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Winding Paths

by Gertrude Page · English · Gutenberg #5636 · 691,122 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Winding Paths

Author: Gertrude Page


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5636]
                Most recently updated: January 29, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5636

Credits: W. Debeuf


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDING PATHS ***




Winding Paths

by Gertrude Page


Contents

 CHAPTER I.
 CHAPTER II.
 CHAPTER III.
 CHAPTER IV.
 CHAPTER V.
 CHAPTER VI.
 CHAPTER VII.
 CHAPTER VIII.
 CHAPTER IX.
 CHAPTER X.
 CHAPTER XI.
 CHAPTER XII.
 CHAPTER XIII.
 CHAPTER XIV.
 CHAPTER XV.
 CHAPTER XVI.
 CHAPTER XVII.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
 CHAPTER XIX.
 CHAPTER XX.
 CHAPTER XXI.
 CHAPTER XXII.
 CHAPTER XXIII.
 CHAPTER XXIV.
 CHAPTER XXV.
 CHAPTER XXVI.
 CHAPTER XXVII.
 CHAPTER XXVIII.
 CHAPTER XXIX.
 CHAPTER XXX.
 CHAPTER XXXI.
 CHAPTER XXXII.
 CHAPTER XXXIII.
 CHAPTER XXXIV.
 CHAPTER XXXV.
 CHAPTER XXXVI.
 CHAPTER XXXVII.
 CHAPTER XXXVIII.
 CHAPTER XXXIX.
 CHAPTER XL.
 CHAPTER XLI.
 CHAPTER XLII.
 CHAPTER XLIII.
 CHAPTER XLIV.
 CHAPTER XLV.
 CHAPTER XLVI.




“So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
And just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs.”




WINDING PATHS




CHAPTER I


There were several interesting points about Hal Pritchard and Lorraine
Vivian, but perhaps the most striking was their friendship for each
other. From two wide-apart extremes they had somehow gravitated
together, and commenced at boarding-school a friendship which only
deepened and strengthened after their exit from the wise supervision of
the Misses Walton, and their entrance as “finished” young women into
the wide area of the world at large.

Lorraine went first. She was six years older than Hal, and under
ordinary circumstances would hardly have been at school with her at
all. As it was, she went at nineteen because she was not very strong,
and sea air was considered good for her. She was a sort of
parlour-boarder, sent to study languages and accomplishments while she
inhaled the sea air of Eastgate. Why, among all the scholars, who for
the most part regarded her as a resplendent, beautifully dressed being
outside their sphere, she should have quickly developed an ardent
affection for Hal, the rough-and-ready tomboy, remained a mystery; but
far from being a passing fancy, it ripened steadily into a deep and
lasting attachment.

When Hal was fifteen, Lorraine left; and it has to be admitted that the
anxious, motherly hearts of the Misses Walton drew a deep breath of
relief, and hoped the friendship would now cease, unfed by daily
contact and daily mutual interests. But there they under-estimated the
depth of affection already in the hearts of the girls, and their
natural loyalty, which scorned a mere question of separation, and
entered into one another’s interests just as eagerly as when they were
together.

Not that they, the Misses Walton, had anything actually against
Lorraine, beyond the fact that she promised a degree of beauty likely,
they felt, coupled as it was with a charming wit and a fascinating
personality, to open out some striking career for her, and possibly
become a snare and a temptation.

On the other hand, Hal was just a homely, nondescript, untidy, riotous
type of schoolgirl, with a very strong capacity for affection, and an
unmanageable predilection for scrapes and adventures, that made her
more likely to fall under the sway of Lorraine, should it promise any
chance of excitement.

And one had only to view Lorraine among the other “young ladies” of the
seminary to fear the worst. Miss Emily Walton would never have admitted
it; but even she, fondly clinging to the old tradition that the terms
“girls” or “women” are less impressive than “young ladies”, felt
somehow that the orthodox nomenclature did not successfully fit her two
most remarkable pupils. Of course they were ladies by birth and
education, else they would certainly not have been admitted to so
select a seminary; but whereas the rest of the pupils might be said
more or less to study, and improve, and have their being in a milk and
biscuit atmosphere, Hal and Lorraine were quite uncomfortably more like
champagne and good, honest, frothing beer.

No amount of prunes and prism advice and surroundings seemed to dull
the sparkle in Lorraine, nor daunt nor suppress fearless, outspoken,
unmanageable Hal. In separate camps, with a nice little following each,
to keep an even balance, they might merely have livened the free hours;
but as a combination it soon became apparent they would waken up the
embryo young ladies quite alarmingly, and initiate a new atmosphere of
gaiety that might become beyond the restraining, select influence even
of the Misses Walton.

The first scare came with the new French mistress, who had a perfect
Parisian accent, but knew very little English. Of course Lorraine
easily divined this, and, being something of a French scholar already,
she soon won Mademoiselle’s confidence by one or two charmingly
expressed, lucid French explanations.

Then came the translation lesson, and choosing a fable that would
specially lend itself, she started the class off translating it into an
English fabrication that convulsed both pupils and mistress. Hal, of
course, followed suit, and the merriment grew fast and furious after a
few positively rowdy lessons.

Mademoiselle herself gave the fun away at the governesses’ dinner, a
very precise and formal meal, which took place at seven o’clock, to be
followed at eight by the pupils’ supper of bread-and-butter with
occasional sardines. She related in broken English what an amusing book
they had to read, repeating a few slang terms, that would certainly
not, under any circumstances, have been allowed to pass the lips of the
young ladies.

After that it was deemed advisable Lorraine should translate French
alone, and Hal be severely admonished.

Then there was the dreadful affair of the Boys’ College. It was not
unusual for them to walk past the school on Sunday afternoons; but it
was only after Lorraine came that a system was instituted by which, if
the four front boys all blew their noses as they passed, it was a
signal that a note, or possibly several, had been slipped under the
loose brick at the school entrance.

Further, it was only Lorraine who could have sent the answers, because
none of the other girls had an uncle often running down for a breath of
sea air, when, of course, he needed his dear niece’s company. He was
certainly a very attentive uncle, and a very generous one too, judging
by the Buszard’s cakes and De Brei’s chocolates, and Miss Walton could
not help eyeing him a little askance.

But then, as Miss Emily said, he was such a very striking,
distinguished-looking gentleman, people had already been interested to
learn he had a niece at the Misses Walton’s seminary. Besides, one
could not reasonably object to a relative calling, and he had seemed so
devoted to Lorraine’s handsome mother when they had together brought
her to school.

But of course, after the disgraceful episode of the notes that blew
into the road, the windows had to be dulled at once, so that no one
could see the boys pass. It was a mercy the thing had been discovered
so soon.

Then shortly after came the breaking-up dances, one for the
governesses, when the masters from the college were invited, and one
the next night for the girls, when the remains of the same supper did
duty again, and with reference to which Miss Walton gently told them
she had not been able to ask any of the boys from the school, as she
was afraid their parents would not approve; she hoped they were not
disappointed, and that the big girls would dance with the little ones,
as it pleased them so.

Lorraine immediately replied sweetly that none of them cared about
dancing with boys, and some of the children would be much more amusing.
She made herself spokeswoman, because Miss Walton had
half-unconsciously glanced at her at the mere mention of the word boys,
fondly believing that the other well-brought-up pupils would prefer
their room to their company, whereas Lorraine might think the party
very tame. Her answer was a pleasant surprise.

But then, who was to know that the night of the governesses’ dance she
had bribed the three girls in the small dormitory to silence, and after
some half-dozen of them had gone to bed with their night-gowns over
their dresses, had given the signal to arise directly the dance was in
full swing. After that they adjourned to the small dormitory and spread
out a repast of sweets and cakes, to which such of the younger masters
as were brave enough to risk detection slipped away up the school
staircase at intervals, to be more than rewarded by Lorraine’s
inimitable mimicry.

“There will be no boys for you to dance with, dear girls,” she told
them gently, “as your parents might not approve,” then added, with
roguish lights in her splendid eyes: “No boys, dear girls, only a few
masters to supper in the small dormitory.”

Hal’s misdemeanours were of a less subtle kind. Neither boys nor
masters interested her particularly as yet; but there were a
thousand-and-one other ways of livening things up, and she tried them
all, sometimes getting off scot free, and sometimes finding herself
uncomfortably pilloried before the rest of the school, to be
cross-questioned and severely admonished at great lenght before being
“sent to Coventry” for a stated period.

But, had she only known it, there were many chicken-hearted girls who
envied her even her disgrace, for the sake of the dauntless, shining
spirit of her that nothing ever crushed. And as for being “sent to
Coventry”, well, Hal and Lorraine easily coped with that through the
twopennyworth system.

If an offender was sent to Coventry, any other girl who spoke to her
had to pay a fine of twopence, and if either of these two gay spirits
found themselves doomed to silence, they persuaded such of the others
as were “game” enough, to have occasional “twopennyworths”.

Of the two, Hal was far the greater favourite; she was in fact the
popular idol; for though the girls were full of admiration for
Lorraine, and not a little proud of her, they were also a little afraid
of a wit that could be sharp-edged, and perhaps resentful too of that
nameless something about her striking personality that made them feel
their inferiority.

Hal was quite different, and her unfailing spirits, her vigorous
championing of the oppressed, or scathing denunciation of anything
sneaky and mean, made them all look up to her, and love her, whether
she knew or not.

Even the governess felt her compelling attraction, and would often, by
a timely word, save her from the consequences of some forgetful moment.
At the same time, the one who warned Miss Walton against the possible
ill results of the girl’s growing love for Lorraine little understood
the nature she had to deal with.

When Hal found herself in the private sanctum, being gently admonished
concerning a friendship that was thought to be growing too strong, she
was quick instantly to resent the slur on her chum. She had been sent
for immediately after “evening prep.,” and having, as usual, inked her
fingers generously, and rubbed an ink-smudge across her face, to say
nothing of really disgracefully tumbled hair, she looked a comical
enough object standing before the impressive presence of the head
mistress.

“Really, Hal,” Miss Walton remonstrated, “can’t you even keep tidy for
an hour in the evening?”

“Not when it’s German night,” answered outspoken Hal; “where to put the
verbs, and how to split them, makes my hair stand on end, and the ink
squirm out of the pot.”

Miss Walton tried to look severe, remarking: “Don’t be frivolous here,
my dear”; but, as Hal described it later, “she looked as if having so
often to be sedate was beginning to make her tired.”

But when she proceeded to explain to Hal that neither she nor her
sister were easy in their minds about her growing devotion to Lorraine,
Hal’s expressive mouth began to look rather stern, and neither the
ink-smudges nor the tousled hair could rob her of a certain naïve
dignity as she asked, “Are you implying anything against Lorraine?”

“No, no, my dear, certainly not,” Miss Walton replied, feeling slightly
at a loss to express herself, “but I have never encouraged a violent
friendship between two girls that is apt to make them hold aloof from
the others, and be continually in one another’s society. And in this
instance, Lorraine being so much older than you, and of a temperament
hardly likely to appeal to your brother, as a desirable one in your
great friend—”

“I am not asking Dudley to make her his great friend—”

“Don’t interrupt me, dear. I am only speaking of what I am perfectly
aware are your brother’s feeling concerning you; and seeing you have
neither father nor mother, I feel my responsibility and his the
greater.”

“But what is the matter with Lorraine?” Hal cried, growing a little
exasperated. “She is not nearly so frivolous as I am, and works far
harder.”

Miss Walton hesitated a little. “We feel she is naturally rather
worldly-minded and ambitious, whereas you—” She paused.

“Whereas I am a simpleton,” suggested Hal, with a mischievous light in
her eyes. “Well, then, dear Miss Walton, how fortunate for me that some
one clever and briljant is willing to give me her friendship and help
to lift me out of my slough of simpletondom!”

Miss Walton looked up with a reproof on her lips, but it died away, and
a new expression came into her eyes as she seemed to see something in
this unruly pupil she had not before suspected. Hal still looked as if
a smothered sense of injustice might presently explode into hot words;
but in the meantime the air of dignity stood its ground in spite of
smudges and untidiness.

Neither spoke for a moment, and then Miss Walton remarked: “You do not
mean to be guided by me in this matter?”

“Lorraine is my friend,” Hal answered. “I cannot let myself listen to
anything that suggests a slur upon her.”

“Not even if your brother expressed a wish on the subject?”

“I do not ask Dudley to let me choose his friends.”

“That is quite a different matter. He is fifteen years your senior.”

Hal was silent. She stood with her hands behind her, and her head held
high, and her clear eyes very straight to the front; well-knit,
well-built, with a promise of that vague something which is so much
stronger a factor in the world than mere beauty.

Miss Walton, who necessarily saw much of the mediocre and commonplace
in her life-work of turning growing girls into presentable young women,
felt her feelings undergo a further change. She also had the tact to
see an appeal would go farther than mere advice.

“I was only thinking of you, Hal,” she said, a trifle tiredly. “I have
nothing against Lorraine, except that she is dangerously attractive if
she likes, and her love of admiration and excitement does not make her
a very wise friend for a girl of your age. You are different, and your
paths are likely to lead far apart in the future. It did not seem to me
desirable you should grow too fond of each other.”

Even as she spoke she found herself wondering what Hal would say, and
in an unlooked-for way interested.

Hal answered promptly:

“I do not think our lives will lie apart. Both of us will have to be
breadwinners at any rate, and that will be a bond.”

Her mobile face seemed to change. “Miss Walton, I’m devoted to
Lorraine. I always shall be. But you needn’t be anxious. The stronger
influence is not where you think. I can bend Lorraine’s will, but she
cannot bend mine. It will always be so. And nothing that you nor any
one can say will make me change to her.”

They said little more, but when she was alone the head mistress stood
silently for some minutes looking into the dying embers of her fire.
Then she uttered to herself an enigmatical sentence:

“Beauty will give to Lorraine the great career; but the greater woman
will be Hal.”

Shortly after that Lorraine departed, and about a year later embarked
in the theatrical world.

No one was surprised, but very adverse opinions were expressed among
the girls concerning her success or otherwise; those who were jealous,
or who had felt slighted during her short reign as school beauty,
condemning any possible likelihood of a hit.

Hal said very little. She was already reaching out tentacles to the
wider world, where schoolgirl criticisms would be mere prattle; and it
was far more serious to her to wonder what Brother Dudley would think
of her having an actress for her greatest friend.

She foresaw rocks ahead, but smiled humorously to herself in spite of
them.

“What a tussle there’ll be!” was her thought, “and how in the world am
I to convince Dudley that Lorraine does not represent a receptacle for
all the deadly sins? Heigho! The mere fact of my disagreeing will
persuade him I am already contaminated, and he will see us both
heading, like fire-engines, for the nethermost hell.”




CHAPTER II


If Dudley Pritchard’s imagination did not actually picture the lurid
and violent descent Hal suggested, it certainly did view with the
utmost alarm his lively young sister’s friendship with a fully fledged
actress.

As a matter of fact, Miss Walton’s prognostications concerning his
attitude to Lorraine Vivian, even as a schoolgirl, had been instantly
confirmed upon their first meeting.

For no particular reason he disapproved of her. That was rather typical
of Dudley. He disapproved of a good many things without quite knowing
why, or being at any particular pains to find out.

Not that it made him bigoted. He could in fact be fairly tolerant; but
as Hal affectionately observed, Dudley was so apt to pat himself on the
back for his toleration towards things that it would never have occured
to most persons needed tolerating.

She knew perfectly well that he considered himself very tolerant
towards much that was to be deprecated in her, but, far from resenting
his attitude, she saw chiefly the humorous side, and managed to glean a
good deal of quiet amusement from it.

Considering the fifteen years’ difference in their ages, and the fact
that Dudley was a hard-working architect in London, seeing life on all
sides, while Hal was still a hoydenish schoolgirl, it was really
remarkable how thoroughly she grasped and understood his character, and
a great deal concerning the world in general, while he seemed to remain
at his first decisions concerning her and most things.

It was just perhaps the difference between the book-student and the
life-student. Dudley had always had a passion for books and for his
profession. His clever brain was a well of knowledge concerning ancient
architectures and relics of antiquity. He studied them because he loved
them, and, before all things else, to him they seemed worth while.

He loved his sister also—he loved her better than any one, but it would
never have occured to him that she should be studied, or that there was
anything in her to study. To him she was quite an ordinary girl, rather
nice-looking when she was neat, but with a most unfortunate lack of the
sedate dignity and discretion that he considered essential to the
typically admirable woman.

That there might be other traits in their place, equally admirable, did
not occur to him. They ware not at any rate the traits he most admired.

Hal, on the other hand, was different in every respect. She loathed
books, and learning, and what she called “dead old bones and rubbish.”
But she loved human nature, and studied it in every phase she could.

Left at a very tender age to Dudley’s sole care and protection, she had
to grow up without the enfolding, sympathetic love of a mother, or the
gay companionship of brothers and sisters. Not in the least depressed,
she started off at an early age in quest of adventure to see what the
world was like outside the four walls of their home.

Brought back, sometimes by a policeman, with whom she had already
become on the friendliest terms, sometimes in a cab in which some one
else had placed her, sometimes by a kindly stranger, she would yet slip
away again on the first opportunity, into the crush of mankind.
Punishment and expostulation were alike useless; Hal was just as
fascinated with people as Dudley was with books, and where her nature
called she fearlessly followed.

Through this roving trait she picked up an amount of commonplace,
everyday knowledge that would have dumbfoundered the clever young
architect, had he been in the least able to comprehend it. But while he
dipped enthusiastically into bygone ages, and won letters and honours
in his profession, she asked questions about life in the present, and
grappled with the problem of everyday existence and the peculiarities
of human nature, in a way that made her largely his superior, despite
his letters and honours.

And best of all was her complete understanding of him. Dudley fondly
imagined he was fulfilling to the best possible endeavours his
obligations of love and guardianship to his young sister. The young
sister, with her tender, quizzical understanding, regarded him as a
mere child, with a deliciously humorous way of always taking himself
very seriously; a brilliant brain, an irritating fund of superiority,
and something altogether apart that made him dearer than heaven and
earth and all things therein to her.

Hal might be dearer than all else to Dudley, without finding herself
loved in any way out of the ordinary, seeing how little he cared much
about except his profession; but to be the beloved of all, to an eager,
passionate, intense nature like hers, meant that in her heart she had
placed him upon a pedestal, and, while fondly having her little smile
over his shortcomings, yet loved him with an all-embracing love. He did
not suspect it, and he would not have understood it if he had; being
rather of the opinion that, considering all he had tried to be to her,
she might have loved him enough in return to make a greater effort to
please him.

Her obdurate resistance during the first stage of his disapproval of
Lorraine Vivian increased this feeling considerably. He felt that if
she really cared for him she should be willing to be guided by his
judgment; and while perceiving, just as Miss Walton had done, that she
meant to have her own way, he had less perspicacity to perceive also
that nameless trait which, for want of a better word, we sometimes call
grit, and which dimly proclaimed she might be trusted to follow her own
strength of character.

When, later, his attitude of displeasure increased a thousandfold.

He was not told of it just at first. Hal was then in the throes of
convincing him that her particular talents lay in the direction of
secretarial work and journalism, rather than governessing or idleness,
and persuading him to make arrangements at once for her to learn
shorthand and typewriting with a view to becoming the private secretary
of a well-known editor of one of the leading newspapers.

The editor in question was a distant connection, and quite willing to
take her if she proved herself capable, recognising, through his skill
at reading character, that she might eventually prove invaluable in
other ways than mere letter-writing.

Dudley, seeing no farther than the fact of the City office, set his
face resolutely against it as long as he could; but, of course, in the
end Hal carried the day. Then came the shock of the knowledge that
Lorraine had gone on the stage; and if, as had been said before, he did
not actually picture the lurid exit to the lower regions Hal gave him
credit for, he was sufficiently upset to have wakeful nights and many
anxious, worried hours.

And to make it worse, Hal would not even be serious.

“Oh, don’t look like that, Dudley!” she cried; “we really are not in
any immediate danger of selling our souls to the Prince of Darkness.
You dear old solemnsides! Just because Lorraine is going on the stage,
I believe you already see me in spangles, jumping through a hoop. Or
rather ‘trying to’, because it is a dead cert. I should miss the hoop,
and do a sort of double somersault over the horse’s tail.”

Dudley shut his firm lips a little more tightly, and looked hard at his
boots, without vouchsafing a reply.

“As a matter of fact,” continued the incorrigible, “you ought to
perceive how beautifully life balances things, by giving a dangerously
attractive person like Lorraine a matter-of-fact, commonplace pal like
myself to restrain her, and at the same time ward off possible dangers
from various unoffending humans, who might fall hurtfully under her
spell.”

“It is only the danger to you that I have anything to do with.”

“Oh fie, Dudley! as if I mattered half as much as Humanity with a
capital H.”

“To me, personally, you matter far more in this particular case.”

“And yet, really, the chief danger to me is that I might unconsciously
catch some reflection of Lorraine’s charm and become dangerously
attractive myself, instead of just an outspoken hobbledehoy no one
takes seriously.”

