespeare, Thompson or some funny American thing; which, as
it also happened that she hated vulgar plays, gave him ground for what
was almost the fondest of his approaches, the theory that their tastes
were, blissfully, just the same. He was for ever reminding her of that,
rejoicing over it and being affectionate and wise about it. There were
times when she wondered how in the world she could “put up with” him,
how she could put up with any man so smugly unconscious of the
immensity of her difference. It was just for this difference that, if
she was to be liked at all, she wanted to be liked, and if that was not
the source of Mr. Mudge’s admiration, she asked herself what on earth
_could_ be? She was not different only at one point, she was different
all round; unless perhaps indeed in being practically human, which her
mind just barely recognised that he also was. She would have made
tremendous concessions in other quarters: there was no limit for
instance to those she would have made to Captain Everard; but what I
have named was the most she was prepared to do for Mr. Mudge. It was
because _he_ was different that, in the oddest way, she liked as well
as deplored him; which was after all a proof that the disparity, should
they frankly recognise it, wouldn’t necessarily be fatal. She felt
that, oleaginous—too oleaginous—as he was, he was somehow comparatively
primitive: she had once, during the portion of his time at Cocker’s
that had overlapped her own, seen him collar a drunken soldier, a big
violent man who, having come in with a mate to get a postal-order
cashed, had made a grab at the money before his friend could reach it
and had so determined, among the hams and cheeses and the lodgers from
Thrupp’s, immediate and alarming reprisals, a scene of scandal and
consternation. Mr. Buckton and the counter-clerk had crouched within
the cage, but Mr. Mudge had, with a very quiet but very quick step
round the counter, an air of masterful authority she shouldn’t soon
forget, triumphantly interposed in the scrimmage, parted the combatants
and shaken the delinquent in his skin. She had been proud of him at
that moment, and had felt that if their affair had not already been
settled the neatness of his execution would have left her without
resistance.

Their affair had been settled by other things: by the evident sincerity
of his passion and by the sense that his high white apron resembled a
front of many floors. It had gone a great way with her that he would
build up a business to his chin, which he carried quite in the air.
This could only be a question of time; he would have all Piccadilly in
the pen behind his ear. That was a merit in itself for a girl who had
known what she had known. There were hours at which she even found him
good-looking, though, frankly there could be no crown for her effort to
imagine on the part of the tailor or the barber some such treatment of
his appearance as would make him resemble even remotely a man of the
world. His very beauty was the beauty of a grocer, and the finest
future would offer it none too much room consistently to develop. She
had engaged herself in short to the perfection of a type, and almost
anything square and smooth and whole had its weight for a person still
conscious herself of being a mere bruised fragment of wreckage. But it
contributed hugely at present to carry on the two parallel lines of her
experience in the cage and her experience out of it. After keeping
quiet for some time about this opposition she suddenly—one Sunday
afternoon on a penny chair in the Regent’s Park—broke, for him,
capriciously, bewilderingly, into an intimation of what it came to. He
had naturally pressed more and more on the point of her again placing
herself where he could see her hourly, and for her to recognise that
she had as yet given him no sane reason for delay he had small need to
describe himself as unable to make out what she was up to. As if, with
her absurd bad reasons, she could have begun to tell him! Sometimes she
thought it would be amusing to let him have them full in the face, for
she felt she should die of him unless she once in a while stupefied
him; and sometimes she thought it would be disgusting and perhaps even
fatal. She liked him, however, to think her silly, for that gave her
the margin which at the best she would always require; and the only
difficulty about this was that he hadn’t enough imagination to oblige
her. It produced none the less something of the desired effect—to leave
him simply wondering why, over the matter of their reunion, she didn’t
yield to his arguments. Then at last, simply as if by accident and out
of mere boredom on a day that was rather flat, she preposterously
produced her own. “Well, wait a bit. Where I am I still see things.”
And she talked to him even worse, if possible, than she had talked to
Jordan.

Little by little, to her own stupefaction, she caught that he was
trying to take it as she meant it and that he was neither astonished
nor angry. Oh the British tradesman—this gave her an idea of his
resources! Mr. Mudge would be angry only with a person who, like the
drunken soldier in the shop, should have an unfavourable effect on
business. He seemed positively to enter, for the time and without the
faintest flash of irony or ripple of laughter, into the whimsical
grounds of her enjoyment of Cocker’s custom, and instantly to be
casting up whatever it might, as Mrs. Jordan had said, lead to. What he
had in mind was not of course what Mrs. Jordan had had: it was
obviously not a source of speculation with him that his sweetheart
might pick up a husband. She could see perfectly that this was not for
a moment even what he supposed she herself dreamed of. What she had
done was simply to give his sensibility another push into the dim vast
of trade. In that direction it was all alert, and she had whisked
before it the mild fragrance of a “connexion.” That was the most he
could see in any account of her keeping in, on whatever roundabout
lines, with the gentry; and when, getting to the bottom of this, she
quickly proceeded to show him the kind of eye she turned on such people
and to give him a sketch of what that eye discovered, she reduced him
to the particular prostration in which he could still be amusing to
her.




CHAPTER X.


“They’re the most awful wretches, I assure you—the lot all about
there.”

“Then why do you want to stay among them?”

“My dear man, just because they _are_. It makes me hate them so.”

“Hate them? I thought you liked them.”

“Don’t be stupid. What I ‘like’ is just to loathe them. You wouldn’t
believe what passes before my eyes.”

“Then why have you never told me? You didn’t mention anything before I
left.”

“Oh I hadn’t got round to it then. It’s the sort of thing you don’t
believe at first; you have to look round you a bit and then you
understand. You work into it more and more. Besides,” the girl went on,
“this is the time of the year when the worst lot come up. They’re
simply packed together in those smart streets. Talk of the numbers of
the poor! What _I_ can vouch for is the numbers of the rich! There are
new ones every day, and they seem to get richer and richer. Oh, they do
come up!” she cried, imitating for her private recreation—she was sure
it wouldn’t reach Mr. Mudge—the low intonation of the counter-clerk.

“And where do they come from?” her companion candidly enquired.

She had to think a moment; then she found something. “From the ‘spring
meetings.’ They bet tremendously.”

“Well, they bet enough at Chalk Farm, if that’s all.”

“It _isn’t_ all. It isn’t a millionth part!” she replied with some
sharpness. “It’s immense fun”—she would tantalise him. Then as she had
heard Mrs. Jordan say, and as the ladies at Cocker’s even sometimes
wired, “It’s quite too dreadful!” She could fully feel how it was Mr.
Mudge’s propriety, which was extreme—he had a horror of coarseness and
attended a Wesleyan chapel—that prevented his asking for details. But
she gave him some of the more innocuous in spite of himself, especially
putting before him how, at Simpkin’s and Ladle’s, they all made the
money fly. That was indeed what he liked to hear: the connexion was not
direct, but one was somehow more in the right place where the money was
flying than where it was simply and meagrely nesting. The air felt that
stir, he had to acknowledge, much less at Chalk Farm than in the
district in which his beloved so oddly enjoyed her footing. She gave
him, she could see, a restless sense that these might be familiarities
not to be sacrificed; germs, possibilities, faint foreshowings—heaven
knew what—of the initiation it would prove profitable to have arrived
at when in the fulness of time he should have his own shop in some such
paradise. What really touched him—that was discernible—was that she
could feed him with so much mere vividness of reminder, keep before
him, as by the play of a fan, the very wind of the swift bank-notes and
the charm of the existence of a class that Providence had raised up to
be the blessing of grocers. He liked to think that the class was there,
that it was always there, and that she contributed in her slight but
appreciable degree to keep it up to the mark. He couldn’t have
formulated his theory of the matter, but the exuberance of the
aristocracy was the advantage of trade, and everything was knit
together in a richness of pattern that it was good to follow with one’s
finger-tips. It was a comfort to him to be thus assured that there were
no symptoms of a drop. What did the sounder, as she called it, nimbly
worked, do but keep the ball going?

What it came to therefore for Mr. Mudge was that all enjoyments were,
as might be said, inter-related, and that the more people had the more
they wanted to have. The more flirtations, as he might roughly express
it, the more cheese and pickles. He had even in his own small way been
dimly struck with the linkèd sweetness connecting the tender passion
with cheap champagne, or perhaps the other way round. What he would
have liked to say had he been able to work out his thought to the end
was: “I see, I see. Lash them up then, lead them on, keep them going:
some of it can’t help, some time, coming _our_ way.” Yet he was
troubled by the suspicion of subtleties on his companion’s part that
spoiled the straight view. He couldn’t understand people’s hating what
they liked or liking what they hated; above all it hurt him
somewhere—for he had his private delicacies—to see anything _but_ money
made out of his betters. To be too enquiring, or in any other way too
free, at the expense of the gentry was vaguely wrong; the only thing
that was distinctly right was to be prosperous at any price. Wasn’t it
just because they were up there aloft that they were lucrative? He
concluded at any rate by saying to his young friend: “If it’s improper
for you to remain at Cocker’s, then that falls in exactly with the
other reasons I’ve put before you for your removal.”

“Improper?”—her smile became a prolonged boldness. “My dear boy,
there’s no one like you!”

“I dare say,” he laughed; “but that doesn’t help the question.”

“Well,” she returned, “I can’t give up my friends. I’m making even more
than Mrs. Jordan.”

Mr. Mudge considered. “How much is _she_ making?”

“Oh you dear donkey!”—and, regardless of all the Regent’s Park, she
patted his cheek. This was the sort of moment at which she was
absolutely tempted to tell him that she liked to be near Park Chambers.
There was a fascination in the idea of seeing if, on a mention of
Captain Everard, he wouldn’t do what she thought he might; wouldn’t
weigh against the obvious objection the still more obvious advantage.
The advantage of course could only strike him at the best as rather
fantastic; but it was always to the good to keep hold when you _had_
hold, and such an attitude would also after all involve a high tribute
to her fidelity. Of one thing she absolutely never doubted: Mr. Mudge
believed in her with a belief—! She believed in herself too, for that
matter: if there was a thing in the world no one could charge her with
it was being the kind of low barmaid person who rinsed tumblers and
bandied slang. But she forbore as yet to speak; she had not spoken even
to Mrs. Jordan; and the hush that on her lips surrounded the Captain’s
name maintained itself as a kind of symbol of the success that, up to
this time, had attended something or other—she couldn’t have said
what—that she humoured herself with calling, without words, her
relation with him.




CHAPTER XI.


She would have admitted indeed that it consisted of little more than
the fact that his absences, however frequent and however long, always
ended with his turning up again. It was nobody’s business in the world
but her own if that fact continued to be enough for her. It was of
course not enough just in itself; what it had taken on to make it so
was the extraordinary possession of the elements of his life that
memory and attention had at last given her. There came a day when this
possession on the girl’s part actually seemed to enjoy between them,
while their eyes met, a tacit recognition that was half a joke and half
a deep solemnity. He bade her good morning always now; he often quite
raised his hat to her. He passed a remark when there was time or room,
and once she went so far as to say to him that she hadn’t seen him for
“ages.” “Ages” was the word she consciously and carefully, though a
trifle tremulously used; “ages” was exactly what she meant. To this he
replied in terms doubtless less anxiously selected, but perhaps on that
account not the less remarkable, “Oh yes, hasn’t it been awfully wet?”
That was a specimen of their give and take; it fed her fancy that no
form of intercourse so transcendent and distilled had ever been
established on earth. Everything, so far as they chose to consider it
so, might mean almost anything. The want of margin in the cage, when he
peeped through the bars, wholly ceased to be appreciable. It was a
drawback only in superficial commerce. With Captain Everard she had
simply the margin of the universe. It may be imagined therefore how
their unuttered reference to all she knew about him could in this
immensity play at its ease. Every time he handed in a telegram it was
an addition to her knowledge: what did his constant smile mean to mark
if it didn’t mean to mark that? He never came into the place without
saying to her in this manner: “Oh yes, you have me by this time so
completely at your mercy that it doesn’t in the least matter what I
give you now. You’ve become a comfort, I assure you!”

She had only two torments; the greatest of which was that she couldn’t,
not even once or twice, touch with him on some individual fact. She
would have given anything to have been able to allude to one of his
friends by name, to one of his engagements by date, to one of his
difficulties by the solution. She would have given almost as much for
just the right chance—it would have to be tremendously right—to show
him in some sharp sweet way that she had perfectly penetrated the
greatest of these last and now lived with it in a kind of heroism of
sympathy. He was in love with a woman to whom, and to any view of whom,
a lady-telegraphist, and especially one who passed a life among hams
and cheeses, was as the sand on the floor; and what her dreams desired
was the possibility of its somehow coming to him that her own interest
in him could take a pure and noble account of such an infatuation and
even of such an impropriety. As yet, however, she could only rub along
with the hope that an accident, sooner or later, might give her a lift
toward popping out with something that would surprise and perhaps even,
some fine day, assist him. What could people mean moreover—cheaply
sarcastic people—by not feeling all that could be got out of the
weather? _She_ felt it all, and seemed literally to feel it most when
she went quite wrong, speaking of the stuffy days as cold, of the cold
ones as stuffy, and betraying how little she knew, in her cage, of
whether it was foul or fair. It was for that matter always stuffy at
Cocker’s, and she finally settled down to the safe proposition that the
outside element was “changeable.” Anything seemed true that made him so
radiantly assent.

This indeed is a small specimen of her cultivation of insidious ways of
making things easy for him—ways to which of course she couldn’t be at
all sure he did real justice. Real justice was not of this world: she
had had too often to come back to that; yet, strangely, happiness was,
and her traps had to be set for it in a manner to keep them unperceived
by Mr. Buckton and the counter-clerk. The most she could hope for apart
from the question, which constantly flickered up and died down, of the
divine chance of his consciously liking her, would be that, without
analysing it, he should arrive at a vague sense that Cocker’s was—well,
attractive; easier, smoother, sociably brighter, slightly more
picturesque, in short more propitious in general to his little affairs,
than any other establishment just thereabouts. She was quite aware that
they couldn’t be, in so huddled a hole, particularly quick; but she
found her account in the slowness—she certainly could bear it if _he_
could. The great pang was that just thereabouts post-offices were so
awfully thick. She was always seeing him in imagination in other places
and with other girls. But she would defy any other girl to follow him
as she followed. And though they weren’t, for so many reasons, quick at
Cocker’s, she could hurry for him when, through an intimation light as
air, she gathered that he was pressed.

