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The Lion's Share

by Arnold Bennett · English · Gutenberg #14487 · 661,654 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lion's Share

Author: Arnold Bennett


        
Release date: December 27, 2004 [eBook #14487]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LION'S SHARE ***

THE LION'S SHARE

by

Arnold Bennett

First Published 1916.



_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

NOVELS--
    A MAN FROM THE NORTH
    ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS
    LEONORA
    A GREAT MAN
    SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
    WHOM GOD HATH JOINED
    BURIED ALIVE
    THE OLD WIVES' TALE
    THE GLIMPSE
    HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND
    CLAYHANGER
    HILDA LESSWAYS
    THESE TWAIN
    THE CARD
    THE REGENT
    THE PRICE OF LOVE


FANTASIAS--
    THE GRAND BABYLON HOTEL
    THE GATES OF WRATH
    TERESA OF WATLING STREET
    THE LOOT OF CITIES
    HUGO
    THE GHOST
    THE CITY OF PLEASURE


SHORT STORIES--
    TALES OF THE FIVE TOWNS
    THE GRIM SMILE OF THE FIVE TOWNS
    THE MATADOR OF THE FIVE TOWNS


BELLES-LETTRES--
    JOURNALISM FOR WOMEN
    FAME AND FICTION
    HOW TO BECOME AN AUTHOR
    THE TRUTH ABOUT AN AUTHOR
    THE REASONABLE LIFE
    HOW TO LIVE ON TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY
    THE HUMAN MACHINE
    LITERARY TASTE
    FRIENDSHIP AND HAPPINESS
    THOSE UNITED STATES
    MARRIAGE
    LIBERTY


DRAMA--
    POLITE FARCES
    CUPID AND COMMONSENSE
    WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS
    THE HONEYMOON
    THE GREAT ADVENTURE
    MILESTONES (in collaboration with Edward Knoblauch)

       *       *       *       *       *

        (In collaboration with Eden Phillpotts)
    THE SINEWS OF WAR: A Romance
    THE STATUE: A Romance





CONTENTS

CHAPTER

1. MISS INGATE, AND THE YACHT
2. THE THIEF'S PLAN WRECKED
3. THE LEGACY
4. MR. FOULGER
5. THE DEAD HAND
6. THE YOUNG WIDOW
7. THE CIGARETTE GIRL
8. EXPLOITATION OF WIDOWHOOD
9. LIFE IN PARIS
10. FANCY DRESS
11. A POLITICAL REFUGEE
12. WIDOWHOOD IN THE STUDIO
13. THE SWOON
14. MISS INGATE POINTS OUT THE DOOR
15. THE RIGHT BANK
16. ROBES
17. SOIRÉE
18. A DECISION
19. THE BOUDOIR
20. PAGET GARDENS
21. JANE
22. THE DETECTIVE
23. THE BLUE CITY
24. THE SPATTS
25. THE MUTE
26. NOCTURNE
27. IN THE GARDEN
28. ENCOUNTER
29. FLIGHT
30. ARIADNE
31. THE NOSTRUM
32. BY THE BINNACLE
33. AGUILAR'S DOUBLE LIFE
34. THE TANK-ROOM
35. THE THIRD SORT OF WOMAN
36. IN THE DINGHY
37. AFLOAT
38. IN THE UNIVERSE
39. THE IMMINENT DRIVE
40. GENIUS AT BAY
41. FINANCIAL NEWS
42. INTERVAL
43. ENTR'ACTE
44. END OF THE CONCERT
45. STRANGE RESULT OF A QUARREL
46. AN EPILOGUE




CHAPTER I

MISS INGATE, AND THE YACHT


Audrey had just closed the safe in her father's study when she was startled
by a slight noise. She turned like a defensive animal to face danger. It
had indeed occurred to her that she was rather like an animal in captivity,
and she found a bitter pleasure in the idea, though it was not at all
original.

"And Flank Hall is my Zoo!" she had said. (Not that she had ever seen the
Zoological Gardens or visited London.)

She was lithe; she moved with charm. Her short, plain blue serge
walking-frock disclosed the form of her limbs and left them free, and it
made her look younger even than she was. Its simplicity suited her gestures
and took grace from them. But she wore the old thing without the least
interest in it--almost unconsciously. She had none of the preoccupations
caused by the paraphernalia of existence. She scarcely knew what it was to
own. She was aware only of her body and her soul. Beyond these her
possessions were so few, so mean, so unimportant, that she might have
carried them to the grave and into heaven without protest from the
authorities earthly or celestial.

The slight noise was due to the door of the study, which great age had
distorted and bereft of sense, and, in fact, almost unhinged. It unlatched
itself, paused, and then calmly but firmly swung wide open. When it could
swing no farther it shook, vibrating into repose.

Audrey condemned the door for a senile lunatic, and herself for a poltroon.
She became defiant of peril, until the sound of a step on the stair beyond
the door threw her back into alarm. But when the figure of Miss Ingate
appeared in the doorway she was definitely reassured, to the point of
disdain. All her facial expression said: "It's only Miss Ingate."

And yet Miss Ingate was not a negligible woman. Her untidy hair was
greying; she was stout, she was fifty, she was plain, she had not elegance;
her accent and turns of speech were noticeably those of Essex. But she had
a magnificent pale forehead; the eyes beneath it sparkled with energy,
inquisitiveness, and sagacity; and the mouth beneath the eyes showed by its
sardonic dropping corners that she had come to a settled, cheerful
conclusion about human nature, and that the conclusion was not flattering.
Miss Ingate was a Guardian of the Poor, and the Local Representative of the
Soldiers' and Sailors' Families Association. She had studied intimately
the needy and the rich and the middling. She was charitable without
illusions; and, while adhering to every social convention, she did so with
a toleration pleasantly contemptuous; in her heart she had no mercy for
snobs of any kind, though, unfortunately, she was at times absurdly
intimidated by them--at other times she was not.

To the west, within a radius of twelve miles, she knew everybody and
everybody knew her; to the east her fame was bounded only by the regardless
sea. She and her ancestors had lived in the village of Moze as long as even
Mr. Mathew Moze and his ancestors. In the village, and to the village, she
was Miss Ingate, a natural phenomenon, like the lie of the land and the
river Moze. Her opinions offended nobody, not Mr. Moze himself--she was
Miss Ingate. She was laughed at, beloved and respected. Her sagacity had
one flaw, and the flaw sprang from her sincere conviction that human nature
in that corner of Essex, which she understood so profoundly, and where she
was so perfectly at home, was different from, and more fondly foolish than,
human nature in any other part of the world. She could not believe that
distant populations could be at once so pathetically and so naughtily human
as the population in and around Moze.

If Audrey disdained Miss Ingate, it was only because Miss Ingate was
neither young nor fair nor the proprietress of some man, and because people
made out that she was peculiar. In some respects Audrey looked upon Miss
Ingate as a life-belt, as the speck of light at the end of a tunnel, as the
enigmatic smile which glimmers always in the frown of destiny.

"Well?" cried Miss Ingate in her rather shrill voice, grinning
sardonically, with the corners of her lips still lower than usual in
anticipatory sarcasm. It was as if she had said: "You cannot surprise me by
any narrative of imbecility or turpitude or bathos. All the same, I am
dying to hear the latest eccentricity of this village."

"Well?" parried Audrey, holding one hand behind her.

They did not shake hands. People who call at ten o'clock in the morning
cannot expect to have their hands shaken. Miss Ingate certainly expected
nothing of the sort. She had the freedom of Flank Hall, as of scores of
other houses, at all times of day. Servants opened front doors for her with
a careless smile, and having shut front doors they left her loose, like a
familiar cat, to find what she wanted. They seldom "showed" her into any
room, nor did they dream of acting before her the unconvincing comedy of
going to "see" whether masters or mistresses were out or in.

"Where's your mother?" asked Miss Ingate idly, quite sure that interesting
divulgations would come, and quite content to wait for them. She had been
out of the village for over a week.

"Mother's taking her acetyl salicylic," Audrey answered, coming to the door
of the study.

This meant merely that Mrs. Moze had a customary attack of the neuralgia
for which the district is justly renowned among strangers.

"Oh!" murmured Miss Ingate callously. Mrs. Moze, though she had lived in
the district for twenty-five years, did not belong to it. If she chose to
keep on having neuralgia, that was her affair, but in justice to natives
and to the district she ought not to make too much of it, and she ought to
admit that it might well be due to her weakness after her operation. Miss
Ingate considered the climate to be the finest in England; which it was, on
the condition that you were proof against neuralgia.

"Father's gone to Colchester in the car to see the Bishop," Audrey coldly
added.

"If I'd known he was going to Colchester I should have asked him for a
lift," said Miss Ingate, with determination.

"Oh, yes! He'd have taken _you!_" said Audrey, reserved. "I suppose you
had fine times in London!"

"Oh! It was vehy exciting! It was vehy exciting!" Miss Ingate agreed
loudly.

"Father wouldn't let me read about it in the paper," said Audrey, still
reserved. "He never will, you know. But I did!"

"Oh! But you didn't read about me playing the barrel organ all the way down
Regent Street, because that wasn't in any of the papers."

"You _didn't!_" Audrey protested, with a sudden dark smile.

"Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Yes, I did. And vehy tiring it was. Vehy tiring
indeed. It's quite an art to turn a barrel organ. If you don't keep going
perfectly even it makes the tune jerky. Oh! I know a bit about barrel
organs now. They smashed it all to pieces. Oh yes! All to pieces. I spoke
to the police. I said, 'Aren't you going to protect these ladies'
property?' But they didn't lift a finger."

"And weren't you arrested?"

"Me!" shrieked Miss Ingate. "Me arrested!" Then more quietly, in an assured
tone, "Oh no! I wasn't arrested. You see, as soon as the row began I just
walked away from the organ and became one of the crowd. I'm all _for_ them,
but I wasn't going to be arrested."

Miss Ingate's sparkling eyes seemed to say: "Sylvia Pankhurst can be
arrested if she likes, and so can Mrs. Despard and Annie Kenney and Jane
Foley, or any of them. But the policeman that is clever enough to catch
Miss Ingate of Moze does not exist. And the gumption of Miss Ingate of Moze
surpasses the united gumption of all the other feminists in England."

"Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!" repeated Miss Ingate with mingled complacency, glee,
passion, and sardonic tolerance of the whole panorama of worldly existence.
"The police were awful, shocking. But I was not arrested."

"Well, _I_ was--this morning," said Audrey in a low and poignant voice.

Miss Ingate was startled out of her mood of the detached ironic spectator.

"What?" she frowned.

They heard a servant moving about at the foot of the stairs, and a capped
head could be seen through the interstices of the white Chinese balustrade.
The study was the only immediate refuge; Miss Ingate advanced right into
it, and Audrey pushed the door to.

"Father's given me a month's C.B."

Miss Ingate, gazing at the girl's face, saw in its quiet and yet savage
desperation the possibility that after all she might indeed be surprised by
the vagaries of human nature in the village. And her glance became
sympathetic, even tender, as well as apprehensive.

"'C.B.'? What do you mean--'C.B.'?"

"Don't you know what C.B. means?" exclaimed Audrey with scornful
superiority over the old spinster. "Confined to barracks. Father says I'm
not to go beyond the grounds for a month. And to-day's the second of
April!"

"No!"

"Yes, he does. He's given me a week, you know, before. Now it's a month."

Silence fell.

Miss Ingate looked round at the shabby study, with its guns, cigar-boxes,
prints, books neither old nor new, japanned boxes of documents, and general
litter scattered over the voluted walnut furniture. Her own house was
old-fashioned, and she realised it was old-fashioned; but when she came
into Flank Hall, and particularly into Mr. Moze's study, she felt as if
she was stepping backwards into history--and this in spite of the fact that
nothing in the place was really ancient, save the ceilings and the woodwork
round the windows. It was Mr. Moze's habit of mind that dominated and
transmogrified the whole interior, giving it the quality of a mausoleum.
The suffragette procession in which Miss Ingate had musically and
discreetly taken part seemed to her as she stood in Mr. Moze's changeless
lair to be a phantasm. Then she looked at the young captive animal and
perceived that two centuries may coincide on the same carpet and that time
is merely a convention.

"What you been doing?" she questioned, with delicacy.

"I took a strange man by the hand," said Audrey, choosing her words
queerly, as she sometimes did, to produce a dramatic effect.

"This morning?"

"Yes. Eight o'clock."

"What? Is there a strange man in the village?"

"You don't mean to say you haven't seen the yacht!"

"Yacht?" Miss Ingate showed some excitement.

"Come and look, Winnie," said Audrey, who occasionally thought fit to
address Miss Ingate in the manner of the elder generation. She drew Miss
Ingate to the window.

Between the brown curtains Mozewater, the broad, shallow estuary of the
Moze, was spread out glittering in the sunshine which could not get into
the chilly room. The tide was nearly at full, and the estuary looked like a
mighty harbour for great ships; but in six hours it would be reduced to a
narrow stream winding through mud flats of marvellous ochres, greens, and
pinks. In the hazy distance a fitful white flash showed where ocean waves
were breaking on a sand-bank. And in the foreground, against a disused Hard
that was a couple of hundred yards lower down than the village Hard, a
large white yacht was moored, probably the largest yacht that had ever
threaded that ticklish navigation. She was a shallow-draft barge-yacht,
rigged like a Thames barge, and her whiteness and the glint of her brass,
and the flicker of her ensign at the stern were dazzling. Blue figures ran
busily about on her, and a white-and-blue person in a peaked cap stood
importantly at the wheel.

"She was on the mud last night," said Audrey eagerly, "opposite the Flank
buoy, and she came up this morning at half-flood. I think they made fast at
Lousey Hard, because they couldn't get any farther without waiting. They
have a motor, and it must be their first trip this season. I was on the
dyke. I wasn't even looking at them, but they called me, so I had to go.
They only wanted to know if Lousey Hard was private. Of course I told them
it wasn't. It was a very middle-aged man spoke to me. He must be the owner.
As soon as they were tied up he wanted to jump ashore. It was rather
awkward, and I just held out my hand to help him. Father saw me from here.
I might have known he would."

"Why! It's going off!" exclaimed Miss Ingate.

The yacht swung slowly round, held by her stern to the Hard. Then the last
hawser was cast off, and she floated away on the first of the ebb; and as
she moved, her main-sail, unbrailed, spread itself out and became a vast
pinion. Like a dream of happiness she lessened and faded, and Lousey Hard
was as lonely and forlorn as ever.

"But didn't you explain to your father?" Miss Ingate demanded of Audrey.

"Of course I did. But he wouldn't listen. He never does. I might just as
well have explained to the hall-clock. He raged. I think he enjoys losing
his temper. He said I oughtn't to have been there at all, and it was just
like me, and he couldn't understand it in a daughter of his, and it would
be a great shock to my poor mother, and he'd talked enough--he should now
proceed to action. All the usual things. He actually asked me who 'the man'
was."

"And who was it?"

"How can I tell? For goodness' sake don't go imitating father, Winnie! ...
Rather a dull man, I should say. Rather like father, only not so old. He
had a beautiful necktie; I think it must have been made out of a strip of
Joseph's coat."

Miss Ingate giggled at a high pitch, and Audrey responsively smiled.

"Oh dear! Oh dear!" murmured Miss Ingate when her giggling was exhausted.
"How queer it is that a girl like you can't keep your father in a good
temper!"

"Father hates me to say funny things. If I say anything funny he turns as
black as ink--and he takes care to keep gloomy all the rest of the day,
too. He never laughs. Mother laughs now and then, but I never heard father
laugh. Oh yes, I did. He laughed when the cat fell out of the bathroom
window on to the lawn-roller. He went quite red in the face with
laughing.... I say, Miss Ingate, do you think father's mad?"

"I shouldn't think he's what you call mad," replied Miss Ingate judicially,
with admirable sang-froid. "I've known so many peculiar people in my time.
And you must remember, Audrey, this is a peculiar part of the world."

"Well, I believe he's mad, anyway. I believe he's got men on the brain,
especially young men. He's growing worse. Yesterday he told me I musn't
have the punt out on Mozewater this season unless he's with me. Fancy
skiffing about with father! He says I'm too old for that now. So there you
are. The older I get the less I'm allowed to do. I can't go a walk, unless
it's an errand. The pedal is off my bike, and father is much too cunning to
have it repaired. I can't boat. I'm never given any money. He grumbles
frightfully if I want any clothes, so I never want any. That's my latest
dodge. I've read every book in the house except the silly liturgical and
legal things he's always having from the London Library--and I've read even
some of those. He won't buy any new music. Golf! Ye gods, Winnie, you
should hear him talk about ladies and golf!"

"I have," said Miss Ingate. "But it doesn't ruffle me, because I don't
play."

"But he plays with girls, and young girls, too, all the same. He's been
caught in the act. Ethel told me. He little thinks I know. He'd let me play
if he could be the only man on the course. He's mad about me and men. He
never looks at me without thinking of all the boys in the district."

"But he's really very fond of you, Audrey."

"Yes, I know," said Audrey. "He ought to keep me in the china cupboard."

"Well, it's a great problem."

"He's invented a beautiful new trick for keeping me in when he's out. I
have to copy his beastly Society letters for him."

"I see he's got a new box," observed Miss Ingate, glancing into the open
cupboard in which stood the safe. On the top of the safe were two japanned
boxes, each lettered in white: "The National Reformation Society." The
uppermost box was freshly unpacked and shone with all the intact pride of
virginity.

"You should read some of the letters. You really should, Winnie," said
Audrey. "All the bigwigs of the Society love writing to each other. I bet
you father will get a typewriting machine this year, and make me learn it.
The chairman has a typewriter, and father means to be the next chairman.
You'll see.... Oh! What's that? Listen!"

"What's what?"

A faint distant throbbing could be heard.

"It's the motor! He's coming back for something. Fly out of here, Winnie,
fly!"

Audrey felt sick at the thought that if her father had returned only a few
minutes earlier he might have trapped her at the safe itself. She still
kept one hand behind her.

Miss Ingate, who with all her qualities was rather easily flustered, ran
out of the dangerous room in Audrey's wake. They met Mr. Mathew Moze at
the half-landing of the stairs.

He was a man of average size, somewhat past sixty years. He had plump
cheeks, tinged with red; his hair, moustache and short, full beard, were
quite grey. He wore a thick wide-spreading ulster, and between his coat and
waistcoat a leather vest, and on his head a grey cap. Put him in the Strand
in town clothes, and he might have been taken for a clerk, a civil servant,
a club secretary, a retired military officer, a poet, an undertaker--for
anything except the last of a long line of immovable squires who could not
possibly conceive what it was not to be the owner of land. His face was
preoccupied and overcast, but as soon as he realised that Miss Ingate was
on the stairs it instantly brightened into a warm and rather wistful smile.

"Good morning, Miss Ingate," he greeted her with deferential cordiality.
"I'm so glad to see you back."

"Good morning, good morning, Mr. Moze," responded Miss Ingate. "Vehy nice
of you. Vehy nice of you."

Nobody would have guessed from their demeanour that they differed on every
subject except their loyalty to that particular corner of Essex, that he
regarded her and her political associates as deadly microbes in the
national organism, and that she regarded him as a nincompoop crossed with a
tyrant. Each of them had a magic glass to see in the other nothing but a
local Effendi and familiar guardian angel of Moze. Moreover, Mr. Moze's
public smile and public manner were irresistible--until he lost his temper.
He might have had friends by the score, had it not been for his deep
constitutional reserve--due partly to diffidence and partly to an immense
hidden conceit. Mr. Moze's existence was actuated, though he knew it not,
by the conviction that the historic traditions of England were committed to
his keeping. Hence the conceit, which was that of a soul secretly
self-dedicated.

Audrey, outraged by the hateful hypocrisy of persons over fifty, and
terribly constrained and alarmed, turned vaguely back up the stairs. Miss
Ingate, not quite knowing what she did, with an equal vagueness followed
her.

"Come in. Do come in," urged Mr. Moze at the door of the study.

Audrey, who remained on the landing, heard her elders talk smoothly of
grave Mozian things, while Mr. Moze unlocked the new tin box above the
safe.

"I'd forgotten a most important paper," said he, as he relocked the box. "I
have an appointment with the Bishop of Colchester at ten-forty-five, and I
fear I may be late. Will you excuse me, Miss Ingate?"

She excused him.

Departing, he put the paper into his pocket with a careful and loving
gesture that well symbolised his passionate affection for the Society of
which he was already the vice-chairman. He had been a member of the
National Reformation Society for eleven years. Despite the promise of its
name, this wealthy association of idealists had no care for reforms in a
sadly imperfect England. Its aim was anti-Romanist. The Reformation which
it had in mind was Luther's, and it wished, by fighting an alleged
insidious revival of Roman Catholicism, to make sure that so far as England
was concerned Luther had not preached in vain.

Mr. Moze's connection with the Society had originated in a quarrel between
himself and a Catholic priest from Ipswich who had instituted a boys'
summer camp on the banks of Mozewater near the village of Moze. Until that
quarrel, the exceeding noxiousness of the Papal doctrine had not clearly
presented itself to Mr. Moze. In such strange ways may an ideal come to
birth. As Mr. Moze, preoccupied and gloomy once more, steered himself
rapidly out of Moze towards the episcopal presence, the image of the
imperturbable and Jesuitical priest took shape in his mind, refreshing his
determination to be even with Rome at any cost.



CHAPTER II

THE THIEF'S PLAN WRECKED


"The fact is," said Audrey, "father has another woman in the house now."

Mr. Moze had left Miss Ingate in the study and Audrey had cautiously
rejoined her there.

