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The Far Horizon

by Lucas Malet · English · Gutenberg #8569 · 693,953 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Far Horizon

Author: Lucas Malet


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8569]
                Most recently updated: April 13, 2014

Language: English

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        Mary Musser, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FAR HORIZON ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Danny Wool, Lorna Hanrahan,
Mary Musser, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.










THE FAR HORIZON

BY

LUCAS MALET

(MRS. MARY ST. LEGER HARRISON)




BY THE SAME AUTHOR

_The Wages of Sin_

_A Counsel of Perfection_

_Colonel Enderby's Wife_

_Little Peter_

_The Carissima_

_The Gateless Barrier_

_The History of Sir Richard Calmady_




"Ask for the Old Paths, where is the Good Way, and walk therein, and ye
shall find rest."--JEREMIAS.


"The good man is the bad man's teacher; the bad man is the material
upon which the good man works. If the one does not value his teacher,
if the other does not love his material, then despite their sagacity
they must go far astray. This is a mystery of great import."--FROM THE
SAYINGS OF LAO-TZU.


..."Cherchons à voir les choses comme elles sont, et ne voulons pas
avoir plus d'esprit que le bon Dieu! Autrefois on croyait que la canne
à sucre seule donnait le sucre, on en tire à peu près de tout
maintenant. Il est de même de la poésie. Extrayons-la de n'importe
quoi, car elle git en tout et partout. Pas un atome de matière qui ne
contienne pas la poésie. Et habituons-nous à considerer le monde comme
un oeuvre d'art, dont il faut reproduire les procédées dans nos
oeuvres."--GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.




CHAPTER I


Dominic Iglesias stood watching while the lingering June twilight
darkened into night. He was tired in body, but his mind was eminently,
consciously awake, to the point of restlessness, and this was unusual
with him. He had raised the lower sash of each of the three tall,
narrow windows to its extreme height, since the first-floor
sitting-room, though of fair proportions, appeared close. His thought
refused the limits of it, and ranged outward over the expanse of
Trimmer's Green, the roadway and houses bordering it, to the far
northwest, that region of hurried storm, of fierce, equinoctial passion
and conflict, now paved with plaques of flat, dingy, violet cloud
opening on smoky rose-red wastes of London sunset. All day thunder had
threatened, but had not broken. And, even yet, the face of heaven
seemed less peaceful than remonstrant, a sullenness holding it as of
troops in retreat denied satisfaction of imminent battle.

Otherwise the outlook was wholly pacific, one of middle-class suburban
security. The Green aforesaid is bottle-shaped, the neck of it
debouching into a crowded westward-wending thoroughfare; while Cedar
Lodge, from the first-floor windows of which Mr. Iglesias contemplated
the oncoming of night, being situate in the left shoulder, so to speak,
of the bottle, commanded, diagonally, an uninterrupted view of the
whole extent of it. Who Trimmer was, how he came by a Green, and why,
or what he trimmed on it, it is idle at this time of day to attempt to
determine. Whether, animated by a desire for the public welfare, he
bequeathed it in high charitable sort; or whether, fame taking a less
enviable turn with him, he just simply was hanged there, has afforded
matter of heated controversy to the curious in questions of suburban
nomenclature and topography. But in this case, as in so many other and
more august ones, the origins defy discovery. Suffice it, therefore,
that the name remains, as does the open space--the latter forming one
of those minor "lungs of London" which offer such amiable oases in the
great city's less aristocratic residential districts. Formerly the
Green boasted a row of fine elms, and was looked on by discreetly
handsome eighteenth-century mansions and villas, set in spacious
gardens. But of these, the great majority--Cedar Lodge being a happy
exception--has vanished under the hand of the early Victorian
speculative builder; who, in their stead, has erected full complement
of the architectural platitudes common to his age and taste. Dignity
has very sensibly given place to gentility. Nevertheless the timid red,
or sickly yellow-grey, brick of the existing houses is pleasingly
veiled by ivy and Virginia creeper, while no shop front obtrudes
derogatory suggestion of retail trade. The local authorities, moreover,
some ten years back girdled the Green with healthy young balsam-poplar
and plane trees and enclosed the grass with iron hurdles--to rescue it
from trampling into unsightly pathways--thus doing a well-intentioned,
if somewhat unimaginative, best to safeguard the theatre of long ago
Trimmer's beneficence or infamy from greater spoliation.

Hence it follows that, certain inherent limitations admitted, the scene
upon which Dominic Iglesias' eyes rested was not without elements of
attraction. And of this fact, being a person of an excellent temperance
of expectation, he was gratefully aware. His surroundings, indeed,
constituted, so it appeared to him, the maximum of comfort and
advantage which could be expected by a middle-aged gentleman, of
moderate fortune, in the capacity of a "paying guest." Not only in word
but in thought--for in acknowledgment of obligation he was scrupulously
courteous. He frequently tendered thanks to his neighbour and old
school-fellow, Mr. George Lovegrove, first for calling his attention to
Mrs. Porcher's advertisement, and subsequently for reassuring him as to
its import. For, though incapable of forming so much as a thought to
her concrete disparagement, Mr. Iglesias was not without a quiet sense
of humour, or of that instinct of self-protection common to even the
most chivalrous of mankind. He was, therefore, perfectly sensible that
"the widow of a military officer," who describes herself in print as
"bright, musical and thoroughly domesticated," while offering "a
cheerful and refined home at the West End, within three minutes of Tube
and omnibus"--"noble dining and recreation rooms, bath h. and c."
thrown in--to unmarried members of the stronger sex, must of necessity
be a lady whose close acquaintance it would be foolhardy to make
without a trifle of preliminary scouting.

Happily not only George Lovegrove, but his estimable wife was at hand.
The latter hastened to prosecute inquiries, beginning with a visit to
the Anglican vicar of the parish, the Rev. Giles Nevington. He reported
Mrs. Porcher an evening communicant at the greater festivals, and a not
ungenerous donor to parochial charities; adding that a former curate
had resided under her roof with perfect impunity. Mrs. Lovegrove
terminated her researches by an interview with the fishmonger, who
assured her that "Cedar Lodge always took the best cuts," sternly
refused fish or poultry which had suffered cold storage, and paid its
housebooks without fail before noon on Thursday. She ascertained,
further, from a source socially intermediate between clergyman and
tradesman, that Mrs. Porcher's husband, some time veterinary surgeon of
a crack regiment, had died in the odour of alcohol rather than in that
of sanctity, leaving his widow--in addition to his numerous and heavy
debts--but a fraction of the comfortable fortune to procure the
enjoyment of which he had so considerately married her. The solid
Georgian mansion was her freehold; and it was to secure sufficient
means for continued residence in it that the poor lady started a
boarding-house, or in the politer language of the present day, had
decided to receive paying guests.

Encouraged by the satisfactory nature of the above information, Mr.
Iglesias--shortly after his mother's death, now nearly eight years
ago--had become a member of Mrs. Porcher's household. He had never, so
far, had reason to regret that step. And it was with a consciousness of
well-being and repose that he returned daily--after hours of strenuous
work in the well-known city banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers &
Barking--to this square first-floor sitting-room, to its dimly white
panelled and painted walls, its nice details of carved work in
chimney-piece and ceiling, and the outlook from its tall, narrow
windows. A touch of old-world stateliness in its aspect satisfied his
latent pride of race. To certain natures not obscurity or slender
means, but the pretentious vulgarity which, in English-speaking
countries, too often goes along with these constitutes the burden and
the offence.

To-night, however, things were different. Material objects remained the
same; but the conditions of existence had taken on a strange
appearance, and with that appearance Iglesias was bound to reckon,
being uncertain as yet whether it was destined to prove that of a
friend or of an enemy. In furtherance of such reckoning, he had
declined dining at the public table, in company with his hostess, Miss
Eliza Hart, her devoted friend and companion, and the three
gentlemen--Mr. de Courcy Smyth, Mr. Farge, and Mr. Worthington--who
shared with him the hospitalities of Cedar Lodge. He had dined here,
upstairs, solitary; and Frederick, the German-Swiss valet, had just
finished clearing the table and departed. Usually under such
circumstances Iglesias would have taken a favourite book from the
carved Spanish mahogany bookcase containing his small library; and,
reading again that which he had often read before, would have found
therein the satisfaction of friendship, along with the soothing
influences of familiarity. But to-night neither Gibbon's _Rome_--a
handsome early edition in many volumes--_The Travels of Anacharsis_,
Evelyn's _Diary_, Napier's _Peninsular War_, John Stuart Mill's
_Logic_, Byron's _Poems_, nor those of Calderon, nor of that so-called
"prodigy of nature," Lope de Vega, not even the dear and immortal _Don
Quixote_ himself, served to attract him. His own thoughts, his own
life, filled his whole horizon, leaving no space for the thoughts or
lives of others. He found himself a prey to a certain mental
incoherence, a bewildering activity of vision. More than once before in
the course of his laborious, monotonous, and, as men go, very virtuous
life had this same thing happened to him--the tides of the obvious and
accustomed suddenly receding and leaving him stranded, as on some
barren sand-bank, uncertain whether the ship of his individual fate
would lie there wind-swept and sun-bleached till rusty rivets fell out
and planks parted, disclosing the ribs of her in unsightly nakedness,
or whether the kindly tide, rising, would float her off into blue water
and she would sail hopefully once again.

It was inevitable that this present experience should recall these
other happenings, evoking memories poignant enough. The first time the
ship of his fate thus stranded was when, as a lad of seventeen, he left
school. Living alone with his mother in a quaint little house in
Holland Street, Kensington, eagerly ambitious to make his way in the
world and to obtain, it had dawned on him that there was something
strange, unhappy, and not as it was wont to be with that, to him, most
beautiful and beloved of women. The mere suspicion was as a blasphemy
against which his young loyalty revolted. For Dominic, with the
inherent pieties of his Latin and Celtic blood, had none of that
contemptuous superiority in regard of his near relations so common to
male creatures of the Protestant persuasion and Anglo-Saxon race. He
took his parents quite seriously; it never having occurred to him that
fathers and mothers are given us merely for purposes of discipline, or
as helot-like examples of what to avoid. He was simple-minded enough
indeed to regard them as sacred, altogether beyond the bounds of
legitimate criticism--and this, as destiny would have it, with intimate
and life-long results.

Vaguely, through the mists of infancy, he could remember a hurried
exodus--after sound of cannon and sight of blood--from Spain, the
fierce and pious country of his birth. Since then, while his mother
lived--namely, till he was a man of over forty--always and only the
house in the Kensington side street, with its crooked creaking
stairways, its high wainscots--behind which mice squeaked and
scampered--its clinging odour of ancient woodwork, its low ceilings,
and uneven floors. At the back of it was a narrow strip of garden,
glorious for one brief week in early summer, with the gold of a big
laburnum; and fragrant later thanks to faithful effort on the part of
the white jasmine clothing its enclosing walls. In fair weather the
morning sun lay warm there; while the sky showed all the bluer overhead
for the dark lines of the adjacent housetops, and upstanding
deformities in the matter of zinc cowls and chimney-pots. Frequented by
cats, boasting in the centre a rockery of gas clinkers and chalk flints
surmounted by a stumpy fluted column bearing a stone basin--in which,
after rain, sparrows disported themselves with much conversation and
fluttering of sooty wings--the garden was, to little Dominic, a place
of wonder and delight. He peopled it with beings of his own fancy,
lovely or terrific, according to his passing humour. Granted a measure
of imagination, the solitary child is often the happiest child, since
the social element, with its inevitable materialism, is absent, and the
dear spirit of romance is unquenched by vulgar comment.

His father, grave and preoccupied, whose arrivals after long periods of
absence had in them an effect of secrecy and haste, was to the small
boy a being, august, but remote. During his brief sojourns at home the
quiet house awoke to greater fulness of life, with much coming and
going of other grave personages, strange of dress, and with a certain
effect of hardly restrained violence in their aspect. A spirit of fear
seemed to enter with them, demanding an unnatural darkening of windows
and closing of doors. Before Dominic they were of few words; but became
eloquent enough, in sonorous foreign speech, as his ears testified when
he was banished from their rather electric presence to the solitude of
the nursery above. And so it came about that a sense of mystery, of
large issues, of things at once strong and hidden, impenetrable to his
understanding and concerning which no questions might be asked,
encircled Dominic's childhood and passed into the very fabric of his
thought. While through it all his mother moved, to him tender and
wholly exquisite, but with the reticence of some deep-seated enthusiasm
silently cherished, some far-reaching alarm silently endured, always
upon her. And this resulted in an atmosphere of seriousness and
responsibility which inevitably reacted on the boy, making him sober
beyond his years, tempering his natural vivacity with watchfulness, and
pitching even his laughter in a minor key.

Only many years later, when after his mother's death it became his duty
to read letters exchanged between his parents during this period, did
Dominic Iglesias touch the key to the riddle, and fully measure the
public danger, the private strain and stress which had surrounded his
childhood and early youth. For his father, a man of far from ignoble
nature, but of narrow outlook and undying hatreds, was deeply involved
in revolutionary intrigue of the most advanced type--a victim of that
false passion of humanity which takes its rise not in honest desire for
the welfare of mankind, but in blind rebellion against all forms of
authority. His self-confidence was colossal; all rule being abominable
to him--save his own--all rulers hideous, save himself. The anarchist,
rightly understood, is merely the autocrat, the tyrant, turned inside
out. And this man, as Dominic gathered from the perusal of those old
letters, to whom the end so justified the means that red-handed crime
took on the fair colours of virtue, his mother had loved, even while
she feared him, with all the faithfulness and pure passion of her Irish
blood. Pathetic combination, the patience and resignation of the one
ever striving to temper the flaming zeal of the other, as though the
spindrift of the Atlantic, sweeping inland from the dim sadness of far
western coasts, should strive with relentless fierceness of sunglare
outpoured on some high-lying walled city of arid central Spain! Mist is
but a weak thing as against rock and fire; and what his mother must
have suffered in moral and spiritual conflict, let alone all question
of active dread, was to her son almost too cruel to contemplate,
although it explained and justified much.

In 1860, when Dominic was a schoolboy of fourteen, his father left home
on one of those sudden journeys the object and objective of which were
alike concealed. For about a year letters arrived at irregular
intervals, hailing from Paris, Naples, Prague, and finally Petersburg.
Then followed silence, broken only by rumours furtively conveyed by a
former associate, one Pascal Pelletier--an angel-faced, long-haired,
hysteric creature, inspired by an impassioned enthusiasm for infernal
machines and wholesale slaughter in theory, and, in practice, by a
gentle doglike devotion to Mrs. Iglesias and young Dominic. He would
arrive depressed and shadowy in the shadowy twilights. But, once in the
presence of the beings whom he loved, he became effervescent. His
belief was unlimited in the Head Centre, the Chief, in his demonic
power and fertility of resource. That any evil should befall
him!--Pascal snapped his thin fingers; while, with the inalienable
optimism of the born fanatic, he proceeded to state hopeful conjecture
as established fact, thereby doing homage to the spirit of delusion
which so conspicuously ruled him even to his inmost thought. But a
spell of cold weather in the winter of 1862 struck a little too
shrewdly through Pascal's seedy overcoat, causing that tender-hearted
subverter of society to cough his life out, with all possible despatch,
in the third-floor back of a filthy lodging-house off Tottenham Court
Road.

This was the end as far as information went, whether authentic or
apocryphal. But Dominic, his horizon still bounded by the world of
school, greedy of distinction both in learning and in games, away all
day and eagerly, if somewhat sleepily, busy over the preparation of
lessons at night, was very far from realising that. Poor voluble
kind-eyed Pascal he mourned with all his heart; yet the months of his
father's absence accumulated into years almost unnoticed. The same
thing had so often happened before; and then, at an unlooked-for
moment, the wanderer had returned. Moreover, the old habit of obedience
was still strong in him. It was understood that concerning his father's
occupations and movements no comment might be made, no questions might
be asked.

Meanwhile, the small house in Holland Street was ever more still, more
unfrequented. As he grew older Dominic became increasingly sensible of
this--sensible of a sort of hush falling on him as he crossed the
threshold, so that instinctively he left much of his wholesome young
animality outside, while his voice took on softer tones in speech, and
his quick light footsteps became more scrupulously noiseless as he ran
up the little crooked stairs.

"When your father comes home we must decide what profession you shall
follow, my Dominic," it had been his mother's habit to declare. But,
even before the time for such decision arrived the boy had begun to
understand he must see to all that unaided. For his mother was ill, how
deeply and in what manner he could not tell. He shrank, indeed, from
all clear thought, let alone speech, on the subject, as from something
indelicate, in a way irreverent. Her beauty remained to her,
notwithstanding a gradual wasting as of fever. A peculiar, very
individual grace of dress and of bearing remained to her likewise. But
she was uncertain in mood, the victim of strange fancies, a being
almost alarmingly far removed from the interests of ordinary life. Long
ago, in submission to her husband's anti-clerical prejudices, she had
ceased to practise her religion, so that the services of the Church no
longer called her forth in beneficent routine of sacred obligation. Now
she never left the house, living, since poor Pascal Pelletier's death,
in complete seclusion. Little wonder then that a hush fell on Dominic
crossing the threshold, since so doing he passed from the world of
healthy action to that of acquiescent sickness, from vigorous
hoarse-voiced realities to the intangible sadness of unrelated dreams!
The effect was one of rather haunting melancholy; and it was
characteristic of the lad that he did not resent it, though rejoicing
in the reputation at school of being high-spirited enough, impatient of
restraint or of any frustration of purpose. His mother had always been
sacred. She remained so, even though her sympathies had become
imperfect, and she moved in regions which his sane young imagination
failed to penetrate. One thing was perfectly plain to him, though it
cut at the root of ambition--namely, that he could not leave her. So,
in that matter of a profession, he must find work which would permit of
his continuing to live at home; and, since her income was narrow, the
work in question must make no heavy demand in respect of preliminary
expense.

Here was a problem more easy of statement than of solution, in face of
Dominic's pride, inexperience, and the singular isolation of his
position! There followed dreary months wherein his evenings were spent
in studying and answerings advertisements; and his days, till late
afternoon, in walking the town from end to end for the interviewing of
possible employers and the keeping of fruitless appointments. He would
set forth full of hope and courage in the morning, only to return full
of the dejection of failure at night. And it was then London began to
reveal herself to him in her solidarity, under the cloud of dun-blue
coal smoke--it was wintertime--which, at once hanging over and
penetrating her immensity, adds the majesty of mystery to the majesty
of mere size. He noted how, in the chill twilights, London grew
strangely and feverishly alive. Lamps sprang into clearness along the
pavements. A dazzling glitter of shop windows marked the great
thoroughfares, while often the angry glare of a fire pulsed along the
sky-line. When night comes in the country, so Dominic told himself, the
land sinks into peaceful repose. But in cities it is otherwise. There
the light leaves heaven for earth; and walks the streets, with much
else far from celestial, until the small hours move towards the dawn
and usher in the decencies of day.

Never before had he seen London thus and understood it in all its
enormous variety, yet as a unit, a whole. How much he actually beheld
with his bodily eyes, how much through the working of a rather exalted
condition of imagination induced by loneliness and bodily fatigue, he
could never subsequently determine. But the great city presented
herself to him in the guise of some prodigious living creature,
breathing, feeding, suffering, triumphing, above all mating and
breeding, terrible in her power and vitality, age old, yet still
unspent. Presented herself to him as horribly prolific, ever outpassing
her own unwieldy limits, sending forth her children, year after year,
all the wide world over by shipping or by rail; receiving some tithe of
them back, proud with accomplished fortune to enhance her glory, or,
disgraced and broken, slinking homeward to the cover of her fog and
darkness merely to swell the numbers of the nameless who rot and die.
He thought of those others, too--and this touched his young ardour with
a quick shudder of personal fear--whom she never sends forth at all;
but holds close in bondage all their lives long, enslaved to her
countless and tyrant activities by their own poverty, or by their
fellow-creatures' misfortune, cruelties, and sins. Was it thus she was
going to deal with him, Dominic Iglesias? Was he to be among the great
city's bondmen through the coming years, better acquainted with the
very earthly light which walks her streets by night, than with the
heavenly light which gladdens the sweet face of day in the open country
and upon the open sea? And for a moment the boy's heart rebelled,
hungry for pleasure, hungry for wide experience, hungry even for
knowledge of those revolutionary intrigues which, as he was beginning
to understand, had surrounded his childhood, and, as he was beginning
to fear, had cost his mother her reason and his father both liberty and
life. Thus did the ship of poor Dominic's fate appear to be stranded or
ever it had fairly set sail at all.

