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Bella Donna: A Novel

by Robert Hichens · English · Gutenberg #17698 · 990,342 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Bella Donna: A Novel

Author: Robert Hichens


        
Release date: February 7, 2006 [eBook #17698]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17698

Credits: Produced by Sjaani, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BELLA DONNA: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Sjaani, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






BELLA DONNA

FIFTH EDITION

[Illustration]




Bella Donna

A NOVEL

By ROBERT HICHENS

Author of "The Call of The Blood," "The Fruitful
Vine," "A Spirit in Prison."




A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers           New York


Copyright, 1908
By J. B. Lippincott Company

Published October, 1908.




BELLA DONNA




I


Doctor Meyer Isaacson had got on as only a modern Jew whose home is
London can get on, with a rapidity that was alarming. He seemed to have
arrived as a bullet arrives in a body. He was not in the heart of
success, and lo! he was in the heart of success. And no one had marked
his journey. Suddenly every one was speaking of him--was talking of the
cures he had made, was advising every one else to go to him. For some
mysterious reason his name--a name not easily to be forgotten once it
had been heard--began to pervade the conversations that were held in the
smart drawing-rooms of London. Women who were well, but had not seen
him, abruptly became sufficiently unwell to need a consultation. "Where
does he live? In Harley Street, I suppose?" was a constant question.

But he did not live in Harley Street. He was not the man to lose himself
in an avenue of brass plates of fellow practitioners. "Cleveland Square,
St. James's," was the startling reply; and his house was detached, if
you please, and marvellously furnished.

The winged legend flew that he was rich, and that he had gone into
practice as a doctor merely because he was intellectually interested in
disease. His gift for diagnosis was so remarkable that he was morally
forced to exercise it. And he had a greedy passion for studying
humanity. And who has such opportunities for the study of humanity as
the doctor and the priest? Patients who had been to him spoke
enthusiastically of his observant eyes. His personality always made a
great impression. "There's no one just like him," was a frequent comment
upon Doctor Meyer Isaacson. And that phrase is a high compliment upon
the lips of London, the city of parrots and of monkeys.

His age was debated, and so was his origin. Most people thought he was
"about forty"; a very safe age, young enough to allow of almost
unlimited expectation, old enough to make results achieved not quite
unnatural, though possibly startling. Yes, he must be "about forty." And
his origin? "Meyer" suggested Germany. As to "Isaacson," it allowed the
ardent imagination free play over denationalized Israel. Someone said
that he "looked as if he came from the East," to which a cynic made
answer, "The East End." There was, perhaps, a hint of both in the Doctor
of Cleveland Square. Certain it is that in the course of a walk down
Brick Lane, or the adjacent thoroughfares, one will encounter men of his
type; men of middle height, of slight build, with thick, close-growing
hair strongly curling, boldly curving lips, large nostrils, prominent
cheek-bones, dark eyes almost fiercely shining; men who are startlingly
un-English. Doctor Meyer Isaacson was like these men. Yet he possessed
something which set him apart from them. He looked intensely
vital--almost unnaturally vital--when he was surrounded by English
people, but he did not look fierce and hungry. One could conceive of him
doing something bizarre, but one could not conceive of him doing
anything low. There was sometimes a light in his eyes which suggested a
moral distinction rarely to be found in those who dwell in and about
Brick Lane. His slight, nervous hands, dark in colour, recalled the
hands of high-bred Egyptians. Like so many of his nation, he was by
nature artistic. An instinctive love of what was best in the creations
of man ran in his veins with his blood. He cared for beautiful things,
and he knew what things were beautiful and what were not. The
second-rate never made any appeal to him. The first-rate found in him a
welcoming enthusiast. He never wearied of looking at fine pictures, at
noble statues, at bronzes, at old jewelled glass, at delicate carvings,
at perfect jewels. He was genuinely moved by great architecture. And to
music he was almost fanatically devoted, as are many Jews.

It has been said of the Jew that he is nearly always possessed of a
streak of femininity, not effeminacy. In Doctor Meyer Isaacson this
streak certainly existed. His intuitions were feminine in their
quickness, his sympathies and his antipathies almost feminine in their
ardour. He understood women instinctively, as generally only other women
understand them. Often he knew, without knowing why he knew. Such
knowledge of women is, perhaps fortunately, rare in men. Where most men
stumble in the dark, Doctor Meyer Isaacson walked in the light. He was
unmarried.

Bachelorhood is considered by many to detract from a doctor's value and
to stand in the way of his career. Doctor Meyer Isaacson did not find
this so. Although he was not a nerve specialist, his waiting-room was
always full of patients. If he had been married, it could not have been
fuller. Indeed, he often thought it would have been less full.

Suddenly he became the fashion, and he went on being the fashion.

He had no special peculiarity of manner. He did not attract the world of
women by elaborate brutalities, or charm it by silly suavities. He
seemed always very natural, intelligent, alive, and thoroughly
interested in the person with whom he was. That he was a man of the
world was certain. He was seen often at concerts, at the opera, at
dinners, at receptions, occasionally even at a great ball.

Early in the morning he rode in the Park. Once a week he gave a dinner
in Cleveland Square. And people liked to go to his house. They knew they
would not be bored and not be poisoned there. Men appreciated him as
well as women, despite the reminiscence of Brick Lane discoverable in
him. His directness, his cleverness, and his apparent good-will soon
overcame any dawning instinct summoned up in John Bull by his exotic
appearance.

Only the unyielding Jew-hater hated him. And so the lines of the life
of Doctor Meyer Isaacson seemed laid in pleasant places. And not a few
thought him one of the fortunate of this world.

One morning of June the doctor was returning to Cleveland Square from
his early ride in the Park. He was alone. The lively bay horse he
rode--an animal that seemed almost as full of nervous vitality as he
was--had had a good gallop by the Serpentine, and now trotted gently
towards Buckingham Palace, snuffing in the languid air through its
sensitive nostrils. The day was going to be hot. This fact inclined the
Doctor to idleness, made him suddenly realise the bondage of work. In a
few minutes he would be in Cleveland Square; and then, after a bath, a
cup of coffee, a swift glance through the _Times_ and the _Daily Mail_,
there would start the procession that until evening would be passing
steadily through his consulting-room.

He sighed, and pulled in his horse to a walk. To-day he was reluctant to
encounter that procession.

And yet each day it brought interest into his life, this procession of
his patients.

Generally he was a keen man. He had no need to feign an ardour that he
really felt. He had a passion for investigation, and his profession
enabled him to gratify it. Very modern, as a rule, were those who came
to him, one by one, admitted each in turn by his Jewish man-servant;
complex, caught fast in the net of civilized life. He liked to sit alone
with them in his quiet chamber, to seek out the hidden links which
united the physical to the mental man in each, to watch the pull of soul
on body, of body on soul. But to-day he recoiled from work. Deep down in
his nature, hidden generally beneath his strong activity, there was
something that longed to sit in the sunshine and dream away the hours,
leaving all fates serenely, or perhaps indifferently, between the hands
of God.

"I will take a holiday some day," he said to himself, "a long holiday. I
will go far away from here, to the land where I am really at home, where
I am in my own place."

As he thought this, he looked up, and his eyes rested upon the brown
facade of the King's Palace, upon the gilded railings that separated it
from the public way, upon the sentries who were on guard, fresh-faced,
alert, staring upon London with their calmly British eyes.

"In my own place," he repeated to himself.

And now his lips and his eyes were smiling. And he saw the great drama
of London as something that a schoolboy could understand at a glance.

Was it really idleness he longed for? He did not know why, but abruptly
his desire had changed. And he found himself wishing for events, tragic,
tremendous, horrible even--anything, if they were unusual, were such as
to set the man who was involved in them apart from his fellows. The
foreign element in him woke up, called, perhaps, from repose by the
unusually languid air, and London seemed meaningless to him, a city
where a man of his type could neither dream, nor act, with all the
languor, or all the energy, that was within him. And he imagined, as
sometimes clever children do, a distant country where all romances
unwind their shining coils, where he would find the incentive which he
needed to call all his secret powers--the powers whose exercise would
make his life complete--into supreme activity.

He gripped his horse with his knees. It understood his desire. It broke
into a canter. He passed in front of the garden of Stafford House,
turned to the left past St. James's Palace and Marlborough House, and
was soon at his own door.

"Please bring up the book with my coffee in twenty minutes, Henry," he
said to his servant, as he went in.

In half an hour he was seated in an arm-chair in an upstairs
sitting-room, sipping his coffee. The papers lay folded at his elbow.
Upon his knee, open, lay the book in which were written down the names
of the patients with whom he had made appointments that day.

He looked at them, seeking for one that promised interest. The first
patient was a man who would come in on his way to the city. Then
followed the names of three women, then the name of a boy. He was coming
with his mother, a lady of an anxious mind. The Doctor had a sheaf of
letters from her. And so the morning's task was over. He turned a page
and came to the afternoon.

"Two o'clock, Mrs. Lesueur; two-thirty, Miss Mendish; three, the Dean of
Greystone; three-thirty, Lady Carle; four, Madame de Lys; four-thirty,
Mrs. Harringby; five, Sir Henry Grebe; five-thirty, Mrs. Chepstow."

The last name was that of the last patient. Doctor Meyer Isaacson's
day's work was over at six, or was supposed to be over. Often, however,
he gave a patient more than the fixed half-hour, and so prolonged his
labours. But no one was admitted to his house for consultation after the
patient whose name was against the time of five-thirty.

And so Mrs. Chepstow would be the last patient he would see that day.

He sat for a moment with the book open on his knee, looking at her name.

It was a name very well known to him, very well known to the
English-speaking world in general.

Mrs. Chepstow was a great beauty in decline. Her day of glory had been
fairly long, but now it seemed to be over. She was past forty. She said
she was thirty-eight, but she was over forty. Goodness, some say, keeps
women fresh. Mrs. Chepstow had tried a great many means of keeping
fresh, but she had omitted that. The step between aestheticism and
asceticism was one which she had never taken, though she had taken many
steps, some of them, unfortunately, false ones. She had been a well-born
girl, the daughter of aristocratic but impecunious and extravagant
parents. Her father, Everard Page, a son of Lord Cheam, had been very
much at home in the Bankruptcy Court. Her mother, too, was reckless
about money, saying, whenever it was mentioned, "Money is given us to
spend, not to hoard." So little did she hoard it, that eventually her
husband published a notice in the principal papers, stating that he
would not be responsible for her debts. It was a very long time since
he had been responsible for his own. Still, there was a certain dignity
in the announcement, as of an honest man frankly declaring his position.

Mrs. Chepstow's life was very possibly influenced by her parents'
pecuniary troubles. When she was young she learnt to be frightened of
poverty. She had known what it was to be "sold up" twice before she was
twenty; and this probably led her to prefer the alternative of being
sold. At any rate, when she was in her twenty-first year, sold she was
to Mr. Wodehouse Chepstow, a rich brewer, to whom she had not even taken
a fancy; and as Mrs. Chepstow she made a great fame in London society as
a beauty. She was christened Bella Donna. She was photographed, written
about, worshipped by important people, until her celebrity spread far
over the world, as the celebrity even of a woman who is only beautiful
and who does nothing can spread in the era of the paragraph.

And then presently she was the heroine of a great divorce case.

Mr. Chepstow, forgetting that among the duties required of the modern
husband is the faculty of turning a blind eye upon the passing fancies
of a lovely and a generally admired wife, suddenly proclaimed some ugly
truths, and completely ruined Mrs. Chepstow's reputation. He won his
case. He got heavy damages out of a well-known, married man. The married
man's wife was forced to divorce him. And Mrs. Chepstow was socially
"done for." Then began the new period of her life, a period utterly
different from all that had preceded it.

She was at this time only twenty-six, and in the zenith of her beauty.
Every one supposed that the man to whom she owed her ruin would marry
her as soon as it was possible. Unfortunately, he died before the decree
_nisi_ was made absolute. Mrs. Chepstow's future had been committed to
the Fates, and they had turned down their thumbs.

Notorious, lovely, now badly off, still young, she was left to shift for
herself in the world.

It was then that there came to the surface of her character a trait that
was not beautiful. She developed a love of money, a passion for material
things. This definite greediness declared itself in her only now that
she was poor and solitary. Probably it had always existed in her, but
had been hidden. She hid it no longer. She tacitly proclaimed it, and
she ordered her life so that it might be satisfied.

And it was satisfied, or at the least for many years appeased. She
became the famous, or the infamous, Mrs. Chepstow. She had no child to
be good for. Her father was dead. Her mother lived in Brussels with some
foreign relations. For her English relations she took no thought. The
divorce case had set them all against her. She put on the panoply of
steel so often assumed by the woman who has got into trouble. She defied
those who were "down upon her." She had made a failure of one life. She
resolved that she would make a success of another. And for a long time
she was very successful. Men were at her feet, and ministered to her
desires. She lived as she seemed to desire to live, magnificently. She
was given more than most good women are given, and she seemed to revel
in its possession. But though she loved money, her parents' traits were
repeated in her. She was a spendthrift, as they had been spendthrifts.
She loved money because she loved spending, not hoarding it. And for
years she scattered it with both hands.

Then, as she approached forty, the freshness of her beauty began to
fade. She had been too well known, and had to endure the fate of those
who have long been talked about. Men said of her, "Mrs. Chepstow--oh,
she's been going a deuce of a time. She must be well over fifty."
Women--good women especially--pronounced her nearer sixty. Almost
suddenly, as often happens in such cases as hers, the roseate hue faded
from her life and a greyness began to fall over it.

She was seen about with very young men, almost boys. People sneered when
they spoke of her. It was said that she was not so well off as she had
been. Some shoddy millionaire had put her into a speculation. It had
gone wrong, and he had not thought it necessary to pay up her losses.
She moved from her house in Park Lane to a flat in Victoria Street, then
to a little house in Kensington. Then she gave that up, and took a small
place in the country, and motored up and down, to and from town. Then
she got sick of that, and went to live in a London hotel. She sold her
yacht. She sold a quantity of diamonds.

And people continued to say, "Mrs. Chepstow--oh, she must be well over
fifty."

Undoubtedly she was face to face with a very bad period. With every
month that passed, loneliness stared at her more fixedly, looked at her
in the eyes till she began to feel almost dazed, almost hypnotized. A
dulness crept over her.

Forty struck--forty-one--forty-two.

And then, one morning of June, Doctor Meyer Isaacson sat sipping his
coffee and looking at her name, written against the time, five-thirty,
in his book of consultations.




II


Doctor Meyer Isaacson did not know Mrs. Chepstow personally, but he had
seen her occasionally, at supper in smart restaurants, at first nights,
riding in the Park. Now, as he looked at her name, he realized that he
had not even seen her for a long time, perhaps for a couple of years. He
had heard the rumours of her decadence, and taken little heed of them,
not being specially interested in her. Nevertheless, this morning, as he
shut up his book and got up to go downstairs to his work, he was aware
of a desire to hear the clock strike the half-hour after five, and to
see Henry opening the door to show Mrs. Chepstow into his
consulting-room. A woman who had lived her life and won her renown--or
infamy--could scarcely be uninteresting.

As the day wore on, he was several times conscious of a wish to quicken
the passing of its moments, and when Sir Henry Grebe, the penultimate
patient, proved to be an elderly _malade imaginaire_ of dilatory habit,
involved speech, and determined misery, he was obliged firmly to check a
rising desire to write a hasty bread-pill prescription and fling him in
the direction of Marlborough House. The half-hour chimed, and still Sir
Henry explained the strange symptoms by which he was beset--the buzzings
in the head, the twitchings in the extremities, the creepings, as of
insects with iced legs, about the roots of the hair. His eyes shone with
the ardour of the determined valetudinarian closeted with one paid to
attend to his complaints.

And Mrs. Chepstow? Had she come? Was she sitting in the next room,
looking inattentively at the newest books?

"The most extraordinary matter in my case," continued Sir Henry, with
uplifted finger, "is the cold sweat that--"

The doctor interrupted him.

"My advice to you is this--"

"But I haven't explained to you about the cold sweat that--"

"My advice to you is this, Sir Henry. Don't think about yourself; walk
for an hour every day before breakfast, eat only two meals a day,
morning and evening, take at least eight hours' rest every night, give
up lounging about in your club, occupy yourself--with work for others,
if possible. I believe that to be the most tonic work there is--and I
see no reason why you should not be a centenarian."

"I--a centenarian?"

"Why not! There is nothing the matter with you, unless you think there
is."

"Nothing--you say there is nothing the matter with me!"

"I have examined you, and that is my opinion."

The face of the patient flushed with indignation at this insult.

"I came to you to be told what was the matter."

"And I am glad to inform you nothing is the matter--with your body."

"Do you mean to imply that my mind is diseased?"

"No. But you don't give it enough to think about. You only give it
yourself. And that isn't nearly enough."

Sir Henry rose, and put a trembling finger into his waistcoat-pocket.

"I believe I owe you--?"

"Nothing. But if you care to put something into the box on my hall
table, you will help some poor man to get away to the seaside after an
operation, and find out what is the best medicine in the world."

"And now for Mrs. Chepstow!" the Doctor murmured to himself, as the door
closed behind the outraged back of an enemy.

He sat still for a minute or two, expecting to see the door open again,
the form of a woman framed in the doorway. But no one came. He began to
feel restless. He was not accustomed to be kept waiting by his patients,
although he often kept them waiting. There was a bell close to his
elbow. He touched it, and his man-servant instantly appeared.

"Mrs. Chepstow is down for five-thirty. It is now"--he pulled out his
watch--"nearly ten minutes to six. Hasn't she come?"

"No, sir. Two or three people have been, without appointments."

"And you have sent them away, of course? Quite right. Well, I shan't
stay in any longer."

He got up from his chair.

"And if Mrs. Chepstow should come, sir?"

"Explain to her that I waited till ten minutes to six and then--" He
paused. The hall door-bell was ringing sharply.

"If it is Mrs. Chepstow, shall I admit her now, sir?"

The doctor hesitated, but only for a second.

"Yes," he said.

And he sat down again by his table.

He had been almost looking forward to the arrival of his last patient of
that day, but now he felt irritated at being detained. For a moment he
had believed his day's work to be over, and in that moment the humour
for work had left him. Why had she not been up to time? He tapped his
delicate fingers impatiently on the table, and drew down his thick brows
over his sparkling eyes. But directly the door moved, his expression of
serenity returned, and when a tall woman came in, he was standing up and
gravely smiling.

"I'm afraid I am late."

The door shut on Henry.

"You are twenty minutes late."

"I'm so sorry."

The rather dawdling tones of the voice denied the truth of the words,
and the busy Doctor was conscious of a slight sensation of hostility.

"Please sit down here," he said, "and tell me why you come to consult
me."

Mrs. Chepstow sat down in the chair he showed her. Her movements were
rather slow and careless, like the movements of a person who is quite
alone and has nothing to do. They suggested to the watching man vistas
of empty hours--how different from his own! She settled herself in her
chair, leaning back. One of her hands rested on the handle of a parasol
she carried. The other held lightly an arm of the chair. Her height was
remarkable, and was made the more apparent by her small waist, and by
the small size of her beautifully shaped head, which was poised on a
long but exquisite neck. Her whole outline announced her gentle
breeding. The most lovely woman of the people could never be shaped
quite like that. As Doctor Isaacson realised this, he felt a sudden
difficulty in connecting with the woman before him her notorious career.
Surely pride must be a dweller in a body so expressive of race!

He thought of the very young men, almost boys, with whom Mrs. Chepstow
was seen about. Was it possible?

Her eyes met his, and in her face he saw a subtle contradiction of the
meaning her form seemed eloquently to indicate.

It was possible.

Almost before he had time to say this to himself, Mrs. Chepstow's face
had changed, suddenly accorded more definitely with her body.

"What a clever woman!" the Doctor thought.

With an almost sharp movement he sat forward in his chair, braced up,
alert, vital. His irritation was gone with the fatigue engendered by the
day's work. Interest in life tingled through his veins. His day was not
to be wholly dull. His thought of the morning, when he had looked at the
patients' book, was not an error of the mind.

"You came to consult me because--?"

"I don't know that I am ill," Mrs. Chepstow said, very composedly.

"Let us hope not."

"Do you think I look ill?"

"Would you mind turning a little more towards the light?"

She sat still for a minute, then she laughed.

"I have always said that so long as one is with a doctor, _qua_ doctor,
one must never think of him as a man," she said; "but--"

"Don't think of me as a man."

"Unfortunately, there is something about you which absolutely prevents
me from regarding you as a machine. But--never mind!"

She turned to the light, lifted her thin veil, and leaned towards him.

"Do you think I look ill?"