When hurry was, better still, impossible, it was because of the
pleasantest thing of all, the particular element of their contact—she
would have called it their friendship—that consisted of an almost
humorous treatment of the look of some of his words. They would never
perhaps have grown half so intimate if he had not, by the blessing of
heaven, formed some of his letters with a queerness—! It was positive
that the queerness could scarce have been greater if he had practised
it for the very purpose of bringing their heads together over it as far
as was possible to heads on different sides of a wire fence. It had
taken her truly but once or twice to master these tricks, but, at the
cost of striking him perhaps as stupid, she could still challenge them
when circumstances favoured. The great circumstance that favoured was
that she sometimes actually believed he knew she only feigned
perplexity. If he knew it therefore he tolerated it; if he tolerated it
he came back; and if he came back he liked her. This was her seventh
heaven; and she didn’t ask much of his liking—she only asked of it to
reach the point of his not going away because of her own. He had at
times to be away for weeks; he had to lead his life; he had to
travel—there were places to which he was constantly wiring for “rooms”:
all this she granted him, forgave him; in fact, in the long run,
literally blessed and thanked him for. If he had to lead his life, that
precisely fostered his leading it so much by telegraph: therefore the
benediction was to come in when he could. That was all she asked—that
he shouldn’t wholly deprive her.

Sometimes she almost felt that he couldn’t have deprived her even had
he been minded, by reason of the web of revelation that was woven
between them. She quite thrilled herself with thinking what, with such
a lot of material, a bad girl would do. It would be a scene better than
many in her ha’penny novels, this going to him in the dusk of evening
at Park Chambers and letting him at last have it. “I know too much
about a certain person now not to put it to you—excuse my being so
lurid—that it’s quite worth your while to buy me off. Come, therefore;
buy me!” There was a point indeed at which such flights had to drop
again—the point of an unreadiness to name, when it came to that, the
purchasing medium. It wouldn’t certainly be anything so gross as money,
and the matter accordingly remained rather vague, all the more that
_she_ was not a bad girl. It wasn’t for any such reason as might have
aggravated a mere minx that she often hoped he would again bring Cissy.
The difficulty of this, however, was constantly present to her, for the
kind of communion to which Cocker’s so richly ministered rested on the
fact that Cissy and he were so often in different places. She knew by
this time all the places—Suchbury, Monkhouse, Whiteroy, Finches—and
even how the parties on these occasions were composed; but her subtlety
found ways to make her knowledge fairly protect and promote their
keeping, as she had heard Mrs. Jordan say, in touch. So, when he
actually sometimes smiled as if he really felt the awkwardness of
giving her again one of the same old addresses, all her being went out
in the desire—which her face must have expressed—that he should
recognise her forbearance to criticise as one of the finest tenderest
sacrifices a woman had ever made for love.




CHAPTER XII.


She was occasionally worried, however this might be, by the impression
that these sacrifices, great as they were, were nothing to those that
his own passion had imposed; if indeed it was not rather the passion of
his confederate, which had caught him up and was whirling him round
like a great steam-wheel. He was at any rate in the strong grip of a
dizzy splendid fate; the wild wind of his life blew him straight before
it. Didn’t she catch in his face at times, even through his smile and
his happy habit, the gleam of that pale glare with which a bewildered
victim appeals, as he passes, to some pair of pitying eyes? He perhaps
didn’t even himself know how scared he was; but _she_ knew. They were
in danger, they were in danger, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen: it
beat every novel in the shop. She thought of Mr. Mudge and his safe
sentiment; she thought of herself and blushed even more for her tepid
response to it. It was a comfort to her at such moments to feel that in
another relation—a relation supplying that affinity with her nature
that Mr. Mudge, deluded creature, would never supply—she should have
been no more tepid than her ladyship. Her deepest soundings were on two
or three occasions of finding herself almost sure that, if she dared,
her ladyship’s lover would have gathered relief from “speaking” to her.
She literally fancied once or twice that, projected as he was toward
his doom, her own eyes struck him, while the air roared in his ears, as
the one pitying pair in the crowd. But how could he speak to her while
she sat sandwiched there between the counter-clerk and the sounder?

She had long ago, in her comings and goings made acquaintance with Park
Chambers and reflected as she looked up at their luxurious front that
_they_, of course, would supply the ideal setting for the ideal speech.
There was not an object in London that, before the season was over, was
more stamped upon her brain. She went roundabout to pass it, for it was
not on the short way; she passed on the opposite side of the street and
always looked up, though it had taken her a long time to be sure of the
particular set of windows. She had made that out finally by an act of
audacity that at the time had almost stopped her heart-beats and that
in retrospect greatly quickened her blushes. One evening she had
lingered late and watched—watched for some moment when the porter, who
was in uniform and often on the steps, had gone in with a visitor. Then
she followed boldly, on the calculation that he would have taken the
visitor up and that the hall would be free. The hall _was_ free, and
the electric light played over the gilded and lettered board that
showed the names and numbers of the occupants of the different floors.
What she wanted looked straight at her—Captain Everard was on the
third. It was as if, in the immense intimacy of this, they were, for
the instant and the first time, face to face outside the cage. Alas!
they were face to face but a second or two: she was whirled out on the
wings of a panic fear that he might just then be entering or issuing.
This fear was indeed, in her shameless deflexions, never very far from
her, and was mixed in the oddest way with depressions and
disappointments. It was dreadful, as she trembled by, to run the risk
of looking to him as if she basely hung about; and yet it was dreadful
to be obliged to pass only at such moments as put an encounter out of
the question.

At the horrible hour of her first coming to Cocker’s he was always—it
was to be hoped—snug in bed; and at the hour of her final departure he
was of course—she had such things all on her fingers’-ends—dressing for
dinner. We may let it pass that if she couldn’t bring herself to hover
till he was dressed, this was simply because such a process for such a
person could only be terribly prolonged. When she went in the middle of
the day to her own dinner she had too little time to do anything but go
straight, though it must be added that for a real certainty she would
joyously have omitted the repast. She had made up her mind as to there
being on the whole no decent pretext to justify her flitting casually
past at three o’clock in the morning. That was the hour at which, if
the ha’penny novels were not all wrong, he probably came home for the
night. She was therefore reduced to the vainest figuration of the
miraculous meeting toward which a hundred impossibilities would have to
conspire. But if nothing was more impossible than the fact, nothing was
more intense than the vision. What may not, we can only moralise, take
place in the quickened muffled perception of a young person with an
ardent soul? All our humble friend’s native distinction, her refinement
of personal grain, of heredity, of pride, took refuge in this small
throbbing spot; for when she was most conscious of the objection of her
vanity and the pitifulness of her little flutters and manoeuvres, then
the consolation and the redemption were most sure to glow before her in
some just discernible sign. He did like her!




CHAPTER XIII.


He never brought Cissy back, but Cissy came one day without him, as
fresh as before from the hands of Marguerite, or only, at the season’s
end, a trifle less fresh. She was, however, distinctly less serene. She
had brought nothing with her and looked about with impatience for the
forms and the place to write. The latter convenience, at Cocker’s, was
obscure and barely adequate, and her clear voice had the light note of
disgust which her lover’s never showed as she responded with a “There?”
of surprise to the gesture made by the counter-clerk in answer to her
sharp question. Our young friend was busy with half a dozen people, but
she had dispatched them in her most businesslike manner by the time her
ladyship flung through the bars this light of re-appearance. Then the
directness with which the girl managed to receive the accompanying
missive was the result of the concentration that had caused her to make
the stamps fly during the few minutes occupied by the production of it.
This concentration, in turn, may be described as the effect of the
apprehension of imminent relief. It was nineteen days, counted and
checked off, since she had seen the object of her homage; and as, had
he been in London, she should, with his habits, have been sure to see
him often, she was now about to learn what other spot his presence
might just then happen to sanctify. For she thought of them, the other
spots, as ecstatically conscious of it, expressively happy in it.

But, gracious, how handsome _was_ her ladyship, and what an added price
it gave him that the air of intimacy he threw out should have flowed
originally from such a source! The girl looked straight through the
cage at the eyes and lips that must so often have been so near as
own—looked at them with a strange passion that for an instant had the
result of filling out some of the gaps, supplying the missing answers,
in his correspondence. Then as she made out that the features she thus
scanned and associated were totally unaware of it, that they glowed
only with the colour of quite other and not at all guessable thoughts,
this directly added to their splendour, gave the girl the sharpest
impression she had yet received of the uplifted, the unattainable
plains of heaven, and yet at the same time caused her to thrill with a
sense of the high company she did somehow keep. She was with the absent
through her ladyship and with her ladyship through the absent. The only
pang—but it didn’t matter—was the proof in the admirable face, in the
sightless preoccupation of its possessor, that the latter hadn’t a
notion of her. Her folly had gone to the point of half believing that
the other party to the affair must sometimes mention in Eaton Square
the extraordinary little person at the place from which he so often
wired. Yet the perception of her visitor’s blankness actually helped
this extraordinary little person, the next instant, to take refuge in a
reflexion that could be as proud as it liked. “How little she knows,
how little she knows!” the girl cried to herself; for what did that
show after all but that Captain Everard’s telegraphic confidant was
Captain Everard’s charming secret? Our young friend’s perusal of her
ladyship’s telegram was literally prolonged by a momentary daze: what
swam between her and the words, making her see them as through rippled
shallow sunshot water, was the great, the perpetual flood of “How much
_I_ know—how much _I_ know!” This produced a delay in her catching
that, on the face, these words didn’t give her what she wanted, though
she was prompt enough with her remembrance that her grasp was, half the
time, just of what was _not_ on the face. “Miss Dolman, Parade Lodge,
Parade Terrace, Dover. Let him instantly know right one, Hôtel de
France, Ostend. Make it seven nine four nine six one. Wire me
alternative Burfield’s.”

The girl slowly counted. Then he was at Ostend. This hooked on with so
sharp a click that, not to feel she was as quickly letting it all slip
from her, she had absolutely to hold it a minute longer and to do
something to that end. Thus it was that she did on this occasion what
she never did—threw off a “Reply paid?” that sounded officious, but
that she partly made up for by deliberately affixing the stamps and by
waiting till she had done so to give change. She had, for so much
coolness, the strength that she considered she knew all about Miss
Dolman.

“Yes—paid.” She saw all sorts of things in this reply, even to a small
suppressed start of surprise at so correct an assumption; even to an
attempt the next minute at a fresh air of detachment. “How much, with
the answer?” The calculation was not abstruse, but our intense observer
required a moment more to make it, and this gave her ladyship time for
a second thought. “Oh just wait!” The white begemmed hand bared to
write rose in sudden nervousness to the side of the wonderful face
which, with eyes of anxiety for the paper on the counter, she brought
closer to the bars of the cage. “I think I must alter a word!” On this
she recovered her telegram and looked over it again; but she had a new,
an obvious trouble, and studied it without deciding and with much of
the effect of making our young woman watch her.

This personage, meanwhile, at the sight of her expression, had decided
on the spot. If she had always been sure they were in danger her
ladyship’s expression was the best possible sign of it. There was a
word wrong, but she had lost the right one, and much clearly depended
on her finding it again. The girl, therefore, sufficiently estimating
the affluence of customers and the distraction of Mr. Buckton and the
counter-clerk, took the jump and gave it. “Isn’t it Cooper’s?”

It was as if she had bodily leaped—cleared the top of the cage and
alighted on her interlocutress. “Cooper’s?”—the stare was heightened by
a blush. Yes, she had made Juno blush.

This was all the greater reason for going on. “I mean instead of
Burfield’s.”

Our young friend fairly pitied her; she had made her in an instant so
helpless, and yet not a bit haughty nor outraged. She was only
mystified and scared. “Oh, you know—?”

“Yes, I know!” Our young friend smiled, meeting the other’s eyes, and,
having made Juno blush, proceeded to patronise her. “_I’ll_ do it”—she
put out a competent hand. Her ladyship only submitted, confused and
bewildered, all presence of mind quite gone; and the next moment the
telegram was in the cage again and its author out of the shop. Then
quickly, boldly, under all the eyes that might have witnessed her
tampering, the extraordinary little person at Cocker’s made the proper
change. People were really too giddy, and if they _were_, in a certain
case, to be caught, it shouldn’t be the fault of her own grand memory.
Hadn’t it been settled weeks before?—for Miss Dolman it was always to
be “Cooper’s.”




CHAPTER XIV.


But the summer “holidays” brought a marked difference; they were
holidays for almost every one but the animals in the cage. The August
days were flat and dry, and, with so little to feed it, she was
conscious of the ebb of her interest in the secrets of the refined. She
was in a position to follow the refined to the extent of knowing—they
had made so many of their arrangements with her aid—exactly where they
were; yet she felt quite as if the panorama had ceased unrolling and
the band stopped playing. A stray member of the latter occasionally
turned up, but the communications that passed before her bore now
largely on rooms at hotels, prices of furnished houses, hours of
trains, dates of sailings and arrangements for being “met”; she found
them for the most part prosaic and coarse. The only thing was that they
brought into her stuffy corner as straight a whiff of Alpine meadows
and Scotch moors as she might hope ever to inhale; there were moreover
in especial fat hot dull ladies who had out with her, to exasperation,
the terms for seaside lodgings, which struck her as huge, and the
matter of the number of beds required, which was not less portentous:
this in reference to places of which the names—Eastbourne, Folkestone,
Cromer, Scarborough, Whitby—tormented her with something of the sound
of the plash of water that haunts the traveller in the desert. She had
not been out of London for a dozen years, and the only thing to give a
taste to the present dead weeks was the spice of a chronic resentment.
The sparse customers, the people she did see, were the people who were
“just off”—off on the decks of fluttered yachts, off to the uttermost
point of rocky headlands where the very breeze was then playing for the
want of which she said to herself that she sickened.

There was accordingly a sense in which, at such a period, the great
differences of the human condition could press upon her more than ever;
a circumstance drawing fresh force in truth from the very fact of the
chance that at last, for a change, did squarely meet her—the chance to
be “off,” for a bit, almost as far as anybody. They took their turns in
the cage as they took them both in the shop and at Chalk Farm; she had
known these two months that time was to be allowed in September—no less
than eleven days—for her personal private holiday. Much of her recent
intercourse with Mr. Mudge had consisted of the hopes and fears,
expressed mainly by himself, involved in the question of their getting
the same dates—a question that, in proportion as the delight seemed
assured, spread into a sea of speculation over the choice of where and
how. All through July, on the Sunday evenings and at such other odd
times as he could seize, he had flooded their talk with wild waves of
calculation. It was practically settled that, with her mother,
somewhere “on the south coast” (a phrase of which she liked the sound)
they should put in their allowance together; but she already felt the
prospect quite weary and worn with the way he went round and round on
it. It had become his sole topic, the theme alike of his most solemn
prudences and most placid jests, to which every opening led for return
and revision and in which every little flower of a foretaste was pulled
up as soon as planted. He had announced at the earliest
day—characterising the whole business, from that moment, as their
“plans,” under which name he handled it as a Syndicate handles a
Chinese or other Loan—he had promptly declared that the question must
be thoroughly studied, and he produced, on the whole subject, from day
to day, an amount of information that excited her wonder and even, not
a little, as she frankly let him know, her disdain. When she thought of
the danger in which another pair of lovers rapturously lived she
enquired of him anew why he could leave nothing to chance. Then she got
for answer that this profundity was just his pride, and he pitted
Ramsgate against Bournemouth and even Boulogne against Jersey—for he
had great ideas—with all the mastery of detail that was some day,
professionally, to carry him afar.