"Another woman in the house!" repeated Miss Ingate, sitting down in happy
expectation. "What on earth do you mean? Who on earth do you mean?"

"I mean me."

"You aren't a woman, Audrey."

"I'm just as much of a woman as you are. All father's behaviour proves it."

"But your father treats you as a child."

"No, he doesn't. He treats me as a woman. If he thought I was a child he
wouldn't have anything to worry about. I'm over nineteen."

"You don't look it."

"Of course I don't. But I could if I liked. I simply won't look it because
I don't care to be made ridiculous. I should start to look my age at once
if father stopped treating me like a child."

"But you've just said he treats you as a woman!"

"You don't understand, Winnie," said the girl sharply. "Unless you're
pretending. Now you've never told me anything about yourself, and I've
always told you lots about myself. You belong to an old-fashioned family.
How were you treated when you were my age?"

"In what way?"

"You know what way," said Audrey, gazing at her.

"Well, my dear. Things seemed to come very naturally, somehow."

"Were you ever engaged?"

"Me? Oh, no!" answered Miss Ingate with tranquillity. "I'm vehy interested
in them. Oh, vehy! Oh, vehy! And I like talking to them. But anything more
than that gets on my nerves. My eldest sister was the one. Oh! She was the
one. She refused eleven men, and when she was going to be married she made
me embroider the monograms of all of them on the skirt of her
wedding-dress. She made me, and I had to do it. I sat up all night the
night before the wedding to finish them."

"And what did the bridegroom say about it?"

"The bridegroom didn't say anything about it because he didn't know. Nobody
knew except Arabella and me. She just wanted to feel that the monograms
were on her dress, that was all."

"How strange!"

"Yes, it was. But this is a vehy strange part of the world."

"And what happened afterwards?"

"Bella died when she had her first baby, and the baby died as well. And the
father's dead now, too."

"What a horrid story, Winnie!" Audrey murmured. And after a pause: "I like
your sister."

"She was vehy uncommon. But I liked her too. I don't know why, but I did.
She could make the best marmalade I ever tasted in my born days."

"I could make the best marmalade you ever tasted in your born days," said
Audrey, sinking neatly to the floor and crossing her legs, "but they won't
let me."

"Won't let you! But I thought you did all sorts of things in the house."

"No, Winnie. I only do one thing. I do as I'm told--and not always even
that. Now, if I wanted to make the best marmalade you ever tasted in your
born days, first of all there would be a fearful row about the oranges.
Secondly, father would tell mother she must tell me exactly what I was to
do. He would also tell cook. Thirdly and lastly, dear friends, he would
come into the kitchen himself. It wouldn't be my marmalade at all. I should
only be a marmalade-making machine. They never let me have any
responsibility--no, not even when mother's operation was on--and I'm never
officially free. The kitchen-maid has far more responsibility than I have.
And she has an evening off and an afternoon off. She can write a letter
without everybody asking her who she's writing to. She's only seventeen.
She has the morning postman for a young man now, and probably one or two
others that I don't know of. And she has money and she buys her own
clothes. She's a very naughty, wicked girl, and I wish I was in her place.
She scorns me, naturally. Who wouldn't?"

Miss Ingate said not a word. She merely sat with her hands in the lap of
her spotted pale-blue dress, faintly and sadly smiling.

Audrey burst out:

"Miss Ingate, what can I do? I must do something. What can I do?"

Miss Ingate shook her head, and put her lips tightly together, while
mechanically smoothing the sides of her grey coat.

"I don't know," she said. "It beats me."

"Then _I'll_ tell you what I can do!" answered Audrey firmly, wriggling
somewhat nearer to her along the floor. "And what I shall do."

"What?"

"Will you promise to keep it a secret?"

Miss Ingate nodded, smiling and showing her teeth. Her broad polished
forehead positively shone with kindly eagerness.

"Will you swear?"

Miss Ingate hesitated, and then nodded again.

"Then put your hand on my head and say, 'I swear.'"

Miss Ingate obeyed.

"I shall leave this house," said Audrey in a low voice.

"You won't, Audrey!"

"I'll eat my hand off if I've not left this house by to-morrow, anyway."

"To-morrow!" Miss Ingate nearly screamed. "Now, Audrey, do reflect. Think
what you are!"

Audrey bounded to her feet.

"That's what father's always saying," she exploded angrily. "He's always
telling me to examine myself. The fact is, I know too much about myself. I
know exactly the kind of girl it is who's going to leave this house.
Exactly!"

"Audrey, you frighten me. Where are you going to?"

"London."

"Oh! That's all right then. I am relieved. I thought perhaps you waited to
come to _my_ house. You won't get to London, because you haven't any
money."

"Oh, yes, I have. I've got a hundred pounds."

"Where?"

"Remember, you've sworn.... Here!" she cried suddenly, and drawing her hand
from behind her back she most sensationally displayed a crushed roll of
bank-notes.

"And who did you get those from?"

"I didn't get them from anybody. I got them out of father's safe. They're
his reserve. He keeps them right at the back of the left-hand drawer, and
he's so sure they're there that he never looks for them. He thinks he's a
perfect model, but really he's careless. There's a duplicate key to the
safe, you know, and he leaves it with a lot of other keys loose in his
desk. I expect he thought nobody would ever dream of guessing it was a key
of the safe. I know he never looked at this roll, because I've been opening
the safe every day for weeks past, and the roll was always the same. In
fact, it was dusty. Then to-day I decided to take it, and here you are! He
finished himself off yesterday, so far as I'm concerned, with the business
about the punt."

"But do you know you're a thief, Audrey?" breathed Miss Ingate, extremely
embarrassed, and for once somewhat staggered by the vagaries of human
nature.

"You seem to forget, Miss Ingate," said Audrey solemnly, "that Cousin
Caroline left me a legacy of two hundred pounds last year, and that I've
never seen a penny of it. Father absolutely declined to let me have the
tiniest bit of it. Well, I've taken half. He can keep the other half for
his trouble."

Miss Ingate's mouth stood open, and her eyes seemed startled.

"But you can't go to London alone. You wouldn't know what to do."

"Yes, I should. I've arranged everything. I shall wear my best clothes.
When I arrive at Liverpool Street I shall take a taxi. I've got three
addresses of boarding-houses out of the _Daily Telegraph_, and they're all
in Bloomsbury, W.C. I shall have lessons in shorthand and typewriting at
Pitman's School, and then I shall get a situation. My name will be
Vavasour."

"But you'll be caught."

"I shan't. I shall book to Ipswich first and begin again from there. Girls
like me aren't so easy to catch as all that."

"You're vehy cunning."

"I get that from mother. She's most frightfully cunning with father."

"Audrey," said Miss Ingate with a strange grin, "I don't know how I can sit
here and listen to you. You'll ruin me with your father, because if you go
I'm sure I shall never be able to keep from him that I knew all about it."

"Then you shouldn't have sworn," retorted Audrey. "But I'm glad you did
swear, because I had to tell somebody, and there was nobody but you."

Miss Ingate might possibly have contrived to employ some of that sagacity
in which she took a secret pride upon a very critical and urgent situation,
had not Mrs. Moze, with a white handkerchief wrapped round her forehead,
at that moment come into the room. Immediately the study was full of
neuralgia and eau-de-Cologne.

When Mrs. Moze and Miss Ingate at length recovered from the tenderness of
meeting each other after a separation of ten days or more, Audrey had
vanished like an illusion. She was not afraid of her mother; and she could
trust Miss Ingate, though Miss Ingate and Mrs. Moze were dangerously
intimate; but she was too self-conscious to remain in the presence of her
fellow-creatures; and in spite of her faith in Miss Ingate she thought of
the spinster as of a vase filled now with a fatal liquor which by any
accident might spill and spread ruin--so that she could scarcely bear to
look upon Miss Ingate.

At the back of the house a young Pomeranian dog, which had recently solaced
Miss Ingate in the loss of a Pekingese done to death by a spinster's
too-nourishing love, was prancing on his four springs round the chained
yard-dog, his friend and patron. In a series of marvellous short bounds, he
followed Audrey with yapping eagerness down the slope of the garden; and
the yard-dog, aware that none but the omnipotent deity, Mr. Moze, sole
source of good and evil, had the right to loose him, turned round once and
laid himself flat and long on the ground, sighing.

The garden, after developing into an orchard and deteriorating into a
scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of the
sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very green
meadow. Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see if anybody
was watching her.

Flank Hall, which for a hundred years had been called "the new hall," was a
seemly Georgian residence, warm in colour, with some quaint woodwork; and
like most such buildings in Essex, it made a very happy marriage with the
landscape. Its dormers and fine chimneys glowed amid the dark bare trees,
and they alone would have captivated a Londoner possessing those precious
attributes, fortunately ever spreading among the enlightened
middle-classes, a motor-car, a cultured taste in architecture, and a desire
to enter the squirearchy. Audrey loathed the house. For her it was the last
depth of sordidness and the commonplace. She could imagine positively
nothing less romantic. She thought of the ground floor on chill March
mornings with no fires anywhere save a red gleam in the dining-room, and
herself wandering about in it idle, at a loss for a diversion, an ambition,
an effort, a real task; and she thought of the upper floor, a mainly
unoccupied wilderness of iron bedsteads and yellow chests of drawers and
chipped earthenware and islands of carpets, and her mother plaintively and
weariedly arguing with some servant over a slop-pail in a corner. The
images of the interior, indelibly printed in her soul, desolated her.

Mozewater she loved, and every souvenir of it was exquisite--red barges
beating miraculously up the shallow puddles to Moze Quay, equinoctial
spring-tides when the estuary was a tremendous ocean covered with foam and
the sea-wall felt the light lash of spray, thunderstorms in autumn
gathering over the yellow melancholy of deathlike sunsets, wild birds
crying across miles of uncovered mud at early morning and duck-hunters
crouching in punts behind a waving screen of delicate grasses to wing them,
and the mysterious shapes of steamers and warships in the offing beyond the
Sand.... The sail of the receding yacht gleamed now against the Sand, and
its flashing broke her heart; for it was the flashing of freedom. She
thought of the yachtsman; he was very courteous and deferential; a mild
creature; he had behaved to her as to a woman.... Oh! To be the petted and
capricious wife of such a man, to nod commands, to enslave with a smile, to
want a thing and instantly to have it, to be consulted and to decide, to
spend with large gestures, to be charitable, to be adored by those whom you
had saved from disaster, to increase happiness wherever you went ... and to
be free!....

The little dog jumped up at her because he was tired of being ignored, and
she caught him and kissed him again and again passionately, and he wriggled
with ecstasy and licked her ears with all the love in him. And in kissing
him she kissed grave and affectionate husbands, she kissed the lovely
scenery of the Sound, and she kissed the magnificent ideal of emancipation.
But the dog had soon had enough of her arms; he broke free, sprang,
alighted, and rolled over, and arose sniffing, with earth on his black
muzzle....

He looked up at her inquiringly.... Strange, short-frocked blue figure
looking down at him! She had a bulging forehead; her brown eyes were
tunnelled underneath it. But what living eyes, what ardent eyes, that
blazed up and sank like a fire! What delicate and exact mirrors of the
secret traffic between her soul and the soul of the world!  She had full
cheeks, and a large mouth ripe red, inviting and provocative. In the midst,
an absurd small unprominent nose that meant nothing! Her complexion was
divine, surpassing all similes. To caress that smooth downy cheek (if you
looked close you could see the infinitesimal down against the light like an
aura on the edge of the silhouette), even to let the gaze dwell on it, what
an enchantment!... She considered herself piquant and comely, and she was
not deceived. She had long hands.

The wind from afar on her cheek reminded her poignantly that she was a
prisoner. She could not go to the clustered village on the left, nor into
the saltings on the right, nor even on to the sea-wall where the new rushes
and grasses were showing. All the estuary was barred, and the winding road
that mounted the slope towards Colchester. Her revolt against injustice
was savage. Hatred of her father surged up in her like glittering lava. She
had long since ceased to try to comprehend him. She despised herself
because she was unreasonably afraid of him, ridiculously mute before him.
She could not understand how anybody could be friendly with him--for was he
not notorious? Yet everywhere he was greeted with respect and smiles, and
he would chat at length with all manner of people on a note of mild and
smooth cordiality. He and Miss Ingate would enjoy together the most
enormous talks. She was, however, aware that Miss Ingate's opinion of him
was not very different from her own. Each time she saw her father and Miss
Ingate in communion she would say in her heart to Miss Ingate: "You are
disloyal to me." ...

Was it possible that she had confided to Miss Ingate her fearful secret?
The conversation appeared to her unreal now. She went over her plan. In the
afternoon her father was always out, and to-morrow afternoon her mother
would be out too. She would have a few things in a light bag that she could
carry--her mother's bag! She would put on her best clothes and a veil from
her mother's wardrobe. She would take the 4.5 p.m. train. The stationmaster
would be at his tea then. Only the booking-clerk and the porter would see
her, and neither would dare to make an observation. She would ask for a
return ticket to Ipswich; that would allay suspicion, and at Ipswich she
would book again. She had cut out the addresses of the boarding-houses.
She would have to buy things in London. She knew of two shops--Harrod's and
Shoolbred's; she had seen their catalogues. And the very next morning after
arrival she would go to Pitman's School. She would change the first of the
£5 notes at the station and ask for plenty of silver. She glanced at the
unlimited wealth still crushed in her hand, and then she carefully dropped
the fortune down the neck of her frock.... Stealing? She repulsed the idea
with violent disdain. What she had accomplished against her father was not
a crime, but a vengeance.... She would never be found in London. It was
impossible. Her plan seemed to her to be perfect in each detail, except
one. She was not the right sort of girl to execute it. She was very shy.
She suspected that no other girl could really be as shy as she was. She
recalled dreadful rare moments with her mother in strange drawing-rooms.
Still, she would execute the plan even if she died of fright. A force
within her would compel her to execute it. This force did not make for
happiness; on the contrary, it uncomfortably scared her; but it was
irresistible.

Something on the brow of the road from Colchester attracted her attention.
It was a handcart, pushed by a labourer and by Police Inspector Keeble,
whom she liked. Following the handcart over the brow came a loose
procession of villagers, which included no children, because the children
were in school. Except on a Sunday Audrey had never before seen a
procession of villagers, and these villagers must have been collected out
of the fields, for the procession was going in the direction of, and not
away from, the village. The handcart was covered with a tarpaulin.... She
knew what had happened; she knew infallibly. Skirting the boundary of the
grounds, she reached the main entrance to Flank Hall thirty seconds before
the handcart. The little dog, delighted in a new adventure, yapped
ecstatically at her heels, and then bounded onwards to meet the Inspector
and the handcart.

"Run and tell yer mother, Miss Moze," Inspector Keeble called out in a
carrying whisper. "There's been an accident. He ditched the car near
Ardleigh cross-roads, trying to avoid some fowls."

Mr. Moze, hurrying too fast to meet the Bishop of Colchester, had met a
greater than the Bishop.

Audrey glanced an instant with a sick qualm at the outlines of the shape
beneath the tarpaulin, and ran.

In the dining-room, over the speck of fire, Mrs. Moze and Miss Ingate were
locked in a deep intimate gossip.

"Mother!" cried Audrey, and then sank like a sack.

"Why! The little thing's fainted!" Miss Ingate exclaimed in a voice
suddenly hoarse.



CHAPTER III

THE LEGACY


Audrey and Miss Ingate were in the late Mathew Moze's study, fascinated--as
much unconsciously as consciously--by the thing which since its owner's
death had grown every hour more mysterious and more formidable--the safe.
It was a fine afternoon. The secondary but still grandiose enigma of the
affair, Mr. Cowl, could be heard walking methodically on the gravel in the
garden. Mr. Cowl was the secretary of the National Reformation Society.

Suddenly the irregular sound of crunching receded.

"He's gone somewhere else," said Audrey.

"I'm so relieved," said Miss Ingate. "I hope he's gone a long way off."

"Are you?" murmured Audrey, with an air of surprised superiority.

But in secret Audrey felt just as relieved as Miss Ingate, despite the fact
that, her mother being prostrate, she was the mistress of the situation,
and could have ordered Mr. Cowl to leave, with the certainty of being
obeyed. She was astonished at her illogical sensations, and she had been
frequently so astonished in the previous four days.

For example, she was free; she knew that she could impose herself on her
mother; never again would she be the slave of an unreasoning tyrant; yet
she was gloomy and without hope. She had hated the unreasoning tyrant; yet
she felt very sorry for him because he was dead. And though she felt very
sorry for him, she detested hearing the panegyrics upon him of the village,
and particularly of those persons with whom he had quarrelled; she actually
stopped Miss Ingate in the midst of an enumeration of his good
qualities--his charm, his smile, his courtesy, his integrity, et cetera;
she could not bear it. She thought that no child had ever had such a
strange attitude to a deceased parent as hers to Mr. Moze. She had
anticipated the inquest with an awful dread; it proved to be a trifle, and
a ridiculous trifle. In the long weekly letter which she wrote to her
adored school-friend Ethel at Manningtree she had actually likened the
coroner to a pecking fowl! Was it possible that a daughter could write in
such a strain about the inquest on her father's body?

The funeral had seemed a function by itself, with some guidance from the
undertaker and still more from Mr. Cowl. Villagers and district
acquaintances had been many at the ceremony, but relatives rare. Mr. Moze's
four younger brothers were all in the Colonies; Mrs. Moze had apparently no
connections. Madame Piriac, daughter of Mr. Moze's first wife by that
lady's first husband, had telegraphed sympathies from Paris. A cousin or so
had come in person from Woodbridge for the day.

It was from the demeanour of these cousins, grave men twice her age or
more, that Audrey had first divined her new importance in the world. Their
deference indicated that in their opinion the future mistress of Flank Hall
was not Mrs. Moze, but Audrey. Audrey admitted that they were right.  Yet
she took no pleasure in issuing commands. She spoke firmly, but she said to
herself: "There is no backbone to this firmness, and I am a fraud." She had
always yearned for responsibility, yet now that it was in her hand she
trembled, and she would have dropped it and run away from it as from a
bomb, had she not been too cowardly to show her cowardice.

The instance of Aguilar, the head-gardener and mechanic, well illustrated
her pusillanimity. She loathed Aguilar; her mother loathed him; the
servants loathed him. He had said at the inquest that the car was in
perfect order, but that Mr. Moze was too excitable to be a good driver.
His evidence was true, but the jury did not care for his manner. Nor did
the village. He had only two good qualities--honesty and efficiency; and
these by their rarity excited jealousy rather than admiration. Audrey
strongly desired to throw the gardener-mechanic upon the world; it
nauseated her to see his disobliging face about the garden. But he remained
scathless, to refuse demanded vegetables, to annoy the kitchen, to
pronounce the motor-car utterly valueless, and to complain of his own
liver. Audrey had legs; she had a tongue; she could articulate. Neither
wish nor power was lacking in her to give Aguilar the supreme experience of
his career. And yet she did not walk up to him and say: "Aguilar, please
take a week's notice." Why? The question puzzled her and lowered her
opinion of herself.

She was similarly absurd in the paramount matter of the safe. The safe
could not be opened. The village, having been thrilled by four stirring
days of the most precious and rare fever, had suffered much after the
funeral from a severe reaction of dullness. It would have suffered much
more had the fact not escaped that the safe could not be opened. In the
deep depression of the day following the funeral the village could still
say to itself: "Romance and excitement are not yet over, for the key of the
Moze safe is lost, and the will is in the safe!"

The village did not know that there were two keys to the safe and that they
were both lost. Nobody knew that except Audrey and Miss Ingate and Mr.
Cowl. The official key was lost because Mr. Moze's key-ring was lost. The
theory was that it had been jerked out of his pocket in the accident.
Persistent search for it had been unsuccessful. As for the unofficial or
duplicate key, Audrey could not remember where she had put it after her
burglary, the conclusion of which had been disturbed by Miss Ingate. At one
moment she was quite sure that she had left the key in the safe, but at
another moment she was equally sure that she was holding the key in her
right hand (the bank-notes being in her left) when Miss Ingate entered the
room; at still another moment she was almost convinced that before Miss
Ingate's arrival she had run to the desk and slipped the key back into its
drawer. In any case the second key was irretrievable. She discussed the
dilemma very fully with Miss Ingate, who had obligingly come to stay in the
house. They examined every aspect of the affair, except Audrey's guiltiness
of theft, which both of them tacitly ignored. In the end they decided that
it might be wiser not to conceal Audrey's knowledge of the existence of a
second key; and they told Mr. Cowl, because he happened to be at hand. In
so doing they were ill-advised, because Mr. Cowl at once acted in a
characteristic and inconvenient fashion which they ought to have foreseen.

On the day before the funeral Mr. Cowl had telegraphed from some place in
Devonshire that he should represent the National Reformation Society at the
funeral, and asked for a bed, on the pretext that he could not get from
Devonshire to Moze in time for the funeral if he postponed his departure
until the next morning. The telegram was quite costly. He arrived for
dinner, a fat man about thirty-eight, with chestnut hair, a low, alluring
voice, and a small handbag for luggage. Miss Ingate thought him very
interesting, and he was. He said little about the National Reformation
Society, but a great deal about the late Mr. Moze, of whom he appeared to
be an intimate friend; presumably the friendship had developed at meetings
of the Society. After dinner he strolled nonchalantly to the sideboard and
opened a box of the deceased's cigars, and suggested that, as he was well
acquainted with the brand, having often enjoyed the hospitality of Mr.
Moze's cigar-case, he should smoke a cigar now to the memory of the
departed. Miss Ingate then began to feel alarmed. He smoked four cigars to
the memory of the departed, and on retiring ventured to take four more for
consumption during the night, as he seldom slept.