He gazed at her steadily, with a scrutiny that was almost cruel. The
face presented to him in the bold light that flowed in through the large
window near which their chairs were placed still preserved elements of
the beauty of which the world had heard too much. Its shape, like the
shape of Mrs. Chepstow's head, was exquisite. The line of the features
was not purely Greek, but it recalled things Greek, profiles in marble
seen in calm museums. The outline of a thing can set a sensitive heart
beating with the strange, the almost painful longing for an ideal life,
with ideal surroundings, ideal loves, ideal realizations. It can call to
the imagination that lies drowsing, yet full of life, far down in the
secret recesses of the soul. The curve of Mrs. Chepstow's face, the
modelling of her low brow, and the undulations of the hair that flowed
away from it--although, alas! that hair was obviously, though very
perfectly, dyed--had this peculiar power of summons, sent forth silently
this subtle call. The curve of a Dryad's face, seen dimly in the green
wonder of a magic wood, might well have been like this, or of a nymph's
bathing by moonlight in some very secret pool. But a Dryad would not
have touched her lips with this vermilion, a nymph have painted beneath
her laughing eyes these cloudy shadows, or drawn above them these
artfully delicate lines. And the weariness that lay about these cheeks,
and at the corners of this mouth, suggested no early world, no goddesses
in the springtime of creation, but an existence to distress a moralist,
and a lack of pleasure in it to dishearten an honest pagan. The ideality
in Mrs. Chepstow's face was contradicted, was set almost at defiance, by
something--it was difficult to say exactly what; perhaps by the faint
wrinkles about the corners of her large and still luminous blue eyes, by
a certain not yet harsh prominence of the cheek-bones, by a slight droop
of the lips that hinted at passion linked with cynicism. There was a
suggestion of hardness somewhere. Freshness had left this face, but not
because of age. There are elderly, even old women who look almost
girlish, fragrant with a charm that has its root in innocence of life.
Mrs. Chepstow did not certainly look old. Yet there was no youth in her,
no sweetness of the girl she once had been. She was not young, nor old,
nor definitely middle-aged.

She was definitely a woman who had strung many experiences upon the
chain of her life, yet who, in certain aspects, called up the thought
of, even the desire for, things ideal, things very far away from all
that is sordid, ugly, brutal, and defaced.

The look of pride, or perhaps of self-respect, which Doctor Isaacson had
seen born as if in answer to his detrimental thought of her, stayed in
this face, which was turned towards the light.

He realized that in this woman there was much will, perhaps much
cunning, and that she was a past mistress in the art of reading men.

"Well," she said, after a minute of silence, "what do you make of it?"

She had a very attractive voice, not caressingly but carelessly
seductive; a voice that suggested a creature both warm and lazy, that
would, perhaps, leave many things to chance, but that might at a moment
grip closely, and retain, what chance threw in her way.

"Please tell me your symptoms," the Doctor replied.

"But you tell me first--do I look ill?"

She fixed her eyes steadily upon him.

"What is the real reason why this woman has come to me?"

The thought flashed through the Doctor's mind as his eyes met hers, and
he seemed to divine some strange under-reason lurking far down in her
shrewd mind, almost to catch a glimpse of it ere it sank away into
complete obscurity.

"Certain diseases," he said slowly, "stamp themselves unmistakably upon
the faces of those who are suffering from them."

"Is any one of them stamped upon mine?"

"No."

She moved, as if settling herself more comfortably in her chair.

"Shall I put your parasol down?" he asked, stretching out his hand.

"No, thanks. I like holding it."

"I'm afraid you must tell me what are your symptoms."

"I feel a sort of general malaise."

"Is it a physical malaise?"

"Why not?" she said, almost sharply.

She smiled, as if in pity at her own childishness, and added
immediately:

"I can't say that I suffer actual physical pain. But without that one
may not feel particularly well."

"Perhaps your nervous system is out of order."

"I suppose every day you have silly women coming to you full of
complaints but without the ghost of a malady?"

"You must not ask me to condemn my patients. And not only women are
silly in that way."

He thought of Sir Henry Grebe, and of his own prescription.

"I had better examine you. Then I can tell you more about yourself."

While he spoke, he felt as if he were being examined by her. Never
before had he experienced this curious sensation, almost of
self-consciousness, with any patient.

"Oh, no," she said, "I don't want to be examined. I know my heart and my
lungs and so on are sound enough."

"At any rate, allow me to feel your pulse."

"And look at my tongue, perhaps!"

She laughed, but she pulled off her glove and extended her hand to him.
He put his fingers on her wrist, and looked at his watch. Her skin was
cool. Her pulse beat regularly and strongly. From her, a message to his
lightly touching fingers, flowed surely determination, self-possession,
hardihood, even combativeness. As he felt her pulse he understood the
defiance of her life.

"Your pulse is good," he said, dropping her hand.

During the short time he had touched her, he seemed to have learnt a
great deal about her.

And she--how much had she learnt about him?

He found himself wondering in a fashion unorthodox in a doctor.

"Mrs. Chepstow," he said, speaking rather brusquely, "I wish you would
kindly explain to me exactly why you have come here to-day. If you don't
feel ill, why waste your time with a doctor? I am sure you are not a
woman to run about seeking what you have."

"You mean health! But--I don't feel as I used to feel. Formerly I was a
very strong woman, so strong that I often felt as if I were safe from
unhappiness, real unhappiness. For Schopenhauer was right, I suppose,
and if one's health is perfect, one rises above what are called
misfortunes. And, you know, I have had great misfortunes."

"Yes?"

"You must know that."

"Yes."

"I didn't really mind them--not enormously. Even when I was what I
suppose nice people called 'ruined'--after my divorce--I was quite able
to enjoy life and its pleasures, eating and drinking, travelling,
yachting, riding, motoring, theatre-going, gambling, and all that sort
of thing. People who are being universally condemned, or pitied, are
often having a quite splendid time, you know."

"Just as people who are universally envied are often miserable."

"Exactly. But of late I have begun to--well, to feel different."

"In what way exactly?"

"To feel that my health is no longer perfect enough to defend me
against--I might call it ennui."

"Yes?"

"Or I might call it depression, melancholy, in fact. Now I don't want--I
simply will not be the victim of depression, as so many women are. Do
you realise how frightfully women--many women--suffer secretly from
depression when they--when they begin to find out that they are not
going to remain eternally young?"

"I realize it, certainly."

"I will not be the victim of that depression, because it ruins one's
appearance and destroys one's power. I am thirty-eight."

Her large blue eyes met the Doctor's eyes steadily.

"Yes?"

"In England nowadays that isn't considered anything. In England, if one
has perfect health, one may pass for a charming and attractive woman
till one is at least fifty, or even more. But to seem young when one is
getting on, one must feel young. Now, I no longer feel young. I am
positive feeling young is a question of physical health. I believe
almost everything one feels is a question of physical health. Mystics,
people who believe in metempsychosis, in the progress upward and
immortality of the soul, idealists--they would cry out against me as a
rank materialist. But you are a doctor, and know the empire of the body.
Am I not right? Isn't almost everything one feels an emanation from
one's molecules, or whatever they are called? Isn't it an echo of the
chorus of one's atoms?"

"No doubt the state of the body affects the state of the mind."

"How cautious you are!"

A rather contemptuous smile flickered over her too red lips.

"And really you must be in absolute antagonism with the priests, the
Christian Scientists, with all the cranks and the self-deceivers who put
soul above matter, who pretend that soul is independent of matter. Why,
only the other day I was reading about the psychophysical investigations
with the pneumograph and the galvanometer, and I'm certain that--"
Suddenly she checked herself. "But that's beside the question. I've told
you what I mean, what I think, that health triumphs over nearly
everything."

"You seem to be very convinced, a very sincere materialist."

"And you?"

"Despite the discoveries of science, I think there are still depths of
mystery in man."

"Woman included?"

"Oh, dear, yes! But to return to your condition."

"Ah!"

She glanced at a watch on her wrist.

"Your day of work, ends--?"

"At six, as a rule."

"I mustn't keep you. The truth is this. I am losing my zest for life,
and because I am losing my zest, I am losing my power over life. I am
beginning to feel weary, melancholy, sometimes apprehensive."

"Of what?"

"Middle age, I suppose, and the ending of all things."

"And you want me to prescribe against melancholy?"

"Why not? What is a doctor for? I tell you I am certain these feelings
in me come from a bodily condition."

"You think it quite impossible that they may proceed from a condition of
the soul?"

"Quite. I believe it all ends here on the day one dies. I feel as
certain of that as of my being a woman. And this being my conviction, I
think it of paramount importance to have a good time while I am here."

"Naturally."

"Now, a woman's good time depends on a woman's power over others, and
that power depends on her thorough-going belief in herself. So long as
she is perfectly well, she feels young, and so long as she feels young,
she can give the impression that she is young--with the slightest
assistance from art. And so long as she can give that impression--of
course I am speaking of a woman who is what is called 'attractive'--it
is all right with her. She will believe in herself, and she will have a
good time. Now, Doctor Isaacson--remember that I consider all
confidences made to a physician of your eminence, all that I tell you
to-day, as inviolably secret--"

"Of course," he said.

"Lately my belief in myself has been--well, shaken. I attribute this to
some failure in my health. So I have come to you. Try to find out if
anything in my bodily condition is wrong."

"Very well. But you must allow me to examine you, and I must put to you
a number of purely medical questions which you must answer truthfully."

_"En avant, monsieur!"_

She put her parasol down on the floor beside her.

"I don't believe in subterfuge--with a doctor," she said.




III


Mrs. Chepstow came out of the house in Cleveland Square as the clocks
were striking seven, stepped into a taximeter cab, and was hurried off
into the busy whirl of St. James's Street, while Doctor Meyer Isaacson
went upstairs to his bedroom to rest and dress for dinner. His clothes
were already laid out, and he sent his valet away. As soon as the man
was gone, the Doctor took off his coat and waistcoat, his collar and
tie, sat down in an arm-chair by the open window, leaned his head
against a cushion, shut his eyes, and deliberately relaxed all his
muscles. Every day, sometimes at one time, sometimes at another, he did
this for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour; and in these moments, as
he relaxed his muscles, he also relaxed his mind, banishing thoughts by
an effort of the will. So often had he done this that generally he did
it without difficulty; and though he never fell asleep in daylight, he
came out of this short rest-cure refreshed as after two hours of
slumber.

But to-day, though he could command his body, his mind was wilful. He
could not clear it of the restless thoughts. Indeed, it seemed to him
that he became all mind as he sat there, motionless, looking almost like
a dead man, with his stretched-out legs, his hanging arms, his dropped
jaw. His last patient was fighting against his desire for complete
repose, was defying his will and conquering it.

After his examination of Mrs. Chepstow, his series of questions, he had
said to her, "There is nothing the matter with you." A very ordinary
phrase, but even as he spoke it, something within him cried to him, "You
liar!" This woman suffered from no bodily disease. But to say to her,
"There is nothing the matter with you," was, nevertheless, to tell her a
lie. And he had added the qualifying statement, "that a doctor can do
anything for." He could see her face before him now as it had looked for
a moment after he had spoken.

Her exquisite hair was dyed a curious colour. Naturally a bright brown,
it had been changed by art to a lighter, less warm hue, that was neither
flaxen nor golden, but that held a strange pallor, distinctive, though
scarcely beautiful. It had the merit of making her eyes look very vivid
between the painted shadows and the painted brows, and this fact had
been no doubt realized by the artist responsible for it. Apparently Mrs.
Chepstow relied upon the fascination of a peculiar, almost anaemic
fairness, in the midst of which eyes, lips, and brows stood forcibly out
to seize the attention and engross it. There was in this fairness, this
blanched delicacy, something almost pathetic, which assisted the
completion, in the mind of a not too astute beholder, of the impression
already begun to be made by the beautiful shape of the face.

When Doctor Meyer Isaacson had finished speaking, that face had been a
still but searching question; and almost immediately a question had come
from the red lips.

"Is there absolutely no unhealthy condition of body such as might be
expected to produce low spirits? You see how medically I speak!"

"None whatever. You are not even gouty, and three-quarters, at least, of
my patients are gouty in some form or other."

Mrs. Chepstow frowned.

"Then what would you advise me to do?" she asked. "Shall I go to a
priest? Shall I go to a philosopher? Shall I go to a Christian Science
temple? Or do you think a good dose of the 'New Theology' would benefit
me?"

She spoke satirically, yet Doctor Isaacson felt as if he heard, far off,
faintly behind the satire, the despair of the materialist, against whom,
in certain moments, all avenues of hope seem inexorably closed. He
looked at Mrs. Chepstow, and there was a dawning of pity in his eyes as
he answered:

"How can I advise you?"

"How indeed? And yet--and that's a curious thing--you look as if you
could."

"If you are really a convinced materialist, an honest atheist--"

"I am."

"Well, then it would be useless to advise you to seek priests or to go
to Christian Science temples. I can only tell you that your complaint is
not a complaint of the body."

"Then is it a complaint of the soul? That's a bore, because I don't
happen to believe in the soul, and I do believe very much in the body."

"I wonder what exactly you mean when you say you don't believe in the
soul."

"I mean that I don't believe there is in human beings anything
mysterious which can live unless the body is living, anything that
doesn't die simultaneously with the body. Of course there is something
that we call mental, that likes and dislikes, loves and hates, and so
on."

"And cannot that something be depressed by misfortune?"

"I did not say I had had any misfortune."

"Nor did I say so. Let us put it this way then--cannot that something be
depressed?"

"To a certain degree, of course. But keep your body in perfect health,
and you ought to be immune from extreme depression. And I believe you
are immune. Frankly, Doctor Meyer Isaacson, I don't think you are right.
I am sure something is out of order in my body. There must be some
pressure somewhere, some obscure derangement of the nerves, something
radically wrong."

"Try another doctor. Try a nerve specialist--a hypnotist, if you like:
Hinton Morris, Scalinger, or Powell Burnham; I fear I cannot help you."

"So it seems."

She got up slowly. And still her movements were careless, but always
full of a grace that was very individual.

"Remember," she said, "that I have spoken to you so frankly in your
capacity as a physician."

"All I hear in this room I forget when I am out of it."

"Truly?" she said.

"At any rate, I forget to speak of it," he said, rather curtly.

"Good-bye," she rejoined.

She left him with a strange sensation, of the hopelessness that comes
from greed and acute worldliness, uncombined with any, even
subconscious, conception of other possibilities than purely material
ones.

What could such a woman have to look forward to at this period of her
life?

Doctor Isaacson was thinking about this now. He remained always
perfectly motionless in his arm-chair, but he had abandoned the attempt
to discipline his mind. He knew that to-day his brain would not repose
with his limbs, and he no longer desired his usual rest-cure. He
preferred to think--about Mrs. Chepstow.

She had made upon him a powerful impression. He recalled the look in her
eyes when she had said that she was thirty-eight, a look that had seemed
to command him to believe her. He had not believed her, yet he had no
idea what her real age was. Only he knew that it was not thirty-eight.
How determined she was not to suffer, to get through life--her one life,
as she thought it--without distress! And she was suffering. He divined
why. That was not difficult. She was "in low water." The tides of
pleasure were failing. And she had nothing to cling to, clever woman
though she was.

Why did he think her clever?

He asked himself that question. He was not a man to take cleverness on
trust. Mrs. Chepstow had not said anything specially brilliant. In her
materialism she was surely short-sighted, if not blind. She had made a
mess of her life. And yet he knew that she was a clever woman.

She had been very frank with him.

Why had she been so frank?

More than once he asked himself that. His mind was full of questions
to-day, questions to which he could not immediately supply answers. He
felt as if in all she had said Mrs. Chepstow had been prompted by some
very definite purpose. She had made upon him the impression of a woman
full of purpose, and often full of subtlety. He could not rid himself of
the conviction that she had had some concealed reason for wishing to
make his acquaintance, some reason unconnected with her health. He
believed she had wished honestly for his help as a doctor. But surely
that was not her only object in coming to Cleveland Square.

The clock on his chimney-piece struck. His time for repose was at an
end. He shut his mouth with a snap, contracted his muscles sharply, and
sprang up from his chair. Ten minutes later he was in a cold bath, and
half an hour later he was dressed for dinner, and going downstairs with
the light, quick step of a man in excellent physical condition and
capital spirits. The passing depression he had caught from his last
patient had vanished away, and he was in the mood to enjoy his
well-earned recreation.

He was dining in Charles Street, Berkeley Square, with Lady Somerson, a
widow who was persistently hospitable because she could not bear to be
alone. To-night she had a large party. When Doctor Isaacson came into
the room on the ground floor where Lady Somerson always received her
guests before a dinner, he found her dressed in rusty black, with her
grey hair done anyhow, managing and directing the conversation of quite
a crowd of important and interesting persons, most of whom had got well
away from their first youth, but were so important and interesting that
they did not care at all what age they were. It was Wednesday night, and
the flavour of the party was political; but among the men were two
soldiers, and among the women was a well-known beauty, who cared very
little for politics, but a great deal for good talk. She was one of
those beauties who reign only in faithful London, partly because of
London's faithfulness, but partly also because of their excellent
digestions, good spirits, and entire lack of pretence. Her name was Mrs.
Derringham; her age was forty-eight. She was not "made up." She made no
attempt to look any younger than she was. Lively, energetic, without
wrinkles, and apparently without vanity, she neither forbade nor
encouraged people to think of her years, but attracted them by her
splendid figure, her animation, her zest and her readiness to enjoy the
passing hour.

Doctor Isaacson knew her well, and as he shook hands with her he thought
of Mrs. Chepstow and of the gospel of Materialism. This woman certainly
knew how to enjoy the good things of this world; but she had interests
that were not selfish: her husband, her children, her charities, her
dependents. She had struck roots deep down into the rich and rewarding
soil of the humanities. Women like Mrs. Chepstow struck no roots into
any soil. Was it any wonder if the days came and the nights when the
souls of them were weary? Was it any wonder if the weariness set its
mark upon their beauty?

The door opened, and the last guest appeared--a man, tall,
broad-chested, and fair, with short yellow hair parted in the middle, a
well-shaped head, a blunt, straight nose, a well-defined but not
obstinate chin, a sensitive mouth, and big, sincere, even enthusiastic,
blue eyes, surmounted by thick blond eyebrows that always looked as if
they had just been brushed vigorously upwards. A small, close-growing
moustache covered his upper lip. His cheeks and forehead were tanned by
the sun. He was thirty-six years old, but looked a great deal younger,
because he was fair. His figure was very muscular and upright, with a
hollow back and lean flanks. His capable, rather large-fingered, but not
clumsy, hands were brown. There was in his face a peculiarly straight
and bright look that suggested the North and Northern things, the
glitter of stars upon snows, cool summits of mountains swept by pure
winds, the scented freshness of pine forests. He had something of the
expression, of the build, and of the carriage of a hero from the North.
But he was surely a hero from the North who had very recently had his
dwelling in the South, and who had taken kindly to it.

When Lady Somerson saw the newcomer, she rushed at him and blew him up.
Then she introduced him to the lady he was to take in to dinner, and,
with an alacrity that was almost feverish, gave the signal for her
guests to move into the dining-room, disclosed at this moment by two
assiduous footmen who briskly pushed back the sliding doors that divided
it from the room in which she had received.

"Our hostess does not conceal her feelings," murmured Mrs. Derringham,
who was Doctor Isaacson's companion, as they found their places at the
long table. "Who is the man whom she has just scolded so vivaciously? I
know his face quite well."

"One of the best fellows in the world--Nigel Armine. I have not seen him
till to-night since last October. He has been out in Egypt."

At this moment he caught the fair man's eyes, and they exchanged with
his a look of friendship.

"Of course! I remember! He looks like a knight-errant. So did his
father, poor Harwich. I used to act with Harwich in the early
never-mind-whats at Burnham House. One scarcely ever sees Nigel now. I
don't think he was ever at all really fond of London and gaieties.
Harwich was, of course. Yet even in his face there was a sort of
strangeness, of other-worldliness. I used to say he had kitten's eyes.
How he believed in women, poor fellow!"

"Don't you believe in women?"

"As a race, no. I believe in a very few individual women. But Harwich
believed in women because they were women. That is always a mistake. He
believed in them as a good Catholic believes in the Saints. And he was
punished for it."

"You mean after Nigel's mother died? That Mrs.--what was her name?--Mrs.
Alstruther?"

"Yes, Mrs. Alstruther. She treated Harwich abominably. Even if she had
been free, she would never have married him. He bored her. But he
worshipped her, and thought to the end that her husband ill-used her.
So absurd, when Paul Alstruther could call neither his soul nor his
purse his own. Nigel Armine has his father's look. He, too, is born to
believe in women."

She paused; then she added:

"I must say it would be rather nice to be the woman he believed in."

"Tell me something about this Mr. Armine, Doctor Isaacson," said Lady
O'Ryan, who was sitting on the Doctor's other side, and had caught part
of this conversation. "You know I am always in County Clare, and as
ignorant as a violet. Who is he exactly?"

"A younger brother of Harwich's, and the next heir to the title."

"That immensely rich Lord Harwich whose horses have won so many races,
and who married Zoe Mulligan, of Chicago, more than ten years ago?"

"Yes. They've never had any children, and Harwich has knocked his health
to pieces, so Armine is pretty sure to succeed. But he's fairly well
off, I suppose, for a bachelor. When his mother died, she left him her
property."

"And what does he do?"

"He was in the army, but resigned his commission when he came into his
land."

"Why?"

"To look after his people. He had great ideas about a landlord's duties
to his tenants."