The longer the time since she had seen Captain Everard the more she was
booked, as she called it, to pass Park Chambers; and this was the sole
amusement that in the lingering August days and the twilights sadly
drawn out it was left her to cultivate. She had long since learned to
know it for a feeble one, though its feebleness was perhaps scarce the
reason for her saying to herself each evening as her time for departure
approached: “No, no—not to-night.” She never failed of that silent
remark, any more than she failed of feeling, in some deeper place than
she had even yet fully sounded, that one’s remarks were as weak as
straws and that, however one might indulge in them at eight o’clock,
one’s fate infallibly declared itself in absolute indifference to them
at about eight-fifteen. Remarks were remarks, and very well for that;
but fate was fate, and this young lady’s was to pass Park Chambers
every night in the working week. Out of the immensity of her knowledge
of the life of the world there bloomed on these occasions as specific
remembrance that it was regarded in that region, in August and
September, as rather pleasant just to be caught for something or other
in passing through town. Somebody was always passing and somebody might
catch somebody else. It was in full cognisance of this subtle law that
she adhered to the most ridiculous circuit she could have made to get
home. One warm dull featureless Friday, when an accident had made her
start from Cocker’s a little later than usual, she became aware that
something of which the infinite possibilities had for so long peopled
her dreams was at last prodigiously upon her, though the perfection in
which the conditions happened to present it was almost rich enough to
be but the positive creation of a dream. She saw, straight before her,
like a vista painted in a picture, the empty street and the lamps that
burned pale in the dusk not yet established. It was into the
convenience of this quiet twilight that a gentleman on the doorstep of
the Chambers gazed with a vagueness that our young lady’s little figure
violently trembled, in the approach, with the measure of its power to
dissipate. Everything indeed grew in a flash terrific and distinct; her
old uncertainties fell away from her, and, since she was so familiar
with fate, she felt as if the very nail that fixed it were driven in by
the hard look with which, for a moment, Captain Everard awaited her.

The vestibule was open behind him and the porter as absent as on the
day she had peeped in; he had just come out—was in town, in a tweed
suit and a pot hat, but between two journeys—duly bored over his
evening and at a loss what to do with it. Then it was that she was glad
she had never met him in that way before: she reaped with such ecstasy
the benefit of his not being able to think she passed often. She jumped
in two seconds to the determination that he should even suppose it to
be the very first time and the very oddest chance: this was while she
still wondered if he would identify or notice her. His original
attention had not, she instinctively knew, been for the young woman at
Cocker’s; it had only been for any young woman who might advance to the
tune of her not troubling the quiet air, and in fact the poetic hour,
with ugliness. Ah but then, and just as she had reached the door, came
his second observation, a long light reach with which, visibly and
quite amusedly, he recalled and placed her. They were on different
sides, but the street, narrow and still, had only made more of a stage
for the small momentary drama. It was not over, besides, it was far
from over, even on his sending across the way, with the pleasantest
laugh she had ever heard, a little lift of his hat and an “Oh good
evening!” It was still less over on their meeting, the next minute,
though rather indirectly and awkwardly, in the middle, of the road—a
situation to which three or four steps of her own had unmistakeably
contributed—and then passing not again to the side on which she had
arrived, but back toward the portal of Park Chambers.

“I didn’t know you at first. Are you taking a walk?”

“Ah I don’t take walks at night! I’m going home after my work.”

“Oh!”

That was practically what they had meanwhile smiled out, and his
exclamation to which for a minute he appeared to have nothing to add,
left them face to face and in just such an attitude as, for his part,
he might have worn had he been wondering if he could properly ask her
to come in. During this interval in fact she really felt his question
to be just “_How_ properly—?” It was simply a question of the degree of
properness.




CHAPTER XV.


She never knew afterwards quite what she had done to settle it, and at
the time she only knew that they presently moved, with vagueness, yet
with continuity, away from the picture of the lighted vestibule and the
quiet stairs and well up the street together. This also must have been
in the absence of a definite permission, of anything vulgarly
articulate, for that matter, on the part of either; and it was to be,
later on, a thing of remembrance and reflexion for her that the limit
of what just here for a longish minute passed between them was his
taking in her thoroughly successful deprecation, though conveyed
without pride or sound or touch, of the idea that she might be, out of
the cage, the very shop-girl at large that she hugged the theory she
wasn’t. Yes, it was strange, she afterwards thought, that so much could
have come and gone and yet not disfigured the dear little intense
crisis either with impertinence or with resentment, with any of the
horrid notes of that kind of acquaintance. He had taken no liberty, as
she would have so called it; and, through not having to betray the
sense of one, she herself had, still more charmingly, taken none. On
the spot, nevertheless, she could speculate as to what it meant that,
if his relation with Lady Bradeen continued to be what her mind had
built it up to, he should feel free to proceed with marked
independence. This was one of the questions he was to leave her to deal
with—the question whether people of his sort still asked girls up to
their rooms when they were so awfully in love with other women. Could
people of his sort do that without what people of _her_ sort would call
being “false to their love”? She had already a vision of how the true
answer was that people of her sort didn’t, in such cases, matter—didn’t
count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might have
been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly what.

Strolling together slowly in their summer twilight and their empty
corner of Mayfair, they found themselves emerge at last opposite to one
of the smaller gates of the Park; upon which, without any particular
word about it—they were talking so of other things—they crossed the
street and went in and sat down on a bench. She had gathered by this
time one magnificent hope about him—the hope he would say nothing
vulgar. She knew thoroughly what she meant by that; she meant something
quite apart from any matter of his being “false.” Their bench was not
far within; it was near the Park Lane paling and the patchy lamplight
and the rumbling cabs and ‘buses. A strange emotion had come to her,
and she felt indeed excitement within excitement; above all a conscious
joy in testing him with chances he didn’t take. She had an intense
desire he should know the type she really conformed to without her
doing anything so low as tell him, and he had surely begun to know it
from the moment he didn’t seize the opportunities into which a common
man would promptly have blundered. These were on the mere awkward
surface, and _their_ relation was beautiful behind and below them. She
had questioned so little on the way what they might be doing that as
soon as they were seated she took straight hold of it. Her hours, her
confinement, the many conditions of service in the post-office,
had—with a glance at his own postal resources and alternatives—formed,
up to this stage, the subject of their talk. “Well, here we are, and it
may be right enough; but this isn’t the least, you know, where I was
going.”

“You were going home?”

“Yes, and I was already rather late. I was going to my supper.”

“You haven’t had it?”

“No indeed!”

“Then you haven’t eaten—?”

He looked of a sudden so extravagantly concerned that she laughed out.
“All day? Yes, we do feed once. But that was long ago. So I must
presently say good-bye.”

“Oh deary _me_!” he exclaimed with an intonation so droll and yet a
touch so light and a distress so marked—a confession of helplessness
for such a case, in short, so unrelieved—that she at once felt sure she
had made the great difference plain. He looked at her with the kindest
eyes and still without saying what she had known he wouldn’t. She had
known he wouldn’t say “Then sup with _me_!” but the proof of it made
her feel as if she had feasted.

“I’m not a bit hungry,” she went on.

“Ah you _must_ be, awfully!” he made answer, but settling himself on
the bench as if, after all, that needn’t interfere with his spending
his evening. “I’ve always quite wanted the chance to thank you for the
trouble you so often take for me.”

“Yes, I know,” she replied; uttering the words with a sense of the
situation far deeper than any pretence of not fitting his allusion. She
immediately felt him surprised and even a little puzzled at her frank
assent; but for herself the trouble she had taken could only, in these
fleeting minutes—they would probably never come back—be all there like
a little hoard of gold in her lap. Certainly he might look at it,
handle it, take up the pieces. Yet if he understood anything he must
understand all. “I consider you’ve already immensely thanked me.” The
horror was back upon her of having seemed to hang about for some
reward. “It’s awfully odd you should have been there just the one
time—!”

“The one time you’ve passed my place?”

“Yes; you can fancy I haven’t many minutes to waste. There was a place
to-night I had to stop at.”

“I see, I see—” he knew already so much about her work. “It must be an
awful grind—for a lady.”

“It is, but I don’t think I groan over it any more than my
companions—and you’ve seen _they’re_ not ladies!” She mildly jested,
but with an intention. “One gets used to things, and there are
employments I should have hated much more.” She had the finest
conception of the beauty of not at least boring him. To whine, to count
up her wrongs, was what a barmaid or a shop-girl would do, and it was
quite enough to sit there like one of these.

“If you had had another employment,” he remarked after a moment, “we
might never have become acquainted.”

“It’s highly probable—and certainly not in the same way.” Then, still
with her heap of gold in her lap and something of the pride of it in
her manner of holding her head, she continued not to move—she only
smiled at him. The evening had thickened now; the scattered lamps were
red; the Park, all before them, was full of obscure and ambiguous life;
there were other couples on other benches whom it was impossible not to
see, yet at whom it was impossible to look. “But I’ve walked so much
out of my way with you only just to show you that—that”—with this she
paused; it was not after all so easy to express—“that anything you may
have thought is perfectly true.”

“Oh I’ve thought a tremendous lot!” her companion laughed. “Do you mind
my smoking?”

“Why should I? You always smoke _there_.”

“At your place? Oh yes, but here it’s different.”

“No,” she said as he lighted a cigarette, “that’s just what it isn’t.
It’s quite the same.”

“Well, then, that’s because ‘there’ it’s so wonderful!”

“Then you’re conscious of how wonderful it is?” she returned.

He jerked his handsome head in literal protest at a doubt. “Why that’s
exactly what I mean by my gratitude for all your trouble. It has been
just as if you took a particular interest.” She only looked at him by
way of answer in such sudden headlong embarrassment, as she was quite
aware, that while she remained silent he showed himself checked by her
expression. “You _have_—haven’t you?—taken a particular interest?”

“Oh a particular interest!” she quavered out, feeling the whole
thing—her headlong embarrassment—get terribly the better of her, and
wishing, with a sudden scare, all the more to keep her emotion down.
She maintained her fixed smile a moment and turned her eyes over the
peopled darkness, unconfused now, because there was something much more
confusing. This, with a fatal great rush, was simply the fact that they
were thus together. They were near, near, and all she had imagined of
that had only become more true, more dreadful and overwhelming. She
stared straight away in silence till she felt she looked an idiot;
then, to say something, to say nothing, she attempted a sound which
ended in a flood of tears.




CHAPTER XVI.


Her tears helped her really to dissimulate, for she had instantly, in
so public a situation, to recover herself. They had come and gone in
half a minute, and she immediately explained them. “It‘s only because
I’m tired. It’s that—it’s that!” Then she added a trifle incoherently:
“I shall never see you again.”

“Ah but why not?” The mere tone in which her companion asked this
satisfied her once for all as to the amount of imagination for which
she could count on him. It was naturally not large: it had exhausted
itself in having arrived at what he had already touched upon—the sense
of an intention in her poor zeal at Cocker’s. But any deficiency of
this kind was no fault in him: _he_ wasn’t obliged to have an inferior
cleverness—to have second-rate resources and virtues. It had been as if
he almost really believed she had simply cried for fatigue, and he
accordingly put in some kind confused plea—“You ought really to take
something: won’t you have something or other _somewhere_?” to which she
had made no response but a headshake of a sharpness that settled it.
“Why shan’t we all the more keep meeting?”

“I mean meeting this way—only this way. At my place there—_that_ I’ve
nothing to do with, and I hope of course you’ll turn up, with your
correspondence, when it suits you. Whether I stay or not, I mean; for I
shall probably not stay.”

“You’re going somewhere else?” he put it with positive anxiety.

“Yes, ever so far away—to the other end of London. There are all sorts
of reasons I can’t tell you; and it’s practically settled. It’s better
for me, much; and I’ve only kept on at Cocker’s for you.”

“For me?”

Making out in the dusk that he fairly blushed, she now measured how far
he had been from knowing too much. Too much, she called it at present;
and that was easy, since it proved so abundantly enough for her that he
should simply be where he was. “As we shall never talk this way but
to-night—never, never again!—here it all is. I’ll say it; I don’t care
what you think; it doesn’t matter; I only want to help you. Besides,
you’re kind—you’re kind. I’ve been thinking then of leaving for ever so
long. But you’ve come so often—at times—and you’ve had so much to do,
and it has been so pleasant and interesting, that I’ve remained, I’ve
kept putting off any change. More than once, when I had nearly decided,
you’ve turned up again and I’ve thought ‘Oh no!’ That’s the simple
fact!” She had by this time got her confusion down so completely that
she could laugh. “This is what I meant when I said to you just now that
I ‘knew.’ I’ve known perfectly that you knew I took trouble for you;
and that knowledge has been for me, and I seemed to see it was for you,
as if there were something—I don’t know what to call it!—between us. I
mean something unusual and good and awfully nice—something not a bit
horrid or vulgar.”

She had by this time, she could see, produced a great effect on him;
but she would have spoken the truth to herself had she at the same
moment declared that she didn’t in the least care: all the more that
the effect must be one of extreme perplexity. What, in it all, was
visibly clear for him, none the less, was that he was tremendously glad
he had met her. She held him, and he was astonished at the force of it;
he was intent, immensely considerate. His elbow was on the back of the
seat, and his head, with the pot-hat pushed quite back, in a boyish
way, so that she really saw almost for the first time his forehead and
hair, rested on the hand into which he had crumpled his gloves. “Yes,”
he assented, “it’s not a bit horrid or vulgar.”

She just hung fire a moment, then she brought out the whole truth. “I’d
do anything for you. I’d do anything for you.” Never in her life had
she known anything so high and fine as this, just letting him have it
and bravely and magnificently leaving it. Didn’t the place, the
associations and circumstances, perfectly make it sound what it wasn’t?
and wasn’t that exactly the beauty?