In the morning he went into the bathroom at eight o'clock and remained
there till noon, reading and smoking in continually renewed hot water. He
descended blandly, begged Miss Moze not to trouble about his breakfast, and
gently assumed a certain control of the funeral. After the funeral he
announced that he should leave on the morrow; but the mystery of the safe
held him to the house. When he heard of the existence of the second key he
organised and took command of a complete search of the study, and in the
course of the search he inspected every document in the study. He said he
knew that the deceased had left a legacy to the Society, and he should not
feel justified in quitting Moze until the will was found.

Now in these circumstances Audrey ought certainly to have telegraphed to
her father's solicitor at Chelmsford at once. In the alternative she ought
to have hired a safe-opening expert or a burglar from Colchester. She had
accomplished neither of these downright things. With absolute power, she
had done nothing but postpone. She wondered at herself, for up to her
father's death she had been a great critic of absolute power.

       *       *       *       *       *

The heavy policemanish step of Mr. Cowl was heard on the landing.

"He's coming down on us!" exclaimed Miss Ingate, partly afraid, and partly
ironic at her own fear. "I'm sure he's coming down on us. Audrey, I liked
that man at first, but now I tremble before him. And I'm sure his moustache
is dyed. Can't you ask him to leave?"

"Is his moustache dyed, Winnie? Oh, what fun!"

Miss Ingate's apprehension was justified. There was a knock at the study
door, discreet, insistent, menacing, and it was Mr. Cowl's knock. He
entered, smiling gravely and yet, as it were, teasingly. His easy bigness,
florid and sinister, made a disturbing contrast with the artless and pure
simplicity of Audrey in her new black robe, and even with Miss Ingate's
pallid maturity, which, after all, was passably innocent and ingenuous. Mr.
Cowl resembled a great beast good-humouredly lolloping into the cage in
which two rabbits had been placed for his diversion and hunger.

Pulling a key from the pocket of his vast waistcoat, he said in his quiet
voice, so seductive and ominous:

"Is this the key of the safe?"

He offered it delicately to Audrey.

It was the key of the safe.

"Did they find it in the ditch?" Audrey demanded, blushing, for she knew
that the key had not been found in the ditch; she knew by a certain
indentation on it that it was the duplicate key which she herself had
mislaid.

"No," said Mr. Cowl. "I found it myself, and not in the ditch. I remembered
you had said that you had changed at the dressmaker's in the village and
had left there an old frock."

"Did I?" murmured Audrey, with a deeper blush.

Mr. Cowl nodded.

"I had the happy idea that you might have had the key and left it in the
pocket of the frock. So I trotted down to the dressmaker's and asked for
the frock, in your name, and lo! the result!"

He pointed to the key lying in Audrey's long hand.

"But how should I have had the key, Mr. Cowl? Why should I have had the
key?" Audrey burst out like a simpleton.

"That, Miss Moze," said he, with a peculiar grin and in an equally peculiar
tone, "is a matter about which obviously you are better informed than I am.
Shall we try the key?"

With a smooth undeniable gesture he took the key again from Audrey, and
bent his huge form to open the safe. As he did so Miss Ingate made a
sarcastic and yet affrighted face at Audrey, and Audrey tried to send a
signal in reply, but failed, owing to imperfect self-control. However, she
managed to say to Mr. Cowl's curved back:

"You couldn't have found the key in the pocket of my old frock, Mr. Cowl."

"And why?" he inquired benevolently, raising and turning his chestnut head.
Even in that exciting instant Audrey could debate within herself whether or
not his superb moustache was dyed.

"Because it has no pocket."

"So I discovered," said Mr. Cowl, after a little pause. "I merely stated
that I had the happy idea--for it proved to be a happy idea--that you might
have left the key in the pocket. I discovered it, as a fact, in a slit of
the lining of the belt.... Conceivably you had slipped it in there--in a
hurry." He put strange implications into the last three words. "Yes, it is
the authentic key," he concluded, as the door of the safe swung heavily and
silently open.

Audrey, for the first time, felt rather like a thief as she beheld the
familiar interior of the safe which a few days earlier she had so
successfully rifled. "Is it possible," she thought, "that I really took
bank-notes out of that safe, and that they are at this very moment in my
bedroom between the leaves of 'Pictures of Palestine'?"

Mr. Cowl was cautiously fumbling among the serried row of documents which,
their edges towards the front, filled the steel shelf above the drawers.
Audrey had never experienced any curiosity concerning the documents. Lucre
alone had interested the base creature. No documents would have helped her
to freedom. But now she thought apprehensively: "My fate may be among those
documents." She was quite prepared to learn that her father had done
something silly in his will.

"This resembles a testament," said Mr. Cowl, smiling to himself, and
pulling out a foolscap scrip, folded and endorsed. "Yes. Dated last year."

He unfolded the document; a letter slipped from the interior of it; he
placed the letter on the small occasional table next to the desk, and
offered the will to Audrey with precisely the same gesture as he had
offered the key.

Audrey tried to decipher the will, and completely failed.

"Will you read it, Miss Ingate?" she muttered.

"I can't! I can't!" answered Miss Ingate in excitement. "I'm sure I can't.
I never could read wills. They're so funny, somehow. And I haven't got my
spectacles." She flushed slightly.

"May _I_ venture to tell you what it contains?" Mr. Cowl suggested. "There
can be no indiscretion on my part, as all wills after probate are public
property and can be inspected by any Tom, Dick or Harry for a fee of one
shilling."

He took the document and gazed at it intently, turning over a page and
turning back, for an extraordinarily long time.

Audrey said to herself again and again, with exasperated impatience: "He
knows now, and I don't know. He knows now, and I don't know. He knows now,
and I don't know."

At length Mr. Cowl spoke:

"It is a perfectly simple will. The testator leaves the whole of his
property to Mrs. Moze for life, and afterwards to you, Miss Moze. There are
only two legacies. Ten pounds to James Aguilar, gardener. And the
testator's shares in the Zacatecas Oil Development Corporation to the
National Reformation Society. I may say that the testator had expressed to
me his intention of leaving these shares to the Society. We should have
preferred money, free of legacy duty, but the late Mr. Moze had a reason
for everything he did. I must now bid you good-bye, ladies," he went on
strangely, with no pause. "Miss Moze, will you convey my sympathetic
respects to your mother and my thanks for her most kind hospitality? My
grateful sympathies to yourself. Good-bye, Miss Ingate.... Er, Miss
Ingate, why do you look at me in that peculiar way?"

"Well, Mr. Cowl, you're a very peculiar man. May I ask whether you were
born in this part of the country?"

"At Clacton, Miss Ingate," answered Mr. Cowl imperturbably.

"I knew it," said Miss Ingate, and the corners of her lips went
sardonically down.

"Please don't trouble to come downstairs," said Mr. Cowl. "My bag is
packed. I have tipped the parlourmaid, and there is just time to catch the
train."

He departed, leaving the two women speechless.

After a moment, Miss Ingate said dryly:

"He was so very peculiar I knew he must belong to these parts."

"How did he know I left my blue frock at Miss Pannell's?" cried Audrey. "I
never told him."

"He must have been eavesdropping!" cried Miss Ingate. "He never found the
key in your frock. He must have found it here somewhere; I feel sure it
must have dropped by the safe, and I lay anything he had opened the safe
before and read the will before. I could tell from the way he looked."

"And why should he suppose that I'd the key?" Audrey put in.

"Eavesdropping! I'm convinced that man knows too much." Audrey reddened
once more. "I believe he thought you'd be capable of burning the will.
That's why he made you handle it in his presence and mine."

"Well, Winnie," said Audrey, "I think you might have told him all that
while he was here, instead of letting him go off so triumphant."

"I did begin to," said Miss Ingate with a snigger. "But you wouldn't back
me up, you little coward."

"I shall never be a coward again!" Audrey said violently.

They read the will together. They had no difficulty at all in comprehending
it now that they were alone.

"I do think it's a horrid shame Aguilar should have that ten pounds," said
Audrey. "But otherwise I don't care. You can't guess how relieved I am,
Winnie. I imagined the most dreadful things. I don't know what I imagined.
But now we shall have all the property and everything, just as much as ever
there was, and only me and mother to spend it." Audrey danced an embryonic
jig. "Won't I keep mother in order! Winnie, I shall make her go with me to
Paris. I've always wanted to know that Madame Piriac--she does write such
funny English in her letters."

"What's that you're saying?" murmured Miss Ingate, who had picked up the
letter which Mr. Cowl had laid on the small table.

"I say I shall make mother go to Paris with me."

"You won't," said Miss Ingate. "Because she won't go. I know your mother
better than you do.... Oh!  Audrey!"

Audrey saw Miss Ingate's face turn scarlet from the roots of her hair to
her chin.

Miss Ingate had dropped the letter. Audrey snatched it.

"My dear Moze," the letter ran. "I send you herewith a report of the
meeting of the Great Mexican Oil Company at New York. You will see that
they duly authorised the contract by which the Zacatecas Oil Corporation
transfers our property to them in exchange for shares at the rate of four
Great Mexican shares for one Zacatecas share. As each of the Development
Syndicate shares represents ten of the Corporation shares, and as on my
recommendation you put £4,500 into the Syndicate, you will therefore own
180,000 Great Mexican shares. They are at present above par. Mark my
words, they will be worth from seven to ten dollars apiece in a year's
time. I think you now owe me a good turn, eh?"

The letter was signed with a name unknown to either of them, and it was
dated from Coleman Street, E.C.



CHAPTER IV

MR. FOULGER


Half an hour later the woman and the girl, still in the study and severely
damaged by the culminating events of Mr. Cowl's visit, were almost
prostrated by the entirely unexpected announcement of the arrival of Mr.
Foulger. Mr. Foulger was the late Mr. Moze's solicitor from Chelmsford.
Audrey's first thought was: "Has heaven telegraphed to him on my behalf?"
But her next was that all the solicitors in the world would now be useless
in the horrible calamity that had befallen.

It is to be noted that Audrey was no worse off than before the discovery of
the astounding value of the Zacatecas shares. The Moze property, inherited
through generations and consisting mainly in farms and tithe-rents, was not
in the slightest degree impaired. On the contrary, the steady progress of
agriculture in Essex indicated that its yield must improve with years.
Nevertheless Audrey felt as though she and her mother were ruined, and as
though the National Reformation Society had been guilty of a fearful crime
against a widow and an orphan. The lovely vision of immeasurable wealth had
flashed and scintillated for a month in front of her dazzled eyes--and then
blackness, nothingness, the dark void! She knew that she would never be
happy again.

And she thought, scornfully, "How could father have been so preoccupied and
so gloomy, with all those riches?" She could not conceive anybody as rich
as her father secretly was not being day and night in a condition of pure
delight at the whole spectacle of existence. Her opinion of Mathew Moze
fell lower than ever, and fell finally.

The parlourmaid, in a negligence of attire indicating that no man was left
alive in the house, waited at the door of the study to learn whether or not
Miss Moze was in.

"You'll _have_ to see him," said Miss Ingate firmly. "It'll be all right.
I've known him all my life. He's a very nice man."

After the parlourmaid had gone, and while Audrey was upbraiding her for not
confessing earlier her acquaintance with Mr. Foulger, Miss Ingate added:

"Only his wife has a wooden leg."

Then Mr. Foulger entered. He was a shortish man of about fifty, with a
paunch, but not otherwise fat; dressed like a sportsman. He trod very
lightly. The expression on his ruddy face was amiable but extremely alert,
hardening at intervals into decision or caution. He saw before him a
nervous, frowning girl in inelegant black, and Miss Ingate with a curious
look in her eyes and a sardonic and timid twitching of her lips. For an
instant he was discountenanced; but he at once recovered, accomplishing a
bright salute.

"Here you are at last, Mr. Foulger!" Miss Ingate responded. "But you're too
late."

These mysterious words, and the speechlessness of Audrey, upset him again.

"I was away in Somersetshire for a little fishing," he said, after he had
deplored the death of Mr. Moze, the illness of Mrs. Moze, and the
bereavement of Miss Moze, and had congratulated Miss Moze on the protective
friendship of his old friend, Miss Ingate. "I was away for a little
fishing, and I only heard the sad news when I got back home at noon to-day.
I came over at once." He cleared his throat and looked first at Audrey and
then at Miss Ingate. He felt that he ought to be addressing Audrey, but
somehow he could not help addressing Miss Ingate instead. His grey legs
were spread abroad as he sat very erect on a chair, and between them his
dependent paunch found a comfortable space for itself.

"You must have been getting anxious about the will. I have brought it with
me," he said. He drew a white document from the breast-pocket of his
cutaway coat, and he perched a pair of eyeglasses carelessly on his nose.
"It was executed before your birth, Miss Moze. But a will keeps like wine.
The whole of the property of every description is left to Mrs. Moze, and
she is sole executrix. If she should predecease the testator, then
everything is left to his child or children. Not perhaps a very
businesslike will--a will likely to lead to unforeseen complications, but
the sort of will that a man in the first flush of marriage often does make,
and there is no stopping him. Your father had almost every quality, but he
was not businesslike--if I may say so with respect. However, I confess that
for the present I see no difficulties. Of course the death duties will have
to be paid, but your father always kept a considerable amount of money at
call. When I say 'considerable,' I mean several thousands. That was a point
on which he and I had many discussions."

Mr. Foulger glanced around with satisfaction. Already the prospect of legal
business and costs had brought about a change in his official demeanour of
an adviser truly bereaved by the death of a client. He saw the young girl,
gazing fiercely at the carpet, suddenly begin to weep. This phenomenon, to
which he was not unaccustomed, did not by itself disturb him; but the face
of Miss Ingate gave him strange apprehensions, which reached a climax when
Miss Ingate, obviously not at all at ease, muttered:

"There is a later will, Mr. Foulger. It was made last year."

"I see," he breathed, scarcely above a whisper.

He thought he did see. He thought he understood why he had been kept
waiting, why Mrs. Moze pretended to be ill, why the girl had frowned, why
the naively calm Miss Ingate was in such a state of nerves. The explanation
was that he was not wanted. The explanation was that Mr. Moze had changed
his solicitor. His face hardened, for he and his uncle between them had
"acted" for the Moze family for over seventy years.

He rose from the chair.

"Then I need not trouble you any longer," he said in a firm tone, and
turned with real dignity to leave.

He was exceedingly astonished when with one swift movement Audrey rose, and
flashed like a missile to the door, and stood with her back to it. The fact
was that Audrey had just remembered her vow never again to be afraid of
anybody. When Miss Ingate with extraordinary agility also jumped up and
approached him, he apprehended, recalling rumours of Miss Ingate's advanced
feminism, that the fate of an anti-suffragette Cabinet Minister might be
awaiting him, and he prepared his defence.

"You mustn't go," said Miss Ingate.

"You are my solicitor, whatever mother may say, and you mustn't go," added
Audrey in a soft voice.

The man was entranced. It occurred to him that he would have a tale to tell
and to re-tell at his club for years, about "a certain fair client who
shall be nameless."

The next minute he had heard a somewhat romantic, if not hysterical,
version of the facts of the case, and he was perusing the original
documents. By chance he read first the letter about the Zacatecas shares.
That Mathew Moze had made a will without his aid was a shock; that Mathew
Moze had invested money without his advice was another shock quite as
severe. But he knew the status of the Great Mexican Oil Company, and his
countenance lighted as he realised the rich immensity of the business of
proving the will and devolving the estate; his costs would run to the most
agreeable figures. As soon as he glanced at the testament which Mr. Cowl
had found, he muttered, with satisfaction and disdain:

"H'm! He made this himself."

And he gazed at it compassionately, as a cabinetmaker might gaze at a piece
of amateur fretwork.

Standing, he read it slowly and with extreme care. And when he had finished
he casually remarked, in the classic legal phrase:

"It isn't worth the paper it's written on."

Then he sat down again, and his neat paunch resumed its niche between his
legs. He knew that he had made a tremendous effect.

"But--but----" Miss Ingate began.

"Not worth the paper it's written on," he repeated. "There is only one
witness, and there ought to be two, and even the one witness is a bad
one--Aguilar, because he profits under the will. He would have to give up
his legacy before his attestation could count, and even then it would be no
good alone. Mr. Moze has not even expressly revoked the old will. If there
hadn't been a previous will, and if Aguilar was a thoroughly reliable man,
and if the family had wished to uphold the new will, I dare say the Court
_might_ have pronounced for it. But under the circumstances it hasn't the
ghost of a chance."

"But won't the National Reformation Society make trouble?" demanded Miss
Ingate faintly.

"Let 'em try!" said Mr. Foulger, who wished that the National Reformation
Society would indeed try.

Even as he articulated the words, he was aware of Audrey coming towards him
from the direction of the door; he was aware of her black frock and of her
white face, with its bulging forehead and its deliciously insignificant
nose. She held out her hand.

"You are a dear!" she whispered.

Her lips seemed to aim uncertainly for his face. Did they just touch, with
exquisite contact, his bristly chin, or was it a divine illusion? ... She
blushed in a very marked manner. He blinked, and his happy blinking seemed
to say: "Only wills drawn by me are genuine.... Didn't I tell you Mr. Moze
was not a man of business?"

Audrey ran to Miss Ingate.

Mr. Foulger, suddenly ashamed, and determined to be a lawyer, said sharply:

"Has Mrs. Moze made a will?"

"Mother made a will? Oh no!"

"Then she should make one at once, in your favour, of course. No time
should be lost."

"But Mrs. Moze is ill in bed," protested Miss Ingate.

"All the more reason why she should make a will. It may save endless
trouble. And it is her duty. I shall suggest that I be the executor and
trustee, of course with the usual power to charge costs." His face was hard
again. "You will thank me later on, Miss Moze," he added.

"Do you mean _now?_" shrilled Miss Ingate.

"I do," said he. "If you will give me some paper, we might go to her at
once. You can be one of the witnesses. I could be a witness, but as I am
to act under the will for a consideration somebody else would be
preferable."

"I should suggest Aguilar," answered Miss Ingate, the corners of her lips
dropping.

Miss Ingate went first, to prepare Mrs. Moze.

When Audrey was alone in the study--she had not even offered to accompany
her elders to the bedroom--she made a long sound: "Ooo!" Then she gave a
leap and stood still, staring out of the window at the estuary. She tried
to force her mood to the colour of her dress, but the sense of propriety
was insufficient for the task. The magnificence of all the world was
unfolding itself to her soul. Events had hitherto so dizzyingly beaten down
upon her head that she had scarcely been conscious of feeling. Now she
luxuriously felt. "I am at last born," she thought. "Miracles have
happened.... It's incredible.... I can do what I like with mother.... But
if I don't take care I shall die of relief this very moment!"



CHAPTER V

THE DEAD HAND


Audrey was wakened up that night, just after she had gone to sleep, by a
touch on the cheek. Her mother, palely indistinct in the darkness, was
standing by the bedside. She wore a white wrap over her night attire, and
the customary white bandage from which emanated a faint odour of
eau-de-Cologne, was around her forehead.

"Audrey, darling, I must speak to you."

Instantly Audrey became the wise directress of her poor foolish mother's
existence.

"Mother," she said, with firm kindness, "please do go back to bed at once.
This sort of thing is simply frightful for your neuralgia. I'll come to you
in one moment."

And Mrs. Moze meekly obeyed; she had gone even before Audrey had had time
to light her candle. Audrey was very content in thus being able to control
her mother and order everything for the best. She guessed that the old lady
had got some idea into her head about the property, or about her own will,
or about the solicitor, or about a tombstone, and that it was worrying her.
She and Miss Ingate (who had now returned home) had had a very extensive
palaver, in low voices that never ceased, after the triumphant departure of
Mr. Foulger. Audrey had cautiously protested; she was afraid her mother
would be fatigued, and she saw no reason why her mother should be
acquainted with all the details of a complex matter; but the gossiping
habit of a quarter of a century was too powerful for Audrey.

In the large parental bedroom the only light was Audrey's candle. Mrs. Moze
was lying on the right half of the great bed, where she had always lain.
She might have lain luxuriously in the middle, with vast spaces at either
hand, but again habit was too powerful.

The girl, all in white, held the candle higher, and the shadows everywhere
shrunk in unison. Mrs. Moze blinked.

"Put the candle on the night-table," said Mrs. Moze curtly.

Audrey did so. The bedroom, for her, was full of the souvenirs of parental
authority. Her first recollections were those of awe in regard to the
bedroom. And when she thought that on that bed she had been born, she had a
very queer sensation.

"I've decided," said Mrs. Moze, lying on her back, and looking up at the
ceiling, "I've decided that your father's wishes must be obeyed."

"What about, mother?"

"About those shares going to the National Reformation Society. He meant
them to go, and they must go to the Society. I've thought it well over and
I've quite decided. I didn't tell Miss Ingate, as it doesn't concern her.
But I felt I must tell you at once."

"Mother!" cried Audrey. "Have you taken leave of your senses?" She
shivered; the room was very cold, and as she shivered her image in the
mirror of the wardrobe shivered, and also her shadow that climbed up the
wall and bent at right-angles at the cornice till it reached the middle of
the ceiling.

Mrs. Moze replied obstinately:

"I've not taken leave of my senses, and I'll thank you to remember that I'm
your mother. I have always carried out your father's wishes, and at my time
of life I can't alter. Your father was a very wise man. We shall be as well
off as we always were. Better, because I can save, and I shall save. We
have no complaint to make; I should have no excuse for disobeying your
father. Everything is mine to do as I wish with it, and I shall give the
shares to the Society. What the shares are worth can't affect my duty.
Besides, perhaps they aren't worth anything. I always understood that
things like that were always jumping up and down, and generally worthless
in the end.... That's all I wanted to tell you."