Meanwhile, if London claimed him, she did so in very cynical fashion,
mocking his willingness to labour, refusing to feed him even while she
refused to let him go. Everything, he feared, was against him--his
youth, his foreign name, his limited acquaintance, the impossibility of
giving definite information regarding his father's past occupations or
present whereabouts. Moreover, his spare young figure, his thin shapely
hands and feet, his blue-black Irish eyes and black hair, his energetic
colourless face, his ready yet reticent speech--all these marked him as
unusual and exotic. And for the unusual and exotic the British employer
of labour--of whatever sort--has, it must be conceded, but little use.
He is half afraid, half contemptuous of it, instinctively disliking
anything more alert and alive than his own most stolid self. But while
men, distrusting the distinctness of his personality and his good
looks, refused to give Dominic work, women, relishing them, were only
too ready to give him enjoyment--of a kind. The boy, in those solitary
wanderings, ran the gauntlet of many temptations; and was
presented--did he care to accept it--with the freedom of the city on
very liberal lines. Happily, inherent cleanliness of nature saved him
from much; and reverent shame at the thought of entering the hushed and
silent house where his mother lived--spotless, amid pathetic memories
and delicate dreams--with the soil of licence upon him, saved him from
more. Crime might have come close to him in his childhood, but vice
never; and the influences of vice are far more insidious, and
consequently more damaging, than those of crime.

Still, one way and another, the boy came very near touching the
confines of despair. Then the tide rose and the stranded ship of his
fate began to lift a little. By means of a series of accidents--the
illness of his former school-fellow, the already mentioned George
Lovegrove, whose post he offered temporarily to fill--he drifted into
connection with the banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers &
Barking. There his knowledge of modern languages, his industry, and a
certain discreet aloofness commended him to his superiors. A minor
clerkship fell vacant; it was offered to him. And from thenceforth, for
Dominic Iglesias, the monotony of fixed routine and steady labour,
until the day when, as a man of past fifty, restless and somewhat
distrustful both of the present and the future, he watched the dying of
the sullen sunset over Trimmer's Green from the windows of the
first-floor sitting-room of Cedar Lodge.




CHAPTER II


That which had in point of fact happened was not, as Iglesias felt,
without a pretty sharp edge of irony. For to-day, London, so long his
task-mistress and gaoler, had assumed a new attitude towards him.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, she had cast him off, given him his freedom. It
was amazing, a thing to take your breath away for the moment. And
agitated and hurt--for his pride unquestionably had suffered in the
process--Iglesias asked himself what in the world he should do with
this gift of freedom, what he should do, indeed, with that which
remained to him of life?

It had come about thus. Seeking an interview that morning with Sir Abel
Barking, in the latter's private room at the bank, he had made certain
statements regarding his own health in justification of a request for
some weeks' rest and holiday now, rather than later, in September, when
his yearly vacation would fall due.

"So you find yourself unequal to dealing satisfactorily with the
increasing intricacy of our financial operations, become confused by
the multiplicity of detail, suffer from pains in the head?" Sir Abel
had commented, with a certain largeness of manner. "I own, my good
friend, I was not wholly unprepared for this announcement."

"My work has not so far, I believe, suffered in any respect," Iglesias
put in quietly. "Directly I had reason to fear it might suffer I----"

"Of course, of course. I make no complaint--none. I go further. I admit
that the area of our undertakings is enlarged, enormously enlarged,
thanks to the remarkable personal energy and strenuous transatlantic
business methods introduced by my nephew Reginald. I grant you all
that----"

Sir Abel cleared his throat. Seduced by the charms of his own
eloquence, he was ready to mount the platform at the shortest possible
notice, even in private life. He loved exposition. He loved periods.
His critics--for what public man is without these, their strictures
naturally inspired by envy?--had been known to add that he also loved
platitudes. Be this as it may, certain it is that he loved an
audience--even of one. He had been considerably ruffled this morning by
communications made to him by his good-looking and somewhat scapegrace
youngest son. Those who fail to rule their own households often find
solace in attempting to rule the households of others. Speech and
patronage consequently tended to the restoration of self-complacency.

"No doubt this expansion, these modern methods, constitute a tax upon
your capacity, my good friend, you having acquired your training under
a less exacting system. I am not surprised. I confess"--he leaned back
in his chair, with an indulgent smile, as one who should say, "the gods
themselves do not wholly escape"--"I confess," he repeated, "it is
something of a tax upon the capacity of a veteran financier such as
myself. But then strain in some form or other, as I frequently remind
myself, is the very master-note of our modern existence. We all
experience it in our degree. And there are those men, such as myself,
for instance, who from their position, their vast interests and heavy
responsibilities, from the almost incalculable issues dependent on
their judgment and their action, are called upon to endure this strain
in its most exhausting manifestations, who are compelled to subordinate
personal case, even health itself, to public obligation. In the end
they pay, incontestable they pay, for their self-abnegation, for their
unswerving obedience to the trumpet-call of public duty."

He paused and mused a while, his head raised, his right hand
resting--it was noticeably podgy and squat--on the highly polished
surface of the extensive writing-table, his left hand dropped, with a
rather awkward negligence, over the arm of his chair. Meanwhile he
gazed, as pensively as his caste of countenance permitted, at a
portrait of himself, in the self-same attitude, which adorned the
opposite wall. It had been presented to him by the electors of his late
constituency. It was life-size and full-length. It had been painted by
a well-known artist whose appreciation of the outward as a revelation
of the inward man is slightly diabolic in its completeness. The
portrait was very clever; it was also very like. Looking upon it no
sane observer could stand in doubt of Sir Abel's eminent respectability
or eminent wealth. His appearance exuded both. Unluckily nature had
been niggardly in the bestowal of those more delicate marks of breeding
which, both in man and beast, denote distinction of personality and
antiquity of race. Pursy, prolific, Protestant, a commonness pervaded
the worthy gentleman's aspect, causing him, as compared with his head
clerk, Dominic Iglesias--standing there patiently awaiting his further
utterance--to be as is a cheap oleograph to a fine sketch in pen and
ink. It may be taken as an axiom that, in body and soul alike, to be
deficient in outline is a sad mistake. But of all these little facts
and the result of them, Sir Abel was, needless to relate, sublimely
ignorant.

"With you, my good friend, it is otherwise," he remarked presently,
reluctantly removing his gaze from the portrait of himself. "A
beneficent Providence has devised the law of compensation. And we may
remark the workings of it everywhere with instruction and
encouragement. Hence social obscurity has its compensating advantages.
You, for example, are affected by none of those considerations of
public obligation binding upon myself. You are so situated that you can
avoid the more trying consequences of this universal overstrain. If the
demands of the position you now fill are too much for you, you can
retire. I congratulate you, Iglesias. For some of us it is impossible,
it is forbidden to retire."

The speaker paused, as when in addressing a political or charitable
meeting he paused for well-merited applause, secure of having made a
telling point. Dominic Iglesias, however, had not applauded. To tell
the truth, his back was stiffening a little. He had a very just
appreciation of the relative social positions of himself and his
employer; still it did not occur to him, somehow, that applause was
necessarily in the part.

"You have the redress in your own hands," Sir Abel went on, not without
a hint of annoyance. "If you need amusement, leisure, rest, they are
all within your reach."

Still Iglesias did not speak.

"See now, my good friend, consider. To be practical"--Sir Abel raised
his finger and wagged it, with a heavy attempt at _bonhomie_. "You have
no family to provide for?"

"No," said Mr. Iglesias.

"You are, in short, not married?"

"No, Sir Abel," he said again.

"Well, then, no obstacle presents itself. But let us pause a moment,
for I must guard myself against misconception. In the interests of both
public and private morality I am a staunch advocate of marriage." Again
he cleared his throat. The platform was conspicuous by its presence--in
idea. "I hold matrimony to be among the primary duties, nay, to be the
primary duty of the Christian and the citizen. We owe it to the race,
we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the opposite sex. Let us be quite
clear on this point. Yet, since I deprecate all bigotry, I admit that
there may be exceptional cases in which absence of the marital
relation, though arguing some emotional callousness, may prove
advantageous to the individual."

A queer light had come into Dominic Iglesias' eyes. The corners of his
mouth worked a little. He stood quite still and rather noticeably erect.

"I do not deny this," Sir Abel continued. "I repeat, I do not deny it.
And yours, my good friend, may be, I am prepared to acknowledge, a case
in point. I take for granted, by the way, that you have saved, since
your salary has been a liberal one?"

Iglesias inclined his head.

"Clearly we need discuss this matter no further then." The speaker
became impressive, admonitory. "Indeed, it appears to me that your lot
is a most favoured one. You are free of all encumbrances. You can
retire in comfort--retire, moreover, with the assurance that your
departure will cause no inconvenience to myself and my colleagues,
since you make room for men younger and more in touch with modern
methods than yourself."

Mr. Iglesias permitted himself to smile.

"Ah, yes!" he said. "Possibly I had not taken that fact sufficiently
into account."

"Yet, clearly, it should augment your satisfaction," Sir Abel Barking
observed, with a touch of severity. "And, by the by, you can draw your
pension. You were entitled, strictly speaking, to do so some years
ago--four, I believe, to be accurate. This was pointed out to you at
the time by my nephew Reginald. He was not at all unwilling that you
should retire then; but you preferred to remain. I had some
conversation, at the time, with my nephew on the subject. I insisted
upon the fact that your service had been exemplary. I finally succeeded
in overruling his objection to your retaining your post."

"I am evidently under a heavy obligation to you, Sir Abel," said
Iglesias.

"Don't mention it--don't mention it," the great man answered nobly.
"Those in power should try to exercise it to the benefit of their
subordinates. It has always been my effort not only to be just, but to
be considerate of the interests and feelings of persons in my
employment."

And with that he again fixed his eyes upon the ironical portrait
adorning the opposite wall, wholly blind to the fact that it at once
revealed his weaknesses and mocked at them, conscious only of an
agreeable conviction that he had treated his head clerk with generosity
and spoken to him with the utmost good-feeling and tact.

With the proud it is ever a question whether to spoil the Egyptians, or
to fling back even the best-earned wages, payable by Egyptians, full in
the said Egyptians' face. For the firm of Barking Brothers & Barking,
in the abstract, Iglesias had the loyalty of long-established habit. It
had been as the rising tide, setting the ship of his fate and fortune
honourably afloat in the dismal days of that early stranding. Its
service had eaten up the best years of his life, it is true. But, even
in so doing, by mere force of constant association, the interests of
the great banking house had come to be his own, its schemes and secrets
his excitement, its successes his satisfaction. Fortunately the human
mind is so constituted that it is possible to have an esteem, amounting
to enthusiasm, for a body corporate, while entertaining but scanty
admiration for the individuals of whom that body is
composed--fortunately indeed, since otherwise what government, secular
or sacred, would long continue to subsist? Hence, to Iglesias, this
matter of the pension was decidedly difficult. Pride said, "This man,
Abel Barking has been offensive; both he and his nephew have been
ungrateful; reject it with contempt." Justice said, "You have no
quarrel with the firm as a whole; accept it." Common sense, pricked up
by anger, said, "Claim your own, take every brass farthing of it."
While personal dignity, winding up the case, admonished, "By no means
give yourself away. Make no impetuous demonstration. Go home and think
it quietly over." And with the advice of personal dignity Mr. Iglesias
fell in.

Yet he was still very sore, the heat of anger past, but the smart of it
remaining, when he journeyed back from the city later in the day. And
not only that after-smart, but a perplexity held him. For two strange
faces had looked into his during the last few hours--those of
Loneliness and Freedom. He had taken for granted, in a general sort of
way, that such personages existed and exercised a certain jurisdiction
in human affairs. But in all the course of his laborious life they had
never before come close, personally claiming him. He had had no time
for them. But they are patient, they only wait. They had time for
him--plenty of it. Suddenly he understood that; and it perplexed him,
for his estimate of his own importance was modest. He even felt
apologetic towards them, as one at whose door distinguished guests
alight for whose entertainment he has made no adequate provision. He
was embarrassed, his sense of hospitality reproaching him.

It so happened that, on this same return journey, he occupied the seat
on the right, immediately behind that of the driver. The sky was
covered, the atmosphere close. The horses, grey ones, showed a thick
yellowish lather where the collar rubbed their necks and the traces
their flanks. They were slack and heavy, and the omnibus hugged the
curb. Within it was empty, and on the top boasted but three passengers
besides Iglesias himself. It followed that, carrying insufficiency of
ballast, the great red-painted vehicle lumbered, and jerked, and swayed
uneasily; while the lighter traffic swept past it in a glittering
stream, the dominant note of which was black as against the dirty drab
of the recently watered wood-pavement. And the character of that
traffic was new to Dominic Iglesias, though he had travelled the
Hammersmith Road, Kensington High Street and Kensington Gore,
Knightsbridge and Piccadilly, back and forth daily, these many years.
For the exigencies of business demanding that the hours of his
journeying should be early and late, always the same, it came about
that the aspect of these actually so-familiar thoroughfares was novel,
as beheld in the height of the season at three o'clock in the afternoon.

At first Iglesias saw without seeing, busy with his own uncheerful
thoughts. But after a while he began to speculate idly on the scene
around him, turning to the outward and material for distraction, if not
for actual comfort. And so the stream of carriages and hansoms, and the
conspicuously well-favoured human beings occupying them, began to
intrigue his attention. He questioned whom they might be and whither
wending, decked forth in such brave array. They seemed to suggest
something divorced from, yet native to, his experience; something he
had never touched in fact, yet the right to which was resident in his
blood. And with this he ceased, in instinct, to be merely the highly
respected and respectable head clerk of Messrs. Barking Brothers &
Barking--now superannuated and laid on the shelf. A gayer, fiercer,
simpler life, quick with violences of vivacious sound and vivid colour,
the excitement of it heightened by clear shining southern sunshine and
blue-black shadow--a life undreamed of by conventional, slow-moving,
rather vulgar middle-class London--to which, on the face of it, he
appeared as emphatically to belong--awoke and cried in Dominic Iglesias.

It was a surprising little experience, causing him to straighten up his
lean yet shapely figure; while the burden of his years, and the long
monotony of them, seemed strangely lifted off him. Then, with the air
of courtly reserve--at once the joke and envy of the younger clerks,
which had earned him the nickname of "the old Hidalgo"--he leaned
forward and addressed the omnibus driver. The latter upraised a broad,
moist and sleepy countenance.

"Polo at Ranelagh," he answered, in a voice thickened by dust and the
laying of that dust by strong waters. "Club team plays 'Undred and
First Lancers."

The words had been to the inquirer pretty much as phrases from the
liturgy of an unknown cult. But it was Iglesias' praiseworthy
disposition not to be angry with that which he did not happen to
understand, so much as angry with himself for not understanding it.

"Only an additional proof, were it needed, of the prodigious extent of
my ignorance!" he reflected in stoically humorous self-contempt. His
eyes dwelt, somewhat wistfully, on the glittering stream of traffic,
once again those two unbidden guests, Loneliness and Freedom--for whose
entertainment he had made inadequate provision--sitting, as it seemed,
very close on either side of him. Then that happened which altered all
the values. Dominic Iglesias suddenly saw a person whom he knew.

He had seen that same person about three hours previously in the bank
in Threadneedle Street, while waiting for admittance to Sir Abel's
private room. Rumour accredited this handsome young gentleman--Sir
Abel's youngest son--with tastes expensive rather than profitable,
liberal socially, rather than estimable ethically, declaring him to be
distinctly of the nature of the proverbial thorn in the banker's
otherwise very prosperous side. He had, so said rumour, the fortune or
misfortune, as you chose to take it, of being at once a considerably
bad boy and a distinctly charming one. Be all that as it might, the
young man had certainly presented a grimly anxious countenance when,
without so much as a nod of recognition, he had stalked past Mr.
Iglesias in the dim light of the glass and mahogany-walled corridor.
But now, as the latter noted, his expression had changed, and that very
much for the better. The young man's face was flushed and eager, and
his teeth showed white and even under his reddish brown moustache. If
anxieties still pursued him they were in subjection to one main
anxiety, the anxiety to please, which of all anxieties is the most
engaging and grace-begetting.

Just then the traffic was held up, thus enabling Iglesias from his
perch on the 'bustop to receive a more than fleeting impression. Two
ladies were seated opposite the young man in the carriage. In them
Iglesias recognised persons of very secure social standing. The elder
he supposed to be Lady Sokeington--Alaric Barking's half-sister--to
whom, on the occasion of her marriage, twelve or thirteen years ago, he
had had the expensive honour of presenting, in his own name and that of
his colleagues, a costly gift of plate. The other lady, so it appeared
to him, was eminently sweet to look upon. She was very young. She
leaned a little forward, and in the pose of her delicate figure and the
carriage of her pretty head--under its burden of pale pink and grey
feathers, flowers, and lace--he detected further example of that
engaging anxiety to please. They made a delightful young couple, the
fair seeming of this life and riches of it very much on their side. Mr.
Iglesias' chivalrous heart went out to them in silent sympathy and
benediction; while, the block being over, his gaze continued to follow
them as long as the young girl's slender white-clad back and the young
man's flushed and eager face remained distinguishable. Then he started,
for he was aware that his unbidden companions had received unexpected
reinforcement. A third guest had arrived, and looked hard and
critically at him. It's name was Old Age, and he found something
sardonic in its glance. With all his gentleness of soul, all his innate
self-restraint, there remained fighting blood in Dominic Iglesias.
Therefore, for the moment, recognising with whom he had to deal, a
light anything but mild visited his eyes, and a rigidity the straight
lines of his chin and lips. Old Age is a sinister visitant even to
those who are moderate in demand and clean of life. For it gives to
drink of the cup not of pleasure, but merely of patience, of physical
loss and intellectual humiliation; and, once it has laid its spell upon
you, you are past all remedy save the supreme remedy of death. And so,
at first sight, Iglesias rebelled--as do all men--turning defiant.
Then, being very sane, he gave in to the relentless logic of fact.
Silently, yet with all courtesy, he acknowledged the newcomer, and bade
it be seated along with the rest. While, after brief pause to rally his
pride, and that courage which is the noblest attribute of pride, he
turned to things concrete and material once more, finally addressing
himself to the omnibus driver:

"Pardon me; polo, as I understand, is a species of game?"

The broad moist countenance was again uplifted, a hint of patronage now
tempering its good-natured apathy.

"Sort'er 'ockey on 'orseback."

"That must be sufficiently dangerous," Mr. Iglesias remarked.

"Bless you, yes. Players breaks their backs pretty frequent, and cuts
the ponies about most cruel--"

He ceased speaking abruptly, jammed the brake down with his heel in
response to the conductor's bell, and drew the sweating horses up short
to permit the ingress of fresh passengers. This accomplished, the
omnibus lumbered onwards while Dominic Iglesias fell into further
meditation.

The explanation vouchsafed him was still far from explicit; yet this
much of illumination he gained from it, namely, the assurance that all
these goodly personages, Alaric Barking and his sweet companion among
them, were on pleasure bent. One and all they fared forth, on this
heavy summer afternoon, in search of amusement--in search of that
intangible yet very powerful factor in human affairs to which it is
given to lift the too great weight of seriousness from mortal life,
cheating perception of relentless actualities, helping to restore the
balance, helping men to hope, to laugh, and to forget. Perceiving all
which, conscious moreover of the near neighbourhood of Loneliness on
the right hand and Old Age on the left, Iglesias began to bestow on
these votaries of pleasure a more earnest attention, recognising in
them the possessors of a secret which it greatly behoved him to enter
into possession of likewise. In what, he asked himself, did it actually
consist, this to him practically unknown quantity, amusement? How was
the spirit of it cultivated, the enjoyment of it consciously attained?
How far did it reside in inward attitude, how far in outward
circumstance? In a word, how did they all do it? It was very incumbent
upon him to learn, and he admitted a ridiculous ignorance.




CHAPTER III


Thus had the chapter of labour ended, and that of leisure opened. And
it was with the sadness of things terminated very strongly upon him
that, as Frederick, the German-Swiss valet, finished clearing the
dinner-table and departed, Mr. Iglesias looked forth over the neatly
protected verdure of Trimmer's Green in the evening quiet. The smugly
pacific aspect of the place irritated him. He was aware of a great
emptiness. And very certainly the scene before him offered no solution
of the problem of the filling of that emptiness. And somehow or other
it had to be filled--Iglesias knew that, knew it through every fibre of
him--or life would be simply insupportable. Meanwhile from the public
drawing-room below came sounds of revelry, innocent enough yet hardly
calculated to soothe over-strained nerves. Little Mr. Farge--whose thin
and reedy tenor carried as does a penny whistle--gave forth the refrain
of a song just then popular in metropolitan music-halls.

"They're keeping latish hours at the Convalescent Home," piped Mr.
Farge; while his friend and devout admirer, Albert Edward Worthington,
tore at the banjo strings and the ladies tittered.