“I am not afraid of that,” he said, evoking a peal of laughter of which
he could not even see the point; “but since you are quite determined to
go into the City as a secretary, instead of procuring a nice
comfortable home as a companion, or staying quietly here to improve
your mind, I naturally feel you will encounter quite enough dangers
without getting mixed up in a theatrical set. Though, really,” in a
grumbling voice, “I can’t see why you don’t stay at home like any
sensible girl. If I am not rich, I have at least enough for two.”

“But if I stayed at home, and lived on you, Dudley, I should feel I had
to improve my mind by way of making you some return; and you can’t
think how dreadfully my mind hates the idea of being improved. And if I
went to some dear old lady as companion, she would be sure to die in an
apoplectic fit in a month, and I should be charged with manslaughter.
And I can’t teach, because I don’t know anything. The only serious
danger I shall run as Mr. Elliott’s secretary will be putting an
occasional addition of my own to his letters, in a fit of exasperation,
or driving his sub-editor mad; and he seems willing to risk that.”

“You are likely to run greater dangers than that if you allow yourself
to be drawn into a theatrical circle.”

“What sort of dangers?… Oh, my dear, saintly episcopal architect, what
foundations of darkness are you building upon now, out of a little
old-fashioned, out-of-date prejudice which you might have dug up from
some of your studies in antiquity books? There are just as many dangers
outside the theatrical world as in it, for the sort of woman dangers
are attractive to; and little Sunday-school teachers have come to
grief, while famous actresses have won through unscathed.”

Dudley’s face expressed both surprise and distaste.

“I wonder what you know about it anyway. I think you are talking at
random. Certainly no dangers would come near you if you listened to my
wishes and settled down quietly at home. If you don’t care about living
in Bloomsbury, I will take a small house in the suburbs, and you can
amuse yourself with the housekeeping, and tennis, and that sort of
thing.”

“And when you want to marry?”

“I shall not want to marry. I am wedded to my profession.”

“O Dudley!… Dudley!…” She slipped off the table where she had been
jauntily seated, and came and stood beside him, passing her arm through
his. “Can’t you see I’d just die of a little house in the suburbs,
looking after the housekeeping: it’s the most dreadful and awful thing
on the face of the earth. I’m not a bit sorry for slaves, and
prisoners, and shipwrecked sailors, and East-end starvelings; every bit
of sympathy I’ve got is used up for the girls who’ve got to stay in
hundrum homes, and be nothing, and do nothing, but just finished young
ladies. Work is the finest thing in the world. It’s just splendid to
have something real to do, and be paid for it. Why, they can’t even go
to prison, or be hungry, or anything except possible wives for possible
men who may or may not happen to want them.”

“Of course you are talking arrant nonsense,” Dudley replied frigidly.
“I don’t know where in the world you get all your queer ideas. Woman’s
sphere is most decidedly the home; you seem to—” but a small hand was
clapped vigorously over his mouth, and eyes of feigned horror searching
his.

“Do you know, I’m half afraid you’ve lived in your musty old books so
long, Dudley,” with mock seriousness, “that you’ve lost all count of
time. It is about a thousand years since sane and sensible men believed
all that drivel about women’s only sphere being the home, and since
women were content to be mere chattels, stuck in with the rest of the
furniture, to look after the children. Nowadays the jolly, sensible
woman that a man likes for wife or pal, is very often a busy worker.”

“Let her work busily at home, then!”

“Why, you’ll want me to crochet antimacassars next, or cross-stitch a
sampler! Just imagine the thing if I tried! It would have dreadful
results, because I should be sure to use bad language—I couldn’t help
it; and the article I should concoct would make people faint, or turn
cross-eyed or colour-blind. I shan’t do nearly so much harm in the end
as a City secretary with an actress pal.”

“One thing is quite certain: you mean, as usual, to have your own way,
and my feelings go for nothing at all.”

He turned away from her, and took up his hat to go out.

“Your protestations of affection, Hal, are apt to seem both insincere
and out of place.”

The tears came swiftly to her eyes, and she took a quick step towards
him, but he had gone, and closed the door after him before she could
speak. She watched his retreating figure, with the tears still
lingering, and then suddenly she smiled.

“Anyhow, I haven’t got to be sweet and gentle and housekeepy,” was her
comforting reflection. “I’m going to be a real worker, earning real
money, and have Lorraine for my pal as well. Some day Dudley will see
it is all right, and I’m only about half as black as he supposes, and
that I love him better than anything else at heart. In the meantime, as
I’m likely to get a biggish dose of dignified disapproval over this
theatre business, I’d better ask Dick to come out to tea this afternoon
to buck me up for what lies ahead. Goodness! what a boon a jolly cousin
is when you happen to have been mated with your great-aunt for a
brother.”




CHAPTER III


For a few years after that particular disagreement nothing of special
note happened. Hal got quickly through her course of shorthand and
typewriting and became Mr. Elliott’s private secretary and general
factotum, which last included an occasional flight into journalism as a
reporter. Naturally, since this sometimes took her to out-of-the-way
places, and brought her in contact with human oddities, she loved it
beyond all things, and was ever ready for a jaunt, no matter whither it
took her.

Brother Dudley was discreetly left a little in the dark about it,
because nothing in the world would ever have persuaded him that a girl
of Hal’s age could run promiscuously about London unmolested. Hal knew
better. She was perfectly well able to acquire a stony stare that
baffled the most dauntless of impertinent intruders; and she had,
moreover, an upright, grenadier-like carriage, and an air of
business-like energy that were safeguards in themselves.

A great deal of persuasive tact was necessary, however, to win Dudley’s
consent to a year in America, whither Mr. Elliott had to go on
business; but on Mrs. Elliott calling upon him herself to explain that
she also was going, and would take care of Hal, he reluctantly
consented.

Curiously enough, it was that year in a great measure that changed the
current of Lorraine’s life. She came to the cross-roads, and took the
wrong turn.

Perhaps Miss Walton, with her knowledge of girls, could have foretold
it. She might have said, in that enigmatical way of hers, “If Lorraine
comes to the cross-roads, where life offers a short cut to fame,
instead of a long, wearisome drudgery, she will probably take it. Hal
will score off her own bat, or not at all. Lorraine will only care
about gaining her end.”

Anyhow the cross-roads came, and Hal, the stronger, was not there. As a
matter of fact, for some little time the two had not seen much of each
other. Lorraine was touring in the provinces, and rarely had time to
come to London. Hal was tied by her work, and could not spare the time
to go to Lorraine.

There was for a little while a cessation of intercourse. Neither was
the least bit less fond, but circumstances kept them apart, and they
could only wait until opportunity brought them together again. Both
were too busy for lengthy correspondence, and only wrote short letters
occasionally, just to assure each other the friendship held firm, and
absence made no real difference.

Then Hal went off to America, and while she was away Lorraine came to
her cross-roads.

It is hardly necessary to review in detail what her life had been since
she joined the theatrical profession. It is mostly hard work and
disillusion and disappointment for all in the beginning, and only a
very small percentage ever win through to the forefront.

But for Lorraine, on the top of all the rest, was a mercenary,
unscrupulous, intriguing mother, who added tenfold to what must
inevitably have been a heavy burden and strain—a mother who taxed her
utmost powers of endurance, and brought her shame as well as endless
worry; and yet to whom, let it be noted down now, to her everlasting
credit, no matter in what other way she may have erred, she never
turned a deaf ear nor treated with the smallest unkindness.

It would be impossible to gauge just what Lorraine had to go through in
her first few years on the stage. She seemed to make no headway at all,
and at the end of the third year she felt herself as far as ever from
getting her chance.

That she was brilliantly clever and brilliantly attractive had not so
far weighed the balance to her side. There were many others also clever
and attractive. She felt she had practically everything except the one
thing needed—influence.

Thus her spirits were at a very low ebb. She was still touring the
provinces, and heartily sick of all the discomfort involved. Dingy
lodgings, hurried train journeys, much bickering and jealousy in the
company with which she was acting, and a great deal of domestic worry
over that handsome, extravagant mother, who had once taken her, in
company with the so-called uncle, to the select seminary of the Misses
Walton.

How her mother managed to live and dress as if she were rich had
puzzled Lorraine many times in those days; but when she left the
shelter of those narrow, restricting walls, where windows were
whitewashed so that even boys might not be seen passing by, she learnt
many things all too quickly.

She learnt something about the uncles too. One of them was at great
pains to try and teach her, but with hideous shapes and suggestions
trying to crowd her mind, the thought of Hal’s freshness still acted as
a sort of protection and kept her untainted.

A little later, after she had commenced to earn a salary, she found
that directly the family purse was empty, and creditors objectionably
insistent, she herself had to come to the rescue.

There were some miserable days then. It was useless to upbraid her
mother. She always posed as the injured one, and could not see that in
robbing her child of a real home she was strewing her path with dangers
as well, by placing her in an ambiguous, comfortless position, from
which any relief seemed worth while.

Then at last came the welcome news that Mrs. Vivian had procured a post
as lady-housekeeper to a rich stockbroker in Kensington, who had also a
large interest in a West-end theatre.

Lorraine read the glowing terms in which her mother described her new
home and employer with a deep sense of relief, seeing in the new
venture a probable escape for herself from those relentless demands
upon her own scanty purse. A month later came the paragraph, in a
voluminous epistle:

“Mr. Raynor says you are to make his house your home whenever you are
free. He insists upon giving you a floor all to yourself, like a little
flat, where you can receive your friends undisturbed, and feel you have
a little home of your own. I am quite certain also that he will try to
help you in your career through his interest in the Greenway Theatre.”

If Lorraine wondered at all concerning this unknown man’s interest in
her welfare she kept it to herself.

A home instead of the dingy lodgings she had grown to hate, and the
prospect of influential help, were sufficiently alluring to drown all
other reflections.

When the tour was over she went direct to Kensington, to make her home
with her mother until her next engagement. She was already too much a
woman of the world not to notice at once that her mother and her host’s
relations seemed scarcely those of employee and employer, and there was
a little passage of arms between herself and Mrs. Vivian the next
morning.

In reply to a long harangue, in which that lady set forth the
advantages Lorraine was to gain from her mother’s perspicacity in
obtaining such a post, she asked rather shortly:

“And why in the world should Mr. Raynor do all this for me, simply
because you are his housekeeper?”

A red spot burned in Mrs. Vivian’s cheek as she replied: “He does it
because he wants me to stay; and I have told him I cannot do so unless
he makes it possible for me to give you a comfortable, happy home
here.”

Lorraine’s lips curled with a scorn she did not attempt to conceal, but
she only stood silently gazing across the Park.

She had already decided to make the best of her mother’s deficiencies,
seeing she was almost the only relative she possessed, but she had a
natural loathing of hypocrisy, and wished she would leave facts alone
instead of attempting to gloss them over. Ever since she left school
she had been obliged to live in lodgings, because her mother would not
take the trouble to try and provide anything more of a home.

It was a little too much, therefore, that she should now allude to her
maternal solicitude because it happened to suit her purpose. She felt
herself growing hard and callous and bitter under the strain of the
early struggle to succeed, handicapped as she was; and because of one
or two ugly experiences that came in the path of such a warfare. She
was losing heart also, and feeling bitterly the stinging whip of
circumstances. As she stood gazing across the Park, some girls about
her own age rode past, returning from their morning gallop, talking and
laughing gaily together.

Lorraine found herself wondering what life would be like with her
beauty and talent if there were no vulgarly extravagant, unprincipled
mother in the background, no insistent need to earn money, no gnawing
ambition for a fame she already began to feel might prove an empty joy.

She had not seen Hal for a year, and she felt an ache for her. In the
shifting, unreliable, soul-numbing atmosphere of her stage career, she
still looked upon Hal as a City of Refuge; and when she had not seen
her for some time she felt herself drifting towards unknown shoals and
quicksands.

And, unfortunately, Hal was away in America, with the editor to whom
she was secretary and typist, and not very likely to be back for three
months.

No; there was nothing for it but to make the best of her mother’s
explanation and the comfortable home at her feet.

As for Mr. Raynor himself, though he seemed to Lorraine vulgarly proud
of his self-made position, vulgarly ostentatious of his wealth, and
vulgarly familiar with both herself and her mother, she could not
actually lay any offence to his charge. And in any case, he undoubtedly
could help her, if he chose, to procure at last the coveted part in a
London theatre. With this end in view, she laid herself out to please
him and to make the most of her opportunity.

And in this way she came to those cross-roads which had to decide her
future.

Before she had been a week in the house, Frank Raynor deserted his
housekeeper altogether, and fell in love with the housekeeper’s
daughter. Within a fortnight he had laid all his possessions at
Lorraine’s feet, promising her not only wealth and devotion, but the
brilliant career she so coveted.

The man was generous, but he was no saint. Give him herself, and she
would have the world at her feet if he could bring it there. Give any
less, and he would have no more to say to her whatsoever.

It was the cross-roads.

Lorrain struggled manfully for a month. She hated the idea of marrying
a man better suited in every way to her mother. She dreaded and hated
the thought of what had perhaps been between them; yet she was afraid
to ask any question that might corroborate her worst fears.

All that was best in her of delicate and refined sensitiveness surged
upward, and she longed to run away to some remote island far removed
from the harsh realities of life.

Yet, how could she? Without money, without influence, without rich
friends, what did the world at large hold for her?

How much easier to go with the tide—seize her opportunity—and dare Fate
to do her worst.

At the last there was a bitter scene between mother and daughter.

“If you refuse Frank Raynor now, you ruin the two of us,” was Mrs.
Vivian’s angry indictment. “What can we expect from him any more? How
are you ever going to get another such chance to make a hit?”

“And what if it ruins my life to marry him?” Lorraine asked.

“Such nonsense! The man can give you everything. What in the world more
do you want? He is good enough looking; he could pass as a gentleman,
and he is rich.”

A sudden nauseous spasm at all the ugliness of life shook Lorraine. She
turned on her mother swiftly, scarcely knowing what she said, and
asked:

“You are anxious enough to sell me to him. What is he to you anyway?
What has he ever been to you?”

Mrs. Vivian blanched before the suddenness of the attack, but she held
her ground.

“You absurd child, what in the world could he be to me? It is easy
enough to see he has no eyes for any one but you.”

“And before I came?”

Lorraine took a step forward, and for a moment the two women faced each
other squarely. The eyes of each were a little hard, the expressions a
little flinty; but behind the older woman’s was a scornful,
unscrupulous indifference to any moral aspect; behind the younger’s a
hunted, rather pitiful hopelessness. The ugly things of life had caught
the one in their talons and held her there for good and all, more or
less a willing slave, the soul of the younger was still alive, still
conscious, still capable of distinguishing the good and desiring it.

The mother turned away at last with a little harsh laugh.

“Before you came he was nothing to me. He never has been anything.”

Without waiting for Lorraine to speak, she turned again, and added:

“If you weren’t a fool, you would perceive he is treating you better
than ninety-nine men in a hundred. He has suggested marriage. The
others might not have done.”

“Oh! I’m not a fool in that way,” came the bitter reply, “but I’ve
wondered once or twice what your attitude would have been,
supposing—er—he had been one of the ninety-nine!”

Mrs. Vivian was saved replying by the unexpected appearance of Frank
Raynor himself. Entering the room with a quick step, he suddenly
stopped short and looked from one to the other. Something in their
expressions told him what had transpired. He turned sharply on the
mother.

“You’ve been speaking to Lorraine about me. I told you I wouldn’t have
it. I know your bullying ways, and I said she was to be left to decide
for herself.”

Lorraine saw an angry retort on her mother’s lips, and hurriedly left
the room. She put on her hat and slipped away into the Park. What was
she to do?… where, oh where was Hal!

Within three months the short cut was taken. Lorraine was engaged to
play a leading part at the Greenway Theatre, and she was the wife of
Frank Raynor.




CHAPTER IV


When Hal came back from America and heard about Lorraine’s marriage, it
was a great shock to her. At first she could hardly bring herself to
believe it at all. Nothing thoroughly convinced her until she stood in
the pretty Kensington house and beheld Mrs. Vivian’s pronounced air of
triumph, and Lorraine’s somewhat forced attempts at joyousness.

It was one of the few occasions in her life when Lorraine was nervous.
She did not want Hal to know the sordid facts; and she did not believe
she would be able to hide them from her.

When Hal, from a mass of somewhat jerky, contradictory information, had
gleaned that the new leading part at the London theatre had been gained
through the middle-aged bridegroom’s influence, her comment was
sufficiently direct.

“Oh, that’s why you did it, is it? Well, I only hope you don’t hate the
sight of him already.”

“How absurd you are, Hal!... Of course I don’t hate the sight of him.
He’s a dear. He gives me everything in the world I want, if he possibly
can.”

“How dull. It’s much more fun getting a few things for oneself. And
when the only thing in all the world you want is your freedom, do you
imagine he’ll give you that?”

Lorraine got up suddenly, thrusting her hands out before her, as if to
ward off some vague fear.

“Hal, you are brutal today. What is the use of talking like that
now?... Why did you go to America?... Perhaps if you hadn’t gone—”

“Give me a cigarette,” said Hal, with a little catch in her voice, “I
want soothing. At the present moment you’re a greater strain than
Dudley talking down at me from a pyramid of worn-out prejudices. I
don’t know why my two Best-Belovèds should both be cast in a mould to
weigh so heavily on my shoulders.”

Sitting on the table as usual, she puffed vigorously at her cigarette,
blowing clouds of smoke, through which Lorraine could not see that her
eyes were dim with tears. For Hal’s unerring instinct told her that, at
a critical moment, Lorraine had taken a wrong path.

Lorraine, however, was not looking in Hal’s direction. She had moved to
the window, and stood with her back to the room, gazing across the
Park, hiding likewise misty, tell-tale eyes.

Suddenly, as Hal continued silent, she turned to her with a swift
movement of half-expressed protest.

“Hal! you shan’t condemn me, you shan’t even judge me. Probably you
can’t understand, because your life is so different—always has been so
different; but at least you can try to be the same. What difference has
it made between you and me anyhow?... What difference need it make? I
have got my chance now, and I am going to be a brilliant success,
instead of a struggling beginner. What does the rest matter between you
and me?”

“It doesn’t matter between you and me. But it matters to you. I feel
I’d give my right hand if you hadn’t done it.”

“How could I help doing it? Oh, I can’t explain; it’s no use. We all
have to fight our own battles in the long run—friends or no friends.
Only the friends worth having stick to one, even when it has been a
nasty, unpleasant sort of battle.”

That hard look, with the hopelessness behind it, was coming back into
Lorraine’s eyes. She was too loyal to tell even Hal what her mother had
been like the last few months before the critical moment came, and at
the critical moment itself. She could not explain just how many
difficulties her marriage had seemed a way out from.

There had been other men who had not proposed marriage. There had been
insistent creditors—her mother’s as well as her own. There had been
that deep hunger for something approaching a real home, and for a sense
of security, in a life necessarily full of insecurities.

Obdurate, difficult theatre managers, powerful, jealous
fellow-actresses, ill health, bad luck! Behind the glamour and the
glitter of the stage, what a world of carking care, of littleness,
meanness, jealousy, and intrigue she had found herself called upon to
do battle with.

And now, if only her husband proved amenable, proved livable with, how
different everything would be? But in any case Hal must be there.
Somehow nothing of all this showed in her face as she fronted the
smoker, still blowing clouds of smoke before her eyes.

“What has become of Rod?” Hal asked suddenly.

Lorraine winced a little, but held her ground steadily.

“Rod had to go. What could Rod and I have done with £500 a year?”

“My own”—from the blunt-speaking one—“it surely seems as if you might
have thought of that before you allowed Rod to run all over the country
after you, and get ‘gated’, and very nearly ‘sent down’, and spend a
year or two’s income ahead in trying to give you pleasure.”

Lorraine flung herself down on the sofa with a callous air, and beat
her foot on the ground impatiently. The parting with Rod was another
thing she did not propose to describe to Hal. It had hurt too badly,
for one thing.

“When you moralise, Hal, you are detestable. Besides, it’s so cheap.
Any one can sit on a table and hurl sarcasm about. I daresay in my
place you would have married Rod, from a sense of duty or something,
and ruined all the rest of his life. Or perhaps, after gently breaking
the news, you’d have let him come dangling round to be ‘mothered’.
Well, I don’t say I haven’t been a bit of a brute to him; but anyhow I
tried to do the square thing in the end. I cut the whole affair dead
off. I told him I would not see him nor write to him again. I’ve since
sent two letters back unopened, and though you mightn’t think it, I was
just eating my heart out for a sight of him. But what’s the good! He’s
got to follow in the footsteps of whole centuries of highly
respectable, complacent, fat old bankers. His father and mother would
have a fit if he didn’t develop into the traditional fat old banker
himself, and beget another of the same ilk to follow on.

“I daresay with me he would have developed a little more soul, and a
little less stomach—but what of it?” with a graceful shrug. “For the
good of his country it is written that he shall acquire weight and
stolidity, instead of an ideal soul, and for the benefit of posterity I
sentenced him to speedy rotundity, and dull respectability, and the
begetting of future bankers. He will presently marry some one named
Alice or Annie, and invite me to the first christening in a spirit of
Christian forgiveness.”