Why did Audrey seize the candle and walk straight out of the bedroom,
leaving darkness behind her? Was it because the acuteness of her feelings
drove her out, or was it because she knew instinctively that her mother's
decision would prove to be immovable? Perhaps both.

She dropped back into her own bed with a soundless sigh of exhaustion. She
did not blow out the candle, but lay staring at it. Her dream was
annihilated. She foresaw an interminable, weary and futile future in and
about Moze, and her mother always indisposed, always fretful, and curiously
obstinate in weakness. But Audrey, despite her tragic disillusion, was less
desolated than made solemn. In the most disturbing way she knew herself to
be the daughter of her father and her mother; and she comprehended that her
destiny could not be broken off suddenly from theirs. She was touched
because her mother deemed her father a very wise man, whereas she, Audrey,
knew that he was nothing of the sort. She felt sorry for both of them. She
pitied her father, and she was a mother to her mother. Their relations
together, and the mystic posthumous spell of her father over her mother,
impressed her profoundly.... And she was proud of herself for having
demonstrated her courage by preventing the solicitor from running away, and
extraordinarily ashamed of her sentimental and brazen behaviour to the
solicitor afterwards. These various thoughts mitigated her despair as she
gazed at the sinking candle. Nevertheless her dream was annihilated.



CHAPTER VI

THE YOUNG WIDOW


It was early October. Audrey stood at the garden door of Flank Hall.

The estuary, in all the colours of unsettled, mild, bright weather, lay at
her feet beneath a high arch of changing blue and white. The capricious
wind moved in her hair, moved in the rich grasses of the sea-wall, bent at
a curtseying angle the red-sailed barges, put caps on the waves in the
middle distance, and drew out into long horizontal scarves the smoke of
faint steamers in the offing.

Audrey was dressed in black, but her raiment had obviously not been
fashioned in the village, nor even at Colchester, nor yet at Ipswich, that
great and stylish city. She looked older; she certainly had acquired
something of an air of knowledge, assurance, domination, sauciness and
challenge, which qualities were all partly illustrated in her large,
audacious hat. The spirit which the late Mr. Moze had so successfully
suppressed was at length coming to the surface for all beholders to see,
and the process of evolution begun at the moment when Audrey had bounced up
and prevented an authoritative solicitor from leaving the study was already
advanced. Nevertheless, at frequent intervals Audrey's eyes changed, and
she seemed for an instant to be a very naive, very ingenuous and wistful
little thing--and this though she had reached the age of twenty. Perhaps
she was feeling sorry for the girl she used to be.

And no doubt she was also thinking of her mother, who had died within eight
hours of their nocturnal interview. The death of Mrs. Moze surprised
everyone, except possibly Mrs. Moze. As an unsuspected result of the
operation upon her, an embolism had been wandering in her veins; it reached
the brain, and she expired, to the great loss of the National Reformation
Society. Such was the brief and simple history. When Audrey stood by the
body, she had felt that if it could have saved her mother she would have
enriched the National Reformation Society with all she possessed.

Gradually the sense of freedom had grown paramount in her, and she had
undertaken the enterprise of completely subduing Mr. Foulger to her own
ends.

The back hall was carpetless and pictureless, and the furniture in it was
draped in grey-white. Every room in the abode was in the same state, and,
since all the windows were shuttered, every room lay moribund in a ghostly
twilight. Only the clocks remained alive, probably thinking themselves
immortal. The breakfast things were washed up and stored away. The last two
servants had already gone. Behind Audrey, forming a hilly background, were
trunks and boxes, a large bunch of flowers encased in paper, and a case of
umbrellas and parasols; the whole strikingly new, and every single item
except the flowers labelled "Paris via Charing Cross and Calais."

Audrey opened her black Russian satchel, and the purse within it. Therein
were a little compartment full of English gold, another full of French
gold, another full of multicoloured French bank-notes; and loose in the
satchel was a blue book of credit-notes, each for five hundred francs, or
twenty pounds--a thick book! And she would not have minded much if she had
lost the whole satchel--it would be so easy to replace the satchel with
all its contents.

Then a small brougham came very deliberately up the drive. It was the
vehicle in which Miss Ingate went her ways; in accordance with Miss
Ingate's immemorial command, it travelled at a walking pace up all the
hills to save the horse, and at a walking pace down all hills lest the
horse should stumble and Miss Ingate be destroyed. It was now followed by
a luggage-cart on which was a large trunk.

At the same moment Aguilar, the gardener, appeared from somewhere--he who
had been robbed of a legacy of ten pounds, but who by his ruthless and
incontestable integrity had secured the job of caretaker of Flank Hall.

The drivers touched their hats to Audrey and jumped down, and Miss Ingate,
with a blue veil tied like a handkerchief round her bonnet and chin--sign
that she was a traveller--emerged from the brougham, sardonically smiling
at her own and everybody's expense, and too excited to be able to give
greetings. The three men started to move the trunks, and the two women
whispered together in the back-hall.

"Audrey," demanded Miss Ingate, with a start, "what are those rings on your
finger?"

Audrey replied:

"One's a wedding ring and the other's a mourning ring. I bought them
yesterday at Colchester.... Hsh!" She stilled further exclamations from
Miss Ingate until the men were out of the hall.

"Look here! Quick!" she whispered, hastily unlocking a large hat-case that
was left. And Miss Ingate looked and saw a block toque, entirely unsuitable
for a young girl, and a widow's veil.

"I look bewitching in them," said Audrey, relocking the case.

"But, my child, what does it mean?"

"It means that I'm not silly enough to go to Paris as a girl. I've had more
than enough of being a girl. I'm determined to arrive in Paris as a young
widow. It will be much better in every way, and far easier for you. In
fact, you'll have no chaperoning to do at all. I shall be the chaperon. Now
don't say you won't go, because you will."

"You ought to have told me before."

"No, I oughtn't. Nothing could have been more foolish."

"But who are you the widow of?"

"Hurrah!" cried Audrey. "You are a sport, Winnie!  I'll tell you all the
interesting details in the train."

In another minute Aguilar, gloomy and unbending, had received the keys of
Flank Hall, and the procession crunched down the drive on its way to the
station.



CHAPTER VII

THE CIGARETTE GIRL


Audrey did not deem that she had begun truly to live until the next
morning, when they left London, after having passed a night in the Charing
Cross Hotel. During several visits to London in the course of the summer
Audrey had learnt something about the valuelessness of money in a
metropolis chiefly inhabited by people who were positively embarrassed by
their riches. She knew, for example, that money being very plentiful and
stylish hats very rare, large quantities of money had to be given for
infinitesimal quantities of hats. The big and glittering shops were full of
people whose pockets bulged with money which they were obviously anxious to
part with in order to obtain goods, while the proud shop-assistants, secure
in the knowledge that money was naught and goods were everything, did their
utmost, by hauteur and steely negatives, to render any transaction
possible. It was the result of a mysterious "Law of Exchange." She was
aware of this. She had lost her childhood's naive illusions about the
sovereignty of money.

Nevertheless she received one or two shocks on the journey, which was
planned upon the most luxurious scale that the imagination of Messrs.
Thomas Cook & Son could conceive. There was four pounds and ninepence to
pay for excess luggage at Charing Cross. Half a year earlier four pounds
would have bought all the luggage she could have got together. She very
nearly said to the clerk at the window: "Don't you mean shillings?" But in
spite of nervousness, blushings, and all manner of sensitive reactions to
new experiences, her natural sang-froid and instinctive knowledge of the
world saved her from such a terrible lapse, and she put down a bank-note
without the slightest hint that she was wondering whether it would not be
more advantageous to throw the luggage away.

The boat was crowded, and the sea and wind full of menace. Fighting their
way along the deck after laden porters, Audrey and Miss Ingate
simultaneously espied the private cabin list hung in a conspicuous spot.
They perused it as eagerly as if it had been the account of a _cause
célèbre._ Among the list were two English lords, an Honourable Mrs., a
baroness with a Hungarian name, several Teutonic names, and Mrs. Moncreiff.

Audrey blushed deeply at the sign of Mrs. Moncreiff, for she was Mrs.
Moncreiff. Behind the veil, and with the touch of white in her toque, she
might have been any age up to twenty-eight or so. It would have been
impossible to say that she was a young girl, that she was not versed in the
world, that she had not the whole catechism of men at her finger-ends. All
who glanced at her glanced again--with sympathy and curiosity; and the
second glance pricked Audrey's conscience, making her feel like a thief.
But her moods were capricious. At one moment she was a thief, a clumsy
fraud, an ignorant ninny, and a suitable prey for the secret police; and at
the next she was very clever, self-confident, equal to the situation, and
enjoying the situation more than she had ever enjoyed anything, and
determined to prolong the situation indefinitely.

The cabin was very spacious, yet not more so than was proper, considering
that the rent of it came to about sixpence a minute. There was room, even
after all the packages were stowed, for both of them to lie down. But
instead of lying down they eagerly inspected the little abode. They found a
lavatory basin with hot and cold water taps, but no hot water and no cold
water, no soap and no towels. And they found a crystal water-bottle, but it
was empty. Then a steward came and asked them if they wanted anything, and
because they were miserable poltroons they smiled and said "No." They were
secretly convinced that all the other private cabins, inhabited by titled
persons and by financiers, were superior to their cabin, and that the
captain of the steamer had fobbed them off with an imitation of a real
cabin.

Then it was that Miss Ingate, who since Charing Cross had been a little
excited by a glimpsed newspaper contents-bill indicating suffragette riots
that morning, perceived, through the open door of the cabin, a most
beautiful and most elegant girl, attired impeccably in that ritualistic
garb of travel which the truly cosmopolitan wear on combined rail-and-ocean
journeys and on no other occasions. It was at once apparent that the
celestial creature had put on that special hat, that special veil, that
special cloak, and those special gloves because she was deeply aware of
what was correct, and that she would not put them on again until destiny
took her again across the sea, and that if destiny never did take her again
across the sea never again would she show herself in the vestments, whose
correctness was only equalled by their expensiveness.

The young woman, however, took no thought of her impressive clothes. She
was existing upon quite another plane. Miss Ingate, preoccupied by the
wrongs and perils of her sex, and momentarily softened out of her sardonic
irony, suspected that they might be in the presence of a victim of
oppression or neglect. The victim lay Half-prone upon the hard wooden seat
against the ship's rail. Her dark eyes opened piteously at times, and her
exquisite profile, surmounted by the priceless hat all askew, made a
silhouette now against the sea and now against the distant white cliffs of
Albion, according to the fearful heaving of the ship. Spray occasionally
dashed over her. She heeded it not. A few feet farther off she would have
been sheltered by a weather-awning, but, clinging fiercely to the rail, she
would not move.

Then a sharp squall of rain broke, but she entirely ignored the rain.

The next moment Miss Ingate and Audrey, rushing forth, had gently seized
her and drawn her into their cabin. They might have succoured other martyrs
to the modern passion for moving about, for there were many; but they chose
this particular martyr because she was so wondrously dressed, and also
perhaps a little because she was so young. As she lay on the cabin sofa she
looked still younger; she looked a child. Yet when Miss Ingate removed her
gloves in order to rub those chill, fragile, and miraculously manicured
hands, a wedding ring was revealed. The wedding ring rendered her intensely
romantic in the eyes of Audrey and Miss Ingate, who both thought, in
private:

"She must be the wife of one of those lords!"

Every detail of her raiment, as she was put at her ease, showed her to be
clothed in precisely the manner which Audrey and Miss Ingate thought
peeresses always were clothed. Hence, being English, they mingled respect
with their solacing pity. Nevertheless, their respect was tempered by a
peculiar pride, for both of them, in taking lemonade on the Pullman, had
taken therewith a certain preventive or remedy which made them loftily
indifferent to the heaving of ships and the eccentricities of the sea. The
specific had done all that was claimed for it--which was a great deal--so
much so that they felt themselves superwomen among a cargo of flaccid and
feeble sub-females. And they grew charmingly conceited.

"Am I in my cabin?" murmured the martyr, about a quarter of an hour after
Miss Ingate, having obtained soda water, had administered to her a dose of
the miraculous specific.

Her delicious cheeks were now a delicate crimson. But they had been of a
delicate crimson throughout.

"No," said Audrey. "You're in ours. Which is yours?"

"It's on the other side of the ship, then. I came out for a little air. But
I couldn't get back. I'd just as lief have died as shift from that seat out
there by the railings."

Something in the accent, something in those fine English words "lief" and
"shift," destroyed in the minds of Audrey and Miss Ingate the agreeable
notion that they had a peeress on their hands.

"Is your husband on board?" asked Audrey.

"He just is," was the answer. "He's in our cabin."

"Shall I fetch him?" Miss Ingate suggested. The corners of her lips had
begun to fall once more.

"Will you?" said the young woman. "It's Lord Southminster. I'm Lady
Southminster."

The two saviours were thrilled. Each felt that she had misinterpreted the
accent, and that probably peeresses did habitually use such words as "lief"
and "shift." The corners of Miss Ingate's lips rose to their proper
position.

"I'll look for the number on the cabin list," said she hastily, and went
forth with trembling to summon the peer.

As Audrey, alone in the cabin with Lady Southminster, bent curiously over
the prostrate form, Lady Southminster exclaimed with an air of childlike
admiration:

"You're real ladies, you are!"

And Audrey felt old and experienced. She decided that Lady Southminster
could not be more than seventeen, and it seemed to be about half a century
since Audrey was seventeen.

"He can't come," announced Miss Ingate breathlessly, returning to the
cabin, and supporting herself against the door as the solid teak sank under
her feet. "Oh yes! He's there all right. It was Number 12. I've seen him. I
told him, but I don't think he heard me--to understand, that is. If you ask
me, he couldn't come if forty wives sent for him."

"Oh, couldn't he!" observed Lady Southminster, sitting up. "Couldn't he!"

When the boat was within ten minutes of France, the remedy had had such an
effect upon her that she could walk about. Accompanied by Audrey she
managed to work her way round the cabin-deck to No. 12. It was empty, save
for hand-luggage! The two girls searched, as well as they could, the whole
crowded ship for Lord Southminster, and found him not. Lady Southminster
neither fainted nor wept. She merely said:

"Oh! All right! If that's it....!"

Hand-luggage was being collected. But Lady Southminster would not collect
hers, nor allow it to be collected. She agreed with Miss Ingate and Audrey
that her husband must ultimately reappear either on the quay or in the
train. While they were all standing huddled together in the throng waiting
for the gangway to put ashore, she said in a low casual tone, ˆ propos of
nothing:

"I only married him the day before yesterday. I don't know whether you
know, but I used to make cigarettes in Constantinopoulos's window in
Piccadilly. I don't see why I should be ashamed of it, d'you?"

"Certainly not," said Miss Ingate. "But it _is_ rather romantic, isn't it,
Audrey?"

Despite the terrific interest of the adventure of the cigarette girl,
disappointment began immediately after landing. This France, of which
Audrey had heard so much and dreamed so much, was a very ramshackle and
untidy and one-horse affair. The custom-house was rather like a battlefield
without any rules of warfare; the scene in the refreshment-room was rather
like a sack after a battle; the station was a desert with odd files of
people here and there; the platforms were ridiculous, and you wanted a pair
of steps to get up into the train. Whatever romance there might be in
France had been brought by Audrey in her secret heart and by Lady
Southminster.

Audrey had come to France, and she was going to Paris, solely because of a
vision which had been created in her by the letters and by the photographs
of Madame Piriac. Although Madame Piriac and she had absolutely no tie of
blood, Madame Piriac being the daughter by a first husband of the French
widow who became the first Mrs. Moze--and speedily died, Audrey persisted
privately in regarding Madame Piriac as a kind of elder sister. She felt a
very considerable esteem for Madame Piriac, upon whom she had never set
eyes, and Madame Piriac had certainly given her the impression that France
was to England what paradise is to purgatory. Further, Audrey had fallen in
love with Madame Piriac's portraits, whose elegance was superb. And yet,
too, Audrey was jealous of Madame Piriac, and especially so since the
attainment of freedom and wealth. Madame Piriac had most warmly invited
her, after the death of Mrs. Moze, to pay a long visit to Paris as a guest
in her home. Audrey had declined--from jealousy. She would not go to Madame
Piriac's as a raw girl, overdone with money, who could only speak one
language and who knew nothing at all of this our planet. She would go, if
she went, as a young woman of the world who could hold her own in any
drawing-room, be it Madame Piriac's or another. Hence Miss Ingate had
obtained the address of a Paris boarding-house, and one or two preliminary
introductions from political friends in London.

Well, France was not equal to its reputation; and Miss Ingate's sardonic
smile seemed to be saying: "So this is your France!"

However, the excitement of escorting the youngest English peeress to Paris
sufficed for Audrey, even if it did not suffice for Miss Ingate with her
middle-aged apprehensions. They knew that Lady Southminster was the
youngest English peeress because she had told them so. At the very moment
when they were dispatching a telegram for her to an address in London, she
had popped out the remark: "Do you know I'm the youngest peeress in
England?" And truth shone in her candid and simple smile. They had not
found the peer, neither on the ship, nor on the quay, nor in the station.
And the peeress would not wait. She was indeed obviously frightened at the
idea of remaining in Calais alone, even till the next express. She said
that her husband's "man" would meet the train in Paris. She ate plenteously
with Audrey and Miss Ingate in the refreshment-room, and she would not
leave them nor allow them to leave her. The easiest course was to let her
have her way, and she had it.

By dint of Miss Ingate's unscrupulous tricks with small baggage they
contrived to keep a whole compartment to themselves. As soon as the train
started the peeress began to cry. Then, wiping her heavenly silly eyes, and
upbraiding herself, she related to her protectresses the glory of a new
manicure set. Unfortunately she could not show them the set, as it had been
left in the cabin. She was actually in possession of nothing portable
except her clothes, some English magazines bought at Calais, and a handbag
which contained much money and many bonbons.

"He's done it on purpose," she said to Audrey as soon as Miss Ingate went
off to take tea in the tea-car. "I'm sure he's done it on purpose. He's
hidden himself, and he'll turn up when he thinks he's beaten me. D'you know
why I wouldn't bring that luggage away out of the cabin?  Because we had a
quarrel about it, at the station, and he said things to me. In fact we
weren't speaking. And we weren't speaking last night either. The radiator
of his--our--car leaked, and we had to come home from the Coliseum in a
motor-bus. He couldn't get a taxi. It wasn't his fault, but a friend of
mine told me the day before I was married that a lady always ought to be
angry when her husband can't get a taxi after the theatre--she says it does
'em good. So first I told him he mustn't leave me to look for one.  Then I
said I'd wait where I was, and then I said we'd walk on, and then I said we
must take a motor-bus. It was that that finished him. He said: 'Did I
expect him to invent a taxi when there wasn't one?' And he swore. So of
course I sulked. You must, you know. And my shoes were too thin and I felt
chilly. But only a fortnight before I was making cigarettes in the window
of Constantinopoulos's. Funny, isn't it? Otherwise he's behaved splendid.
Still, what I do say is a man's no right to be ill when he's taking you to
Paris on your honeymoon. I knew he was going to be ill when I left him in
the cabin, but he stuck me out he wasn't. A man that's so bad he can't come
to his wife when _she's_ bad isn't a man--that's what I say. Don't you
think so? You know all about that sort of thing, I lay."

Audrey said briefly that she did think so, glad that the peeress's intense
and excusable interest in herself kept her from being curious about others.

"Marriage ain't all chocolate-creams," said the peeress after a pause.
"Have one?" And she opened her bag very hospitably.

Then she turned to her magazines. And no sooner had she glanced at the
cover of the second one than she gave a squeal, and, fetching deep breaths,
passed the periodical to Audrey. At the top of the cover was printed in
large letters the title of a story by a famous author of short tales. It
ran:

"MAN OVERBOARD."

Henceforward a suspicion that had lain concealed in the undergrowth of the
hearts of the two girls stalked boldly about in full daylight.

"He's done it, and he's done it to spite me!" murmured Lady Southminster
tearfully.

"Oh no!" Audrey protested. "Even if he had fallen overboard he'd have been
seen and the captain would have stopped the boat."

"Where do you come from?" Lady Southminster retorted with disdain. "That's
an _omen_, that is"--pointing to the words on the cover of the magazine.
"What else could it be? I ask you."

When Miss Ingate returned the child was fast asleep. Miss Ingate was paler
than usual. Having convinced herself that the sleeper did genuinely sleep,
she breathed to Audrey:

"He's in the next compartment! ... He must have hidden himself till nearly
the last minute on the boat and then got into the train while we were
sending off that telegram."

Audrey blenched.

"Shall you wake her?"

"Wake her, and have a scene--with us here? No, I shan't. He's a fool."

"How d'you know?" asked Audrey.

"Well, he must have been a fool to marry her."

"Well," whispered Audrey. "If I'd been a man I'd have married that face
like a shot."

"It might be all right if he'd only married the face. But he's married what
she calls her mind."

"Is he young?"

"Yes. And as good-looking in his own way as she is."

"Well--"

But the Countess of Southminster stirred, and the slight movement stopped
conversation.