"O'Ryan's tenants have enormous ideas about his duties to them."

"That must be trying. Armine lived in the country, and made a great many
generous experiments--built model cottages, started rifle ranges,
erected libraries, gymnasiums, swimming baths. In fact, he spent his
money royally--too royally."

"And were they sick with gratitude?"

"Their thankfulness did not go so far as that. In fact, some of Armine's
schemes for making people happy met with a good deal of opposition.
Finally there was a tremendous row about a right of way. The tenants
were in the wrong, and Armine was so disgusted at their trying to rob
him of what was his, after he had showered benefits upon them, that he
let his place and hasn't been there since."

"That's so like people, to ignore libraries and village halls, and
shriek for the right to get over a certain stile, or go down a muddy
path that leads from nothing to nowhere."

"The desire of the star for the moth!"

"You call humanity a star?"

"I think there is a great brightness burning in it; don't you?"

"There seems to be in Mr. Armine, certainly. What an enthusiastic look
he has! How could he get wrong with his tenants?"

"It may have been his enthusiasm, his great expectations, his ideality.
Perhaps he puzzled his people, asked too much imagination, too much
sacred fire from them. And then he has immense ideas about honesty, and
the rights of the individual; and, in fact, about a good many things
that seldom bother the head of the average man."

"Don't tell me he has developed into a crank," said Mrs. Derringham.
"There's something so underbred about crankiness; and the Harwich family
have always been essentially aristocrats."

"I shouldn't think Armine was a crank, but I do think he is an idealist.
He considers Watts's allegorical pictures the greatest things in Art
that have been done since Botticelli enshrined Purity in paint. In
modern music Elgar's his man; in modern literature, Tolstoy. He loves
those with ideals, even if their ideals are not his. I do not say he is
an artist. He is not. His motto is not 'Art for art's sake,' but 'Art
for man's sake.'"

"He is a humanitarian?"

"And a great believer."

"In man?"

"In the good that is in man. I often think at the back of his mind, or
heart, he believes that the act of belief is almost an act of creation."

"You mean, for instance, that if you believe in a man's truthfulness you
make him a truthful man?"

"Yes."

"Oh, Doctor Isaacson," said Lady O'Ryan, "do introduce Mr. Armine to my
husband, and make him believe my husband is a miser instead of a
spendthrift. It would be such a mercy to the family. We might begin to
pay off the mortgage on the castle."

The conversation took a frivolous turn, and died in laughter.

But towards the end of dinner Mrs. Derringham again spoke of Nigel
Armine, asking:

"And what does Mr. Armine do now?"

"He went to Egypt after he let his place, bought some land there, in the
Fayyum, I believe, and has been living on it a good deal. I think he has
been making some experiments in farming."

"And does he believe in the truth and honesty of the average
donkey-boy?"

"I don't know. But I must confess I have heard him extol the merits of
the Bedouins."

At this moment Lady Somerson sprang up, in her usual feverish manner,
and the men in a moment were left to themselves. As the sliding doors
closed behind Lady Somerson's active back, there was a hesitating
movement among them, suggestive of a half-formed desire for
rearrangement.

Then Armine came decisively away from his place on the far side of the
long table, and joined Meyer Isaacson.

"I'm glad to meet you again, Isaacson," he said, grasping the Doctor's
hand.

The Doctor returned his grip with a characteristic clasp, and they sat
down side by side, while the other men began talking and lighting
cigarettes.

"Have you only just come back?" asked the Doctor.

"I have been back for a week."

"So long! Where are you staying?"

"At the Savoy."

"The Savoy?"

"Are you surprised!"

The Doctor's brilliant eyes were fixed upon Armine with an expression
half humorous, half affectionate.

"Any smart hotel would seem the wrong place for you," he said. "I can
see you on the snows of the Alps, or your own moors at Etchingham, even
at--where is it?"

"Sennoures."

"But at the Savoy, the Ritz, the Carlton--no. Their gilded banality
isn't the _cadre_ for you at all."

"I'm very happy at the Savoy," Armine replied.

As he spoke, he looked away from Meyer Isaacson across the table to the
wall opposite to him. Upon it hung a large reproduction of Watts's
picture, "Progress." He gazed at it, and his face became set in a
strange calm, as if he had for a moment forgotten the place he was in,
the people round about him. Meyer Isaacson watched him with a
concentrated interest. There was something in this man--there always had
been something--which roused in the Doctor an affection, an admiration,
that were mingled with pity and even with a secret fear. Such a nature,
the Doctor often thought, must surely be fore-ordained to suffering in a
world that holds certainly many who cherish ideals and strive to mount
upwards, but a majority that is greedy for the constant gratification of
the fleshly appetites, that seldom listens to the dim appeal of the
distant voices which sometimes speak, however faintly, to all who dwell
on earth.

"What a splendid thing that is!" Armine said, at last, with a sigh. "You
know the original?"

"I saw it the other day at the gallery in Compton."

"Progress--advance--going on irresistibly all the time, whether we see
it, feel it, or not. How glorious!"

"You are always an optimist?"

"I do believe in the triumph of good. More and more every day I believe
in that, the triumph of good in the world, and in the individual. And
the more believers there are--true believers--in that triumph, the more
surely, the more swiftly, it will be accomplished. You can help,
Isaacson."

"By believing?"

"Yes, that's the way to help. But Lord! how few people take it!
Suspicion is one of the most destructive agents at work in the world.
Suspect a man, and you almost force him to give you cause for suspicion.
Suspect a woman, and instantly you give her a push towards deceit. How I
hate to hear men say they don't trust women."

"Women say that, too."

"Sex treachery! Despicable! They who say that are traitresses in their
own camp."

"You value truth, don't you?"

"Above everything."

"Suppose women truly mistrust other women; are they to pretend the
contrary?"

"They can be silent, and try to stamp out an unworthy, a destructive,
feeling."

He said nothing for a moment. Then he looked up at Meyer Isaacson and
continued:

"Are you going anywhere when you leave here?"

"I've accepted something in Chesham Place. Why?"

"Must you go to it?"

"No."

"Come and have supper with me at the Savoy."

"Supper! My dear Armine! You know nowadays we doctors are preaching, and
rightly preaching, less eating and drinking to our patients. I can eat
nothing till to-morrow after my morning ride."

"But you can sit at a supper-table, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes, I can do that."

"Come and sit at mine. Let's go away from here together."

"Certainly."

"You shall see whether I am out of place at the Savoy."




IV


At a quarter to eleven that night Meyer Isaacson and Nigel Armine came
down the bit of carpet that was unrolled to the edge of the pavement in
front of Lady Somerson's door, and got into the former's electric
brougham. As it moved off noiselessly, the Doctor said:

"You had a long talk with Mrs. Derringham in the drawing-room."

"Yes," replied Armine, rather curtly.

He relapsed into silence, leaning back in his corner.

"I like her," the Doctor continued, after a pause.

"Do you?"

"And you--don't."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I feel it; I gather it from the way you said 'yes.'"

Armine moved, and leaned slightly forwards.

"Isn't she rather _mauvaise langue_?" he asked.

"Mrs. Derringham? I certainly don't think her so."

"She's one of the disbelievers in women you spoke of after dinner; one
of the traitresses in the woman's camp. Why can't women hang together?"

"They do sometimes."

"Yes, when there's a woman to be hounded down. They hang together when
there's a work of destruction on hand. But do they hang together when
there's a work of construction to be done?"

"Do you mean a reputation to be built up?"

Armine pulled his moustache. In the electric light Meyer Isaacson could
see that his blue eyes were shining.

"Because," Meyer Isaacson continued, "if you do mean that, I should be
inclined to say that each of us must build up his or her reputation
individually for himself or herself."

"We need help in nearly all our buildings-up, and how often, how
damnably often, we don't get it!"

"Was Mrs. Derringham specially down upon some particular woman
to-night?"

"Yes, she was."

"Do you care to tell me upon whom?"

"It was Mrs. Chepstow."

"You were talking about Mrs. Chepstow?" Isaacson said slowly. "The
famous Mrs. Chepstow?"

"Famous!" said Armine. "I hardly see that Mrs. Chepstow is a famous
woman. She is not a writer, a singer, a painter, an actress. She does
nothing that I ever heard of. I shouldn't call such a woman famous. I
daresay her name is known to lots of people. But this is the age of
chatterboxes, and of course--"

At this moment the brougham rolled on to the rubber pavement in front of
the Savoy Hotel and stopped before the entrance.

As he was getting out and going into the hall, Meyer Isaacson remembered
that the letter Mrs. Chepstow had written to him asking for an
appointment had been stamped "Savoy Hotel." She had been staying at the
hotel then. Was she staying there now? He had never heard Armine mention
her before, but his feminine intuition suddenly connected Armine's
words, "I'm very happy at the Savoy," with the invitation to sup there,
and the conversation about Mrs. Chepstow just reported to him by his
friend. Armine knew Mrs. Chepstow. They were going to meet her in the
restaurant to-night. Meyer Isaacson felt sure of it.

They left their coats in the cloak-room and made their way to the
restaurant, which as yet was almost empty. The _maitre d'hotel_ came
forward to Armine, bowing and smiling, and showed them to a table in a
corner. Meyer Isaacson saw that it was laid for only two. He was
surprised, but he said nothing, and they sat down.

"I really can't eat supper, Armine," he said. "Don't order it for me."

"Have a little soup, at least, and a glass of champagne?"

Without waiting for a reply, he gave an order.

"We might have sat in the hall, but it is more amusing in here.
Remember, I haven't been in London--seen the London show--for over eight
months. One meets a lot of old friends and acquaintances in places like
this."

Meyer Isaacson opened his lips to say that Armine would be far more
likely to meet his friends during the season if he went to parties in
private houses. America was beginning to stream in, mingled with English
country people "up" for a few days, and floating representatives of the
nations of the earth. In this heterogeneous crowd he saw no one whom he
knew, and Armine had not so far recognized anybody. But he shut his lips
without speaking. He realized that Armine had a purpose in coming to the
Savoy to-night, in bringing him. For some reason his friend was trying
to mask that purpose, but it must almost immediately become apparent. He
had only to wait for a few minutes, and doubtless he would know exactly
what it was.

A waiter brought the soup and the champagne.

"If any of the patients to whom I have strictly forbidden supper should
see me now," said the Doctor, "and if they should divine that I have
come straight from a long dinner!--Armine, I am making a heavy sacrifice
on friendship's altar."

"You don't see any patients, I hope?"

"Not as yet," the Doctor answered.

Almost before the words were out of his mouth, he saw Mrs. Chepstow at
some distance from them, coming in at the door. She came in alone. He
looked to see her escort, but, to his surprise, she was not followed by
any one. Holding herself very erect, and not glancing to the right or
left, she walked down the room escorted by the _maitre d'hotel_, passed
close to Armine and the Doctor, went to a small table set in the angle
of a screen not far off, and sat down with her profile turned towards
them. She said a few words to the _maitre d'hotel_. He spoke to a
waiter, then hurried away. Mrs. Chepstow sat very still in her chair,
looking down. She had laid a lace fan beside the knives and glasses that
shone in the electric light. Her right hand rested lightly on it. She
was dressed in black, and wore white gloves, and a diamond comb in her
fair, dyed hair. Her strange, colourless complexion looked
extra-ordinarily delicate and pure from where the two friends were
sitting. There was something pathetic in its whiteness, and in the quiet
attitude of this woman who sat quite alone in the midst of the gay
crowd. Many people stared at her, whispered about her, were obviously
surprised at her solitude; but she seemed quite unconscious that she was
being noticed. And there was a curious simplicity in her
unconsciousness, and in her attitude, which made her seem almost girlish
from a little distance.

"There's Mrs. Chepstow," said a man at the next table to Armine's,
bending over to his companion, a stout and florid specimen from the
City. "And absolutely alone, by Jove!"

"Couldn't get even a kid from Sandhurst to-night, I s'pose," returned
the other. "I wonder she comes in at all if she can't scrape up an
escort. Wonder she has the cheek to do it."

They lowered their voices and leaned nearer to each other. Armine lifted
his glass of champagne to his lips, sipped it, and put it down.

"If you do see any patients, you can explain it's all my fault," he said
to the Doctor. "I will take the blame. But surely you don't have to
follow all your prescriptions?"

His voice was slightly uneven and abstracted, as if he were speaking
merely to cover some emotion he was determined to conceal.

"No. But I ought to set an example of reasonable living, I suppose."

They talked for a few minutes about health, with a curious formality,
like people who are conscious that they are being critically listened
to, or who are, too consciously, listening to themselves. Once or twice
Meyer Isaacson glanced across the room to Mrs. Chepstow. She was eating
her supper slowly, languidly, and always looking down. Apparently she
had not seen him or Armine. Indeed, she did not seem to see any one, but
she was rather sadly unconscious of her surroundings. The Doctor found
himself pitying her, then denying to himself that she merited
compassion. With many others, he wondered at her solitude. To sup thus
alone in a crowded restaurant was to advertise her ill success in the
life she had chosen, her abandonment by man. Why did she do this? He
could not then divine, although afterwards he knew. And he was quietly
astonished. Just at first he expected that she would presently be joined
by some one who was late. But no one came, and no second place was laid
at her table.

Conversation flagged between Armine and him, until the former presently
said:

"I want to introduce you to some one to-night."

"Yes? Who is it?"

He asked, but he already knew.

"Mrs. Chepstow."

The Doctor was on the verge of saying that he was already acquainted
with her, when Armine added:

"I spoke about you to her, and she told me she had never met you."

"When was that?"

"Four days ago, when I was introduced to her, and talked to her for the
first time."

The Doctor did not speak for a minute. Then he said:

"I shall be delighted to be presented to her."

Although he was remarkably truthful with his friends, he was always
absolutely discreet in his professional capacity. He did not know
whether Mrs. Chepstow would wish the fact of her having consulted him
about her health to be spoken of. Therefore he did not mention it. And
as Armine knew that four days ago Mrs. Chepstow and he were strangers,
in not mentioning it he was obliged to leave his friend under the
impression that they were strangers still.

"She is staying in this hotel, and is sitting over there. But of course
you know her by sight," said Armine.

"Oh, yes, I have seen her about."

"I think you will like her, if you can clear your mind of any prejudices
you may have formed against her."

"Why should I be prejudiced against Mrs. Chepstow?"

"People are. No one has a good word for her. Both women and men speak
ill of her."

From the tone of Armine's voice Meyer Isaacson knew that this fact had
prejudiced him in Mrs. Chepstow's favour. There are some men who are
born to defend lost causes, who instinctively turn towards those from
whom others are ostentatiously turning away, moved by some secret
chivalry which blinds their reason, or by a passion of simple human pity
that dominates their hearts and casts a shadow over the brightness of
their intellects. Of these men Nigel Armine was one, and Meyer Isaacson
knew it. He was not much surprised, therefore, when Armine continued:

"They see only the surface of things, and judge by what they see. I
suppose one ought not to condemn them. But sometimes it's--it's devilish
difficult not to condemn cruelty, especially when the cruelty is
directed against a woman. Only to-night Mrs. Derringham--and you say
she's a good sort of woman--"

"Very much so."

"Well, she said to me, 'For such women as Mrs. Chepstow I have no pity,
so don't ask it of me, Mr. Armine.' What a confession, Isaacson!"

"Did she give her reasons?"

"Oh, yes, she tried to. She said the usual thing."

"What was that?"

"She said that Mrs. Chepstow had sold herself body and soul to the Devil
for material things; that she was the typical greedy woman."

"And did she indicate exactly what she meant by the typical greedy
woman?"

"Yes. I will say for her that she was plain-spoken. She said: 'The woman
without ideals, without any feeling for home and all that home means,
the one man, children, peace found in unselfishness, rest in work for
others; the woman who betrays the reputation of her sex by being
absolutely concentrated upon herself, and whose desires only extend to
the vulgar satisfactions brought by a preposterous expenditure of money
on clothes, jewels, yachts, houses, motors, everything that rouses
wonder and admiration in utterly second-rate minds.'"

"There are such women."

"Perhaps there are. But, my dear Isaacson, one has only to look at Mrs.
Chepstow--with unprejudiced eyes, mind you--to see that she could never
be one of them. Even if I had never spoken to her, I should know that
she must have ideals, could never not have them, whatever her life is,
or has been. Physiognomy cannot utterly lie. Look at the line of that
face. Don't you see what I mean?"

They both gazed for a moment at the lonely woman.

"There is, of course, a certain beauty in Mrs. Chepstow's face," the
Doctor said.

"I am not speaking of beauty; I am speaking of ideality, of purity.
Don't you see what I mean? Now, be honest."

"Yes, I do."

"Ah!" said Armine.

The exclamation sounded warmly pleased.

"But that look, I think, is a question merely of line, and of the way
the hair grows. Do you mean to say that you would rather judge a woman
by that than by the actions of her life?"

"No. But I do say that if you examined the life of a woman with a face
like that--the real life--you would be certain to find that it had not
been devoid of actions such as you would expect, actions illustrating
that look of ideality which any one can see. What does Mrs. Derringham
really know of Mrs. Chepstow? She is not personally acquainted with her,
even. She acknowledged that. She has never spoken to her, and doesn't
want to."

"That scarcely surprises me, I confess," the Doctor remarked.

There was a definite dryness in his tone, and Armine noticed it.

"You are prejudiced, I see," he said.

In his voice there was a sound of disappointment.

"I don't exactly know why, but I have always looked upon you as one of
the most fair-minded, broad-minded men I have met, Isaacson," he said.
"Not as one of those who must always hunt with the hounds."

"The question is, What is prejudice? The facts of a life are facts, and
cannot leave one wholly uninfluenced for or against the liver of the
life. If I see a man beating a dog because it has licked his hand, I
draw the inference that he is cruel. Would you say that I am
narrow-minded in doing so? If one does not judge men and women by their
actions, by what is one to judge them? Perhaps you will say, 'Don't
judge them at all.' But it is impossible not to form opinions on people,
and every time one forms an opinion one passes a secret judgment. Isn't
it so?"

"I think feeling enters into the matter. Often one gets an immediate
impression, before one knows anything about the facts of a life. The
facts may seem to give that impression the lie. But is it wrong? I think
very often not. I remember once I heard a woman, and a clever woman, say
of a man whom she knew intimately, 'They accuse him of such and such an
act. Well, if I saw him commit it, I would not believe he had done it!'
Absurd, you will say. And yet is it so absurd? In front of the real man
may there not be a false man, is there not often a false man, like a
mask over a face? And doesn't the false man do things that the real man
condemns? I would often rather judge with my heart than with my eyes,
Isaacson--yes, I would. That woman said a fine thing when she said that,
and she was not absurd, though every one who heard her laughed at her.
When one gets what one calls an impression, one's heart is speaking, is
saying, 'This is the truth.' And I believe the heart, without reasoning,
knows what the truth is."

"And if two people get diametrically different impressions of the same
person? What then? That sometimes happens, you know."

"I don't believe you and I could ever get diametrically different
impressions of a person," said Armine, looking at Mrs. Chepstow; "and
to-night I can't bother myself about the rest of the world."

"Don't you think hearts can be stupid as well as heads? I do. I think
people can be muddle-hearted as well as muddle-headed."

As the Doctor spoke, it seemed to flash upon him that he was passing a
judgment upon his friend--this man whom he admired, whom he almost
loved.

"I should always trust my heart," said Armine. "But I very often
mistrust my head. Won't you have any more champagne?"

"No, thank you."

"What do you say to our joining Mrs. Chepstow? It must be awfully dull
for her, supping all alone. We might go and speak to her. If she doesn't
ask us to sit down, we can go into the hall and have a cigar."

"Very well."

There was neither alacrity nor reluctance in Meyer Isaacson's voice, but
if there had been, Armine would probably not have noticed it. When he
was intent on a thing, he saw little but that one thing. Now he paid the
bill, tipped the waiter, and got up.

"Come along," he said, "and I will introduce you."

He put his hand for an instant on his friend's arm.

"Clear your mind of prejudice, Isaacson," he said, in a low voice. "You
are too good and too clever to be one of the prejudiced crowd. Let your
first impression be a true one."

As the doctor went with his friend to Mrs. Chepstow's table, he did not
tell him that first impression had been already formed in the
consulting-room of the house in Cleveland Square.




V


"Mrs. Chepstow!"

At the sound of Nigel Armine's voice Mrs. Chepstow started slightly,
like a person recalled abruptly from a reverie, looked up, and smiled.

"You are here! I'm all alone. But I was hungry, so I had to brave the
rabble."

"I want to introduce a friend to you. May I?"

"Of course."

Armine moved, and Doctor Isaacson stood by Mrs. Chepstow.

"Doctor Meyer Isaacson, Mrs. Chepstow."

The Doctor scarcely knew whether he had expected Mrs. Chepstow to
recognize him, or whether he had anticipated what actually happened--her
slight bow and murmured "I'm delighted to meet you." But he did know
that he was not really surprised at her treatment of him as an entire
stranger. And he was glad that he had said nothing to Armine of her
visit to Cleveland Square.

"Aren't you going to sit down and talk to me for a little?" Mrs.
Chepstow said. "I'm all alone and horribly dull."