Hal smiled more soberly than was her wont.

“And what of you?”

“What of me?... Oh, I don’t come into that sort of scheme. I never
ought to have been there at all. Still, I’m glad I showed him he’d got
something in himself beside the stale accumulations of many banker
ancestors; if it’s only for the sake of the next little banker, who may
want to lay claim to an individual soul.”

“But it hurt, Lorraine?... don’t tell me it didn’t hurt after...
after—”

“Oh yes, it hurt,” with a low, bitter laugh; “but what of that either?
It’s generally the woman who gets hurt; but I suppose I knew I was
riding for a fall.”

“I don’t suppose you are any more hurt than he is. You know he
worshipped you.”

“Yes; only presently it will be easy for him to get back into the old,
orthodox groove with ‘Alice’, and persuade himself that I was only a
youthful infatuation, whereas I— Oh, what does it matter, Hal! Come out
of that ‘great-aunt’ mood, and let’s be jolly while we can. I’ll ring
for coffee and liqueurs, and then we’ll make lots of ripping plans to
see everything in England worth seeing—until I can find time to go
abroad.”

Hal sprang off her table.

“Oh, very well,” she rejoined, “Let’s get rowdy and sing the song ‘Love
may go hang.’ When I’ve got it over with Dudley, we’ll just go straight
on, keeping a good look out for the next fence. You’d better tell me
something about this paternal husband of yours, just to prepare me for
our meeting. He doesn’t put his knife in his mouth, and that sort of
thing, does he?”

“No; not quite so bad. His worst offence at present, I think, is to
call me ‘wifey’.”

“Wifey!” in accents of horror. “Lorraine, how awful!”

“Yes; but I’m breaking him of it by degrees: that and his fondness for
a soft felt hat.”

They sat on chatting together with apparent gayness, but Hal’s heart
was no lighter after she had duly been presented to the paternal
husband, as she called him, and she journeyed solemnly home on a bus,
feeling rather as if she had been to a funeral. She tried at first to
hide her feelings from Dudley—no difficult matter at all, since he
usually contributed little but a slightly absent “yes” and “no” to the
conversation, and if the conversation languished he took small notice.

However, he had to be told, and Hal rarely troubled to do much beating
about the bush, so, in order to rouse him speedily and thoroughly, just
as he was settling down to his newspaper she hurled the news at his
head without any preliminary preparation.

“What do you think Lorraine has done now? Been and gone and married a
man old enough to be her father!”

“Married!... Lorraine Vivian married!”

Dudley’s newspaper went down suddenly on to his knee.

Hal had squatted on the hearthrug, tailor fashion, before the fire, and
she gave a little swaying movement backward and forward, to signify the
affirmative. He looked at her a moment as if to make sure she was not
joking, and then said, with sarcastic lips:

“A man old enough to be her father?... then it isn’t even Rod Burrell!”

“No; it isn’t even Rod Burrell.”

“Some one with more money and influence, I suppose? Well, I don’t know
that Burrell needs any one’s condolences.”

“He does, badly.”

“He won’t for long. The Burrells are a sensible lot, and no sensible
man frets over a heartless woman.”

“Lorraine is not a heartless woman. She has too much heart.”

“She is certainly very generous with it.”

“I don’t know which is the more detestable, a sarcastic man or a
sensible one.” Hal shut her lips tightly, and stared at the fire.

“I imagine you hardly expect any sort of man to admire Miss Vivian’s
action.”

“It doesn’t matter in the least what ‘any sort of man’ thinks. I am
only concerned with the possibility that she will weary of matrimony
quickly and be miserable. I told you, because I wanted you to hear it
from me instead of from a newspaper.”

Dudley suddenly grew more serious, as he realised how it must in a
measure affect Hal also.

“Who is he?”

“He is a stockbroker, named Frank Raynor, aged fifty.”

“And of course she married him for his money?”

“I suppose so. Also he partly owns the Greenway Theatre.”

“Pshaw . . . it’s a mere bargain.”

Hal was silent. She had rested her chin on her hands, and was now
gazing steadily at the embers.

“Of course if he is not a gentleman, you will have to leave off seeing
so much of her.”

“Not at all. She would need me all the more.”

“That is quite possible,” drily; “but you owe something to yourself and
me.”

“I couldn’t owe failing a friend to any one. But he is a gentleman
almost—a self-made one, and he doesn’t let you forget it.”

“Then you’ve seen him?”

“Yes, today.” Her lips suddenly twitched with irresistible humour. “He
called me ‘Hal’ and Lorraine ‘wifey.’ We bore it bravely.”

“What business had he to call you by your Christian name?”

“None. I suppose he just felt like it. He also alluded to my new hat as
a bonnet. Also he used to be an office-boy or something. He seemed
inordinately proud of it.”

“I loathe a self-made man who is always cramming it down one’s throat.
I don’t see how you can have much in common with either of them any
more.”

Hal got up, as if she did not want to pursue the subject.

“It won’t make the smallest difference to Lorraine and me,” she said.

Dudley knit his forehead in vexation and perplexity, remarking:

“Of course you mean to be obstinate about it.”

“No,” with a little laugh; “only firm.” She came round to his chair and
leant over the back it.

“Dear old long-face, don’t look so worried. None of the dreadful things
have happened yet that you expected to come of my friendship with
Lorraine. The nearest approach to them was the celebrated young author
I interviewed, who asked me to go to Paris with him for a fortnight,
and he was a clergyman’s son who hadn’t even heard of Lorraine. Next, I
think, was the old gentleman who offered to take me to the White City.
I don’t seem much the worse for either encounter, do I? and it’s silly
to meet trouble halfway.”

She bent her head and kissed him on the forehead.

“Dudley,” she finished mischievously, “what are you going to give
Lorraine for a wedding-present?”

“I might buy her the book, ‘How to be Happy though Married,’” he said
dilly, “or write her a new one and call it ‘Words of Warning for
Wifey.’”

“We’ll give her something together,” Hal exclaimed triumphantly,
knowing that, as usual, she had won the day.

Then she went off to bed, feigning a light-heartedness she was far from
feeling, and dreading, with vague misgivings, what the future might
bring forth.




CHAPTER V


It was a little over two years later that the crash came. There was
first a commonplace, sordid tale of bickering and quarrelling, with
passionate jealousy on the part of the middle-aged husband, and
callous, maddening indifference on the part of the now successful and
brilliant actress.

To do Lorraine justice, she was not actively at fault. Her sense of
fair play made her try sincerely to make the best of what had all along
been an inevitable fiasco. She did not sin in deed against the man to
whom she had sold herself, but in thought it was hardly possible for
her to give him anything but tolerance, or to feel much beyond the
callous indifference she purposely cultivated, to make their life
together endurable. The things that at first only irritated her grew
almost unbearable afterwards.

Lorraine’s father had been a gentleman by birth, breeding, and nature.
If she inherited from her mother an ambitious, calculating spirit, she
also inherited from her father refinement, and tone, and a certain
fineness character, that showed itself chiefly in unorthodox ways, for
the simple reason that her life and conditions were entirely removed
from a conventional atmosphere.

As a man she might merely have lived a double life, conforming to the
conventions when advisable, and following her own ambitions and bent in
secret, without ever apparently stepping over the line.

As a woman she could but cultivate callous indifference to a great
deal, and satisfy her soul by “playing fair” according to her lights,
in the path before her, but nothing could save her from a mental nausea
of the things in her husband which belonged to his plebeian origin and
nature, and which crossed with a shrivelling, searing touch her own
inherent refinement and high-born spirit.

The objectionable friends he brought to the house she found it easier
to bear than the things he said about them behind their backs; neither,
again, was his addiction to drink so trying as his mental coarseness. A
man who had drank too much could be avoided, but the lowness of Frank
Raynor’s mind seemed to follow and drag hers down.

Yet for two years she held bravely on, cultivating a hard spirit, and
throwing herself heart and soul into the first delicious joy of
success. This last surprised even her friends and admirers. A moderate
hit was quite expected, but not a triumph which placed her almost in
the first rank, and was due not merely to her acting, but to a bigness
of spirit and comprehension she had never before had an opporturnty to
reveal.

It was, indeed, the justification of Hal’s devotion. Hal, by her very
nature, could not love a small-minded woman. What she so unceasingly
loved and admired in Lorraine was a hidden something she alone had had
the perspicacity to perceive, and could so instinctively rely upon. It
was the something which, given once a fair opening, carried her quickly
through the company of the lesser successes, and placed her on that
high plane which demands soul as well as skill.

Then came the dreadful climax. In a drunken, mad moment her husband
hurled at her that he had been her mother’s lover, and proposed to
return to his old allegiance—had, in fact, already done so.

Lorraine immediately packed up her own special belongings and left his
roof for ever.

Expostulations, promises, threats, passionate assurances that he had
not been responsible for what he said failed alike to move her. She
knew that whether responsible or not he had spoken the truth, and that
everything else either he or her mother could say was false.

Finding her obdurate, he swore to ruin them both; but she told him she
would sing for bread in the streets before she would go back to him;
and he knew she meant it.

Fearing his influence against her and his sworn revenge, she went to
Italy for a year, and hid in quiet villages until his passion should
somewhat have died, finding herself in the dreadful position, not only
of being betrayed by her mother, but quite unable to obtain any sort of
freedom without revealing the black stain upon her only near relation.

She could not seek a divorce under the terrible circumstances, and she
was far too proud and spirited to touch a farthing of her husband’s
money. It was like a dreadful chapter in her life, of which she could
only turn down the page; never, never, obliterate nor escape from.

In the black days and weeks of despair which followed, she often felt
she must have lost her reason without Hal, and even to her she could
not tell the actual truth. Hal asked once, and then no more. Afterwards
it was like a secret, unnamed horror between them, from which the
curtain must not be raised.

For the rest there was the usual but intenser scene of remonstrance
between Dudley and Hal with the usual resentful and obdurate
termination. This time Dudley even got seriously angry, unable to see
anything but a foolish, unprincipled woman reaping a just reward of her
own sowing; and for nearly a week his displeasure was such that he
addressed no single word to Hal if he could help it.

Hal, for once, was too wretched about everything to resent his
attitude, and merely waited for the sun to shine again and the black,
enveloping clouds to roll away.

She saw Lorraine everyday, in the apartments whence she had fled, and
helped her to make the necessary arrangements to cancel the short
remainder of an engagement and get away. She even had one interview
with the irate husband, but no one ever knew what took place, except
that Raynor sought no repetition, and seemed afterwards to have a
respectful awe of Hal’s name which spoke volumes.

Accustomed to intimidating women with a curse and an oath, he had found
himself unexpectedly dealing with two who could scorch him with a scorn
and contempt far more withering than a vulgar tirade of blasphemous
language.

Finally the break was made complete. Lorraine got safely away to Italy,
her mother retired to an English village, and Raynor departed to
America for good.

For him it was merely a case of fresh pastures for fresh money-making
and fresh intrigues.

For Mrs. Vivian only a passing exile from the gaieties and extravagance
she loved.

For Lorraine it meant a hideous memory, a hideous, overwhelming
catastrophe, and a hideous tie from which she could not hope to free
herself.

She went away in a state of nervous prostration that was an illness,
feeling the horror of it all in her very bones, and clinging with a
silent hopelessness to Hal in a way that was more heart-rending than
any hysterical outburst.

Yet that Hal was there was good indeed. Hal, who, though only
twenty-one, could look out on an ugly world with those clear eyes of
hers, and while seeing the ugliness undisguised, see always as it were
beside it the ultimate good, the ultimate hope, the silver lining
behind the blackest cloud. Hal, who could criticise unerringly, with
direct, outspoken humour,and yet scorn to judge; who had learnt, by
some strange instinct, the precious art of holding out a friendly hand
and generous friendship, even to those condemned of the orthodox,
sufferers probably through their own wild and foolish actions, without
in any way becoming besmirched herself, or losing her own inherent
freshness and purity.

It was not in the least surprising that a man as wedded to his books
and profession as Dudley should fail to realise what was, in a measure,
phenomenal. By the simple rule of A B C, he argued that ill necessarily
contaminates, if the one to come in contact is of young and
impressionable years. There might of course be exceptions, but hardly
among those as frivolous and obstinate as Hal.

He worried himself almost ill about it all, until Lorraine was safely
out of England, adding seriously to poor Hal’s troubled mind, seeing
she must stand by the one while longing to soothe and please the other,
and fretting silently over his anxious expression. But once back in
their old groove, he quickly recovered his spirits, and even tried to
make up to Hal a little for what she had lost. Unfortunately, however,
he hit upon an unhappy expedient.

He tried to persuade her to make a friend of a certain Doris Hayward,
instead of Lorraine.

Doris’s brother had been Dudley’s great friend in the days when both
were articled to the same profession, but a terrible accident had later
lain him on an invalid couch for the rest of his life.

When clerk of the works of one of London’s great buildings, a heavy
crane had slipped and swung sideways, flinging him into the street
below. He was picked up and carried into the nearest hospital,
apparently dead, but he had presently come back, almost from the grave,
to drag out a weary life as an incurable on an invalid sofa.

Soon afterwards his father died, leaving Basil and his two sisters the
poor pittance of £50 a year between them.

Ethel, the elder, was already a Civil Service clerk at the General Post
Office, earning £110 a year, and on these two sums they had to subsist
as best they could.

Basil earned occasional guineas for copying work, when he was well
enough to stand the strain, and Doris remained at home with him in the
little Holloway flat, as nurse and housekeeper.

Dudley, with his usual lack of comprehension where women were
concerned, evolved what seemed to him an admirable plan, in which Hal
and Doris became great friends, thereby brightening poor Doris’s dull
existence, and weaning Hal from her allegiance to the unstatisfactory
Lorraine.

His plans, however, quickly met with the discouragement and downfall
inevitable from the beginning. At first he tried strategy, and Hal, in
a good-tempered, careless way, merely listened, while easily avoiding
any encounter.

Then Dudley went a step too far.

“I have to be out three evenings this week, so I asked Doris Hayward to
come and keep you company, as I thought you might be dull.”

“You asked Doris to come and keep _me_ company!” repeated Hal, quite
taken aback.

“Yes; why not? She is such a nice girl, and just your age. I can’t
think why you are not greater friends.”

“It’s pretty apparent,” with a little curl of her lips.

“We haven’t anything in common: that’s all.”

“But why haven’t you? You can’t possibly know if you never meet. She
seems such a far more sensible friend for you than Lorraine Vivian,”
with a shade of irritation.

“Probably that is exactly why I don’t want her friendship,” with a
light laugh.

“But you might try to be reasonable just once in a way. Try to be
friendly tomorrow evening.”

Hal, with her quick, light gracefulness, crossed to him, and playfully
gave him a little shake.

“Dudley, you dear old idiot. I don’t know about being reasonable, but I
can certainly be honest; and it’s honest I’m going to be now. I think
it is almost a slur on Lorraine to mention a little, silly,
dolly-faced, conceited creature like Doris in the same breath; and as
for being friendly to her tomorrow evening, that’s impossible, because
I shall not be here. I’m going to the Denisons, and I don’t intend to
postpone it. You will have to write and tell her I am engaged.”

Dudley’s mouth quickly assumed the rigidity which denoted he was
greatly displeased, and his voice was frigid as he replied:

“You are very injust to Doris. You scarcely know her, and yet you
condemn her offhand: the fault you are always finding in me. As for any
comparison between her and Miss Vivian, it is very certain she would
not sell herself to a man, and then run away from him because things
did not turn out as she wanted them.”

Hal turned away, with a slight shrug and a humorous expression as of
helplessness.

“We won’t argue, _mon frère_, because, since you always read books
instead of people, you are not very well up in the subject. To put it
both candidly and vulgarly, I haven’t any use for Doris Hayward at all.
Ethel I admire tremendously, though I don’t think she likes me; and
Basil is a saint straight out of heaven, suffering martyrdom for no
conceivable reason, but Doris is like a useless ornamental china
shepherdess, which ought to be put on a high shelf where it can’t get
itself nor any one else into trouble. I’m really dreadfully afraid if I
had to spend a whole evening alone with her, I should drop her and
break her to relieve my feelings.”

“Well, you needn’t worry”—moving coldly away. “I have far too much
respect for Doris to allow her to come here just to be criticised by
you. I will explain that you are unexpectedly engaged,” and he opened a
paper in a manner to close the conversation.

Hal made a little grimace at him behind it, and retired discreetly to
prepare for her daily sojourn in the City.

It happened, however, when, a year later, Lorraine came back to take up
her theatrical career again in England, there was some vague change in
her that made Dudley less severe in his criticisms. Trouble had not
hardened her, nor softened her, but it had made her a little less sure
of herself, and a little more willing to please.

Hitherto she had taken rather a pleasure in shocking Dudley, under the
impression that it would do him good and open his mind a little. Now
she had a greater respect for his sterling side, and could smile kindly
at his little foibles and fads. The result was that Dudley admitted, a
trifle grudgingly, she had changed for the better, and rather looked
forward to the occasional evenings she spent with Hal at their
Bloomsbury apartments.

He also had to admit that success had in no wise spoilt her, that it
probably never would. The year of absence, it was soon seen, had not
injured her reputation in the least. She came back to the stage renewed
and invigorated, and with still more of that depth of feeling and
atmosphere of soul which had so enriched her personations before.

She became, very speedily, without any question, one of the leading
actressess of the day; and the veil of mystery that hung over the
sudden termination of her short married life, if anything, enhanced her
charm to a mystery-loving public. And all the time, as Dudley could not
but see, she never changed to Hal.

From adulation and adoration, from triumphs that might easily turn any
head she always came quickly back to the little Bloomsbury sitting-room
when she could, to have one of their old gay gossips and merry laughs.
She seemed in some way to find a rest there that she could not get
elsewhere, in the company of people who expected her to live up to a
recognised standard of individuality.

And the change in Lorraine was a change for the better in Hal too, who
began now to tone down a little, and at the same time to strengthen and
deepen in character.

They were, in fact, a pair it was good to see and good to know. In the
first few years after the break-up of her home Lorraine was at her
handsomest. Her dark, thick hair had a gloss on it that in some lights
showed like a bronze glow, and she wore it in thick coils round her
small head, free from any exaggerated fashion, and yet with a
distinction all its own. Her dark eyes once more showed the roguish
lights of her schooldays, and her alluring red mouth twitched
mischievously when she was in a gay mood.

A little below the medium height, she was so perfectly built as to
escape any appearance of shortness, and carried herself so well, she
sometimes appeared almost tall.

Considering what her life had been, she looked strangely young for her
years, seeming to combine most alluringly the knowledge and sympathy of
a woman of thirty-five with the freshness and capacity for enjoyment of
twenty-five. The irrevocable tie so far had not clashed with any new
affection; her husband remained in America and made no sign; and her
art was all-sufficing.

Hal was built on quite different lines. Tall, and slender, and well
knit, she moved with the surging grace of the athlete, and looked out
upon the world with a joyfulness and humorous kindliness that won her
friends everywhere. She was not beautiful in any sense that could be
compared with Lorraine, but she had pretty brown hair, and fine eyes,
and a clear, warm skin that made up for other defects, and helped to
produce a very attractive whole.

Lorraine had taught her how to dress—an art of far deeper significance
than many women trouble to realise; and wherever Hal went, if she did
not create a sensation, at least she carried a distinction and
pleasingness that were rarely overlooked. Her daily sojourn in the
City, among the bread-winners, had made her large-hearted and
generously tolerant, without hurting in any degree her own innate
womanliness and charm.

She showed in her every gesture and action how it was possible to be of
those who must scramble for buses, and press for trams, and live daily
in the midst of panting, struggling, working, grasping humans, without
losing tone, or gentleness, or a radiant, fearless spritit.

At the office of the newspaper where she filled the post of secretary
and typist, she was a sort of cheerful institution to smooth worried
faces and call up a smile amidst the irritability and frowns.

Blunderers went to her with their troubles, and felt fairly secure if
she would break the news of the blunder or mistake to the irritable and
awe-inspiring chief. He, in his turn, would be irritable before her,
but never with her; and it was a recognised fact among the staff that
she was almost the only one who could make him laugh.

Thus a few intervening years passed happily enough, briging Lorraine to
her thirty-first birthday and Hal to her twenty-fifth, without any
further upheavals to strike a discordant note across the daily round,
except such inevitable trials as Lorraine continued to meet through her
mother, and Hal through her devotion to a non-comprehending brother.
Only, while they had each other and their work, such difficulties were
not hard to cope with; and life sang a gayer, happier song to them than
she usually sings to the mere pleasure-seekers.

For work in a wide interesting sphere is a priceless boon, and the men
who would condemn women solely to pleasure-seeking and the four walls
of their home are showing the very acme of selfishness, in that they
are endeavouring to keep solely and entirely for themselves one of the
best things life has to give.




CHAPTER VI


It will be remembered, perhaps, that an occasion has already occured
when Hal had cause to congratulate herself upon the possession of a
cousin, named Dick, who acted as an antidote to a brother who sometimes
resembled a great-aunt.

