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“Not he!” said the daughter. But the mother was right.
Living alone in the queer little cottage, the world, his accustomed life, the Brydges woman, all seemed very far away. Miss Sheepmarsh was very near. Her frank enjoyment of his talk, her gay acceptance of their now almost constant companionship, were things new in his experience of women, and might have warned him that she at least was heart-whole. They would have done had he ever faced the fact that his own heart had caught fire. He bicycled with her along the pleasant Kentish lanes; he rowed with her on the little river of dreams; he read to her in the quiet of the August garden; he gave himself up wholly to the pleasure of those hours that flew like moments – those days that passed like hours. They talked of books and of the heart of books – and inevitably they talked of themselves. He talked of himself less than most men, but he learned much of her life. She was an ardent social reformer; had lived in an Art-and-Culture-for-the-People settlement in Whitechapel; had studied at the London School of Economics. Now she had come back to be with her mother, who needed her. She and her mother were almost alone in the world; there was enough to live on, but not too much. The letting of the little house had been Celia’s idea: its rent was merely for “luxuries.” He found out from the mother, when she came to tolerate him, that the “luxuries” were Celia’s – the luxuries of helping the unfortunate, feeding the hungry, and clothing little shivering children in winter time.
And all this while he had not heard a word of sister or cousin – of any one whom he might identify as the tobacconist’s assistant.
It was on an evening when the level sunbeams turned the meadows by the riverside to fine gold, and the willows and alders to trees of Paradise, that he spoke suddenly, leaning forward on his sculls. “Have you,” he asked, looking into her face, “any relation who is in a shop?”
“No,” said she; “why?”
“I only wondered,” said he coldly.
“But what an extraordinary thing to wonder!” she said. “Do tell me what made you think of it.”
“Very well,” he said, “I will. The person who told me that your mother had lodgings, also told me that your mother had a daughter who served in a shop.”
“Never!” she cried. “What a hateful idea!”
“A tobacconist’s shop,” he persisted; “and her name was Susannah Sheepmarsh.”
“Oh,” she answered, “that was me.” She spoke instantly and frankly, but she blushed crimson.
“And you’re ashamed of it, – Socialist?” he asked with a sneer, and his eyes were fierce on her burning face.
“I’m not! Row home, please. Or I’ll take the sculls if you’re tired, or your shoulder hurts. I don’t want to talk to you any more. You tried to trap me into telling a lie. You don’t understand anything at all. And I’ll never forgive you.”
“Yes, you will,” he said to himself again and again through the silence in which they plashed down the river. But when he was alone in his cottage, the truth flew at him and grappled him with teeth and claws. He loved her. She loved, or had loved – or might have loved – or might love – his brother. He must go: and the next morning he went without a word. He left a note for Mrs Sheepmarsh, and a cheque in lieu of notice; and letter and cheque were signed with his name in full.
He went back to the old life, but the taste of it all was gone. Shooting parties, house parties, the Brydges woman even, prettier than ever, and surer of all things: how could these charm one whose fancy, whose heart indeed, wandered for ever in a green garden or by a quiet river with a young woman who had served in a tobacconist’s shop, and who would be some day his brother’s wife?
The days were long, the weeks seemed interminable. And all the time there was the white house, as it had been; there were mother and daughter living the same dainty, dignified, charming life to which he had come so near. Why had he ever gone there? Why had he ever interfered? He had meant to ensnare her heart just to free his brother from an adventuress. An adventuress! He groaned aloud.
“Oh, fool! But you are punished!” he said; “she’s angry now – angrier even than that evening on the river, for she knows now that even the name you gave her to call you by was not the one your own people use. This comes of trying to act like an ass in a book.”
The months went on. The Brydges woman rallied him on his absent air. She spoke of dairymaids. He wondered how he could ever have found her amusing, and whether her vulgarity was a growth, or had been merely hidden.
And all the time Celia and the white house were dragging at his heart-strings. Enough was left of the fool that he constantly reproached himself for having been, to make him sure that had he had no brother, had he met her with no duty to the absent to stand between them she would have loved him.
Then one day came the South African mail, and it brought a letter from his brother, the lad who had had the sense to find a jewel behind a tobacconist’s counter, and had trusted it to him.
The letter was long and ineffective. It was the postscript that was vital.
“I say, I wonder whether you’ve seen anything of Susannah? What a young fool I was ever to think I could be happy with a girl out of a shop. I’ve met the real and only one now – she’s a nurse; her father was a clergyman in Northumberland. She’s such a bright little thing, and she’s never cared for any one before me. Wish me luck.”
John Selborne almost tore his hair.
“Well, I can’t save him across half the world! Besides – ”
At thirty-seven one should have outgrown the wild impulses of youth. He said this to himself, but all the same it was the next train to Yalding that he took.