Iglesias listened in a somewhat grim spirit of endurance. On the far
side of the Green he could see the gaslights in the Lovegroves'
dining-room. These appeared to watch him rather uncomfortably, as with
three supplicating and reproachful eyes. He debated whether he would
not take his hat, step across, and tell his old friend what had
happened--it would at least relieve him of the sound of little Farge's
serenading. But his pride recoiled somehow. Good souls, man and wife,
they would be full of solicitude and kindness; but they would say the
wrong thing. They would not understand. How, indeed, should they, being
wholly at one with their surroundings--unimaginative, domestic, British
middle-class, with its virtues and limitations aggressively in
evidence? George Lovegrove would suggest some minor municipal office,
or membership of the local borough council, as a crown of consolation.
His wife would skirt round the subject of matrimony. She had done so
before now; and Iglesias, while presenting a dignified front to the
enemy, had inwardly shuddered. She was an excellent, estimable woman;
but when ponderously arch, when extensively sly! Oh, dear no! It didn't
do. Her gambols were too sadly suggestive of those of a skittish
hippopotamus. Dominic Iglesias was conscious that he had a skin too
little to-night; he could not witness them with philosophy. The
kindliest intention, the best-meant words, might cause him extravagant
annoyance.

He turned away from the window and took a turn the length of the
room--a tall, distinct, and even stately figure in the thickening dusk.
He felt rather horribly desolate. He was fairly frightened by the
greatness of the emptiness, within and about him, engendered by absence
of employment. He had little to reproach himself with. His record was
cleaner than most men's--he could not but know that. He had sacrificed
personal ambition, personal happiness, to the service of one supremely
dear to him. Not for a moment did he regret it. Had it to be done all
over again, without hesitation he would do it. Still there was no
blinking facts. Here was the nemesis, not of ill living, but of
good--namely, emptiness, loneliness, homelessness, Old Age here at his
elbow, Death waiting there ahead.

"The routine has gone on too long," he said to himself bitterly. "I
have lost my pliability, lost my humanity. I am a machine now, not a
man. To the machine, work is life. Work over, life is over; and the
machine is just so much lumber--better broken up and sent to the rag
and bottle shop, where it may fetch the worth of its weight as
scrap-iron."

He turned, came back to the open window again and stood there, rather
carefully avoiding the three reproachful eyes of the Lovegroves'
dining-room gaselier, and fixing his gaze on that sullen fierceness of
sunset still hanging in the extreme northwest.

"Unluckily there is no rag and bottle shop where superannuated bank
clerks of five-and-fifty have even the very modest market value of
scrap-iron!" he went on. "Of all kinds of uselessness, that of we
godlike human beings is the most utterly obvious when our working day
is past. Mental decay and bodily corruption as the ultimate. And, this
side of it, a few years of increasing degradation, a mere senseless
killing of time until the very unpleasing goal is reached--along with a
growing selfishness, and narrowness of outlook; along, possibly, with
some development of senile sensuality, the more detestable because it
lacks the provocations of hot blood. Oh! Dominic Iglesias, Dominic
Iglesias, is that the ugly road you are doomed to travel--a toothless
greed for filling your belly with fly-blown dainties off the
refuse-heap?"

And through the open window, in sinister accompaniment to little Mr.
Farge's sophisticated and unpastoral pipings, came the voice of the
great city herself in answer--low, multitudinous, raucous, without
emphasis but without briefest relief of interval or of pause. And this
laid hold strongly of Iglesias' imagination, reminding him of all the
intimate wretchedness of that first stranding of the ship of his fate.
Reminding him of his long and fruitless trampings in search of
employment--good looks, energy, youth itself, seeming but an added
handicap--when London revealed herself to him in her solidarity,
revealed herself as a prodigious living creature, awful in her
mysterious vigour, ever big with impending birth, merciless with
impending death. As she showed herself to him then, with life all
untried before him, so she showed herself still when, in the blackness
of his present humour, all life worth the name appeared over and
passed. He had changed, so he believed, to the point of nullity and
final ineptitude. She remained strong, active, relentless as ever. As
long ago, so now, she struck him as monstrous. Yet now, though all the
conditions were changed, he had, as long ago, an instinct that from her
there was no escape.

"I have served you honestly enough all these years," he said--since she
had voice to speak, she had also ears to hear, mayhap--"and you have
taken much and given little. To-day you have turned me off, told me to
quit. But where, I ask you, can I go? I am too stiffened by work,
unskilled in travel, too unadaptable to begin again elsewhere.
Moreover, you hold the record of my experience, all my glad and
sorrowful memories. I might try to leave you, but it's no use. I am
planted and rooted in you, monstrous mother that you are. If I know
myself, I should go only to come back."

For the moment the calm of long self-control was broken up within him.
Dominic Iglesias dwelt, consciously and sensibly, in the horror of the
Outer Darkness--which horror is known only to that small and somewhat
suspect minority of human beings who are also capable, by the operation
of the divine mercy, of dwelling in the glory of the Uncreated Light.
The swing of the pendulum is equal to right as to left. He was
staggered by the misery of his own isolation--a stranger, as he
suddenly realised, by temperament and ideals, as well as by race! Then
resolutely he turned his back on this, with an instinct of
self-preservation directing his thought to things practical and average.

For example, that question of the pension--concerning which he now
found, to his slight surprise, he was no longer the least in doubt.
This money was his by right. The hard strain in his nature was
dominant--to the full he would claim his rights. And since in moments
of despair the human mind invariably requires a human victim, be it
merely a simulacrum, a waxen image of a man to melt in the fires of its
humiliation and revolt, Iglesias remembered, with much contemptuous
satisfaction, the ironical portrait of Sir Abel Barking adorning the
wall of the latter's private room at the bank. He hailed the diabolic
talent of the artist who had laid bare with such subtle skill the
flatulence of his sitter. It was a pretty revenge, very assuaging just
now to Iglesias. For the real man, as he reflected, was not the man who
sat heavily self-complacent in a library chair, exuding platitudes and
pride of patronage; but the man who hung upon the wall forever
ridiculous while paint and canvas should last. Thus would he go down to
posterity! And to Dominic Iglesias, just now, it seemed very excellent
that posterity should know him for the wind-bag hypocrite he
essentially was. Securely entrenched behind his own large prosperity,
uxoriousness, paternity, had he not counted his, Iglesias', blessings
to him; counselling amusement, rest, congratulating him on just all
that which made for his present distress--namely, his obscure position,
his enforced idleness, his absence of human ties, the general
meagreness of his state in life? The more he thought of the incident,
the more it filled him with indignation and disgust. Therefore, very
certainly he would claim his pension; claim an infinitesimal but actual
fraction of this man's great wealth; would live long so as to claim it
as long as possible, till the paying of it, indeed, should become a
weariness to the payer. And he would spend it, too, unquestionably he
would. Mr. Iglesias' rare and gracious smile had an almost cruel edge
to it.

"The machine shall become a man again," he said. "And the man shall
amuse himself. How, I don't yet know, but I will find out. Work has
made me dull and inept."

He straightened himself up, tired, yet unbroken, defiant, aware--though
the horror of the Outer Darkness was yet upon him--of purpose still
militant and unspent.

"Play may make me the reverse of dull and inept. I have always been
diligent and methodical. I will continue to be so. This enterprise
admits of no delay. I will begin at once, begin to-morrow, to amuse
myself."

It is characteristic of the Latin to see things written in fire and
blood, which the slower-brained Anglo-Saxon only sees written in red
paint--if, indeed, he ever arrives at seeing them written at all.
To-night the Latin held absolute sway in Dominic Iglesias. With freedom
had come a curious reversion to type. His humour, like his smile, was a
trifle cruel. He observed, criticised, judged, condemned unsparingly,
all mental courtesies in abeyance. When, therefore, at this juncture
the three eyes of the Lovegroves' dining-room gaselier winked slowly,
and closed their lids--so to speak--ceasing to watch and to supplicate,
he suffered no self-reproach. The good, simple couple were shutting up
house and going to bed, he supposed. They sought repose betimes; and,
unless supper had been more aggressively cold and heavy than usual,
slept, till broad day, a dreamless sleep. Decidedly it was well he had
not taken his hat and stepped across to visit them, for, beyond all
question, they would not have understood! The voice of London, for
instance, meant nothing to them. They had no notion London had a voice.
Still less had they any notion she was a prodigious living creature.
London was the place where they resided--that was all, and, since the
streets are admittedly noisy and dusty, they had taken a house in this
genteel and convenient suburb. Of the tremendous life and force of
things, miscalled man-made and inanimate, they had no faintest
conception. Small wonder they went to bed betimes and slept a dreamless
sleep! Thinking of which--notwithstanding their kindness and
affection--they became, just now, to Iglesias as truly astonishing
phenomena in their line as Sir Abel Barking in his. He saw in them
merely specimens, though good ones, of the great majority of the
British public, a public so overlaid and permeated by convention, so
parochial in outlook, so hidebound by social tradition and insular
prejudice, that it is really less in touch with everlasting fact than
the animals it pets, demoralises, and eats. These at least have
instinct, and so are at one with universal nature. In perception, in
spontaneity of action, good Mrs. Lovegrove was as an infant compared to
her parrot or her pug. So was little Mr. Farge with his sophisticated
warblings--so, for that matter, were all the other persons among whom
his, Iglesias', lot was cast. His sense of isolation deepened. If
amusement was his object, most certainly the society of Trimmer's Green
would not supply it. He must look further afield for all that.

In the far northwest the last of the sunset had faded; only the cloud
remained. Yet the horizon, above the broken line of the house-roofs and
chimney-pots, pulsed with light--the very earthly light which, in great
cities, flares out when the light of heaven dies, to walk the streets,
with much else of doubtful loveliness, till it is shamed by the cold
chastity of dawn. And along with that outflaring, a certain
meretricious element introduced itself into the aspect of Trimmer's
Green. Across the roadway, the gaslamps showed cones of vivid yet
sickly brightness, bringing at regular intervals the sharply indented
leaves of the plane trees and the shivering silver of the
balsam-poplars into an arresting and artificial distinctness. Between
were spaces of vacancy and gloom. And from out such a space,
immediately opposite, slowly emerged a shambling and ungainly figure,
in which Dominic Iglesias recognised the third of his fellow-lodgers,
Mr. de Courcy Smyth. His acquaintance with the said lodger was of the
slightest, since the latter had but recently entered into residence and
rarely appeared at meals. Mrs. Porcher habitually referred to him with
a pitying respect as "a gentleman very influential in literary and
professional circles, but unfortunate in his married life"; ending with
a sigh and upward glance of her still fine eyes, as one who could
sympathise, having herself been through that gate. Influential or not,
it occurred to Iglesias that the man presented a sorry spectacle
enough. For a minute or so he stood aimlessly in the full glare of a
gaslamp. His thin, creasy Inverness cape was thrown back, displaying
evening dress. He carried a soft grey felt hat in one hand. His whole
aspect was seedy, disappointed, dejected; his face pale and puffy, his
sparse reddish hair and beard but indifferently trimmed. It was borne
in upon Iglesias, moreover, that the man was hungry, that he had
not--and that for some time--had enough to eat. Voluntary poverty is
among the most beautiful, involuntary poverty among the ugliest, sights
upon earth; and to which order of poverty that of de Courcy Smyth
belonged, Mr. Iglesias was in no doubt. This was a sordid sight, a
sight of discouragement, adding the last touch to the melancholy which
oppressed him. The seedy figure crossed the road, fumbled for a minute
with a latchkey. Then nerveless footsteps ascended the stairs, passed
the door, and took their joyless way up and onward to the
bed-sitting-room immediately above.

Down below the music had ceased, while sounds arose suggestive of a
little playfulness on the part of the two young men in bidding their
hostess and Miss Eliza Hart good-night. Very soon the house became
silent. But Dominic Iglesias, though tired, was in no humour for sleep.
He drew forward a leather-covered armchair and sat near the open
window, in at which came a breathing of night wind. This was soothing,
touching his forehead as with delicate pressure of a cool and
sympathetic hand; so that, without any sense of surprising transition,
he found himself in the garden of the little house in Holland Street,
Kensington, once again. The laburnum was in full blossom, and the
breeze uplifted the light drooping branches of it, making all their
golden glory dance in the sunshine. There must have been rain in the
night, too, for the stone basin was full of water, in which the
sparrows were busy washing, sending up tiny iridescent jets and
fountains from their swiftly fluttering wings. It was delicious to
Dominic. He felt very safe, very gay. Only a heavy ill-favoured tabby
cat came from nowhere. It had designs upon the sparrows. Twice it
climbed stealthily up the broken bricks and gas clinkers. Twice the
little boy drove it away. It was not a nice cat. It had a broad white
face, deceitful little eyes, and grey whiskers. It declared it only
caught sparrows for their good and for the good of the community. It
assured Dominic he was guilty of a grave error of judgment in
attempting to interfere. It said a great deal about moral
responsibility and the heavy obligations persons of wealth and position
owe to themselves.

Just then Pascal Pelletier, carrying a square Huntley Palmer's biscuit
tin, containing an infernal machine, under his arm, his angelic
countenance radiant in the sunshine, came down the steps from the
dining-room window. And, while Dominic ran to greet him, the cat crept
back again--its face was the face of Sir Abel Barking, and it made a
spring at the sparrows. But the pillar broke and the basin toppled
over, pinning it, across the loins, down on to the clinkers under the
edge of the stone lip.

"Oh! you've spoilt my garden, you've spoilt my garden!" Dominic cried.
"The basin has fallen. The sparrows will never wash in it any more."

But Pascal Pelletier patted him on the head tenderly.

"Do not weep over the fallen basin, very dear one," he said. "Rather
sing aloud Te Deum in praise of the glorious goddess of Social
Revolution who has delivered the enemy of the people into our hands.
This is no affair of cat and bird, but of the capitalist and the
proletariat on which he battens. So for a little space let the unholy
creature lie there writhing. Let it understand what it is to have a
back broken by the weight of an impossible burden. Let it try vainly to
drag its limbs from beneath an immovable load. Observe it, let it
suffer. Very soon we will finish with it, and explode the iniquitous
system it represents. See, in the name of humanity, of labour, of the
unknown and unnumbered millions of the martyred poor, I set a match to
this good little fuse, and, with the rapidity of thought, blow
blasphemous tyrant Capital into a thousand fragments of reeking flesh
and splintered bone!"

But to the little boy, words and spectacle alike had become unendurably
painful.

"No, no, Pascal, you cannot cure everything that way. It is not just,"
he cried. And running forward with all his strength he lifted the stone
basin off the wounded creature--cat, man, beast of prey, modern
financier, be it what it might. He stopped to gather it up in his arms,
and, repulsive though it was, to comfort and protect it. But just then
came a thunderous rattle and crash knocking him senseless.

Mr. Iglesias sat bolt upright in his chair, uncertain of his identity
and surroundings, shaken and bewildered.

Upstairs, de Courcy Smyth--spent and stupefied by the writing of a
would-be smart critique on the first-night performance of a screaming
farce, for one of to-morrow's evening papers--had stumbled, upsetting
the fire-irons, as he slouched across his room to bed. Iglesias heard
the creak of the wire-wove mattress as the man flung himself down; and
that familiar sound restored his sense of actualities. Yet all his mood
was changed and softened. The return to childhood had made a strange
impression upon him, filling him with a great nostalgia for things
apparently lost, but exquisite; and which, having once been, might,
though he knew not by what conceivable alchemy of time or chance, once
again be. Meanwhile, he must have slept long, for the wind had grown
chill. The voice of London, the monstrous mother, had grown weak and
intermittent. And the earthly light, pulsing along the horizon, had
grown faint, humbled and chastened by the whiteness of approaching dawn.




CHAPTER IV


A quarter-mile range of high unpainted oak paling, well seasoned, well
carpentered, innocent of chink or shrinkage, impervious to the human
eye. Visible above it the domed heads of enormous elm trees steeped in
sunshine, rising towards the ample curve of the summer sky. At
intervals, with tumultuous rush and scurry, the thud of the hoofs of
unseen horses, galloping for all they are worth over grass. The suck
and rub of breeches against saddle-flaps, the rattle of a curb chain or
the rings of a bit. A call, a challenge, smothered exclamations. The
long-drawn swish of the polo stick through the air, and the whack of
the wooden head of it against ball, or ground, or something unluckily
softer and more sentient. A pause, broken only by distant voices, and
the sound, or rather sense, of men and horses in quiet and friendly
movement; followed by the tumultuous rush and scurry, and all the
moving incidents of the heard, yet unwitnessed, drama over again.

For here it was that gallant and costly game beloved of Oriental
princes--rather baldly described to Mr. Iglesias yesterday by the
driver of the Hammersmith 'bus as a "kind of hockey on horseback"--in
very full swing no doubt. Only unfortunately Iglesias found himself on
the wrong side of the palings. And, since he had learned, indirectly,
from the observations of the monumental police-sergeant--directing the
stream of carriages at the entrance gates--to other would-be
spectators, that to the polo ground, as to so much else obviously
desirable in this world, there is "no admission except by ticket," on
the wrong side of these same palings he recognised he was fated to
stay. It was a disappointment, not to say an annoyance. For he had come
forth, in accordance with his determination, to make observations and
inquiries regarding that same matter of amusement. And, since the
influence of that which is to be acts upon us almost, if not quite, as
strongly as the influence of that which has been, the handsome, eager
countenance of young Alaric Barking and the graceful figure of his fair
companion, as seen from the 'bustop, occurred very forcibly in this
connection to Dominic Iglesias' mind. He would go forth and behold that
which they had gone forth to behold. He would witness the sports of the
well-born and rich. From these he elected, somewhat proudly, to take
his first lessons in the fine art of amusement. So here he was; and
here, too--very much here--were the palings, spelling failure and
frustration of purpose.

Fortunately unwonted exercise and the pure invigorating atmosphere
tended to generate placidity, and agreeable harmony of the mental and
physical being. It followed that active annoyance was short-lived. For
a minute or two Mr. Iglesias loitered, listening to the moving music of
the unseen game. Then, walking onward to the end of the enclosure,
where the palings turn away sharply at the left, he crossed the road
and made for a wooden bench just there amiably presenting itself. It
was pleasant to rest. The walk had been a long one; but it now appeared
to him that the labour of it had not been wholly in vain. For around
him stretched a breezy common, broken by straggling bramble and furze
brakes, and dotted with hawthorn bushes, upon the topmost branches of
which the crowded pinkish-white blossoms still lingered. From one to
another small birds flitted with a pretty dipping flight, uttering
quick detached notes as in merry question and answer. Through the rough
turf the bracken pushed upward, uncurling sturdy croziers of brownish
green. Away to the right, beyond the railway line, rose the densely
wooded slopes of Roehampton and Sheen; while, against the purple-green
gloom of them, the home signals of Barnes Station--hard white lines and
angles tipped with scarlet and black--stood out in high relief like the
gigantic characters of some strange alphabet. Down the wide road motors
ground and snorted; and carriages moved slowly, two abreast, the
menservants sitting at ease, talking and smoking while waiting to take
up at the police-guarded gate, back there towards the heat and smoke of
London, when the polo match should be played out.

But immediately London, the heat, and smoke, and raucous voice of it,
seemed far enough away, the wholesome charm of the country very
present. For a while Dominic Iglesias yielded himself up to it.
Receptive, quiescent, contented, he basked in the sunshine, his mind
vacant of definite thought. But for a while only. For as physical
fatigue wore off, definite thought returned; and with it the sense of
his own loneliness, the oppression of a future empty of work, the
bitterness of this enhanced by the little disappointment he had lately
suffered. He leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees,
looking at the bracken croziers pushing bravely upward through the
rough turf to air and light. Even these blind and speechless things
worked, in a sense, fulfilling the law of their existence. He went back
on the dream of last night, on his own childhood, the happiness, yet
haunting unspoken anxiety of it, his father's fanaticism, fierce
revolutionary propaganda, and mysteriously uncertain fate.

"And to think that was the pit out of which I, of all men, was digged!"
he said to himself. "Have I done something to restore the family
balance in respect of right reason, or is the shame of incapacity upon
me? Have I sacrificed myself, or cowardly have I merely shirked living?
Heaven knows--I don't, only----"

But here his uncheerful meditations were broken in on by a voice,
imperative in tone, yet perceptibly shaken by laughter.

"Cappadocia!" it called. "Cappadocia! Do you hear? Come here, you
little reprobate."

Then Dominic Iglesias perceived that he had ceased to be sole occupant
of the bench. A dog, a tiny toy spaniel, sat beside him. It sidled very
close, gazing at him with foolishly prominent eyes. Its ears, black
edged with tan, soft and lustrous as floss silk, hung down in long
lappets on either side its minute and melancholy face. The tip of its
red tongue just showed. It was abnormally self-conscious and solemn. It
planted one fringed paw upon Iglesias' arm and it snored.

"Cappadocia!--well, of all the cheeky young beggars----"

This time the voice broke in unmistakable merriment, wholly
spontaneous, as of relief, even of mischievous triumph; and Mr.
Iglesias, looking up, found himself confronted by a young woman. She
advanced slowly, her trailing string-coloured lace skirts gathered up
lazily in one hand. About her shoulders she wore a long blue-purple
silk scarf, embroidered with dragons of peacock, and scarlet, and gold.
These rather violent colours found repetition in the nasturtium leaves
and flowers that crowned her lace hat, the wide brim of which was tied
down with narrow strings of purple velvet, gipsy fashion, beneath her
chin. Under her arm she carried another tiny spaniel, the creature's
black morsel of a head peeping out quaintly from among the forms of the
embroidered dragons, which last appeared to writhe, as in the heat of
deadly conflict, as their wearer moved. Her face was in shadow owing to
the breadth of the brim of her hat. Otherwise the sunshine embraced her
whole figure, conferring on it a glittering yet singularly
unsubstantial effect, as though a column of pale windswept dust were
overlaid, here and there, with splendour of rich enamel.