The journey was endless, but it was no longer than the sleep of the
Countess. At length dusk and mist began to gather in the hollows of the
land; stations succeeded one another more frequently. The reflections of
the electric lights in the compartment could be seen beyond the glass of
the windows. The train still ruthlessly clattered and shook and swayed and
thundered; and weary lords, ladies and financiers had read all the
illustrated magazines and six-penny novels in existence, and they lolled
exhausted and bored amid the debris of literature and light refreshments.
Then the speed of the convoy slackened, and Audrey, looking forth, saw a
pale cathedral dome resting aloft amid dark clouds. It was a magical
glimpse, and it was the first glimpse of Paris. "Oh!" cried Audrey, far
more like a girl than a widow. The train rattled through defiles of high
twinkling houses, roared under bridges, screeched, threaded forests of cold
blue lamps, and at last came to rest under a black echoing vault.

Paris!

And, mysteriously, all Audrey's illusions concerning France had been born
again. She was convinced that Paris could not fail to be paradisiacal.

Lady Southminster awoke.

Almost simultaneously a young man very well dressed passed along the
corridor. Lady Southminster, with an awful start, seized her bag and sprang
after him, but was impeded by other passengers. She caught him only after
he had descended to the platform, which was at the bottom of a precipice
below the windows. He had just been saluted by, and given orders to, a
waiting valet. She caught him sharply by the arm. He shook free and walked
quickly away up the platform, guided by a wise instinct for avoiding a
scene in front of fellow-travellers. She followed close after him, talking
with rapidity. They receded. Audrey and Miss Ingate leaned out of the
windows to watch, and still farther and farther out. Just as the
honeymooning pair disappeared altogether their two forms came into contact,
and Audrey's eyes could see the arm of Lord Southminster take the arm of
Lady Southminster. They vanished from view like one flesh. And Audrey and
Miss Ingate, deserted, forgotten utterly, unthanked, buffeted by passengers
and by the valet who had climbed up into the carriage to take away the
impedimenta of his master, gazed at each other and then burst out laughing.

"So that's marriage!" said Audrey.

"No," said Miss Ingate. "That's love. I've seen a deal of love in my time,
ever since my sister Arabella's first engagement, but I never saw any that
wasn't vehy, vehy queer."

"I do hope they'll be happy," said Audrey.

"Do you?" said Miss Ingate.



CHAPTER VIII

EXPLOITATION OF WIDOWHOOD


The carriage had emptied, and the two adventurers stood alone among empty
compartments. The platform was also empty. Not a porter in sight. One after
the other, the young widow and the elderly spinster, their purses bulging
with money, got their packages by great efforts down on to the platform.

An employee strolled past.

"_Porteur?_" murmured Audrey timidly.

The man sniggered, shrugged his shoulders, and vanished.

Audrey felt that she had gone back to her school days. She was helpless,
and Miss Ingate was the same. She wished ardently that she was in Moze
again. She could not imagine how she had been such a fool as to undertake
this absurd expedition which could only end in ridicule and disaster. She
was ready to cry. Then another employee appeared, hesitated, and picked up
a bag, scowling and inimical. Gradually the man, very tousled and dirty,
clustered all the bags and parcels around his person, and walked off.
Audrey and Miss Ingate meekly following. The great roof of the station
resounded to whistles and the escape of steam and the clashing of wagons.

Beyond the platforms there were droves of people, of whom nearly every
individual was preoccupied and hurried. And what people! Audrey had in her
heart expected a sort of glittering white terminus full of dandiacal men
and elegant Parisiennes who had stepped straight out of fashion-plates, and
who had no cares--for was not this Paris? Whereas, in fact, the multitude
was the dingiest she had ever seen. Not a gleam of elegance! No hint of
dazzling colour! No smiling and satiric beauty! They were just persons.

At last, after formalities, Audrey and Miss Ingate reached the foul and
chilly custom-house appointed for the examination of luggage.
Unrecognisable peers and other highnesses stood waiting at long counters,
forming bays, on which was nothing at all. Then, far behind, a truck hugely
piled with trunks rolled in through a back door and men pitched the trunks
like toys here and there on the counters, and officials came into view, and
knots of travellers gathered round trunks, and locks were turned and lids
were lifted, and the flash of linen showed in spots on the drabness of the
scene. Miss Ingate observed with horror the complete undoing of a lady's
large trunk, and the exposure to the world's harsh gaze of the most
intimate possessions of that lady. Soon the counters were like a fair. But
no trunk belonging to Audrey or to Miss Ingate was visible. They knew then,
what they had both privately suspected ever since Charing Cross, that their
trunks would be lost on the journey.

"Oh! My trunk!" cried Miss Ingate.

Beneath a pile of other trunks on an incoming truck she had espied her
property. Audrey saw it, too. The vision was magical. The trunk seemed like
a piece of home, a bit of Moze and of England. It drew affection from them
as though it had been an animal. They sped towards it, forgetting their
small baggage. Their _porteur_ leaped over the counter from behind and made
signs for a key. All Audrey's trunks in turn joined Miss Ingate's; none was
missing. And finally an official, small and fierce, responded to the
invocations of the _porteur_ and established himself at the counter in
front of them. He put his hand on Miss Ingate's trunk.

"Op-en," he said in English.

Miss Ingate opened her purse, and indicated to the official by signs that
she had no key for the trunk, and she also cried loudly, so that he should
comprehend:

"No key! ... Lost!"

Then she looked awkwardly at Audrey.

"I've been told they only want to open one trunk when there's a lot. Let
him choose another one," she murmured archly.

But the official merely walked away, to deal with the trunks of somebody
else close by.

Audrey was cross.

"Miss Ingate," she said formally, "you had the key when we started, because
you showed it to me. You can't possibly have lost it."

"No," answered Winnie calmly and knowingly. "I haven't lost it. But I'm not
going to have the things in my trunk thrown about for all these foreigners
to see. It's simply disgraceful. They ought to have women officials and
private rooms at these places. And they would have, if women had the vote.
Let him open one of your trunks. All your things are new."

The _porteur_ had meanwhile been discharging French into Audrey's other
ear.

"Of course you must open it, Winnie," said she. "Don't be so absurd!"
There was a persuasive lightness in her voice, but there was also command.
For a moment she was the perfect widow.

"I'd rather not."

"The _porteur_ says we shall be here all night," Audrey persisted.

"Do you know French?"

"I learnt French at school, Winnie," said the perfect widow. "I can't
understand every word, but I can make out the drift." And Audrey went on
translating the porter according to her own wisdom. "He says there have
been dreadful scenes here before, when people have refused to open their
trunks, and the police have had to be called in. He says the man won't
upset the things in your trunk at all."

Miss Ingate gazed into the distance, and privately smiled. Audrey had
never guessed that in Miss Ingate were such depths of obstinate stupidity.
She felt quite distinctly that her understanding of human nature was
increasing.

"Oh! Look!" said Miss Ingate casually. "I'm sure those must be real
Parisians!" Her offhandedness, her inability to realise the situation, were
exasperating to the young widow. Audrey glanced where Miss Ingate had
pointed, and saw in the doorway of the custom-house two women and a lad,
all cloaked but all obviously in radiant fancy dress, laughing together.

"Don't they look French!" said Miss Ingate.

Audrey tapped her foot on the asphalt floor, while people whose luggage had
been examined bumped strenuously against her in the effort to depart. She
was extremely pessimistic; she knew she could do nothing with Miss Ingate;
and the thought of the vast, flaring, rumbling city beyond the station
intimidated her. The _porteur_, who had gone away to collect their
neglected small baggage, now returned, and nudged her, pointing to the
official who had resumed his place behind the trunks. He was certainly a
fierce man, but he was a little man, and there was an agreeable peculiarity
in his eye.

Audrey, suddenly inspired and emboldened, faced him; she shrugged her
shoulders Gallically at Miss Ingate's trunk, and gave a sad, sweet, wistful
smile, and then put her hand with an exquisite inviting gesture on the
smallest of her own trunks. The act was a deliberate exploitation of
widowhood. The official fiercely shrugged his shoulders and threw up his
arms, and told the _porteur_ to open the small trunk.

"I told you they would," said Miss Ingate negligently.

Audrey would have turned upon her and slain her had she not been busy with
the tremendous realisation of the fact that by a glance and a gesture she
had conquered the customs official--a foreigner and a stranger. She wanted
to be alone and to think.

Just as the trunk was being relocked, Audrey heard an American girlish
voice behind her:

"Now, you must be Miss Ingate!"

"I am," Miss Ingate almost ecstatically admitted.

The trio in cloaked fancy dress were surrounding Miss Ingate like a
bodyguard.



CHAPTER IX

LIFE IN PARIS


Miss Thompkins and Miss Nickall were a charm to dissipate all the
affrighting menace of the city beyond the station. Miss Thompkins had
fluffy red hair, with the freckles which too often accompany red hair, and
was addressed as Tommy. Miss Nickall had fluffy grey hair, with warm,
loving eyes, and was addressed as Nick. The age of either might have been
anything from twenty-four to forty. The one came from Wyoming, the other
from Arizona; and it was instantly clear that they were close friends. They
had driven up to the terminus before going to a fancy-dress ball to be
given that night in the studio of Monsieur Dauphin, a famous French painter
and a delightful man. They had met Monsieur Dauphin on the previous evening
on the terrace of the Café de Versailles, and Monsieur had said, in
response to their suggestion, that he would be enchanted and too much
honoured if they would bring their English friends to his little
"leaping"--that was, hop.

Also they had thought that it would be nice for the travellers to be met at
the terminus, especially as Miss Ingate had been very particularly
recommended to Miss Thompkins by a whole group of people in London. It was
Miss Thompkins who had supplied the address of reliable furnished rooms,
and she and Nick would personally introduce the ladies to their landlady,
who was a sweet creature.

Tommy and Nick and Miss Ingate were at once on terms of cordial
informality; but the Americans seemed to be a little diffident before the
companion. Their voices, at the introduction, had reinforced the surprise
of their first glances. "Oh! _Mrs._ Moncreiff!" The slightest insistence,
no more, on the "Mrs."! Nothing said, but evidently they had expected
somebody else!

Then there was the boy, whom they called Musa. He was dark, slim, with
timorous great eyes, and attired in red as a devil beneath his student's
cloak. He apologised slowly in English for not being able to speak English.
He said he was very French, and Tommy and Nick smiled, and he smiled back
at them rather wistfully. When Tommy and Nick had spoken with the
chauffeurs in French he interpreted their remarks. There were two
motor-taxis, one for the luggage.

Miss Thompkins accompanied the luggage; she insisted on doing so. She could
tell sinister tales of Paris cabmen, and she even delayed the departure in
order to explain that once in the suburbs and in the pre-taxi days a cabman
had threatened to drive her and himself into the Seine unless she would be
his bride, and she saved herself by promising to be his bride and telling
him that she lived in the Avenue de l'Opéra; as soon as the cab reached a
populous thoroughfare she opened the cab door and squealed and was rescued;
she had let the driver go free because of his good taste.

As the procession whizzed through nocturnal streets, some thunderous with
traffic, others very quiet, but all lined with lofty regular buildings,
Audrey was penetrated by the romance of this city where cabmen passionately
and to the point of suicide and murder adored their fares. And she thought
that perhaps, after all, Madame Piriac's impression of Paris might not be
entirely misleading. Miss Ingate and Nick talked easily, very charmed with
one another, both excited. Audrey said little, and the dark youth said
nothing. But once the dark youth murmured shyly to Audrey in English:

"Do you play at ten-nis, Madame?"

They crossed a thoroughfare that twinkled and glittered from end to end
with moving sky-signs. Serpents pursued burning serpents on the heights of
that thoroughfare, invisible hands wrote mystic words of warning and
invitation, and blazing kittens played with balls of incandescent wool.
Throngs of promenaders moved under theatrical trees that waved their pale
emerald against the velvet sky, and the ground floor of every edifice was a
glowing café, whose tables, full of idle sippers and loungers, bulged out
on to the broad pavements.... The momentary vision was shut off instantly
as the taxis shot down the mouth of a dark narrow street; but it had been
long enough to make Audrey's heart throb.

"What is that?" she asked.

"That?" exclaimed Nick kindly. "Oh! That's only the _grand boulevard_."

Then they crossed the sombre, lamp-reflecting Seine, and soon afterwards
the two taxis stopped at a vast black door in a very wide street of serried
palatial façades that were continually shaken by the rushing tumult of
electric cars. Tommy jumped out and pushed a button, and the door
automatically split in two, disclosing a vast and dim tunnel. Tommy ran
within, and came out again with a coatless man in a black-and-yellow
striped waistcoat and a short white apron. This man, Musa, and the two
chauffeurs entered swiftly into a complex altercation, which endured until
Audrey had paid the chauffeurs and all the trunks had been transported
behind the immense door and the door bangingly shut.

"Vehy amusing, isn't it?" whispered Miss Ingate caustically to Audrey.
"Aren't they dears?"

"Madame Dubois's establishment is on the third and fourth floors," said
Nick.

They climbed a broad, curving, carpeted staircase.

"We're here," said Audrey to Miss Ingate after scores of stairs.

Miss Ingate, breathless, could only smile.

And Audrey profoundly felt that she was in Paris. The mere shape of the
doorknob by the side of a brass plate lettered "Madame Dubois" told her
that she was in an exotic land.

And in the interior of Madame Dubois's establishment Tommy and Nick
together drew apart the curtains, opened the windows, and opened the
shutters of a pleasantly stuffy sitting-room. Everybody leaned out, and
they saw the superb thoroughfare, straight and interminable, and the moving
roofs of the tram-cars, and dwarfs on the pavements. The night was mild
and languorous.

"You see that!" Nick pointed to a blaze of electricity to the left on the
opposite side of the road. "That's where we shall take you to dine, after
you've spruced yourselves up. You needn't bother about fancy dress.
Monsieur Dauphin always has stacks of kimonos--for his models, you know."

While the travellers spruced themselves up in different bedrooms, Tommy
chattered through one pair of double doors ajar, and Nick through the
other, and Musa strummed with many mistakes on an antique Pleyel piano. And
as Audrey listened to the talk of these acquaintances, Tommy and Nick, who
in half an hour had put on the hue of her lifelong friends, and as she
heard the piano, and felt the vibration of cars far beneath, she decided
that she was still growing happier and happier, and that life and the world
were marvellous.

A little later they passed into the café-restaurant through a throng of
seated sippers who were spread around its portals like a defence. The
interior, low, and stretching backwards, apparently endless, into the
bowels of the building, was swimming in the brightest light. At a raised
semicircular counter in the centre two women were enthroned, plump, sedate,
darkly dressed, and of middle age. To these priestesses came a constant
succession of waiters, in the classic garb of waiters, bearing trays which
they offered to the gaze of the women, and afterwards throwing down coins
that rang on the marble of the counter. One of the women wrote swiftly in a
great tome. Both of them, while performing their duties, glanced
continually into every part of the establishment, watching especially each
departure and each arrival.

At scores of tables were the most heterogeneous collection of people that
Audrey had ever seen; men and women, girls and old men, even a few children
with their mothers. Liquids were of every colour, ices chromatic, and the
scarlet of lobster made a luscious contrast with the shaded tints of
salads. In the extreme background men were playing billiards at three
tables. Though nearly everybody was talking, no one talked loudly, so that
the resulting monotone of conversation was a gentle drone, out of which
shot up at intervals the crash of crockery or a hoarse command. And this
drone combined itself with the glittering light, and with the mild warmth
that floated in waves through the open windows, and with the red plush of
the seats, and with the rosiness of painted nymphs on the blue walls, and
with the complexions of women's faces, and their hats and frocks, and with
the hues of the liquids--to produce a totality of impression that made
Audrey dizzy with ecstasy. This was not the Paris set forth by Madame
Piriac, but it was a wondrous Paris, and in Audrey's esteem not far removed
from heaven.

Miss Ingate, magnificently pale, followed Tommy and Nick with ironic
delight up the long passage between the tables. Her eyes seemed to be
saying: "I am overpowered, and yet there is something in me that is not
overpowered, and by virtue of my kind-hearted derision I, from Essex, am
superior to you all!" Audrey, with glance downcast, followed Miss Ingate,
and Musa came last, sinuously. Nobody looked up at them more than casually,
but at intervals during the passage Tommy and Nick nodded and smiled: "How
d'ye do? How d'ye do?" "_Bon soir,_" and answers were given in American or
French voices.

They came to rest near the billiard tables, and near an aperture with a
shelf where all the waiters congregated to shout their orders. A
grey-haired waiter, with the rapidity and dexterity of a conjurer, laid a
cloth over the marble round which they sat, Audrey and Miss Ingate on the
plush bench, and Tommy and Nick, with Musa between them, on chairs
opposite. The waiter then discussed with them for five minutes what they
should eat, and he argued the problem seriously, wisely, helpfully, as
befitted. It was Audrey, in full view of a buffet laden with shell-fish and
fruit, who first suggested lobster, and lobster was chosen, nothing but
lobster. Miss Ingate said that she was not a bit tired, and that lobster
was her dream. The sentiment was universal at the table. When asked what
she would drink, Audrey was on the point of answering "lemonade." But a
doubt about the propriety of everlasting lemonade for a widow with much
knowledge of the world, stopped her.

"I vote we all have grenadines," said Nick.

Grenadine was agreeable to Audrey's ear, and everyone concurred.

The ordering was always summarised and explained by Musa in a few phrases
which, to Audrey, sounded very different from the French of Tommy and Nick.
And she took oath that she would instantly begin to learn to speak French,
not like Tommy and Nick, whose accent she cruelly despised, but like Musa.

Then Tommy and Nick removed their cloaks, and sat displayed as a geisha and
a contadina, respectively. Musa had already unmasked his devilry. The café
was not in the least disturbed by these gorgeous and strange apparitions.
An orchestra began to play. Lobster arrived, and high glasses full of
glinting green. Audrey ate and drank with gusto, with innocence, with the
intensest love of life. And she was the most beautiful and touching sight
in the café-restaurant. Miss Ingate, grinning, caught her eye with joyous
mockery. "We are going it, aren't we, Audrey?" shrieked Miss Ingate.

Miss Thompkins and Miss Nickall began slowly to differentiate themselves in
Audrey's mind. At first they were merely two American girls--the first
Audrey had met. They were of about the same age--whatever that age might
be--and if they were not exactly of the same age, then Tommy with red hair
was older than Nick with grey hair. Indeed, Nick took the earliest
opportunity to remark that her hair had turned grey at nineteen. They both
had dreamy eyes that looked through instead of looking at; they were both
hazy concerning matters of fact; they were both attached like a couple of
aunts to Musa, who nestled between them like a cat between two cushions;
they were both extraordinarily friendly and hospitable; they both painted
and both had studios--in the same house; they both showed quite a
remarkable admiration and esteem for all their acquaintances; and they both
lacked interest in their complexions and their hair.

The resemblance did not go very much farther. Tommy, for all her praising
of friends, was of a critical, curious, and analytical disposition, and her
greenish eyes were always at work qualifying in a very subtle manner what
her tongue said, when her tongue was benevolent, as it often was. Feminism
and suffragism being the tie between the new acquaintances, these subjects
were the first material of conversation, and an empress of militancy known
to the world as "Rosamund" having been mentioned, Miss Ingate said with
enthusiasm:

"She lives only for one thing."

"Yes," replied Tommy. "And if she got it, I guess no one would be more
disgusted than she herself."

There was an instant's silence.

"Oh, Tommy!" Nick lovingly protested.

Said Miss Ingate with a comprehending satiric grin:

"I see what you mean. I quite see. I quite see. You're right, Miss
Thompkins. I'm sure you're right."

Audrey decided she would have to be very clever in order to be equal to
Tommy's subtlety. Nick, on the other hand, was not a bit subtle, except
when she tried to imitate Tommy. Nick was kindness, and sympathy, and
vagueness. You could see these admirable qualities in every curve of her
face and gleam of her eyes. She was very sympathetic, but somewhat shocked
when Audrey blurted out that she had not come to Paris in order to paint.

"There are at least fifty painters in this café this very minute," said
Tommy. And somehow it was just as if she had said: "If you haven't come to
Paris to paint, what have you come for?"

"Does Mr. Musa paint, too?" asked Audrey.

"Oh _no_!" Both his protectresses answered together, pained. Tommy added:
"Musa plays the violin--of course."

And Musa blushed. Later, he murmured to Audrey across the table, while
Tommy was ordering a salad, that there were tennis courts in the Luxembourg
gardens.

"I used to paint," Miss Ingate broke out. "And I'm beginning to think I
should like to paint again."

Said Nick, enraptured:

"I'll let you use my studio, if you will. I'd just love you to, now! Where
did you study?"

"Well, it was like this," said Miss Ingate with satisfaction. "It was a
long time ago. I finished painting a dog-kennel because the house-painter's
wife died and he had to go to her funeral, and the dog didn't like being
kept waiting. That gave me the idea. I went into water-colours, but
afterwards I went back to oils. Oils seemed more real. Then I started on
portraits, and I did a portrait of my Aunt Sarah from memory. After she saw
it she tore up her will, and before I could get her into a good temper
again she married her third husband and she had to make a new will in
favour of him. So I found painting very expensive. Not that it would have
made any difference, I suppose, would it? After that I went into
miniatures. The same dog that I painted the kennel for ate up the best
miniature I ever did. It killed him. I put a cross over his grave in the
garden. All that made me see what a fool I'd been, and I exchanged my
painting things for a lawn-mower, but it never turned out to be any good."

"You dear! You precious! You priceless!" cooed Nick. "I shall fix up my
second best easel for you to-morrow."

"Isn't she just too lovely!" Tommy murmured aside to Audrey.

"I not much understand," said Musa.

Tommy translated to him, haltingly, and Audrey was moved to say, with
energy:

"What I want most is to learn French, and I'm going to begin to-morrow
morning."