"May we?"

Armine drew up a chair.

"Sit on my other side, Doctor Isaacson. I've heard a great deal about
you. You've made perfect cures of most of my enemies."

There was not the least trace of consciousness in her manner, not the
faintest suspicion of embarrassment in her look, and, as he sat down,
the Doctor found himself admiring the delicate perfection of her deceit,
as he had sometimes admired a subtle _nuance_ in the performance of some
great French actress.

"You ought to hate me then," he said.

"Why? If I don't hate them?"

"Don't you hate your enemies?" asked Armine.

"No; that's a weakness in me. I never could and never shall. Something
silly inside of me invariably finds excuses for people, whatever they
are or do. I'm always saying to myself, 'They don't understand. If they
really knew all the circumstances, they wouldn't hate me. Perhaps they'd
even pity me.' Absurd! A mistake! I know that. Such feelings stand in
the way of success, because they prevent one striking out in one's own
defence. And if one doesn't strike out for oneself, nobody will strike
out for one."

"I don't think that's quite true," Armine said.

"Oh, yes, it is. If you're pugnacious, people think you're plucky, and
they're ready to stand up for you. Whereas, if you forgive easily,
you're not easily forgiven."

"If that is so," Armine said, "why don't you change your tactics?"

As he said this, he glanced at Isaacson, and the Doctor understood that
he was seeking to display to his friend what he believed to be this
woman's character.

"Simply because I can't. I am what I am. I can't change myself, and I
can't act in defiance of the little interior voice. I often try to, for
I don't pretend in the least to be virtuous; but I have to give in. I
know it's weakness. I know the world would laugh at it. But--_que
voulez-vous?_--some of us are the slaves of our souls."

The last sentence seemed almost to be blurted out, so honestly was it
said. But instantly, as if regretting a sincere indiscretion, she added:

"Doctor Isaacson, what an idiot you must think me!"

"Why, Mrs. Chepstow?"

"For saying that. You, of course, think we are the slaves of our
bodies."

"I certainly do not think you an idiot," he could not help saying, with
significance.

"Isaacson is not an ordinary doctor," said Armine. "You needn't be
afraid of him."

"I don't think I'm afraid of anybody, but one doesn't want to make
oneself absurd. And I believe I often am absurd in rating the body too
low. What a conversation!" she added, smiling. "But, as I was all alone
in the crowd, I was thinking of all sorts of things. A crowd makes one
think tremendously, if one is quite alone. It stimulates the brain, I
suppose. So I was thinking a lot of rubbish over my solitary meal."

She looked at the two men apologetically.

"_La femme pense_," she said, and she shrugged her shoulders.

Armine drew his chair a little nearer to her, and this action suddenly
made Doctor Isaacson realize the power that still dwelt in this woman,
the power to govern certain types of men.

"And the man acts," completed Armine.

"And the woman acts, too, and better than the man," the Doctor thought
to himself.

Again his admiration was stirred, this time by the sledge-hammer
boldness of Mrs. Chepstow, by her complete though so secret defiance of
himself.

"But what were you thinking about?" Armine continued, earnestly. "I
noticed how preoccupied you were even when you came into the room."

"Did you? I was thinking about a conversation I had this afternoon.
Oddly enough"--she turned slowly towards Meyer Isaacson--"it was with a
doctor."

"Indeed?" he said, looking her full in the face.

"Yes."

She turned away, and once more spoke to Armine.

"I went this afternoon to a doctor, Mr. Armine, to consult him about a
friend of mine who is ill and obstinate, and we had a most extraordinary
talk about the soul and the body. A sort of fight it was. He thought me
a typical silly woman. I'm sure of that."

"Why?"

"Because I suppose I took a sentimental view of our subject. We women
always instinctively take the sentimental view, you know. My doctor was
severely scientific and frightfully sceptical. He thought me an absurd
visionary."

"And what did you think him?"

"I'm afraid I thought him a crass materialist. He had doctored the body
until he was able to believe only in the body. He referred everything
back to the body. Every emotion, according to him, was only caused by
the terminal of a nerve vibrating in a cell contained in the grey matter
of the brain. I dare say he thinks the most passionate love could be
operated for. And as to any one having an immortal soul--well, I did
dare, being naturally fearless, just to mention the possibility of my
possessing such a thing. But I was really sorry afterwards."

"Tell us why."

"Because it brought upon me such an avalanche of scorn and arguments. I
didn't much mind the scorn, but the arguments bored me."

"Did they convince you?"

"Mr. Armine! Now, did you ever know a woman convinced of anything by
argument?"

He laughed.

"Then you still believe that you have an immortal soul?"

"More, far more, than ever."

She was laughing, too. But, quite suddenly, the laughter died out of
her, and she said, with an earnest face:

"I wouldn't let any one--any one--take some of my beliefs from me."

The tone of her voice was almost fierce in its abrupt doggedness.

"I must have some coffee," she added, with a complete change of tone. "I
sleep horribly badly, and that's why I take coffee. Mere perversity!
Three black coffees, waiter."

"Not for me!" said Meyer Isaacson.

"You must, for once. I hate doing things alone. There is no pleasure in
anything unless some one shares it. At least"--she looked at
Armine--"that is what every woman thinks."

"Then how unhappy lots of women must be," he said.

"The lonely women. Ah! no man will ever know how unhappy."

There was a moment of silence. Something in the sound of Mrs.
Chepstow's voice as she said the last words almost compelled a silence.

For the first time since he had been with her that night Meyer Isaacson
felt that perhaps he had caught a glimpse of her true self, had drawn
near to the essential woman.

The waiter brought their coffee, and Mrs. Chepstow added, with a little
laugh:

"Even a meal eaten alone is no pleasure to a woman. To-night, till you
came to take pity upon me, I should have been far happier with
'something on a tray' in my own room. But now I feel quite convivial.
Isn't the coffee here good?"

Suddenly she looked cheerful, almost gay. Happiness seemed to blossom
within her.

"Never mind if you lie awake for once, Doctor Isaacson," she continued,
looking across at him. "You will have done a good action; you will have
cheered up a human being who had been feeling down on her luck. That
talk I had with a doctor had depressed me most horribly, although I told
myself that I didn't believe a word he said."

Meyer Isaacson sipped his coffee and said nothing.

"I think one of the wickedest things one can do in the world is to try
to take any comforting and genuine belief away from the believer," said
Armine, with energy.

"Would you leave people even in their errors?" said the Doctor.
"Suppose, for instance, you saw some one--some friend--believing in a
person whom you knew to be unworthy, would you make no effort to
enlighten him?"

He spoke very quietly--almost carelessly. Mrs. Chepstow fixed her big
blue eyes on him and for a moment forgot her coffee.

"Perhaps I should. But you know my theory."

"Oh--to be sure!"

Meyer Isaacson smiled. Mrs. Chepstow looked from one man to the other
quickly.

"What theory? Don't make me feel an outsider," she said.

"Mr. Armine thinks--may I, Armine?"

"Of course."

"Thinks that belief in the goodness, the genuineness of people helps
them to become good, genuine, so that the unworthy might be made
eventually worthy by a trust at first misplaced."

"Mr. Armine is--" She checked herself. "It is a pity the world isn't
full of Mr. Armines," she said, softly.

Armine flushed, almost boyishly.

"I wish my doctor knew you, Mr. Armine. If you create by believing, I'm
sure he destroys by disbelieving."

As she said the last words, her eyes met Meyer Isaacson's, and he saw in
them, or thought he saw, a defiance that was threatening.

The lights winked. Mrs. Chepstow got up.

"They're going to turn us out. Let us anticipate them--by going. It's so
dreadful to be turned out. It makes me feel like Eve at the critical
moment of her career."

She led the way from the big room. As she passed among the tables, every
man, and almost every woman, turned to stare at her as children stare at
a show. She seemed quite unconscious of the attention she attracted. But
when she bade good night to the two friends in the hall, she said:

"Aren't people horrible sometimes? They seem to think one is--" She
checked herself. "I'm a fool!" she said. "Good night. Thank you both for
coming. It has done me good."

"Don't mind those brutes!" Armine almost whispered to her, as he held
her hand for a moment. "Don't think of them. Think of--the others."

She looked at him in silence, nodded, and went quietly away.

Directly she had gone Meyer Isaacson said to his friend:

"Well, good night, Armine. I am glad you're back. Let us see something
of each other."

"Don't go yet. Come to my sitting-room and have a smoke."

"Better not. I have to be up early. I ride at half-past seven."

"I'll ride with you, then."

"To-morrow?"

"Yes, to-morrow."

"But have you got any horses up?"

"No; I'll hire from Simonds. Don't wait for me, but look out for me in
the Row. Good night, old chap."

As they grasped hands for a moment, he added:

"Wasn't I right?"

"Right?"

"About her--Mrs. Chepstow? She may have been driven into the Devil's
hands, but don't you see, don't you feel, the good in her, struggling
up, longing for an opportunity to proclaim itself, to take the reins of
her life and guide her to calm, to happiness, to peace? I pity that
woman, Isaacson; I pity her."

"Pity her if you like," the Doctor said, with a strong emphasis, on the
first word, "but--"

He hesitated. Something in his friend's face stopped him from saying
more, told him that perhaps it would be much wiser to say nothing more.
Opposition drives some natures blindly forward. Such natures should not
be opposed.

"I pity Mrs. Chepstow, too," he concluded. "Poor woman!"

And in saying that he spoke the truth. But his pity for her was not of
the kind that is akin to love.

The black coffee Mrs. Chepstow had persuaded Meyer Isaacson to take kept
him awake that night. Like some evil potion, it banished sleep and
peopled the night with a rushing crowd of thoughts. Presently he did not
even try to sleep. He gave himself to the crowd with a sort of
half-angry joy.

In the afternoon he had been secretly puzzled by Mrs. Chepstow. He had
wondered what under-reason she had for seeking an interview with him.
Now he surely knew that reason. Unless he was wrong, unless he
misunderstood her completely, she had come to make a curiously
audacious _coup_. She had seen Nigel Armine, she had read his strange
nature rightly; she had divined that in him there was a man who, unlike
most men, instinctively loved to go against the stream, who
instinctively turned towards that which most men turned from. She had
seen in him the born espouser of lost causes.

She was a lost cause. Armine was her opportunity.

Armine had talked to her four days ago of Meyer Isaacson. The Doctor
guessed how, knowing the generous enthusiasm of his friend. And she, a
clever woman, made distrustful by misfortune, had come to Cleveland
Square, led by feminine instinct, to spy out this land of which she had
heard so much. The Doctor's sensation of being examined, while he sat
with Mrs. Chepstow in his consulting-room, had been well-founded. The
patient had been reading the Doctor, swiftly, accurately. And she had
acted promptly upon the knowledge of him so rapidly acquired. She had
"given herself away" to him; she had shown herself to him as she was.
Why? To shut his mouth in the future. The revelation, such as it was,
had been made to him as a physician, under the guise of described
symptoms. She had told him the exact truth of herself in his
consulting-room, in order that he might not tell others--tell Nigel
Armine--what that truth was.

Her complete reliance upon her own capacity for reading character
surprised and almost delighted the Doctor. For there was something
within him which loved strength and audacity, which could appreciate
them artistically at their full value. She had given a further and a
fuller illustration of her audacity that evening in the restaurant.

Now, in the night, he could see her white face, the look in her
brilliant eyes above the painted shadows, as she told to Nigel the
series of lies about the interview in Cleveland Square, putting herself
in the Doctor's place, him in her own. She had enjoyed doing that,
enjoyed it intellectually. And she had forced the Doctor to dance to her
piping. He had been obliged to join her in her deceit--almost to back
her up in it.

He knew now why she had been alone at her table, why she had advertised
her ill success in the life she had chosen, her present abandonment by
men. This had been done to strike at Armine's peculiar temperament. It
was a very clever stroke.

But it was a burning of her boats.

Meyer Isaacson frowned in the night.

A woman like Mrs. Chepstow does not burn her boats for nothing. How much
did she expect to gain by that sacrifice of improper pride, a pride
almost dearer than life to a woman of her type? The _quid pro quo_--what
was it to be?

He feared for Nigel, as he lay awake while the night drew on towards
dawn.




VI


Mrs. Chepstow's sitting-room at the Savoy was decorated with pink and
green in pale hues which suited well her present scheme of colour. In it
there was a little rosewood piano. Upon that piano's music-desk, on the
following day, stood a copy of Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius," open at the
following words:

"Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo! Go forth upon thy
journey, Christian soul! Go from this world!"

Scattered about the room were _The Nineteenth Century and After_, _The
Quarterly Review_, the _Times_, and several books; among them Goethe's
"Faust," Maspero's "Manual of Egyptian Archaeology," "A Companion to
Greek Studies," Guy de Maupassant's "Fort Comme la Mort," D'Annunzio's
"Trionfo della Morte," and Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter." There was also
a volume of Emerson's "Essays." In a little basket under the
writing-table lay the last number of _The Winning Post_, carefully
destroyed. There were a few pink roses in a vase. In a cage some
canary-birds were singing. The furniture had been pulled about by a
clever hand until the room had lost something of its look of a room in a
smart hotel. The windows were wide open on to the balcony. They
dominated the Thames Embankment, and a light breeze from the water
stirred the white and green curtains that framed them.

Into this pretty and peacefully cheerful chamber Nigel Armine was shown
by a waiter at five o'clock precisely, and left with the promise that
Mrs. Chepstow should be informed of his arrival.

When the door had closed behind the German waiter's back, Nigel stood
for a moment looking around him. This was the first visit he had paid to
Mrs. Chepstow. He sought for traces of her personality in this room in
which she lived. He thought it looked unusually cosy for a room in an
hotel, although he did not discover, as Isaacson would have discovered
in a moment, that the furniture had been deftly disarranged. His eyes
roved quickly: no photographs, no embroideries, one or two extra
cushions, birds, a few perfect roses, a few beautifully bound books, the
windows widely opened to let the air stream in. And there was an open
piano! He went over to it and bent down.

"Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo! Go forth upon thy
journey, Christian soul! Go from this world!"

So she loved "Gerontius," that intimate musical expression of the wonder
and the strangeness of the Soul! He did not remember he had told her
that he loved it. He stood gazing at the score. The light wind came in
from the river far down below, and the curtains made a faint sound as
they moved. The canaries chirped intermittently. But Nigel heard the
voice of a priest by the side of one who was dying. And as he looked at
the chords supporting the notes on which the priest bade the soul of the
man return to its Maker, he seemed to hear them, as he had heard them,
played by a great orchestra; to feel the mysterious, the terrible, yet
beautiful act of dissolution.

He started. He had launched himself into space with the soul. Now,
abruptly, he was tethered to earth in the body. Had he not heard the
murmur of a dress announcing the coming of its wearer? He looked towards
the second door of the room, which opened probably into a bedroom. It
was shut, and remained shut. He came away from the piano. What books
was she fond of reading! Emerson--optimism in boxing-gloves;
Maspero--she was interested, then, in things Egyptian. "Faust"--De
Maupassant--D'Annunzio--Hawthorne, "The Scarlet Letter." He took this
last book, which was small and bound in white, into his hand. He had
known it once. He had read it long ago. Now he opened it, glanced
quickly through its pages. Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale--suddenly he
remembered the story, the sin of the flesh, the scarlet letter that
branded the sin upon the woman's breast while the man went unpunished.

And Mrs. Chepstow had it, bound in white.

"Are you judging my character by my books?"

A warm and careless voice spoke behind him. She had come in and was
standing close to him, dressed in white, with a black hat, and holding a
white parasol in her hand. In the sunshine she looked even fairer than
by night. Her pale but gleaming hair was covered by a thin veil, which
she kept down as she greeted Nigel.

"Not judging," he said, as he held her hand for a moment. "Guessing,
perhaps, or guessing at."

"Which is it? 'The Scarlet Letter'! I got it a year ago. I read it. And
when I had read it, I sent it to be bound in white."

"Why was that?"

"'Though your sin shall be as scarlet,'" she quoted.

He was silent, looking at her.

"Let us have tea."

As she spoke, she went, with her slow and careless walk which Isaacson
had noticed, towards the fireplace, and touched the electric bell. Then
she sat down on a sofa close to the cage of the canary-birds, and with
her back to the light.

"I suppose you are fearfully busy with engagements," she continued, as
he came to sit down near her. "Most people are, at this time of year.
One ought to be truly grateful for even five minutes of anybody's time.
I remember, ages ago, when I was one of the busy ones, I used to expect
almost servile thankfulness for any little minute I doled out. How
things change!"

She did not sigh, but laughed, and, without giving him time to speak,
added:

"Which of my other books did you look at?"

"I saw you had Maspero."

"Oh, I got that simply because I had met you. It turned my mind towards
Egypt, which I have never seen, although I've yachted all over the
place. Last night, after we had said good night, I couldn't sleep; so I
sat here and read Maspero for a while, and thought of your Egyptian
life. I didn't mean to be impertinent. One has to think of something."

"Impertinent!"

Her tone, though light, had surely been coloured with apology.

"Well, people are so funny--now. I remember the time when lots of them
were foolish in the opposite way. If I thought of them, they seemed to
take it as an honour. But then I wasn't thirty-eight, and I was in
society."

The German waiter came in with tea. When he had arranged it and gone
out, Nigel said, with a certain diffidence:

"I wonder you don't live in the country."

"I know what you mean. But you're wrong. One feels even more out of it
there."

She gave him his cup gently, with a movement that implied care for his
comfort, almost a thoughtful, happy service.

"The Rector is embarrassed, his wife appalled. The Doctor's 'lady,' much
as she longs for one's guineas, tries to stop him even from attending
one's dying bed. The Squire, though secretly interested to fervour, is
of course a respectable man. He is a 'stay' to country morality, and his
wife is a pair of stays. The neighbours respond in their dozens to the
_mot d'ordre_, and there one is _plantee_, like a lonely white moon
encircled by a halo of angry fire. Dear acquaintance, I've tried it.
Egypt--Omaha--anything would be better. What are you eating? Have one of
these little cakes. They really are good. I ordered them specially for
you and our small festivity."

She was smiling as she handed him the plate.

"I should think Egypt would be better!" exclaimed Nigel, with a strength
and a vehemence that contrasted almost startlingly with her light,
half-laughing tone. "Why don't you go there? Why don't you try the free
life?"

"Live among the tribes, like Lady Hester Stanhope in the Lebanon? I'm
afraid I could never train myself to wear a turban. Besides, Egypt is
fearfully civilized now. Every one goes there. I should be cut all up
the Nile."

The brutality of her frankness startled and almost pained him. For a
moment, in it he seemed to discern a lack of taste.

"You are right," she said; and suddenly the lightness died away
altogether from her voice. "But how is one not to get blunted? And even
long ago I always hated pretence. Women are generally pretending. And
they are wise. I have never been wise. If I were wise, I should not let
you see my lonely, stupid, undignified situation."

Suddenly she turned so that the light from the window fell full upon
her, and lifted her veil up over the brim of her hat.

"Nor my face, upon which, of course, must be written all sorts of
worries and sorrows. But I couldn't pretend at eighteen, nor can I at
thirty-eight. No wonder so many men--the kind of men you meet at your
club, at the Marlborough, or the Bachelors', or the Travellers'--call me
an 'ass of a woman.' I am an ass of a woman, a little--little--ass."

In saying the very last words all the severity slipped away out of her
voice, and as she smiled again and moved her head, emphasizing
humorously her own reproach to herself, she looked almost a girl.

"The 'little' applies to my mind, of course, not to my body; or perhaps
I ought to say to my soul, instead of to my body."

"No, 'little' would be the wrong adjective for your soul," Nigel said.

Mrs. Chepstow looked touched, and turned once more away from the light,
after Nigel had noticed that she looked touched.

"Have you seen your friend, Doctor Isaacson, to-day?" she said, seeming
to make an effort in changing the conversation. "I like that man, though
usually I dislike Jews because of their love for money. I like him, and
somehow I feel as if he had liked me the other night, as if he had felt
kindly towards me."

"Isaacson is a splendid fellow. I haven't seen him again. He has been
called away by a case. We were to have ridden together this morning, but
he sent to say it was impossible. He has gone into the country."

"Will he be away long?"

"I don't know. I hope not. I want him here badly."

"Oh?"

"I mean that he's congenial to me in many ways, and that congenial
spirits are rare."

"You must have troops of friends. You are a man's man."

"I don't know. What is a man's man?"

"A man like you."

"And a woman's man?" he asked, drawing his chair a little towards her.

"Every man's man is a woman's man."

"You say you cannot pretend. Cannot you flatter?"

"I can pretend to that extent, and sometimes do. But why should I
flatter you? I don't believe you care a bit about it. You love a kindly
truth. Who doesn't? I've just told you a kindly truth."

"I should like to tell you some kindly truths," he said.

"I'm afraid there are not many you, or any one else, could tell. I dare
say there are one or two, though, for I believe there is in every one
of us a little bit--almost infinitesimal, perhaps--of ineradicable good,
a tiny flame which no amount of drenching can ever extinguish."

"I know it."

"Oh, but it does want cherishing--cherishing--cherishing all the time,
the tiny flame of ineradicable good."