And it was just this effect of something unsubstantial, in a way
fictitious and out of relation to sober fact, which struck Dominic
Iglesias, robbing him for the moment of his dignified courtesy. Frankly
he stared at this appearance, so strangely at variance with the
realities of his own melancholy thought. Meanwhile the little dog
snuggled up yet closer against him.

"Yes--pray don't disturb yourself," the young lady went on volubly
"It's too bad, I know, to intrude on you like this. But as Cappadocia
refuses to come to me, it is clear I have to come after Cappadocia.
It's simply disgraceful the way she carries on when one takes her out,
making acquaintances like this, casually, all over the place. The maids
flatly refuse to air her, even on a string. They say it becomes a
little too compromising. But, as I explain to them, she's not a bit the
modern woman. She belongs to a stage of social development when pretty
people infinitely preferred being compromised to being squelched." The
speaker laughed again quietly. "I'm not altogether sure they weren't
right. When you are squelched, finished, done for, it matters precious
little whether you've been compromised first or not. Don't you agree?
Any way, Cappadocia's not going to be squelched if she can help it.
She's horribly scared, or pretends to be, at motors. Let one toot and
she forgets all her fine-lady manners, and just skips to anybody for
protection. She'll take refuge in the most unconventional places to
escape."

The part of wisdom, in face of this very forthcoming young person,
would have been no doubt to arise and withdraw. But to Dominic
Iglesias, just then, dogs, woman, conversation, were alike so remote
and unreal, part merely of the scene which he had been contemplating,
that he failed to take them seriously. Divorced from routine, he was
divorced, in a way, from habitual modes of mind and conduct. He neither
consented nor refused, but just let things happen, attaching little or
no meaning to them. If this feminine being chose to prattle--well, let
her do so. Really he did not care.

"I am not very modern myself," he said, with a shade of weariness. "So
perhaps your small dog had some intuition of a kindred spirit when
taking refuge with me."

"All the same, you hardly date from the social era of Charles II., I
fancy," the young lady answered quickly.

As she spoke she raised her chin with a slightly impudent movement,
thus bringing her countenance into the sunlight. For the first time
Iglesias clearly saw her face. It was small, the features
insignificant, the skin smooth and fine in texture, but sallow. Her
hair, black and very massive, was puffed out and dressed low, hiding
her ears. Her lips were rather positively red, and the tinge of colour
on either cheek, though slight, was not wholly convincing in tone. Even
to a person of Mr. Iglesias' praiseworthy limitation of experience in
such matters, her face was vaguely suggestive of the footlights--would
have been distinctly so but for her eyes. These were curiously at
variance with the rest of her appearance. They belonged to a quite
other order of woman, so to speak--a woman of finer physique, of higher
intelligence, possibly of nobler purposes. They were arrestingly large
in size, thereby helping to dwarf the proportions of her face. In
colour they were a rather light warm hazel, with a slight film over
both iris and pupil, and a noticeably bluish shade in the whites of
them. In these last particulars they were like a baby's eyes; but very
unlike in the reflective intensity of their observation as she fixed
them upon Dominic Iglesias.

"Cappadocia may be a fool about motors," she remarked, "but she's
uncommonly shrewd in reading character. She seems to like you, to have
taken you on, don't you know; and she's generally right. So I'll sit
down, please. Oh! no, no, come along now"--this as Mr. Iglesias rose
and made a movement to depart--"why, dear man, the very point of the
whole show is that you should sit down, too."




CHAPTER V


And so it came about that the Lady of the Windswept Dust sat at one end
of the flat bench and Dominic Iglesias at the other, with the two
absurd and exquisite little dogs in between. And the lady chattered.
Her voice was sweet and full, with plaintive tones and turns of
laughter in it; and, though the vowel sounds were not wholly
impeccable, having the tang in them common to the speech of the cockney
bred, the aspirates happily remained inviolate. And Iglesias listened,
still with a curious indifference, as, sitting in the body of the
house, he might have listened to patter from the other side of the
footlights. It passed the time. Presently he would get up, taking the
whole of his rather sorrowful personality along with him, and go out by
the main entrance, while she left by the stage door--and so vanished,
little dogs and all.

"It's my habit to play fair," she announced. "If I'm going to ask
personal questions at the finish, I always lead up to them by supplying
personal information at the start. It's mean to induce other people to
give themselves away unless you give yourself away first--also, I
observe it is usually quite unsuccessful. Well, then, to begin with,
his name"--she gently poked the tiny spaniel beside her, causing it to
wriggle uneasily all the length of its satiny back--"is Onions.
Graceful and distinguished, isn't it? But I give you my word I couldn't
help myself. Cappadocia's so duchessy that I had to knock the conceit
out of her somehow, or it would not have been possible to live with
her. She was altogether too smart for me--used to look at me as if I
was a cockroach. So I consulted a friend of mine about it; for it's a
little too much to be made to feel like a black-beetle in your own
house, and by a thing of that size, too! And he--my friend--said there
is nothing to compare with a _mésalliance_ for taking the stuffing out
of anyone. I own I was not exactly off my head about that speech of
his. In a way it was rather a facer; but when I got cool I saw he was
right. After all, he knew, and I knew--and he knew that I knew----"

The lady paused. Her voice had taken on a plaintive inflection. She
looked away at the domed heads of the enormous elm trees above the
range of oak palings.

"For the life of me I can't imagine why you're here," she exclaimed,
"instead of inside there with all the rest of them! However, we haven't
got as far as that yet. I was telling you about my King Charleses. So
my friend brought me this one"--again she poked the little dog gently.
"His pedigree's pretty fair, but of course it's not a patch on
Cappadocia's. Her prizes and the puppies--you don't mind my alluding
quite briefly to the puppies--are a serious source of income to me. But
I believe she would have ignored the defective pedigree. He is rather
nice-looking, you see, and Cappadocia is rather superficial. It is the
name that worries her--Onions, Willie Onions, that's where the real
trouble comes in. Not like it? I believe you. She's capable of saving
up all her pocket-money to buy him a foreign title, as a rich, ugly
woman I once knew did who married a man called Spittles. He was a bad
lot when she married him, and he stayed so. But as the Comte d'Oppitale
it didn't matter. Vices became merely quaint little eccentricities. If
he beat her it was with an umbrella with a coronet on the handle, and
that made all the difference. Everything for the shop window, you see,
with a nature like hers or Cappadocia's. But I don't rub it in, I
assure you I don't. I only remind Cappadocia of the fact by calling her
Mrs. W. O. when she's a pest and a terror. And that's better than
smacking her, anyhow, isn't it?"

To this proposition Mr. Iglesias gravely assented. The lady drew her
blue-purple scarf a little closer about her shoulders, causing the
embroidered dragons to writhe as in the heat of conflict, while the
sunlight glinted on the gold thread of their crests and claws, and
glittered in their jewelled eyes. She gazed at the elm trees again.

"It's quite nice to hear you speak, you know," she remarked
parenthetically. "The conversation has been a little one-sided so far.
I was beginning to be afraid you might be bored. But now it's all
right. I flourish on encouragement! So, to go on, my name is
Poppy--Poppy St. John--Mrs. St. John. Rather good, isn't it?"

"Distinctly so," said Mr. Iglesias. Her unblushing effrontery began to
entertain him somewhat. And then he had sallied forth in search of
amusement. This was not the form of amusement he would have selected;
but--since it presented itself?

"I'm glad you like it," she returned. "I've always thought it rather
telling myself--an improvement on Mrs. Willie Onions, anyhow. Oh! yes,
a vast improvement," she repeated. "My friend was quite right. I tell
you it's an awful handicap to have a name which gives you away
socially. The man, the husband, I mean, may be the best of the good.
Still, it's difficult to forgive him for labelling you with some
stupidity like that. There's no getting away from it. You feel like a
bottle of pickles, or boot-polish, or a tin of insecticide whenever a
servant announces you. Everybody knows where you do--and don't--come
in. But, to go on, I am barely three--only I fancy you are the sort of
person who is rather rough on lying, aren't you? Well, in that case,
quite between ourselves--I am just turned nine-and-twenty."

She faced round on Dominic Iglesias, fixing on him those curiously
arresting eyes, which at once emphasised and redeemed the commonness of
her face, as the sweetness of her voice emphasised and redeemed the
commonness of her accent, and the quietude of her manner and movements
mitigated the impertinence of her words and vulgarity of her diction.

"And really that's about all it is necessary for you to know at
present," she asserted. "We shall see later, if we keep it up--if
Cappadocia keeps it up, I mean, of course. She is fearfully gone on you
now, that's clear; and she may be capable of a serious attachment. I
can't tell. An unfortunate marriage has been known to turn that way
before now. Anyhow, we'll give her the benefit of the doubt."

Poppy laughed softly, leaning forward and still looking at Mr. Iglesias
from under the shadow of her wide-brimmed hat.

"Now," she said, "come along. I've shown you I play fair all round,
even to a stuck-up little monkey of a thing like Cappadocia. It's your
turn to stand and deliver. I had been watching you and speculating for
ever so long before our introduction. Tell me, who on earth are you?"

Iglesias' figure stiffened a little; but it was impossible to be
annoyed with her. To begin with, she was too unreal, too unsubstantial
a being. And, to go on with, invincible good-temper is so very
disarming.

"Who am I? Nobody," he answered gravely.

"Bless us, here's a find!" Poppy cried, apparently addressing the
little dogs. "Hasn't he so much of a name even as Willie Onions?
Where's it gone to? It must be nearly as awkward for him as it was for
the man who had no shadow. Come, though," she added in tones of
remonstrance, "you must play fair. Cards on the table and no
humbugging. To put it another way, what do you do?"

"Since yesterday, nothing," he answered.

The young lady regarded him with increasing interest.

"But, my gentle lunatic," she said, "you didn't exactly begin your
acquaintance with this planetary sphere yesterday--couldn't, you know,
though you are very beautiful to look at. So, if you don't very
particularly much mind, we'll hark back to before yesterday."

Dominic Iglesias' gravity gave way slightly. He smiled in spite of his
natural pride and reticence.

"For over thirty-five years I was a clerk in a city bank."

"Pshaw!" Poppy cried hotly. "And pray what variety of congenital idiot
do you take me for? If you are going to decline upon fiction, please
let it be of a higher order than that. I tell you it's unworthy of you!"

She pursed up her lips and moved her head slowly from side to side in
high disgust.

"Don't be childish," she said. "Don't be transparently silly. If you
want to gas, do put a little more intelligence into it. You--you--out
of sight the most distinguished-looking man I've ever met except
Lord--well, we won't name names, it sounds showy--you a clerk in a city
bank! There, excuse me, but simply--" Poppy snapped her fingers like a
pair of castanets, making the little dogs start and whimper. "Fiddle!"
she cried; "tell it to a bed-ridden spinster in a blind
asylum!--Fiddle-de-dee!"

And for the life of him Dominic Iglesias could not help laughing. It
was a new sensation. It occurred to him that he had not laughed for
years--hardly since the days of poor Pascal Pelletier and the little
garden in Holland Street, Kensington.

Poppy watched him, her eyes dancing. Her expression was very charming,
wholly unselfconscious, in a way maternal, just then. But Iglesias was
hardly sensible of it.

"That's good," she said. "Now you'll feel a lot better. I saw there was
something wrong with you from the start which needed breaking up. Now,
suppose you quit inadequate inventions and just tell the truth."

"Unfortunately, I have done so already," Mr. Iglesias said.

The lady paused a moment, her face full of inquiry and doubt.

"Honest injun?"

The term was not familiar to her hearer, but he judged it to be of the
nature of an asseveration, and assented.

"And do you mean to tell me that for all those years you went through
that drudgery every day?"

"I had my Sundays," Iglesias answered; "and, since their invention, my
bank holidays. Latterly I got three weeks' holiday in the summer,
formerly a fortnight."

Laughter had speedily evaporated; and, his harsher mood returning upon
him, Iglesias found a certain bitter enjoyment in setting forth the
extreme meagreness of his life before this light-hearted, unsubstantial
piece of womanhood. Again he classed her with the absurd and exquisite
little dogs as something superfluous, out of relation to sad and sober
realities.

"And yet you manage to look as you do! It beats me," Poppy declared. "I
tell you it knocks me out of time completely. For, if you'll excuse my
being personal, there is an air about you not usually generated by an
office stool--at least, in my experience. Where do you get it from? You
can't be English?"

"I am a Spaniard by extraction," Mr. Iglesias said, with a slight lift
of the head.

"There now, my dear man, don't you go and freeze up again. We were just
beginning to get along so nicely," Poppy put in quickly. "I am having a
capital good time, and you're not having an altogether bad one, are
you? But, tell me, how long ago were you extracted?"

"Very long ago. I was brought to England as a baby child."

"Oh! I didn't mean it that way," she returned. "I was not touching on
the unpardonable subject of age; not that it would matter much in your
case, for you are one of the lucky sort with whom age does not count. I
only meant are you an all-round foreigner?"

"Practically--my mother was partly Irish."

Dominic Iglesias looked away to those densely wooded slopes of Sheen
and Roehampton, against the purple-green gloom of which the home
signals of Barnes Station--hard white lines and angles tipped with
scarlet and black--stood out like the gigantic characters of some
strange alphabet. The air was sweet with the scent of new-mown hay. The
birds flirted up and down the hawthorn bushes and furze brakes. It was
all very charming; yet that same emptiness and distrust of the future
were very present to Iglesias. He forgot all about his companion, aware
only that those two unbidden guests, Old Age and Loneliness, stood
close beside him, claiming harbourage and entertainment.

"Ah! your mother," Poppy said slowly, with the slightest perceptible
inflection of mockery. "And she is alive still?"

Dominic Iglesias turned upon the poor Lady of the Windswept Dust
fiercely. She had come too close, come from her proper place--were not
her lips painted?--behind the footlights, and laid her hands upon that
which was holy. He was filled with unreasoning anger towards her--anger
towards himself, too, that he should have departed from his habitual
silence and reticence, submitted to be cross-questioned, and listened
to her feather-headed patter so long. He rose to his feet, for the
moment young, alert, full of a pride at once militant and protective.

"God forbid!" he said sternly. "Dear saint and martyr, she is safe from
all misreading at last. She is dead."

He stood a moment trying to choke down his anger before addressing her
again.

"It is time I should go," he said presently. "I think we have talked
enough."

But Poppy St. John presented a singular appearance. All the audacity
had departed from her. She sat huddled together, looking very small and
desolate; her eyes--the one noble feature of her face--swimming with
tears.

"No, no; don't go," she cried in tones of childlike entreaty. "Why
should you go? I like you, and I meant no harm. I've had the beastliest
day, and meeting you was a let-up. You did me good somehow. Cappadocia
was quite right in taking to you. I only wanted to know about you
because--well, you are different. Pshaw, don't tell me. I know what I
am talking about. You're straight. You're good right through."

The words were poured forth so rapidly that Iglesias hardly gathered
the exact purport of them. But one thing was clear to him--namely, that
this frivolous and meretricious being must be human after all, since
she could suffer.

"Don't go," she repeated. "I'm miserable. I'll explain. I'll tell you.
Just sit down again. It would be awfully kind. You see, I've been
expecting a friend. It was all-important I should see him to-day,
because there were things to be said. I've been awake half the night
screwing up my courage to saying them. And then he never turned up. I
got nerves waiting hour after hour--anybody would, waiting like that.
And I began to imagine every kind of pestilent disaster."

Poppy swallowed a little and dabbed her pocket-handkerchief against her
eyes.

"I shall be all right in a minute," she went on. "Do sit down, please.
You say you're nobody and have nothing to do, so you can't very well be
in a hurry. I am like this sometimes. It's awfully silly, but I can't
help it. Some rotten trifle sets me off, and then I can't stop myself.
I begin to go over all my worst luck.--Doesn't it occur to you there's
no earthly good in standing? It obliges me to talk loud, and it's
stupid to take all Barnes Common into our confidence. Thanks; that's
very nice of you.--Well, you see when I'm like his, the flood-gates of
memory are opened--which sounds pretty enough, but the prettiness is
strictly limited to the sound for most of us, at least as far as my
experience goes. The water is generally a bit dirty, and there are too
many dead things floating about in it; and, when they reel by, as the
current takes them, they turn and seem to struggle and come half alive."

She paused, hitching the embroidered dragons up about her shoulders.

"That is why I put on this scarf to-day. It was given me by a man who
was awfully fond of me before--I married. He bought it in the bazaar at
Peshawur, and sent it home to me just as he was starting on one of
those little frontier wars the accounts of which they keep out of the
English papers. And he was killed, poor dear old boy, in some footy
little skirmish. And this is all I've got left of him."

Poppy spread out the ends of the scarf for Mr. Iglesias' inspection.

"It must have cost a lot of money. The stones are real, you see; and
that gold thread is tremendously heavy. Just feel the weight. It was
all his people's doing. They didn't consider me smart enough for
him--or rather for themselves. They weren't anybody in particular, but
they were climbing. The society microbe had bitten them badly. So they
bundled him off to India. What another pair of shoes it would have been
for me if he'd lived! At least it seems so to me when I'm down on my
luck, as I am to-day. But after all, I don't know." Poppy began to be
impudent, to laugh again, though somewhat brokenly. "Sometimes I don't
believe one can count on any of you men till you are well dead, and
then you're not much use, you know, faithful or unfaithful."

She dabbed her eyes once more and looked at Mr. Iglesias, smiling
ruefully.

"Life's a pretty rotten business, at times, all round, isn't it?" she
said. "You must have found it so with that thirty years' drudgery in a
city bank. By the way, what bank was it?"

And Dominic Iglesias, touched by that very human story, attracted, in
spite of himself, by the frankness of his companion, a little shaken by
the novelty of the whole situation, answered mechanically:

"The bank? Oh, yes! Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking of Threadneedle
Street."

For a moment Poppy sat silent, her mouth round as an O. Then she drew
her open hand down sharply behind poor Willie Onions, and shot the
small dog, in a sitting position, off the bench on to the rough grass.
His fringed legs stuck out stiff as sticks, while his enormous lappets
of ears flew up and back, giving him the most wildly demented
appearance during this brief inglorious flight through space.

"Catch birds!" she cried, "catch birds, I tell you! Think of your
figure. My good child, take exercise or you'll be as round as a tub!"

She clapped her hands encouragingly, but the little animal,
half-scared, half-offended, came closer, fawning upon her trailing
string-coloured skirts. Poppy leaned down, resting her elbows upon her
knees, and napped at the unhappy Onions with her handkerchief.

"Go away, you silly billy. Have a little decent pride, can't you? Don't
bestow attentions when they're unwelcome." Then she addressed herself
to Mr. Iglesias, but without looking up. "I beg your pardon, all this
must seem rather abrupt. But sometimes one's duty to one's family takes
one on the jump, as you may say; and one repairs neglect right away
also on the jump. But--but--there's one thing I should like to
know--when I told you my name just now--Poppy St. John, Mrs. St.
John--you remember?"

"I remember," he said.

"Well, didn't it convey--didn't it mean anything special to you?"

"I am afraid not," Iglesias answered. "You must pardon my ignorance,
since I have lived very much out of the world. I know nothing of
society."

"So much the better. The world is a vastly overrated place, and society
is about the biggest fraud going." She left off teasing the little dog,
sat bolt upright, and looked full at Dominic Iglesias, her eyes
serious, redeeming all the insignificance of her features and those
little doubtful details of the general effect of her. "Don't make any
mistake about either of them," she said. "Let the world and society
alone as you value your peace of mind and independence. They're dead
sea fruit to all outsiders such as--well--you and me. I hate them; only
they've got me, and will have me in some form or other till the end, I
suppose. But you are different, and I warn you"--Poppy's voice took on
an odd inflection of mingled bitterness and tenderness--"they are not a
bit adapted for a beautiful, innocent, uncrowned king like you."

She got up as she spoke, gathering her trailing skirts about her, and
called sharply to the little dogs.

"The dew is rising," she said, "and Cappadocia's a regular cry-baby if
she gets her feet wet. I must take her home. There's my card. You see
the address? You can come when you like, only let me know the day
beforehand, because I should be sorry to have people with me or to be
out. Cappadocia 'll want you. So shall I. You do me good. I'll play
quite fair, I promise you. Good-night."