Nick was kindly confusing and shaming Miss Ingate with a short history and
catechism of modern art, including such names as Vuillard, Bonnard,
Picasso, Signac, and Matisse--all very eagerly poured out and all very
unnerving for Miss Ingate, whose directory of painting was practically
limited to the names of Raphael, Sir Joshua, Rembrandt, Rubens,
Gainsborough, Turner, Leighton, Millais, Gustave Doré and Frank Dicksee.
When, however, Nick referred to Monsieur Dauphin, Miss Ingate was as it
were washed safely ashore and said with assurance: "Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh
yes!"

Tommy listened for a few moments, and then, leaning across the table and
lighting a cigarette, she said in an intimate undertone to Audrey: "I hope
you don't _mind_ coming to the ball to-night. We really didn't know------"
She stopped. Her eyes, ferreting in Audrey's black, completed the
communication.

Unnerved for the tenth of a second, Audrey recovered and answered:

"Oh, no! I shall like it very much."

"You've been up against life!" murmured Tommy in a melting voice, gazing at
her. "But how wonderful all experience is, isn't it. I once had a husband.
We separated--at least, he separated. But I know the feel of being a wife."

Audrey blushed deeply. She wanted to push away all that sympathy, and she
was exceedingly alarmed by the revelation that Tommy was an initiate. The
widow was the merest schoolgirl once more. But her blush had saved her from
a chat in which she could not conceivably have held her own.

"Excuse me being so clumsy," said Tommy contritely. "Another time." And
she waved her cigarette to the waiter in demand for the bill.

It was after the orchestra had finished a tango, and while Tommy was
examining the bill, that the first violin and leader, in a magenta coat,
approached the table, and with a bow offered his violin deferentially to
Musa. Many heads turned to watch what would happen. But Musa only shrugged
his shoulders and with an exquisite gesture of refusal signified that he
had to leave. Whereupon the magenta coat gracefully retired, starting a
Hungarian dance as he went.

"Musa is supposed to be the greatest violinist in Paris--perhaps in the
world," Tommy whispered casually to Audrey. "He used to play here, till
Dauphin discovered him."

Audrey, overcome by this prodigious blow, trembled at the contemplation of
her blind stupidity.

Beyond question, Musa now looked extremely important, vivid, masterful. She
had been mistaking him for a nice, ornamental, useless boy.



CHAPTER X

FANCY DRESS


Just as the café-restaurant had been an intensification of ordinary life,
so was the ball in Dauphin's studio an intensification of the
café-restaurant. It had more colour, more noise, more music, more heat,
more varied kinds of people, and, of course, far more riotous movement than
the café-restaurant. The only quality in which the café-restaurant stood
first was that of sustenance. Monsieur Dauphin had not attempted to rival
the café-restaurant in the matter of food and drink. And that there was no
general hope of his doing so could be deduced from the fact that many of
the more experienced guests arrived with bottles, fruit, sausages, and
sandwiches of their own.

When Audrey and her friends entered the precincts of the vast new white
building in the Boulevard Raspail, upon whose topmost floor Monsieur
Dauphin painted the portraits of the women of the French, British, and
American plutocracies and aristocracies, a lift full of gay-coloured
figures was just shooting upwards past the wrought-iron balustrades of the
gigantic staircase. Tommy and Nick stopped to speak to a columbine who
hovered between the pavement and the threshold of the house.

"I don't know whether it's the grenadine or the lobster, or whether it's
Paris," said Miss Ingate confidentially in the interval; "but I can
scarcely tell whether I'm standing on my head or my heels."

Before the Americans rejoined them, the lift had returned and ascended with
another covey of fancy costumes, including a man with a nose a foot long
and a girl with bright green hair, dressed as an acrobat. On its next
journey the lift held Tommy and Nick's party, and it held no more.

When the party emerged from it, they were greeted with a cheer, hoarse and
half human, by a band of light amateur mountebanks of both sexes who were
huddled in a doorway. Within a quarter of an hour Audrey and Miss Ingate,
after astounding struggles in a dressing-room in which Nick alone saved
their lives and reputations, appeared in Japanese disguise according to
promise, and nobody could tell whether Audrey was maid, wife, or widow. She
might have been a creature created on the spot, for the celestial purpose
of a fancy-dress ball in Monsieur Dauphin's studio.

The studio was very large and rather lofty. Its walls had been painted by
gifted pupils of Monsieur Dauphin and by fellow-artists, with scenes of
life according to Catullus, Theocritus, Propertius, Martial, Petronius, and
other classical writers. It is not too much to say that the walls of the
studio constituted a complete novelty for Audrey and Miss Ingate. Miss
Ingate opened her mouth to say something, but, saying nothing, forgot for a
long time to shut it again.

Chinese lanterns, electrically illuminated, were strung across the studio
at a convenient height so that athletic dancers could prodigiously leap up
and make them swing. Beneath this incoherent but exciting radiance the
guests swayed and glided, in a joyous din, under the influence of an
orchestra of men snouted like pigs and raised on a dais. In a corner was a
spiral staircase leading to the flat roof of the studio and a view of all
Paris. Up and down this corkscrew contending parties fought amiably for the
right of way.

Tommy and Nick began instantly to perform introductions between Audrey and
Miss Ingate and the other guests. In a few moments Audrey had failed to
catch the names of a score and a half of people--many Americans, some
French, some Argentine, one or two English. They were all very talented
people, and, according to Miss Ingate, the most characteristically French
were invariably either Americans or Argentines.

A telephone bell rang in the distance, and presently a toreador stood on a
chair and pierced the music with a message of yells in French, and the room
hugely guffawed and cheered.

"Where is the host?" Audrey asked.

"That's what the telephoning was about," said Tommy, speaking loudly
against the hubbub. "He hasn't come yet. He had to rush off this afternoon
to do pastel portraits of two Russian princesses at St. Germain, and he
hasn't got back yet. The telephone was to say that he's started."

Then one of the introduced--it was a girl wearing a mask--took Audrey by
the waist and whirled her strongly away and she was lost in the maze.
Audrey's first impulse was to protest, but she said to herself: "Why
protest? This is what we're here for." And she gave herself up to the
dance. Her partner held her very firmly, somewhat bending over her.
Neither spoke. Gyrating in long curves, with the other dancers swishing
mysteriously about them like the dancers of a dream, and the music as far
off as another world, they clung together in the rhythm and in the
enchantment, until the music ceased.... The strong girl threw Audrey
carelessly off, and walked away, breathing hard. And there was something in
the strong girl's nonchalant and curt departure which woke a chord in
Audrey's soul that had never been wakened before. Audrey could scarcely
credit that she was on the same planet as Essex. She had many dances with
men whom she hoped and believed she had been introduced to by Tommy, and no
less than seventeen persons of either sex told her in unusual English that
they had heard she wanted to learn French and that they would like to teach
her; and then she met Musa, the devil.

Musa, with an indolent and wistful smile, suggested the roof. Audrey was
now just one of the throng, and quite unconscious of herself; she fought
archly and gaily on the spiral staircase exactly as she had seen others do,
and at last they were on the roof, and the silhouettes of other fantastic
figures and of cowled chimney pots stood out dark against the vague yellow
glow of the city beneath. While Musa was pointing out the historic
landmarks to her, she was thinking how she could never again be the girl
who had left Moze on the previous morning. And yet Musa was so natural and
so direct that it was impossible to take him for anything but a boy, and
hence Audrey sank back into early girlhood, talking spasmodically to Musa
as she used in school days to talk to the brother of her school friend.

"I will teach you French," said Musa, unaware that he had numerous
predecessors in the offer. "But will you play tennis with me in the gardens
of the Luxembourg?"

Audrey said she would, and that she would buy a racket.

"Tell me about all those artists Miss Nickall spoke of," she said. "I must
know about all the artists, and all the musicians, and all the authors. I
must know all about them at once. I shan't sleep until I know all their
names and I can talk French. I shan't _sleep_."

Musa began the catalogue. When a girl came and chucked him under the chin,
he angrily slapped her face. Then, to avoid complications, they descended.

In the middle of the studio, wearing a silk hat, a morning coat, striped
trousers, yellow gloves, and boots with spats, stood a smiling figure.

"_Voilà_ Dauphin!" said Musa.

"Musa!" called Monsieur Dauphin, espying the youth on the staircase. Then
he made a gesture to the orchestra: "Give him a violin!"

Audrey stood by Musa while he played a dance that nobody danced to, and
when he had finished she was rather ashamed, under the curtain of wild
cheering, because with her Essex incredulity she had not sufficiently
believed in Musa's greatness.

"Permit your host to introduce himself," said a voice behind her, not in
the correct English of a linguistic Frenchman, but in utterly English
English. She had now descended to the floor of the studio.

Emile Dauphin raised his glossy hat, and then asked to be allowed to put it
on again, as the company had decided that it was part of his costume. He
had a delicious smile, at once respectful and intimate. Audrey had read
somewhere that really great men were always simple and unaffected--indeed
that it was often impossible to guess from their demeanour that, etc.,
etc.--and this experience of the first celebrity with whom she had ever
spoken (except Musa, who was somehow only Musa) confirmed the statement,
and confirmed also her young instinctive belief that what is printed must
be true. She was beginning to feel the stealthy on-comings of fatigue, and
certainly she was very nervous, but Monsieur Dauphin's quite particularly
sympathetic manner, and her own sudden determination not to be a little
blushing fool gave her new power.

"I can't express to you," he said, moving towards the dais and mesmerising
her to keep by his side. "I can't express to you how sorry I was to be so
late." He made the apology with lightness, but with sincerity. Audrey knew
how polite the French were. "But truly circumstances were too much for me.
Those two Russian princesses--they came to me through a mutual friend, a
dear old friend of mine, very closely attached also to them. They leave
to-morrow morning by the St. Petersburg express, on which they have engaged
a special coach. What was I to do? I tried to tear myself away earlier, but
of course there were the portrait sketches to finish, and no doubt you know
the usage of the best society in Russia."

"Yes," murmured Audrey.

"Come up on the dais, will you?" he suggested. "And let us survey the scene
together."

They surveyed the scene together. The snouted band was having supper on the
floor in a corner, and many of the guests also were seated on the floor.
Miss Ingate, intoxicated by the rapture of existence, and Miss Thompkins
were carefully examining the frescoes on the walls. A young woman covered
from head to foot with gold tinsel was throwing chocolates into Musa's
mouth, or as near to it as she could.

"What a splendid player Mr. Musa is!" Audrey inaugurated her career as a
woman of the world. "I doubt if I have ever heard such violin playing."

"I'm so glad you think so," replied Monsieur Dauphin. "Of course you know
I'm very conceited about my painting. Anybody will tell you so. But beneath
all that I'm not so sure. I often have the gravest doubts about my work.
But I never had any doubt that when I took Musa out of the orchestra in the
Café de Versailles I was giving a genius to the world. And perhaps that's
how I shall be remembered by posterity. And if it is I shall be content."

Never before had Audrey heard anybody connect himself with posterity, and
she was very much impressed. Monsieur Dauphin was resigned and yet brave.
By no means convinced that posterity would do the right thing, he
nevertheless had no grudge against posterity.

Just then there was a sharp scream at the top of the spiral staircase. With
a smile that condoned the scream and excused his flight, Monsieur Dauphin
ran to the staircase, and up it, and disappeared on to the roof. Nobody
seemed to be perturbed. Audrey was left alone and conspicuous on the dais.

"Charming, isn't he?" said Miss Thompkins, arriving with Miss Ingate in
front of the flower-screened platform.

"Oh! he is!" answered Audrey with sincerity, leaning downwards.

"Has he told you all about the Russian princesses?"

"Oh, yes," said Audrey, pleased.

"I thought he would," said Miss Thompkins, with a peculiar intonation.

Audrey knew then that Miss Thompkins, having first maliciously made sure
that she was a ninny, was now telling her to her face that she was a ninny.

Tommy continued:

"Then I guess he told you he'd given Musa to the world."

Audrey nodded.

"Ah! I knew he would. Well, when he comes back he'll tell you that you must
come to one of his _real_ entertainments here, and that this one is
nothing. Then he'll tell you about all the nobs he knows in London. And at
last he'll say that you have a strangely expressive face, and he'd like to
paint it and show the picture in the Salon. But he won't tell you it'll
cost you forty thousand francs. So I'll tell you that, because perhaps
later on, if you don't know, you might find yourself making a noise like a
tenderfoot. You see, Miss Ingate hasn't concealed that you're a lady
millionaire."

"No, I haven't," said Miss Ingate, glowing and yet sarcastic. "I couldn't
bring myself to, because I was so anxious to see if human nature in Paris
is anything like what it is in Essex."

"And why should you hide it, Winnie?" Audrey stoutly demanded.

"Well, au revoir," Tommy murmured delicately, with a very original gesture.
"He's coming back."

As Monsieur Dauphin, having apparently established peace on the roof,
approached again, Audrey discreetly examined his face and his demeanour, to
see if she could perceive in him any of the sinister things that Tommy had
implied. She was unable to make up her mind whether she could or not. But
in the end she decided that she was as shrewd as anybody in the place.

"Have you been to my roof-garden, Mrs. Moncreiff?" he asked in a persuasive
voice, raising his eyebrows.

She said she had, and that she thought the roof was heavenly.

Then from the corner of her eye she saw Miss Ingate and Tommy sidling
mischievously away, like conspirators who have lighted a time fuse. She
considered that Tommy, with her red hair and freckles, and strange glances
and strange tones full of a naughty and malicious sweetness, was even more
peculiar than Miss Ingate. But she was not intimidated by them nor by the
illustrious Monsieur Dauphin, so perfectly master of his faculties. Rather
she was exultant in the contagion of their malice. Once more she felt as if
she had ceased to be a girl a very long time ago. And she was aware of
agreeable and exciting temptations.

"Are you taking a house in Paris?" inquired Monsieur Dauphin.

Audrey answered primly:

"I haven't decided. Should you advise me to do so?"

He waved a hand.

"Ah! It depends on the life you wish to lead. Who knows--with a young woman
who has all experience behind her and all life before her! But I do hope I
may see you again. And I trust I may persuade you to come to my studio
again." Audrey felt the thrill of drama as he proceeded. "This is scarcely
a night for you. I ought to tell you that I give three entertainments
during the autumn. To-night is the first. It is for students and those
English and Americans who think they are seeing Paris here. Then I give
another for the political and dramatic worlds. Each is secretly proud to
meet the other. The third I reserve to my friends. Some of my many friends
in London are good enough to come over specially for it. It is on
Christmas Eve. I do wish you would come to that one."

"I suppose," she said, catching the diabolic glances of Miss Ingate and
Tommy, "I suppose you know almost more people in London than in Paris?"

He answered:

"Well, I count among my friends more than two-thirds of the subscribers to
Covent Garden Opera.... By the way, do you happen to be connected with the
Moncreiffs of Suddon Wester? They have a charming house in Hyde Park
Terrace. But probably you know it?"

Audrey burst out laughing. She laughed loud and violently till the tears
stood in her eyes.

"Well," he said, at a loss, deprecatingly. "Perhaps these Moncreiffs _are_
rather weird."

"I was only laughing," she said in gasps, but with a complete secret
composure. "Because we had such an awful quarrel with them last year. I
couldn't tell you the details. They're too shocking."

He gave a dubious smile.

"D'you know, dear young lady," he recommenced after a brief pause, "I
should adore to paint a portrait of you laughing. It would be very well
hung in the Salon. Your face is so strangely expressive. It is utterly
different, in expression, from any other face I ever saw--and I have
studied faces."

Heedless of the general interest which she was arousing, Audrey leaned on
the rail of the screen of flowers, and gave herself up afresh to laughter.
Monsieur Dauphin was decidedly puzzled. The affair might have ended in
hysteria and confusion had not Miss Ingate, with Nick and Tommy, come
hurrying up to the dais.



CHAPTER XI

A POLITICAL REFUGEE


"Rosamund has come to my studio and wants to see me at once. _She has sent
for me._ Miss Ingate says she shall go, too."

It was these words in a highly emotionalised voice from Miss Nickall that,
like a vague murmured message of vast events, drew the entire quartet away
from the bright inebriated scene created by Monsieur Dauphin.

The single word "Rosamund" sufficed to break one mood and induce another in
all bosoms save that of Audrey, who was in a state of permanent joyous
exultation that she scarcely even attempted to control. The great militant
had a surname, but it was rarely used save by police magistrates. Her
Christian name alone was more impressive than the myriad cognomens of
queens and princesses. Miss Nickall ran away home at once. Miss Thompkins
was left to deliver Miss Ingate and Audrey at Nick's studio, which, being
in the Rue Delambre, was not far away. And not the shedding of the kimono
and the re-assumption of European attire could affect Audrey's spirits. Had
she been capable of regret in that hour, she would have regretted the
abandonment of the ball, where the refined, spiritual, strange faces of the
men, and the enigmatic quality of the women, and the exceeding novelty of
the social code had begun to arouse in her sentiments of approval and
admiration. But she quitted the staggering frolic without a sigh; for she
carried within her a frolic surpassing anything exterior or physical.

The immense flickering boulevard with its double roadway stretched away to
the horizon on either hand, empty.

"What time is it?" asked Miss Ingate.

Tommy looked at her wrist-watch.

"Don't tell me! Don't tell me!" cried Audrey.

"We might get a taxi in the Rue de Babylone," Tommy suggested. "Or shall we
walk?"

"We _must_ walk," cried Audrey.

She knew the name of the street. In the distance she could recognise the
dying lights of the café-restaurant where they had eaten. She felt already
like an inhabitant of the dreamed-of city. It was almost inconceivable to
her that she had been within it for only a few hours, and that England lay
less than a day behind her in the past, and Moze less than two days. And
Aguilar the morose, and the shuttered rooms of Flank Hall, shot for an
instant into her mind and out again.

The other two women walked rather quickly, mesmerised possibly by the magic
of the illustrious Christian name, and Audrey gave occasional schoolgirlish
leaps by their side. A little policeman appeared inquisitive from a
by-street, and Audrey tossed her head as if saying: "Pooh! I belong here.
All the mystery of this city is mine, and I am as at home as in Moze
Street."

And as they surged through the echoing solitude of the boulevard, and as
they crossed the equally tremendous boulevard that cut through it east and
west, Tommy told the story of Nick's previous relations with Rosamund. Nick
had met Rosamund once before through her English chum, Betty Burke, an art
student who had ultimately sacrificed art to the welfare of her sex, but
who with Mrs. Burke had shared rooms and studio with Nick for many months.
Tommy's narrative was spotted with hardly perceptible sarcasms concerning
art, women, Betty Burke, Mrs. Burke, and Nick; but she put no barb into
Rosamund. And when Miss Ingate, who had never met Rosamund, asked what
Rosamund amounted to in the esteem of Tommy, Tommy evaded the question.
Miss Ingate remembered, however, what she had said in the café-restaurant.

Then they turned into the Rue Delambre, and Tommy halted them in the deep
obscurity in front of another of those huge black doors which throughout
Paris seemed to guard the secrets of individual life. An automobile was
waiting close by. A little door in the huge one clicked and yielded, and
they climbed over a step into black darkness.

"Thompkins!" called Miss Thompkins loudly to the black darkness, to
reassure the drowsy concierge in his hidden den, shutting the door with a
bang behind them; and, groping for the hands of the others, she dragged
them forward stumbling.

"I never have a match," she said.

They blundered up tenebrous stairs.

"We're just passing my door," said Tommy. "Nick's is higher up."

Then a perpendicular slit of light showed itself--and a portal slightly
open could be distinguished.

"I shall quit here," said Tommy. "You go right in."

"You aren't leaving us?" exclaimed Miss Ingate in alarm.

"I won't go in," Tommy persisted in a quiet satiric tone. "I'll leave my
door open below, and see you when you come down."

She could be heard descending.

"Why, I guess they're here," said a voice, Nick's, within, and the door was
pulled wide open.

"My legs are all of a tremble!" muttered Miss Ingate.

Nick's studio seemed larger than reality because of its inadequate
illumination. On a small paint-stained table in the centre was an oil-lamp
beneath a round shade that had been decorated by some artist's hand with a
series of reclining women in many colours. This lamp made a moon in the
midnight of the studio, but it was a moon almost without rays; the shade
seemed to imprison the light, save that which escaped from its superior
orifice. Against the table stood a tall thin woman in black. Her face was
lit by the rays escaping upward; a pale, firm, bland face, with rather
prominent cheeks, loose grey hair above, surmounted by a toque. The dress
was dark, and the only noticeable feature of it was that the sleeves were
finished in white linen; from these the hands emerged calm and veined under
the lampshade; in one of them a pair of gloves were clasped. On the table
lay a thin mantle.

At the back of the studio there sat another woman, so engloomed that no
detail of her could be distinguished.

"As I was saying," the tall upright woman resumed as soon as Miss Ingate
and Audrey had been introduced. "Betty Burke is in prison. She got six
weeks this morning. She may never come out again. Almost her last words
from the dock were that you, Miss Nickall, should be asked to go to London
to look after Mrs. Burke, and perhaps to take Betty's place in other ways.
She said that her mother preferred you to anybody else, and that she was
sure you would come. Shall you?"

The accents were very clear, the face was delicately smiling, the little
gestures had a quite tranquil quality. Rosamund did not seem to care
whether Miss Nickall obeyed the summons or not. She did not seem to care
about anything whatever except her own manner of existing. She was the
centre of Paris, and Paris was naught but a circumference for her. All
phenomena beyond the individuality of the woman were reduced to the
irrelevant and the negligible. It would have been absurd to mention to her
costume balls. The frost of her indifference would have wilted them into
nothingness.

"Yes, of course, I shall go," Nick answered.