Dick, or to give him his full name, Richard Alastair Bruce, was indeed
her best friend and boon companion next to Lorraine. He was her
earliest playmate, and likewise her latest. For many months together
they had been companions in the wildest of wild escapades as children,
at Dick’s country home; and now that they were both responsible members
of the community, in the world’s greatest city, they were equally
attached.

If Hal was down on her luck, she telephoned Dick to come instantly to
the rescue, and if it was humanly possible he came. If Dick wanted a
sympathetic or gay companion, either to go out with him or to listen to
his latest inspirations, he telephoned to Hal, and little short of an
urgent, important engagement would delay her.

At the time he becomes of any importance in this narrative he was
established in a flat in the Cromwell Road, as one of a trio sometimes
known as the Three Graces. The other two were Harold St. Quintin and
Alymer Hermon.

The appellation was first given to them when they were freshmen at New
College, Oxford; partly because they were inseparable, partly because
they were a particularly good-looking trio, and partly because they all
three came up from Winchester with great cricket reputations. Within
two years they were all playing for the ‘Varsity’ and one of them was
made captain.

Three years from the term of their leaving, after each had gone his own
way for a season, they gravitated together again, and finally became
established in the Cromwell Road flat, once more on the old
affectionate terms.

Dick Bruce was following a literary career, of a somewhat ambiguous
nature. He wrote weird articles for weird papers, under weird
pseudonyms, verses, under a woman’s name, for women’s papers, usually
of the _Home Dressmaker_ type; occasional lines to advertise some
patent medicine or soap; one or two Salvation Army hymns of a
particularly rousing nature: and sometimes a weighty, brilliant article
for a first-class paper, duly signed in his own name.

Besides all this he visited a publisher’s office most days, where he
was supposed to be meditating the acquirement of a partnership. Hal was
very apt at terse, concise definitions, and she was quite up to her
best form when she described him as “the maddest of a mad clan run
amok.”

Harold St. Quintin, or Quin, as every one called him, was idealist,
etherealist, and dreamer. His original intention had been to enter the
Church, but having gone down into East London to give six months to
slum work, he had remained two years without showing any inclination to
give it up. Sometimes he lived at the flat, and sometimes he was lost
for a week at a time somewhere east of St. Paul’s, where one might as
well have looked for him as for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Alymer Hermon, after a sojourn on the continent to study languages, was
now established with a barrister, waiting, it must be confessed,
without much concern, for his first brief.

Of the three he was the most striking. Dick Bruce was only ordinarily
good-looking, with a very white skin, a fine forehead, and an arresting
pair of eyes—eyes that were like an index to a brain that held volumes
of original observations and whimsicalities, and revealed only just as
much or little as the author chose.

Harold St. Quintin was small and rather delicate, with never-failing
cheerfulness on his lips, and eyes that seemed always to have behind
them the recollection of the pitiful scenes among which he voluntarily
moved.

Alymer Hermon was Adonis returned to earth. He stood six foot five and
a half inches in his socks, and was as perfectly proportioned as a man
may be; with a head and face any sculptor might have been proud to copy
line by line for a statue of masculine beauty.

When he was captain of the Oxford Eleven, people spoke of his beauty
more than his cricket, although the latter was quite sufficiently
striking in itself. There were others who had sweepstakes on his
height, before the score he would make, or the men he would bowl.

The ‘Varsity’ was proud of him, as they had never been proud of a
captain before, because he upheld every tradition of manliness and
manhood at its best. And they only liked him the better that so far his
attitude to his own comeliness was rather that of boredom than anything
else. Certainly it weighed as nothing in the balance against the joy of
scoring a century and achieving a good average with his bowling.

He was equally bored with the young girls who gazed at him in
adoration, and the women who petted him, and it was a considerable
source of worry to him that he might appear effeminate, because of his
blue eyes and golden hair, and fresh, clear complexion, when in reality
he was as manly as the plainest of hard-sinewed warriors, though the
indulgence of a slightly aesthetic manner and way of speech, learnt at
the University, increased rather than counteracted the suggestion of
effeminacy.

But, taking all things into consideration, he was singularly unspoilt
and unassuming; and sometimes blended with an old-fashioned, paternal
air a boyishness and power of enjoyment that could not fail to charm.

The first time that Lorraine met the trio was when Hal took her to
spend the evening at the flat one Sunday, by arrangement with her
cousin. She herself knew all three well, having been to the flat many
times, but it had taken some little persuasion to get Lorraine to go
with her.

“Of course they are just boys,” said grandiloquent twenty-five, “but
they are quite amusing, and they will be proud of it all their lives if
they can say they once had Lorraine Vivian at the flat as a guest.”

“What do you call boys?” asked Lorraine, looking amused; “I thought you
said they had all left college,”

“So they have, but that’s nothing. Dick is only twenty-five, and the
others are about twenty-four.”

“A much more irritating age than mere boyhood as a rule.”

“Decidedly; but they really are a little exceptional. Dick, of course,
is quite mad—that’s what makes him interesting. Alymer Hermon is a
giant with a great cricket reputation, and Harold St. Quintin is a sort
of modern Francis Assisi with a sense of humour.”

“The giant sounds the dullest. I hope he doesn’t want to talk cricket
all the time, because I don’t know anything about it, except that if a
man stands before the wicket he is out, and if he stands behind it he
is not in.”

“Oh no; he doesn’t talk cricket. He mostly talks drivel with Dick, and
St. Quintin laughs.”

“Dick sounds quite the best, in spite of his madness. A cricketer who
talks drivel, and a future clergyman working in the East End, don’t
suggest anything that appeals to me in the least.”

Nevertheless, when Lorraine, looking very lovely, entered the small
sitting-room of her three hosts, her second glance, in spite of
herself, strayed back to the young giant on the hearth-rug. He was
looking at Hal sideways, with a quizzical air; and she heard him say:

“It may be new, but it’s not the very latest fashion, because it
doesn’t stick out far enough at the back, and it doesn’t cover up
enough of your face.”

“Oh well!” said Hal jauntily, “if I had as much time as you to study
the fashions, I daresay I should know as much about them. But I have to
_work_ for my living,” with satirical emphasis.

“What a nuisance for you,” with a delightful smile. “I only pretend to
work for mine.”

“We all know that. You sit on a stool, and look nice, and wait for a
brief to come along and beg to be taken up.”

“It’s a chair. I’m not one of the clerks. And I shouldn’t get a brief
any quicker if I went and shouted on the housetops that I wanted one.”

“Besides, you don’t want one. You know you wouldn’t know what to do
with it if you got it. Well, how’s East London?…” and Hall crossed to
the slum-worker, with a show of interest she evidently did not feel for
the embryo barrister. Lorraine smiled at him, however, and he moved
leisurely forward to take the vacant seat beside her on the sofa.

“Is Hal trying to sharpen her wit at your expense?” she asked him, in a
friendly, natural way.

“Yes; but it’s a very blunt weapon at the best. People who always think
they are the only ones to work are very tiring; don’t you think so?”

“Decidedly; and I don’t suppose she does half s much as you and I in
reality.”

“Oh well, I could hardly belie myself so far as to assert that. You
see, it takes a long time to make people understand what a good
barrister you would be if you got the chance to prove it.”

Hal could not resist a timely shot.

“Personally, I shoud advise you to try and prove it without the chance.
The chance might undo the proving, you see.”

“What a rotten, mixed-up, meaningless remark!” he retorted. “Is it
because you find I am so dull, you still have to talk to me?”

“Quin is never dull, he is only depressing. Dick, do hurry up and begin
supper. I always feel horribly hungry here, because I know Quin has
just come away from some starving family or other, and I have to try
and eat to forget.”

Lorraine leant across to the dreamy-eyed first-class circketer,
voluntarily giving his life to the slums.

“Why do you do it?” she asked with sudden interest. “It seems, somehow,
unnatural in a—” she hesitated, then finished a little lamely, “a man
like you.”

“Oh no, not at all,” he hastened to assure her. “It’s the most
fascinating work in the world. It’s full of novelty and surprises for
one thing.”

She shuddered a little.

“But the misery and want and starvation. The … the… utter hopelessness
of it all.”

“But it isn’t hopeless at all. Nothing is hopeless. And then, knowing
the misery is there, and doing nothing, is far worse than seeing it and
doing what one can.”

“Oh no, because one can forget so often.”

“Some can. I can’t. Therefore I can only choose to go and wrestle with
it.”

“Of course it is heroic of you, but still!—”

Harold St. Quintin gave a gay laugh.

“It is not a bit more heroic than your work on the stage to give people
pleasure. I get as much satisfaction in return as you do; and that is
the main point. Slum humanity is seething with interest, and it is by
no means all sad, nor all discouraging. There is probably more humour
and heroism there per square mile than anywhere else.”

“And no doubt more animal life also,” put in Dick Bruce. “It’s the
superfluous things that put me off, not the want of anything.”

“It’s feeling such an ass puts me off,” added Hermon; “they’re all so
busy and alert about one thing or another down there, they make me feel
a mere cumberer of the earth. A woman manages a husband, and a family,
and some sort of a home, and does the breadwinning as well. The
children try to earn pennies in their playtime; and the men work at
trying to get work.”

“Whereas you?…” suggested Hal with a twinkle, “work at trying not to
get work.”

“Come to supper, and don’t be so personal, Hal,” said her cousin. “I
wrote a poem on you last week, and called it ‘Why Men Die Young.’ It is
in a rag called _The Woman’s Own Newspaper_. It is also in _The Youth’s
Journal_, with the pronouns altered, and a different title; but I
forget what.”

“What a waste of time—writing such drivel,” Hal flung at him. “Why
don’t you compose a masterpiece, and scale Olympus?”

“Too commonplace. Lots of men have done that. Very few are positive
geniuses at writing drivel. I claim to be in the front rank.”

They sat down to a lively repast, and Lorraine found herself, instead
of an awe-inspiring, distinguished guest, treated with a frank
camaraderie that was both amusing and refreshing. They all made a butt
of Hal, who was quite equal to the three of them; and when the giant
paraphrased one of her (Lorraine’s) most tragic utterances on the stage
into a serio-comic dissertation on a fruit salad they were eating,
lacking in wine, she laughed as gaily as any, and felt she had known
them for years.

Then Hal insisted upon playing a game she had that moment invented,
which consisted of each one confessing his or her greatest failing, and
the gaiety grew.

She led off by informing them that she found she always jumped eagerly
at any excuse to avoid her morning bath. Dick Bruce followed it up with
a confession that he found he was never satisfied with fewer than four
“best girls”, because he liked to compare notes between them, and write
silly verses on his observations; while Harold St. Quintin owned to an
objectionable fancy for bull’s-eye peppermints and blowing eggs.

Alymer Hermon confessed that he loved giving advice to people years
older than himself, concerning things he knew nothing whatever about.

Lorraine tried to cry off, but, hard pressed, she admitted that she
liked the excitement of spending money she had not got, and then having
to pawn something to satisfy her creditors. “Spending money you will
not miss,” she finished, “is very dull beside spending money you do not
possess.”

Alymer Hermon then suggested they should tell each other of besetting
faults, and at once informed Hal her colossal opinion of herself and
all she did was only equalled by its entire lack of foundation.

Hal hurled back at him that every inch in height after six feet
absorbed vitality from the brain, and that, though his dense stupidity
was most trying, the reason for it claimed their compassion.

“You pride yourself beyond all reason on your stature,” she said, “and
are too dense to perceive it is your undoing.”

Lorraine leant towards him and said:

“Inches give magnanimity: big men are always big-hearted; you can
afford to forgive her, and retaliate that too much brain-power sinks
individuality into mere machinery. I should say Hal’s besetting fault
was rapping every one on the knuckles, as if they were the keys of a
typewriting machine.”

“And yours, my dear Lorraine, is smiling into every one’s eyes, as if
the world held no others for you. Were I a man, and you smiled at me
so, I would strangle you before you had time to repeat the glance on
some one else.”

“And Dick’s besetting sin,” murmured St. Quintin plaintively, “is a
persistent fancy for other people’s ties and other people’s boots. I
have cause to bless the benign and other people’s boots. I have cause
to bless the benign providence who fashioned my shoulders sufficiently
smaller than his to prevent his wearing my coats.”

“And yours, Quin,” broke in Hermon, “is a fond and loathsome affection
for pipes so seasoned that the Board of Trade ought to prohibit their
use.”

“After all,” Hal rapped out at him, “that’s not so bad as love of a
looking-glass.”

“And love of a looking-glass is no worse than love of throwing stones
from glass houses,” he retorted.

“Of course it isn’t, Hal,” broke in her cousin, “and probably if you
had anything nice to look at in your glass—”

Hal stood up.

“The meeting is adjourned,” she announced solemnly, “and the honourable
member who was just spoken has the president’s leave to absent himself
on the occasion of the next gathering.”

“Excellent,” cried Quin, while Hermon in great glee rapped the table
with his knife handle and exclaimed, “Capital, Dick!... That drew
her... I think you might say it took the middle stump.”

“Oh, thank goodness he’s got on to cricket,” breathed Hal. “He does
know a little about that, and may possibly talk sense for ten minutes.
Come along, Lorraine, and don’t address Baby at present, for fear you
distract him from his game and start him off struggling to be clever
again. As it is Sunday night, perhaps Dick would like to read us his
latest effusions in the way of boisterous hymns!”

She led the way back to the bachelor sitting-room, and for some little
time Dick amused them greatly with his experiences over editors and
magazines, and then the two went off together to Lorraine’s flat.

At this time she was living at the bottom of Lower Sloane Street, with
windows looking over the river, and it was generally supposed that her
mother lived with her.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Vivian only occupied the ground floor flat in
company with a friend. Lorraine give her an income on condition she
should live there, and so, in a sense, act as a sort of chaperone to
silence the tongues ever ready to find food for scandal in the fact of
brilliance and beauty living alone; but mother and daughter had never
again been on terms of cordiality.

So Hal was often Lorraine’s companion for several nights, coming and
going as she fancied, always sure of a welcome. To her the flat was a
constant delight, and in the evening she loved to sit on the verandah
and watch the gliding river—not to sentimentalise and dream, but
because she loved London with all her heart and soul and strength, and
to her the river was as the city’s pulsing heart.

The moist freshness of the air coming across from Battersea Park was
only the more refreshing after Bloomsbury, and the vicinity of several
well-known names in the world of art and letters appealed porwerfully
to her imagination. Lorraine usually sat just inside the long French
window, taking care of her voice, and listening contentedly to Hal’s
chatter.

They sat thus for a little while after their return from Cromwell Road,
and it was noticeable that Lorraine was even more silent than usual.
Hal told her something about each of their three hosts in turn, while
showing an unmistakable preference for the slum-worker and her cousin.
At last Lorraine interrupted her.

“Why do you say so little about Mr. Hermon?... you merely told me he
was a cricketer, which doesn’t, as a matter of fact, describe him at
all.”

Hal shrugged her shoulders.

“I suppose he doesn’t interest me except in that way.”

“But it is a mere side issue. If he weren’t a cricketer he would be
just as remarkable.”

“But he isn’t remarkable. He’s only exceptionally big.”

“He’s one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever seen, anyway.”

“Oh, nonsense, Lorraine. Besides, he is hardly a man yet. He’s only
twenty-four.”

“I can’t help that,” with a little laugh. “I’ve seen a great many men
in my life, but I’ve never seen any one before like Alymer Hermon.”

“Why in the world not? What do you mean?”

“Well, to begin with, he’s the most perfect specimen of manhood I’ve
ever beheld. He’s abnormally big without the slightest suggestion of
being either too big or awkward. He’s simply magnificent. Most men of
that size are just leggy and gawky: he is neither. Again, other men
built as he, are usually rather brainless and weak, or probably made so
much of by women that they become wrapped up in themselves, and are
always expecting admiration. Alymer Hermon has the freshness of a
delightful boy, with the fine face and courtly manners of a charming
man. If you can’t see this, it’s because you don’t know men as well as
I do.”

Hal stepped over the window sill into the room.

“Pooh!” she said impatiently. “What in the world has happened to you?
He’s just a stuffed blue-and-gold Apollo.”

Lorraine got up also.

“He’s more than that. Some day you will see; unless... unless....”

“Well, unless what?”

“Oh, nothing, only a man like that can’t expect to escape being spoilt.
A certain type of woman will inevitably mark him down for her prey, and
ruin all his freshness.”

“Then you had better take him under your wing,” Hal laughed. “It would
be a pity for such a paragon to be lost to society. Personally, stuffed
blue-and-gold Apollos don’t interest me in the least. Come along to
bed. I’m dead tired,” and she dragged Lorraine away.

But instead of sleeping, the actress lay silently watching a star that
shone in at her window, and thinking a little sadly about the man
nature had chosen to endow so bountifully. In a few weeks she would be
thirty-two and he was twenty-four.

Supposing it had been twenty-two instead of thirty-two, and out of his
splendour he had given his heart to her dark beauty, what a tale it
might have been—what a fairy-tale of sweet, impossible things, with a
golden-haired prince and a dark-eyed princess.

She awoke from her day-dream with a touch of impatience, apostrophising
herself for her folly. After all, what had a beautiful, successful
woman at her prime to do with a youth of twenty-four, who played
foolish games at a supper-table, and was only just beginning to know
his world? Of course he would bore her intolerably at a second
interview, and, closing her eyes resolutely, she drove his image from
her mind.




CHAPTER VII


The second interview, however, by a mere coincidence, took place at
Lorraine’s flat. She was walking leisurely down Sloane Street one
afternoon, after visiting her milliner’s, when she ran into the young
giant going in the opposite direction.

“How so?...” she asked gaily, as is face lit up with a pleased smile,
and he stopped in front of her. “Whither away at this hour? Are you
chasing a brief?”

“Much too brief,” he told her. “I had to carry some important papers to
a certain well-known Cabinet Minister; and he did not even vouchsafe me
a glance of his countenance. I was given an acknowledgment of them by
the footman, as if I had been a messenger boy.”

“Too bad. I think you deserve that another celebrity should give you a
cup of tea, to redeem your opinion of the immortals. My flat is quite
near, and I am now returning. Will you come?”

“Oh, won’t I?” he said boyishly, and turned back.

It was the fashionable hour in Sloane Street, when many well-dressed,
well-known people are often seen walking, and when the road is full of
private motors and carriages. Lorraine found herself moving still more
slowly. She was accustomed to being gazed at herself, had in fact grown
a little blasé of it, but the frank admiration bestowed on her giant
amused and pleased her.

Covertly she watched, as she chatted up to him, for the tell-tale
consciousness and perhaps heightened colour. But when he was looking
back into her face he looked straight before him, over the heads of the
admiring eyes, and paid no smallest heed to them. Neither was he in the
least self-conscious with her. She wondered if he even realised that
the tête-à-tête he accepted so simply would have been a joy of heaven
to many. Anyhow, far from resenting his seeming want of due
appreciation, she found it made him more interesting.

She spoke of Hal, and he immediately exclaimed: “Hal is a ripper, isn’t
she? I can’t help teasing her, you know; it’s the best fun in the
world.”

“Do you usually tease your feminine friends?” she asked. “I’ve no doubt
you have a great many.”

“Oh, no, I haven’t. Men pals are far jollier.”

“Still, I expect your inches bring you many fair admirers.”

He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and looked a trifle bored, and she
divined that he disliked flattery and probably the subject of his
appearance. She adroitly turned the conversation back to Hal, and spoke
of her until they reached the block of flats.

“Is this where you live? What a ripping situation!” he exclaimed. “I
would sooner be near the river than near Knightsbridge, even if it is
not so classy.”

He followed her into the lift, and then into her charming home, full of
enthusiasm, and still without exhibiting a shade of self-consciousness.

Lorraine found her interest growing momentarily, as he took up his
stand on her hearth and gazed frankly around, with undisguised
pleasure.

“What a jolly nice room. It’s one of the prettiest I’ve seen. You have
the same color-scheme as the Duchess of Medstone in her boudoir, but I
like your furniture better.”

Lorraine glanced up a little surprised.

“Do you know the Duchess of Medstone?”

“Well, yes”—a trifle bashfully. “You see, those sort of people ask me
to their houses because of my cricket. Private cricket weeks are rather
fashionable, and I get invitations as the late Oxford captain.”

“And do you go to people you don’t know?”

“Yes, rather, if I can raise the funds. The nuisance is the tipping.
There’s always such a rotten lot of servants; and I’m too much afraid
of them to give anything but gold.”

The tea came in, and she saw him glance round for the chair best suited
to his bulk.

“My chairs were not designed for giants,” she told him laughingly; “you
will have to come and sit on the settee.”

He came at once, stretching his long legs out before him, with lazy
ease, and then drawing his knees up sharply, as if in sudden
remembrance that he was a guest and they were comparative strangers.
Lorraine liked him, both for the moment’s forgetfulness and the sudden
remembrance, and as she glanced again at his beautiful head and
splendid shoulders, she was conscious of a sudden thrill of
appreciative admiration.

Hal was right in naming him Apollo. The Sun God might have been
fashioned just so, when first he ravished the eyes of Venus.