The sun stood in a triumph of crimson and gold, which passed into the
fine blue of a belt of earth mist. Eastward the sky blushed, too, but
with brazen blushes, tarnished by the breath of the great city--the
pure blue of the earth mist exchanged for the murk of coal smoke and
the thousand and one exhalations of steaming streets, public-houses and
restaurants. Poppy St. John walked slowly along the footpath, her
figure dyed by the effulgence of the skies to the crimson and gold of
her name. About her shoulders the embroidered dragons glittered as she
moved, while the two tiny spaniels trotted humbly at her heels. For a
brief space she showed absolutely resplendent. Then suddenly an
interposing terrace of smart much-be-balconied and beflowered little
houses shut off the sunset; and in their rather vulgar shadow Dominic
Iglesias, watching, beheld her transformed into the unsubstantial, in a
way fictitious, Lady of the Windswept Dust and of the footlights once
again.




CHAPTER VI


That weekly ceremony--well known to Trimmer's Green--Mrs. Lovegrove's
afternoon at-home, was in progress. She wore her black satin gown, and
her white Maltese lace fichu, just to give it a touch of summer
lightness. It must be added that she was warm and uncomfortable, having
conscientiously superintended preparations in respect of commissariat
in the overheated atmosphere of the basement; hurried upstairs--the
imagined tinkle of the front-door bell perpetually in her ears--to pull
her stays in at the waist and project herself into the aforementioned
official garments--a very trying process on a June day to a person of
ample contours and what may be described as the fluidic temperament.
Later she had cooled off, or tried so to cool--for on such occasions
there is invariably some window-blind, ornament, or piece of furniture
actively in need of straightening--sitting in her somewhat fog-stained
and sun-faded drawing-room during that evil period of waiting in which
the intending hostess first suffers acute mortification because she is
"quite sure nobody will come," and then gets hot all over from the
equally agitating certainty that everybody she has ever known will
appear simultaneously, and that there will be neither cakes nor
conversation enough to go round.

But this disquieting and oft-repeated preface to the afternoon's
festivity was now happily over. And the good lady, oblivious of
discomfort and a slightly disorganised complexion, sat purring with
satisfaction upon her best Chesterfield sofa, Dr. Giles Nevington
beside her. "Pleasure, not business, to-day, Mrs. Lovegrove. For once I
am going to make no demands on my faithful and able coadjutor. This
call is a purely friendly one--no subscription lists of any sort or
description in my pocket," the clergyman had said in his resonant bass
when clasping her hand.--A large, dark, clean-shaven man of forty, a
studied effect of geniality and benevolence about him, slightly
tempered, perhaps, by cold and watchful blue-grey eyes, fixed--so said
his detractors--with unswerving determination upon the shovel-hat,
apron, and gaiters of the Anglican episcopate.

Rhoda Lovegrove, however, was very far from being among the detractors.
She relished this gracious speech enormously. She also approved the
attitude of her husband at this juncture; since, with praiseworthy
tact, he engaged the attention of her two other guests, a Mrs. Ballard
and her daughter. These ladies were rich, the younger had pretensions
both to beauty and fashion; but their present was, alas! stained by
Noncomformity, their past contaminated by association with retail
trade. At the entrance of the vicar, remembering these sad defects,
George Lovegrove rose to the occasion. Gently, but firmly, he pranced
round them heading them towards the doorway.

"Who are those?" Dr. Nevington inquired, with some interest. "Not
parishioners, I fancy."

"Not in any true sense," Mrs. Lovegrove replied. "Dissenters, and I am
sorry to say rather spiteful against the Church."

The clergyman leaned back and crossed his legs comfortably.

"Ah! well, poor human nature! A touch of jealousy perhaps," he remarked.

Mrs. Lovegrove beamed.

"Very likely--still I should be just as well pleased not to continue
their acquaintance. I don't like to hear things that are disrespectful.
I should have ceased to call, but relatives of theirs are old friends
of Mr. Lovegrove's mother's family."

"Quite so, quite so," the other returned. Even when silent the sound of
him seemed to encompass him, as the roll of a drum seems to salute you
when merely beholding that instrument. His speech filled all the room,
flowing forth into every corner, sweeping upward in waves to the very
cornice. The feminine members of his congregation found this most
beautiful; having, indeed, been known to declare that did he preach in
Chinese, they would still receive edification and spiritual
benefit.--"Quite so," he repeated, "the breaking of old family ties is
certainly to be avoided. And then, moreover, we should always guard
against any appearance of harshness or illiberality in dealing with
Christians from whom we have reason to differ in minor questions of
doctrine or practice. We must never forget that the Nonconformists,
though they went out from us, do remain the brethren of all
right-minded Churchmen in a very special sense, since they have the
great lessons of the Reformation at heart. I could wish that certain
parties within the Church were animated by the same manly and
intelligent intolerance of idolatry and superstition as the majority of
the dissenters whom I meet. Personally I should welcome greater freedom
of intercourse, and a frequent interchange of pulpits."

"We know who'd be the gainers," Mrs. Lovegrove put in gracefully.

"Ah! well, I am prepared to believe that the gain might not be
exclusively on one side."

Mrs. Lovegrove folded her fat hands, purring almost audibly. He seemed
to her so very wise and good.

"That's so like you, Dr. Nevington," she said. "As I always tell Mr.
Lovegrove, we have a great responsibility in having you for our pastor
and friend. You are a standing rebuke to many of us, being so
wide-minded yourself."

"Hardly that, hardly that," he answered with becoming modesty. "In my
humble way I do strive towards unity, that is all. Even towards the
Church of Rome I would extend a friendly and helpful hand. We cannot,
of course, go to her, yet she should never be discouraged from coming
to us.--But here is your good husband back again--ceased to be unevenly
yoked with the unbeliever, eh, Lovegrove?"

"I was glad you took them away, Georgie," Mrs. Lovegrove put in. "Still
I'm sorry for you, for the vicar's been talking so nobly. You've missed
such a lot."

"Ah, hardly that. I have merely been giving your dear good wife a
little lecture on Christian charity. How is Mrs. Nevington? Thank you,
wonderfull well, earnest and energetic as ever. I do not know how I
could meet the demands of this large parish without her."

"A true helpmeet," purred Mrs. Lovegrove.

"Truly so--and specially in all questions of organisation. She is
altogether my superior in administrative capacity. Indeed, it is an
understood thing between us that I relieve her of what may be called
the bad third of her marriage vow. If she will love and honour, I
assure her I am ready to obey. A capital working rule for husbands--eh,
Lovegrove?--always supposing they have found the right woman, as you
and I have."

In the midst of this delicious badinage the hostess had to rise to
receive further guests. Conflicting emotions struggled within her ample
bosom--namely, regret at leaving that thrice happy sofa, and
satisfaction that others should behold the glory thereon so visibly
enthroned.

"How d'ye do, Mrs. Porcher? How d'ye do, Miss Hart?" she said. "Very
kind of you to come and call. Only a few friends as yet, but perhaps
that's just as pleasant this warm afternoon. Dr. Nevington, as you see,
and at his very best"--she lowered her voice discreetly. "So at home,
so full of great thoughts, and yet so comical--quite a privilege for
all to hear him talk."

Encouraged by recent commendation, George Lovegrove again rose with
praiseworthy tact to the occasion. It may be stated in passing that, in
person, he was below the middle height, a thick oblong man, his figure,
indeed, not unsuggestive of a large carapace, from the four corners of
which sprouted short arms and legs. His face was round, fresh-coloured,
and clean to the point of polish. His yellowish grey hair, well
flattened and shining, grew far back on his forehead. And this,
combined with small blue eyes, clear as a child's, a slight inward
squint to them, produced an effect of permanent and innocent surprise
not devoid of pathos. In character he was guileless and humble-minded.
The spectacle of cruelty or injustice would, however, rouse him to the
belligerent attitude of the proverbial _brebis enragé_. He believed
himself to be very happy--an added touch of pathos perhaps--and was
pained and surprised if it was brought home to him that others found
life a less comfortable and kindly invention than he himself did. Hence
reports of suicides worried him sadly. He would always have returned a
verdict of temporary insanity, this being to him the only explanation
conceivable of a voluntary exit from our so excellent present form of
existence. Yet George Lovegrove was not without his little secret
sorrow--who indeed is? A deep-seated regret for nonexistent small
Lovegroves possessed him, the instinct of paternity being strong in
him. He loved children, and, when alone, often lingered beside
perambulators in Kensington Gardens fondly observing their contents.
Yet not for ten thousand pounds sterling would he have admitted this
weakness, lest in doing so he should hurt "the wife's feelings." And it
was in obedience to consideration for the said feelings that he now
threw himself gallantly into the breach. For, after acting as
appreciative chorus to an interlude of sonorous trifling on the part of
the clergyman with the newcomers, he adroitly--under promise of showing
her recent additions to his collection of picture postcards--detached
Miss Eliza Hart from the neighbourhood of the sofa and conveyed her to
the farther side of the room. Mrs. Porcher, neat, pensive, and
sentimental, could be trusted to play the part of attentive listener;
but the great Eliza, as he knew by experience, was liable to develop
dangerous energy, to get a little above herself, shake her leonine mane
of upstanding sandy hair, and become altogether too talkative, not to
say loud, for such distinguished company. Personally he had a soft spot
in his heart for Eliza. But, if she put herself forward, he feared for
"the wife's feelings," therefore did he skilfully detach her.

And he had reason to congratulate himself on this manoeuvre, for Eliza
undoubtedly was in a frolicsome humour.

"Yes," she remarked, contemplating the portrait of a celebrated
actress. "That is very taking and stylish; and it is just what I should
like to have done with my Peachie." This graceful _sobriquet_ was
generally understood to bear testimony to the excellence of Mrs.
Porcher's complexion. "Now, if we wanted a gentleman guest or two more
at any time, a picture postcard of her like this, just slightly tinted,
in answer to inquiries?"

Miss Hart, her head on one side, looked playfully at Mr. Lovegrove.

"What about a subsequent summons for over-crowding?" he chuckled. The
whole breadth of the room, well understood, was between him and the
wife's feelings, not to mention the august presence beside her upon the
sofa.

"No doubt that has to be thought of!" Eliza nodded sagely. "But is she
not looking sweeter than ever to-day? Do not pretend you have not
noticed it, Mr. Lovegrove. There's no deceiving me! I know you."

Like all mild and moral men, Lovegrove flushed with delight at any
suggestion that he was a gay dog, a dashing blade. His good, honest
face took on a higher polish than ever.

"You are too clever by half, Miss Hart."

"Well, somebody has to keep their wits about them, with such a love as
Peachie to care for. I dressed her myself to-day. 'The pearl-grey gown
if you like,' I said, 'but not a scrap of black with it. Just a touch
of colour at the throat, please.' 'No, dear Liz,' she said, 'it would
call for remark, since I have never done so since I lost Major
Porcher.' But there, Mr. Lovegrove, I insisted. For why she should go
on wearing complimentary mourning all her life for a wretch that nearly
broke her heart and ruined her, passes me. 'Forget the serpent,' I
said, 'and put on a little turquoise tulle pompom.' Now just look at
her!"

"Rather dangerous for some people, is it not?" Lovegrove inquired quite
slyly.

"Hard on our gentlemen, you mean? Well, perhaps it is. But then they
always have the sight of me to put up with.--No compliments, thank you.
I have my eyesight and my toilet-glass, and they have let me know I was
no Venus ever since I can remember. It would not do to depress our
gentlemen too much. They might leave, and then wherever would Cedar
Lodge be?"

Miss Hart became suddenly serious and confidential. "And that reminds
me," she went on. "I wanted to have a private word with you to-day
about a certain gentleman."

"Who may be?" the good George inquired.

"You can guess, can't you? Your own candidate."

"Mr. Iglesias?"

The lady nodded.

"Peachie must be spared anxiety, therefore I speak, Mr. Lovegrove.
Something is going on, and she is getting worried. You cannot approach
the person to whom we are alluding as you can either of our others.
Rather stand-offish, even now after nearly eight years that he has been
with us. Between you and me and the bedpost, Mr. Lovegrove, I am just a
wee bit nervous of that person. So if you could hint, quite in
confidence, what his plans may be for the future it would' be really
friendly."

"Dear me, dear me! Plans? I do not quite follow you, Miss Hart. Nothing
wrong with him, I trust?"

"That is just what we cannot find out. No spying, of course, Mr.
Lovegrove. Neither Peachie nor I would descend to such meanness. Our
gentlemen have perfect liberty. We would scorn to put questions. But it
is close on a week now since the person we are alluding to has been to
the City."

"Bless me! You surprise me. He cannot have left Barking Brothers &
Barking?"

The great Eliza shook her leonine mane.

"I believe that is just exactly what he has done."

"You do surprise me. I can hardly credit it. Nearly a week, and he as
punctual and regular as clockwork! I must run over this evening and
catch him. Something must be wrong. And yet why has he not been here?
Dear me. Miss Hart, you----"

But the end of the sentence was lost in the bass notes issuing from the
presence upon the sofa.

"Truly, the prosperity of the nation," Dr. Nevington was saying, "of
this dear old England of ours that we so love, is wholly bound up with
the prosperity of her national Church. I use the word prosperity in a
plain, manly, straightforward sense. Personally I should rejoice to see
the bonds of Church and State drawn closer. It could not fail to make
for the welfare of both. Then, among other benefits, we should see the
poverty of many members of my cloth, which is now a crying scandal--"

"You do hear very sad tales from the country districts, certainly,"
sighed Mrs. Lovegrove.

"The state of affairs is more than sad, it is iniquitous. And therefore
the Church must assert herself. The individual minister must assert
himself, and claim a higher scale of remuneration. Help yourself, show
push and principle, cultivate practical aims--that is what I preach to
young men reading for Holy Orders. We have no place in these days for
visionaries and dreamers. We want men who march with the times, who are
interested in politics, and can make themselves felt."

So did the great voice roll on and outward. Very beautiful to the
listeners in sound--though, in sense, it may be questioned whether it
conveyed very definite ideas to them--but highly embarrassing to the
house-parlourmaid, whose feminine tones quite failed to make headway
against the volume of it. With the consequence that Dominic Iglesias
was left standing in the shadow of the doorway unheeded.

He was aware, and that not without surprise, how much these few days of
freedom and leisure had quickened his perceptions. His mental attitude
had changed. His demand had ceased to be moderate. Hence he suffered a
hundred offences to taste and sensibility hitherto unknown, or at least
unregistered. He knew when a woman was plain, when a conversation was
vapid or vulgar, a manner pretentious, a speech lacking in sincerity.
Consciously he stood aside, no longer out of humility or indifference,
but critically observant, challenging things however familiar, and
passing judgment upon them. For example, the unlovely character of Mrs.
Lovegrove's drawing-room engrossed his attention--the dirty-browns and
tentative watery blues of it, the multiplicity of flimsy, worthless,
little ornaments revealing a most lamentable absence of artistic
perception. In that fine booming clerical voice he detected a kindred
absence of delicate perception, a showiness born of very inadequate
conception of relative values. Indeed, the voice and the sentiments
given forth by it, in as far as he caught the drift of them, raised a
definite spirit of antagonism in him. The voice seemed to trample.
Dominic Iglesias was taken with an inclination--very novel in him--to
trample, too. He crossed the room, an added touch of gravity and
dignity in his aspect and manner.

The clergyman gazed at him with some curiosity, while Mrs. Lovegrove
surged up off the sofa.

"Mr. Iglesias! Well, of all people! Whoever would have expected to see
you at this early hour of the day?"

"Talk of a certain gentleman and that gentleman appears," Miss Eliza
Hart whispered. Then wagging her finger at her host, "Now don't you
forget that little question of mine. Find out his intentions, just, as
you may say, under the rose. But there's Peachie signalling to go."

In the ensuing interval of farewells, which were slightly protracted
owing to friskiness on the part of the fair Eliza, Iglesias found
himself standing beside the clergyman. The latter still regarded him
with curiosity. But, whatever his faults, not his worst enemy could
accuse Dr. Nevington of being a respecter of persons unless he was well
assured beforehand whom such persons might be. He therefore turned to
Iglesias with the easy air of patronage not uncommon to his cloth, as
one who should say: "My good sir, don't be afraid. I am a man of the
world as well as a Christian. I will handle you gently. I won't hurt
you."

"I think I caught a foreign name," he remarked. "You are paying a visit
to London? I hope our capital makes an agreeable impression upon you."

"The visit has been of such long duration," Iglesias answered, "that
impressions have, I am afraid, become slightly blurred by usage."

"Ah! indeed--no doubt that happens in some measure to all of us. I am
to understand that you are a resident?"

Iglesias assented.

"In this district?"

Again he assented.

"Indeed. Really, I wish I had known it sooner. It always gives me
pleasure to meet persons of another nationality than my own.
Intercourse with them makes for liberality of view. It often dispels
anti-English prejudice. I am always glad to be helpful to strangers."

"You are very kind," Iglesias said with gravity.

"Not at all--not at all. I hold very practical views not only regarding
the duties of the Englishman to the alien, but of the pastor towards
his flock. But I find it almost impossible, I regret to say, to become
personally acquainted with all my parishioners. My curates are capital
young fellows--earnest, active, go-ahead. But in a large area such as
this there is always a shifting population with which the clergy,
however energetic, find it difficult to keep in touch. We are obliged
to discriminate between dwellers and sojourners. As soon as any person
is proved to be a _bona fide_ dweller my curates pass his or her name
on to me, and either I or my wife call in due course."

Dominic Iglesias permitted himself to smile.

"An excellent system, no doubt," he remarked.

"I find it works very well on the whole. But no system is infallible.
There must be occasional oversights, and you have been the victim of
one. I mention this to disabuse your mind of the idea of any
intentional neglect. Well, Mrs. Lovegrove, and so our good friends Mrs.
Porcher and Miss Hart have gone--estimable women both of them in their
own line. I ought to be running away, too, and I have just been having
a word with your other guest here, Mr.----"

"Iglesias," Dominic put in coldly. He was in a state of pretty high
displeasure. To hear his name mispronounced might, he felt, precipitate
a catastrophe.

"Iglesias?--ah! yes, thank you--I have been explaining to Mr. Iglesias
our system of parochial visiting and quoting our well-known joke about
the dwellers and sojourners. You remember it? He has, I regret to find,
been counted among the latter, while he has qualified as one of the
former. The mistake must be remedied. Well, good-by to you, Mrs.
Lovegrove; I shall see your good husband on my way downstairs. Good-day
to you, Mr. Iglesias. I shall hope to meet you again."

And with that he, and the encompassing sound of him, moved towards the
door. Mrs. Lovegrove subsided upon the sofa. The supreme glory had
departed, yet an afterglow from the effulgence of it remained in her
beaming face as she looked up at Mr. Iglesias.

"It was a good fairy that brought you in so early to-day," she said.
"Really, I am pleased you should have had the chance to meet Dr.
Nevington. And I could see he was quite taken with you, by the way he
began to talk before I had the chance to introduce you. But that's the
vicar all over! He never is one to stand upon ceremony."

"So I can believe," Dominic said.

"You saw it? Ah, part of his thoughtfulness, wanting to put everybody
at their ease. And I'm sure if there's one thing more disheartening
than another, it is to have two of your friends standing up side by
side, as stiff as a couple of pokers, without so much as a word. I know
I am too ready to enter into conversation with strangers; but if there
is a thing I cannot bear, it's any appearance of coolness."

She passed her handkerchief round her forehead and across her lips. She
was marshalling her energies for a daring effort.

"Very warm, is it not?" she remarked, perhaps superfluously. Then she
came to the point. "I know you are not very much of a churchgoer, Mr.
Iglesias."

"I am afraid not"--he paused a moment. "You see, I was born and brought
up in another faith."

"Yes--so George has told me. But I am sure none of us would ever be so
illiberal as to throw that up against you. The vicar has been talking
so beautifully about Christian charity; and we all know it was a thing
you could not help. It was your misfortune, anybody would understand
that, not your fault. Too, it's all over long ago and forgotten."

Dominic looked rather hard at her; but it was clear her words were
innocent of any intention of offence.

"I suppose it is," he said sadly, Old Age and Loneliness laying their
hands upon him, for some reason, very sensibly once again.

"Not that that's anything to be otherwise than thankful for," she
added, with a slightly misplaced effort at consolation. "Of course
anyone must feel how providential it is to be saved from all those
terrible false doctrines and practices--not that I know anything about
them. There's so much, don't you think, it is so much better not to
know anything about. Then one feels more at liberty to speak."

Mr. Iglesias smiled.

"I am not sure that the matter had occurred from exactly that point of
view before."

"Really now, and a clever person like you!" Mrs. Lovegrove passed her
handkerchief across her forehead again. "George has a wonderful opinion
of your cleverness, you know. And that is why I have always wished you
and the vicar could be brought together. I have--yes, I own to it--I
have been afraid sometimes you were a little unsettled about religion,
and that it might unsettle Georgie, too. But I knew if you once met the
vicar that would all be set right. As I often say to George, let
anybody just _see_ Dr. Nevington and then they will begin to have an
inkling of all they miss in not hearing him in the pulpit."

But here, perhaps fortunately, the master of the house trotted back.
He, too, beamed. He was filled with innocent rejoicing. Had he not
successfully protected the wife's feelings, and was not Iglesias--who
remained to him a wonderful being, stirring whatever element of romance
might be resident in his guileless nature--present in person?