"When?" was the implacable question.

"Oh! By the first train," said Nick eagerly. As she approached the lamp,
the gleam of the devotee could be seen in her gaze. In one moment she had
sacrificed Paris and art and Tommy and herself, and had risen to the sacred
ardour of a vocation. Rosamund was well accustomed to watching the process,
and she gave not the least sign of satisfaction or approval.

"I ought to tell you," she went on, "that I came over from London suddenly
by the afternoon service in order to escape arrest. I am now a political
refugee. Things have come to this pass. You will do well to leave by the
first train. That is why I decided to call here before going to bed."

"Where's Tommy?" asked Nick, appealing wildly to Miss Ingate and Audrey.
Upon being answered she said, still more wildly: "I must see her. Can
you--No, I'll run down myself." In the doorway she turned round: "Mrs.
Moncreiff, would you and Miss Ingate like to have my studio while I'm away?
I should just love you to. There's a very nice bed over there behind the
screen, and a fair sort of couch over here. Do say you will! _Do_!"

"Oh! We will!" Miss Ingate replied at once, reassuringly, as though in
haste to grant the supreme request of some condemned victim. And indeed
Miss Nickall appeared ready to burst into tears if she should be thwarted.

As soon as Nick had gone, Miss Ingate's smiling face, nervous, intimidated,
audacious, sardonic, and good humoured, moved out of the gloom nearer to
Rosamund.

"You knew I played the barrel organ all down Regent Street?" she ventured,
blushing.

"Ah!" murmured Rosamund, unmoved. "It was you who played the barrel-organ?
So it was."

"Yes," said Miss Ingate. "But I'm like you. I don't care passionately for
prison. Eh! Eh! I'm not so vehy, vehy fond of it. I don't know Miss Burke,
but what a pity she has got six weeks, isn't it? Still, I was vehy much
struck by what someone said to me to-day--that you'd be vehy sorry if women
_did_ get the vote. I think I should be sorry, too--you know what I mean."

"Perfectly," ejaculated Rosamund, with a pleasant smile.

"I hope I'm not skidding," said Miss Ingate still more timidly, but also
with a sardonic giggle, looking round into the gloom. "I do skid sometimes,
you know, and we've just come away from a----"

She could not finish.

"And Mrs. Moncreiff, if I've got the name right, is she with us, too?"
asked Rosamund, miraculously urbane. And added: "I hear she has wealth and
is the mistress of it."

Audrey jumped up, smiling, and lifting her veil. She could not help
smiling. The studio, the lamp, Rosamund with her miraculous
self-complacency, Nick with her soft, mad eyes and wistful voice, the
blundering ruthless Miss Ingate, all seemed intensely absurd to her.
Everything seemed absurd except dancing and revelry and coloured lights and
strange disguises and sensuous contacts. She had the most careless
contempt, stiffened by a slight loathing, for political movements and every
melancholy effort to reform the world. The world did not need reforming and
did not want to be reformed.

"Perhaps you don't know my story," Audrey began, not realising how she
would continue. "I am a widow. I made an unhappy marriage. My husband on
the day after our wedding-day began to eat peas with his knife. In a week I
was forced to leave him. And a fortnight later I heard that he was dead of
blood-poisoning. He had cut his mouth."

And she thought:

"What is the matter with me? I have ruined myself." All her exultation had
collapsed.

But Rosamund remarked gravely:

"It is a common story."

Suddenly there was a movement in the obscure corner where sat the unnamed
and unintroduced lady. This lady rose and came towards the table. She was
very elegant in dress and manner, and she looked maturely young.

"Madame Piriac," announced Rosamund.

Audrey recoiled.... Gazing hard at the face, she saw in it a vague but
undeniable resemblance to certain admired photographs which had arrived at
Moze from France.

"Pardon me!" said Madame Piriac in English with a strong French accent. "I
shall like very much to hear the details of this story of _petits pois_."
The tone of Madame Piriac's question was unexceptionable; it took account
of Audrey's mourning attire, and of her youthfulness; but Audrey could
formulate no answer to it. Instead of speaking she gave a touch to her
veil, and it dropped before her piquant, troubled, inscrutable face like a
screen.

Miss Ingate said with noticeable calm, but also with the air of a
conspirator who sees danger to a most secret machination:

"I'm afraid Mrs. Moncreiff won't care to go into details."

It was neatly done. Madame Piriac brought the episode to a close with a
sympathetic smile and an apposite gesture. And Audrey, safe behind her
veil, glanced gratefully and admiringly at Miss Ingate, who, taken quite
unawares, had been so surprisingly able thus to get her out of a scrape.
She felt very young and callow among these three women, and the mere
presence of Madame Piriac, of whom years ago she had created for herself a
wondrous image, put her into a considerable flutter. On the whole she was
ready to believe that the actual Madame Piriac was quite equal to the image
of her founded on photographs and letters. She set her teeth, and decided
that Madame Piriac should not learn her identity--yet! There was little
risk of her discovering it for herself, for no photograph of Audrey had
gone to Paris for a dozen years, and Miss Ingate's loyalty was absolute.

As Audrey sat down again, the illustrious Rosamund took a chair near her,
and it could not be doubted that the woman had the mien and the carriage of
a leader.

"You are very rich, are you not?" asked Rosamund, in a tone at once
deferential and intimate, and she smiled very attractively in the gloom.
Impossible not to reckon with that smile, as startling as it was seductive!

Evidently Nick had been communicative.

"I suppose I am," murmured Audrey, like a child, and feeling like a child.
Yet at the same time she was asking herself with fierce curiosity: "What
has Madame Piriac got to do with this woman?"

"I hear you have eight or ten thousand a year and can do what you like with
it. And you cannot be more than twenty-three.... What a responsibility it
must be for you!  You are a friend of Miss Ingate's and therefore on our
side. Indeed, if a woman such as you were not on our side, I wonder whom
we _could_ count on. Miss Ingate is, of course, a subscriber to the
Union--"

"Only a very little one," cried Miss Ingate.

Audrey had never felt so abashed since an ex-parlourmaid at Flank Hall, who
had left everything to join the Salvation Army, had asked her once in the
streets of Colchester whether she had found salvation. She knew that she,
if any one, ought to subscribe to the Suffragette Union, and to subscribe
largely. For she was a convinced suffragette by faith, because Miss Ingate
was a convinced suffragette. If Miss Ingate had been a Mormon, Audrey also
would have been a Mormon. And, although she hated to subscribe, she knew
also that if Rosamund demanded from her any subscription, however
large--even a thousand pounds--she would not know how to refuse. She felt
before Rosamund as hundreds of women, and not a few men, had felt.

"I may be leaving for Germany to-morrow," Rosamund proceeded. "I may not
see you again--at any rate for many weeks. May I write to London that you
mean to support us?"

Audrey was giving herself up for lost, and not without reason. She
foreshadowed a future of steely self-sacrifice, propaganda, hammers, riots,
and prison; with no self-indulgence in it, no fine clothes, no art, and no
young men save earnest young men. She saw herself in the iron clutch of her
own conscience and sense of duty. And she was frightened. But at that
moment Nick rushed into the room, and the spell was broken. Nick considered
that she had the right to monopolise Rosamund, and she monopolised her.

Miss Ingate prudently gathered Audrey to her side, and was off with her.
Nick ran to kiss them, and told them that Tommy was waiting for them in the
other studio. They groped downstairs, guided by a wisp of light from
Tommy's studio.

"Why didn't you come up?" asked Miss Ingate of Tommy in Tommy's
antechamber. "Have you and _she_ quarrelled?"

"Oh no!" said Tommy. "But I'm afraid of her. She'd grab me if she had the
least chance, and I don't want to be grabbed."

Tommy was arranging to escort them home, and had already got out on the
landing, when Rosamund and Madame Piriac, followed by Nick holding a candle
aloft, came down the stairs. A few words of explanation, a little innocent
blundering on the part of Nick, a polite suggestion by Madame Piriac, and
an imperious affirmative by Rosamund--and the two strangers to Paris found
themselves in Madame Piriac's waiting automobile on the way to their rooms!

In the darkness of the car the four women could not distinguish each
other's faces. But Rosamund's voice was audible in a monologue, and Miss
Ingate trembled for Audrey and for the future.

"This is the most important political movement in the history of the
world," Rosamund was saying, not at all in a speechifying manner, but quite
intimately and naturally. "Everybody admits that, and that's what makes it
so extraordinarily interesting, and that is why we have had such
magnificent help from women in the very highest positions who wouldn't
dream of touching ordinary politics. It's a marvellous thing to be in the
movement, if we can only realise it. Don't you think so, Mrs. Moncreiff?"

Audrey made no response. The other two sat silent. Miss Ingate thought:

"What's the girl going to do next? Surely she could mumble something."

The car curved and stopped.

"Here we are," said Miss Ingate, delighted. "And thank you so much. I
suppose all we have to do is just to push the bell and the door opens. Now
Audrey, dear."

Audrey did not stir.

"_Mon Dieu!_" murmured Madame Piriac, "What has she, little one?"

Rosamund said stiffly and curtly:

"She is asleep.... It is very late. Four o'clock."

Excellent as was Audrey's excuse for her lapse, Rosamund was not at all
pleased. That slumber was one of Rosamund's rare defeats.



CHAPTER XII

WIDOWHOOD IN THE STUDIO


Audrey was in a white piqué coat and short skirt, with pale blue blouse and
pale blue hat--and at the extremity blue stockings and white tennis shoes.
She picked up a tennis racket in its press, and prepared to leave the
studio. She had bought the coat, the skirt, the blouse, the hat, the
tennis shoes, the racket, the press, and practically all she wore, visible
and invisible, at that very convenient and immense shop, the Bon Marché,
whose only drawback was that it was always full. Everybody in the Quarter,
except a few dolls not in earnest, bought everything at the Bon Marché,
because the Bon Marché was so comprehensive and so reliable. If you desired
a toothbrush, the Bon Marché not only supplied it, but delivered it in a
30-h.p. motor-van manned by two officials in uniform. And if you desired a
bedroom suite, a pair of corsets, a box of pastels, an anthracite stove, or
a new wallpaper, the Bon Marché would never shake its head.

And Audrey was now of the Quarter. Many simple sojourners in the Quarter
tried to imply the Latin Quarter when they said the Quarter. But the
Quarter was only the Montparnasse Quarter. Nevertheless, it sufficed. It
had its own boulevards, restaurants, cafés, concerts, theatres, palaces,
shops, gardens, museums, and churches. There was no need to leave it, and
if you were a proper amateur of the Quarter, you never did leave it save to
scoff at other Quarters. Sometimes you fringed the Latin Quarter in the big
cafés of the Boulevard St. Michel, and sometimes you strolled northwards as
far as the Seine, and occasionally even crossed the Seine in order to enter
the Louvre, which lined the other bank, but you did not go any farther. Why
should you?

Audrey had become so acclimatised to the Quarter that Miss Nickall's studio
seemed her natural home. It was very typically a woman's studio of the
Quarter. About thirty feet each way and fourteen feet high, with certain
irregularities of shape, it was divided into corners. There were the two
bed-corners, which were lounge-corners during the day; the afternoon-tea
corner, with a piece or two of antique furniture and some old silk
hangings, where on high afternoons tea was given to droves of visitors; and
there was the culinary corner, with spirit-lamps, gas-rings, kettles, and a
bowl or two over which you might spend a couple of arduous hours in
ineffectually whipping up a mayonnaise for an impromptu lunch. Artistic
operations were carried out in the middle of the studio, not too far from
the stove, which never went out from November to May. A large mirror hung
paramount on one wall. The remaining spaces of the studio were filled with
old easels, canvases, old frames, old costumes and multifarious other
properties for pictures, trunks, lamps, boards, tables, and bric-à-brac
bought at the Ham-and-Old-Iron Fair. There were a million objects in the
studio, and their situations had to be, and were, learnt off by heart. The
scene of the toilette was a small attached chamber.

The housekeeping combined the simplicity of the early Christians with the
efficient organising of the twentieth century. It began at about half-past
seven, when unseen but heard beings left fresh rolls and the _New York
Herald_ or the _Daily Mail_ at the studio door. You made your own bed, just
as you cleaned your own boots or washed your own face. The larder
consisted of tins of coffee, tea, sugar, and cakes, with an intermittent
supply of butter and lemons. The infusing of tea and coffee was practised
in perfection. It mattered not in the least whether toilette or breakfast
came first, but it was exceedingly important that the care of the stove
should precede both. Between ten and eleven the concierge's wife arrived
with tools and utensils; she swept and dusted under a considerable
percentage of the million objects--and the responsibilities of housekeeping
were finished until the next day, for afternoon tea, if it occurred, was a
diversion and not a toil.

A great expanse of twelve to fifteen hours lay in front of you. It was not
uncomfortably and unchangeably cut into fixed portions by the incidence of
lunch and dinner. You ate when you felt inclined to eat, and nearly always
at restaurants where you met your acquaintances. Meals were the least
important happenings of the day. You had no reliable watch, and you needed
none, for you had no fixed programme. You worked till you had had enough of
work. You went forth into the world exactly when the idea took you. If you
were bored, you found a friend and went to sit in a café. You were ready
for anything. The word "rule" had been omitted from your dictionary. You
retired to bed when the still small voice within murmured that there was
naught else to do. You woke up in the morning amid cups and saucers,
lingerie, masterpieces, and boots. And the next day was the same. All the
days were the same. Weeks passed with inexpressible rapidity, and all
things beyond the Quarter had the quality of vague murmurings and noises
behind the scenes.

May had come. Audrey and Miss Ingate had lived in the studio for six months
before they realised that they had settled down there and that habits had
been formed. Still, they had accomplished something. Miss Ingate had gone
back into oils and was attending life classes, and Audrey, by terrible
application and by sitting daily at the feet of an oldish lady in black,
and by refusing to speak English between breakfast and dinner, had acquired
a good accent and much fluency in the French tongue. Now, when she spoke
French, she thought in French, and she was extremely proud of the
achievement. Also she was acquainted with the names and styles of all known
modern painters from pointillistes to cubistes, and, indeed, with the
latest eccentricities in all the arts. She could tell who was immortal, and
she was fully aware that there was no real painting in England. In brief,
she was perhaps more Parisian even than she had hoped. She had absorbed
Paris into her system. It was still not the Paris of her early fancy; in
particular, it lacked elegance; but it richly satisfied her.

She had on this afternoon of young May an appointment with a young man. And
the appointment seemed quite natural, causing no inward disturbance. Less
than ever could she understand her father's ukases against young men and
against every form of self-indulgence. Now, when she had the idea of doing
a thing, she merely did it. Her instincts were her only guide, and, though
her instincts were often highly complex, they seldom puzzled her. The old
instinct that the desire to do a thing was a sufficient reason against
doing it, had expired. For many weeks she had lived with a secret fear that
such unbridled conduct must lead to terrible catastrophes, but as nothing
happened this fear also expired. She was constantly with young men, and
often with men not young; she liked it, but just as much she liked being
with women. She never had any difficulties with men. Miss Thompkins
insinuated at intervals that she flirted, but she had the sharpest contempt
for flirtation, and as a practice put it on a level with embezzlement or
arson. Miss Thompkins, however, kept on insinuating. Audrey regarded
herself as decidedly wiser than Miss Thompkins. Her opinions on vital
matters changed almost weekly, but she was always absolutely sure that the
new opinion was final and incontrovertible. Her scorn of the old English
Audrey, though concealed, was terrific.

And it is to be remembered that she was a widow. She was never half a
second late, now, in replying when addressed as "Mrs. Moncreiff."
Frequently she thought that she in fact was a widow. Widowhood was a very
advantageous state. It had a free pass to all affairs of interest. It
opened wide the door of the world. It recked nothing of girlish codes. It
abolished discussions concerning conventional propriety. Its chief defect,
for Audrey, was that if she met another widow, or even a married woman, she
had to take heed lest she stumbled. Fortunately, neither widows nor wives
were very prevalent in the Quarter. And Audrey had attained skill in the
use of the state of widowhood. She told no more infantile perilous tales
about husbands who ate peas with a knife. In her thankfulness that the
tyrannic Rosamund had gone to Germany, and that Madame Piriac had vanished
back into unknown Paris, Audrey was at pains to take to heart the lesson of
a semi-hysterical blunder.

She descended the dark, dusty oak stairs utterly content. And at the door
of the gloomy den of the concierge the concierge's wife was standing. She
was a new wife, the young mate of a middle-aged husband, and she had only
been illuminating the den (which was kitchen, parlour, and bedroom in a
space of ten feet by eight) for about a month. She was plump and pretty,
and also she was fair, which was unusual for a Frenchwoman. She wore a
striped frock and a little black apron, and her yellow hair was waved with
art. Audrey offered her the key of the studio with a smile, and, as Audrey
expected, the concierge's wife began to chatter. The concierge's wife loved
to chatter with Anglo-Saxon tenants, and she specially enjoyed chattering
with Audrey, because of the superior quality of Audrey's French and of her
tips. Audrey listened, proud because she could understand so well and
answer so fluently.

The sun, which in May shone on the courtyard for about forty minutes in the
afternoon on clear days, caught these two creatures in the same beam. They
made a delicious sight--Audrey dark, with her large forehead and negligible
nose, and the concierge's wife rather doll-like in the regularity of her
features. They were delicious not only because of their varied charm, but
because they were so absurdly wise and omniscient, and because they had
come to settled conclusions about every kind of worldly problem. Youth and
vitality equalised their ranks, and the fact that Audrey possessed many
ascertained ancestors, and a part of the earth's surface, and much money,
and that the concierge's wife possessed nothing but herself and a few bits
of furniture, was not of the slightest importance.

The concierge's wife, after curiosity concerning tennis, grew confidential
about herself, and more confidential. And at last she lowered her tones,
and with sparkling eyes communicated information to Audrey in a voice that
was little more than a whisper.

"Oh! truly? I must go," hastily said Audrey, blushing, and off she ran,
reduced in an instant to the schoolgirl. Her departure was a retreat.
These occasional discomfitures made a faint blot on the excellence of being
a widow.



CHAPTER XIII

THE SWOON


In the north-east corner of the Luxembourg Gardens, where the lawn-tennis
courts were permitted by a public authority which was strangely impartial
and cosmopolitan in the matter of games, Miss Ingate sat sketching a group
of statuary with the Rue de Vaugirard behind it. She was sketching in the
orthodox way, on the orthodox stool, with the orthodox combined paint-box
and easel, and the orthodox police permit in the cover of the box.

The bright and warm weather was tonic; it accounted for the whole
temperament of Parisians. Under such a sky, with such a delicate pricking
vitalisation in the air, it was impossible not to be Parisian. The trees,
all arranged in beautiful perspectives, were coming into leaf, and through
their screens could be seen everywhere children shouting as they played at
ball and top, and both kinds of nurses, and scores of perambulators and
mothers, and a few couples dallying with their sensations, and old men
reading papers, and old women knitting and relating anecdotes or entire
histories. And nobody was curious beyond his own group. The people were
perfectly at home in this grandiose setting of gardens and fountains and
grey palaces, with theatres, boulevards and the odour and roar of
motor-buses just beyond the palisades. And Miss Ingate in the exciting
sunshine gazed around with her subdued Essex grin, as if saying: "It's the
most topsy-turvy planet that I was ever on, and why am I, of all people,
trying to make this canvas look like a piece of sculpture and a street?"

"Now, Miss Ingate," said tall red-haired Tommy, who was standing over her.
"Before you go any farther, do look at the line of roofs and see how
interesting it is; it's really full of interest. And you've simply not got
on speaking terms with it yet."

"No more I have! No more I have!" cried Miss Ingate, glancing round at
Audrey, who was swinging her racket. "Thank you, Tommy. I ought to have
thought of it for my own sake, because roofs are so much easier than
statues, and I must get an effect somewhere, mustn't I?"

Tommy winked at Audrey. But Tommy's wink was as naught to the great
invisible wink of Miss Ingate, the everlasting wink that derided the
universe and the sun himself.

Then Musa appeared, with paraphernalia, at the end of a path. Accompanying
him was a specimen of the creature known on tennis lawns as "a fourth." He
was almost nameless, tall, very young, with the seedlings of a moustache
and a space of nude calf between his knickerbockers and his socks. He was
very ceremonious, shy, ungainly and blushful. He played a fair-to-middling
game; and nothing more need be said of him.

Musa by contrast was an accomplished man of the world, and the fact that
the fourth obviously regarded him as a hero helped Musa to behave in a
manner satisfactory to himself in front of these English and American
women, so strange, so exotic, so kind, and so disconcerting. Musa looked
upon Britain as a romantic isle where people died for love. And as for
America, in his mind it was as sinister, as wondrous, and as fatal as the
Indies might seem to a bank clerk in Bradford. He had need of every moral
assistance in this or any other social ordeal. For, though he was still the
greatest violinist in Paris, and perhaps in the world, he could not yet
prove this profound truth by the only demonstration which the world
accepts.

If he played in studios he was idolised. If he played at small concerts in
unknown halls he was received with rapture. But he was never lionised. The
great concert halls never saw him on their platforms; his name was never in
the newspapers; and hospitable personages never fought together for his
presence at their tables, even if occasionally they invited him to perform
for charity in return for a glass of claret and a sandwich. Monsieur
Dauphin had attempted to force the invisible barriers for him, but without
success. All his admirers in the Quarter stuck to it that he was in the
rank of Kreisler and Ysaye; at the same time they were annoyed with him
inasmuch as he did not force the world to acknowledge the prophetic good
taste of the Quarter. And Musa made mistakes. He ought to have arrived at
studios in a magnificent automobile, and to have given superb and
uproarious repasts, and to have rendered innumerable women exquisitely
unhappy. Whereas he arrived by tube or bus, never offered hospitality of
any sort, and was like a cat with women. Hence the attitude of the Quarter
was patronising, as if the Quarter had said: "Yes, he is the greatest
violinist in Paris and perhaps in the world; but that's all, and it isn't
enough."