“And so the duchess took you into her boudoir?” she asked, with an
unaccountable twinge of jealousy. “I do not know her. I’m afraid my
friends are not so aristocratic as yours. But I believe she is
considered very handsome.”

“Hard,” he said, with an old-fashioned air. “Handsome enough, but very
hard. I did not like her nearly so much as Lady Moir, her sister.”

“Still no doubt she was very nice to you?”

Lorraine rather hated herself for the question. The ways of
aristocratic ladies, whose idle hours often supply a field of labour
for the Evil One, were perfectly well known to her; and she wondered a
little sharply how far he was still unspoilt. The majority of big,
strong, full-blooded young men in his place would assuredly have sipped
the cup of pleasure pretty deeply by now, even at his years, but with
that fine, strong face, and the clear, frank eyes was he of these? She
believed not, and was glad.

He did not treat her question as if it implied any special favours, and
merely replied jocularly:

“Well, I suppose, since her blood is very blue and mine merely tinged,
she was rather gracious, but of course the really ‘blue’ people
generally are.”

“Tell me who you happen to be?” Lorraine leant back against her
cushions, with her slow, easy grace, asking the question with a
lightness that robbed it of all pointedness or snobbery.

He seemed amused, for he smiled as he answered frankly:

“I happen to be Alymer Hadstock Hermon, one fo _the_ Hermons all right,
but not the drawing-room end, so to speak; at the same time tinged with
her family shadiness—‘blue’ of course I mean—though no doubt it applies
in other ways as well. Does that satisfy your curiosity, or do you want
to know more?”

She loved looking at him, particularly with that humorous little smile
on his lips, so she said:

“Not half. I want to know all the rest.”

“Very well. It’s quite an open book. I was born twenty-four years ago.
I am an only child, and, as usual, the apple of my mother’s eye and the
terror of my father’s pocket. He, my father, is not much else just now
except a recluse. He was recently a member of parliament, a Liberal
member, and, God knows, that’s little enough. I believe he even climbed
in by a Chinese pigtail.

“My grandfather was a Judge in the Divorce Court, which doesn’t somehow
sound quite respectable, and my great-grandfather was a writer of law
books, for which, personally, I think he ought to have been hanged. I
can’t go any farther back; at any rate I don’t want to, because I’m
certain it’s all so correct and dull there isn’t even a family
skeleton.”

“Is it the women or the men of the family that are beautiful?”

“Oh, both,” with humorous eagerness. “Skeletons and ghosts we sought,
and clamoured for, but ugliness, never.”

“Well, it’s a pity you were not a woman. Looks are wasted in a man.
Give a man a ready tongue and a taking manner, and he can usually get
what he wants, if he’s as ugly as a frog. With you, on the other hand,
things will come too easily. You will miss all the fun of the chase. On
my soul I’m sorry for you.”

“The briefs don’t come anyway, nor the ‘oof’: that’s all I can see to
be sorry for.”

“You don’t want them badly enough, that’s all. If you want the one,
you’ll make love to an influential woman who can get them, and if you
want the other, you’ll marry an heiress.”

“I say, you’re giving me rather a rotten character, aren’t you?”

He faced her suddenly, and a new expression dawned in his eyes, as if
he were only just awakening to the fact that she was beautiful.

“Do you really think I’m such a rotter as all that?”

She glanced away, lowering her eyelids, so that her long lashes swept
the warm olive cheeks, and with a little callous shrug answered:

“Why should you be a rotter for doing what all the rest of the world
does? Four-fifths of mankind would give anything for your chances.”

“But you just said you were sorry for me?”

“So I am. So I should be for the four-fifths of mankind, if they got
all they wanted just for the asking.”

He smiled with a sudden, charming whimsicality.

“I don’t feel much in need of sympathy, you know. It’s a ripping old
world, as long as you can indulge a few mild fancies, and be left
alone.”

“Mild fancies!”

She turned on him suddenly.

“What have you to do with mild fancies? Why, you can have the world at
your feet with a little exertion. Haven’t you any ambition? Don’t you
even want to plead in the greatest law court in the world as one of the
first barristers in Europe?”

“Not particularly. Why should I? It would be no end of a fag. I’d far
rather be left alone.”

“You… you… sluggard,” breaking into a laugh. “If I were Fate, I’d just
take you by the shoulders and shake you till you woke up. Then I’d go
on shaking to keep you awake. You shouldn’t be wasted on mere nonentity
if I held the threads.”

But his blue eyes only smiled whimsically back at her.

“I’m jolly glad you haven’t a say in the matter. Why, I should have to
give up cricket, and take to working! You’re as bad as Quin with his
slumming, and Dick with his rotten verses.”

“You don’t know yet that I haven’t a say in the matter,” she remarked
daringly. “Have a cigarette. I’m awfully sorry I didn’t remember
sooner.”

“Indeed, you ought to be,” was the gay rejoinder. “I’ve been just dying
for the moment when you would remember.”

An electric bell rang out as they were lighting their cigarettes, and a
moment later Hal danced into the room with shining eyes and glowing
cheeks. A few paces from the door she stopped suddenly.

“Hullo, Baby,” she said, addressing Hermon, “where have you sprung
from?”

“I found it wandering alone in Sloane Street,” Lorraine remarked, “and
now we’ve been teaing together.”

Alymer did not look any too pleased at Hal’s frank appellation, but
former remonstrance had only been met with derision, and he knew he had
no choice but to submit with a good grace.

“I might ask the same question, Lady-Clerk,” he replied.

“Don’t call me a lady-clerk—I hate the term. I’m a typist, secretary,
bachelor-girl, city-worker, anything you like, not a lady-clerk—bah!…”

“Then don’t call me Baby.”

Hal’s face broke into the most attractive of smiles.

“I can’t help it. Everything about you, your size, your face, your ways
just clamour to be called ‘Baby’. Of course if you’d rather be Apollo—”

“Good Lord, no: is that the only alternative?”

“I’m afraid so; you needn’t go if you don’t want to,” as he prepared to
depart. “We are not going to talk grown-up secrets.”

“If I were Mr. Hermon, I’d give you one good shaking, Hal,” put
Lorraine. “I’m sure you deserve it.”

“Not a bit. Nothing could do him more good than regular interviews with
me, to undo all the harm he has received in between from silly, idiotic
women, who make him think he is something out of the ordinary. Isn’t
that so, Baby? Aren’t you labouring under the delusion that you’re a
remarkable fine specimen of humanity? And all the time, Heaven knows,
you’ve about as much honest purpose and brains as a big over-grown
school-boy.”

“I hope you are not intending to imply he is more richly endowed with
dishonest purpose?” said Lorraine.

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind that,” Hal declared, “so long as it was energy and
purpose of some kind.”

“Even to giving you that good shaking,” he asked, coming forward a step
menacingly.

“Not in here,” in alarm; “you and I scrapping in Lorraine’s
drawing-room would cost a hundred pounds or so in valuables. I’ll cry
‘pax’,” as he still advanced. “Of course you are rather a fine boy
really, I was only pulling your leg.”

Hermon subsided with a laugh, and Hal proceeded to explain that she had
come on business, having been asked by the editor of one of their small
magazines to write up an interview with the actress for him.

“I shall say I found you having a cosy tête-à-tête with a young
barrister of many inches and little brains,” she laughed. “Come,
Lorraine, spout away. What is your favourite _hors d’œuvre?_ Did you
feel like a boiled owl at your first appearance? And which horse do you
back for next year’s Derby?”

She started scribbling, to the amusement of the other two, carrying on
a desultory conversation meanwhile.

“This isn’t anything to do with my department, but I like Mr. Hadley,
and he was keen about it, and offered me three guineas, so I said I’do
do it… Are your eyes yellow or green? For the life of me, I don’t know.
Which would you rather I called them? … I’ve got to go to Marlboro’
House tomorrow to get up a short and vivid account of a garden party,
because Miss Alton, who generally does it, is down with ‘flu’. Were you
a prodigal as a kid? no; I mean a prodigy… Fancy me at Marlboro’ House!
Awful thought, isn’t it? How they dare?

“What is your favourite pastime? Shall I put down shooting? I know you
don’t know one end of a gun from the other, but it doesn’t matter; and
it reads rather well—something unique about it in an actress.”

“Why not put angling, and give some of my dear enemies a chance to ask
what for?”

“Or jam-making,” suggested Alymer, “and redeem the stage in the eyes of
the British matron.”

“Oh, don’t talk… how can I write? Shall I bring myself in, and dig up
the dear old chestnut of David and Jonathan?… or shall I describe
Dudley’s disapproval melting into undisguised worship,” she rippled
with laughter as she scribbled on. “Oh dear, think if Dudley were to
find it, and read it, because he hasn’t even discovered yet that he has
ceased to disapprove.

“Who’s your favourite poet? I might say Dick Bruce; he would write a
book of poems at once. And Quin might be your hero in real life. Do you
know where you were born? Up in the Himalayas sounds nice and airy, and
it might as well have been there as anywhere.”

“If you want anymore you must get it while I eat my dinner,” said
Lorraine, rising. “I have to try and be at the theatre at seven just
now. You may as well both dine with me, and you can come to my
dressing-room afterwards if you like, Hal.”

“No, thank you”; and Hal pulled a wry face. “I’ve seen quite enough of
the wings, and the green-room, and all the rest of it. You might take
Baby, just to show him the real thing, and put him off it once for
all.”

She turned to Hermon.

“Have you ever been behind the scenes? I used to go sometimes, just for
the fun of it, while it was a novelty; but it quite cured me of any
possible taste of the stage. Most of the performers were so nervous
they could hardly speak, their teeth just chattered with cold and
fright mingled, and the gloom of it was like a vault. And then all the
gaping, staring faces in rows, looking out of the darkness. You can’t
think how idiotic people look seen like that. It always suggested to me
that both stage and stalls were like children playing at being
lunatics.”

“That’s only your dreadfully prosaic, unromantic mind, Hal. You just
like to write newspaper articles, and type letters, and smother your
imagination under dry-and-dust facts.”

“Smother my imagination,” echoed Hal, with a laugh. “Why, it would take
the imaginations of fifty ordinary people to concoct some of the
paragraphs we fix up during the week. My imagination is a positive
goldmine at the office, at least it would be if they dare print all
that I suggest.”

“You should run a paper yourself,” suggested Hermon; “a few libel
actions would made it pay like anything.”

“Ah, you haven’t seen Dudley,” with a little grimace. “Dudley would
have a fit and die before the first action had had time to reach its
interesting stage. I’d take you home to see him now, but he happens to
have gone up to Holloway to dinner.”

“I’m dining out myself, so I must fly.” He turned to Lorraine, with a
gay smile. “I say, may I come and dine with you some other time?”

“Come to the Carlton on Sunday, will you?”

Lorraine hardly knew why she made the sudden decision; she only knew
perfectly well she would have to break another engagement to keep it,
and that she was foolishly glad when he accepted.

“It’s all right; you needn’t ask me,” volunteered Hal, as her friend
glanced at her. “I’m going motoring with Dick, and I shall insist upon
staying out until ten or eleven. I always try and fill my Sundays full
of fresh air. “Where are you going tonight, Baby?” she added, with a
charmingly impudent smile.

“The Albert Hall, with Lady Selon”; and a twinkle shone in his eyes.

“Goodness gracious! What in the world are you going to the Albert Hall
for? and who is Lady Selon?”

“She is Soccer Selon’s sister-in-law, and she asked me to take her to a
concert. Is there anything else you would like to know?”

“Her age?” archly.

“Somewhere about thirty-five, I should imagine.”

“Oh! your grandmother, or thereabouts. Well, skip along. Tell Dick to
call for me early on Sunday.”

When he had said good-bye to Lorraine and departed, Hal held up her
hand, hanging in a limp fashion.

“I wish you’d teach him to shake hands, Lorry. It feels like shaking a
blind cord and tassel. Are you going to mother him? What an odd idea
for you to bother with a boy! You surely don’t mean to tell me he
interests you?”

“I like to look at him. He’s such a splendid young animal. I feel—oh, I
don’t know what I feel.”

“Lots of London policemen are splendid young animals, but you don’t
want tête-à-tête teas with them if they are.”

“You absurd child! Is there any reason why I shouldn’t have tea with
Mr. Hermon, if it amuses me?”

“None specially; but if it’s just a splendid young animal to look at,
you want, I daresay it would be safer to import a polar bear from the
Zoo.”

Lorraine felt a spot of colour burn in her cheeks, but she only laughed
the subject aside, and alluded to it no more before they parted at the
theatre door.

Only at a late supper-party that night she was quieter than was her
wont; and, contrary to her habit, one of the first to leave. A
well-known rising politician, who had been paying her much attention of
late, prepared, as usual, to escort her home. She wished he would have
stayed behind, but had no sufficient reason for refusing his company.
He taxed her with silence as they spun westwards, and she pleaded a
headache, wondering a little why all he said, and looked, and did,
somehow seemed banal and irritating tonight.

He was so sure of himself, so fashionably blasé, so carelessly clever,
so daringly frank, with all the finished air of the modern smart man,
basking callously in the assured fact of his own brilliance and
superiority. She knew that most women would envy her the attentions of
such a one, and that his interest was undoubtedly a great compliment,
as such compliments go; but tonight she found herself remembering all
the other women who had reigned before her, all those who would
presently succeed her, and she was conscious of an impatient disgust of
all the shallowness and insincerety of the fashionable, successful man.

“May I come in?” he asked, when they reached the flat, looking rather
as if he were conferring a favour than soliciting one.

“No; it is too late. Good-night.”

“Too late!…” he laughed a little, and Lorraine felt her temper rising.
“It is not exceptionally late, a little earlier than usual in fact. Why
mayn’t I come in?”

“Because I don’t want you,” she said coldly, and she saw him bite his
lip in swift vexation.

“I shall certainly not press you,” he retorted, and turned away.

At the window of her drawing-room Lorraine lingered a few moments,
gazin with a half-longing expression at the gleam of the lights on the
dark flowing river. What was it that gave her that strange sense of
heartache tonight? Why had her usual companions bored and irritated
her? Why did Alymer Hermon’s fine, boyish, refreshing face come so
often to her mind?

She was certainly not in love with him. The mere idea was ridiculous,
but it was equally certain that something about him had given rise to
this vague unrest and longing. Was it perhaps that he called to her
mind the youth she had never known, the young splendid, whole-hearted
years, when it was so easy to believe and hope and enjoy that which
life had never given her time for?

True, the world was at her feet now, just as much as it would ever be
at his, but with what a difference? For her, with the work and stain of
the knowledge of much evil, and little good. For him, at present, with
all the glorious freshness of the morning.

She glanced back into the dim room, and among the shadows she saw him
standing there again, towering up upon her hearthrug, before her
hearth, with that youthful, frank assurance that was so attractive. Of
a truth he was unspoilt yet, unspoilt and splendid as the dawn of the
morning—but for how long?

What would they make of him presently, the women of the world, who must
needs worship such a man, and strew their charms before him. How was he
to keep his freshness, when temptation hemmed him in on every side?

She felt a sudden yearning as of hungry mother-love towards him. If he
had been her son, her very own son, how she would have fought the whole
world to help him keep his armour bright, and his colours flying high.

And instead?...

The wave of hungry mother-love was followed by one as of swift and
angry protest. Who had ever cared whether she kept her armour bright
and her colours flying high? Had not life itself mocked at her early
aspirations, and trampled jeeringly on her untutored, unformed high
desires? What chance had she ever had, long as she might, to keep the
morning freshness?

Well, what of it? She had sought and striven for fame, and fame had
come; she was a poor creature if she could not look life in the face
now, and laugh above her wounds.

And in the meantime perhaps she could help him fight some of those
other women still; the women who would drag him down for their own
satisfaction, and care nothing for the hurt to him.

Anyhow, she would try to be a good pal to him, and not a temptress. For
once she would fight for some one else’s hand instead of her own, and
gain what satisfaction she could in feeling herself a true friend.




CHAPTER VIII


About the time that the three in the Chelsea flat were leave-taking, a
stream of women-clerks in the long passages of the General Post Office
proclaimed that pressure of work had again meant “overtime” to these
energetic City-workers.

In consequence, there was a lack of elasticity in the many passing
feet, and the suggestion of a tired silence in the cloak-room; for
though the girls hastened to get away from the dreary monotony of the
huge building, they were, many of them, too tired to depart as joyfully
as was their wont.

Yet most of them, behind the tiredness, looked out upon the world with
clear, capable eyes, and strong, self-reliant faces, that spoke well
for the spirit of their set. Up there in the big office-rooms, year in
year out, these refined, well-educated women kept ledgers and accounts
and did the general office work of the Civil Service with a precision
and neatness and correctness equal to the work of any men, and
invariably to the astonishment of any interested visitor who was
permitted to inquire into the system.

Yet the majority of their salaries ranged from £90 a year to £210, and
they were obliged to pas an examination of no mean stamp to attain a
post. Small wonder that many of them, having to help support others as
well as keep themselves, had the delicate, listless, anaemic appearance
of underfed women badly in need of fresh air, good food, and wholesome
exercise.

The policy of Great Britain towards her women workers is surely one of
the greatest contradictions of our enlightened age. Even putting aside
the vexed question of suffragism, how little has she ever done to try
and cope with the needs of working womanhood?

In some Government departments, as, for instance, the Army Clothing
Department, it is a known fact that the women are actually sweated; and
that in the higher branches, employing gentlewomen, they pay them the
lowest possible wage, not because the work is ill-done, but because,
owing to present conditions, plenty of gentlewomen are found to accept
the offer.

Many of these gentlewomen lose their health in their struggle to obtain
good food, decent lodging, and a neat appearance on Government
salaries, knowing full well that the moment they fall out of the ranks
numbers will be waiting to fill their places.

And in the meantime enlightened authors and politicians write articles,
and make speeches, holding forth upon the charm and beauty of the Home
Woman, and drawing unflattering comparisons between her and the worker.

Comfortable elderly gentlemen, who have had successful careers and can
now afford to dine unwisely every night, and keep their daughters in
well-dressed indolence, self-satisfied, self-aggrandising,
self-advertising young politicians, who, having obtained an attentive
public, delight to cant about the rights of the citizen and the good of
the Empire, clever, intuitive, charming novelists, who apparently
possess an unaccountable vein of dense non-comprehension on some
points—all harp upon this theme of the Home Woman, and the Home Sphere,
and the infinite superiority, in their own lordly eyes, of the gentle,
domesticated scion of the family hearth.

As if one-fourth of the women wage-earners, gentle or otherwise, in
England today had any choice in the matter whatever. The rapidity with
which a vacant place in the ranks is filled and the numbers waiting for
it is surely sufficient proof of that; to say nothing of the pitiful
conditions under which many, gentle and otherwise, cling to their posts
long after a merciful fate should have given them the opportunity to
save the remnants of their shattered health amidst country breezes.

It is useless to cry out to the woman that work and competition with
men is unbecoming to her. She _must_ work, and she _must_ compete, and
seeing this, it is surely time the British Government accepted the fact
magnanimously, and took more definite steps to assure her welfare.

If it can only be done through woman’s suffrage, then woman’s suffrage
must surely come, because, whether British legislators care for the
good of women or not, nature does care, and as the race moves forward
the working woman will have to be protected.

It has been seen over and over again that no band of politicians, nor
powerful men, nor tape-bound State can long defy any advancing good for
the needs of the whole.

Whether women work or not, they are the mothers of the future; and
because this fact is greater than the sum of all other facts brought
forward by the narrowness and short-sightedness of men, we may safely
believe that, since they _must_ work, nature will see to it that they
work under the most favourable conditions, no matter what rich men have
to go the poorer for it.

Pity is that the hour is so delayed; that narrowness, and selfishness,
and self-aggrandisement still flourish, to the eternal cost of those of
England’s mothers who bring weaklings into the world, through the hard
conditions of their enforced labour.

The _true patriot_ of today will agitate not only for the highest
possible efficiency in the Navy and Army; but, with no less resolve and
sincerity, for the best possible conditions obtainable for all
women-workers, that the Empire may not later sink suddenly to decay, in
spite of her defences, through the impoverished, feeble, sickly
off-spring who are all the men she has left.

The _true patriot_ will accept the ever-strengthening fact, however
unpalatable, that the development and emancipation of womanhood has
brought women to the front as workers, _to stay_; and he will perceive
that therefore it is incumbent upon the men to endeavour to find that
happy mean, where they can work together to the advantage of both, and
to the stability and greatness of a beloved country.

Only now the women-workers toil bravely on, heartening each other with
jests under conditions in which it is extremely likely men would merely
cavil and sulk and fill the air with their complainings; dressing
themselves daintily through personal effort in spite of meagre purses;
throwing themselves with a splendid joyousness into their few precious
days of freedom; banding themselves together often and often to wring
occasional hours of gaiety from the months of toil; keeping brave eyes
to the front and brave hearts to the task, while they wait steadfastly
for the day when their worth shall be appreciated and their claims
recognised.