So she bravely and magnificently left it, and little by little she felt
him take it up, take it down, as if they had been on a satin sofa in a
boudoir. She had never seen a boudoir, but there had been lots of
boudoirs in the telegrams. What she had said at all events sank into
him, so that after a minute he simply made a movement that had the
result of placing his hand on her own—presently indeed that of her
feeling herself firmly enough grasped. There was no pressure she need
return, there was none she need decline; she just sat admirably still,
satisfied for the time with the surprise and bewilderment of the
impression she made on him. His agitation was even greater on the whole
than she had at first allowed for. “I say, you know, you mustn’t think
of leaving!” he at last broke out.

“Of leaving Cocker’s, you mean?”

“Yes, you must stay on there, whatever happens, and help a fellow.”

She was silent a little, partly because it was so strange and exquisite
to feel him watch her as if it really mattered to him and he were
almost in suspense. “Then you _have_ quite recognised what I’ve tried
to do?” she asked.

“Why, wasn’t that exactly what I dashed over from my door just now to
thank you for?”

“Yes; so you said.”

“And don’t you believe it?”

She looked down a moment at his hand, which continued to cover her own;
whereupon he presently drew it back, rather restlessly folding his
arms. Without answering his question she went on: “Have you ever spoken
of me?”

“Spoken of you?”

“Of my being there—of my knowing, and that sort of thing.”

“Oh never to a human creature!” he eagerly declared.

She had a small drop at this, which was expressed in another pause, and
she then returned to what he had just asked her. “Oh yes, I quite
believe you like it—my always being there and our taking things up so
familiarly and successfully: if not exactly where we left them,” she
laughed, “almost always at least at an interesting point!” He was about
to say something in reply to this, but her friendly gaiety was quicker.
“You want a great many things in life, a great many comforts and helps
and luxuries—you want everything as pleasant as possible. Therefore, so
far as it’s in the power of any particular person to contribute to all
that—” She had turned her face to him smiling, just thinking.

“Oh see here!” But he was highly amused. “Well, what then?” he enquired
as if to humour her.

“Why the particular person must never fail. We must manage it for you
somehow.”

He threw back his head, laughing out; he was really exhilarated. “Oh
yes, somehow!”

“Well, I think we each do—don’t we?—in one little way and another and
according to our limited lights. I’m pleased at any rate, for myself,
that you are; for I assure you I’ve done my best.”

“You do better than any one!” He had struck a match for another
cigarette, and the flame lighted an instant his responsive finished
face, magnifying into a pleasant grimace the kindness with which he
paid her this tribute. “You’re awfully clever, you know; cleverer,
cleverer, cleverer—!” He had appeared on the point of making some
tremendous statement; then suddenly, puffing his cigarette and shifting
almost with violence on his seat, he let it altogether fall.




CHAPTER XVII.


In spite of this drop, if not just by reason of it, she felt as if Lady
Bradeen, all but named out, had popped straight up; and she practically
betrayed her consciousness by waiting a little before she rejoined:
“Cleverer than who?”

“Well, if I wasn’t afraid you’d think I swagger, I should say—than
anybody! If you leave your place there, where shall you go?” he more
gravely asked.

“Oh too far for you ever to find me!”

“I’d find you anywhere.”

The tone of this was so still more serious that she had but her one
acknowledgement. “I’d do anything for you—I’d do anything for you,” she
repeated. She had already, she felt, said it all; so what did anything
more, anything less, matter? That was the very reason indeed why she
could, with a lighter note, ease him generously of any awkwardness
produced by solemnity, either his own or hers. “Of course it must be
nice for you to be able to think there are people all about who feel in
such a way.”

In immediate appreciation of this, however, he only smoked without
looking at her. “But you don’t want to give up your present work?” he
at last threw out. “I mean you _will_ stay in the post-office?”

“Oh yes; I think I’ve a genius for that.”

“Rather! No one can touch you.” With this he turned more to her again.
“But you can get, with a move, greater advantages?”

“I can get in the suburbs cheaper lodgings. I live with my mother. We
need some space. There’s a particular place that has other
inducements.”

He just hesitated. “Where is it?”

“Oh quite out of _your_ way. You’d never have time.”

“But I tell you I’d go anywhere. Don’t you believe it?”

“Yes, for once or twice. But you’d soon see it wouldn’t do for you.”

He smoked and considered; seemed to stretch himself a little and, with
his legs out, surrender himself comfortably. “Well, well, well—I
believe everything you say. I take it from you—anything you like—in the
most extraordinary way.” It struck her certainly—and almost without
bitterness—that the way in which she was already, as if she had been an
old friend, arranging for him and preparing the only magnificence she
could muster, was quite the most extraordinary. “Don’t, _don’t_ go!” he
presently went on. “I shall miss you too horribly!”

“So that you just put it to me as a definite request?”—oh how she tried
to divest this of all sound of the hardness of bargaining! That ought
to have been easy enough, for what was she arranging to get? Before he
could answer she had continued: “To be perfectly fair I should tell you
I recognise at Cocker’s certain strong attractions. All you people
come. I like all the horrors.”

“The horrors?”

“Those you all—you know the set I mean, _your_ set—show me with as good
a conscience as if I had no more feeling than a letter-box.”

He looked quite excited at the way she put it. “Oh they don’t know!”

“Don’t know I’m not stupid? No, how should they?”

“Yes, how should they?” said the Captain sympathetically. “But isn’t
‘horrors’ rather strong?”

“What you _do_ is rather strong!” the girl promptly returned.

“What _I_ do?”

“Your extravagance, your selfishness, your immorality, your crimes,”
she pursued, without heeding his expression.

“I _say_!”—her companion showed the queerest stare.

“I like them, as I tell you—I revel in them. But we needn’t go into
that,” she quietly went on; “for all I get out of it is the harmless
pleasure of knowing. I know, I know, I know!”—she breathed it ever so
gently.

“Yes; that’s what has been between us,” he answered much more simply.

She could enjoy his simplicity in silence, and for a moment she did so.
“If I do stay because you want it—and I’m rather capable of that—there
are two or three things I think you ought to remember. One is, you
know, that I’m there sometimes for days and weeks together without your
ever coming.”

“Oh I’ll come every day!” he honestly cried.

She was on the point, at this, of imitating with her hand his movement
of shortly before; but she checked herself, and there was no want of
effect in her soothing substitute. “How can you? How can you?” He had,
too manifestly, only to look at it there, in the vulgarly animated
gloom, to see that he couldn’t; and at this point, by the mere action
of his silence, everything they had so definitely not named, the whole
presence round which they had been circling, became part of their
reference, settled in solidly between them. It was as if then for a
minute they sat and saw it all in each other’s eyes, saw so much that
there was no need of a pretext for sounding it at last. “Your danger,
your danger—!” Her voice indeed trembled with it, and she could only
for the moment again leave it so.

During this moment he leaned back on the bench, meeting her in silence
and with a face that grew more strange. It grew so strange that after a
further instant she got straight up. She stood there as if their talk
were now over, and he just sat and watched her. It was as if now—owing
to the third person they had brought in—they must be more careful; so
that the most he could finally say was: “That’s where it is!”

“That’s where it is!” the girl as guardedly replied. He sat still, and
she added: “I won’t give you up. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye?”—he appealed, but without moving.

“I don’t quite see my way, but I won’t give you up,” she repeated.
“There. Good-bye.”

It brought him with a jerk to his feet, tossing away his cigarette. His
poor face was flushed. “See here—see here!”

“No, I won’t; but I must leave you now,” she went on as if not hearing
him.

“See here—see here!” He tried, from the bench, to take her hand again.

But that definitely settled it for her: this would, after all, be as
bad as his asking her to supper. “You mustn’t come with me—no, no!”

He sank back, quite blank, as if she had pushed him. “I mayn’t see you
home?”

“No, no; let me go.” He looked almost as if she had struck him, but she
didn’t care; and the manner in which she spoke—it was literally as if
she were angry—had the force of a command. “Stay where you are!”

“See here—see here!” he nevertheless pleaded.

“I won’t give you up!” she cried once more—this time quite with
passion; on which she got away from him as fast as she could and left
him staring after her.




CHAPTER XVIII.


Mr. Mudge had lately been so occupied with their famous “plans” that he
had neglected for a while the question of her transfer; but down at
Bournemouth, which had found itself selected as the field of their
recreation by a process consisting, it seemed, exclusively of
innumerable pages of the neatest arithmetic in a very greasy but most
orderly little pocket-book, the distracting possible melted away—the
fleeting absolute ruled the scene. The plans, hour by hour, were simply
superseded, and it was much of a rest to the girl, as she sat on the
pier and overlooked the sea and the company, to see them evaporate in
rosy fumes and to feel that from moment to moment there was less left
to cipher about. The week proves blissfully fine, and her mother, at
their lodgings—partly to her embarrassment and partly to her
relief—struck up with the landlady an alliance that left the younger
couple a great deal of freedom. This relative took her pleasure of a
week at Bournemouth in a stuffy back-kitchen and endless talks; to that
degree even that Mr. Mudge himself—habitually inclined indeed to a
scrutiny of all mysteries and to seeing, as he sometimes admitted, too
much in things—made remarks on it as he sat on the cliff with his
betrothed, or on the decks of steamers that conveyed them, close-packed
items in terrific totals of enjoyment, to the Isle of Wight and the
Dorset coast.

He had a lodging in another house, where he had speedily learned the
importance of keeping his eyes open, and he made no secret of his
suspecting that sinister mutual connivances might spring, under the
roof of his companions, from unnatural sociabilities. At the same time
he fully recognised that as a source of anxiety, not to say of expense,
his future mother-in law would have weighted them more by accompanying
their steps than by giving her hostess, in the interest of the tendency
they considered that they never mentioned, equivalent pledges as to the
tea-caddy and the jam-pot. These were the questions—these indeed the
familiar commodities—that he had now to put into the scales; and his
betrothed had in consequence, during her holiday, the odd and yet
pleasant and almost languid sense of an anticlimax. She had become
conscious of an extraordinary collapse, a surrender to stillness and to
retrospect. She cared neither to walk nor to sail; it was enough for
her to sit on benches and wonder at the sea and taste the air and not
be at Cocker’s and not see the counter-clerk. She still seemed to wait
for something—something in the key of the immense discussions that had
mapped out their little week of idleness on the scale of a world-atlas.
Something came at last, but without perhaps appearing quite adequately
to crown the monument.

Preparation and precaution were, however, the natural flowers of Mr.
Mudge’s mind, and in proportion as these things declined in one quarter
they inevitably bloomed elsewhere. He could always, at the worst, have
on Tuesday the project of their taking the Swanage boat on Thursday,
and on Thursday that of their ordering minced kidneys on Saturday. He
had moreover a constant gift of inexorable enquiry as to where and what
they should have gone and have done if they hadn’t been exactly as they
were. He had in short his resources, and his mistress had never been so
conscious of them; on the other hand they never interfered so little
with her own. She liked to be as she was—if it could only have lasted.
She could accept even without bitterness a rigour of economy so great
that the little fee they paid for admission to the pier had to be
balanced against other delights. The people at Ladle’s and at Thrupp’s
had _their_ ways of amusing themselves, whereas she had to sit and hear
Mr. Mudge talk of what he might do if he didn’t take a bath, or of the
bath he might take if he only hadn’t taken something else. He was
always with her now, of course, always beside her; she saw him more
than “hourly,” more than ever yet, more even than he had planned she
should do at Chalk Farm. She preferred to sit at the far end, away from
the band and the crowd; as to which she had frequent differences with
her friend, who reminded her often that they could have only in the
thick of it the sense of the money they were getting back. That had
little effect on her, for she got back her money by seeing many things,
the things of the past year, fall together and connect themselves,
undergo the happy relegation that transforms melancholy and misery,
passion and effort, into experience and knowledge.

She liked having done with them, as she assured herself she had
practically done, and the strange thing was that she neither missed the
procession now nor wished to keep her place for it. It had become
there, in the sun and the breeze and the sea-smell, a far-away story, a
picture of another life. If Mr. Mudge himself liked processions, liked
them at Bournemouth and on the pier quite as much as at Chalk Farm or
anywhere, she learned after a little not to be worried by his perpetual
counting of the figures that made them up. There were dreadful women in
particular, usually fat and in men’s caps and write shoes, whom he
could never let alone—not that _she_ cared; it was not the great world,
the world of Cocker’s and Ladle’s and Thrupp’s, but it offered an
endless field to his faculties of memory, philosophy, and frolic. She
had never accepted him so much, never arranged so successfully for
making him chatter while she carried on secret conversations. This
separate commerce was with herself; and if they both practised a great
thrift she had quite mastered that of merely spending words enough to
keep him imperturbably and continuously going.

He was charmed with the panorama, not knowing—or at any rate not at all
showing that he knew—what far other images peopled her mind than the
women in the navy caps and the shop-boys in the blazers. His
observations on these types, his general interpretation of the show,
brought home to her the prospect of Chalk Farm. She wondered sometimes
that he should have derived so little illumination, during his period,
from the society at Cocker’s. But one evening while their holiday
cloudlessly waned he gave her such a proof of his quality as might have
made her ashamed of her many suppressions. He brought out something
that, in all his overflow, he had been able to keep back till other
matters were disposed of. It was the announcement that he was at last
ready to marry—that he saw his way. A rise at Chalk Farm had been
offered him; he was to be taken into the business, bringing with him a
capital the estimation of which by other parties constituted the
handsomest recognition yet made of the head on his shoulders. Therefore
their waiting was over—it could be a question of a near date. They
would settle this date before going back, and he meanwhile had his eye
on a sweet little home. He would take her to see it on their first
Sunday.




CHAPTER XIX.


His having kept this great news for the last, having had such a card up
his sleeve and not floated it out in the current of his chatter and the
luxury of their leisure, was one of those incalculable strokes by which
he could still affect her; the kind of thing that reminded her of the
latent force that had ejected the drunken soldier—an example of the
profundity of which his promotion was the proof. She listened a while
in silence, on this occasion, to the wafted strains of the music; she
took it in as she had not quite done before that her future was now
constituted. Mr. Mudge was distinctly her fate; yet at this moment she
turned her face quite away from him, showing him so long a mere quarter
of her cheek that she at last again heard his voice. He couldn’t see a
pair of tears that were partly the reason of her delay to give him the
assurance he required; but he expressed at a venture the hope that she
had had her fill of Cocker’s.

She was finally able to turn back. “Oh quite. There’s nothing going on.
No one comes but the Americans at Thrupp’s, and _they_ don’t do much.
They don’t seem to have a secret in the world.”

“Then the extraordinary reason you’ve been giving me for holding on
there has ceased to work?”

She thought a moment. “Yes, that one. I’ve seen the thing through—I’ve
got them all in my pocket.”

“So you’re ready to come?”

For a little again she made no answer. “No, not yet, all the same. I’ve
still got a reason—a different one.”