She took his cup quickly, and began to pour out some more tea for him,
like one ashamed of an outburst and striving to cover it up by action.

"Bring Doctor Isaacson to see me one day--if he'll come," she said, in a
changed, cool voice, the non-committal voice of the trained woman of the
world.

He felt that the real woman had for an instant risen to the surface, and
had sunk again into the depths of her; that she was almost ashamed of
this real, good woman. And he longed to tell her so, to say to her,
"Don't be ashamed. Let me see the real woman, the good woman. That is
the woman I seek when I am near you." But he did not dare to strike a
blow on her reserve.

"I will bring Isaacson," he said, quietly. "I want him to know you
really. Why are you smiling?"

"But--I am not smiling!"

Nor was she; and, seeing her quiet gravity and wonder, he was surprised
that he had imagined it.

"I must tell you," she said, "that though I took such a fancy to Doctor
Isaacson, I don't think he is like you; I don't think he is a
psychologist."

"You think me a psychologist?" said Nigel, in very honest surprise.

"Yes, and I'll tell you why, if you'll promise not to be offended."

"Please--please do."

"I think one reads character as much with the eyes of the heart as with
the eyes of the brain. You use two pairs of eyes in your reading. But I
am not sure that Doctor Isaacson does."

"Why did you ask me not to be offended? You meant to put it differently.
And you would have been right. Isaacson is a brilliant man, and I am
not. But he has as much heart as I, although he has so much more brain
than I. And the stronger each is, the better for a man."

"But the brain--oh, it has such a tendency to overshadow, to browbeat
the heart. In its strength it so often grows arrogant. The _juste
milieu_--I think you have it. Be content, and never let your brain cry
out for more, lest your heart should have to put up with less."

"You think too well of me," he said; "much too well."

She leaned forward over the tea-table and looked at him closely, with
the peculiar scrutiny of one so strongly concentrated upon the matter in
hand as to be absolutely unself-conscious.

"I wonder if I do," she said; and he felt as if she were trying to drag
the very heart out of him and to see how it was beating. "I wonder if I
do."

She relaxed her muscles, which had been tense, and leaned back, letting
her right hand, which for a moment had grasped the edge of the table,
drop down on to her lap.

"It may be so. I do think well of you. That is certain. And I'm afraid I
think very often badly of men. And yet I do try to judge fairly, and not
only to put on the black cap because of my own unfortunate experiences.
There are such splendid men--but there are such utter brutes. You must
know that. And yet I doubt if a man ever knows how good, or how bad,
another man can be. Perhaps one must be a woman thoroughly to know a
man--man, the beast and the angel."

"I dare say that is true."

He spoke almost with conviction. For all the time he had been with her
he had been companioned by a strange, unusual feeling of being
understood, of having the better part of him rightly appraised, and even
too greatly appreciated. And this feeling had warmed his mind and heart
almost as a generous wine warms the body.

"I'm sure it is true."

He put down his cup. Suddenly there had come to him the desire to go
away, to be alone. He saw the curtains moving gently by the windows, and
heard the distant, softened sound of the voices and the traffic of the
city. And he thought of the river, and the sunset, and the barges
swinging on the hurrying tide, and of the multitudes of eddies in the
water. Like those eddies were the thoughts within his mind, the feelings
within his heart. Were they not being driven onwards by the current of
time, onwards towards the spacious sea of action? Abruptly his heart was
invaded by a longing for largeness, a longing that was essential in his
nature, but that sometimes lay quiescent, for largeness of view, such as
the Bedouin has upon the desert that he loves and he belongs to;
largeness of emotion, largeness of action. Largeness was
manliness--largeness of thinking and largeness of living. Not the
drawing-room of the world, but the desert of the world, with its
exquisite oases, was the right place for a man. Yet here he was in a
drawing-room. At this moment he longed to go out from it. But he longed
also to catch this woman by the hand and draw her out with him. And he
remembered how Browning, the poet, had loved a woman who lay always in a
shrouded room, too ill to look on the sunshine or breathe the wide airs
of the world; and how he carried her away and took her to the peaks of
the Apennines. The mere thought of such a change in a life was like a
cry of joy.

"What is it?" said Mrs. Chepstow, surprised at the sudden radiance in
Nigel's face, seeing before her for the first time a man she could not
read, but a man whose physique now forcibly appealed to her--seemed to
become splendid under some inward influence, as a half-naked athlete's
does when he slowly fills his lungs, clenches his fists, and hardens all
his muscles. "What is it?"

But he did not tell her. He could not tell her. And he got up to go
away. As he passed the piano, he looked again at the score of "The Dream
of Gerontius."

"Are you fond of that?" he asked her.

"What? Oh--'Gerontius'"

She let her eyes rest for a brief instant on his face.

"I love it. It carries me away--as the soul is carried away by the
angel. 'This child of clay to me was given'--do you remember?"

"Yes."

He bade her good-bye. The last thing he looked at in her room was "The
Scarlet Letter," bound in white, lying upon her table. And he glanced
from it to her before he went out and shut the door.

Just outside in the corridor he met a neatly dressed French girl, whose
eyes were very red. She had evidently been crying long and bitterly. She
carried over her arm the skirt of a gown, and she went into the room
which communicated with Mrs. Chepstow's sitting-room.

"Poor girl!" thought Nigel. "I wonder what's the matter with her."

He went on down the corridor to the lift, descended, and made his way to
the Thames Embankment.

When the door shut behind him, Mrs. Chepstow remained standing for a
minute near the piano, waiting, like one expectant of a departing
guest's return. But Nigel did not come back to say any forgotten, final
word. Presently she realized that she was safely alone, and she went to
the piano, sat down, and struck the chords which supported the notes on
which the priest dismissed the soul. But she only played them for a
moment. Then, taking the music off the stand and throwing it on the
floor, she began to play a Spanish dance, lascivious, alluring, as full
of the body as the music of Elgar is full of the soul. And she played it
very well, as well, almost, as a hot-blooded girl of Seville could have
danced it. As she drew near the end, she heard a sound in the adjoining
room, and she stopped abruptly and called out:

"Henriette!"

There was no reply.

"Henriette!" Mrs. Chepstow called again.

The door of the bedroom opened, and the French girl with red eyes
appeared.

"Why don't you answer when I speak to you? How long have you been
there?"

"Two or three minutes, madame," said the girl, in a low voice.

"Did you meet any one in the corridor?"

"Yes, madame, a gentleman."

"Coming from here?"

"Yes, madame."

"Did he see you?"

"Naturally, madame."

"I mean--to notice you?"

"I think he did, madame."

"And did he see you go into my room--with those eyes?"

"Yes, madame."

An angry frown contracted Mrs. Chepstow's forehead, and her face
suddenly became hard and looked almost old.

"Heavens!" she exclaimed. "If there is a stupid thing to be done, you
are sure to--Go away! go away!"

The maid retreated quickly, and shut the door.

"Idiot!" Mrs. Chepstow muttered.

She knew the value of a last impression.

She went out on to her balcony and looked down to the Embankment, idly
watching the traffic, the people walking by.

Although she did not know it, Nigel was among them. He was strolling by
the river. He was looking at the sunset. And he was thinking of the poet
Browning, and of the woman whom love took from the shrouded chamber and
set on the mountain peaks.




VII


Although Nigel Armine was an enthusiast, and what many people called an
"original," he was also a man of the world. He knew the trend of the
world's opinion, he realized clearly how the world regarded any actions
that were not worldly. The fact that often he did not care did not mean
that he did not know. He was no ignorant citizen, and in his
acquaintance with Mrs. Chepstow his worldly knowledge did not forsake
him. Clearly he understood how the average London man--the man he met at
his clubs, at Ranelagh, at Hurlingham--would sum up any friendship
between Mrs. Chepstow and himself.

"Mrs. Chepstow's hooked poor old Armine!"

Something like that would be the verdict.

Were they friends? Could they ever be friends?

Nigel had met Mrs. Chepstow by chance in the vestibule of the Savoy. He
had been with a racing man whom he scarcely knew, but who happened to
know her well. This man had introduced them to each other carelessly,
and hurried away to "square things up with his bookie." Thus casually
and crudely their acquaintance was begun. How was it to continue?
Or--was it to continue?

Nigel was a strong man in the flower of his life. He was not a saint.
And he was beginning to wonder. And Isaacson, who was again in town, was
beginning to wonder, too.

During the season the Doctor was very busy. Many Americans and
foreigners desired to consult him. He adhered to his rule, and never
admitted a patient to his house after half-past five had struck, yet his
work was seldom over before the hour of seven. He could not see Nigel
often, because he could not see any one often; but he had seen him more
than once, more than once he had heard gossip about him, and he
realized, partly through knowledge, and partly through instinct, his
situation with Mrs. Chepstow. Nigel longed to be frank with Isaacson,
yet told him very little, held back by some strange reserve, subtly
inculcated, perhaps, by the woman. Other men told Isaacson far too much,
drawing evil inferences with the happy laughter of the beast and not of
the angel.

And the Doctor drew his own conclusion.

From the very first, he had realized that the acquaintance between this
socially ruined, no longer young, yet still fascinating woman, and this
young, enthusiastic man would be no slight, ephemeral thing. The woman
had willed it otherwise. And perhaps the almost ungovernable
root-qualities of Nigel had willed it otherwise, too, although he did
not know that. Enthusiasm plies a whip that starts steeds in a mad
gallop it is not easy to arrest. Even the vigorous force that started
them may be unable to pull them up.

Where exactly was Nigel going?

Smiling and sneering men in the clubs said, to a crude liaison. They
said more. They said the liaison was a fact, and marvelled that a fellow
like Armine should be willing to be "a bad last." Isaacson knew the
untruth of this gossip. There was no liaison. But would there ever be
one? Did Mrs. Chepstow intend that there should be one? Or had her
intention from the beginning been quite otherwise?

Isaacson did not know in detail what Nigel's past had been. He imagined
it, from the man's point of view, to have been unusually pure. But he
did not suppose it stainless. His keen eyes of a physician read the
ardour of Nigel's temperament. He made no mistake about his man. Nigel
ought to have married. That he had never done so was due to a sorrow in
early life, the death of a girl whom he had loved. Isaacson knew nothing
of this, and sometimes he had wondered why no woman captured this nature
so full of impulse and of sympathy, so full of just those qualities
which make good women happy. If Mrs. Chepstow should capture it, the
irony of life would be in flood.

Would she win the love as well as the pity and the chivalry of Nigel,
which she already had? Would she awaken the flesh of this man as well
as the spirit, and through spirit and flesh would she attain his soul?

And then?

Isaacson's sincerity was sorely tested by his friendship at this period.
Original though he was, and full of the sensitive nature's distaste for
marching with the mob, he was ranged with the mob against Nigel in this
affair of Mrs. Chepstow. Yet Nigel claimed him as an ally, a kindred
spirit. He was not explicit, but in their fugitive intercourse he was
perpetually implying. It was "You and I," and the rest of the world shut
out. Pity was working within him, chivalry was working, the generosity
of his soul, but also its fighting obstinacy. There was something in
Nigel which loved to have its back against the wall. He wanted to put
Isaacson into the same pugnacious position, facing the overwhelming
odds. But the overwhelming odds were on the same side as the Doctor. On
the whole, Isaacson was not sorry that he had so few hours to spare. For
he did not know what to do. Professional secrecy debarred him from
telling Nigel what Mrs. Chepstow had said of herself. What others said
of her would never set Nigel against her, but would always incline him
towards her.

So far Mrs. Chepstow and he were acquaintances. But already the moment
had come when Nigel was beginning to want of her more than mere
acquaintanceship, and, because of this driving want of more, to ask
himself whether he should require less. His knowledge of the world
might, or might not, have told him that with Mrs. Chepstow an
unembarrassed friendship would be difficult. That would have been
theory. Practice already taught him that the difficulty would probably
prove insurmountable even by his enthusiasm and courage. Were they
friends? Could they ever be friends?

Even while he asked himself the question, a voice within him answered,
"No."

Women who have led certain lives lose the faculty for friendship, if
they ever possessed it. Events have taught them, what instinct seems to
teach many women, to look on men as more physical even than they are.
And such women show their outlook perpetually, in word, in look, in
action, and in the indefinable _nuances_ of manner which make a person's
atmosphere. This outlook affects men, both shames them and excites them,
acting on god and brute. Neither shamed god nor brute with lifted head
is in the mood for friendship.

Mrs. Chepstow had this instinctive outlook on male creation, and not
even her delicate gifts as a _comedienne_ could entirely disguise it.

At last Nigel reached a crisis of restlessness and uncertainty, which
warned him that he must drift and delay no longer, but make up his mind
quite definitely what course he was going to take. He was not a man who
could live comfortably in indecision. He hated it, indeed, as an
attribute of weakness.

He must "have it out" with himself.

It was now July. The season would soon be over. And his acquaintance
with Mrs. Chepstow? Would that be over too? It might come to an end
quite naturally. He would go into the country, presently to Scotland for
the shooting. And she--where would she go? This question set him
thinking, as often in these last days--thinking about her loneliness, a
condition exaggerated and underlined by her to make an impression on
him. She did not seem to dwell upon it. She was far too clever for that.
But somehow it was always cropping up. When he paid her a visit, she was
scarcely ever out. And if she was in, she was invariably alone.
Sometimes she wore a hat and said she had just come in. Sometimes, when
he left her, she would say she was going out. But always the impression
created was of a very lonely woman, with no engagements and apparently
no friends, who passed the long summer days in solitude,
playing--generally "Gerontius"--upon the little rosewood piano, or
reading "The Scarlet Letter," or some sad or high-minded book. There was
no pose apparent in all this. Indeed, sometimes Mrs. Chepstow seemed
slightly confused, almost ashamed, at being so unoccupied, so unclaimed
by any society or any bright engagements. And more than once Nigel
suspected her of telling him white lies when she spoke of dining out
with "people" in the evening, or of joining a "party" for the play. For
he noticed that when she made such statements it was generally after
some remark, some little incident, which had indicated his pity. And he
divined the pride of a well-bred woman stirring within her, the desire
to conceal or to make the least of her unfortunate situation. Far from
posing to gain his pity, he believed her to be "playing up," if
possible, to avoid it. And this belief, not unnaturally, rendered it far
more keen. So he fell in with her intention.

Once or twice when, in mental colloquies, he played, as he supposed, the
part of the ordinary man of the world arguing out the question with the
impulsive, chivalrous man, he said, and insisted strongly, that a woman
such as Mrs. Chepstow, justifiably famous for beauty and scandalously
famous for very different reasons, if she sought to deceive--and of
course the man of the world thought such women compact of
deception--would try to increase her attraction by representing herself
as courted, desired, feted, run after by men. Such women always did
that. Never would she wish it to be known that she was undesired, that
she was abandoned. Men want what other men want. But who wants the
unwanted? The fact that Mrs. Chepstow allowed him to see and to realize
her solitude, so simply and so completely, proved to Nigel her almost
unwise unworldliness. The man of the world, so sceptical, was convinced.
And as to the enthusiast--he bowed down.

Nigel made the mistake of judging Mrs. Chepstow's capacity by the
measure of his own shrewdness, which in such a direction was not great.
What seemed the inevitable procedure of such a woman to Nigel's amount
of worldly cleverness, seemed the procedure to be avoided to Mrs.
Chepstow's amount of the same blessing. She seldom took the obvious
route in deception, as Isaacson had realized almost from the first
moment when he knew her. She paid people the compliment of crediting
them with astuteness, and thought it advisable to be not only more
clever than they were stupid, but more clever than they were clever.

And so Nigel's pity grew; and now, when he was "having it out" with
himself, he felt that when the season was over Mrs. Chepstow must miss
him, not because she had picked him out as a man specially attractive to
her, but simply because he had brought the human element into a very
lonely life. In their last conversation he had spoken of the end of the
season, of the exodus that would follow it.

"Oh--yes, of course," she had said, rather vaguely.

"Where are you going?"

She had sat for a moment in silence, and he had believed he followed the
movement of her thought. He had felt certain that she was considering
whether she would tell him a lie, recount some happy plan invented at
the moment to deceive him. Feeling this certainty, he had looked at her,
and his eyes had asked her to tell him the truth. And he had believed
that she yielded to them, when at length she said:

"I haven't any special plans. I dare say I shall stay on quietly here."

She had not given him an opportunity of making a rejoinder, but had at
once turned the conversation to some quite different topic. And again he
had divined pride working busily within her.

She must miss him.

She must miss any one who occasionally stepped in to break her solitude.
Sometimes he had wondered at this solitude's completeness. He wondered
again now. Everybody had their friends, their intimates, whether
delightful or preposterous. Who were hers? Of course the average woman
had "dropped" her long ago. But there are other women in London besides
the average woman. There are brilliant women of Bohemia, there are
clever women even belonging to society who "take their own way," and
know precisely whom they choose, whoever interests or attracts them.
And--there are friends, faithful through changes, misfortunes, even
disasters. Where were Mrs. Chepstow's? He did not dare to ask.

He recalled his first visit to her, not with any maudlin sentimentality,
but with a quiet earnestness: the empty room looking to the river, the
open piano and the music upon it, the few roses, and the books. He
recalled "The Scarlet Letter" bound in white, and her partial quotation
from the Bible in explanation of its binding. Abruptly she had stopped,
perhaps suddenly conscious of the application to herself. At tea she had
said of the cakes that were so good, "I ordered them specially for you
and our little festivity." There was a great simplicity in the words,
and in her voice when she had said them. In her loneliness, a cup of tea
drunk with him was a "festivity." He imagined her sitting alone in that
room in August, when the town is parched, dried up, and half deserted.
How would she pass her days?

He compared his life with hers, or rather with a life he imagined as
hers. And never before had he realized the brightness, even the
brilliance, of his life, with its multitudinous changes and activities,
its work--the glorious sweating with the brown labourers in the sand
flats at the edge of the Fayyum--its sport, its friendships, its
strenuous and its quiet hours, so dearly valued because they were rather
rare. It was a good life. It was almost a grand life. London now,
Scotland presently; then the late autumn, the train, the sight of the
sea, the cry of the siren, the throbbing of the engines, and
presently--Egypt! And then the winter of sunshine, and the songs of his
workmen, his smiling fellahin, and the reclaiming of the desert.

The reclaiming of the desert!

Nigel was alone in his bedroom in the Savoy. It was late at night. He
was in pajamas, smoking a cigar by the open window. He looked down to
the red carpet on which his bare feet were set in their red babouches,
and suddenly he realized the beauty of what he was doing in the Fayyum.
He had never really thought of it before in this way--of the reclaiming
of the desert; but now that he did think of it, he was glad, and his
heart bounded, looking forward in affection to the winter.

And her winter? What would that be like?

What an immense difference one honest, believing, and therefore
inspiring affection must make in a lonely life! Only one--that is
enough. And the desert is reclaimed.

He saw the brakes of sugar-cane waving, the tall doura swaying in the
breeze, where only the sands had been. And his brown cheeks glowed, as a
hot wave of blood went through them.

Progress! He loved to think of it. It was his passion. That grand old
Watts's picture, with its glow, its sacred glow of colour, in which was
genius! Each one must do his part.

And in that great hotel, how many were working consciously for the
cause?

Excitement woke in him. He thought of the rows and rows of numbered
doors in the huge building, and within, beyond each number, a mind to
think, a heart to feel, a soul to prompt, a body to act. And beyond his
number--himself! What was he doing? What was he going to do? He got up
and walked about his room, still smoking his cigar. His babouches
shuffled over the carpet. He kicked them off, and went on walking, with
bare, brown feet. Often in the Fayyum he had gone barefoot, like his
labourers. What was he going to do to help on the slow turning of the
mighty wheel of progress? He must not be a mere talker, a mere raver
about grand things, while accomplishing nothing to bring them about. He
despised those windy talkers who never act. He must not be one of them.
That night, when he sat down "to have it out" with himself, he had done
so for his own sake. He had been an egoist, had been thinking, perhaps
not solely but certainly chiefly, of himself. But in these lonely
moments men are generally essentially themselves. Nigel was not
essentially an egoist. And soon himself had been almost forgotten. He
had been thinking far more of Mrs. Chepstow than of himself. And now he
thought of her again in connection with this turning of the great wheel
of progress. At first he thought of her alone in this connection, then
of her and of himself.

It is difficult to do anything quite alone, anything wholly worth the
doing. That was what he was thinking. Nearly always some other intrudes,
blessedly intrudes, to give conscious, or unconscious, help. A man puts
his shoulder to the wheel, and in front of him he sees another shoulder.
And the sight gives him courage.

The thought of strenuous activity made him think of Mrs. Chepstow's
almost absolute inactivity. He saw her sitting, always sitting, in her
room, while life flowed on outside. He saw her pale face. That her face
was carefully made pale by art did not occur to him. And then again he
thought of Mrs. Browning and of the mountain peaks.

What was he going to do?

He made a strong mental effort, as he would have expressed it, to "get
himself in hand." Now, then, he must think it out. And he must "hold up"
his enthusiasm, and just be calm and reasonable, and even calculating.