Hastening to the office in the morning, or hastening home (probably to
cook their own dinner) at night, they read those clever, carefully
worded articles and speeches by the men of power and weight, harping
upon the charm and beauty and superiority of the Home Woman; and they
laugh across to each other with a frank, rather pitying, rather
irritated laughter, at the extraordinary dull-wittedness of some
brilliant brains.

They wonder gaily how these enlightened, clever gentlemen would like it
if they all became sweet Home women in the workhouses, cultivating
elegant gardens, and floating round in flowing gowns at their expense.

The men call them “new women” with derision, or mannish, or unsexed;
but those who have been among them, and known them as friends, know
that they hold in their ranks some of the most generous-hearted,
unselfish, big-souled women to exist in England today; and that it is
just because of that they are able to plod cheerfully on, and laugh
that indulgent, pitying little laugh, when an outraged man swells with
virtuous indignation, and waxes eloquent upon their want of womanly
attributes.

Of such as the best of these was Ethel Hayward. Among the crowd now
hurrying more or less tiredly into the open air, she might not have
been noticed. So many had white faces, dark-circled eyes,
shabby-genteel clothing, and just a commonplace fairness, that in the
throng it was difficult to discover distinguishing attributes.

One had to see her apart, and note the quick, urgent step, the
independent, lofty poise of her head, and the steadfastness of the
tired eyes, and firm, strong mouth, to feel that life had given her a
heavy burden, which only a noble soul could have supported with
heroism.

As she left the portals of the General Post Office she hesitated a few
seconds as to her direction. “Should she go straight back to the little
flat in Holloway, or should she go west, and get the drawing-paper
Basil was wanting?”

Doris could easily get the drawing-paper the next day, if she chose;
and at the flat Dudley Pritchard would have arrived for the evening.
She surmised hastily that it was extremely probable Doris had made some
other engagement for herself that she would be unwilling to delay, and
that Dudley would in no wise regret her own tardy return.

The last thought caused her eyes to grow a little strained, as she
walked quickly westwards—strained with the determination to face the
fact unflinchingly, and try to overcome the deep, insistent ache it
caused.

But the love of a lifetime is not dismissed at will, and looking a
little pitifully backward, though she was but twenty-eight, Ethel felt
she could not remember the time when she did not love Dudley Pritchard,
though it had perhaps only crystallised into the great feature of her
life at the time when, in silent, heroic endeavour, he had given of all
he had to win his friend back to life and health.

It was Dudley’s careful savings that he had paid for the great
specialist and the big operation; Dudley’s courage and devotion that
had nerved the stricken man to take up the awful burden of perpetual
invalidism; Dudley’s never-failing encouragement and friendship that
helped him still to bear the dreary months of utter weariness, in the
little home kept together by his sister’s salary.

High up in the dreary-looking block of flats in Holloway, attended
through the day by the erratic ministrations of Doris, and at night by
the yearning tenderness of Ethel, Basil Hayward dragged out a weary
martyrdom, that prayed only for release. In vain Ethel murmured over
him, that to work for him was a glory compared to what it would be to
live without him; in the silent, tedious hours of her absence, his soul
broke itself in hopeless, passionate protest against the decree that
compelled him to accept his daily bread at the hands of the sister he
would gladly have striven for day and night.

It as a martyrdom across which one can but draw a curtain, and stand
“eyes frontt”. Look this way, look that, what answer is there, what
reason, what explanation, of the hidden martyrdoms of the work-a-day
world, which the blank wall of heaven seems to regard with utter
unconcern?

Mankind today is less disposed than ever of yore to calmly fold the
hands and say, “It is the will of God.” They can no longer do so
honestly without either blaming or criticising the Divine Will that not
merely permits, but is said to send, such martyrdoms.

Better surely to accept bravely the enigma of the universe, and strive
to lessen the suffering in our own little sphere, believing that same
Divine Will is striving with us to mitigate the ills humanity has
brought upon itself through blind disobedience and careless
indifference to the laws of nature.

Uncomplaining resignation may help by its example, but the resignation
which sits with folded hands and makes no effort to amend, is only a
form of feebleness. The strong soul accepts life silently as a field of
battle, asking for energy, resource, courage, and that fine spirit
which obeys the unseen general in unquestioning faith.

It was only in such a spirit, through those years of pain and mystery,
that Ethel was able to witness her passionately loved brother’s
martyrdom, and give all the years of her youth to earn that pour salary
from a wealthy Empire, to keep some sort of a home for the three of
them in the little, dingy Holloway flat.

For even if Doris had been capable of sustained endeavour, the
bedridden man could not have been left alone for long, and no choice
was left them but to eke out Ethel’s pitiful £110 salary between them.

Often perhaps a passionate resentment burned in her heart concerning
the heavy handicaps under which a woman achieves work equal to a man’s;
but she had no time to lend herself to any open protest, and toiled on,
silently fighting her individual daily battle the better encouraged by
those brave women taking all the opprobrium of the warfare upon their
own shoulders, for the sake of working womanhood as a whole.

Only, of late a fresh burden had been added in the fear that Dudley was
growing to care for her sister Doris.

It was not that she grudged Doris the happiness, nor the prospect of a
home in which she and Dudley might together take care of Basil; but she
saw ahead the tragedy of the awakening, when Dudley learnt of the
shallow, selfish little heart behind Doris’s charming exterior.

That he, of all people, should be drawn to such an one was only the
contradiction seen on all sides in life. Because he had that
old-fashioned distrust of the independent, self-reliant woman, he must
needs go to the opposite extreme, and let himself be drawn to one
capable of little else in the world but ornamentation. Doris, she knew,
was fitted only to be a rich man’s plaything. Dudley, she felt
instinctively, would start off by expecting of her things she had never
had to give, and in his dismay and disappointment might wreck both
their lives.

Yet she felt powerless to take any step that might save them from each
other, knowing full well that Doris, bored with her life at the flat,
had decided that even life with Dudley would be better. And even as
Ethel hastened westwards, instead of towards home, Doris with infinite
pains put the finishing touches to her pretty hair, and took a last
survey of her dainty person before the well-known step should sound on
the stone staircase outside their unpretentious little door.

She had been very irritable with the invalid, because he was trying to
get a plan copied quickly, and wanted a special arrangement of light,
just when she was ready to go and dress after preparing the dinner; but
when at last Dudley knocked on the door, Doris opened it to him with a
face of such charming innocence and smiles that irritability would
never have been imagined in the répertoire of her characteristics. A
little helpless, a little childish, she might be, but what clever man
does not love a clinging woman?

“It was so nice of you to come,” she said. “It is such a dreary place
to turn out to after your long day at the office.”

“But I love coming,” he answered simply. “You know I do.”

He looked at her with unconscious admiration, and Doris noted for the
hundredth time that although he was not particularly tall, nor
particularly good-looking, nor particularly anything, yet his thin,
clean-shaven face had a clever, distinguished air, and he had
unmistakably the cut and breeding of a gentleman. She knew that even if
he were only moderately well off, and could not afford the dash she
loved, he was at least good to be seen with, and a man who might one
day make his mark. So, though she deprecated most of the qualities
which were in reality his best points, she decided in her calculating
little head she would seriously contemplate becoming Mrs. Dudley
Pritchard.

His greeting with the invalid was, for Dudley, a little boisterous—the
result of a hint from Ethel. He would probably never have had time to
see for himself that such a man as Basil Hayward would hate a pitying
air or invalid manner, but he was sympathetic enough to respond quickly
to a suggestion that the latest cricket or football news, gaily
imparted, was far more pleasing to the invalid than a sympathetic
inquiry after his health.

For Basil Hayward, sufferer and martyr, was prouder of his near
relationship to a celebrated international cricketer than he would ever
had been of his own sublime courage had it been lauded to the skies.
Life had left him little enough, but “give me the power still to glory
in every manly and athletic achievement of my countrymen,” was his
unspoken request.

So they discussed the latest sporting news of the world, and then had a
great argument on a plan of Dudley’s for a competition for a
grand-stand and pavilion on a celebrated aviation ground, while they
waited for Ethel.

The small flat had only one sitting-room, and while they talked Doris
flitted gracefully about, putting the finishing touches to the table.
Afterwards she sat on a low chair under the lamp, so that the light
fell full on her pretty hair, while she bowed her head with unwonted
industry over a piece of sewing.

Occasionally she glanced up at the two men, meeting Dudley’s eyes with
a pretty confiding look that only added to her charm.

“Ethel is so late. I wonder if we had better wait,” she said at last.
“She told me on no account to do so.”

Basil glanced at the clock a little anxiously.

“It is too bad,” he murmured; “they have no right to expect so much
overtime work. She is sure to come soon.”

“Yes; but I think she would like us to begin”; and Doris rose slowly.
“It will save time when she does come in.”

It was plain Basil disapproved, but she pretended not to see it, and in
a short time she and Dudley were seated tête-à-tête, while the invalid
remained on his couch. They were gay from spontaneity of pleasure, and
Hal would have been surprised at the cheeriness of her grave brother,
had she seen how he responded to Doris’s playful mood.

Then Ethel’s key sounded in the door, and it was as though a slight
shadow fell upon them. Doris wished she had been later still; Dudley
seemed to grow grave again, from habit, and Basil watched the door like
a big devoted dog, with eyes of hungry love.

As she entered her first glance was for him, and her nod and smile ere
she turned to greet the visitor hid all her own weariness, and was
reflected in a light of glad welcome on the sick man’s face.

“I’m so glad you didn’t wait,” she said; “I stayed to get the
drawing-paper.”

“But why did you, dear?” he asked, with quick remonstrance. “Doris
could easily have gone tomorrow.”

“Of course I could”; and Doris skilfully threw a hurt tone in her
voice, which Dudley was quick to detect.

“I wanted to walk,” was all Ethel said, as she moved away to take off
her hat and coat.

But in spite of her efforts the gaiety did not return, and Doris grew a
little pensive and sad.

Dudley, with his surface reasoning, saw in her attitude something that
suggested the other two were in the habit of being entirely wrapped up
in each other, to the exclusion of the young sister.

Ethel might be a remarkably clever and capable woman; he knew perfectly
well that she was just as able with her fingers as her brain, and did
nearly all the upholstering and dressmaking of the household in her
evening free time; but wasn’t she just a little superior and
self-satisfied also—just a little unkindly indifferent to the monotony
and dullness of her young sister’s existence?

Dudley found his sympathy go out more and more to those childlike eyes,
and the pretty, clinging ways; and a sort of half-fledged resentment
grew up against the elder sister. He could not choose but admire her,
if it were only for her devotion to her brother, but he felt a vague
something, in his thoughts of her, that he could not express, and
remained grave.

Ethel, watching them both covertly while she moved about helping Doris
to clear away the dinner things, guessed at much that was passing in
his mind, and unconsciously grew a little strained in her manner to
him. That he should pity Doris and blame her seemed at last irony, but
it could not be helped; and not even to win his love could she attempt
to change her natural manner, and appear what might better please him.

She even said “good-night” a little coldly, and remained beside Basil
while Doris went out into the tiny hall with him to get his hat and
coat.

Doris seemed to Dudley a lonely little figure out there in the dim
light, with just the suggestion of a droop about her lips and
wistfulness in her eyes. He believed that she found herself left out in
the cold with those other two, but was too proud to complain. He felt a
tenderness springing up in his heart and spreading to his eyes as he
leaned towards her with a protecting air.

She was small and fragile. It made him feel big and protective; and he
liked it. Hal was so tall and straight and slim and boyish—not in the
least the sort of person one could really feel protective to; and he
liked clinging women… His head bent down quite near to hers as he said
in a low tone: “I suppose they are like lovers, those two, and you feel
a little out of it, eh?”

“Yes”—confidingly and gratefully—“and it makes me very unhappy, because
I love to slave for Basil just as much as Ethel does. But he does not
want me…” with a little sad air.

“Oh, I think you are mistaken. It could never be that. It is only that
they have always been so devoted, and I expect it is too lonely for you
here. You do not get enough change. Would you care to go to the White
City with me on Thursday evening?”

“Oh, I should love it!” and there was a quick gleam in her eyes.

“Very well, I will arrange it.” His hand closed over hers lingeringly.
“Good-bye. Don’t be despondent. I will let you know where to meet me.
We might have dinner at a restaurant first; shall we?”

Again she expressed her delight, and Dudley went off with a glow of
pleasure that was a surprise to him.

But behind the closed door Doris smiled a little smile in the darkness,
that had none of the artless innocence of the smiles reserved for him.

“Ethel would just give her head to go with him,” was her first thought;
and then, “I hope he won’t go to a cheap restaurant.”

In the sitting-room Ethel was putting the last touches to the invalid’s
comfort for the night, moving about busily. Doris leaned against the
table, and made no attempt to help her.

“Dudley wants me to go to the White City with him on Thursday evening.
I said I would.”

“Thursday is the night I have to go and see Dr. Renshaw”; and Ethel
glanced round with a shadow of vexation on her face.

“I know it is, but you will not be very late.” She paused, then added,
“I do not get so many treats that I can afford to miss one.”

“Dudley could probably have gone any other night. Did you ask him?”

Ethel spoke a little quickly, and Doris looked ready with a sharp
retort, when Basil interposed.

“Thursday will be all right, chum. Doris won’t leave before six and you
will get in by half-past seven. I shall have nearly two whole hours in
which to do any silly thing I like, without getting scolded”; and his
smile was very winsome.

“I don’t like you to have to wait so long for your dinner. You always
get faint. Perhaps Dr. Renshaw would see me another evening... I—”

“Oh, nonsense, chum”—in the same cheery voice—“I’ll have a tin of
sardines, and eat one every ten minutes until you come.”

Ethel let the matter drop, seeing it would please him best, and Doris
retired to their room with a slightly sulky air.

“There always seems to be something to damp it if I am to have a
treat,” was her complaint.

“I don’t think you will feel damped after you start,” Ethel replied
quietly, and they went to bed in silence.




CHAPTER IX


When Dudley got back he found Hal waiting up for him, with an
expression of shining eagerness on her face.

“Oh, Dudley, such fun!” she began, “Lorraine has got the royal box for
me for Thursday evening. We must have a little dinner-party. Who shall
we take? It holds four comfortably, and two men could stand at the
back.”

“Thursday evening!” looking a little taken aback. “I am engaged.”

“Engaged! Well, you must put it off. Why didn’t you tell me? I thought
you said you had any night free except Friday.”

“I only made the engagement this evening.”

“Are you going to see Basil again? He won’t mind being put off.”

“No. It isn’t Basil.”

“What then?”

Dudley turned away, threw his gloves carelessly down on a sidetable,
and picked up some letters.

“I asked Doris to go to the White City with me.”

“You—you asked Doris to go to the White City?...” she repeated
incredulously. “What in the world for?”

“To see it, of course. What else should I ask her for?”

“Oh, Heaven only knows! Why ask her at all? I should certainly upset
her into the canal from sheer irritation if she came with me.”

“Such nonsense.” He knit his forehead into a decided frown. “You are so
unfair to Doris. You used to complain that I was unfair to Lorraine. I
was never as unfair as you are now. You don’t really know Doris at all;
and she has never done anything to hurt you.”

“It doesn’t follow that she wouldn’t if she had the chance. You’re so
awfully dense about women, Dudley. Why didn’t you invite Ethel instead?
She is worth a hundred Dorises. Then we could have taken her to the
theatre.”

His voice and manner grew very cold.

“I don’t agree with you, but it is not a subject I care to discuss. Is
there any reason why Doris should not be invited to the theatre?”

“None whatever, except that I don’t propose to ask her.”

They faced each other a moment almost angrily, except that whereas
Dudley was distinctly vexed, Hal was a little scornful, and
half-laughing.

“Then I cannot come either, and”—he paused a moment, to add with
decision—“I object to your going unchaperoned.”

“Do you mean that you wish me to give up the box?”

“You know what I mean.”

Hal was thoughtful a moment, and then remarked with sudden glee:

“I know what I’ll do. I’ll take the Three Graces, and persuade Quin’s
aunt to come as chaperone. Then we’ll all have supper with Lorraine
afterwards. You shall have a nice, quiet, interesting evening with
Doris, and I’ll get two stalls for you for another night.”

She moved about, gathering up her things.

“You don’t know Quin’s aunt, Lady Bounce, do you? She’s the dearest old
soul, and she loves a theatre. Night-night, old boy; don’t keep Doris
too long near the canal, in case you are taken with my inclination”;
and she went gaily off, humming a popular air.

Dudley read through his letters without grasping any of their contents.
For the first time Hal’s attitude to Doris seriously worried him, and
he felt vaguely there was trouble ahead.

But when Thursday came, and they were together, she again had the same
pleasing effect upon his senses, and he let himself be persuaded that
if Hal grew to know her better, she could not choose but grow fond of
her.

In the meantime a group in the royal box at the Greenway Theatre was
causing no small interest to a crowded house.

There was Hal, with her smart, well-groomed air, gleaming white neck
and arms, and her white, even teeth that looked so attractive even in
the distance when she smiled.

Dick Bruce, spruce and scholarly, hugely pleased with himself, because
he had an article in _The National Review_, on the strength of the
colonies in war time; and some lines entitled “Baby’s Boredom” in
_Fireside Chat_, concerning which he had already announced his
intention of standing the champagne for their supper with the cheque.

Of the other two occupants it would be difficult to say which attracted
the most attention. Alymer Hermon, with his immense stature and
splendid head, or Quin’s aunt, Lady Bounce, who presented so striking a
resemblance to another well-known little old lady sometimes seen at the
theatre, that friends of the last-mentioned were utterly puzzled.

Surely only one little lady in London wore that early Victorian dress,
with the ringlets and “grande dame” air, and sat with such genuine
delight and enjoyment through a play? And yet why did she not look out
for her numerous friends, down there in the stalls, and recognise them?

And who in the world was she with? If that were indeed Lady Phyllis
Fenton—and it seemed incredible it should not be—who was the splendid
young giant, and who the white-faced girl with the brilliant smile?

And all the time, absorbed in the play and her companions, the little
old lady smiled and talked, calmly indifferent to the many eyes below
waiting for the expected bow of recognition.

Quin, apparently, had not been willing to desert his slummers for a gay
West-end theatre; so Hal was only escorted by two Graces instead of
three, but the light in her eyes, for any one near enough to see,
suggested she was enjoying herself to the utmost in spite of it.

Then came the final sensation, of the little old lady in her strange
costume and ringlets, passing through the vestibule, on the arm of the
young giant, followed by the sleek-looking, well-groomed pair of
cousins, who chatted to each other with an air of the utmost unconcern
towards the curious glances now levelled at them upon all sides.

“It _must_ be Lady Phyllis Fenton,” said some. “It _can’t_ be,” said
others. “Then who the devil is it?” asked the men.

And still the little group passed on, smiling and unconcerned, though a
red spot burned in the giant’s smooth cheeks, and he carefully avoided
any possibility of meeting Hal’s gleaming eyes.

A roomy electric brougham was awaiting them, and then the watchers said
it glided away: “Surely that is Lady Phyllis’s car and liveries?”

But what they would have made of the scene inside the car it is
difficult to say, for the dear little old lady suddenly collapsed
backwards on her seat, with a howl of laughter, and shot into the air a
pair of trousered legs.

“Oh my conscience!” gasped Quin, amid choking laughter. “It will be the
sensation of the season; and when Aunt Phyllis gets to hear about it
she’ll first have a fit with wrath and then laugh until she’s ill.”

“I’d no idea you were such an actor, Quin,” Hal exclaimed admiringly
when she could speak; “you ought be holding crowded houses enthralled,
instead of slumming.”

“Heaven preserve me. Theatres are mostly mummies looking at mummies.
Down east I get in touch with flesh and blood—the real thing; and I
prefer it. But I wouldn’t have missed tonight for something. Oh,
lord!... just think of the people who know Aunt Phyllis that I must
have cut; and all the fuss there will be when aunt is admonished for
supping at the Savoy with an actress! We aren’t half through the fun
yet.”

With which they all went off into fresh peals of laughter, at various
reminiscences, and were bordering upon a condition of imbecility when
Lorraine at last joined them with the latest news.

“It’s positively immense,” she said. “The manager told me Lady Phyllis
Fenton had come with Miss Pritchard, and tomorrow every paper will
announce it, and the mystery will grow. I ’phoned for a private room at
the Savoy, to keep the puzzle up. She must only be seen passing through
on Mr. Hermon’s arm. How splendid they must look. I almost wish I
wasn’t in the secret.”

“Oh, they do!” Hal cried. “Alymer ought to have had knee breeches and
silk stockings, and they would look just perfect. I have to talk fast
to Dick, or I should give it all away in my face.”

“You’ll have to settle with your aunt,” Lorraine laughed to Quin. “I
hope she won’t cut you off with a shilling.”

“She will be furiously angry and terrifically interested,” he said. “I
expect I shall have to take you all to dinner to show her what the
party looked like. Of course, Bonne, her maid, will give it away,
because I borrowed the garments from her, and said they were for a play
I was getting up in the East End.”

“You’ll have a bad half-hour with Dudley,” Dick remarked to Hal, with
enjoyment. “He is sure to hear of it somewhere.”