He looked her all over as if it might have been something she kept in
her mouth or her glove or under her jacket—something she was even
sitting upon. “Well, I’ll have it, please.”

“I went out the other night and sat in the Park with a gentleman,” she
said at last.

Nothing was ever seen like his confidence in her and she wondered a
little now why it didn’t irritate her. It only gave her ease and space,
as she felt, for telling him the whole truth that no one knew. It had
arrived at present at her really wanting to do that, and yet to do it
not in the least for Mr. Mudge, but altogether and only for herself.
This truth filled out for her there the whole experience about to
relinquish, suffused and coloured it as a picture that she should keep
and that, describe it as she might, no one but herself would ever
really see. Moreover she had no desire whatever to make Mr. Mudge
jealous; there would be no amusement in it, for the amusement she had
lately known had spoiled her for lower pleasures. There were even no
materials for it. The odd thing was how she never doubted that,
properly handled, his passion was poisonable; what had happened was
that he had cannily selected a partner with no poison to distil. She
read then and there that she should never interest herself in anybody
as to whom some other sentiment, some superior view, wouldn’t be sure
to interfere for him with jealousy. “And what did you get out of that?”
he asked with a concern that was not in the least for his honour.

“Nothing but a good chance to promise him I wouldn’t forsake him. He’s
one of my customers.”

“Then it’s for him not to forsake _you_.”

“Well, he won’t. It’s all right. But I must just keep on as long as he
may want me.”

“Want you to sit with him in the Park?”

“He may want me for that—but I shan’t. I rather liked it, but once,
under the circumstances, is enough. I can do better for him in another
manner.”

“And what manner, pray?”

“Well, elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere?—I _say_!”

This was an ejaculation used also by Captain Everard, but oh with what
a different sound! “You needn’t ‘say’—there’s nothing to be said. And
yet you ought perhaps to know.”

“Certainly I ought. But _what_—up to now?”

“Why exactly what I told him. That I’d do anything for him.”

“What do you mean by ‘anything’?”

“Everything.”

Mr. Mudge’s immediate comment on this statement was to draw from his
pocket a crumpled paper containing the remains of half a pound of
“sundries.” These sundries had figured conspicuously in his prospective
sketch of their tour, but it was only at the end of three days that
they had defined themselves unmistakeably as chocolate-creams. “Have
another?—_that_ one,” he said. She had another, but not the one he
indicated, and then he continued: “What took place afterwards?”

“Afterwards?”

“What did you do when you had told him you’d do everything?”

“I simply came away.”

“Out of the Park?”

“Yes, leaving him there. I didn’t let him follow me.”

“Then what did you let him do?”

“I didn’t let him do anything.”

Mr. Mudge considered an instant. “Then what did you go there for?” His
tone was even slightly critical.

“I didn’t quite know at the time. It was simply to be with him, I
suppose—just once. He’s in danger, and I wanted him to know I know it.
It makes meeting him—at Cocker’s, since it’s that I want to stay on
for—more interesting.”

“It makes it mighty interesting for _me_!” Mr. Mudge freely declared.
“Yet he didn’t follow you?” he asked. “_I_ would!”

“Yes, of course. That was the way you began, you know. You’re awfully
inferior to him.”

“Well, my dear, you’re not inferior to anybody. You’ve got a cheek!
What’s he in danger of?”

“Of being found out. He’s in love with a lady—and it isn’t right—and
_I’ve_ found him out.”

“That’ll be a look-out for _me_!” Mr. Mudge joked. “You mean she has a
husband?”

“Never mind what she has! They’re in awful danger, but his is the
worst, because he’s in danger from her too.”

“Like me from you—the woman _I_ love? If he’s in the same funk as me—”

“He’s in a worse one. He’s not only afraid of the lady—he’s afraid of
other things.”

Mr. Mudge selected another chocolate-cream. “Well, I’m only afraid of
one! But how in the world can you help this party?”

“I don’t know—perhaps not at all. But so long as there’s a chance—”

“You won’t come away?”

“No, you’ve got to wait for me.”

Mr. Mudge enjoyed what was in his mouth. “And what will he give you?”

“Give me?”

“If you do help him.”

“Nothing. Nothing in all the wide world.”

“Then what will he give _me_?” Mr. Mudge enquired. “I mean for
waiting.”

The girl thought a moment; then she got up to walk. “He never heard of
you,” she replied.

“You haven’t mentioned me?”

“We never mention anything. What I’ve told you is just what I’ve found
out.”

Mr. Mudge, who had remained on the bench, looked up at her; she often
preferred to be quiet when he proposed to walk, but now that he seemed
to wish to sit she had a desire to move. “But you haven’t told me what
_he_ has found out.”

She considered her lover. “He’d never find _you_, my dear!”

Her lover, still on his seat, appealed to her in something of the
attitude in which she had last left Captain Everard, but the impression
was not the same. “Then where do I come in?”

“You don’t come in at all. That’s just the beauty of it!”—and with this
she turned to mingle with the multitude collected round the band. Mr.
Mudge presently overtook her and drew her arm into his own with a quiet
force that expressed the serenity of possession; in consonance with
which it was only when they parted for the night at her door that he
referred again to what she had told him.

“Have you seen him since?”

“Since the night in the Park? No, not once.”

“Oh, what a cad!” said Mr. Mudge.




CHAPTER XX.


It was not till the end of October that she saw Captain Everard again,
and on that occasion—the only one of all the series on which hindrance
had been so utter—no communication with him proved possible. She had
made out even from the cage that it was a charming golden day: a patch
of hazy autumn sunlight lay across the sanded floor and also, higher
up, quickened into brightness a row of ruddy bottled syrups. Work was
slack and the place in general empty; the town, as they said in the
cage, had not waked up, and the feeling of the day likened itself to
something than in happier conditions she would have thought of
romantically as Saint Martin’s summer. The counter-clerk had gone to
his dinner; she herself was busy with arrears of postal jobs, in the
midst of which she became aware that Captain Everard had apparently
been in the shop a minute and that Mr. Buckton had already seized him.

He had as usual half a dozen telegrams; and when he saw that she saw
him and their eyes met he gave, on bowing to her, an exaggerated laugh
in which she read a new consciousness. It was a confession of
awkwardness; it seemed to tell her that of course he knew he ought
better to have kept his head, ought to have been clever enough to wait,
on some pretext, till he should have found her free. Mr. Buckton was a
long time with him, and her attention was soon demanded by other
visitors; so that nothing passed between them but the fulness of their
silence. The look she took from him was his greeting, and the other one
a simple sign of the eyes sent her before going out. The only token
they exchanged therefore was his tacit assent to her wish that since
they couldn’t attempt a certain frankness they should attempt nothing
at all. This was her intense preference; she could be as still and cold
as any one when that was the sole solution.

Yet more than any contact hitherto achieved these counted instants
struck her as marking a step: they were built so—just in the mere
flash—on the recognition of his now definitely knowing what it was she
would do for him. The “anything, anything” she had uttered in the Park
went to and fro between them and under the poked-out china that
interposed. It had all at last even put on the air of their not needing
now clumsily to manoeuvre to converse: their former little postal
make-believes, the intense implications of questions and answers and
change, had become in the light of the personal fact, of their having
had their moment, a possibility comparatively poor. It was as if they
had met for all time—it exerted on their being in presence again an
influence so prodigious. When she watched herself, in the memory of
that night, walk away from him as if she were making an end, she found
something too pitiful in the primness of such a gait. Hadn’t she
precisely established on the part of each a consciousness that could
end only with death?

It must be admitted that in spite of this brave margin an irritation,
after he had gone, remained with her; a sense that presently became one
with a still sharper hatred of Mr. Buckton, who, on her friend’s
withdrawal, had retired with the telegrams to the sounder and left her
the other work. She knew indeed she should have a chance to see them,
when she would, on file; and she was divided, as the day went on,
between the two impressions of all that was lost and all that was
re-asserted. What beset her above all, and as she had almost never
known it before, was the desire to bound straight out, to overtake the
autumn afternoon before it passed away for ever and hurry off to the
Park and perhaps be with him there again on a bench. It became for an
hour a fantastic vision with her that he might just have gone to sit
and wait for her. She could almost hear him, through the tick of the
sounder, scatter with his stick, in his impatience, the fallen leaves
of October. Why should such a vision seize her at this particular
moment with such a shake? There was a time—from four to five—when she
could have cried with happiness and rage.

Business quickened, it seemed, toward five, as if the town did wake up;
she had therefore more to do, and she went through it with little sharp
stampings and jerkings: she made the crisp postal-orders fairly snap
while she breathed to herself “It’s the last day—the last day!” The
last day of what? She couldn’t have told. All she knew now was that if
she _were_ out of the cage she wouldn’t in the least have minded, this
time, its not yet being dark. She would have gone straight toward Park
Chambers and have hung about there till no matter when. She would have
waited, stayed, rung, asked, have gone in, sat on the stairs. What the
day was the last of was probably, to her strained inner sense, the
group of golden ones, of any occasion for seeing the hazy sunshine
slant at that angle into the smelly shop, of any range of chances for
his wishing still to repeat to her the two words she had in the Park
scarcely let him bring out. “See here—see here!”—the sound of these two
words had been with her perpetually; but it was in her ears to-day
without mercy, with a loudness that grew and grew. What was it they
then expressed? what was it he had wanted her to see? She seemed,
whatever it was, perfectly to see it now—to see that if she should just
chuck the whole thing, should have a great and beautiful courage, he
would somehow make everything up to her. When the clock struck five she
was on the very point of saying to Mr. Buckton that she was deadly ill
and rapidly getting worse. This announcement was on her lips, and she
had quite composed the pale hard face she would offer him: “I can’t
stop—I must go home. If I feel better, later on, I’ll come back. I’m
very sorry, but I _must_ go.” At that instant Captain Everard once more
stood there, producing in her agitated spirit, by his real presence,
the strangest, quickest revolution. He stopped her off without knowing
it, and by the time he had been a minute in the shop she felt herself
saved.

That was from the first minute how she thought of it. There were again
other persons with whom she was occupied, and again the situation could
only be expressed by their silence. It was expressed, of a truth, in a
larger phrase than ever yet, for her eyes now spoke to him with a kind
of supplication. “Be quiet, be quiet!” they pleaded; and they saw his
own reply: “I’ll do whatever you say; I won’t even look at you—see,
see!” They kept conveying thus, with the friendliest liberality, that
they wouldn’t look, quite positively wouldn’t. What she was to see was
that he hovered at the other end of the counter, Mr. Buckton’s end, and
surrendered himself again to that frustration. It quickly proved so
great indeed that what she was to see further was how he turned away
before he was attended to, and hung off, waiting, smoking, looking
about the shop; how he went over to Mr. Cocker’s own counter and
appeared to price things, gave in fact presently two or three orders
and put down money, stood there a long time with his back to her,
considerately abstaining from any glance round to see if she were free.
It at last came to pass in this way that he had remained in the shop
longer than she had ever yet known to do, and that, nevertheless, when
he did turn about she could see him time himself—she was freshly taken
up—and cross straight to her postal subordinate, whom some one else had
released. He had in his hand all this while neither letters nor
telegrams, and now that he was close to her—for she was close to the
counter-clerk—it brought her heart into her mouth merely to see him
look at her neighbour and open his lips. She was too nervous to bear
it. He asked for a Post-Office Guide, and the young man whipped out a
new one; whereupon he said he wished not to purchase, but only to
consult one a moment; with which, the copy kept on loan being produced,
he once more wandered off.

What was he doing to her? What did he want of her? Well, it was just
the aggravation of his “See here!” She felt at this moment strangely
and portentously afraid of him—had in her ears the hum of a sense that,
should it come to that kind of tension, she must fly on the spot to
Chalk Farm. Mixed with her dread and with her reflexion was the idea
that, if he wanted her so much as he seemed to show, it might be after
all simply to do for him the “anything” she had promised, the
“everything” she had thought it so fine to bring out to Mr. Mudge. He
might want her to help him, might have some particular appeal; though
indeed his manner didn’t denote that—denoted on the contrary an
embarrassment, an indecision, something of a desire not so much to be
helped as to be treated rather more nicely than she had treated him the
other time. Yes, he considered quite probably that he had help rather
to offer than to ask for. Still, none the less, when he again saw her
free he continued to keep away from her; when he came back with his
_Guide_ it was Mr. Buckton he caught—it was from Mr. Buckton he
obtained half-a-crown’s-worth of stamps.

After asking for the stamps he asked, quite as a second thought, for a
postal-order for ten shillings. What did he want with so many stamps
when he wrote so few letters? How could he enclose a postal-order in a
telegram? She expected him, the next thing, to go into the corner and
make up one of his telegrams—half a dozen of them—on purpose to prolong
his presence. She had so completely stopped looking at him that she
could only guess his movements—guess even where his eyes rested.
Finally she saw him make a dash that might have been toward the nook
where the forms were hung; and at this she suddenly felt that she
couldn’t keep it up. The counter-clerk had just taken a telegram from a
slavey, and, to give herself something to cover her, she snatched it
out of his hand. The gesture was so violent that he gave her in return
an odd look, and she also perceived that Mr. Buckton noticed it. The
latter personage, with a quick stare at her, appeared for an instant to
wonder whether his snatching it in _his_ turn mightn’t be the thing she
would least like, and she anticipated this practical criticism by the
frankest glare she had ever given him. It sufficed: this time it
paralysed him; and she sought with her trophy the refuge of the
sounder.




CHAPTER XXI.


It was repeated the next day; it went on for three days; and at the end
of that time she knew what to think. When, at the beginning, she had
emerged from her temporary shelter Captain Everard had quitted the
shop; and he had not come again that evening, as it had struck her he
possibly might—might all the more easily that there were numberless
persons who came, morning and afternoon, numberless times, so that he
wouldn’t necessarily have attracted attention. The second day it was
different and yet on the whole worse. His access to her had become
possible—she felt herself even reaping the fruit of her yesterday’s
glare at Mr. Buckton; but transacting his business with him didn’t
simplify—it could, in spite of the rigour of circumstance, feed so her
new conviction. The rigour was tremendous, and his telegrams—not now
mere pretexts for getting at her—were apparently genuine; yet the
conviction had taken but a night to develop. It could be simply enough
expressed; she had had the glimmer of it the day before in her idea
that he needed no more help than she had already given; that it was
help he himself was prepared to render. He had come up to town but for
three or four days; he had been absolutely obliged to be absent after
the other time; yet he would, now that he was face to face with her,
stay on as much longer as she liked. Little by little it was thus
clarified, though from the first flash of his re-appearance she had
read into it the real essence.