Fate was kind; at Yalding it had almost always been kind. The glow of red firelight shone out over the snow through the French window among the brown jasmine stalks.
Mrs Sheepmarsh was out, Miss Sheepmarsh was at home. Would he step this way?
He stepped into the presence of the girl. She rose from the low chair by the fire, and the honest eyes looked angrily at him.
“Look here,” he said, as the door closed between them and the maid-servant, “I’ve come to tell you things. Just this once let me talk to you; and afterwards, if you like, I can go away and never come back.”
“Sit down,” she said coldly. “I don’t feel friends with you at all, but if you want to speak, I suppose you must.”
So then he told her everything, beginning with his brother’s letter, and ending with his brother’s letter.
“And, of course, I thought it couldn’t be you, because of your being called Celia; and when I found out it really was you, I had to go away, because I wanted to be fair to the boy. But now I’ve come back.”
“I think you’re the meanest person I ever knew,” she said; “you thought I liked your brother, and you tried to make me like you so that you might throw me over and show him how worthless I was. I hate you and despise you.”
“I didn’t really try,” he said miserably.
“And you took a false name to deceive us.”
“I didn’t: it really is my second name.”
“And you came here pretending to be nice and a gentleman, and – ” She was lashing herself to rage, with the lash of her own voice, as women will. John Selborne stood up suddenly.
“Be quiet,” he said, and she was quiet. “I won’t hear any more reproaches, unless – Listen, I’ve done wrong – I’ve owned it. I’ve suffered for it. God knows I’ve suffered. You liked me in the summer: can’t you try to like me again? I want you more than anything else in the world. Will you marry me?”
“Marry you,” she cried scornfully; “you who – ”
“Pardon me,” he said. “I have asked a question. Give me no for an answer, and I will go. Say yes, and then you may say anything else you like. Yes or no. Shall I go or stay? Yes or no. No other word will do.”
She looked at him, her head thrown back, her eyes flashing with indignation. A world of scorn showed in the angle of the chin, the poise of her head. Her lips opened. Then suddenly her eyes met his, and she knew that he meant what he said. She covered her face with her hands.
“Don’t – don’t cry, dear one,” he said. “What is it? You’ve only to choose. Everything is for you to decide.”
Still she did not speak.
“Good-bye, then,” he said, and turned. But she caught at him blindly.
“Don’t – don’t go!” she cried. “I didn’t think I cared about you in the summer, but since you went away, oh, you don’t know how I’ve wanted you!”
“Well,” he said, when her tears were dried, “aren’t you going to scold me?”
“Don’t!” said she.
“At least tell me all about my brother – and why he thought you would be so ready to marry him.”
“That? Oh, that was only his conceit. You know I always do talk to people in railway carriages and things. I suppose he thought it was only him I talked to.”
“And the name?”
“I – I thought if I said my name was Susannah he wouldn’t get sentimental.”
“You ‘took a false name to deceive him’?”
“Don’t – oh, don’t!”
“And the tobacco shop?”
“Ah – that rankles?” She raised her head to look at him.
“Not it,” he answered coolly. “I simply don’t believe it.”
“Why? But you’re quite right. It was a woman in my district in London, and I took the shop for her for three days, because her husband was dying, and she couldn’t get any one else to help her. It was – it was rather fun – and – and – ”
“And you wouldn’t tell me about it, because you didn’t want me to know how proud you were of it.”
“Proud? Ah, you do understand things! The man died, and I had given her those three days with him. I wasn’t proud, was I? – only glad that I could. So glad – so glad!”
“But you let my brother think – ”
“Oh yes, I let him think it was my trade; I thought it might make him not be silly. You see, I always knew he couldn’t understand things.”
“Celia?”
“Yes?”
“And have you really forgiven me?”
“Yes, yes, I forgive you! But I never should have if – There’s mother at the front door. Let me go. I want to let her in myself.”
“If?”
“Let me go. If – ”
“If?”
“If you hadn’t understood and – ”
“Yes?”
“If you hadn’t come back to me!”
XII
WHILE IT IS YET DAY
“And is it really true? Are you going to govern the Fortunate Islands?”
“I am, indeed – or rather, to be accurate, I am going to deputy-govern them – I mean, father is – for a year.”
“A whole year!” he said, looking down at her fan. “What will London do without you?”
“London will do excellently,” she answered – “and that’s my pet fan, and it’s not used to being tied into knots.” She took it from him.
“And what shall I do without you?”
“Oh! laugh and rhyme and dance and dine. You’ll go out to the proper number of dinners and dances, and make the proper measure of pretty little speeches and nice little phrases; and you’ll do your reviews, and try to make them as like your editor’s as you can; and you’ll turn out your charming little rondeaux and triolets, and the year will simply fly. Heigho! I’m glad I’m going to see something big, if it’s only the Atlantic.”