“Quite sure,” resignedly; “but if it were a bad two hours it would
still have been worth it. It reminds me of the old days at school,
Lorraine, when we used to get into scrapes on purpose, if the fun made
it worth while.”

There was no gayer supper party in the Savoy that night, and the
champagne paid for with the proceeds of “Baby’s Boredom” proved none
the less vivifying for the insipidity of its source. Dick insisted upon
reciting his doggerel, and Quin was not only much toasted as “Lady
Bounce”, but carried kicking round the room by the giant, because in a
moment of forgetfulness he used a swear-word, which they all insisted
was a reflecton upon the conversation of his illustrious aunt.

Lorraine, in most amusing form herself, laughed until she was tired
out, and wondered why she was not bored. She asked the question of
Alymer Hermon, who was privileged to see her home, while Dick returned
with Hal, and Quin beat a hasty retreat to get rid of his disguise.

“After all, you are only boys,” she said, with a little smile, “and
I’m... well, I’m Lorraine Vivian.”

The giant gazed thoughtfully out of the brougham window a moment, and
from her corner Lorraine looked long, and a little sadly, at the finely
modelled head and profile.

“Perhaps,” he said at length, “a great many people you meet make a
special effort to please you, and try to make an impression on you. We
being all so young, and just nobodies, realise the uselessness of
wasting our efforts, and are merely natural.”

She smiled in the shadow, and glanced away from him with the sadness
deepening.

“I feel tonight I should like to be one of you—so young and just
nobody. It would be a pleasant change.”

“I don’t think you would like it at all.”

He looked at her with a slightly puzzled air.

“Only the other day you were speaking to me of achievement and
ambition. You seemed to care so much. You must be glad.”

“Oh yes, yes,” wearily; “but it isn’t enough by itself. There is
something I have missed, and tonight I feel that it might outweight all
the rest—something to do with being young, and careless, and fresh, and
just nobody.”

Still looking at her with slightly puzzled, very kindly eyes, he
answered simply, “I’m so sorry.”

She seemed to shrink away suddenly into her corner. The very simplicity
of his sympathy, and the quiet, natural friendliness in his face,
stirred some strange chord in her heart with a swift, unaccountable
ache. He looked so big and strong and splendid there in the shadow,
with his freshness and his charm; and she felt very brain-fagged and
world-weary; and without in the least knowing why, or what led up to
the desire, she wanted to feel his arms about her, and his freshness
soothing her spirit.

And instead he was not even attempting to make love to her, not even
flirting with her. Would any other man she knew have ridden beside her
thus after the gentleness she had shown? Was that perhaps the very
secret of his attraction? Or was it a physical allurement—the
irresistible charm of bigness and strength, independent of anything
else, drawing with its time-old sway?

She had no time to probe further, as the brougham stopped at her door.
He handed her out with the deference so often met with in big men,
remarking with an old-fashioned air that suited him to perfection:

“I’m afraid we have all tired you very much. It was good of you to come
with us. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate it.”

“Oh, indeed no; you refreshed me. Good-night. Stevens will run you
home. Don’t forget Sunday”, and she moved away.

“It must be his bigness,” was her last thought as her head touched the
pillow. “When I am used to it, no doubt the novelty will pass, and I
shall find him merely boyish, and be rather bored.”

“I wonder if it is her dainty smallness,” Dudley was musing, away in
his Bloomsbury lodging, feeling still, with a pleasant thrill, the
touch of Doris’s small hand on his arm, and seeing again the upward,
confiding expression in her wide blue eyes. “Odd that Hal should be so
far astray in her judgment, when she is usually so clever; but if she
knew her better she would change her mind.”

As for Hal herself, she hastily tumbled into bed, still chuckling in
huge enjoyment over her evening.

“Those boys are just dears,” was her thought, “and I wouldn’t have
missed Lady Bounce for the world. What a good thing Dudley was taken
with paternal affection for that little fool Doris, and I had to have a
chaperone. Heigh-ho! what a scene there will be if he hears about it;
but what’s the odds so long as you’re happy? And oh dear! what will
Lady Phyllis Fenton say when she finds out”; and once more the even
teeth flashed an irresistible smile into the darkness.




CHAPTER X


It was force of habit chiefly that caused Lorraine, as a rule, to sleep
long and late on Sunday mornings; and it was greatly to her advantage
that for so many months, and even years, no mental anxiety had robbed
her of a splendid capacity to rest. She seemed to have a faculty for
limiting her worrying hours to the daylight, and being able to lay them
aside, like her correspondence, at night.

Yet on the following Sunday morning she found herself early awake, with
a brain only too ready to begin probing restlessly, and having little
of the calm friendliness she intended it should have towards her guest
of the evening.

To add to her unrest, her mother paid her an early visit, of a sort
that had been growing too frequent of late. It was not enough that
Lorraine paid her rent, and gave her a handsome allowance; when there
chanced to be no one else to pay her debts, these came upon Lorraine’s
shoulders also.

T-day it was a long, rambling tale of a hard-hearted dressmaker who,
having had a new frock back for alteration, had taken upon herself to
return the skirt, without the bodice, with an intimation that she was
retaining the delayed portion until her long account was settled. Hence
Mrs. Vivian found herself with what she called a most important
engagement, without the equally important new frock to go in.

Lorraine lay under the bedclothes, with only her head showing, and
watched her a little coldly, as she moved restlessly about the room
airing her woes. She had promised Madame Luce, over and over again, to
settle in a week or two; and who would have believed the odious woman
would serve her such a trick?

Never again, if she had to go naked, would she order a garment from her
of any description whatever. And the friends she had sent to her as
customers! Why, half the woman’s trade was owing to her introduction.

“Perhaps the friends don’t pay their bills,” Lorraine suggested in a
tired voice.

Mrs. Vivian drew herself up a little haughtily.

“I do not think there is any occasion to cast reflections on my
friends, even if you do not choose to be sociable to them,” which
remark was intended as a dignified hit at Lorraine’s invincible
determination to maintain friendly relations with her mother, without
having anything whatever to do with her mother’s friends.

As many previous hits, it fell quite harmlessly; it was doubtful if
Lorraine even heard it, half hidden there in the bedclothes with her
tired eyes.

“I suppose it isn’t any use reminding you that your personal
expenditure exceeds mine?” she hinted, “and that you have already far
overstepped the allowance we stipulated?”

“You do not have time to go about as much as I do, and it makes a great
difference not having hosts of friends.”

“You don’t seem to get much pleasure out of them,” Lorraine could not
resist saying, knowing as she did how much of her salary went into the
pockets of these so-called friends, in order to buy their adherence.

“Do I get much pleasure out of anything?” irritably. “My only child is
one of the first actresses in London, and what is it to me? Do I have
the pleasure of going about with her? or living with her? or taking any
part in her success?”

“I suppose it isn’t such a small thing to live by her. If I were not
successful, we could certainly not live here. It might have been
Islington and omnibuses,” and she smiled.

“As if that were all. Probably, as real companions we might have been
even happier in Islington.”

Lorraine stiffened. “Companions!… Ah, I, with whom else ever dancing
attendance, and changing in identity every few months?”

But she made no comment, for the days of her hot-headed, deep-hearted
judging were over; and from behind inscrutable eyes she looked upon the
things that one sees without seeming to see them, and accepted facts
that hurt her very soul, with a callous, cynical air that defied the
keenest shafts of probing.

It was her armour in an envious, merciless world, that would have
rejoiced before her eyes if it could have driven in a barbed arrow even
through her mother.

More than once a jealous enemy had tried and failed, routed utterly by
Lorraine’s cynical, cool treatment of a fact that she knew no
persuasion nor arguing could have helped her to refute. She did not
even weep about it now in secret.

It was as though she had shed all the tears she had to shed during that
year of utter revulsion spent in the Italian Riviera, companied by the
passionless solitudes of snowtopped mountains. Something of a great
patience and a great gentleness had come to her then, helping her to
hide the loathing she could not crush, and place the fact of motherhood
first of all.

As her mother, she had taken Mrs. Vivian back into her heart, and given
her generously of what worldly possessions she had. And she had done it
with a wondrous quiet and absence of all ostentation either outwardly
or inwardly. It had never occured to Lorraine that, whether it was a
duty or not, after what had passed it was certainly a fine act upon her
part.

She had not questioned about it at all. To her mother’s apologetic gush
she had merely turned calm eyes and a strong face.

“It isn’t worth while to remember the past at all,” she had said; “we
will just begin again on rather different lines. I’ll always let you
have as much money as I can spare.”

Mrs. Vivian had been a little taken aback by the new Lorraine who
returned from Italy; and not a little afraid before the calm,
inscrutable eyes; so that she had secretly rejoiced at the arrangement
which gave her a separate establishment of her own; but none the less,
in bursts of righteous indignation supposed to emanate from her
outraged feelings as a mother, she usually chose to make it her pet
grievance.

And still Lorraine only smiled the tired smile, and glanced carelessly
aside with the inscrutable eyes until the tirade was over, the coveted
cheque made out, and her own little sanctum once again in peaceful
possession.

Only just occasionally, if the interview had been specially trying, she
might have been seen afterwards to glance whimsically across to the
picture, recently enlarged from an old photograph, of a fine-looking
man in full hunting-rig standing beside a favourite hunter.

“Poor old dad,” she murmured once; “I don’t wonder you couldn’t keep up
the old place. I don’t know how you got along at all without my
salary.”

Once when she was feeling the drag of it all a little keenly she told
the man in the picture: “Mother is splendidly handsome, and I daresay I
owe her a good deal; but thank God you were there with your fine old
name and family to give me the things that matter most. It sometimes
seems as if we had got each other still, dad, and, for the rest, some
are frail in one way and some another, and fretting doesn’t help any
one.” The fine eyes had grown more whimsically wistful looking into the
face of the huntsman as she finished: “Anyhow, the last favourite is
second cousin to a duke, and she pointed out to me, he might have been
only a butcher.”

How much Hal knew of her mother’s life Lorraine had never been able to
gauge, but she had reason to think she knew something and was sporting
enough to pretend otherwise. If so, she blessed her for it, feeling
that by that generous non-acknowledgment she rendered a service both to
her and her dead father.

Yet it seemed strange that any one so young and fresh as Hal should be
able to act thus, instead of suffering a violent repulsion. Was it the
depth of her splendid friendship; or was it a naturally adaptable,
common-sense nature; or was it non-comprehension?

As time passed and she grew to know Hal yet better, she felt
instinctively it was the first of these, coupled with that true
sportsman-spirit which was one of her strongest attributes.

Lorraine was not the only one who felt that whether Hal had any
religion or not, or any faith, through good and ill, by easy paths and
difficult, one might be absolutely sure that she would “play the game.”
It made her feel herself richer with her one friend than with her
mother’s admitted hosts, and though she seemed to hesitate and reason
on that Sunday morning, both knew the cheque would finally be written,
and the coveted garment rescued in time for the important lunch.

Only, afterwards, a shadow seemed to linger today that heretofore would
have vanished with the departing figure. The sunshine crept through the
drawn curtains, lying like a shaft of hope across the gloom, but it
brought no answering gleam into the beautiful eyes, with their tired,
far-off gaze.

It was all very well for Hal to be a main feature in her life, blessing
it with her friendship, while she turned kindly, unseeing eyes away
from the corners where the murky shadows lay: Hal, who knew about the
mad, discreditable marriage and its violent termination, and probably
also of her mother’s insatiable thirst for admiration and excitement at
any cost.

There was something about Hal in herself that was as a shining armour,
against which unkind barbs fell harmlessly, and enabled her to go on
her serene and joyful way in blissful non-attention.

But could it be the same with this treasured only son, who was
doubtless destined for a high place in the world by doting parents, and
other proud bearers of the same old name? Of course he might sup and
trifle with certain denizens of the theatrical world galore; it would
only be part of his education, and a thing to wink at, but she already
doubted whether such a slight companionship would have any attraction.

In spite of his youthfulness, there was something in him that would
naturally and quickly respond to the fine shades in herself, and grow
into a friendship that had no part with the casual, gay
acquaintanceships of the theatre and the world.

In a sense he was like Hal, and she knew that just as she attracted
Hal’s devotion in spite of all disparity of years and circumstances,
so, if she chose, she could make this young giant more or less her
slave.

But was it worht it?

What did she, on her high pedestal, want with his young admiration?
What did she want with a companion so undeveloped that she herself must
awaken his strongest forces?

Through the gloom, unheeding the shaft of sunlight, she saw him again,
towering up there on her hearth, with his young splendour, so
extraordinarily unspoilt as yet; and she knew that, reasonable or
unreasonable, she was attracted far beyond her wont.

And then she thought of his easy-going temperament, his lack of
ambition, his half-sleepy attitude towards life.

What if the wheels ran so smoothly for him that the latent forces were
never aroused, and little achieved of all that might be?

If love came at his asking, and a sufficiency of success to satisfy an
easy-going nature, what would there ever be to stir depths which she
truly believed were worth stiring? Was it so small a thing to help a
fine soul forward to its best attainment?... was such an aim not worth
some going aside for both?

She felt there were things she could teach him, which without her he
might entirely miss; and if without her he were the better according to
a conventional standard, he might yet be far the poorer in the big,
deep things of life.

Well, no doubt circumstances would end by suiting themselves, with or
without her agency. In the meantime why worry, in a world that it would
seem worked out its own ends, sublimely indifferent to the individual?

They were going to dine together tonight anyhow; their first
tête-à-tête dinner and evening: time enough to probe and worry when she
was more sure a mutual attraction existed; wiser at present to seek a
counter attraction for her own sake, that she might not uselessly build
a castle without foundations.

Prompt as ever, she reached out for the receiver beside her bed and
rang up the Albany to know if Lord Denton were awake yet.

“I’m not awake,” came back a sleepy answer. “I am asleep, and dreaming
of Lorraine Vivian. If my man wakes me now, I shall curse him solidly
for half an hour.”

“Well, will you dream you are going to take her for a spin into the
country shortly? I happen to know she is fainting for the longing to
breathe country air.”

“In my dream I am already waiting at her door, with the Yellow Peril
spluttering its heart out with delight, and eagerness to be off. I have
even dreamt she managed to put a motor bonnet on in half-an-hour—is it
conceivable—or should it be half a day?”

“No, your dream is right. Be outside the door in half an hour, and you
will see.”

An hour later they were spinning out into Surrey at an alarming pace,
both silently revelling in the freshness and motion and the fact that
they were too old friends to need to trouble about conversation. When
they dived into the lanes he slowed down, remarking:

“I suppose we mustn’t risk scrunching any one up.”

Lorraine only smiled, remaining silent a little longer, and then she
suddenly asked him:

“When you feel yourself inclined to fall in love foolishly what do you
do?”

“Well… as a rule…” he began slowly and humorously, “I either cut and
run, or I hurry to see so much of her that I am bound to get bored.”

“The first plan sounds the safest, but would often be the most
difficult of execution. Supposing the second miscarries and you don’t
get bored?”

“Well, then I think—usually—there is an awful moment when I have to
tell her I can’t afford both a motor and a wife; and to be motorless
would kill me.”

A sudden little twitching at the corners made Lorraine’s mouth
dangerously fascinating.

“Evidently you have never fallen in love with me,” she said, “for you
have not been driven to either way of escape.”

He looked into her face with an answering humour, and a twinkle in his
eyes as alluring as her smilling lips.

“Because when I fell in love with you I did it sensibly, and not
foolishly,” was his answer; “instinct told me I couldn’t have you for
my wife however much I wished it, so I said myself: ‘Flip, old boy,
she’ll make a thundering good pal, you close with it,’ and I did.”

She made no comment, and he went on more seriously:

“You see, even if you became marriageable and I cut out the motor, you
wouldn’t be attracted to an ordinary sort of cove like me. I suit you
down to the ground as a pal, but it wouldn’t go any farther.”

“I wonder why you think that?”

“I don’t exactly _think_ it—thinking is too much bother—but it’s just
there, like a commonplace fact. You are all temperament, and
high-strung nerves, and soul, and enthusiasm, and that sort of thing,
which makes you a great actress. I’m just a two-legged, superior sort
of animal, who hasn’t much brain, but knows what he likes, and usually
does it without wasting time on pros and cons. Consequently, I’m just
as likely to end in prison as anywhere else, and take it without much
concern as all in the day’s work. You are more likely to end in a
nunnery, as the most devout of all the nuns.”

“What an odd idea! Why a nunnery?”

“Oh, because it’s an extreme of one sort or another, and you are made
for extremes. You’ll perhaps be very wicked first”—he smiled
delightfully—“after which, of course, you’d have to be very good. It’s
the way you’re made. I’m cut out on quite a different plan. I can’t be
‘very’ anything, unless it’s very drunk after the Oxford and Cambridge
at Lord’s.”

“Do you think I could be very wicked?” She asked the question with a
thoughtfulness that amused him greatly, and he answered at once:

“I haven’t a doubt of it. You are probably plotting the particular form
of wickedness at this very moment.”

She laughed, and he went on in the same serio-comic mood:

“I quite envy you. It must be very thrilling to think to oneself, ‘I’ve
dared to be desperately wicked.’ You cease to be a nonentity at once
and become a force. You get right to hand-grips with the big elemental
things. Of course that is interesting, but it usually means a
confounded lot of bother.”

“You are as bad as Hal Pritchard. She announced the other day she would
rather have a dishonest purpose than no purpose at all.”

“It’s the same idea, only Miss Pritchard lives up to her creed by being
full of energy and purpose; whereas I can’t be anything but a mediocre
waster. I’ve neither the pluck to be wicked, not the energy to be good,
nor enough purpose to regret it. I believe I’m best described as an
aristocratic ‘stiff’, a ‘stiff’ being a person who spends his life
trying to avoid having to do things.

“I fill a niche all the same,” he finished, “because I make such an
excellent foil for the other chaps, who like to pride themselves on
their superiority and hard work. It’s nice for them to be able to say
contemptuously, ‘Look at Denton,’ and it’s nice for me to be able to
feel I’m of some use, without the bother of making an effort.”

“You are certainly quite incorrigible as an idler, if that can be
called a purpose, and, Flip, don’t change; I love you for it; you are
one of the most restful things I have ever known.”

He glanced into her face with a keenness that somewhat belied his
professed incapacity to be in earnest, and remarked with seeming
lightness:

“Feeling a bit down on your luck, eh? Are you thinking of falling in
love foolishly?”

“I’m thinking of trying to guard against doing so.”

“You ought not to find it difficult. Crowd him out with other
admirers.”

“It seems as if he were going to do the crowding out.”

“Why, is he so big?” jocularly.

“There’s six foot five-and-a-half of him.”

“Whew! And thin as a lathe, I suppose; a sort of animated telegraph
pole.”

“No; broad in proportion, cut to measure absolutely.”

“Then he is a fine fellow,” with conviction.

Lorraine felt a swift glow of pride, and then inwardly admonished
herself for being silly. What, after all, was size? As Hal had
trenchantly remarked, plenty of London policemen were just as big and
fine. Half in self-defence she added:

“He has brains as well, and he is as handsome as Apollo.”

“Then run,” was the laconic response; “don’t stop to buy a ticket; pay
the other end.”

She smiled, but grew suddenly serious. Leaning forward with eyes
straining hard to the horizon, she said: “Flip, I’ve had a hard life,
in spite of the success. Shall I run?... or... shall I stay, and snatch
joy, while there is still time?”

He looked at her with a growing interest.

“If I were you I should run,” he said; “but, all the same, I think
you’ll stay.”

“No; I don’t think I shall. There are other reasons. He is a good deal
younger than I—and—well, I’ve a fair amount on my soul already.”

The tired shadow was coming back to her eyes, but she laughed suddenly
with an attempt at gaiety.

“You ought to have heard Hal Pritchard on the subject. She remarked
there were plenty of London policemen just as big, and suggested if I
wanted a fine young animal to play with, I should be safer with a polar
bear from the Zoo.”

“Well done, Hal. We ought to have brought her. Where is she today?”

“Careering across England in a haphazard fashion with her cousin Dick
Bruce. Do you mind turning towards home now? I’m dining out, and have
some letters to write.”

“Who’s the happy man tonight?... I thought of course I was to have the
whole day.”

“With a view to getting wholesomely bored! No, Flip, I don’t propose to
let you find that way out just yet.”

“I should have found it for myself long ago if it were possible. As it
is, I have grown resigned, and accept what crumbs fall to my portion.”
He paused a moment and then asked, “Is it Goliath tonight?”

“It is.”

“Rash woman; and just when I have advised you to run.”

“But it is not in the least serious yet. I only asked you in view of it
becoming so.”

“Which means you will try and start to run, _after_ you are firmly in
the trap.”

“Not at all. I won’t go near the trap. I’ll tell him I’m old enough to
be his mother, and talk down to him from years of detestable common
sense and sagacity.”

“Which sounds as if it would be even duller than dining with me.”

“Oh no. It holds novelty anyway. You are never dull, but likewise you
are no longer novel.”

They made for the high roads again, and spun along mostly in silence
until the car once more came to a standstill at Lorraine’s door.

“Come in,” she said, “I’ve lots of time.”