That was what the night before, at eight o’clock, her hour to go, had
made her hang back and dawdle. She did last things or pretended to do
them; to be in the cage had suddenly become her safety, and she was
literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside.
_He_ might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him
she was afraid. The most extraordinary change had taken place in her
from the moment of her catching the impression he seemed to have
returned on purpose to give her. Just before she had done so, on that
bewitched afternoon, she had seen herself approach without a scruple
the porter at Park Chambers; then as the effect of the rush of a
consciousness quite altered she had on at last quitting Cocker’s, gone
straight home for the first time since her return from Bournemouth. She
had passed his door every night for weeks, but nothing would have
induced her to pass it now. This change was the tribute of her fear—the
result of a change in himself as to which she needed no more
explanation than his mere face vividly gave her; strange though it was
to find an element of deterrence in the object that she regarded as the
most beautiful in the world. He had taken it from her in the Park that
night that she wanted him not to propose to her to sup; but he had put
away the lesson by this time—he practically proposed supper every time
he looked at her. This was what, for that matter, mainly filled the
three days. He came in twice on each of these, and it was as if he came
in to give her a chance to relent. That was after all, she said to
herself in the intervals, the most that he did. There were ways, she
fully recognised, in which he spared her, and other particular ways as
to which she meant that her silence should be full to him of exquisite
pleading. The most particular of all was his not being outside, at the
corner, when she quitted the place for the night. This he might so
easily have been—so easily if he hadn’t been so nice. She continued to
recognise in his forbearance the fruit of her dumb supplication, and
the only compensation he found for it was the harmless freedom of being
able to appear to say: “Yes, I’m in town only for three or four days,
but, you know, I _would_ stay on.” He struck her as calling attention
each day, each hour, to the rapid ebb of time; he exaggerated to the
point of putting it that there were only two days more, that there was
at last, dreadfully, only one.

There were other things still that he struck her as doing with a
special intention; as to the most marked of which—unless indeed it were
the most obscure—she might well have marvelled that it didn’t seem to
her more horrid. It was either the frenzy of her imagination or the
disorder of his baffled passion that gave her once or twice the vision
of his putting down redundant money—sovereigns not concerned with the
little payments he was perpetually making—so that she might give him
some sign of helping him to slip them over to her. What was most
extraordinary in this impression was the amount of excuse that, with
some incoherence, she found for him. He wanted to pay her because there
was nothing to pay her for. He wanted to offer her things he knew she
wouldn’t take. He wanted to show her how much he respected her by
giving her the supreme chance to show _him_ she was respectable. Over
the dryest transactions, at any rate, their eyes had out these
questions. On the third day he put in a telegram that had evidently
something of the same point as the stray sovereigns—a message that was
in the first place concocted and that on a second thought he took back
from her before she had stamped it. He had given her time to read it
and had only then bethought himself that he had better not send it. If
it was not to Lady Bradeen at Twindle—where she knew her ladyship then
to be—this was because an address to Doctor Buzzard at Brickwood was
just as good, with the added merit of its not giving away quite so much
a person whom he had still, after all, in a manner to consider. It was
of course most complicated, only half lighted; but there was,
discernibly enough, a scheme of communication in which Lady Bradeen at
Twindle and Dr. Buzzard at Brickwood were, within limits, one and the
same person. The words he had shown her and then taken back consisted,
at all events, of the brief but vivid phrase “Absolutely impossible.”
The point was not that she should transmit it; the point was just that
she should see it. What was absolutely impossible was that before he
had setted something at Cocker’s he should go either to Twindle or to
Brickwood.

The logic of this, in turn, for herself, was that she could lend
herself to no settlement so long as she so intensely knew. What she
knew was that he was, almost under peril of life, clenched in a
situation: therefore how could she also know where a poor girl in the
P.O. might really stand? It was more and more between them that if he
might convey to her he was free, with all the impossible locked away
into a closed chapter, her own case might become different for her, she
might understand and meet him and listen. But he could convey nothing
of the sort, and he only fidgeted and floundered in his want of power.
The chapter wasn’t in the least closed, not for the other party; and
the other party had a pull, somehow and somewhere: this his whole
attitude and expression confessed, at the same time that they entreated
her not to remember and not to mind. So long as she did remember and
did mind he could only circle about and go and come, doing futile
things of which he was ashamed. He was ashamed of his two words to Dr.
Buzzard; he went out of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the
paper again and thrust it into his pocket. It had been an abject little
exposure of dreadful impossible passion. He appeared in fact to be too
ashamed to come back. He had once more left town, and a first week
elapsed, and a second. He had had naturally to return to the real
mistress of his fate; she had insisted—she knew how to insist, and he
couldn’t put in another hour. There was always a day when she called
time. It was known to our young friend moreover that he had now been
dispatching telegrams from other offices. She knew at last so much that
she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing. There were no
different shades of distinctness—it all bounced out.




CHAPTER XXII.


Eighteen days elapsed, and she had begun to think it probable she
should never see him again. He too then understood now: he had made out
that she had secrets and reasons and impediments, that even a poor girl
at the P.O. might have her complications. With the charm she had cast
on him lightened by distance he had suffered a final delicacy to speak
to him, had made up his mind that it would be only decent to let her
alone. Never so much as during these latter days had she felt the
precariousness of their relation—the happy beautiful untroubled
original one, if it could only have been restored—in which the public
servant and the casual public only were concerned. It hung at the best
by the merest silken thread, which was at the mercy of any accident and
might snap at any minute. She arrived by the end of the fortnight at
the highest sense of actual fitness, never doubting that her decision
was now complete. She would just give him a few days more to come back
to her on a proper impersonal basis—for even to an embarrassing
representative of the casual public a public servant with a conscience
did owe something—and then would signify to Mr. Mudge that she was
ready for the little home. It had been visited, in the further talk she
had had with him at Bournemouth, from garret to cellar, and they had
especially lingered, with their respectively darkened brows, before the
niche into which it was to be broached to her mother that she must find
means to fit.

He had put it to her more definitely than before that his calculations
had allowed for that dingy presence, and he had thereby marked the
greatest impression he had ever made on her. It was a stroke superior
even again to his handling of the drunken soldier. What she considered
that in the face of it she hung on at Cocker’s for was something she
could only have described as the common fairness of a last word. Her
actual last word had been, till it should be superseded, that she
wouldn’t forsake her other friend, and it stuck to her through thick
and thin that she was still at her post and on her honour. This other
friend had shown so much beauty of conduct already that he would surely
after all just re-appear long enough to relieve her, to give her
something she could take away. She saw it, caught it, at times, his
parting present; and there were moments when she felt herself sitting
like a beggar with a hand held out to almsgiver who only fumbled. She
hadn’t taken the sovereigns, but she _would_ take the penny. She heard,
in imagination, on the counter, the ring of the copper. “Don’t put
yourself out any longer,” he would say, “for so bad a case. You’ve done
all there is to be done. I thank and acquit and release you. Our lives
take us. I don’t know much—though I’ve really been interested—about
yours, but I suppose you’ve got one. Mine at any rate will take
_me_—and where it will. Heigh-ho! Good-bye.” And then once more, for
the sweetest faintest flower of all: “Only, I say—see here!” She had
framed the whole picture with a squareness that included also the image
of how again she would decline to “see there,” decline, as she might
say, to see anywhere, see anything. Yet it befell that just in the fury
of this escape she saw more than ever.

He came back one night with a rush, near the moment of their closing,
and showed her a face so different and new, so upset and anxious, that
almost anything seemed to look out of it but clear recognition. He
poked in a telegram very much as if the simple sense of pressure, the
distress of extreme haste, had blurred the remembrance of where in
particular he was. But as she met his eyes a light came; it broke
indeed on the spot into a positive conscious glare. That made up for
everything, since it was an instant proclamation of the celebrated
“danger”; it seemed to pour things out in a flood. “Oh yes, here it
is—it’s upon me at last! Forget, for God’s sake, my having worried or
bored you, and just help me, just _save_ me, by getting this off
without the loss of a second!” Something grave had clearly occurred, a
crisis declared itself. She recognised immediately the person to whom
the telegram was addressed—the Miss Dolman of Parade Lodge to whom Lady
Bradeen had wired, at Dover, on the last occasion, and whom she had
then, with her recollection of previous arrangements, fitted into a
particular setting. Miss Dolman had figured before and not figured
since, but she was now the subject of an imperative appeal. “Absolutely
necessary to see you. Take last train Victoria if you can catch it. If
not, earliest morning, and answer me direct either way.”

“Reply paid?” said the girl. Mr. Buckton had just departed and the
counter-clerk was at the sounder. There was no other representative of
the public, and she had never yet, as it seemed to her, not even in the
street or in the Park, been so alone with him.

“Oh yes, reply paid, and as sharp as possible, please.”

She affixed the stamps in a flash. “She’ll catch the train!” she then
declared to him breathlessly, as if she could absolutely guarantee it.

“I don’t know—I hope so. It’s awfully important. So kind of you.
Awfully sharp, please.” It was wonderfully innocent now, his oblivion
of all but his danger. Anything else that had ever passed between them
was utterly out of it. Well, she had wanted him to be impersonal!

There was less of the same need therefore, happily, for herself; yet
she only took time, before she flew to the sounder, to gasp at him:
“You‘re in trouble?”

“Horrid, horrid—there’s a row!” But they parted, on it, in the next
breath; and as she dashed at the sounder, almost pushing, in her
violence, the counter-clerk off the stool, she caught the bang with
which, at Cocker’s door, in his further precipitation, he closed the
apron of the cab into which he had leaped. As he rebounded to some
other precaution suggested by his alarm, his appeal to Miss Dolman
flashed straight away.

But she had not, on the morrow, been in the place five minutes before
he was with her again, still more discomposed and quite, now, as she
said to herself, like a frightened child coming to its mother. Her
companions were there, and she felt it to be remarkable how, in the
presence of his agitation, his mere scared exposed nature, she suddenly
ceased to mind. It came to her as it had never come to her before that
with absolute directness and assurance they might carry almost anything
off. He had nothing to send—she was sure he had been wiring all
over—and yet his business was evidently huge. There was nothing but
that in his eyes—not a glimmer of reference or memory. He was almost
haggard with anxiety and had clearly not slept a wink. Her pity for him
would have given her any courage, and she seemed to know at last why
she had been such a fool. “She didn’t come?” she panted.

“Oh yes, she came; but there has been some mistake. We want a
telegram.”

“A telegram?”

“One that was sent from here ever so long ago. There was something in
it that has to be recovered. Something very, very important, please—we
want it immediately.”

He really spoke to her as if she had been some strange young woman at
Knightsbridge or Paddington; but it had no other effect on her than to
give her the measure of his tremendous flurry. Then it was that, above
all, she felt how much she had missed in the gaps and blanks and absent
answers—how much she had had to dispense with: it was now black
darkness save for this little wild red flare. So much as that she saw,
so much her mind dealt with. One of the lovers was quaking somewhere
out of town, and the other was quaking just where he stood. This was
vivid enough, and after an instant she knew it was all she wanted. She
wanted no detail, no fact—she wanted no nearer vision of discovery or
shame. “When was your telegram? Do you mean you sent it from here?” She
tried to do the young woman at Knightsbridge.

“Oh yes, from here—several weeks ago. Five, six, seven”—he was confused
and impatient—“don’t you remember?”

“Remember?” she could scarcely keep out of her face, at the word, the
strangest of smiles.

But the way he didn’t catch what it meant was perhaps even stranger
still. “I mean, don’t you keep the old ones?”

“For a certain time.”

“But how long?”

She thought; she _must_ do the young woman, and she knew exactly what
the young woman would say and, still more, wouldn’t. “Can you give me
the date?”

“Oh God, no! It was some time or other in August—toward the end. It was
to the same address as the one I gave you last night.”

“Oh!” said the girl, knowing at this the deepest thrill she had ever
felt. It came to her there, with her eyes on his face, that she held
the whole thing in her hand, held it as she held her pencil, which
might have broken at that instant in her tightened grip. This made her
feel like the very fountain of fate, but the emotion was such a flood
that she had to press it back with all her force. That was positively
the reason, again, of her flute-like Paddington tone. “You can’t give
us anything a little nearer?” Her “little” and her “us” came straight
from Paddington. These things were no false note for him—his difficulty
absorbed them all. The eyes with which he pressed her, and in the
depths of which she read terror and rage and literal tears, were just
the same he would have shown any other prim person.

“I don’t know the date. I only know the thing went from here, and just
about the time I speak of. It wasn’t delivered, you see. We’ve got to
recover it.”




CHAPTER XXIII.


She was as struck with the beauty of his plural pronoun as she had
judged he might be with that of her own; but she knew now so well what
she was about that she could almost play with him and with her new-born
joy. “You say ‘about the time you speak of.’ But I don’t think you
speak of an exact time—_do_ you?”

He looked splendidly helpless. “That’s just what I want to find out.
Don’t you keep the old ones?—can’t you look it up?”

Our young lady—still at Paddington—turned the question over. “It wasn’t
delivered?”

“Yes, it _was_; yet, at the same time, don’t you know? it wasn’t.” He
just hung back, but he brought it out. “I mean it was intercepted,
don’t you know? and there was something in it.” He paused again and, as
if to further his quest and woo and supplicate success and recovery,
even smiled with an effort at the agreeable that was almost ghastly and
that turned the knife in her tenderness. What must be the pain of it
all, of the open gulf and the throbbing fever, when this was the mere
hot breath? “We want to get what was in it—to know what it was.”

“I see—I see.” She managed just the accent they had at Paddington when
they stared like dead fish. “And you have no clue?”

“Not at all—I’ve the clue I’ve just given you.”

“Oh the last of August?” If she kept it up long enough she would make
him really angry.

“Yes, and the address, as I’ve said.”

“Oh the same as last night?”

He visibly quivered, as with a gleam of hope; but it only poured oil on
her quietude, and she was still deliberate. She ranged some papers.
“Won’t you look?” he went on.

“I remember your coming,” she replied.

He blinked with a new uneasiness; it might have begun to come to him,
through her difference, that he was somehow different himself. “You
were much quicker then, you know!”

“So were you—you must do me that justice,” she answered with a smile.
“But let me see. Wasn’t it Dover?”

“Yes, Miss Dolman—”

“Parade Lodge, Parade Terrace?”

“Exactly—thank you so awfully much!” He began to hope again. “Then you
_have_ it—the other one?”

She hesitated afresh; she quite dangled him. “It was brought by a
lady?”

“Yes; and she put in by mistake something wrong. That’s what we’ve got
to get hold of!” Heavens, what was he going to say?—flooding poor
Paddington with wild betrayals! She couldn’t too much, for her joy,
dangle him, yet she couldn’t either, for his dignity, warn or control
or check him. What she found herself doing was just to treat herself to
the middle way. “It was intercepted?”