The young man and the boy made ready for the game as for a gladiatorial
display. Their frowning seriousness proved that they had comprehended the
true British idea of sport. Musa came round the net to Audrey's side, but
Audrey said in French:

"Miss Thompkins and I will play together. See, we are going to beat you and
Gustave."

Musa retired. A few indifferent spectators had collected. Gustave, the
fourth, had to serve.

"Play!" he muttered, in a thick and threatening voice, whose depth was the
measure of his nervousness.

He served a double fault to Tommy, and then a fault to Audrey. The fourth
ball he got over. Audrey played it. The two males rushed with appalling
force together on the centre line in pursuit, and a terrible collision
occurred. Musa fell away from Gustave as from a wall. When he arose out of
the pebbly dust his right arm hung very limp from the shoulder. No sooner
had he risen than he sank again, and the blood began to leave his face, and
his eyes closed. The fourth, having recovered from the collision, knelt
down by his side, and gazed earnestly at him. Tommy and Audrey hurried
towards the statuesque group, and Audrey was thinking: "Why did I refuse to
let him play with me? If he had played with me there would have been no
accident." She reproached herself because she well knew that only out of
the most absurd contrariness had she repulsed Musa. Or was it that she had
repulsed him from fear of something that Tommy might say or look?

In a few seconds, strongly drawn by this marvellous piece of luck,
promenaders were darting with joyous rapidity from north, south, east and
west to witness the tragedy. There were nurses with coloured streamers six
feet long, lusty children, errand boys, lads, and sundry nondescript men,
some of whom carefully folded up their newspapers as they hurried to the
cynosure. They beheld the body as though it were a corpse, and the corpse
of an enemy; they formulated and discussed theories of the event; they
examined minutely the rackets which had been thrown on the ground. They
were exercising the immemorial rights of unmoved curiosity; they held
themselves as indifferent as gods, and the murmur of their impartial voices
floated soothingly over Musa, and the shadow of their active profiles
covered him from the sparkling sunshine. Somebody mentioned policemen, in
the plural, but none came. All remarked in turn that the ladies were
English, as though that were a sufficient explanation of the whole affair.

No one said:

"It is Musa, the greatest violinist in Paris and perhaps in Europe."

Desperately Audrey stooped and seized Musa beneath the armpits to lift him
to a sitting position.

"You'd better leave him alone," said Tommy, with a kind of ironic warning
and innuendo.

But Audrey still struggled with the mass, convinced that she was showing
initiative and firmness of character. The fourth with fierce vigour began
to aid her, and another youth from the crowd was joining the enterprise
when Miss Ingate arrived from her stool.

"Drop him, you silly little thing!" adjured Miss Ingate. "Instead of
lifting his head you ought to lift his feet."

Audrey stared uncertain for a moment, and then let the mass subside.
Whereupon Miss Ingate with all her strength lifted both legs to the height
of her waist, giving Musa the appearance of a wheelless barrow.

"You want to let the blood run _into_ his head," said Miss Ingate with a
self-conscious grin at the increasing crowd. "People only faint because the
blood leaves their heads--that's why they go pale."

Musa's cheeks showed a tinge of red. You could almost see the precious
blood being decanted by Miss Ingate out of the man's feet into his head. In
a minute he opened his eyes. Miss Ingate lowered the legs.

"It was only the pain that made him feel queer," she said.

The episode was over, and the crowd very gradually and reluctantly
scattered, disappointed at the lack of a fatal conclusion. Musa stood up,
smiling apologetically, and Audrey supported him by the left arm, for the
right could not be touched.

"Hadn't you better take him home, Mrs. Moncreiff?" Tommy suggested. "You
can get a taxi here in the Rue de Vaugirard." She did not smile, but her
green eyes glinted.

"Yes, I will," said Audrey curtly.

And Tommy's eyes glinted still more.

"And I shall get a doctor," said Audrey. "His arm may be broken."

"I should," Tommy concurred with gravity.

"Well, if it is, _I_ can't set it," said Miss Ingate quizzically. "I was
getting on so well with the high lights on that statue. I'll come along
back to the studio in about half an hour."

The fourth, who had been hovering near like a criminal magnetised by his
crime, bounded off furiously at the suggestion that he should stop a taxi
at the entrance to the gardens.

"I hope he has broken his arm and he can never play any more," thought
Audrey, astoundingly, as she and the fourth helped pale Musa into the open
taxi. "It will just serve those two right." She meant Miss Ingate and
Tommy.

No sooner did the taxi start than Musa began to cry. He did not seem to
care that he was in the midst of a busy street, with a piquant widow by his
side.



CHAPTER XIV

MISS INGATE POINTS OUT THE DOOR


"Why did you cry this afternoon, Musa?"

Musa made no reply.

Audrey was lighting the big lamp in the Moncreiff-Ingate studio. It made
exactly the same moon as it had made on the night in the previous autumn
when Audrey had first seen it. She had brought Musa to the studio because
she did not care to take him to his own lodgings.  (As a fact, nobody that
she knew, except Musa, had ever seen Musa's lodgings.) This was almost the
first moment they had had to themselves since the visit of the little
American doctor from the Rue Servandoni. The rumour of Musa's misfortune
had spread through the Quarter like the smell of a fire, and various
persons of both sexes had called to inspect, to sympathise, and to take
tea, which Audrey was continually making throughout the late afternoon.
Musa had had an egg for his tea, and more than one girl had helped to
spread the yolk and the white on pieces of bread-and-butter, for the victim
of destiny had his right arm in a sling. Audrey had let them do it, as a
mother patronisingly lets her friends amuse her baby.

In the end they had all gone; Tommy had enigmatically looked in and gone,
and Miss Ingate had gone to dine at the favourite restaurant of the hour in
the Rue Léopold Robert. Audrey had refused to go, asserting that which was
not true; namely, that she had had an enormous tea, including far too many
_petits fours_. Miss Ingate in departing had given a glance at her sketch
(fixed on the easel), and another at Audrey, and another at Musa, all
equally ironic and kindly.

Musa also had declined dinner, but he had done nothing to indicate that he
meant to leave. He sat mournful and passive in a basket chair, his sling
making a patch of white in the gloom. The truth was that he suffered from a
disability not uncommon among certain natures: he did not know how to go.
He could arrive with ease, but he was no expert at vanishing. Audrey was
troubled. As suited her age and condition, she was apt to feel the
responsibility of the whole universe. She knew that she was responsible for
Musa's accident, and now she was beginning to be aware that she was
responsible for his future as well. She was sure that he needed
encouragement and guidance. She pictured him with his fiddle under his
chin, masterful, confident, miraculous, throwing a spell over everyone
within earshot. But actually she saw him listless and vanquished in the
basket chair, and she perceived that only a strongly influential and
determined woman, such as herself, could save him from disaster. No man
could do it. His tears had shaken her. She was willing to make allowances
for a foreigner, but she had never seen a man cry before, and the spectacle
was very disturbing. It inspired her with a fear that even she could not be
the salvation of Musa.

"I demanded something of you," she said, after lowering the wick of the
lamp to exactly the right point, and staring at it for a greater length of
time than was necessary or even seemly. She spoke French, and as she
listened to her French accent she heard that it was good.

"I am done for!" came the mournful voice of Musa out of the obscurity
behind the lamp.

"What! You are done for? But you know what the doctor said. He said no bone
was broken. Only a little strain, and the pain from your----" Admirable
though her French accent was, she could not think of the French word for
"funny-bone." Indeed she had never learnt it. So she said it in English.
Musa knew not what she meant, and thus a slight chasm was opened between
them which neither could bridge. She finished: "In one week you are going
to be able to play again."

Musa shook his head.

Relieved as she was to discover that Musa had cried because he was done
for, and not because he was hurt, she was still worried by his want of
elasticity, of resiliency. Nevertheless she was agreeably worried. The
doctor had disappointed her by his light optimism, but he could not smile
away Musa's moral indisposition. The large vagueness of the studio, the
very faint twilight still showing through the great window, the silence and
intimacy, the sounds of the French language, the gleam of the white sling,
all combined to permeate her with delicious melancholy. And not for
everlasting bliss would she have had Musa strong, obstinate, and certain of
success.

"A week!" he murmured. "It is for ever. A week of practice lost is
eternally lost. And on Wednesday one had invited me to play at Foa's. And I
cannot."

"Foa? Who is Foa?"

"What! You do not know Foa? In order to succeed it is necessary, it is
essential, to play at Foa's. That alone gives the _cachet_. Dauphin told me
last week. He arranged it. After having played at Foa's all is possible.
Dauphin was about to abandon me when he met Foa. Now I am ruined. This
afternoon after the tennis I was going to Durand's to get the new Caprice
of Roussel--he is an intimate friend of Foa. I should have studied it in
five days. They would have been ravished by the attention .... But why talk
I thus? No, I could not have played Caprice to please them. I am cursed. I
will never again touch the violin, I swear it. What am I?  Do I not live on
the money _lent_ to me regularly by Mademoiselle Thompkins and Mademoiselle
Nickall?"

"You don't, Musa?" Audrey burst out in English.

"Yes, yes!" said Musa violently. "But last month, from Mademoiselle
Nickall--nothing! She is in London; she forgets. It is better like that.
Soon I shall be playing in the Opéra orchestra, fourth desk, one hundred
francs a month. That will be the end. There can be no other."

Instead of admiring the secret charity of Tommy and Nick, which she had
never suspected, Audrey was very annoyed by it. She detested it and
resented it. And especially the charity of Miss Thompkins. She considered
that from a woman with eyes and innuendoes like Tommy's charity amounted to
a sneer.

"It is extremely unsatisfactory," she said, dropping on to Miss Ingate's
sofa.

Not another word was spoken. Audrey tapped her foot. Musa creaked in the
basket chair. He avoided her eyes, but occasionally she glared at him like
a schoolmistress. Then her gaze softened--he looked so ill, so helpless,
so hopeless. She wanted to light a cigarette for him, but she was somehow
bound to the sofa. She wanted him to go--she hated the prospect of his
going. He could not possibly go, alone, to his solitary room. Who would
tend him, soothe him, put him to bed? He was an infant....

Then, after a long while, Miss Ingate entered sharply. Audrey coughed and
sprang up.

"Oh!" ejaculated Miss Ingate.

"I--I think I shall just change my boots," said Audrey, smoothing out the
short white skirt. And she disappeared into the dressing-room that gave on
to the studio.

As soon as she was gone, Miss Ingate went close up to Musa's chair. He had
not moved.

She said, smiling, with the corners of her mouth well down:

"Do you see that door, young man?"

And she indicated the door.

When Audrey came back into the studio.

"Audrey," cried Miss Ingate shrilly. "What you been doing to Musa? As soon
as you went out he up vehy quickly and ran away."

At this information Audrey was more obviously troubled and dashed than Miss
Ingate had ever seen her, in Paris. She made no answer at all.
Fortunately, lying on the table in front of the mirror was a letter for
Miss Ingate which had arrived by the evening post. Audrey went for it,
pretending to search, and then handed it over with a casual gesture.

"It looks as if it was from Nick," she murmured.

Miss Ingate, as she was putting on her spectacles, remarked:

"I hope you weren't hurt--me not coming with you and Musa in the taxi from
the gardens this afternoon, dear."

"Me? Oh no!"

"It wasn't that I was so vehy interested in my sketch. But to my mind
there's nothing more ridiculous than several women all looking after one
man. Miss Thompkins thought so, too."

"Oh! Did she?... What does Nick say?"

Miss Ingate had put the letter flat on the table in the full glare of the
lamp, and was leaning over it, her grey hair brilliantly illuminated.
Audrey kept in the shadow and in the distance. Miss Ingate had a habit of
reading to herself under her breath. She read slowly, and turned pages over
with a deliberate movement.

"Well," said Miss Ingate twisting her head sideways so as to see Audrey
standing like a ghost afar off. "Well, she _has_ been going it! She's
broken a window in Oxford Street with a hammer; she had one night in the
cells for that. And she'd have had to go to prison altogether only some
unknown body paid the fine for her. She says: 'There are some mean persons
in the world, and he was one. I feel sure it was a man, and an American,
too. The owners of the shops are going to bring a law action against me
for the value of the plate-glass. It is such fun. And our leaders are
splendid and so in earnest. They say we are doing a great historical work,
and we are. The London correspondent of the _New York Times_ interviewed me
because I am American. I did not want to be interviewed, but our
instructions are--never to avoid publicity. There is to be no more window
breaking for the present. Something new is being arranged. The hammer is
so heavy, and sometimes the first blow does not break the window. The
situation is _very_ serious, and the Government is at its wits' end. This
we _know_. We have our agents everywhere. All the most thoughtful people
are strongly in favour of votes for women; but of course some of them are
afraid of our methods. This only shows that they have not learnt the
lessons of history. I wonder that you and dear Mrs. Moncreiff do not come
and help. Many women ask after you, and everybody at Kingsway is very
curious to know Mrs. Moncreiff. Since Mrs. Burke's death, Betty has taken
rooms in this house, but perhaps Tommy has told you this already. If so,
excuse. Betty's health is very bad since they let her out last. With regard
to the rent, will you pay the next quarter direct to the concierge
yourselves? It will save so much trouble. I must tell you----'"

Slowly Audrey moved up to the table and leaned over the letter by Miss
Ingate's side.

"So you see!" said Miss Ingate. "Well, we must show it to Tommy in the
morning. 'Not learnt the lessons of history,' eh? I know who's been talking
to Nick. _I_ know as well as if I could hear them speaking."

"Do you think we ought to go to London?" Audrey demanded bluntly.

"Well," Miss Ingate answered, with impartial irony on her long upper lip.
"I don't know. Of course I played the organ all the way down Regent Street.
I feel very strongly about votes for women, and once when I was helping in
the night and day vigil at the House of Commons and some Ministers came out
smoking their _cigahs_ and asked us how we liked it, I was vehy, vehy
angry. However, the next morning I had a cigarette myself and felt better.
But I'm not a professional reformer, like a lot of them are at Kingsway.
It isn't my meat and drink. And I don't think it matters much whether we
get the vote next year or in ten years. I'm Winifred Ingate before I'm
anything else. And so long as I'm pretty comfortable no one's going to make
me believe that the world's coming to an end. I know one thing--if we did
get the vote it would take me all my time to keep most of the women I know
from, voting for something silly."

"Winnie," said Audrey. "You're very sensible sometimes."

"I'm always very sensible," Winnie retorted, "until I get nervous. Then I'm
apt to skid."

Without more words they transformed the studio, by a few magical strokes,
from a drawing-room into a bedroom. Audrey, the last to retire,
extinguished the lamp, and tripped to her bed behind her screen. Only a few
slight movements disturbed the silence.

"Winnie," said Audrey suddenly. "I do believe you're one of those awful
people who compromise. You're always right in the middle of the raft."

But Miss Ingate, being fast asleep, offered no answer.



CHAPTER XV

THE RIGHT BANK


The next day, after a studio lunch which contained too much starch and was
deficient in nitrogen, Miss Ingate, putting on her hat and jacket, said
with a caustic gesture:

"Well, I must be off to my life class. And much good may it do me!"

The astonishing creature had apparently begun existence again, and begun it
on the plane of art, but this did not prevent the observer within her from
taking the same attitude towards her second career as she had taken towards
her first. Nothing seemed more meet for Miss Ingate's ironic contemplation
than the daily struggle for style and beauty in the academies of the
Quarter.

Audrey made no reply. The morning had been unusually silent, giving
considerable scope for Miss Ingate's faculty for leaving well alone.

"I suppose you aren't coming out?" added Miss Ingate.

"No. I went out a bit this morning. You know I have my French lesson in
twenty minutes."

"Of course."

Miss Ingate seized her apparatus and departed. The instant she was alone
Audrey began in haste to change into all her best clothes, which were
black, and which the Quarter seldom saw. Fashionably arrayed, she sat down
and wrote a note to Madame Schmitt, her French instructress, to say that
she had been suddenly called away on urgent business, and asking her
nevertheless to count the time as a lesson given. This done, she put her
credit notes and her cheque-book into her handbag, and, leaving the note
with the concierge's wife, who bristled with interesting suspicions, she
vanished into Paris.

The weather was even more superb than on the previous day. Paris glittered
around her as she drove, slowly, in a horse-taxi, to the Place de l'Opéra
on the right bank, where the _grand boulevard_ meets the Avenue de l'Opéra
and the Rue de la Paix. Here was the very centre of the fashionable and
pleasure-ridden district which the Quarter held in noble scorn. She had
seen it before, because she had started a banking account (under advice
from Mr. Foulger), and the establishment of her bankers was situate at the
corner of the Avenue de l'Opéra and the Rue de la Paix. But she knew
little of the district, and such trifling information as she had acquired
was tinged by the natural hostility of a young woman who for over six
months, with no compulsion to do so, had toiled regularly and fiercely in
the pursuit of knowledge. She paid off the cab, and went to test the
soundness of her bankers. The place was full of tourists, and in one
department of it young men in cages, who knew not the Quarter, were
counting, and ladling, and pinning together, and engorging, and dealing
forth, the currency and notes of all the great nations of the earth. The
spectacle was inspiring.

In half a year the restive but finally obedient Mr. Foulger had sent three
thousand pounds to Paris in the unpoetic form of small oblong pieces of
paper signed with his own dull signature. Audrey desired to experience the
thrill of authentic money. She waited some time in front of a cage, with
her cheque-book open on the counter, until a young man glanced at her
interrogatively through the bars.

"How much money have I got here, please?" she asked. She ought to have
said: "What is my balance, please?" But nobody had taught her the sacred
formula.

"What name?" said the clerk.

"Moze--Audrey Moze," she answered, for she had not dared to acquaint Mr.
Foulger with her widowhood, and his cheques were made out to herself.

The clerk vanished, and in a moment reappeared, silently wrote something on
a little form, and pushed it to her under the grille. She read:

                            "73,065 frs. 50c."

The fact was that in six months she had spent little more than the amount
which she had brought with her from London. Having begun in simplicity, in
simplicity she had continued, partly because she had been too industrious
and too earnest for luxurious caprices, partly because she had never been
accustomed to anything else but simplicity, and partly from wilfulness. It
had pleased her to think that she was piling tens of thousands upon tens of
thousands--in francs.

But in the night she had decided that the moment had arrived for a change
in the great campaign of seeing life and tasting it.

She timorously drew a cheque for eleven thousand francs, and asked for ten
thousand in notes and a thousand in gold. The clerk showed no trace of
either astonishment or alarm; but he insisted on her endorsing the cheque.
When she saw the gold, she changed half of it for ten notes of fifty francs
each.

Emerging with false but fairly plausible nonchalance from the crowded
establishment, where other clerks were selling tickets to Palestine,
Timbuctoo, Bagdad, Berlin, and all the abodes of happiness in the world,
she saw at the newspaper kiosk opposite the little blue poster of an
English daily. It said: "More Suffragette Riots." She had a qualm, for her
conscience was apt to be tyrannic, and its empire over her had been
strengthened by the long, steady course of hard work which she had
accomplished. Miss Ingate's arguments had not placated that conscience.
It had said to her in the night: "If ever there was a girl who ought to
assist heartily in the emancipation of women, that girl is you, Audrey
Moze."

"Pooh!" she replied to her conscience, for she could always confute it with
a sharp word--for a time.

And she crossed to the _grand boulevard_, and turned westward along the
splendid, humming, roaring thoroughfare gay with flags and gleaming with
such plate-glass as Nick the militant would have loved to shatter.
Certainly there was nothing like this street in the Quarter. The Quarter
could equal it neither in shops, nor in cafés, nor in vehicles, nor in
crowds. It was an exultant thoroughfare, and Audrey caught its buoyancy,
which could be distinctly seen in the feather on her hat. At the end of it
she passed into the cool shade of a music-shop with the name "Durand" on
its façade. She had found the address, and another one, in the telephone
book at the Café de Versailles that morning. It was an immense shop
containing millions of pieces of music for all instruments and all tastes.
Yet when she modestly asked for the Caprice for violin of Roussel, the
_morceau_ was brought to her without the slightest hesitation, together
with the pianoforte accompaniment. The price was twelve francs.

Her gloved hand closed round the slim roll with the delicate firmness which
was actuating all her proceedings on that magnificent afternoon. She was
determined to save Musa not merely from himself, but from Miss Thompkins
and everybody. It was not that she was specially interested in Musa. No!
She was interested in a clean, neat job--that was all. She had begun to
take charge of Musa, and she intended to carry the affair through. He had
the ability to succeed, and he should succeed. It would be ridiculous for
him not to succeed. From certain hints, and from a deeply sagacious
instinct, she had divined that money and management were the only
ingredients lacking to Musa's triumph. She could supply both these
elements; and she would. And her reward would be the pride of the workman
in his job.

Now her firmness hesitated. She retraced the boulevard to the Place de
l'Opéra, and then took the Rue de la Paix. In the first shop on the
left-hand side, next to her bankers, she saw amid a dazzling collection of
jewelled articles for travellers and letter-writers and diary-keepers, a
sublime gold handbag, or, as the French say, hand-sack. Its clasp was set
with a sapphire. Impulse sent her gliding right into the shop, with the
words already on her lips: "How much is that gold hand-sack in the window?"
But when she re

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