“No,” with a little smile. “I’ve had my crumbs for the day. I’m going
to have a good solid crust now to keep the balance. Do you know Lottie
Bird?… Fourteen stone, if she’s an ounce, and a tongue like a
sixty-horse-power motor. There are times when she’s so damned practical
and overpowering she does me good. This is one of them. Good-bye. Don’t
kill the giant with a glance; and don’t be silly enough to get hurt
yourself.”

“All right. I’ll go in full armour,” and she nodded gaily enough as he
moved off down the street.




CHAPTER XI


What Lorraine exactly meant by full armour she did not quite know, but
it might very well have been taken to mean the shining armour of her
own best loveliness. Certainly after no small consideration she chose
what she believed to be her most becoming gown, and she was unusually
critical about the dressing of her hair.

All the same, at 7.45 she was ready, and her cavalier had not yet
arrived. She waited five minutes until he came, and then it was
necessary to wait another five minutes that he might not know she had
been more up to time than he. Then she entered the drawing-room in a
little bit of a hurry, and cut short his simple, direct apologies by
regretting her own tardiness, and saying she had been out motoring
until late.

But she had time to note quickly that he also had dressed himself with
special care, plastering down resolutely the unruly determination of
his fair hair to curl. That was good. Any suggestion of a curl must
have produced an effect of effeminacy, whereas that neat, plastered
wave showed the shapeliness of his head, and gave him a touch of manly
decision. Her electric brougham was at the door, but she kept it
waiting a few minutes, that they might be later than the majority of
diners, and pass up a well-filled room.

In the end their arrival was equal to her best expectations. She led
the way slowly, with a queenly grace that was one of her best
attributes; but as she nodded casually to an acquaintance here and
there, she had plenty of time to observe the curious eyes from all
around, looking with undisguised admiration, not so much at her
faultless appearance, which was more or less known, but at her striking
cavalier.

She had engaged a small table at one of the top corners and arranged
the seats sideways, so that both could look over the room if they
wanted to, and at the same time be easily seen by others. She did this
because it amused her to see people gazing at him, and to watch his
quiet self-possession. She almost wondered if he even realised how much
attention he attracted, but perceived that he could hardly help doing
so, though he took it all with so simple and unabashed an air.

She watched also to see if, as most of the strikingly handsome men she
had known, he courted tell-tale glances from other eyes, and sipped
honey from any flower within reach, as well as from his own particular
flower. And when she found that his absolute and undivided attention
was given to her, and that all the power of entertaining he could
muster was called into her service, she felt a glow of gratitude to him
that he had not disappointed her, but proved himself the simple,
high-bred gentleman she longed to find him.

It made her show herself to him at her very best. Not showily witty,
nor callously gay, nor fashionably original, but just her own self of
light humour and dainty speech and kindly sympathy, the true, best self
that held Hal’s unswerving devotion through good account and ill.

Unconsciously she left the time-worn paths of beauty and success, and
became young, and fresh, and whole-hearted as he; tackling abstruse
problems with a childlike, vigorous air; holding him spell-bound with
her own charm of conversation one moment, and leading him on to talk
with ease and frankness the next.

The other diners got up and retired to the lounge, and still they sat
on; no hint of boredom, no note of disparity, no need of other
companionship. As they were preparing to rise, she told him lightly
that he talked amazingly well for his tender years.

“Only twenty-four,” he answered; “it does seem a kiddish age, doesn’t
it!”

“Dreadfully kiddish. It makes me feel old enough to be your
grandmother.”

He glanced up, half-questioning, half-deprecating.

“That would be the oddest thing of all, unless I really appear to be
about twenty years before my time.”

For a reason she could not have fathomed, she looked into his eyes with
a sudden seriousness and said:

“I was thirty-two last week.”

She saw a quick look of surprise he did not attempt to hide, followed
by a very charming smile, as he asserted:

“It is impossible. You could not sit there and look like that if you
were thirty-two.”

“The impossible is so often the true. I’m glad you don’t think I seem
old. It is nice to believe one can keep young at heart, in spite of the
years. Shall we go to the lounge?”

Again they moved through the admiring crowd, but this time Lorraine
felt less idle interest and more inward wonder; and without any
misgiving she steered to a quiet alcove, where they could talk without
again being the cynosure of many eyes.

Here, in a pleasant, friendly way, she led him once again to talk of
the future, and was glad to find, in answering sincerity with
sincerity, he was ready to admit that he was a little sorry about his
own lack of ambition and want of application. He did not pretend now
that it was of no moment. He told her he would like to achieve, only
somehow he always found his attention wander to other things, and his
desire grow slack after a week of rigid application.

She recognised that the motive-power was missing, and that unless
something deeper than mere desire of achievement stirred him, he would
probably never attain. He needed a goal that should make everything
else in the world pale before it, and something that seemed almost as
life and death to hang on his success. But how get it for him? If he
loved, and was bidden wait until he had prospered, the end was all too
sure and the love too easy.

It was something different that was needed; something that would bring
him up with dead abruptness against a blank wall, and leave him with a
taste of life that was dust and ashes unless he found a way through.
Either that or some sweet, wild, unattainable desire, that might drive
him to work and ambition by way of escape.

And there again, where should he encounter such a desire? One had only
to look into his calm, fine face to feel that the unattainable in the
form of love, barred by marriage vows as lightly made as broken, would
never stir the depths of his heart, nor appeal to his real self in any
way whatever.

He would not love such a woman, however for a time she might fascinate
him; and afterwards there would only be the nausea and the memory that
was like an unpleasant taste. Such a woman might teach him many things
it is no harm for a man to know; but she would never call to the best
in him, nor help him to realise himself.

“Have you seen your friend the duchess lately?” she asked, with a
disarming smile, not wishing to appear merely curious.

“Yes; I saw her on Friday, at a ball. She was in great form.”

“You danced with her?”

“Yes. She’s not a good dancer.”

“Then you only had one, I suppose?”

“No, three.” He smiled a little. “We sat out two.”

“You ought to have felt highly honoured.”

“Oh, I don’t know. She is very amusing. A very funny thing happened
last week. Out of sheer devilry, she and a friend and two men went to
the Covent Garden Fancy Dress Ball, disguised of course, and just for
an hour or two. To their horror, after the procession, the friend was
handed a large glass-and-silver salad bowl, as a prize for being the
best ‘twostep’ dancer in the room. Of course she had to go off with the
beastly thing; but she was so proud of winning it, she couldn’t resist
giving their escapade away, and it got round everywhere.”

“I wonder if our escapade with Lady Bounce is out yet? I haven’t seen
Hal since Thursday.”

“Oh yes, it is,” eagerly; “the duchess had heard about it. She was
pumping me to know who was in the joke. We are longing to see Quin and
hear the latest, but he is down east.”

“What an oddity he is!” thoughtfully. “I liked him so much: but it is
difficult to reconcile him with slumming.”

“He’s one of the best. Every one loves him. And he does his slumming in
quite a way of his own. I’ve been with him sometimes, and he just goes
among the rough characters down there as if he hated being a swell and
wanted to be one of them. He positively asks them for sympathy, and of
course it takes their fancy and he is friends with them all.”

“I think you are a remarkable trio altogether. Hal’s cousin Dick is
just as original in his way as St. Quintin. And you, of course, are
somehow different to the majority. I wonder how you will each end? St.
Quintin will perhaps become a bishop. Dick Bruce will write an
astounding, weird novel, and bound into fame. And you? …”

He flushed a little. “I shall be left far behind by both of them,
futilely wishing to catch up.”

“I hope not. Your chance is just as good as theirs, if you choose to
make it so,”

“I fail to see that I have any chance at all.”

“Most chances rest chiefly with ourselves. It’s a great thing to be
ready for them if they come. I hope you’ll be that.”

“I hope so too, but it would be easier if one were more sure they were
coming,” and he laughed with a lightness that jarred a little.

She rose to go, as it was getting late, feeling slightly disappointed
in some vague way; and when they parted she noticed that his handshake
was slightly limp, as of one who would not grasp life tightly enough to
compel it to surrender its good things to him.

But in her own sanctum she rallied herself, and hardened her heart,
asking what had it to do with her after all, and how could his success
or non-success in any way concern her.

Doubtless in the end he would share the fate of the great majority and
attain only mediocrity; having missed that one great blinding shaft of
pain or joy that might have stabbed him into tense, pulsing life, and
spurred him up the heights of fame and glory.

She let her evening-cloak slide to a chair, turning to glance at a
calling card on the table, with a renewal of the old, callous, cynical
air. The practical force of Flip Denton’s conversation was making
itself felt. Of course it was an absurdity for her to imagine herself
in love with a youth of twenty-four—almost the dullest of all ages—be
he never so good to look at. She might very well keep a motherly eye on
him, and show him a side of life he might perhaps not see otherwise,
but it must end there.

No doubt a certain novelty had made the evening unusually pleasant:
after two or three more they would certainly pall, and then she would
go back to her old chums; the men of the world who had paid their
footing and won their experience, and come through, careless enough
devils at best in their own phraseology, but non the worse for a fall
or two, and a win or two, and a self-taught hardihood for most things
life was likely any more to send.

She smiled a little as she remembered how calmly he had thanked her and
said good-night. Of a surety he took his fruits quietly and
unconcernedly enough. She wondered if he were secretly in love with
some pink-and-white débutante, who flushed and smiled when he spoke,
and gazed up at him with fond, adoring eyes. It was likely enough.

No doubt he would tell her all about it soon, as a very young man tells
a favourite sister, or a jolly, not too elderly aunt. She rather hoped
he would. It would be an anti-climax humorous enough to cure her all in
a moment of seeming anything to him other than that jolly, not too
elderly aunt. Then she would invite Flip to dinner, and they would be
gay together—she could imagine the tone in which he would call her
“aunty”—and her folly would fall from her like an outgrown chrysalis,
leaving her sane, and cynical, and wordly, and whole again.

The train of thought pleased her, and soothed in some way an
indefinable rasping sense of the general futility of all feeling and
all striving. Surely she, with her young-old heart, her world-worn
memories, and her youth that never was, should know that worldly-wise
dictum full well.

Of course she kew it.

The things that mattered were beauty and brilliance and success; and
these she had in good measure, brimming over. Her mood made her cross
suddenly to the many-sided mirror, and switch on a blaze of light that
would brook no feigning.

In its searching gleams she looked at herself with clear, fearless
eyes. Yes; it was all there still, untouched and unimpaired by those
thirty-two years: the colouring, the skin, the rounded, supple
figure—all the things for which men loved her and the world gave her
fame.

She gave herself a little mocking salute, and then turned away to hurry
into her pretty, cosy bed.

But what the blaze of light had not seen the mothering darkness hid
tenderly. Two bright tear-drops, filling tired eyes that had tried so
often to fool themselves into blind and callous content.




CHAPTER XII


“Dick Bruce will write an astounding, weird novel, and bound into
fame,” Lorraine had remarked to her companion, and away somewhere down
in Kent, an hour or so earlier, Dick had remarked to Hal as they spun
along:

“I’ve got the maddest idea for a novel you ever heard of. I’m going to
make the hit of next season.”

“I hope it’s not about babies,” said Hal, thinking of his doggerel.

“Yes, it is—babies and vegetables.”

“Oh, nonsense. You can’t make a novel out of babies and vegetables.”

“You see if I can’t. The vegetables are all to be endowed with life,
and of course the scene of my tale will be the vegetable kingdom.”

“And where do the babies come in?”

“The babies will represent mankind.”

“I never heard such rot. Why should mankind be represented by babies?
Much better let them be represented by green peas or gooseberries.”

“Not at all. Mankind can only properly be represented by babies;
mankind being in its infancy.”

“But it isn’t. It’s much older than vegetables.”

“It is not. Man was made last, and instead of developing into a
reasonable, rational object, like a potato or a cabbage, he has strayed
away into all manner of wild side-issues, and is still nothing but a
very much perplexed infant.”

“And do you propose to try and help him to emulate the reasonable,
rational condition of the potato and cabbage?”

“I propose to show him his inferiority to these delectable creations.”

“Then if he has any sense he will just duck you in the Serpentine and
make you apologise. Personally I consider myself anything but a baby,
and far superior to any of the cabbage tribe.”

“Ah!...” he cried gleefully. “You are actually proving my theory. I
can’t explain now, but just wait till that book is written.”

“Are you taking rooms at Colney Hatch while you do it?”

“I have thought about it. You show more understanding in that remark
than in any of the others.”

“It doesn’t require much effort of understanding to think that out. Is
the onion or the mangel-wurzel to be your hero?”

“You are unsympathetic. I shall not tell you any more.”

“Not at all. I am most interested really. I should make the cabbage
your hero, and the onion your heroïne, then she can weep on his
breast.” They swerved violently, and with a little gasp she added, “All
the same, I’ve no desire to weep on the highway underneath a motor-car.
What _are_ you doing?”

“I don’t know. The steering-wheel seems a bit odd.”

They stopped to examine the wheel, and almost immediately, out of the
gathering darkness behind shot another car, hooting violently to them
to get out of the way. Unable to stop the oncoming car in time, Dick
tried to move aside, failed, and in less than a minute the newcomer, in
spite of brakes swiftly adjusted, crashed into them, smashing their
lamp, and badly damaging the back near-side wheel of the car.

“Well, I’m blowed!” said Dick, “that’s the only moment in the whole day
you shouldn’t have been on that particular square yard of the entire
globe. Any other moment, I could either have moved aside or stopped you
in time.”

The occupant of the other car, who was driving alone, sprang out and
came briskly forward.

“What the devil!...” he began, then noticed the lady, and stopped
short.

“It was certainly the devil,” said Dick, ruefully examining his
battered wheel, and “I always thought he was credited with the deceny
to look after his own. How have you fared?”

“Well, he seems to have looked after me all right,” in a cheery voice;
“there’s nothing that will prevent my going on to town. But if you will
pardon my curiosity, why take root in the middle of the road and ask
for trouble?”

Hal’s smile suddenly flashed out in the lamp-light irresistibly.

“It’s a new theory about vegetables being wiser than mankind, but of
course we took root too soon.”

A pair of grey eyes looked quizzically at her in the darkness,
discerning only the gleam of a white face in a close-fitting bonnet,
and the flash of white, even teeth.

“The blasted steering wheel wouldn’t act,” said Dick. “We had just that
second slowed down to examine it. You might have come along here to all
eternity and not have been as inopportune.”

“You take it very well.” The big-coated apparition, in motor-cap with
the ear-flaps down, and motor-goggles, and the suggestion of a
rotundity about the centre, was not at all engaging to look at, but he
had a charming voice.

“I’m taking it so ill that I daren’t express myself out loud,” said
Hal. “What in the world are we to do? Is there a train anywhere near?”

“I’m afraid not, but there is a decent enough inn close by.”

“An inn isn’t much use to me.” She paused, then added solemnly: “I’ve
got a strait-laced brother.”

Hal’s voice was rather deep and rich for a woman, and it had a
dangerous allurement in the darkness. The stranger took off his goggles
and tried again to see her face, while Dick took a minute stock of his
damage.

“Well,” he suggested, a little daringly, “if he is able to chaperone
you at the inn himself?—”

“He isn’t,” said Hal; “he’s somewhere east of Piccadilly, studying
Phœnician Architecture, and the herringbone pattern on antique
masonry.”

“Oh, damn!” intercepted Dick, “the old man has let me down badly this
time; this car won’t move before daybreak. It means a red light burning
all night, and we must go to the inn.”

“But, Dick,” Hal exclaimed in quick alarm. “How can I let Dudley know?
He’ll have a fit at the idea of my being out all night like that.”

“He ought to be too thankful you are safe and sound to mind anything
else.”

“But he won’t; because he is always grumbling at my not getting back
before dark. There must surely be a train from somewhere?”

Her voice had grown seriously alarmed as she began to realise what sort
of a fix she was in. The stranger came forward to lend his aid to the
inspection, and after a cursory glance added his verdict to Dick’s.

“You won’t move her before morning; and there are no trains anywhere
near here on Sunday night. I am going to London myself; you must let me
give you both a lift.”

Dick stood up with an air of finality.

“I can’t leave her. She isn’t exactly all my own, you see. I must stay
at the inn, but if you wouldn’t mind taking Miss Pritchard—” he looked
at Hal a little anxiously.

“I shall be delighted,” came the brisk response from the stranger.

Hal for once was nonplussed, but her habitual humour reasserted itself.

“I don’t know which Dudley will think the most dreadful,” she remarked
comically, “for me to stay at the inn unchaperoned, or motor back with
a stranger. I seem to be fairly between the devil and the deep sea.”

The men laughed, but Dick made the decision.

“You had better go back,” he said. “He will at least have you safe
under lock and key by midnight that way and not lie awake worrying all
night himself.”

“Then let me run you to the inn first,” said the stranger, and after
fixing his red lights, Dick went off with them in search of help to
make the car safer for the night.

A little later the stranger’s motor turned Londonwards with two
occupants only, one in front and one behind. After a few miles he
stopped.

“Won’t you come and sit in front? It seems so unsociable to travel like
this.”

“Most unsociable,” said Hal, “but it would please Brother Dudley.”

“Never mind Brother Dudley now.” The voice was very attractive. “Mind
me, instead. I’m very dull here, and I hate driving in the dark. My
chauffeur is down with the ‘flu’, and I couldn’t beg, borrow, nor steal
any one else’s.”

“Are you a doctor?” she asked, taking her seat beside him.

“Why do you think I should be a doctor?” tucking a warm rug cosily
round her, in a leisurely fashion.

“Only because I thought perhaps you were obliged to go, in spite of
your chauffeur being ill.”

“I was obliged to go, but I’m not a doctor.”

They started forward again, but the pace was noticeably slower.

“I hope you don’t mind going slowly, it is so difficult to steer in te
dark?”

Hal was perfectly aware he had not found it so difficult before, but
she only said lightly:

“Anything to keep safe from another mishap. I might have to walk home
next time.”

“Or stay at an inn with me!...” with an amused laugh. “What would
Brother Dudley do then?”

“Have brain fever first, I expect, then creeping paralysis, then
sleeping sickness.”

He chuckled with enjoyment, and presently remarked: “I don’t think you
treat Dudley respectfully enough if he is an affectionate elder
brother.”

“Oh, yes I do. I sort of leaven the lump. Without me he’d be just a
clever prig; he couldn’t help it. With me he is only better than most
men; and his lofty ideas don’t get top-heavy, because I keep him in
touch with commonplace humanity.”

“Why is he better than most men? What is the matter with the rest of
us?”

“The rest of you don’t bother to have lofty ideas at all, much less
struggle to live up to them.”

“You are a little sweeping. Do you like men to have lofty ideas, and be
priggish?”

“They don’t necessarily go together. It’s only Dudley who thinks all
the rest of the world ought to be good too.”

“And don’t you agree with him?”

“I look at things from a different standpoint. I admire him
tremendously, and feel his superiority; but it is more natural to me to
take things as I find them and make the best of them as they are.”

“You are evidently a very sensible young lady. You can find a warm spot
in your heart even for a sinner, for instance!”

“I rather like them,” and she gave a low laugh.

“Of course you do, if you’re a true woman.”

“Oh, I’m a true woman right enough. I like a man to have a spice of the
devil in him; and I like playing with fire; and I love getting into
mischief.”

“Capital!... you and I must be friends. I’m beginning to think it was a
lucky mishap for me at all events.”

“I haven’t finished my qualifications yet. You may change your mind. I
like all those sort of things, but at the same time I like the big
things as well. Also I’m told I’m most annoyingly practical, and most
irritatingly capable of taking care of myself, and never getting burnt,
so to speak.”

“Who told you that?”

“I think it was some one at the office.”

“What office?”

She mentioned the name of one of the leading London papers.

“Oh, you’re a working young lady, are you?” He asked the question with
a new note in his voice, though it would have been difficult to tell
just how the information struck him.

Hal gave another laugh.

“A working young lady! How awful! I shall not be friends with you if
you call me anything so dreadful as that.”

“What do you call it?”

“Well, I think I like ‘Breadwinner’ best, as that is what I do it
for—but I don’t mind working woman.”

The stranger looked hard into the darkness a few moments, then he asked
suddenly, sitll with the new note in his voice:

“And I suppose you want the vote?”

Mentally he was wondering whether, if she knew who he was, she would
attack him physically or insist upon writing in chalk all over his car.

“I don’t want it for myself, because I shouldn’t know what to do with
it, and I haven’t much time to find out. But I want fair play for
women-workers generally, and if that is the only way to get it, I hope
it will come quickly.”

“What do you mean by fair play?”

“Just whatever is fair play. I don’t think women ought to be making
iron chains at Cradley Heath for a penny a yard, for instance, and that
sort of thing. I think it is a slur on the men who govern the country
that it is possible. If you were one of them, and drove about in this
beautiful car, not caring twopence whether starving women were sweated
or not, I should—” she hesitated.

“Well, what should you—”

Detecting the mysterious note in his voice, she added with mischievous,
half-serious intent:

“I should want to scratch you, and bite you, and push you into the
first available ditch, for a poor coward, who was afraid to take care
of the interests of woman, in case she got too well able in the end to
take care

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