He thought of the girl whom he had loved long ago and who had died.
Since her death he had put aside love as a passion. Now and then--not
often--a sort of travesty of love had come to him, the spectre of the
real. It is difficult for a young, strong man in the pride of his life
never to have any dealing either with love or with its spectre. But
Isaacson was right. Nigel's life had been much purer than are most men's
lives. Often he had fought against himself, and his own natural
inclination, because of his great respect for love. Not always had he
conquered. But the fights had strengthened the muscles of his will, and
each fall had shown him more clearly the sadness, almost the horror,
imprinted on the haggard features of the spectre of the real.

Mrs. Chepstow for years had been looking upon, had been living with,
that spectre, if what was said of her was true.

And Nigel did not deceive himself on this point. He did not
sentimentally exalt a courtesan into an angel, as boys so often do. Mrs.
Chepstow had certainly lived very wrongly, in a way to excite disgust,
perhaps, as well as pity. Yet within her were delicacy, simplicity, the
pride of breeding, even a curious reserve. She had still a love of fine
things. She cared for things ethereal. He thought of his first visit to
her, the open piano, "Proficiscere, anima Christiana," "The Scarlet
Letter," and her quotation. What had she been thinking while she played
Elgar's curiously unearthly music, while she read Hawthorne's pitiful
book? She had been using art, no doubt, as so many use it, as a means of
escape from life. And her escape had been not into filth or violence,
not into the salons of wit, or into the salons where secrets are
unveiled, but into the airy spaces with the angel, into the forest with
Hester and little Pearl.

Why could they not continue friends?

His body spoke in answer, and he laid the blame for the answer entirely
on himself. He condemned himself at that moment, was angry with himself,
cursed himself. And he cursed himself, not because he was morbid, but
because he was healthy-minded, and believed that his evil inclinations
had been aroused by his knowledge of Mrs. Chepstow's past. And that fact
was a beast, was something to be stamped on. He would never allow
himself comfortably to be that sort of man. Yet he was, it seemed,
enough that sort of man to make friendship with Mrs. Chepstow difficult,
perhaps impossible. If love had led him to such an inclination, he
would, being no prude, have understood it as a perfectly natural and
perfectly healthy thing. But he did not love Mrs. Chepstow. He would
never love, really love, again. For years he had said that to himself,
and had believed it. He said it again now. And even if he could renew
that strange power, to love, he could not love a woman who was not pure.
He felt certain of that. He thought of the dead girl and of Mrs.
Chepstow. But to-night he could not recall the dead girl's figure,
face, look, exactly. Mrs. Chepstow's he could, of course, recall. He
had seen her that very day. And the girl he had loved had been dead for
many years. She lived in his memory now rather as a symbol of purity and
beauty than as a human being.

Mrs. Chepstow, of course, would never find a man sincerely to love her
now.

And yet why not! Suddenly Nigel checked himself, as he generally did
when he found himself swiftly subscribing to the general opinion of the
great mass of men. Why not? The shoulder to the wheel; it was nearly
always the shoulder of love--love of an idea, love of a woman, love of
humanity, love of work, love of God. All the men he knew, or very nearly
all, would laugh at the idea of Mrs. Chepstow being sincerely loved. But
the fact that they would laugh could have no effect on a manly heart or
a manly spirit.

He felt almost angry with her for the loneliness and the immobility
which pained his chivalry and struck at his sense of pity. If he could
think of her as going away, too, as wandering, in Switzerland, in Italy,
in some lovely place, he would feel all right. But always he saw her
seated in that room, alone, deserted, playing the piano, reading, with
no prospect of company, of change. Mrs. Chepstow had acted her part
well. She had stamped a lonely image upon the retina of Nigel's
imagination.

He was still walking about his room in bare feet. But his cigar had gone
out, though it was still between his lips. The hour was very late. He
heard a distant clock strike two. And just after he had listened to its
chime, followed by other chimes in near and distant places of the city,
the night idea of a strong and young man came to him.

If he could not be friends with Mrs. Chepstow, could he be--the other
thing to her!

He put up his hand to his lips, took away the cigar, and flung it out of
the window violently. And this physical violence was the echo of his
mental violence. She might allow such a thing. Often, if half of what
was said of her was true, she had entered into a similar relation with
other men. He would not believe that "often." He put it differently.
She had certainly entered into a similar relation with some men--perhaps
with two or three, multiplied by scandal--in the past. Would she enter
into it with him, if he asked her? And would he ever ask her?

He threw himself down again in his arm-chair, and stared at his bare
feet planted firmly on the floor. But he saw, not his feet, but the ugly
spectre of love, that hideous, damnable ghost, that most pretentious of
all pretensions. She had lived with the ghost till she had become pale
like a ghost. In the picture of "Progress," which he loved, there was a
glow, a glory of light, raying out to a far horizon. It would be putting
a shoulder to the wheel to set a glow in the cheeks of a woman, not a
glow of shame but of joy. And to be--and then Nigel used to himself that
expression of the laughing men in the clubs--"a bad last!" No, that sort
of thing was intolerable.

Suddenly the ghost faded away, and he saw his brown feet. They made him
think at once of the sun, of work, of the good, real, glowing life.

No, no; none of those intolerable beastlinesses for him. That thought,
that imagination, it was utterly, finally done with. He drew a long
breath, and stretched up his arms, till the loose sleeves of his
night-suit fell down, exposing the strong, brown limbs. And as he had
looked at his feet, he looked at them, then felt them, thumped them, and
rejoiced in the glory of health. But the health of mind and heart was
essential to the complete health of the body. He felt suddenly
strong--strong for more than one, as surely a man should be--strong for
himself, and his woman, for her who belongs to him, who trusts him, who
has blotted out--it comes to that with a woman who loves--all other men
for him.

Was he really condemned to an eternal solitude because of the girl who
had died so many years ago? For his life was a solitude, as every
loveless life is, however brilliant and strenuous. He realized that, and
there came to him a thought that was natural and selfish. It was this:
How good it must be to be exclusively loved by a woman, and how a
woman, whom men and the world have abandoned, must love the man who
comes, like a knight through the forest, and carries her away, and takes
her into his life, and gives her back self-respect, and a place among
women, and, above all, the feeling that of all feelings a woman holds
dearest, "Somebody wants me." It must be good to be loved as such a
woman would love. His generosity, which instinctively went out to
abandoned things, walked hand in hand with man's eternal, indestructible
selfishness that night, as he thought of Mrs. Chepstow for the first
time as married again to some man who cared not for the world's opinion,
or who cared for it so much as to revel in defying it.

How would she love such a man?

He began to wonder about that part of her nature dedicated to, designed
for, love.

With him she was always perfectly simple, and seemed extremely frank.
But he felt now that in her simplicity she had always been reserved,
almost strangely reserved for such a woman. Perhaps that reserve had
been her answer to his plainly shown respect. Just because of her
position, he had been even more respectful to her than he was to other
women, following in this a dictate of his temperament. What would she be
like in the unreserve of a great love?

And now a fire was kindled in Nigel, and began to burn up fiercely. He
felt, very consciously and definitely, the fascination of this woman. Of
course, he had always been more or less subject to it. Isaacson had
known that when he saw Nigel draw his chair nearer to hers at the
supper-table in the Savoy. But he had been subject to it without ever
saying to himself, "I am in subjection." He had never supposed that he
was in subjection. The abrupt consciousness of how it was with him
excited him tremendously. After the long interval of years, was he to
feel again the powerful fever, and for a woman how different from the
woman he had loved? She stood, in her young purity, at one end of the
chain of years, and Mrs. Chepstow--did she really stand at the other?

He seemed to see these two looking at each other across the space that
was set by Time, and for a moment his face contracted. But he had
changed while traversing that space. Then he was an eager boy, in the
joy of his bounding youth. Now he was a vigorous man. And during the
interval that separated boy from man had come up in him his strong love
of humanity, his passion for the development of the good that lies
everywhere, like the ore in gold-bearing earth. That love had perhaps
been given to him to combine the two loves, the altruistic love, and the
love for a woman bringing its quick return.

The two faces of women surely softened as they gazed now upon each
other.

Such loves in combination might crown his life with splendour. Nigel
thought that, with the enthusiasm which was his birthright, which set
him so often apart from other men. And, moving beneath such a splendour,
how absolutely he could defy the world's opinion! Its laughter would be
music, its sneering word only the signal to a smile.

But--he must think--he must think--

He sprang up, pulled up his loose sleeves to his shoulders, tucked them
together, and with bared arms leaned out to the night, holding his hands
against his cheeks.




VIII


Mrs. Chepstow had said to Nigel, "Bring Doctor Isaacson--if he'll come."
He had never gone, though Nigel had told him of her words, had told him
more than once. Without seeming deliberately to avoid the visit, he had
deliberately avoided it. He never had an hour to spare in the day, and
Nigel knew it. But he might have gone on a Sunday. It happened that, at
present, on Sundays he was always out of town.

He had said to himself, "_Cui bono?_"

He had the sensitive nature's dislike of mingling intimately in the
affairs of others, and moreover he felt instinctively that if he tried
to play a true friend's part to Nigel, he might lose Nigel as a friend.
His clear insight would be antagonistic to Nigel's blind enthusiasm,
his calm worldly knowledge would seem only frigid cruelty to Nigel's
generosity and eagerness in pity. And, besides, Isaacson had a strong
personal repulsion from Mrs. Chepstow, a repulsion almost physical.

The part of him that was Jewish understood the part of her that was
greedy far too well. And he disliked, while he secretly acknowledged,
his own Jewishness. He seldom showed this dislike, even subtly, to the
world and never showed it crudely, as do many of Jewish blood, by a
strange and hideous anti-Semitism. But it was always alive within him,
always in conflict with something belonging to his nature's artistic
side, a world-feeling to which race-feeling seemed stupid and very
small. The triumphs of art aroused this world-feeling within him, and in
his love of art he believed that he touched his highest point. As
Isaacson's mental unconventionality put him _en rapport_ with Nigel, his
Jewishness, very differently, put him _en rapport_ with her. There is a
communion of repulsion as well as a communion of affection. Isaacson
knew that Mrs. Chepstow and he could be linked by their dislike. His
instinct was to avoid her, not to let this link be formed. Subsequent
circumstances made him ask himself whether men do not often call things
towards them with the voices of their fears.

The season was waning fast, was nearly at an end, when one night, very
late, Nigel called in Cleveland Square. Isaacson had just come back from
dining with the Dean of Waynfleet when the bell rang. He feared a
professional summons, and was relieved when a sleepy servant asked if he
would see Mr. Armine. They met in a small, upstairs room where Isaacson
sat at night, a room lined with books, cosy, but perhaps a little
oppressive. As Nigel came in quickly with a light coat over his arm and
a crush hat in his hand, a clock on the mantel piece struck one.

"I caught sight of you just now in St. James's Street in your motor, or
I wouldn't have come so late," Nigel said. "Were you going straight to
bed? Tell me the truth. If you were, I'll be off."

"I don't think I was. I've been dining out, and should have had to read
something. That's why you kept your coat?"

"To demonstrate my good intention. Well!"

He put the coat and hat on a chair.

"Will you have anything?"

"No, thanks."

Nigel sat down in an arm-chair.

"I've seen so little of you, Isaacson. And I'm going away to-morrow."

"You've had enough of it?"

"More than enough."

Isaacson was sitting by a table on which lay a number of books. Now and
then he touched one with his long and sallow fingers, lifted its cover,
then let it drop mechanically.

"You are coming back in the autumn?"

"For some days, in passing through. I'm going to Egypt again."

"I envy you--I envy you."

As he looked at Nigel's Northern fairness, and thought of his own
darkness, it seemed to him that he should be going to the sun, Nigel
remaining in the lands where the light is pale. Perhaps a somewhat
similar thought occurred to Nigel, for he said:

"You ought to go there some day. You'd be in your right place there.
Have you ever been?"

"Never. I've often wanted to go."

"Why don't you go?"

Isaacson's mind asked that question, and his Jewishness replied. He made
money in London. Every day he spent out of London was a loss of so much
money.

"Some day," Nigel continued, "you must take a holiday and see Egypt."

"This winter?" said Isaacson.

He lifted the cover of a book. His dark, shining, almost too intelligent
eyes looked at Nigel, and looked away.

"Not this winter," he added, quietly.

"But--why not this winter?"

Nigel spoke with a slight embarrassment.

"I couldn't get away. I have too much work. You'll be in the Fayyum?"

Nigel was staring at the Oriental carpet. His strong hands lay palm
downwards on the arms of his chair, pressing them hard.

"I shall go there," he replied.

"And live under the tent? I met a man last night who knows you, an
Egyptian army man on leave, Verreker. He told me you were reclaiming
quite a lot of desert."

"I should like to reclaim far more than I ever can. It's a good task."

"Hard work?"

"Deuced hard. That's why I like it."

"I know; man's love of taming the proud spirit."

"Is it that? I don't think I bother much about what prompts me to a
thing. But--I say, Isaacson, sometimes it seems to me that you have a
devilish long sight into things, an almost uncanny long sight."

He leaned forward.

"But in you I don't mind it."

"I don't say I acknowledge it. But why should you mind it in any one?"

Nigel quoted some words of Mrs. Chepstow, but Isaacson did not know he
quoted.

"Hasn't the brain a tendency to overshadow, to brow-beat the heart?" he
said. "Isn't it often arrogant in its strength?"

"One must let both have an innings," said Isaacson, smiling at the slang
which suited him so little and suited Nigel so well.

"Yes, and I believe you do. That's why--but to go on with what we were
saying. You've got a long sight into things. Now, living generally, as
you do, here in London, don't you think that men and women living in
crowds often get off the line of truth and kindness? Don't you think
that being all together, backed up, as it were, by each other--as a
soldier is by his regiment when going into battle--they often become
hard, brutal, almost get the blood-lust into them at times?"

Isaacson did not reply for a moment.

"Perhaps sometimes they do," he answered at last.

"And don't you think they require sacrifices?"

"Do you mean human sacrifices?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps--sometimes."

"Why have you never been to call on Mrs. Chepstow?"

Again the sallow fingers began to play with the book-covers, passing
from one to another, but always slowly and gently.

"I haven't much time for seeing any one, except my patients, and the
people I meet in society."

"And of course you never meet Mrs. Chepstow in society."

"Well--no, one doesn't."

"She would have liked a visit from you, and she's very much alone."

"Is she?"

"Are you stopping on much longer in London?"

"Till the twelfth or fifteenth of August."

"She is stopping on, too."

"Mrs. Chepstow! In the dog-days!"

"She doesn't seem to have anywhere special to go to."

"Oh!"

Isaacson opened a book, and laid his hand upon a page. It happened to be
a book on poisons and their treatment. He smoothed the page down
mechanically and kept his hand there.

"I say, Isaacson, you couldn't have the blood-lust?"

"I hope not. I think not."

"I believe you hate it as I do, hate and loathe it with all your soul.
But I've always felt that you think for yourself, and don't care a rap
what the world is thinking. I've looked in to-night to say good-bye, and
to ask you, if you can get the time, just to give an eye to--to Mrs.
Chepstow now and again. I know she would value a visit from you, and she
really is infernally lonely. If you go, she won't bore you. She's a
clever woman, and cares for things you care for. Will you look in on her
now and then?"

Isaacson lifted his hand from the book.

"I will call upon her," he said.

"Good!"

"But are you sure she wishes it?"

"Quite sure--for she told me so."

The simplicity of this answer made Isaacson's mind smile and something
else in him sigh.

"I have to go into the country," Nigel said. "I've got to see Harwich
and Zoe, my sister-in-law you know, and my married sister--"

A sudden look of distress came into his eyes. He got up. The look of
distress persisted.

"Good-night, Isaacson, old fellow!"

He grasped the Doctor's hand firmly, and his hand was warm and strong.

"Good-night. I like to feel I know one man who thinks so entirely for
himself as you do. For--I know you do. Good-bye."

The look of distress had vanished, and his sincere eyes seemed to shine
again with courage and with strength.

"Good-bye."

When he was gone, Isaacson stood by the mantel-piece for nearly five
minutes, thinking and motionless. The sound of the little clock striking
roused him. He lifted his head, looked around him, and was just going to
switch off the light, when he noticed the open book on his table. He
went to shut it up.

"It must be ever remembered that digitalin is a cumulative poison, and
that the same dose, harmless if taken once, yet frequently repeated
becomes deadly; this peculiarity is shared by all poisons affecting the
heart."

He stood looking at the page.

"This peculiarity is shared by all poisons affecting the heart."

He moved his head as if in assent. Then he closed the book slowly and
switched off the light.

On the August Bank Holiday, one of the most dreadful days of London's
year, he set out to call on Mrs. Chepstow.

A stagnant heat pervaded London. There were but few people walking. Few
vehicles drove by. Here and there small groups of persons, oddly
dressed, and looking vacant in their rapture, stared, round-eyed, on the
town. Londoners were in the country, staring, round-eyed, on fields and
woods. The policemen looked dull and heavy, as if never again would any
one be criminal, and as if they had come to know it. Bits of paper blew
aimlessly about, wafted by a little, feverish breeze, which rose in
spasms and died away. An old man, with a head that was strangely bald,
stared out from a club window, rubbed his enquiring nose, looked back
into the room behind him and then stared out again. An organ played "The
Manola," resuscitated from a silence of many years.

London was at its summer saddest.

Could Mrs. Chepstow be in it? Soon Isaacson knew. In the entrance hall
of the Savoy, where large and lonely porters were dozing, he learnt that
she was at home. So be it. He stepped into the lift, and presently
followed a servant to her door. The servant tapped. There was no answer.
He tapped again more loudly, while Isaacson waited behind him.

"Come in!" called out a voice.

The servant opened the door, announcing:

"Doctor Meyer Isaacson."

Mrs. Chepstow had perhaps been sitting on her balcony, for when Isaacson
went in she was in the opening of a window space, standing close to a
writing-table, which had its drawers facing the window. Behind her, on
the balcony, there was a small arm-chair.

"Doctor Meyer Isaacson!" she said, with an intonation of surprise.

The servant went out and shut the door.

"How quite amazing!"

"But--why, Mrs. Chepstow?"

He had taken and dropped her hand. As he touched her, he remembered
holding her wrist in his consulting room. The sensation she had
communicated to him then she communicated again, this time perhaps more
strongly.

"Why? It is Bank Holiday! And you never come to see me. By the way, how
clever of you to divine that I should be in on such a day of universal
going out."

"Even men have their intuitions."

"Don't I know it, to my cost? But to-day I can only bless man's
intuition. Where will you sit?"

"Anywhere."

"Here, then."

He sat down on the sofa, and she in a chair, facing the light. She was
without a hat. Isaacson wondered what she had been doing all the day,
and why she was in London. That she had her definite reason he knew, as
a woman knows when another woman is wearing a last year's gown. As their
eyes met, he felt strongly the repulsion he concealed. Yet he realized
that Mrs. Chepstow was looking less faded, younger, more beautiful than
when last he had been with her. She was very simply dressed. It seemed
to him that the colour of her hair was changed, was a little brighter.
But of this he was not sure. He was sure, however, that a warmth, as of
hope, subtly pervaded her whole person. And she had seemed hard, cold,
and almost hopeless on the day of her visit to him.

A woman lives in the thoughts of men about her. At this moment Mrs.
Chepstow lived in Isaacson's thought that she looked younger, less
faded, and more beautiful. Her vanity was awake. His thought of her had
suddenly increased her value in her own eyes, made her think she could
attract him. She had scarcely tried to attract him the first time that
she had met him. But now he saw her go to her armoury to select the
suitable weapon with which to strike him. And he began to understand why
she had calmly faced the light. Never could such a man as Nigel get so
near to Mrs. Chepstow as Doctor Meyer Isaacson, even though Nigel should
love her and Isaacson learn to hate her. At that moment Isaacson did
not hate her, but he almost hated his divination of her, the "Kabala,"
he carried within him and successfully applied to her.

"What has kept you in this dreary city, Doctor Isaacson," she said. "I
thought I was absolutely alone in it."

"People are still thinking they are ill."

"And you are still telling them they are not?"

"That depends!"

"I believe you have adopted that idea, that no one is ill, as a curative
method. And really there may be something in it. I fancied I was ill.
You told me I was well. Since that day something--your influence, I
suppose--seems to have made me well. I think I believe in you--as a
doctor."

"Why spoil everything by concluding with a reservation?"

"Oh, but your career is you!"

"You think I have sunk my humanity in ambition?"

"Well, you are in town on Bank Holiday!"

"In town to call on you!"

"You were so sure of finding me on such a day?"

She sent him a look which mocked him.

"But, seriously," she continued, "does not the passion for science in
you dominate every other passion? For science--and what science brings
you?"

With a sure hand she had touched his weak point. He had the passion to
acquire, and through his science of medicine he acquired.

"You cannot expect me to allow that I am dominated by anything," he
answered. "A man will seldom make a confession of slavery even to
himself, if he really is a man."

"Oh, you really are a man, but you have in you something of the woman."

"How do you know that?"

"I don't know it; I feel it."

"Feeling is woman's knowledge."

"And what is man's?"