"Why, what's the meaning of this, Dominic?" he chuckled. "You've turned
over a new leaf, gadding round to at-home days! Where's Threadneedle
Street? What's come over you?"

"Threadneedle Street and I have agreed to part company."

"What, for good? Never?" this from both husband and wife.

"Yes, for good," Iglesias said.

Mr. Lovegrove ceased to beam. He became anxious again, and consequently
solemn.

"Well, you do surprise me," he said. "Nothing gone wrong, I trust? Not
any unpleasantness happened?"

"None," Iglesias answered. In breaking the news to these kindly but
rudimentary souls he had determined to treat it very lightly. "I have
come to the conclusion that I have worked long enough. It is a mistake
to risk dying in harness. You retired, Lovegrove, three years ago. I am
going to look about me a little and see what the rest of the world is
doing."

"You'll miss the bank, and feel a little strange at first. Georgie did,
though he had his home to interest him," Mrs. Lovegrove remarked.

"Undoubtedly George was more fortunate than I am," Iglesias replied, in
his most courtly manner.

"Not but that all that could be easily remedied," she added, with a
touch of archness. Then Mr. Iglesias thought it time to depart. In the
hall his host held him, literally by the buttonhole, looking up with
squinting blue eyes into his face.

"It's all rather sudden, Dominic," he said. "I do not want to intrude
upon your confidence; but if there is anything behind, anything in
which I can help?"

Mr. Iglesias shook his head.

"Nothing, my good old friend," he said.

"The wife's right, you know. You'll miss the bank, the regular hours,
and the occupation. She's quite right. I did at first."

"I know. But already I have pretty well got through that phase, I
think."

"Ah, you have a bigger mind than mine. You can rise to a wider view.
Change affects a commonplace man like myself most. I was dreadfully
lost at first--more than the wife knew. Females are very sensitive, and
it would have hurt her to know all I felt. If the Almighty is good
enough to give a man a faithful woman to look after him, he can't be
too scrupulous in sparing her pain--at least, so I think." Suddenly his
tone changed. "But you are not going to leave us, Dominic?--you are not
going to move, I do hope?"

He was mindful of his promise to Eliza Hart, but he was also mindful of
himself. It had occurred to him for how very much in the interest and
pleasure of his life Dominic Iglesias really stood.

"Why, should you regret my going? Should you miss me?" the other asked,
struck by his tone.

"Miss you," he said, "and after a friendship covering forty years! I
know you are my superior in every way. I know I am not on your level.
All the advantage is on my side in our friendship, always has been. But
that is just where it is. Why, you know, Dominic--next to the wife of
course--all along you have been the best thing I had."

Then it came to Iglesias, looking down at him, that among the many
millions of his fellow-mortals, this whimsical childlike being stood
nearest to him in sympathy and in love. The thought moved him
strangely, at once deepening his sense of isolation and lessening the
load of it.

"In that case I will not move. I will stay here, at Trimmer's Green,"
he said.

When Mr. Lovegrove reentered the sun-faded drawing-room his wife
greeted him in these words:

"Well, I have been thinking it all over, Georgie, and we shall only be
doing our duty by Mr. Iglesias if we send for your cousin Serena. For
my part, I don't trust Mrs. Porcher. Did you see that fly-away blue
bow? Those who seem so soft are often the deepest. And widows have all
sorts of little cunning ways with them." She rose from the thrice happy
sofa. "I was gratified to have Dr. Nevington and Mr. Iglesias meet. But
we certainly will have to send for Serena," she said.




CHAPTER VII


Mr. Iglesias crossed Trimmer's Green in the dusty sunshine. He had
engaged to stay; and, indeed, he asked himself what person, what
objects or interests there were to take him else-whither? Nevertheless,
the promise seemed, somehow, a limiting of possibility and of hope. It
was destiny. London, very evidently, having got him, did not mean to
let him go. And London was not attractive this evening, but blouzy and
jaded from the heat. He passed on into the great thoroughfare and
turned eastward, absorbed in thought. Children cried. A pungent scent
of over-ripe fruit came from barrows in the roadway and open doors of
green-grocers' shops. Tempers appeared to be on edge. Workmen, pouring
out from a big block of flats under construction on the left, jostled
him in passing, not in insolence, but simply in inattention. Their
language was starred with sanguinary adjectives. The noise of the
traffic was loud. Iglesias turned up one of the side streets leading on
to Campden Hill. It was quieter here and the air was a trifle purer.
Halfway up the hill he hesitated. There was a shrine to be visited in
these regions--in it stood an altar of the dead. And above that altar,
in Iglesias' imagination, hung the picture of a woman, beautiful, and,
to him, infinitely sad.

He turned eastward again and made his way into Holland Street. He
rarely had the courage to go back there. He had never reentered the
house. But this evening he was taken by the desire to look on it all
once again. For he was still pursued by the disquieting question as to
whether he had shirked the possibilities of his life, or had sacrificed
them to a higher duty than any duty of personal development. If the
latter, however barren of active happiness both past and present, he
would be in his own eyes justified, and desolation would cease to have
in it any flavour of self-contempt. Perhaps this dwelling-place of his
childhood, youth, and what should have been the best of his manhood,
might help to answer the question and set his doubts at rest.

A board--"To Let"--was up on the narrow iron balcony of the
dining-room. Iglesias rang, and after brief parley with the
caretaker--a neat bald-headed little old man, in carpet slippers and a
well-brushed once-smart brown check suit, altogether too capacious for
his attenuated person--was admitted.

"The place is quite empty save for my bits of sticks in the basement,
sir," he said. "You are at liberty to go where you please. I am
afflicted with the asthma and am glad to avoid mounting the stairs." He
ended up with a husky little cough. So Iglesias passed through the
vacant house unattended.

He received a pathetic yet agitating impression. The rooms were even
smaller than he had supposed. They were gloomy, too, from the worn
paint of the high wainscots and discoloration of the low ceilings. All
the windows were shut and the atmosphere was close and faint. The
corners were thick with crouching shadows, merely awaiting the cover of
night, as it seemed to Iglesias, to take definite shape, stand upright,
and come forth to possess and people all the house. Even now it
belonged so sensibly to them that his own reverent footsteps sounded to
him harshly intrusive upon the bare, uneven floors. At intervals,
downstairs in the basement, he could hear the little old caretaker's
husky cough.

And it was strange to him to consider what those crouching shadows
might represent. Not the ghosts of human beings--in such he had small
belief--but an aftermath of human emotions, purposes, and passions,
formulated or endured in this apparently so innocent place. To his
knowledge the origins of revolution had seethed here. The walls had
listened to details of political intrigue, of projected assassination,
to vehement declarations of undying hate. Of the men who had plotted
and dreamed here, uplifted in spirit by the magic of terrible ideas,
none were left. One by one they had gone out into the silence to meet
death, swift-handed or heartlessly lingering, as the case might be. And
what had they actually accomplished? he asked himself. Had their death,
often as must be surmised of a sufficiently hideous sort, really
advanced the cause of humanity and helped on the birth of that Golden
Age, in which Justice shall reign alongside Peace? Or had these men
merely wasted themselves, adding to the sum total of human confusion
and wrong; and wasted the hearts and happiness of those allied to them
by ties of friendship and of blood, leaving the second generation to
repair, in so far as it might, the ruin which their violence had
worked? Dominic Iglesias could not say. But this at least, though it
savoured of reproach, he could not disguise from himself--namely, that
out of the intemperate heat and fierceness of these men's thought and
action had come, as a necessary consequence, the narrow opportunities
and cold isolation of his own.

"As physically, so morally, spiritually, socially," he said to himself,
"the younger generation pays the debts contracted by the generation
immediately preceding it. Justice, indeed, reigns already, always has
done so--. justice of a rather tremendous sort. But peace?--Peace is
still very much to seek, both for the individual and the race."

Iglesias visited his mother's bed-chamber. He visited his former
nursery. Then he visited the drawing-room, the heart of this very
pathetic shrine where the altar of his dead was, almost visibly set up.
To this room, during the many years of his mother's mental illness, he
had come back daily after work; and had ministered to her, suiting his
speech to her passing humour, trying to distract her brooding
melancholy, and to soothe and amuse her as though she was an ailing
child. Thank God, there was nothing ugly to remember regarding her. She
had never been harsh or unlovely in her ways. Still, the strain of
constant intercourse with her had been very great--how great Iglesias
had hardly realised until now, as he stood in the centre of the room
reconstructing its former appearance in thought and replacing its
familiar furnishings.

There to the left of the further window, overlooking the garden, she
had always sat, so that the light might fall upon her needlework--very
fine Irish lace, in the making of which nearly all her waking hours
were spent. She had learned the beautiful art as a young girl in her
convent school; and her skill in it was great. In those sad later years
when her mind was clouded the intricate designs and endless variety of
delicate and ingenious stitches had come to have symbolic meanings for
her full of mystic significance. In them she poured forth her soul, as
another might pour it forth in music, finding there an imaginative
language far surpassing, in its subtlety of suggestion, articulate
speech. There were deserts of net, of spider's web fineness, to be
laboriously traversed; hills of difficulty to be climbed, whence far
horizons disclosed themselves; dainty flower-gardens, crossed by open
paths, and hedged about with curves, sinuous and full of pretty
impediments. And there were, to her, vaguely agitating and even fearful
things in this lacework also--confusions of outline, broken purposes,
multiplicity of opposing intentions, struggle of good and evil powers
in the intricacies of some rich arabesque; or monotonous repetitions of
design which distressed her as with the terrors of imprisonment and of
unescapable fate. She was filled with feverish anxiety until such
portions of her self-imposed task were completed. Then she would be
very glad. And Iglesias, glancing up silently from the pages of his
newspaper or book, would see the sorrow pass out of her face as she
leaned back in her chair and softly laughed. And he would perceive
that, in the achievement of those countless but carefully ordered
stitches, she had also achieved some mysterious victory of the spirit
which, for a time at least, would give her freedom of soul and content.
As a boy he had been rather jealous of her lacemaking, declaring that
it was dearer to her than he himself was. But as he grew more
experienced, more chastened, and, it must be added, more sad, he had
come to understand that it veritably was as speech to her--though
speech which he could but rarely interpret--expressing all that she
could not, or dared not, otherwise express, all the poetry of her
sweet, broken nature, its denied aspirations in religion, its tortured
memories of danger and of love.

Now, standing in the centre of the empty room, and looking at the place
beside the window where she habitually sat, Iglesias seemed to see once
more, as he had so often seen in the past, her fine-drawn profile and
softly waved upturned hair, her head and shoulders draped in a black
mantilla, the lines of which followed those of her figure as she bent
over her work. He could see the long delicate white hands moving
rhythmically, with the assurance of perfected skill, over the web in
its varying degrees of whiteness from the filmy transparency of the net
foundation to the opacity of the closely wrought pattern. Those hands,
in their ceaseless and exquisite industry, had troubled his imagination
at times. For too often it had seemed as though they alone were really
alive, intelligent, sentient, the rest of the woman dead. The
impression was so vivid even yet--though Iglesias knew it to be
subjective only, projected by the vividness of remembrance--that
instinctively he crossed the room, laid his left hand upon the moulding
of the high wainscot, leaned over the vacant space which appeared to
hold her image, and spoke gently to her, so that the moving hands might
find rest for a moment, while she recognised and greeted him, looking
up.

There had always been a pause before the words of greeting came, while
her consciousness travelled back, hesitatingly, to the actual and
material world around her from the world of emotion and phantasy in
which her spirit lived. There was a pause now, a prolonged silence,
broken at last by the husky cough of the little old caretaker
downstairs. The vacant space remained vacant. Nevertheless Dominic
Iglesias received both recognition and greeting, and from these derived
inward assurance that all was well--that he was justified of his past
action, that he had not shirked the possibilities of his life, but
sacrificed them to a higher duty than any individual and private one.
The present might be empty of purpose and pleasure, the future lacking
in promise and in hope; yet to him one perfect thing had been
granted--namely, a human relationship of unsullied beauty,
notwithstanding all its sadness, from first to last.

"And in the strength of that meat, one should surely be able to go many
days!" he said, as he straightened himself up. "Thank God, I never
failed her. How far she realised it or not, is but a small matter. I am
obscure, perhaps as things now stand wholly superfluous, still I have,
at all events, never grasped personal advantage at the expense of a
fellow-creature's heart."

Yet, even so, the longing for sympathy and companionship oppressed him
as never before. The sight of this place had stirred his affections and
his spiritual sense. His soul cried out for some language in which to
express itself--even though it were a language of symbol only, such as
his mother had found in her lacemaking. How barren and vapid a thing
was the exterior life, as all those whom he knew understood and lived
it--his co-lodgers, his fellow-clerks, the good Lovegroves, his late
employer, Sir Abel Barking, even, as he divined, that sonorous
Protestant clergyman whom he had met this afternoon--as against the
interior life, suggestion of which this vacant shadow-haunted house of
innumerable memories presented to his mind! Was there any method by
which the interior and exterior life could be brought into sane and
fruitful relation, so that the former might sensibly permeate and
dignify the latter?

The comfortable inward conviction, just vouchsafed him, that he was
justified of his own past action, merely emphasised his consciousness
that he was still very much adrift, with no definite port to steer for.
He had, perhaps unwisely, promised George Lovegrove that he would stay
on at Trimmer's Green, but what, after all, did that amount to? Even
the exterior life was second-hand enough there; the interior life, as
he judged, practically non-existent. And so his staying must be
ennobled by some purpose beyond that of stepping across to smoke an
after-dinner pipe with the good, affectionate Lovegrove man, or
attending his estimable wife's "at homes." During the last ten days Mr.
Iglesias had striven, with rare, pathetic diligence, to cultivate
amusement. True, the oak palings had shut him out from Ranelagh; but,
with that and a few other exceptions, amusement, as practised in great
cities, is merely a matter of cash. Therefore he had dined at smart
restaurants, had sampled theatres and music halls, had sat in the Park
and watched the world and--in their more decent manifestations--the
flesh and the devil drive by. He had to admit that unfortunately all
this left him cold, had bored rather than entertained him. He had not
felt out of place socially. His natural dignity and detachment of mind
were alike too strong for that; but he had arrived at the conclusion
that you must have learned the rudiments of the art of amusement in
early youth if you are to practise it with satisfaction to yourself in
middle-age. And he very certainly had not learned the rudiments--not,
anyhow, according to the English fashion. He had been aware, during
these social excursions, that he was a good deal stared at and even
commented on. At first he supposed this arose from some peculiarity of
his dress or manner. Then he understood that the cause of this
unsolicited attention bore a more flattering character, and in this
connection certain remarks made by the Lady of the Windswept Dust
occurred to his mind. But, Mr. Iglesias' pride being greatly in excess
of his vanity--when the first moment of half-humorous surprise was
passed--he found that these tributes to his personal appearance
afforded him more displeasure than pleasure. He turned from them with a
movement of annoyance, and turned from those places in which they were
liable to manifest themselves likewise. No, indeed, it was something
other than this he had to find, something lying far deeper in the needs
of human nature, if the emptiness of his days was to be filled and the
hunger of his heart and spirit satisfied!

Pondering which things he went down the creaking stairs of the house in
Holland Street, Kensington, leaving the empty and, to him, sacred rooms
to the crouching shadows. He had had his answer from the one person
whom he had perfectly loved. And surely, in justifying the past, that
answer gave promise of hope for the future? The way would be made
clear, the method would declare itself. Let him have patience, only
patience, as she, his mother, had had when traversing deserts and
climbing Difficulty Hill in her lacework; and to him, also, should far
horizons be disclosed.

In the narrow hall the neat little old caretaker met him, huskily
coughing.

"The rent is low, sir," he said, "and the landlord is asking no
premium. If you should wish further particulars, or to inspect the
offices----"

But Mr. Iglesias put a couple of half-crowns into his hand.

"No," he answered, "I do not propose to take the house. Persons who
were dear to me lived here once; and so I wanted to see it. As long as
it is unlet I may come back from time to time."

The old man shuffled his slippered feet upon the bare boards, looking
with mild ecstasy at the coins.

"And you will be most welcome, sir," he said. "Your generosity happens
to be of great assistance to me--not that I wish it repeated. I am not
grasping, sir, but I am grateful. I have a taste in literature which my
reduced circumstances do not allow me to gratify. I see the prospect of
many hours' enjoyment before me. I thank you."




CHAPTER VIII


And so it came about that a more tranquil spirit, touched with sober
gladness, possessed Dominic Iglesias as, leaving that house of many
memories, he pursued his way down Church Street and, passing into
Kensington High Street opposite St. Mary Abbot's Church, turned
eastward once again. A few doors short of the gateway leading into
Palace Gardens was an unpretentious Italian restaurant where he
proposed to dine. For it grew late. He had spent longer than he had
supposed in wordless prayer before the altar of his dead. The
remembrance of the book-loving little caretaker's gratitude remained by
him pleasantly, softening his humour towards all his fellow-men. Simple
kindness has great virtue, uplifting to the heart. To Iglesias it
seemed those five shillings had been eminently well invested.

The streets were clearer now; and he walked slowly, enjoying the cooler
air born of the sunset, and drawing from the leafy spaces of Kensington
Gardens and the park. Presently he became aware of a figure, not
altogether unfamiliar, threading its way among the intermittent stream
of pedestrians along the pavement a few paces ahead. His eyes followed
it reluctantly. In his present peaceful humour its aspect struck a
jarring note. Soiled white flannel trousers, a short blue boating coat,
a soft grey felt hat, tennis shoes, a shambling and uncertain gait as
of one who neither knows nor cares whither he is going or why he
goes--the whole effect purposeless, slovenly, inept.

Then followed a little scene which caused Iglesias to further slacken
his pace. For the seedy figure, reaching the open door of the
restaurant, hesitated, standing between the clipped bay trees set in
green tubs which flanked the entrance on either hand. Stepped aside,
craning upward to see over the yellow silk curtains drawn across the
lower half of the windows. Moved back to the door and stood there
undecided. Finally, as a smiling waiter, napkin on arm, came forward,
the man crushed his hat down on his forehead, forced his hands deep
into his trouser pockets and turned away with an audible oath. This
brought him face to face with Mr. Iglesias, who recognised in him his
fellow-lodger, Mr. de Courcy Smyth.

"What, you!" he exclaimed snarlingly, while his pasty face flamed.
"There seems no escape from our dear Cedar Lodge to-night."

Then with an uneasy laugh he made an effort to recover himself.

"Really, I beg your pardon, Mr. Iglesias," he continued, "but my nerves
are villainously on edge. I have just met those two young idiots, Farge
and Worthington, waltzing home arm in arm like a pair of demented
turtle-doves. Having to associate with such third-rate commercial
fellows and witness their ebullitions of mutual admiration makes a man
of education, like myself, utterly sick. I came out this evening to get
free of the whole Cedar Lodge lot. You did the same, I suppose. Pray
don't let me frustrate your purpose. I sympathise with it. I will
remove myself."

The splotchy red had died out of the speaker's face. Notwithstanding
the warmth of the evening he stood with his shoulders raised and his
knees a little bent, as a poorly clad man stands in a chill wind on a
wintry day. Iglesias observed his attitude, and in his present mood it
influenced him more than the surly greeting had done.

"I intended to dine here," he said quietly. "So, I fancy, did you."

"Oh! I have changed my mind, thank you," Smyth answered.

"In consequence of my arrival, I am afraid?"

"No, I had other reasons."

"In any case I should be very glad if you would reconsider your
decision and remain," Dominic said. "I am, as you see, alone, and I
have not often the pleasure of meeting you. I shall be very happy if
you will stay and dine with me, as my guest."

Smyth gave an odd, furtive look at the open door of the restaurant and
the row of white tables within. A light had come into his pale blue
eyes, making them uncomfortably like those of some half-starved animal.

"I am at a loss to know why I should accept hospitality from you," he
remarked, at once cringingly and insolently.

"Simply because you would give me pleasure by doing so. I should value
your society."

"I am not in evening dress."

"Nor am I," Dominic answered, with admirable seriousness. There was
something pitiful to him in the conflict, obviously going forward in
the other's mind, between hunger and reluctance to incur an obligation.
He cut it short with gentle authority. "There is a vacant table in the
corner where we can talk free from interruption. Let us go in and
secure it."

At the beginning of the meal the conversation was intermittent, the
burden of supporting it lying with Mr. Iglesias. But, as course
followed course, hot and succulent, while the _chianti_ at once
steadied his circulation and stimulated his brain, de Courcy Smyth
became talkative, not to say garrulous. Finally he began to assert
himself, to swagger, thereby laying bare the waste places of his own
nature.

"You may think I was hard on Farge and Worthington just now, Mr.
Iglesias," he said. "I own they disgust me; not only in themselves, but
as examples of certain modern tendencies which are choking the life out
of me and such men as me. You business people are on the up grade just
now, and you know it. Whoever goes under, you are safe to do yourselves
most uncommonly well. I don't mean anything personal, of course. I am
just stating a self-evident fact. Commerce is in the air--you all reek
of success. And so even shopwalkers, like Worthington, and that thrice
odious puppy Farge, grow sleek, and venture to spread themselves in the
presence of their betters--in the presence of a scholar and a
gentleman, who is well connected and has received a classical
education, like myself."