“It fell into the wrong hands. But there’s something in it,” he
continued to blurt out, “that _may_ be all right. That is, if it’s
wrong, don’t you know? It’s all right if it’s wrong,” he remarkably
explained.

What _was_ he, on earth, going to say? Mr. Buckton and the
counter-clerk were already interested; no one _would_ have the decency
to come in; and she was divided between her particular terror for him
and her general curiosity. Yet she already saw with what brilliancy she
could add, to carry the thing off, a little false knowledge to all her
real. “I quite understand,” she said with benevolent, with almost
patronising quickness. “The lady has forgotten what she did put.”

“Forgotten most wretchedly, and it’s an immense inconvenience. It has
only just been found that it didn’t get there; so that if we could
immediately have it—”

“Immediately?”

“Every minute counts. You _have_,” he pleaded, “surely got them on
file?”

“So that you can see it on the spot?”

“Yes, please—this very minute.” The counter rang with his knuckles,
with the knob of his stick, with his panic of alarm. “Do, _do_ hunt it
up!” he repeated.

“I dare say we could get it for you,” the girl weetly returned.

“Get it?”—he looked aghast. “When?”

“Probably by to-morrow.”

“Then it isn’t here?”—his face was pitiful.

She caught only the uncovered gleams that peeped out of the blackness,
and she wondered what complication, even among the most supposable, the
very worst, could be bad enough to account for the degree of his
terror. There were twists and turns, there were places where the screw
drew blood, that she couldn’t guess. She was more and more glad she
didn’t want to. “It has been sent on.”

“But how do you know if you don’t look?”

She gave him a smile that was meant to be, in the absolute irony of its
propriety, quite divine. “It was August 23rd, and we’ve nothing later
here than August 27th.”

Something leaped into his face. “27th—23rd? Then you’re sure? You
know?”

She felt she scarce knew what—as if she might soon be pounced upon for
some lurid connexion with a scandal. It was the queerest of all
sensations, for she had heard, she had read, of these things, and the
wealth of her intimacy with them at Cocker’s might be supposed to have
schooled and seasoned her. This particular one that she had really
quite lived with was, after all, an old story; yet what it had been
before was dim and distant beside the touch under which she now winced.
Scandal?—it had never been but a silly word. Now it was a great tense
surface, and the surface was somehow Captain Everard’s wonderful face.
Deep down in his eyes a picture, a scene—a great place like a chamber
of justice, where, before a watching crowd, a poor girl, exposed but
heroic, swore with a quavering voice to a document, proved an _alibi_,
supplied a link. In this picture she bravely took her place. “It was
the 23rd.”

“Then can’t you get it this morning—or some time to-day?”

She considered, still holding him with her look, which she then turned
on her two companions, who were by this time unreservedly enlisted. She
didn’t care—not a scrap, and she glanced about for a piece of paper.
With this she had to recognise the rigour of official thrift—a morsel
of blackened blotter was the only loose paper to be seen. “Have you got
a card?” she said to her visitor. He was quite away from Paddington
now, and the next instant, pocket-book in hand, he had whipped a card
out. She gave no glance at the name on it—only turned it to the other
side. She continued to hold him, she felt at present, as she had never
held him; and her command of her colleagues was for the moment not less
marked. She wrote something on the back of the card and pushed it
across to him.

He fairly glared at it. “Seven, nine, four—”

“Nine, six, one”—she obligingly completed the number. “Is it right?”
she smiled.

He took the whole thing in with a flushed intensity; then there broke
out in him a visibility of relief that was simply a tremendous
exposure. He shone at them all like a tall lighthouse, embracing even,
for sympathy, the blinking young men. “By all the powers—it’s wrong!”
And without another look, without a word of thanks, without time for
anything or anybody, he turned on them the broad back of his great
stature, straightened his triumphant shoulders, and strode out of the
place.

She was left confronted with her habitual critics. “‘If it’s wrong it’s
all right!’” she extravagantly quoted to them.

The counter-clerk was really awe-stricken. “But how did you know,
dear?”

“I remembered, love!”

Mr. Buckton, on the contrary, was rude. “And what game is that, miss?”

No happiness she had ever known came within miles of it, and some
minutes elapsed before she could recall herself sufficiently to reply
that it was none of his business.




CHAPTER XXIV.


If life at Cocker’s, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost
something of its savour, she had not been slow to infer that a heavier
blight had fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs. Jordan.

With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, with the
blinds down on all the homes of luxury, this ingenious woman might well
have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands. She bore up,
however, in a way that began by exciting much of her young friend’s
esteem; they perhaps even more frequently met as the wine of life
flowed less free from other sources, and each, in the lack of better
diversion, carried on with more mystification for the other an
intercourse that consisted not a little in peeping out and drawing
back. Each waited for the other to commit herself, each profusely
curtained for the other the limits of low horizons. Mrs. Jordan was
indeed probably the more reckless skirmisher; nothing could exceed her
frequent incoherence unless it was indeed her occasional bursts of
confidence. Her account of her private affairs rose and fell like a
flame in the wind—sometimes the bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful
of ashes. This our young woman took to be an effect of the position, at
one moment and another, of the famous door of the great world. She had
been struck in one of her ha’penny volumes with the translation of a
French proverb according to which such a door, any door, had to be
either open or shut; and it seemed part of the precariousness of Mrs.
Jordan’s life that hers mostly managed to be neither. There had been
occasions when it appeared to gape wide—fairly to woo her across its
threshold; there had been others, of an order distinctly disconcerting,
when it was all but banged in her face. On the whole, however, she had
evidently not lost heart; these still belonged to the class of things
in spite of which she looked well. She intimated that the profits of
her trade had swollen so as to float her through any state of the tide,
and she had, besides this, a hundred profundities and explanations.

She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always
gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest admirers;
gentlemen from the City in especial—as to whom she was full of
information about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the
elements of her charming commerce. The City men _did_, in short, go in
for flowers. There was a certain type of awfully smart stockbroker—Lord
Rye called them Jews and bounders, but she didn’t care—whose
extravagance, she more than once threw out, had really, if one had any
conscience, to be forcibly restrained. It was not perhaps a pure love
of beauty: it was a matter of vanity and a sign of business; they
wished to crush their rivals, and that was one of their weapons. Mrs.
Jordan’s shrewdness was extreme; she knew in any case her customer—she
dealt, as she said, with all sorts; and it was at the worst a race for
her—a race even in the dull months—from one set of chambers to another.
And then, after all, there were also still the ladies; the ladies of
stockbroking circles were perpetually up and down. They were not quite
perhaps Mrs. Bubb or Lady Ventnor; but you couldn’t tell the difference
unless you quarrelled with them, and then you knew it only by their
making-up sooner. These ladies formed the branch of her subject on
which she most swayed in the breeze; to that degree that her confidant
had ended with an inference or two tending to banish regret for
opportunities not embraced. There were indeed tea-gowns that Mrs.
Jordan described—but tea-gowns were not the whole of respectability,
and it was odd that a clergyman’s widow should sometimes speak as if
she almost thought so. She came back, it was true, unfailingly to Lord
Rye, never, evidently, quite losing sight of him even on the longest
excursions. That he was kindness itself had become in fact the very
moral it all pointed—pointed in strange flashes of the poor woman’s
nearsighted eyes. She launched at her young friend portentous looks,
solemn heralds of some extraordinary communication. The communication
itself, from week to week, hung fire; but it was to the facts over
which it hovered that she owed her power of going on. “They _are_, in
one way _and_ another,” she often emphasised, “a tower of strength”;
and as the allusion was to the aristocracy the girl could quite wonder
why, if they were so in “one way,” they should require to be so in two.
She thoroughly knew, however, how many ways Mrs. Jordan counted in. It
all meant simply that her fate was pressing her close. If that fate was
to be sealed at the matrimonial altar it was perhaps not remarkable
that she shouldn’t come all at once to the scratch of overwhelming a
mere telegraphist. It would necessarily present to such a person a
prospect of regretful sacrifice. Lord Rye—if it _was_ Lord Rye—wouldn’t
be “kind” to a nonentity of that sort, even though people quite as good
had been.

One Sunday afternoon in November they went, by arrangement, to church
together; after which—on the inspiration of the moment the arrangement
had not included it—they proceeded to Mrs. Jordan’s lodging in the
region of Maida Vale. She had raved to her friend about her service of
predilection; she was excessively “high,” and had more than once wished
to introduce the girl to the same comfort and privilege. There was a
thick brown fog and Maida Vale tasted of acrid smoke; but they had been
sitting among chants and incense and wonderful music, during which,
though the effect of such things on her mind was great, our young lady
had indulged in a series of reflexions but indirectly related to them.
One of these was the result of Mrs. Jordan’s having said to her on the
way, and with a certain fine significance, that Lord Rye had been for
some time in town. She had spoken as if it were a circumstance to which
little required to be added—as if the bearing of such an item on her
life might easily be grasped. Perhaps it was the wonder of whether Lord
Rye wished to marry her that made her guest, with thoughts straying to
that quarter, quite determine that some other nuptials also should take
place at Saint Julian’s. Mr. Mudge was still an attendant at his
Wesleyan chapel, but this was the least of her worries—it had never
even vexed her enough for her to so much as name it to Mrs. Jordan. Mr.
Mudge’s form of worship was one of several things—they made up in
superiority and beauty for what they wanted in number—that she had long
ago settled he should take from her, and she had now moreover for the
first time definitely established her own. Its principal feature was
that it was to be the same as that of Mrs. Jordan and Lord Rye; which
was indeed very much what she said to her hostess as they sat together
later on. The brown fog was in this hostess’s little parlour, where it
acted as a postponement of the question of there being, besides,
anything else than the teacups and a pewter pot and a very black little
fire and a paraffin lamp without a shade. There was at any rate no sign
of a flower; it was not for herself Mrs. Jordan gathered sweets. The
girl waited till they had had a cup of tea—waited for the announcement
that she fairly believed her friend had, this time, possessed herself
of her formally at last to make; but nothing came, after the interval,
save a little poke at the fire, which was like the clearing of a throat
for a speech.




CHAPTER XXV.


“I think you must have heard me speak of Mr. Drake?” Mrs. Jordan had
never looked so queer, nor her smile so suggestive of a large
benevolent bite.

“Mr. Drake? Oh yes; isn’t he a friend of Lord Rye?”

“A great and trusted friend. Almost—I may say—a loved friend.”

Mrs. Jordan’s “almost” had such an oddity that her companion was moved,
rather flippantly perhaps, to take it up. “Don’t people as good as love
their friends when they I trust them?”

It pulled up a little the eulogist of Mr. Drake. “Well, my dear, I love
_you_—”

“But you don’t trust me?” the girl unmercifully asked.

Again Mrs. Jordan paused—still she looked queer. “Yes,” she replied
with a certain austerity; “that’s exactly what I’m about to give you
rather a remarkable proof of.” The sense of its being remarkable was
already so strong that, while she bridled a little, this held her
auditor in a momentary muteness of submission. “Mr. Drake has rendered
his lordship for several years services that his lordship has highly
appreciated and that make it all the more—a—unexpected that they
should, perhaps a little suddenly, separate.”

“Separate?” Our young lady was mystified, but she tried to be
interested; and she already saw that she had put the saddle on the
wrong horse. She had heard something of Mr. Drake, who was a member of
his lordship’s circle—the member with whom, apparently, Mrs. Jordan’s
avocations had most happened to throw her. She was only a little
puzzled at the “separation.” “Well, at any rate,” she smiled, “if they
separate as friends—!”

“Oh his lordship takes the greatest interest in Mr. Drake’s future.
He’ll do anything for him; he has in fact just done a great deal. There
_must_, you know, be changes—!”

“No one knows it better than I,” the girl said. She wished to draw her
interlocutress out. “There will be changes enough for me.”

“You’re leaving Cocker’s?”

The ornament of that establishment waited a moment to answer, and then
it was indirect. “Tell me what _you’re_ doing.”

“Well, what will you think of it?”

“Why that you’ve found the opening you were always so sure of.”

Mrs. Jordan, on this, appeared to muse with embarrassed intensity. “I
was always sure, yes—and yet I often wasn’t!”

“Well, I hope you’re sure now. Sure, I mean, of Mr. Drake.”

“Yes, my dear, I think I may say I _am_. I kept him going till I was.”

“Then he’s yours?”

“My very own.”

“How nice! And awfully rich?” our young woman went on.

Mrs. Jordan showed promptly enough that she loved for higher things.
“Awfully handsome—six foot two. And he _has_ put by.”

“Quite like Mr. Mudge, then!” that gentleman’s friend rather
desperately exclaimed.

“Oh not _quite!_” Mr. Drake’s was ambiguous about it, but the name of
Mr. Mudge had evidently given her some sort of stimulus. “He’ll have
more opportunity now, at any rate. He’s going to Lady Bradeen.”

“To Lady Bradeen?” This was bewilderment. “‘Going—’?”

The girl had seen, from the way Mrs. Jordan looked at her, that the
effect of the name had been to make her let something out. “Do you know
her?”

She floundered, but she found her feet. “Well, you’ll remember I’ve
often told you that if you’ve grand clients I have them too.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Jordan; “but the great difference is that you hate
yours, whereas I really love mine. _Do_ you know Lady Bradeen?” she
pursued.

“Down to the ground! She’s always in and out.”

Mrs. Jordan’s foolish eyes confessed, in fixing themselves on this
sketch, to a degree of wonder and even of envy. But she bore up and,
with a certain gaiety, “Do you hate _her_?” she demanded.

Her visitor’s reply was prompt. “Dear no!—not nearly so much as some of
them. She’s too outrageously beautiful.”

Mrs. Jordan continued to gaze. “Outrageously?”

“Well, yes; deliciously.” What was really delicious was Mrs. Jordan’s
vagueness. “You don’t know her—you’ve not seen her?” her guest lightly
continued.

“No, but I’ve heard a great deal about her.”

“So have I!” our young lady exclaimed.

Jordan looked an instant as if she suspected her good faith, or at
least her seriousness. “You know some friend—?”

“Of Lady Bradeen’s? Oh yes—I know one.”

“Only one?”

The girl laughed out. “Only one—but he’s so intimate.”

Mrs. Jordan just hesitated. “He’s a gentleman?”

“Yes, he’s not a lady.”

Her interlocutress appeared to muse. “She’s immensely surrounded.”

“She _will_ be—with Mr. Drake!”

Mrs. Jordan’s gaze became strangely fixed. “Is she _very_
good-looking?”

“The handsomest person I know.”