"Do women think he has any?"

"Some men have knowledge--dangerous men, like you."

"In what way am I dangerous?"

"If I tell you, you will be more so. I should be foolish to lead you to
your weapons."

"You want no leading to yours."

It was, perhaps, almost an impertinence; but he felt she would not think
it so, and in this he accurately appraised her taste, or lack of taste.
Delicacy, reverence, were not really what she wanted of any man. Nigel
might pray to a pale Madonna; Isaacson dealt with a definitely blunted
woman of the world. And in his intercourse with people, unless indeed he
loved them, he generally spoke to their characters, did not hold
converse with his own, like a man who talks to himself in an unlighted
room.

She smiled.

"Few women do, if they have any."

"Is any woman without them?"

"Yes, one."

"Name her."

"The absolutely good woman."

For a moment he was silent, struck to silence by the fierceness of her
cynicism, a fierceness which had leapt suddenly out of her as a drawn
sword leaps from its sheath.

"I don't acknowledge that, Mrs. Chepstow," he said--and at this moment
perhaps he was the man talking to himself in the dark, as Nigel often
was.

"Of course not. No man would."

"Why not?"

"Men seldom name, even to themselves, the weapons by which they are
conquered. But women know what those weapons are."

"The Madame Marneffes, but not the Baroness Hulots."

"A Baroness Hulot never counts."

"Is it really clever of you to generalize about men? Don't you
differentiate among us at all?"

He spoke entirely without pique, of which he was quite unconscious.

"I do differentiate," she replied. "But only sometimes, not always.
There are broad facts which apply to men, however different they may be
from one another. There are certain things which all men feel, and feel
in much the same way."

"Nigel Armine and I, for instance?"

A sudden light--was it a light of malice?--flashed in her brilliant
eyes.

"Yes, even Mr. Armine and you."

"I shall not ask you what they are."

"Perhaps the part of you which is woman has informed you."

Before she said "woman" she had paused. He felt that the word she had
thought of, and had wished to use, was "Jewish." Her knowledge of him,
while he disliked it because he disliked her, stirred up the part of him
which was mental into an activity which he enjoyed. And the enjoyment,
which she felt, increased her sense of her own value. Conversation ran
easily between them. He discovered, what he had already half suspected,
that, though not strictly intellectual--often another name for
boring--she was far more than merely shrewd. But her mentality seemed to
him hard as bronze. And as bronze reflects the light, her mentality
seemed to reflect all the cold lights in her nature. But he forgot the
stagnant town, the bald-headed man at the club window, the organ and
"The Manola." Despite her generalizing on men, with its unexpressed
avowal of her deep-seated belief in physical weapons, she had chosen
aright in her armoury. His brain had to acknowledge it. There again was
the link between them. When at last he got up to go, she said:

"I suppose you will soon be leaving London?"

"I expect to get away on the fifteenth. Are you staying on?"

"I dare say I shall. You wonder what I do here?"

"Yes."

"I am out a great deal on my balcony. When you came I was there."

She made a movement towards it.

"Would you like to see my view?"

"Thank you."

As he followed her through the window space, he was suddenly very
conscious of the physical charm that clung about her. All her movements
were expressive, seemed very specially hers. They were like an integral
part of a character--her character. They had almost the individuality of
an expression in the eyes. And in her character, in her individuality,
mingled with much he hated was there not something that charmed? He
asked himself the question as he stood near her on the balcony. And now,
escaped from her room, even at this height there came upon him again the
hot sluggishness of London. The sun was shining brightly, the air was
warm and still, the view was large and unimpeded; but he felt a strange,
almost tropical dreariness that seemed to him more dreadful than any
dreariness of winter.

"Do you spend much of your time here?" he said.

"A great deal. I sit here and read a book. You don't like it?"

She turned her bright eyes, with their dilated pupils, slowly away from
his, and looked down over the river.

"I do. But there's a frightful dreariness in London on such a day as
this. Surely you feel it?"

"No. I don't feel such things this summer."

In saying the words her voice had altered. There was a note of triumph
in it. Or so Isaacson thought. And that warmth, as of hope, in her had
surely strengthened, altering her whole appearance.

"One has one's inner resources," she added, quietly, but with a thrill
in her voice.

She turned to him again. Her tall figure--she was taller than he by at
least three inches--was beautiful in its commanding, yet not vulgar,
self-possession. Her thin and narrow hands held the balcony railing
rather tightly. Her long neck took a delicate curve when she turned her
head towards him. And nothing that time had left of beauty to her
escaped his eyes. He had eyes that were very just.

"Did you think I had none?"

Suddenly he resolved to speak to her more plainly. Till this moment she
had kept their conversation at a certain level of pretence. But now her
eyes defied him, and he replied to their defiance.

"Do you forget how much I know of you?" he said.

"Do you mean--of the rumours about me?"

"I mean what you told me of yourself."

"When was that? Oh, do you mean in your consulting room? And you believe
all a woman tells you?"

She smiled at him satirically.

"I believe what you told me that day in my consulting-room, as
thoroughly as I disbelieve what you told me, and Mr. Armine, the night
we met you at supper."

"And what are your grounds for your belief and disbelief?"

"Suppose I said my instinct?"

"I should answer, by all means trust it, if you like. Only do not expect
every one to trust it, too."

Her last words sounded almost like a half-laughing menace.

"Why should I want others to trust it?" he asked, quietly.

"I leave your instinct to tell you that, my dear Doctor," she answered
gently, with a smile.

"Well," he said, "I must say good-bye. I must leave you to your inner
resources. You haven't told me what they are."

"Can't you imagine?"

"Spiritual, I suppose!"

"You've guessed it--clever man!"

"And your gospel of Materialism, which you preached to me so powerfully,
gambling, yachting, racing, motoring, theatre-going, eating and
drinking, in the 'for to-morrow we die' mood: those pleasures of the
typical worldly life of to-day which you said you delighted in? You have
replaced them all satisfactorily with 'inner resources'?"

"With inner resources."

Her smiling eyes did not shrink from his. He thought they looked hard as
two blue and shining jewels under their painted brows.

"Good-bye--and come again."

While Isaacson walked slowly down the corridor, Mrs. Chepstow opened her
writing-table drawer, and took from it a packet of letters which she had
put there when the servant first knocked to announce the visitor.

The letters were all from Nigel.




IX


Isaacson did not visit Mrs. Chepstow again before he left London for his
annual holiday. More than once he thought of going. Something within him
wanted to go, something that was perhaps intellectually curious. But
something else rebelled. He felt that his finer side was completely
ignored by her. Why should he care what she saw in him or what she
thought about it? He asked himself the question. And when he answered
it, he was obliged to acknowledge that she had made upon his nature a
definite impression. This impression was unfavorable, but it was too
distinct. Its distinctness gave a measure of her power. He was aware
that, much as he disliked Mrs. Chepstow, much as he even shrank from
her, with a sort of sensitive loathing, if he saw her very often he
might come to wish to see her. Never had he felt like this towards any
other woman. Does not hatred contain attraction? By the light of his
dislike of Mrs. Chepstow, Isaacson saw clearly why she attracted Nigel.
But during those August days, in the interior combat, his Jewishness
conquered his intellectual curiosity, and he did not go again to the
Savoy.

His holiday was spent abroad on the Lake of Como, and quite alone. Each
year he made a "retreat," which he needed after the labours of the year,
labours which obliged him to be perpetually with people. He fished in
the green lake, sketched in the lovely garden of the almost deserted
hotel, and passed every day some hours in scientific study.

This summer he was reading about the effects of certain little-known
poisons. He spent strange hours with them. He had much imagination, and
they became to him like living things, these agents of destruction.
Sometimes, after long periods passed with them, he would raise his head
from his books, or the paper on which he was taking notes, and, seeing
the still green waters of the lake, the tall and delicate green
mountains lifting their spires into the blue, he would return from his
journey along the ways of terror, and, dazed, like a tired traveller, he
would stare at the face of beauty. Or when he worked by night, after
hours during which the swift action of the brain had rendered him deaf
to the sounds without, suddenly he would become aware of the chime of
bells, of bells in the quiet waters and on the dreaming shores. And he
would lift his head and listen, till the strangeness of night, and of
the world with its frightful crimes and soft enchantments, stirred and
enthralled his soul. And he compared his two lives, this by the quiet
lake, alone, filled with research and dreams, and that in the roar of
London, with people streaming through his room. And he seemed to himself
two men, perhaps more than two.

Soon the four weeks by the lake were gone. Then followed two weeks of
travel--Milan, Munich, Berlin, Paris. And then he was home again.

He had heard nothing of Nigel, nothing of Mrs. Chepstow.

September died away in the brown arms of October, and at last a letter
came from Nigel. It was written from Stacke House, a shooting-lodge in
Scotland, and spoke of his speedy return to the South.

"I am shooting with Harwich," he wrote, "but must soon be thinking about
my return to Egypt. I didn't write to you before, though I wanted to
thank you for your visit to Mrs. Chepstow. You can't think how she
appreciated it. She was delighted by your brilliant talk and sense of
humour, but still more delighted by your cordiality and kindness. Of
late she hasn't had very much of the latter commodity, and she was quite
bowled over. By Jove, Isaacson, if men realized what a little true
kindness means to those who are down on their luck, they'd have to 'fork
out,' if only to get the return of warm affection. But they don't
realize.

"I sometimes think the truest thing said since the Creation is that
'They know not what they do.' Add, 'and what they leave undone,' and you
have an explanation of most of the world's miseries. Good-bye, old chap.
I shall come to Cleveland Square directly I get to London. Thank you for
that visit. Yours ever, Nigel Armine."

Nigel's enthusiasm seemed almost visibly to exhale from the paper as
Isaacson held the letter in his hands. "Your cordiality and kindness."
So that had struck Mrs. Chepstow--the cordiality and kindness of his,
Isaacson's manner! Of course she and Nigel were in correspondence.
Isaacson remembered the occasional notes almost of triumph in her
demeanour. She had had letters from Nigel during his absence from
London. His letters--the hope in her face. Isaacson saw her on the
balcony looking out over the river. Had she not looked out as the human
soul looks out upon a prospect of release? In the remembrance of them
her expression and her attitude became charged with more definite
meaning. And he surely grasped that meaning, which he had wondered about
before.

Yet Nigel said nothing. And all this time he had been away from Mrs.
Chepstow. Such an absence was strange, and seemed unlike him, quite
foreign to his enthusiastic temperament, if Isaacson's surmise was
correct. But perhaps it was not correct. That well-spring of human
kindness which bubbled up in Nigel, might it not, perhaps, deceive?

"Feeling is woman's knowledge." Isaacson had said that. Now mentally he
added, "And sometimes it is man's." He felt too much about Nigel, but
he strove to put his feeling away.

Presently he would know. Till then it was useless to debate. And he had
very much to do.

Not till nearly the end of October did Nigel return to London. The
leaves were falling in battalions from the trees. The autumn winds had
come, and with them the autumn rain, that washes sadly away the last
sweet traces of summer. Everywhere, through country and town, brooded
that grievous atmosphere of finale which in England seldom or never
fails to cloud the waning year.

The depression that is characteristic of this season sent many people to
doctors. Day after day Isaacson sat in his consulting-room, prescribing
rather for the minds of men than for their bodies, living rather with
their misunderstood souls than with their physical symptoms. And this
year his patients reacted on him far more than usual. He felt almost as
if by removing he received their ills, as if their apprehensions were
communicated to his mind, as germs are communicated to the body, and as
if they stayed to do evil. He told himself that his holiday had not
rested him enough. But he never thought for a moment of diminishing his
work. Success swept him ever onward to more exertion. As his power grew,
his appetite for it grew. And he enjoyed his increasing fortune.

At last Nigel rang at his door. Isaacson could not see him, but sent out
word to make an appointment for the evening. They were to meet at eight
at an orchestral concert in Queen's Hall.

Isaacson was a little late in keeping this engagement. He came in
quickly and softly between two movements of Tschaikowsky's "Pathetic
Symphony," found Nigel in his stall, and, with a word, sat down beside
him. The conductor raised his baton. The next movement began.

In the music there was a throbbing like the throbbing of a heart, that
persisted and persisted with a beautiful yet terrible monotony. Often
Isaacson had listened to this symphony, been overwhelmed by the two
effects of this monotony, an effect of loveliness and an effect of
terror that were inextricably combined. To-night, either because he was
very tired or for some other reason, the mystery of the sadness of this
music, which floats through all its triumph, appealed to him more than
usual, and in a strangely poignant way. The monotonous pulsation was
like the pulse of life, that life in which he and the man beside him
were for a time involved, from which presently they would be released,
whether with or against their wills. The pulse of life! Suddenly from
the general his mind passed to the particular. He thought of a woman's
pulse, strong, regular, inexorable. He seemed to feel it beneath his
fingers, the pulse of Mrs. Chepstow. And he knew that he had thought of
her because Nigel Armine was thinking of her, that he connected her with
this music because Nigel was doing the same. This secretly irritated
Isaacson. He strove to detach his mind from this thought of Mrs.
Chepstow. But his effort was in vain. Her pulse was beneath his fingers,
and with every stroke of it he felt more keenly the mystery and cruelty
of life. When the movement was finished, he did not speak a word. Nor
did he look at Nigel. Even when the last note of the symphony seemed to
fade and fall downwards into an abyss of misery and blackness, he did
not speak or move. He felt crushed and overwhelmed, like one beaten and
bruised.

"Isaacson!"

"Yes?"

He turned a little in his seat.

"Grand music! But it's all wrong."

"Why?"

"Wrong in its lesson."

The artist in Isaacson could not conceal a shudder.

"I don't look for a lesson; I don't want a lesson in it."

"But the composer forces it on one--a lesson of despair. Give it all up!
No use to make your effort. The Immanent Will broods over you. You must
go down in the end. That music is a great lie. It's splendid, it's
superb, but it's a lie."

"Shall we go out? We've got ten minutes."

They made their way to the corridor and strolled slowly up and down,
passing and repassing others who were discussing the music.

"Such music puts my back up," Nigel continued, with energy; "makes me
feel I won't give in to it."

Isaacson could not help smiling.

"I can't look at Art from the moral plane."

"But surely Art often makes you think either morally or immorally.
Surely it gives you impulses which connect themselves with life, with
people."

Isaacson looked at him.

"I don't deny it. But these impulses are like the shadowy spectres of
the Brocken, mere outlines which presently, very soon, dissolve into the
darkness. Though great music is full of form, it often creates chaos in
those who hear it."

"Then that music should call up in you a chaos of despair."

"It does."

"It makes me want to fight."

"What?"

"All the evil and the sorrow of the world. I hate despair."

Isaacson glanced at him again, and noticed how strong he was looking,
and how joyous.

"Scotland has done you good," he said. "You look splendid to-night."

Secretly he gave a special meaning to the ordinary expression. To-night
there was a splendour in his friend which seemed to be created by an
inner strength radiating outward, informing, and expressing itself in
his figure and his features.

"I'm looking forward to the winter."

Isaacson thought of the note of triumph in Mrs. Chepstow's voice when
she said to him, "I don't feel such things this summer." Surely Nigel
now echoed that note.

An electric bell sounded. They returned to the concert-room.

They stayed till the concert was over, and then walked away down Regent
Street, which was moist and dreary, full of mist and of ugly noises.

"When do you start for Egypt?" said Meyer Isaacson.

"In about ten days, I think. Do you wish you were going there?"

"I cannot possibly escape."

"But do you wish to?"

For a moment Isaacson did not answer.

"I do and I don't," he said, after the pause. "Work holds one strangely,
because, if one is worth anything as a worker, its grip is on the soul.
Part of me wants to escape, often wants to escape."

He remembered a morning ride, his desire of his "own place."

"The whole of me wants to escape," Nigel replied.

He looked about him. People were seeking "pleasure" in the darkness. He
saw them standing at street corners, watchfully staring lest they should
miss the form of joy. Cabs containing couples rolled by, disappeared
towards north and south, disappeared into the darkness.

"I want to get into the light."

"Well, there it is before us."

Isaacson pointed to the brilliant illumination of Piccadilly Circus.

"I want to get into the real light, the light of the sun, and I want
every one else to get into it too."

"You carry your moral enthusiasm into all the details of your life,"
exclaimed Isaacson. "Would you carry the world to Egypt?"

Nigel took his arm.

"It seems so selfish to go alone."

"Are you going alone?"

The question was forced from Isaacson. His mind had held it all the
evening, and now irresistibly expelled it into words.

Nigel's strong fingers closed more tightly on his arm.

"I don't want to go alone."

"I would far rather be alone than not have the exactly right
companion--some one who could think and feel with me, and in the sort of
way I feel. Any other companionship is destructive."

Isaacson spoke with less than his usual self-possession, and there were
traces of heat in his manner.

"Don't you agree with me?" he added, as Nigel did not speak.

"People can learn to feel alike."

"You mean that when two natures come together, the stronger eventually
dominates the weaker. I should not like to be dominated, nor should I
like to dominate. I love mutual independence combined with perfect
sympathy."

Even while he was speaking, he was struck by his own exigence, and
laughed, almost ironically.

"But where to find it!" he exclaimed. "Those are right who put up with
less. But you--I think you want more than I do, in a way."

He added that lessening clause, remembering, quite simply, how much more
brilliant he was than Nigel.

"I like to give to people who don't expect it," Nigel said. "How hateful
the Circus is!"

"Shall we take a cab to Cleveland Square?"

"Yes--I'll come in for a little."

When they were in the house, Nigel said:

"I want to thank you for your visit to Mrs. Chepstow."

He spoke abruptly, as a man does who has been for some time intending to
say a thing, and who suddenly, but not without some difficulty, obeys
his resolution.

"Why on earth should you thank me?"

"Because I asked you to go."

"Is Mrs. Chepstow still in London?"

"Yes. I saw her to-day. She talks of coming to Egypt for the winter."

"Cairo, I suppose?"

"I think she is sick of towns."

"Then no doubt she'll go up the Nile."

There was a barrier between them. Both men felt it acutely.

"If she goes--it is not quite certain--I shall look after her," said
Nigel.

Meyer Isaacson said nothing; and, after a silence that was awkward,
Nigel changed the conversation, and not long after went away. When he
was gone, Isaacson returned to his sitting-room upstairs and lit a
nargeeleh pipe. He had turned out all the electric burners except one,
and as he sat alone there in the small room, so dimly lighted, holding
the long, snake-like pipe-stem in his thin, artistic hands, he looked
like an Eastern Jew. With a fez upon his head, Europe would have dropped
from him. Even his expression seemed to have become wholly Eastern, in
its sombre, glittering intelligence, and in the patience of its craft.

"I shall look after her."

Said about a woman like Mrs. Chepstow by a man of Nigel's youth, and
strength, and temperament, that could only mean one of two things, a
liaison or a marriage. Which did it mean? Isaacson tried to infer from
Nigel's tone and manner. His friend had seemed embarrassed, had
certainly been embarrassed. But that might have been caused by something
in his, Isaacson's, look or manner. Though Nigel was enthusiastic and
determined, he was not insensitive to what was passing in the mind of
one he admired and liked. He perhaps felt Isaacson's want of sympathy,
even direct hostility. On the other hand, he might have been embarrassed
by a sense of some obscure self-betrayal. Often men talk of uplifting
others just before they fall down themselves. Was he going to embark on
a liaison with this woman whom he pitied? And was he ashamed of the deed
in advance?

A marriage would be such madness! Yet something in Isaacson at this
moment almost wished that Nigel contemplated marriage--his secret
admiration of the virtue in his friend. Such an act would be of a piece
with Nigel's character, whereas a liaison--and yet Nigel was no saint.

Isaacson thought what the world would say, and suddenly he knew the
reality of his affection for Nigel. The idea of the gossip pained,
almost shocked him; of the gossip and bitter truths. A liaison would
bring forth almost disgusted and wholly ironical laughter at the animal
passions of man, as blatantly shown by Nigel. And a marriage? Well, the
verdict on that would be, "Cracky!"

Isaacson's brain could not dispute the fact that there would be justice
in that verdict. Yet who does not secretly love the fighter for lost
causes?

"I shall look after her."

The expression fitted best the cruder, more sordid method of gaining
possession of this woman. And men seem made for falling.

The nargeeleh was finished, but still Isaacson sat there. Whatever
happened, he would never protest to Nigel. The _feu sacre_ in the man
would burn up protest. Isaacson knew that--in a way loved to know it.
Yet what tears lay behind--the tears for what is inevitable, and what
can only be sad! And he seemed to hear again the symphony which he had
heard that night with Nigel, the unyielding pulse of life, beautiful,
terrible, in its monotony; to hear its persistent throbbing, like the
beating of a sad heart--which cannot cease to beat.

Upon the window suddenly there came a gust of wild autumn rain. He got
up and went to bed.




X


Very seldom did Meyer Isaacson allow his heart to fight against the
dictates of his brain; more seldom still did he, presiding over the
battle, like some heathen god of mythology, give his conscious help to
the heart. But all men at times betray themselves, and some betrayals,
if scarcely clever, are not without nobility. Such a betrayal led him
upon the following day to send a note to Mrs. Chepstow, asking for an
appointment. "May I see you alone?" he wrote.