Smyth paused, turning sideways to the table, leaning his elbow on it,
crossing his legs and staring gloomily down the long room.

"But what do they know or care about scholarship?" he continued. "What
they do know is that the spirit of this unspeakably vulgar age is with
them and their miserable huckstering. They know that well enough and
act upon it, though they are too illiterate to put it into words--know
that trade is in process of exploding learning, of exploiting
literature and art to its own low purposes, in process of scaling
Olympus, in short, and ignominiously chucking out the gods."

Dominic Iglesias had listened to this astonishing tirade in silence.
The man was evidently suffering from feelings of bitter injury, also he
was his--Iglesias'--guest. Both pity and hospitality engaged him to
endurance. But there are limits. And at this point professional dignity
and a lingering loyalty towards the house of Barking Brothers & Barking
enjoined protest.

"No doubt we live in times of commerce, rather than in those of
chivalry," he remarked. "Still, I venture to think your condemnation is
too sweeping. One should discriminate surely between trade and finance."

"Only as one discriminates between a little dog and a big one. The
little dog is the easier to kick. I can't get at the Rothschilds and
Rockefellers; and so I go for the Farges and Worthingtons," Smyth
answered. "In principle I am right. Trade, commerce, finance, juggle
with the names as you like, it all comes back to the same thing in the
end, namely, the murder of intellect by money. Comes back to the
worship of Mammon, chosen ruler of this contemptible _fin de siècle_,
and safe to be even more tyrannously the ruler of the coming century.
What hope, I ask you, is left for us poor devils of literary men? None,
absolutely none. Just in proportion as we honour our calling and refuse
to prostitute our talents we are at a discount. The powers that be have
no earthly use for us. We have not the ghost of a chance."

He altered his position, looking quickly and nervously at his host.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "For the moment I forgot you were on the
other side, among the conquerors, not the conquered. Probably this
conversation does not interest you in the least."

"On the contrary, it interests me very deeply," Dominic replied gravely.

"All the same, out of self-respect I ought to hold my tongue about it,
I suppose. For I have accepted the position, Mr. Iglesias. I have
learned to do that. Only on each fresh occasion that it is brought home
to me--and it has been brought home abominably clearly to-night--my
gorge rises at it. And it ought to be so. For it is an outrage--you
yourself must admit--that a man who started with excellent prospects
and with the consciousness of unusual talents--of genius,
perhaps--should be ruined and broken, while every miserable little
counter-jumper----"

He leaned his elbows on the table, hiding his face in his hands, and
his shoulders shook.

"For I have talent," he cried, in a curiously thin voice. "Before God I
have. They may refuse to publish me, refuse to play me, force me to
pick up scraps of hack-work on fourth-rate papers to earn a bare
subsistence--at times hardly that. Yet all the same, no supercilious
beast of an editor or actor-manager--curse the whole stinking
lot--shall rob me of my faith in myself--of my belief that I am
great--if I had justice, nothing less than that, I tell you, nothing
less than great."

Dominic Iglesias drew himself up, sitting very still, his lips rigid,
not from defect, but from excess of sympathy. The restaurant was empty
now, save for a man, four tables down, safely ensconced behind the pink
pages of an evening paper, and for a couple, at the far end, in the
window--a young Frenchwoman, whose coquettish hat and trim rounded
figure were silhouetted against the yellow silk curtain, and a
precocious black-haired youth, with a skin like pale, pink satin, round
eyeglasses and an incipient moustache. His attention was entirely
occupied with the young woman; hers entirely occupied with herself. And
of this Dominic Iglesias was glad. For the matter immediately in hand
was best conducted without witnesses. He found it strangely engrossing,
strangely moving. However vain, however madly exaggerated even, de
Courcy Smyth's estimate of himself, there could be no question but that
his present emotion was as actual and genuine as his past hunger had
been. The man was utterly spent in body and in spirit. Offensive in
speech, slovenly in person, yet these distasteful things added to,
rather than detracted from, Iglesias' going out of sympathy towards
him. He had rarely been in contact with a fellow-creature in such
abandonment of distress. It was terrible to witness; yet it gave him a
sense of fellowship, of nearness, even of power, which had in it an
element of deep-seated satisfaction. While he waited for the moment
when it should become clear to him how to act, his thought travelled
back to the Lady of the Windswept Dust. He saw, not her over-red lips,
but her serious eyes; saw her tearful and in a way broken, for all her
light speech, her fanciful garments, and her antics with her absurd
little dogs amid the sweetness of sunshine and summer breeze on Barnes
Common. She was far enough away, so he judged, in sentiment and
circumstance from the embittered and poverty-haunted man sitting
opposite to him. Yet though superficially so dissimilar, they were
alike in this, that both had dared to reveal themselves, passing beyond
conventional limits in intercourse with him, Iglesias. Both had cried
out to him in their distress. And then, thinking of that recently
visited altar of the dead, thinking of the one perfect relationship he
had known--his relationship to his mother--it came to him as a
revelation that not participation in the pride of life and the
splendour of it--still less association in mere pleasure and
amusement--forms the cement which binds together the units of humanity
in stable and consoling relationship; but association in sorrow, the
cry for help and the response to that cry, whether it be help to the
staying of the hunger of the heart and of the intellect, or simply to
the staying of that baser yet very searching hunger of overstrained
nerves and an empty stomach. The revelation was partial. Iglesias
groped, so to speak, in the light of it uncertain and dazzled. But he
received it as real--an idea the magnitude of which, in inspiration and
application, he was as yet by no means equal to measure. Still he
believed that could he but yield himself to it, and, in yielding,
master it, it would carry him very far, teaching him that language of
the spirit which he desired to acquire; and hence placing in his hand
that earnestly coveted key to an adjustment between the exterior and
interior life, the life of the senses and the life of the spirit, which
must needs eventuate, manward and godward alike, in triumphant harmony.

Meanwhile there sat de Courcy Smyth, blear-eyed, sandy-red bearded,
unsavoury, trying, poor wretch, to rally whatever of manhood was left
in him and swagger himself out of his fit of hysteria. The Latin,
however dignified, is instinctively more demonstrative than the
Anglo-Saxon. Iglesias leaned across the table and laid his hand on the
other man's shoulder.

"Wait a little," he said. "Drink your coffee and smoke. We need not
hurry to move."

There was a pause, during which Smyth obediently swallowed his coffee,
swallowed his _chasse_ of cognac.

"I have made an egregious ass of myself," he said sullenly.

"No, no," Iglesias answered. "You have honoured me by taking me into
your confidence. It rests with me to see that you never have cause to
regret having done so."

"I believe you mean that."

"Certainly I mean it," Iglesias answered.

Smyth's hands trembled as he took a cigar and held a match to it.

"I am unaccustomed to meeting with kindness," he said in a low voice.
Then recovering himself somewhat, he began to speak volubly again. "Of
course I understand it all well enough. They are simply afraid of my
work, those beasts of editors and playwrights. It is too big for them,
they dare not face it and the consequences of it. It is strong stuff,
Mr. Iglesias, strong stuff with plenty of red blood in it, and with
scholarship, too. And so they pigeon-hole my stories and drames in
self-defence, knowing that if these once reached the public, either in
print or in action, their own fly-blown anæmic productions would be
hissed off the stage or would ruin the circulation of the periodical
which inserted them. It is all jealousy, I tell you, Mr. Iglesias,
rank, snakish jealousy, bred by self-interest out of fear--a truly
exalted parentage!"

He shifted his position restlessly, again setting his elbows upon the
table and fingering the broken bread upon the cloth.

"At times, when I can rise above the immediate injustice and cruelty
which pursue me," he went on, "I glory in my martyrdom. I range myself
alongside those heroes of literature and art, who, because they were
ahead of the age in which they lived, were scorned and repudiated by
their contemporaries; but they found their revenge in the worship of
succeeding generations. My time will come just as theirs did. It
must--I tell you it must. I know that. I am safe of eventual
recognition; but I want it now, while I am alive, while I can glut
myself with the joy of it. I want to see the men who lord it over me,
just because they have influence and money, who affect to despise me
because they are green with envy and fear of me, brought to their
knees, flattened so that I can wipe my boots on them. And--and"--he
looked full at Dominic Iglesias, spreading out both hands across the
narrow table, his pale prominent eyes blood-shot, his face working--"I
want to see someone else--a woman--brought to her knees also. I want to
make her feel what she has lost--curse her!--and have her come back
whining."

"And if she did come back," Iglesias asked, almost sternly, "what would
you do? Forgive her?"

De Courcy Smyth's hands dropped with a queer little thud on the table.

"I don't know. I suppose so. If she wanted to she could always get
round me." Then he turned on Iglesias with hysterical violence. "But
what do you know? Why do you ask that? Are you among her patrons? I
trusted you. I believed you were a gentleman in feeling--and it is a
dirty trick to get me in here and fill me up with food and liquor, when
you must have seen my nerves were all to pieces, and then spring this
upon me. Oh! hell!" he cried, "is there no comfort anywhere? Is
everyone a traitor?"

And seeing his utter abjectness, Iglesias' heart went out to the
unhappy man in immense and unqualified pity.

"I am grieved," he said gently, "if I have pained you unnecessarily.
But truly I have sprung nothing upon you. How could I do so? I know
nothing whatever of your circumstances save that which you yourself
have told me during the last hour."

"Then why did you ask that question about--about her?"

"Because," Dominic answered, "I am ready to fight for you, in as far as
you will allow me to do so; but I do not fight against women."

"You must have had uncommonly little experience of them then," Smyth
answered with a sneer.

To this observation Mr. Iglesias deemed it superfluous to make any
answer. A silence followed. The restaurant was empty, but for the
waiters, who stood in a little knot about the door amusing themselves
by watching the movement of the street. Looking round to make sure no
one was within hearing, Smyth rose unsteadily to his feet.

"You meant what you said just now, Mr. Iglesias--that you were ready to
fight for me?" he asked ungently yet cringingly.

"Certainly I meant it," Dominic replied, "the proviso I have made being
respected."

"Yes, yes, of course--but what do you understand by fighting for me?
Money?"

Dominic had risen, too. He remained for a moment in thought.

"Within reasonable relation to my means, yes," he said.

"I only want my chance," the other asserted. "The rest will follow as a
matter of course. You would risk nothing, Mr. Iglesias. It would be an
investment, simply an investment. The play is not finished yet--I have
been too disheartened and disgusted recently to be able to work at it.
But it is great, I tell you, great. When it is done will you give me my
chance, and take a theatre for me and finance a couple of _matinées?_"

Again Dominic Iglesias thought for a moment, and again, driven by that
strange necessity of fellowship--though knowing all the while he was
putting his hand to a very questionable adventure--he replied in the
affirmative.




CHAPTER IX


On that same evening, and at the same hour at which Dominic Iglesias
bound himself to the practical assistance of a personally unsavoury and
professionally unsuccessful playwright, a conversation was in progress
between two persons of more exalted social station in the drawing-room
of a pleasant house in Chester Square. The said drawing-room,
mid-Victorian in aspect, was decorated in white and gold and
unaggressive green. The ground of the chintz was very white, sprinkled
over with bunches of shaded mauve roses unknown to horticulture. Lady
Constance Decies' tea-grown was white and mauve also. For she was still
in half-mourning for her father, the late Lord Fallowfeild, who had
died some eighteen months previously at a very venerable age, and with
a touching modesty as though his advent in another world might savour
of intrusion. He had always been a humble-minded man. He remained so to
the last.

The windows stood open to the balcony. And the effect of the woman, and
of the soft lights and colours surrounding her, was reposeful. For at
the age of fifty Lady Constance, though stately, was a mild and very
gentle person upon whom the push of the modern world had laid no hand.
All the active drama of her life had been crowded into a few weeks of
the early summer of her eighteenth year; since which, now remote,
period she had enjoyed a tranquil existence, happy in the love of her
husband and the care of her children. Her pretty brown hair was
beginning to turn grey upon the temples. Her eyes, set remarkably far
apart, had a certain vagueness and a great innocence of expression. She
was naturally timid, and cared but little for any society beyond that
of her near relations. To-night she was particularly content, mildly
radiant even, thanks to the presence of her favourite brother, the
present Lord Fallowfeild, and his avowed admiration of her younger
daughter--a maiden of nineteen, who stood before her, with shining
eyes, in all the delicate splendour of a spotless ball-dress.

"Yes, darling, you look very sweet," she said. "Just lean down--the
lace has got caught in the flowers on your _berthe_. That's right.
Don't keep your father too late."

"And in all things be discreet"--this from Lord Fallowfeild. "It's been
my motto through life, as your mother knows. And you couldn't have a
brighter example of the excellent results of it than myself.
Good-night, my dear. Enjoy yourself," and he patted her on the cheek,
avoiding the kiss which she in all innocence proffered him. "Pretty
child, Kathleen, uncommonly pretty," he continued as the door closed
behind the graceful figure. "It strikes me, Con, your girls have all
the good looks of the family in the younger generation, with the
exception of Violet Aldham. But she's getting pinched, a bit pinched
and witch-like. Then she makes up too much. I have no prejudice against
a woman's improving upon nature where nature's been niggardly. But it
is among the things that'll keep. It's a mistake to begin it too early.
In my opinion Violet has begun it too early--might quite well have
given herself another ten years' grace.--Maggie's girls are gawky, you
know; and, between ourselves, so terribly flat, poor things, both fore
and aft. Upon my word, I'm not surprised they don't marry."

"I am afraid Maggie feels it a good deal," said Lady Constance.
Satisfaction mingled with pity in her soul. The disabilities of other
women's children are never wholly distressing to a tender mother's
heart. "You see, she's so anxious the girls should not marry the
bishop's chaplains; and yet really they hardly see any other young men.
I think it is a very difficult position, that of a bishop's wife."

Lord Fallowfeild smiled, settling himself back in the corner of the
wide sofa and crossing his long legs. He had thought more deeply on a
good many subjects than the majority of his acquaintance supposed; with
the consequence that he occasionally surprised his fellow-peers by the
acuteness of his observations in debate. Lord Fallowfeild, it may be
added, took his recently acquired office of hereditary legislator with
a commendable mixture of humour and seriousness.

"Their position is an anomalous one," he said; "and an anomalous
position is inevitably a difficult one--ought to be SO; in my opinion.
But that's not to the point. We were talking, not about the episcopal
ladies, but about this little business of Kathleen's. So you believe
Lady Sokeington has views and intentions?"

"I know that she has. But you see, Shotover," Lady Constance went on,
returning to the name which that gentleman had rendered somewhat
notorious in earlier years by a record in sport, in debts, in amours,
and in irresistible sweetness of temper--"I want to be quite sure he is
really good. Because the affair has not gone very far yet and it might
be put a stop to--at least I hope and think it might--without making
darling Kathleen too dreadfully unhappy. You do believe he really is
good?"

Lord Fallowfeild leaned forward and rubbed a hardly perceptible atom of
fluff off his left trouser leg just above the ankle.

"My dear Con," he answered, "you are very charming, but you are a
trifle embarrassing, too, you know. Haven't you learned, even at this
time of day, that very few men in our world are good in a good woman's
sense of the word?"

Lady Constance's smooth forehead puckered into fine little lines.

"Shotover, dear," she said, "you're not getting embittered, I hope?"

"Me? Bless you, no, never in life!" he returned, smiling very
reassuringly at her. "Don't worry yourself under that head. I quarrel
with nobody and nothing, not even the consequences of my past
iniquities. It is a very just world, take it all round, and has been
kinder to me than I deserve."

"Oh! but you do nothing, you--you are what--you won't think me rude,
Shotover?--what the boys call 'very decent' now."

Lady Constance spoke hurriedly, her colour rising in the most engaging
manner.

"As decent as I know how, you dear soul," he said, taking her hand in
his. "But that makes no difference to one's knowledge of one's own
ways, in the past, or of the ways of other men."

"But Alaric Barking?"

"Neither better nor worse than the rest."

Then Lord Fallowfeild shut his small and beautiful mouth very tight, as
though he would be glad to avoid further cross-questioning. Lady
Constance's forehead remained puckered.

"It's dreadfully difficult when one's girls grow up," she said
plaintively. "One can be comfortable about them, poor darlings, and
enjoy them when they are in the nursery--even in the schoolroom, though
governesses are worrying. They know so much about quantities of
subjects which seem to me not to matter. One never refers to them in
ordinary conversation; and if one should be obliged to it is so easy to
ask somebody to tell one. And yet they manage to make me feel
dreadfully uncomfortable and ignorant because I know nothing about
them. But when they grow up----"

"Who, the governesses?" Lord Fallowfeild inquired. "I never supposed
they stood in need of that process--thought they started out of the egg
all finished, as you might say, and ran about at once like chickens."

"No, no, the girls, poor darlings," Lady Constance replied. "One does
get dreadfully anxious about them, Shotover, really one does--specially
if one has escaped something very frightening oneself and has been very
happy--lest they should fall in love with the wrong people, or lest
they should be anything which one did not know beforehand and then
everything should turn out dreadful. I should be so miserable. I don't
think I could bear it. I know it is wrong to say that, because if one
was really good, one would accept whatever God sent without murmuring.
So I could for myself, I think. In any case I should earnestly try to.
But for the children it is so much harder. If they were unhappy I
should feel ashamed of having had them--as if I'd done something
horribly selfish; because, you see, there can be nothing so delightful
as having children."

She looked at Lord Fallowfeild in the most pathetic manner, the corners
of her mouth a-shake. And he took her hand and held it again, touched
by the sincerity of her confused utterance, and the great mother-love
resident in her. Touched, perhaps, by the age-old problem of man and
maid, also.

"Dear little Con, dear little Con," he said, "I'm awfully sorry you
should be worried, but I'm afraid we've got to look facts in the face.
And it's no kindness for me to lie to you about these matters. I don't
pretend to say what's right or what's wrong; I only say what it is. We
can't make society, and the ways of it, all over again even to save
Kathleen a heartache. I don't want to seem a brute, but she must just
take her chance along with the rest of you. Marriage always has been a
confounded uncertain business, and will always remain so, I suppose.
The sort of remedies excited persons suggest to mitigate the dangers of
it are a good deal worse than the disease, in my opinion. Every woman
has to take her chance. Every man has to take his, too, you know--and
the chance strikes some of us as such an uncommonly poor one, that,
upon my honour, it seems safest to wash one's hands of it altogether."

"But you're not unhappy, Shotover, dear? You're not lonely?" Lady
Constance inquired anxiously.

"Abominably so sometimes, Con. But I manage, oh! I manage. I have my
consolations"--he smiled at her, perhaps a trifle shamefacedly. "But
now about Kathleen," he went on, "as I say, she must take her chance
along with the rest of you, poor little dear. After all, you took your
chance when you married Decies, and it has not turned out so badly, you
know."

Lady Constance became radiant once more, as some mild-shining summer
moon emerging from behind temporarily obscuring clouds.

"Oh! but then," she said, "of course that was so entirely different."

Lord Fallowfeild patted her hand, his head bent, looking at her
somewhat merrily.

"Was it, my dear, was it?--I wonder," he said.

She withdrew her head with a certain dignity. Notwithstanding her
softness and tenderness, there were occasions--even with those she
loved best--when Lady Constance could delicately mark her displeasure.

"I think you are a little embittered, Shotover," she asserted.

He leaned back, still smiling, and shaking his head at her.

"Old and wise--unpleasantly old, and not quite such a fool as I used to
be, that's all," he answered.

For a time there was silence, both brother and sister thinking their
own thoughts. Then the latter spoke. Like many gentle persons, she was
persistent. She always had been so.

"I should be so grateful if you would tell me, because I think I ought
to know, and then I should try to turn the course of darling Kathleen's
affections before it all becomes too pronounced. Is there any
entanglement, anything amounting to what one calls an impediment,
in--well--you understand--against Alaric Barking?"

Lord Fallowfeild got up, took a turn across the room, came back, and
stood in front of her.

"I wish you wouldn't, Con," he said. "Upon my soul, I wish you
wouldn't. It's a nasty thing for an old man, who has gone the pace in
his day pretty thoroughly, to give away a lad who may have made a slip
just at the start, and who is doing his best to get his feet again and
run straight. Alaric Barking's a good fellow. I like him. I never have
been and never shall be partial to that family. Your sister Louisa
cried up their virtues and their confounded solvency, in the old days,
till she made them a positive nuisance. She's not a happy way of
inculcating a moral economic lesson, hasn't Louisa. But I own I'm fond
of this boy. He's far the best of the whole lot--gentlemanlike, and a
sportsman, and good-looking--unusually so for one of that family--and,
my dear, he's downright honestly in love with Kathleen. I've watched
him--did so when he was down at Ranelagh one day last month with her
and Victoria Sokeington--and I know the real thing when I see it."