Mrs. Jordan continued to contemplate. “Well, _I_ know some beauties.”
Then with her odd jerkiness: “Do you think she looks _good_?” she
inquired.

“Because that’s not always the case with the good-looking?”—the other
took it up. “No, indeed, it isn’t: that’s one thing Cocker’s has taught
me. Still, there are some people who have everything. Lady Bradeen, at
any rate, has enough: eyes and a nose and a mouth, a complexion, a
figure—”

“A figure?” Mrs. Jordan almost broke in.

“A figure, a head of hair!” The girl made a little conscious motion
that seemed to let the hair all down, and her companion watched the
wonderful show. “But Mr. Drake _is_ another—?”

“Another?”—Mrs. Jordan’s thoughts had to come back from a distance.

“Of her ladyship’s admirers. He’s ‘going,’ you say, to her?”

At this Mrs. Jordan really faltered. “She has engaged him.”

“Engaged him?”—our young woman was quite at sea.

“In the same capacity as Lord Rye.”

“And was Lord Rye engaged?”




CHAPTER XXVI.


Mrs. Jordan looked away from her now—looked, she thought, rather
injured and, as if trifled with, even a little angry. The mention of
Lady Bradeen had frustrated for a while the convergence of our
heroine’s thoughts; but with this impression of her old friend’s
combined impatience and diffidence they began again to whirl round her,
and continued it till one of them appeared to dart at her, out of the
dance, as if with a sharp peck. It came to her with a lively shock,
with a positive sting, that Mr. Drake was—could it be possible? With
the idea she found herself afresh on the edge of laughter, of a sudden
and strange perversity of mirth. Mr. Drake loomed, in a swift image,
before her; such a figure as she had seen in open doorways of houses in
Cocker’s quarter—majestic, middle-aged, erect, flanked on either side
by a footman and taking the name of a visitor. Mr. Drake then verily
_was_ a person who opened the door! Before she had time, however, to
recover from the effect of her evocation, she was offered a vision
which quite engulfed it. It was communicated to her somehow that the
face with which she had seen it rise prompted Mrs. Jordan to dash, a
bit wildly, at something, at anything, that might attenuate criticism.
“Lady Bradeen’s re-arranging—she’s going to be married.”

“Married?” The girl echoed it ever so softly, but there it was at last.

“Didn’t you know it?”

She summoned all her sturdiness. “No, she hasn’t told me.”

“And her friends—haven’t they?”

“I haven’t seen any of them lately. I’m not so fortunate as _you_.”

Mrs. Jordan gathered herself. “Then you haven’t even heard of Lord
Bradeen’s death?”

Her comrade, unable for a moment to speak, gave a slow headshake. “You
know it from Mr. Drake?” It was better surely not to learn things at
all than to learn them by the butler.

“She tells him everything.”

“And he tells _you_—I see.” Our young lady got up; recovering her muff
and her gloves she smiled. “Well, I haven’t unfortunately any Mr.
Drake. I congratulate you with all my heart. Even without your sort of
assistance, however, there’s a trifle here and there that I do pick up.
I gather that if she’s to marry any one it must quite necessarily be my
friend.”

Mrs. Jordan was now also on her feet. “Is Captain Everard your friend?”

The girl considered, drawing on a glove. “I saw, at one time, an
immense deal of him.”

Mrs. Jordan looked hard at the glove, but she hadn’t after all waited
for that to be sorry it wasn’t cleaner. “What time was that?”

“It must have been the time you were seeing so much of Mr. Drake.” She
had now fairly taken it in: the distinguished person Mrs. Jordan was to
marry would answer bells and put on coals and superintend, at least,
the cleaning of boots for the other distinguished person whom she
might—well, whom she might have had, if she had wished, so much more to
say to. “Good-bye,” she added; “good-bye.”

Mrs. Jordan, however, again taking her muff from her, turned it over,
brushed it off and thoughtfully peeped into it. “Tell me this before
you go. You spoke just now of your own changes. Do you mean that Mr.
Mudge—?”

“Mr. Mudge has had great patience with me—he has brought me at last to
the point. We’re to be married next month and have a nice little home.
But he’s only a grocer, you know”—the girl met her friend’s intent
eyes—“so that I’m afraid that, with the set you’ve got into, you won’t
see your way to keep up our friendship.”

Mrs. Jordan for a moment made no answer to this; she only held the muff
up to her face, after which she gave it back. “You don’t like it. I
see, I see.”

To her guest’s astonishment there were tears now in her eyes. “I don’t
like what?” the girl asked.

“Why my engagement. Only, with your great cleverness,” the poor lady
quavered out, “you put it in your own way. I mean that you’ll cool off.
You already _have_—!” And on this, the next instant, her tears began to
flow. She succumbed to them and collapsed; she sank down again, burying
her face and trying to smother her sobs.

Her young friend stood there, still in some rigour, but taken much by
surprise even if not yet fully moved to pity. “I don’t put anything in
any ‘way,’ and I’m very glad you’re suited. Only, you know, you did put
to _me_ so splendidly what, even for me, if I had listened to you, it
might lead to.”

Mrs. Jordan kept up a mild thin weak wail; then, drying her eyes, as
feebly considered this reminder. “It has led to my not starving!” she
faintly gasped.

Our young lady, at this, dropped into the place beside her, and now, in
a rush, the small silly misery was clear. She took her hand as a sign
of pitying it, then, after another instant, confirmed this expression
with a consoling kiss. They sat there together; they looked out, hand
in hand, into the damp dusky shabby little room and into the future, of
no such very different suggestion, at last accepted by each. There was
no definite utterance, on either side, of Mr. Drake’s position in the
great world, but the temporary collapse of his prospective bride threw
all further necessary light; and what our heroine saw and felt for in
the whole business was the vivid reflexion of her own dreams and
delusions and her own return to reality. Reality, for the poor things
they both were, could only be ugliness and obscurity, could never be
the escape, the rise. She pressed her friend—she had tact enough for
that—with no other personal question, brought on no need of further
revelations, only just continued to hold and comfort her and to
acknowledge by stiff little forbearances the common element in their
fate. She felt indeed magnanimous in such matters; since if it was very
well, for condolence or reassurance, to suppress just then invidious
shrinkings, she yet by no means saw herself sitting down, as she might
say, to the same table with Mr. Drake. There would luckily, to all
appearance, be little question of tables; and the circumstance that, on
their peculiar lines, her friend’s interests would still attach
themselves to Mayfair flung over Chalk Farm the first radiance it had
shown. Where was one’s pride and one’s passion when the real way to
judge of one’s luck was by making not the wrong but the right
comparison? Before she had again gathered herself to go she felt very
small and cautious and thankful. “We shall have our own house,” she
said, “and you must come very soon and let me show it you.”

“_We_ shall have our own too,” Mrs. Jordan replied; “for, don’t you
know? he makes it a condition that he sleeps out?”

“A condition?”—the girl felt out of it.

“For any new position. It was on that he parted with Lord Rye. His
lordship can’t meet it. So Mr. Drake has given him up.”

“And all for you?”—our young woman put it as cheerfully as possible.

“For me and Lady Bradeen. Her ladyship’s too glad to get him at any
price. Lord Rye, out of interest in us, has in fact quite _made_ her
take him. So, as I tell you, he will have his own establishment.”

Mrs. Jordan, in the elation of it, had begun to revive; but there was
nevertheless between them rather a conscious pause—a pause in which
neither visitor nor hostess brought out a hope or an invitation. It
expressed in the last resort that, in spite of submission and sympathy,
they could now after all only look at each other across the social
gulf. They remained together as if it would be indeed their last
chance, still sitting, though awkwardly, quite close, and feeling
also—and this most unmistakeably—that there was one thing more to go
into. By the time it came to the surface, moreover, our young friend
had recognised the whole of the main truth, from which she even drew
again a slight irritation. It was not the main truth perhaps that most
signified; but after her momentary effort, her embarrassment and her
tears Mrs. Jordan had begun to sound afresh—and even without
speaking—the note of a social connexion. She hadn’t really let go of it
that she was marrying into society. Well, it was a harmless
compensation, and it was all the prospective bride of Mr. Mudge had to
leave with her.




CHAPTER XXVII.


This young lady at last rose again, but she lingered before going. “And
has Captain Everard nothing to say to it?”

“To what, dear?”

“Why, to such questions—the domestic arrangements, things in the
house.”

“How _can_ he, with any authority, when nothing in the house is his?”

“Not his?” The girl wondered, perfectly conscious of the appearance she
thus conferred on Mrs. Jordan of knowing, in comparison with herself,
so tremendously much about it. Well, there were things she wanted so to
get at that she was willing at last, though it hurt her, to pay for
them with humiliation. “Why are they not his?”

“Don’t you know, dear, that he has nothing?”

“Nothing?” It was hard to see him in such a light, but Mrs. Jordan’s
power to answer for it had a superiority that began, on the spot, to
grow. “Isn’t he rich?”

Mrs. Jordan looked immensely, looked both generally and particularly,
informed. “It depends upon what you call—! Not at any rate in the least
as _she_ is. What does he bring? Think what she has. And then, love,
his debts.”

“His debts?” His young friend was fairly betrayed into helpless
innocence. She could struggle a little, but she had to let herself go;
and if she had spoken frankly she would have said: “Do tell me, for I
don’t know so much about him as _that_!” As she didn’t speak frankly
she only said: “His debts are nothing—when she so adores him.”

Mrs. Jordan began to fix her again, and now she saw that she must only
take it all. That was what it had come to: his having sat with her
there on the bench and under the trees in the summer darkness and put
his hand on her, making her know what he would have said if permitted;
his having returned to her afterwards, repeatedly, with supplicating
eyes and a fever in his blood; and her having, on her side, hard and
pedantic, helped by some miracle and with her impossible condition,
only answered him, yet supplicating back, through the bars of the
cage,—all simply that she might hear of him, now for ever lost, only
through Mrs. Jordan, who touched him through Mr. Drake, who reached him
through Lady Bradeen. “She adores him—but of course that wasn’t all
there was about it.”

The girl met her eyes a minute, then quite surrendered. “What was there
else about it?”

“Why, don’t you know?”—Mrs. Jordan was almost compassionate.

Her interlocutress had, in the cage, sounded depths, but there was a
suggestion here somehow of an abyss quite measureless. “Of course I
know she would never let him alone.”

“How _could_ she—fancy!—when he had so compromised her?”

The most artless cry they had ever uttered broke, at this, from the
younger pair of lips. “_Had_ he so—?”

“Why, don’t you know the scandal?”

Our heroine thought, recollected there was something, whatever it was,
that she knew after all much more of than Mrs. Jordan. She saw him
again as she had seen him come that morning to recover the telegram—she
saw him as she had seen him leave the shop. She perched herself a
moment on this. “Oh there was nothing public.”

“Not exactly public—no. But there was an awful scare and an awful row.
It was all on the very point of coming out. Something was
lost—something was found.”

“Ah yes,” the girl replied, smiling as if with the revival of a blurred
memory; “something was found.”

“It all got about—and there was a point at which Lord Bradeen had to
act.”

“Had to—yes. But he didn’t.”

Mrs. Jordan was obliged to admit it. “No, he didn’t. And then, luckily
for them, he died.”

“I didn’t know about his death,” her companion said.

“It was nine weeks ago, and most sudden. It has given them a prompt
chance.”

“To get married?”—this was a wonder—“within nine weeks?”

“Oh not immediately, but—in all the circumstances—very quietly and, I
assure you, very soon. Every preparation’s made. Above all she holds
him.”

“Oh yes, she holds him!” our young friend threw off. She had this
before her again a minute; then she continued: “You mean through his
having made her talked about?”

“Yes, but not only that. She has still another pull.”

“Another?”

Mrs. Jordan hesitated. “Why, he was _in_ something.”

Her comrade wondered. “In what?”

“I don’t know. Something bad. As I tell you, something was found.”

The girl stared. “Well?”

“It would have been very bad for him. But, she helped him some way—she
recovered it, got hold of it. It’s even said she stole it!”

Our young woman considered afresh. “Why it was what was found that
precisely saved him.”

Mrs. Jordan, however, was positive. “I beg your pardon. I happen to
know.”

Her disciple faltered but an instant. “Do you mean through Mr. Drake?
Do they tell _him_ these things?”

“A good servant,” said Mrs. Jordan, now thoroughly superior and
proportionately sententious, “doesn’t need to be told! Her ladyship
saved—as a woman so often saves!—the man she loves.”

This time our heroine took longer to recover herself, but she found a
voice at last. “Ah well—of course I don’t know! The great thing was
that he got off. They seem then, in a manner,” she added, “to have done
a great deal for each other.”

“Well, it’s she that has done most. She has him tight.”

“I see, I see. Good-bye.” The women had already embraced, and this was
not repeated; but Mrs. Jordan went down with her guest to the door of
the house. Here again the younger lingered, reverting, though three or
four other remarks had on the way passed between them, to Captain
Everard and Lady Bradeen. “Did you mean just now that if she hadn’t
saved him, as you call it, she wouldn’t hold him so tight?”

“Well, I dare say.” Mrs. Jordan, on the doorstep, smiled with a
reflexion that had come to her; she took one of her big bites of the
brown gloom. “Men always dislike one when they’ve done one an injury.”

“But what injury had he done her?”

“The one I’ve mentioned. He _must_ marry her, you know.”

“And didn’t he want to?”

“Not before.”

“Not before she recovered the telegram?”

Mrs. Jordan was pulled up a little. “Was it a telegram?”

The girl hesitated. “I thought you said so. I mean whatever it was.”

“Yes, whatever it was, I don’t think she saw _that_.”

“So she just nailed him?”

“She just nailed him.” The departing friend was now at the bottom of
the little flight of steps; the other was at the top, with a certain
thickness of fog. “And when am I to think of you in your little
home?—next month?” asked the voice from the top.

“At the very latest. And when am I to think of you in yours?”

“Oh even sooner. I feel, after so much talk with you about it, as if I
were already there!” Then “_Good_-bye!” came out of the fog.

“Good-_bye_!” went into it. Our young lady went into it also, in the
opposed quarter, and presently, after a few sightless turns, came out
on the Paddington canal. Distinguishing vaguely what the low parapet
enclosed she stopped close to it and stood a while very intently, but
perhaps still sightlessly, looking down on it. A policeman; while she
remained, strolled past her; then, going his way a little further and
half lost in the atmosphere, paused and watched her. But she was quite
unaware—she was full of her thoughts. They were too numerous to find a
place just here, but two of the number may at least be mentioned. One
of these was that, decidedly, her little home must be not for next
month, but for next week; the other, which came indeed as she resumed
her walk and went her way, was that it was strange such a matter should
be at last settled for her by Mr. Drake