In the evening came an answer:

     "Dear Doctor:

     "I thought you had quite forgotten me. I have a pleasant
     recollection of your visit in the summer. Indeed, it made me
     understand for the first time that even a Bank Holiday need not be
     a day of wrath and mourning. Do repeat your visit. And as I know
     you are always so busy telling people how perfectly healthy they
     are, come next Sunday to tea at five. I shall keep out the
     clamouring crowd, so that we may discuss any high matter that
     occurs to us."

     Yours sincerely,

     "Ruby Chepstow."

It was Wednesday when Isaacson read, and re-read, this note. He
regretted the days that must intervene before the Sunday came. For he
feared to repent his betrayal. And the note did not banish this fear.
More than once he did repent. Then he and Nigel met and again he gave
conscious help to his heart. He did not speak to Nigel of the projected
visit, and Nigel did not say anything more about Mrs. Chepstow. Isaacson
wondered at this reserve, which seemed to him unnatural in Nigel. More
than once he found himself thinking that Nigel regretted what he had
said about the possibility of Mrs. Chepstow visiting Egypt. But of this
he could not be sure. On Sunday, at a few minutes past five, he arrived
at the Savoy, and was taken to Mrs. Chepstow's room.

The autumn darkness had closed over London, and when he came into the
room, which was empty, the curtains were drawn, the light shone, a fire
was blazing on the hearth. Not far from it was placed a tea-table, close
to a big sofa which stood out at right angles from the wall.

There were quantities of white carnations in vases on the mantel-piece,
on the writing-table, and on the top of the rosewood piano. The piano
was shut, and no "Gerontius" was visible.

Meyer Isaacson stood for a moment looking round, feeling the atmosphere
of this room, or at least trying to feel it. In the summer had it not
seemed a little lonely, a little dreary, a chamber to escape from,
despite its comfort and pretty colours? Now it was bright, cosy, even
hopeful. Yes, he breathed a hopeful atmosphere.

A door clicked. Mrs. Chepstow came in.

She wore a rose-coloured dress, cut very high at the throat, with tight
sleeves that came partly over her hands, emphasizing their attractive
delicacy. The dress was very plainly made and seemed moulded to her
beautiful figure. She had no hat on, but Isaacson had never before been
so much struck by her height. As she came in, she looked immensely tall.
And there was some marked change in her appearance. For an instant he
did not know what it was. Then he saw that she had given to her cheeks
an ethereal flush of red. This altered her extraordinarily. It made her
look younger, more brilliant, but also much less refined. She smiled
gaily as she took his hand. She enveloped him at once with a definite
cheerfulness which came to him as a shock. As she held his hand, she
touched the bell. Then she drew him down on the sofa, with a sort of
coaxing cordiality.

"This shall be better than Bank Holiday," she said. "I know you pitied
me then. You wondered how I could bear it. Now I've shut out the river.
I'm glad you never came again till I could have the lights and the fire.
I love the English winters, don't you, because one has to do such
delicious things to keep all thought of them out. Now, in the hot places
abroad, that people are always raving about, all the year round one can
never have a room like this, an hour like this by a clear fire, with
thick curtains drawn--and a friend."

As she said the last three words, her voice had a really beautiful sound
in it, and a sound that was surely beautiful because of some moral
quality it contained or suggested. More than a whole essay of Emerson's
did this mere sound suggest friendship. The leaves of the book of this
woman's attractions were being turned one by one for Isaacson. And of
all her attractions her voice perhaps was the greatest.

The waiter came in with tea. When he had gone, the Doctor could speak.

But he scarcely knew what to say. Very seldom was his self-possession
disturbed. To-day he felt at a disadvantage. The depression, perhaps
chiefly physical, which had lately been brooding over him, and which had
become acute at the concert, deepened about him to-day, made him feel
morally small. Mrs. Chepstow's cheerfulness seemed like height. For a
moment in all ways she towered above him, and even her bodily height
seemed like a mental triumph, or a triumph of her will over his.

"But this is only autumn," he said.

"We can pretend it is winter."

She gave him his cup of tea, with the same gesture that had charmed
Nigel on the day when he first visited her. Then she handed him a plate
with little bits of lemon on it.

"I've found out your tastes, you see. I know you never take milk."

He was obliged to feel grateful. Yet something in him longed to refuse
the lemon, the something that never ceased from denouncing her. He
uttered the right banality:

"How good of you to bother about me!"

"But you bother about me, and on your only free day! Don't you think I
am grateful to you?"

There was no mockery in her voice. Today her irony was concealed, but,
like a carefully-covered fire, he knew it was burning still. And because
it was covered he resented it. He resented this comedy they were
playing, the insincerity into which she was smilingly leading him. She
could not imagine that she deceived him. She was far too clever for
that. Then what was the good of it all?--that she had put him, that she
kept him, at a disadvantage.

She handed him the muffins. She ministered to him as if she wanted to
pet him. Again he had to feel grateful. Even in acute dislike men must
be conscious of real charm in a woman. And Isaacson did not know how to
ignore anything that was beautiful. Had the Devil come to him--with a
grace, he must have thought, "How graceful is the Devil!" Now he was
charmed by her gesture. Nevertheless, being a man of will, and, in the
main, a man who was very sincere, he called up his hard resolutions, and
said:

"No, I don't think you are grateful. I don't think you are the woman to
be grateful without a cause."

"Or with one," he mentally added.

"But here is the cause!"

She touched his sleeve. And suddenly, with that touch, all her charm for
him vanished, and he was angry with her for daring to treat him like
those boys by whom she had been surrounded, for daring to think that she
could play upon the worst in him.

"I'm afraid you are mistaken," he said. "I am no cause for your
gratitude."

She looked more cordial and natural even than before.

"But I think you are. For you don't really like me, and yet you come to
see me. That is unselfishness."

"Only supposing what you say were true, and that you did like me."

"I do like you."

She said it quite simply, without emphasis. And even to him it sounded
true.

"Some day perhaps you will know it."

"But--I do not believe it."

He had recovered from the stroke of her greatest weapon, her voice.

"That does not matter. What is matters, not what some one thinks is, or
is not."

"Yes," he said. "What is matters. I have come here, not to pay a formal
call, or even a friendly visit, but, perhaps, to commit an
impertinence."

She smilingly moved her head, and handed him her cigarette-case.

"No, you would never do that."

He hesitated to take a cigarette--and now her bright eyes frankly mocked
him, and said, "A cigarette commits you to nothing!" Certainly she knew
how to make him feel almost like an absurd and awkward boy; or was it
his feeling of overwork, of physical depression, that was disarming him
today?

"Thank you."

He lighted a cigarette, and she lighted another, still with a happy air.

"How do you know that?" he asked.

"I feel it."

With a little laugh, she reminded him of his saying about women.

"You are wrong. I am going to do it," he said.

"But--do you really think it an impertinence?"

He was beset by his sensitive dislike to mix in other people's affairs,
but almost angrily he overcame it.

"I don't know. You may. Mrs. Chepstow, you were raving just now about
the delights of the English winter--"

"Shut out!" she interpolated.

"Then why should you avoid them?"

"And who says I am going to?"

"Are not you going to Egypt?"

She settled herself in the angle of the sofa.

"Would it be the wrong climate for me, Doctor Isaacson?"

She put an emphasis on "Doctor."

"I am not talking as a doctor."

"Then as a friend--or as an enemy?"

"As a friend--of his."

"Of whom?"

"Of Nigel Armine."

"Because he is working in the Fayyum, may not I go up the Nile?"

"If you were on the Nile, Armine would not be in the Fayyum."

"You are anxious about his reclaiming of the desert? Have you put money
into his land scheme?"

"You think I only care for money?" he said, nettled, despite himself, at
the sound of knowledge in her voice.

"What do you know of me?"

"And you--of me?"

She still spoke lightly, smilingly. But he thought of the inexorable
beating of that pulse of life--of life, and the will to live as her
philosophy desired.

"I don't wish to speak of any knowledge I may have of you. But--leave
Armine in the Fayyum."

"Did he say I was going to Egypt?"

"He spoke of it once only. Then he said you might go."

"Anything else?"

"He said that if you did go he would look after you."

She sat looking at him in silence.

"And--why not?" she said at last, as he said nothing more.

"Others have--looked after you."

Her face did not change.

"Doesn't he know it?" she said.

"And he isn't like--others."

"I know what he is like."

When she said that, Isaacson hated her, hated her for her woman's power
of understanding, and, through her understanding, of governing men.

"What does he mean by--looking after you?" he said.

And now, almost without knowing it, he spoke sternly, and his dark face
was full of condemnation.

"What did you mean when you said that 'others' have done it?"

"Then it is that!"

Isaacson had not meant to speak the words, but they escaped from his
lips. No passing light in her eyes betrayed that she had caught the
reflection of the thought that lay behind them.

"Men! Men!" his mind was saying. "And--even Armine!"

"You are afraid for the Fayyum?" she said.

"Oh, Mrs. Chepstow!" he began, with a sudden vehemence that suggested
the unchaining of a nature. Then he stopped. Behind his silence there
was a flood of words--words to describe her temperament and Armine's,
her mode of life and Armine's, what she deserved--and he; words that
would have painted for Mrs. Chepstow not only the good in Isaacson's
friend, but also the secret good in Isaacson, shown in his love of it,
his desire to keep it out of the mud. And it was just this secret good
that prevented Isaacson from speaking. He could not bear to show it to
this woman. Instinctively she knew, appreciated, what was, perhaps, not
high-minded in him. Let her be content with that knowledge. He would not
make her the gift of his goodness.

And--to do so would be useless.

"Yes?" she said.

She sat up on the sofa. She was looking lightly curious.

"If you do go to the Nile, let me wish you a happy winter."

He was once more the self-possessed Doctor so many women liked.

"If I go, I shall know how to make him happy," she replied, echoing his
cool manner, despite her more earnest words.

He got up. Again he hated her for her knowledge of men. He hated her so
much that he longed to be away from her. Why should she be allowed to
take a life like Armine's into her soiled hands, even if she could make
him happy for a time, being a mistress of deception?

"Good-bye."

He just touched her hand.

"Good-bye. I am grateful. You know why."

Again she sent him that cordial smile. He left her standing up by the
hearth. The glow from the flames played over her rose-coloured gown. Her
beautiful head was turned towards the door to watch him go. In one hand
she held her cigarette. Its tiny wreath of smoke curled lightly about
her, mounting up in the warm, bright room. Her figure, the shape of her
head, her eyes--they looked really lovely. She was still the "Bella
Donna" men had talked about so long. But as he went out, he saw the tiny
wrinkles near her eyes, the slight hardness about her cheekbones, the
cynical droop at the corners of her mouth.

Armine did not see them. He could not make Armine see them. Armine saw
only the beauties she possessed. His concentration on them made for
blindness.

And yet even he had his ugliness. For now Isaacson believed in the
liaison between him and Mrs. Chepstow.

Only eight days later, after Mrs. Chepstow and Nigel had sailed for
Alexandria, did he learn that they were married.




XI


Immediately after their marriage at a registrar's office, Nigel and his
wife, with a maid, and a great many trunks of varying shapes and sizes,
travelled to Naples and embarked on the _Hohenzollern_ for Egypt, where
Nigel had rented for the winter the Villa Androud, on the bank of the
Nile near Luxor.

Nigel was happy, but he was not wholly free from anxiety, although he
was careful to keep that anxiety from his wife, and desired even
sometimes to deny that it existed to himself. In making this marriage he
had obeyed the cry of two voices within him, the voice of the senses and
the voice of the soul. He did not know which had sounded most clearly;
he did not know which inclination had prevailed over him most strongly,
the longing for a personal joy, or the pitiful desire to shed happiness
and peace on a darkened and soiled existence. The future perhaps would
tell him. Meanwhile he put before him one worthy aim, to be the perfect
husband.

Although the month was November, and the rush for the Nile had not
begun, the _Hohenzollern_ was crowded with passengers, and when the
Armines came into the dining-room for lunch, as the vessel was leaving
Naples, every place was already taken.

"Give us a table upstairs alone," said Nigel to the head-steward,
putting something into his hand. "We shall like that ever so much
better."

He had caught sight of a number of staring English faces, on some of
which there seemed to be more than the dawning of a recognition of Mrs.
Armine.

As if mechanically the rosy Prussian retained the something, and
replied, with a strong German accent:

"I must give you the table at the top of the staircase, sir, but I
cannot promise that you will be alone. If there are any more to come,
they will have to sit with you."

"Anyhow, put us there."

"Pray that we have this to ourselves for the voyage, Ruby," said Nigel,
a moment later, as they sat side by side on a white settee close to the
open door which led out on to the deck at the top of the main companion.

As he finished speaking, a steward appeared, quickly conducting to their
table a tall and broad young man, who made them a formal bow, and
composedly sat down opposite to them.

He was remarkably well dressed in clothes which must have been cut by an
English tailor, and which he wore with a carelessness almost English,
but also with an easy grace that was utterly foreign. Thin, with mighty
shoulders and an exceptionally deep chest, it was obvious that his
strength must be enormous. His neck looked as powerful as a bull's, and
his rather small head was poised upon it with a sort of triumphant
boldness. His hair was black and curly, his forehead very broad, his
nose short, straight, and determined, with wide and ardent nostrils.
Under a small but dense moustache his lips were thick and rather
pouting. His chin, thrust slightly forward in a manner almost
aggressive, showed the dusk of close-shaven hair. The tint of his skin,
though dark, was clear--had even something of delicacy. His hands,
broad, brown, and muscular, had very strong-looking fingers which
narrowed slightly at the tips. His eyes were large and black, were set
in his head with an almost singular straightness, and were surmounted by
brows which, depressed towards the nose, sloped upwards towards the
temples. These brows gave to the eyes beneath them, even to the whole
face, a curiously distinctive look of open resolution, which was
seizing, and attractive or unattractive according to the temperament of
the beholder.

He took up the _carte du jour_, studied it at length and with obvious
care, then gave an order in excellent French, which the steward hastened
away to carry out. This done, he twisted his moustaches and looked
calmly at his companions, not curiously, but rather as if he regarded
them with a polite indifference, and merely because they were near him.
Mrs. Armine seemed quite unaware of his scrutiny, but Nigel spoke to him
almost immediately, making some remark about the ship in English. The
stranger answered in the same language, but with a strong foreign
accent. He seemed quite willing to talk. He apologized for interrupting
their tete-a-tete, but said he had no choice, as the saloon was
completely full. They declared they were quite ready for company, Nigel
with his usual sympathetic geniality, Mrs. Armine with a sort of
graceful formality beneath which--or so her husband fancied--there was
just a suspicion of reluctance. He guessed that she would have much
preferred a private table, but when he said so to her, as they were
taking their coffee on deck, she answered:

"No, what does it matter? We shall so soon be in our own house. Tell me
about the villa, Nigel, and Luxor. You know I have never seen it."

With little more than a word she had deftly flicked the intruding
stranger out of their lives, she had concentrated herself on Nigel. He
felt that all her force, like a strong and ardent stream, was flowing
into the new channel which he had cut for her. He obeyed her. He told
her about Egypt. And as he talked, and watched her listening, he began
to feel thoroughly for the first time the vital change in his life, and
something within him rejoiced, that was surely his manhood singing.

The voyage passed swiftly by, attended by perfect weather, calm,
radiant, blue--weather that releases humanity from any bonds of
depression into a joyous world. Yet for the Armines it was not without
an unpleasant incident. Among the passengers were a Lord and Lady
Hayman, whom Nigel Armine knew, and whom Mrs. Armine had known in the
days when London had loved her. It was impossible not to meet them,
equally impossible not to perceive their cold confusion at each
encounter, shown by a sudden interest in empty seas and unpopulated
horizons. That they mistook the situation was so evident to Nigel that
one day he managed to confront Lord Hayman in the smoke-room and to
have it out with him.

"Congratulate you, I'm sure, congratulate you!" murmured that gentleman,
whose practical brown eyes became suddenly wells full of ironical
amazement. "Tell my wife at once. Knew nothing at all about it."

He got away, with a moribund cigar between his teeth, and no doubt
informed Lady Hayman, who thereafter bowed to Nigel, but with a
reluctant muscular movement that adequately expressed an inward moral
surprise mingled with condemnation. Mrs. Armine seemed totally
undisturbed by these demonstrations, her only comment upon the lady
being that it was really strange that "in these days" any one could be
found to wear magenta and red together, especially any one with a
complexion like Lady Hayman's. And her astonishment at the triple
combination of colours seemed so simple, so sincere, that it had to be
believed in as merely an emanation from an artistic temperament. It was
probable that the Haymans told other English on the _Hohenzollern_ the
news of Nigel's marriage, for several of the faces that had stared from
the luncheon-tables continued to stare on the deck, but with a slightly
different expression; the sheer, dull curiosity being exchanged for that
half-satirical interest with which the average person of British blood
regards a newly-married couple.

This contemplation of them made Nigel secretly angry, and awoke in him a
great and peculiar tenderness for his wife, founded on a suddenly more
acute understanding of the brutality of the ostracism, combined with
notoriety, which she had endured in recent years. Now at last she had
some one to protect her. His heart enfolded her with ample wings. But he
longed to be free from this crowd, from which on a ship they could not
escape, and they spoke to no one during the voyage except to their
companion at meals.

With him they were soon on the intimate terms of shipboard--terms that
commit one to nothing in the future when land is reached. Although he
was dressed like an Englishman, and on deck wore a straw hat with the
word "Scott" inside it, he soon let them know that his name was Mahmoud
Baroudi, that his native place was Alexandria, that he was of mixed
Greek and Egyptian blood, and that he was a man of great energy and
will, interested in many schemes, pulling the strings of many
enterprises.

He spoke always with a certain polite but bold indifference, as if he
cared very little what impression he made on others; and all the
information that he gave about himself was dropped out in a careless,
casual way that seemed expressive of his character. The high rank, the
great riches of his father he rather implied than definitely mentioned.
Only when he talked of his occupations was he more definite, more
strongly personal. Nigel gathered that he was essentially a man of
affairs, had nothing in common with the typical lazy Eastern, who loves
to sit in the sun, to suffer the will of Allah, and to fill the years
with dreams; that he was cool, clear-headed, and full of the marked
commercial ability characteristic of the modern Greek. Whether this
aptitude was combined with the sinuous cunning that is essentially
Oriental Nigel did not know. He certainly could not perceive it. All
that Baroudi said was said with clearness, and a sort of acute
precision, whether he discussed the land question, the irrigation works
on the Nile, the great boom of 1906, in which such gigantic fortunes
were made, or the cotton and sugar industries, in both of which he was
interested. The impression he conveyed to Nigel was that he was born to
"get on" in whatever he undertook, and that in almost any form of
activity he could be a fine ally, or an equally fine opponent. That he
was fond of sport was soon apparent. He spoke with an enthusiasm that
was always mingled with a certain serene _insouciance_ of the horses he
had bred and of the races he had won in Alexandria and Cairo, of
yachting, of big-game shooting up the Nile beyond Khartum in the country
of the Shillouks, and of duck, pigeon, and jackal shooting in the Fayyum
and on the sacred Lake of Kurun.

Nigel found him an excellent fellow, the most sympathetic and energetic
man of Eastern blood whom he had ever encountered. Mrs. Armine spoke of
him more temperately; he did not seem to interest her, and Nigel was
confirmed by her lack of appreciation in an idea that had already
occurred to him. He believed that Baroudi was a man who did not care for
women, except, no doubt, as the occasional and servile distractions of
an unoccupied hour in the harem. He was always very polite to Mrs.
Armine, but when he talked he soon, as if almost instinctively,
addressed himself to Nigel; and once or twice, when Mrs. Armine left
them alone together over their coffee and cigars, he seemed to Nigel to
become another man, to expand almost into geniality, to be not merely
self-possessed--that faculty never failed him--but to be more happily at
his ease, more racy, more ready for intimacy. Probably he was governed
by the Oriental's conception of woman as an inferior sex, and was unable
to be quite at home in the complete equality and ease of the English
relation with women.

When the _Hohenzollern_ sighted Alexandria, Baroudi went below for a
moment. He reappeared wearing the fez. They bade each other good-bye in
the harbour, with the usual vague hopes of a further meeting that do
duty on such occasions, and that generally end in nothing.

Mrs. Armine seemed glad to be rid of him and to be alone with her
husband.

"Don't let us stay in Cairo," she said. "I want to go up the river. I
want to be in the Villa Androud."

After one night at Shepheard's they started for Luxor, or rather for
Keneh, where they got out in the early morning to visit the temple of
Denderah, taking a later train which brought them to Luxor towards
evening, just as the gold of the sunset was beginning to steal into the
sky and to cover the river with glory.

Mrs. Armine was fatigued by the journey, and by the long day at
Denderah, which had secretly depressed her. She looked out of the window
of their compartment at the green plains of doura, at the almost naked
brown men bending rhythmically by the shadufs, at the children passing
on donkeys, and the women standing at gaze with corners of their dingy
garments held fast between their teeth; and she felt as if she still s

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