"But--but, I am afraid, Shotover, you mean me to understand there is
some impediment?" Lady Constance repeated.

"Oh! well, hang it all, I'm awfully sorry, but if you are determined to
have it, Connie, perhaps there is. Only for heaven's sake don't be in
too much of a hurry. Between ourselves, I happen to know the boy's
doing his best to shake himself free in an honourable manner. So don't
rush the business. Like the dear tender-hearted creature you are, have
a little mercy on the poor beggar. Let the whole affair drift a little.
It may straighten out."

Lady Constance meditated for a minute or so.

"It's very dreadful that there should be any impediment," she said.

"I'll back Alaric to agree with you there," Lord Fallowfeild answered.

"You'll do what you can, Shotover, won't you, to help Kathleen? I never
forget how you helped me once!"

Lord Fallowfeild's handsome face expressed rather broad amusement.

"I'm afraid the two cases are hardly parallel, my dear," he said.




CHAPTER X


"The play's on the other side, the crowd's on the other side, all the
fun's on the other side, and I am on this side with nothing more lively
than you, you little shivering idiot, for company."

Poppy St. John drew the spaniel's long silky ears through her fingers
slowly.

"I am bored, Cappadocia," she said, with a yawn which she made not the
slightest effort to stifle, "bored right through to my very marrow. Oh
dear, oh dear, oh dear, how I do wish something would happen!"

Poppy sat, propped up with scarlet silk cushions, in a cane deck-chair,
on the white-railed balcony upon which the first-floor bedroom windows
opened. Around her were strewn illustrated magazines and ladies'
papers; but unfortunately the stories in the former appeared to her
every bit as silly as the fashion-plates in the latter. Both had
equally little to do with life as the ordinary flesh and blood human
being lives it. She was filled with a rebellious sense of the banality
of her surroundings this afternoon. Even from her coign of vantage upon
the balcony, whence wide prospects disclosed themselves, everything
looked foolish, pointless, of the nature of an unpardonably stale joke.

The said balcony, divided into separate compartments by the
interposition of wooden barriers, extended the whole length of the
terrace of twenty-seven houses. And these were all precisely alike,
with white wood and stucco "enrichments," as the technical phrase has
it. Cheap stained and leaded glass adorned the upper panels of the
twenty-seven front doors, which were approached by twenty-seven flights
of steps--thus securing a measure of light and air to the twenty-seven
basements. The front doors were set in couples, alternating with
couples of bay windows. There was a determination of cheap smartness, a
smirking self-consciousness about the little houses, a suggestion of
having put on their best frocks and high-heeled shoes and standing very
much on tiptoe to attract attention. The balconies, narrow where the
upper bays encroached on them, wide where the house fronts were
recessed above the twin front doors, broke forth into a garland of
flower-boxes. Cascades of pink ivy-leaf geranium, creeping-jenny, and
nasturtiums backed by white or yellow Paris daisies, flowed outward
between the white ballusters and masked the edge of the woodwork. The
effect, though pretty, was not quite satisfactory--being suggestive of
millinery, of an over-trimmed summer hat.

Immediately below was the roadway, bordered by an asphalt pavement on
either side, then the high impenetrable oak paling, which had baffled
Dominic Iglesias' maiden effort at participation in the amusements of
the rich. From Poppy's balcony, however, the palings offered no
impediment to observation. All the green expanse of the smaller
polo-ground was visible. So was the whole height of the grove of
majestic elms on the right and the back of the club house; and, and the
left, between _massifs_ of shrubbery, a vista of lawns sloping towards
the river peopled by a sauntering crowd.

It was upon this last that Poppy directed her gaze. To the naked eye
the units composing it showed as vertical lines of grey, brown, and
black, blotted with bright delicate colour, and splashed here and there
with white, the whole mingling, uniting, breaking into fresh
combinations kaleidoscope fashion. Through the opera-glasses figures of
men, women, and horses detached themselves, becoming quaintly distinct,
neat as toys, an assemblage of elegant highly finished marionnettes.
There was a fascination in watching the movement of these brilliant,
clear-cut silent little things upon that amazingly verdant carpet of
grass. But it was a fascination which, for Poppy, had by now worn
somewhat thin. The interest proved too far away, too impersonal. Indeed
it may be questioned whether any who have not within themselves large
store of resignation, or of hope, can look on at gaiety, in which they
have no share, without first sadness and then pretty lively irritation.
And of those two most precious commodities, resignation and hope, Poppy
had but limited reserve stock at present. So she pulled the little
dog's ears rather hard and lamented:

"Oh! my good gracious me, if only something would happen!"

Then, the words hardly out of her mouth, she shot the much-enduring
Cappadocia off her lap and, restoring her elbows on the rails, leaned
right out over the balcony.

"Come here, dear beautiful lunatic, come here," she cried. "For pity's
sake don't pass by!"

Perhaps fortunately this very unconventional invitation was lost upon
Dominic Iglesias, soberly crossing the road with due observance of the
eccentricities of the drivers of motor-cars and riders of bicycles.
Looking up, he was aware of a vision quite sufficiently indicative of
welcome, without added indiscretion of words.--The white balustrade,
the trailing fringe of nasturtiums, succulent leaves and orange-scarlet
blossoms; the woman's bust and shoulders in her string-coloured lace
gown, her small face, curiously vivid in effect, capped by the heavy
masses of her black hair, her singular eyes full of light, the red of
her lips and tinge of stationary pink in her cheeks supplemented by a
glow of quick excitement. A few weeks ago the ascetic in Iglesias might
have taken alarm. Now it was different. He had his idea, and, walking
in the strength of it, dared adventure himself in neighbourhoods
otherwise slightly questionable.

Five minutes later Poppy advanced across the little drawing-room to
meet him.

"Well," she said, "of course you might have come sooner. But, equally
of course, you might never have come at all, so I won't quarrel with
you about the delay, though I would like you to know it has worried me
a good deal."

"Has it? I am sorry for that," Dominic answered gravely.

"Yes, be sorry, be sorry," she repeated. "It is comfortable to hear you
say so."

She looked at him with the utmost frankness, took his hand and led him
to a settee filling in the right angle between the fireplace and the
double doors at the back of the room.

"Sit down," she said, "and let us talk. Have another cushion--so--and
if you're good I'll give you tea presently. And understand, you needn't
be careful of yourself. I'll play perfectly fair with you. I've been
thinking it all out during this time you didn't come; and I never go
back on my word once given. So, look here, you needn't account for
yourself in any way. I don't even want to know your name--specially I
don't want to know that. It might localise you, and I don't want to
have you localised. Directly a person is localised it takes away their
restfulness to one. One begins to see just all the places where they
belong to somebody else, notice-boards struck up everywhere warning one
to keep off the grass. And that's a nuisance. It raises Old Nick in
one, and makes one long to commit all manner of wickedness which would
never have entered one's head otherwise."

Poppy held her hands palm to palm between her knees, glancing at
Dominic Iglesias now and again sideways as she spoke. The bodice of her
dress, cut slightly _en coeur_, showed the nape of her neck, and the
whole of her throat, which was smooth and rounded though rather long.
Her make altogether was that not uncommon to London girls of the lower
middle-class: small-boned and possibly anæmic, but prettily moulded,
and with an attraction of over-civilisation as of hot-house-grown
plants. Just now her head seemed bowed down by the weight of her dark
hair, as she sat gathered together, making herself small as a child
will when concentrating its mind to the statement of some serious
purpose.

"I've knocked about a lot," she went on. "It's right you should know
that. And there's not very much left to tell me about a number of
things not usually set down in conversation books designed for
_débutants_. But just on that account I may be rather useful to you in
some ways.--Don't go and be offended now, there's a dear, good man,"
she added coaxingly. "Because judging by what you told me the other
day, there's no doubt that, under some heads, you are very much of a
_débutant_."

"I suppose I am," Iglesias said slowly. It was very strange to him to
find himself in so sudden and close an intimacy with this at once so
wise and so artificial woman creature. But he had his idea. Moreover,
increasingly he trusted her.

"Of course you are," she asserted. "That's just where the beauty of it
all comes in. You're the veriest infant. One has only to look into your
face to see that.--Don't go and freeze up now. You belong to another
order of doctrine and practice to that current in contemporary society."

Poppy gazed at the floor, still making herself small, the palms of her
hands pressed together between her knees.

"And that's just why you can be useful to me, awfully useful, if you
choose--I don't mean money, business, anything of the kind. I'm
perfectly competent to manage my own affairs, thank you. But you're
good for me, somehow. You rest me."

She began to rock herself gently backwards and forwards, but without
taking the heels of her shoes off the ground.

"Yes, you rest me, you rest me," she repeated.

"I am glad," Iglesias said. He felt soberly pleased, thankful almost.

Again Poppy glanced at him sideways.

"Yes, I believe you are," she said. "And that shows things have
happened to you--in you, more likely--since we last met. You have come
on a great piece."

"I doubt if I have come on, so much as gone back, to influences of long
ago," he answered; "to things which had been overlaid by the dust of my
working years almost to the point of obliteration."

"Was it pleasant to go back?" Poppy asked.

"Not at all. The going was painful. It required some courage to brush
off the dust."

"It usually does require courage--at least that's my experience--to
brush off the dust."

Dominic Iglesias made no immediate answer. He was a little startled at
his companion's acute reading of him, a little touched by her
confidence. Her words seemed to suggest the possibility of a
relationship which fitted in admirably with the development of his
idea. He sat looking away across the room, and, doing so, became aware
that the said room possessed unexpected characteristics, calculated to
elucidate his impressions of its owner's character. It was a man's room
rather than a woman's, innocent of furbelows and frills. Two low, wide
settees, well furnished with cushions and upholstered in dark
yellowish-red tapestry, fitted into the corners on either side the
double doors. A couple of large armchairs and a revolving book-table
occupied the centre of the room. An upright piano, in an ebonised case,
draped across the back with an Indian phulkari--discs of looking-glass
set in coarsely worked yellow eyelet holes forming the border of
it--stood at right angles to the wall just short of the bay window. In
the window, placed slant-wise, was a carved black oak writing-table, a
long row of photographs stuck up against the back shelf of it. The
walls were hung with a set of William Nicolson's prints, strong, dark,
distinct, slightly sinister in effect; a fine etching of Jean François
Millet's _Gleaners_; and, in noticeable contrast to this last, a
mezzotint of Romney's picture of Lady Hamilton spinning. Upon the
book-table were a silver ash-tray and cigarette-box. The air was
unquestionably impregnated with the odour of tobacco, which the burning
of scent-sticks quite failed to dissemble.

While Mr. Iglesias thus noted the details of his surroundings, his
companion observed him, closely, intently. Suddenly she flung herself
back against the piled-up cushions.

"Let the dust lie, let it lie," she cried, almost shrilly. And as
Dominic turned to her, surprised at her vehemence, she added, "Yes,
it's safest so. Let it lie till it grows thick, carpeting all the
surface, so that, treading on it, one's footsteps are muffled, making
no sound!"

Poppy jumped up, crossed swiftly to the writing-table, swept the long
row of photographs together and pushed them into a drawer.

"There you go, face downwards, every man Jack of you," she said. "And,
for all I care, there you may stay."

Then she turned round, confronting Dominic Iglesias, who had risen
also, her head carried high, her teeth set.

"You may not grasp the connection of ideas--I don't the very least see
how you should, and I've no extra special wish that you should. But you
must just take my word for it that's one way of thickening the dust, in
my particular case, and not half a bad way either!"

She pushed the heavy masses of her hair up from her forehead, crossed
the little room again and stood before Iglesias smiling, her hands
clasped behind her back.

"Yes, you rest me," she said, "you do, even more than I expected. I
wanted awfully to see you; and yet I was half afraid if I did we
mightn't pull the thing off. But we are going to pull it off, aren't
we?"

This direct appeal demanded a direct answer; and Iglesias, looking down
at her, felt nerved to a certain steadiness of resolve.

"Yes, we are," he said gravely. "That, at least, is my purpose. I have
very few friends. I should value a new one." Then he added, with a
certain hesitancy, "I am glad you are not disappointed."

"Ah! you have come on--not a question about it," Poppy cried. "Sit down
again. You needn't go yet. And we are through with disturbances for
this afternoon anyhow. An anti-cyclone, as the weather reports put it,
is extending over all our coasts. I feel quite happy. Let me enjoy the
anti-cyclone while it lasts--and I'll give you your tea."

But of that tea Dominic Iglesias was fated not to drink. A ring at the
bell, a parley at the front door, followed by the advent of an elderly
parlourmaid bearing a card on a small lacquer tray.

"His lordship says if you're engaged he could wait a little, ma'am. But
he wants particularly to see you to-day."

Poppy took the card, glanced at it, and then at Dominic Iglesias.

"I'm afraid, I'm awfully afraid I shall have to let you go," she said.
She took both his hands, and holding them, without pressure but with a
great friendliness, went on: "Don't be offended, or you'll make me
miserable. But he's an old friend; and he's been a perfect brick to
me--stood by me through all my worst luck. I can't send him away. You
won't be off ended?"

"No," Iglesias said.

"And you will come again? You make me feel all smooth and good. You
promise you'll come?"

"Yes," Iglesias said.

In the narrow passage a tall, eminently well-dressed middle-aged
gentleman stood aside to let him pass. Dominic Iglesias received the
impression of a very handsome person, whose possible insolence of
bearing received agreeable modification, thanks to the expression of
kindly humorous eyes and a notably beautiful mouth.

Upon the centre table of the square first-floor sitting-room at Cedar
Lodge a note awaited Mr. Iglesias, addressed in George Lovegrove's neat
business hand.

"Dear old friend," it ran--"the wife asks you to take supper with us
to-morrow night. Step across as early as you like. My cousin, Miss
Serena Lovegrove, is paying us a visit. Yours faithfully, G. L.--N. B.
Come as you are: no ceremony. G. L."




CHAPTER XI


"Hullo, girlie," called the red and green parrot, as it helped itself
up the side of its zinc cage with beak as well as claws.

Serena Lovegrove had opened the door suddenly. Then, seeing that Mr.
Iglesias alone occupied the room, neither her host nor hostess being
present, she paused in the doorway, a large floppy yellow silk work-bag
in her hands, undecided whether to retreat or to proceed. And it was
thus that the bird, discovering her advent, announced it, while the
pupils of his hard, round yellowish grey eyes dilated and
contracted--"snapped," as Serena would have said--maliciously.

Serena was a tall, elegant, faded woman, dressed in black, her little
upright head balanced upon a long thin stalk of neck. Though undeniably
faded, there was, as now seen in the quiet evening light, a suggestion
of youthfulness about her. He brown eyes, pretty though rather small,
snapped even as did those of the parrot. Excitement--to-night she was
very much excited--invariably produced in Serena an effect of clutching
at her long-departed girlhood, an effect sufficiently pathetic in the
case of a woman well on in the forties. And it was precisely this
ineffectual throw-back to a Serena of seventeen or eighteen which lent
a sharp edge of irony to the strident salutations of the parrot, as it
called out again:

"Hullo, girlie! Polly's own pet girlie," then with a prolonged and
ear-piercing whistle:--"Hi, four-wheeler! girlie's going out." And
hoarsely, with a growl in its throat: "Move on there, stoopid, can't
yer? Shut the door."

During the delivery of these final admonitions Mr. Iglesias had
recognised the shadowy figure standing on the threshold and advanced.
This decided Serena. Still twisting the ribbons of the yellow work-bag
round her thin fingers, she drifted into the room.

"I think I have had the pleasure of meeting you once or twice before,
Miss Lovegrove," Dominic said. His manner was specially gentle and
courtly, for he could not but feel the poor lady was at a disadvantage,
owing to the very articulate indiscretions of the parrot.

"Oh! yes," Serena answered. "Certainly we have met. But you are wrong
as to the number of times. It is more than once or twice. Five times, I
think; or it may have been six. No, it is five, because I remember you
were expected, in the evening, the day before I went home the winter
before last; and at the last moment you were unable to come. That would
have made six. Now it is only five."

"You have an excellent memory," Iglesias said. "It is kind of you to
remember so clearly."

"I wonder if it is--I mean, I wonder whether it is kind," Serena
rejoined.

She was quite innocent of any intention of sarcasm. But her mind, like
those of so many unoccupied, and consequently self-occupied persons,
was addicted to speculation of a minor and vacuous sort. She was also
liable--as such persons often are--to mistake cavilling for spirit and
wit--a most tedious error!

"Still you are right in saying I have a good memory," she added.
"People generally observe that. But then I was always taught it was
rude to forget. Forgetfulness is the result of inattention. At school I
never had any difficulty in learning by heart."

"You must have found that both a useful and pleasant talent."

"Perhaps," Serena replied negligently. She was determined not to commit
herself, having arrived at the conclusion that Mr. Iglesias' address
was too civil. "It was bad manners of him not to remember how often we
had met," she said to herself, "and now he is trying to pass it off.
But that won't do!" Serena had many and distinct views on the subject
of manner and manners. She was never certain that civility did not
argue a defect of sincerity. She agreed with herself to think that over
again later. Meanwhile she would carefully remark Mr. Iglesias. "If he
is insincere, as I fear he is, he is sure to betray it in other ways.
Then I shall be on my guard." Forewarned is, of course, forarmed, and
Serena felt very acute. Though against exactly what she was taking such
elaborate precautions, it would have been difficult for her, or for
anyone else, to have stated. However, just now it was incumbent upon
her to make conversation. As is the way with persons not very fertile
in ideas, she had recourse to the simple expedient of asking a leading
question.

"Are you fond of animals?" she inquired.

"I am afraid I have very little knowledge of animals," Iglesias replied.

Serena laughed dryly. This was so transparent a subterfuge.

"What a very odd answer!" she said. "Because everybody must really know
whether they like animals or not."

"I am afraid I stand by myself then, a solitary exception. I have had
little or nothing to do with animals, and have therefore had no
opportunity of discovering whether they attract me or not."

"How very odd!" Serena repeated.

She moved across to the centre-table where Mr. Lovegrove's books of
picture postcards, the miscellaneous consequences of many charity
bazaars, and kindred aesthetic treasures reposed, and deposited her
work-bag in their company. Her movement revived the attention of the
parrot, who had been nodding on its perch.

"Poor old girlie, take a brandy and soda? Kiss and be friends.
Good-night, all," it murmured hoarsely, half asleep.

"If your question bore reference to that particular animal, I stand in
no doubt as to my sentiments," Dominic remarked. "I am anything but
fond of it. I think it an odious bird."

"Ah! you see you do know," Serena exclaimed. "I was sure you did." She
felt justified in her suspicion of his sincerity. "But nobody would
agree with you, Mr. Iglesias, because of course it is really a very
clever parrot. They very seldom learn to say so many things."

"How fortunate!" Dominic permitted himself to ejaculate.

"I don't see why you should say it is fortunate."

"Do not its remarks strike you as somewhat impertinent and intrusive?"

"I wonder if an animal can be impertinent," Serena said reflectively.

But here to her vexation, for it appeared to her that she had just
started a really interesting subject of discussion, Mrs. Lovegrove
bustled into the room.

"Well, Mr. Iglesias," she began, "I am sure I am very delighted to see
you, and so will Georgie be. He was remarking only yesterday we don't
seem to see so much of you as we used to do. He's just a little behind
time, is Georgie, having been kept by the dear vicar at a meeting about
the Church Workers' Social Evenings Guild at the Mission Room in Little
Bethesda Street. You wouldn't know where that is, Mr. Iglesias--though
I can't help hoping you will some day--but Serena knows, don't you,
Serena? It's where Susan--her elder sister, Miss Lovegrove"--this aside
to Dominic--"gave an address once to the members of the Society for the
Conversion of the Jews."

"No doubt I remember; but Susan is always giving addresses somewhere,"
Serena said loftily.

"And very good and kind of her it is to give addresses," Mrs. Lovegrove
rejoined. "Even the dear vicar says what a remarkable gift she has as a
speaker, and there's no question as to the worth of his praise."

"I wonder if it is--I mean I wonder if it is good and kind of Susan to
give addresses," Serena remarked. "Because of course she enjoys giving
them. Susan likes to have a number of people listening to her."

"But if the object is a noble one?"--this from Mrs. Lovegrove, a little
nonplussed and put about.

"Still, if you enjoy doing anything, how can it be good and kind to do
it?" Serena said argumentatively. "Susan is very fond of publicity. I
think people very often deceive themselves about their own motives."

She looked meaningly at Dominic Iglesias as she spoke. And he looked
back at her gravely and kindly, though with a slightly amused smile.
His thoughts had travelled away--they had done so pretty frequently
during the last twenty-four hours--to the smirking self-conscious
little house on the verge of Barnes Common. Unpromising though it had
appeared outwardly, yet within it he believed he had found a friend--a
friend who was also an enigma. Perhaps, as he now reflected, all women
are enigmas. Certainly they are amazingly different. He thought of
Poppy. He looked at Serena. Yes, doubtless they all are enigmas;
only--might Heaven forgive him the discourtesy--all are not enigmas
equally well wo

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