“You are very cruel,” he said.
“Am I? But it’s not cruel to be cruel if nobody’s hurt, is it? And I am so tired of nice little verses and pretty little dances and dainty little dinners. Oh, if I were only a man!”
“Thank God you’re not!” said he.
“If I were a man, I would do just one big thing in my life, even if I had to settle down to a life of snippets and trifles afterwards.”
Her eyes were shining. They always glittered, but now they were starry. The drifted white folds across her breast stirred to her quickened breath.
“If you loved me, Sybil, I could do something great!” said he.
“But I don’t,” she said – “at any rate, not now; and I’ve told you so a dozen times. My dear Rupert, the man who needs a woman to save him isn’t worth the saving.”
“What would you call a big thing?” he asked. “Must I conquer an empire for you, or start a new religion? Or shall I merely get the Victoria Cross, or become Prime Minister?”
“Don’t sneer,” said she; “it doesn’t become you at all. You’ve no idea how horrid you look when you’re sneering. Why don’t you – ? Oh! but it’s no good! By the way, what a charming cover Housman has designed for your Veils and Violets! It’s a dear little book. Some of the verses are quite pretty.”
“Go on,” said he, “rub it in. I know I haven’t done much yet; but there’s plenty of time. And how can one do any good work when one is for ever sticking up one’s heart like a beastly cocoanut for you to shy at? If you’d only marry me, Sybil, you should see how I would work!”
“May I refer you to my speech – not the last one, but the one before that.”
He laughed; then he sighed.
“Ah, my Pretty,” he said, “it was all very well, and pleasant enough to be scolded by you when I could see you every day; but now – ”
“How often,” she asked calmly, “have I told you that you must not call me that? It was all very well when we were children; but now – ”
“Look here,” he said, leaning towards her, “there’s not a soul about; they’re in the middle of the Lancers. Let me kiss you once – it can’t matter to you – and it will mean so very much to me.”
“That’s just it,” she said; “if it didn’t mean – ”
“Then it shan’t mean anything but good-bye. It’s only about eight years since you gave up the habit of kissing me on every occasion.”
She looked down, then she looked to right and left, then suddenly she looked at him.
“Very well,” she said suddenly.
“No,” he said; “I won’t have it unless it does mean something.”
There was a silence. “Our dance, I think?” said the voice of one bending before her, and she was borne away on the arm of the partner from whom she had been hiding.
Rupert left early. He had not been able to secure any more dances with her. She left late. When she came to think the evening over, she sighed more than once. “I wish I loved him a little less, or a little more,” she said; “and I wish – yes, I do wish he had. I don’t suppose he’ll care a bit for me when I come back.”
So she set sail for the Fortunate or other Isles, and in dainty verses on loss and absence he found some solace for the pain of parting with her. Yet the pain was a real thing, and grew greater, and life seemed to have no taste, even tobacco no charm. She had always been a part of his life since the days when nothing but a sunk fence divided his father’s park from her father’s rabbit-warren. He grew paler, and he developed a wrinkle or two, and a buoyant friend meeting him in Piccadilly assured him that he looked very much off colour, and in his light-hearted way the friend advised the sort of trip round the world from which yesterday had seen his own jovial return.
“Do you all the good in the world, my boy. ’Pon my soul, you have a tired sort of look, as if you’d got some of these jolly new diseases people have taken to dying of lately – appendi-what’s-its-name, you know, and things like that. You book your passage to Marseilles at once. So long! You take my tip.”
What Rupert took was a cab. He looked at himself in one of the little horseshoe mirrors. He certainly did look ill; and he felt ill – tired, bored, and nothing seemed worth while. He drove to a doctor friend, who punched and prodded him and listened with tubes at his chest and back, looked grave, and said: “Go to Strongitharm – he’s absolutely at the top. Twenty-guinea fee. But it’s better to know where we are. You go to Strongitharm.”
Rupert went, and Strongitharm gave his opinion. He gave it with a voice that trembled with sympathy, and he supplemented it with brandy-and-soda, which he happened to have quite handy.
Then Rupert disappeared from London and from his friends – disappeared suddenly and completely. He had plenty of money, and no relations near enough to be inconveniently anxious. He went away and he left no address, and he did not even write excuses to the people with whom he should have danced and dined, nor to the editor whose style he should have gone on imitating.
The buoyant friend rejoiced at the obvious and natural following of his advice.
“He was looking a little bit below himself, you know, and I said: ‘Go round the world; there’s nothing like it,’ and, by Jove! he went. Now, that’s the kind of man I like – knows good advice when he gets it, and acts on it right off.”
So the buoyant one spread the rumour that ran its course and died, and had to be galvanised into life once more to furnish an answer to Sybil’s questionings, when, returning from the Fortunate or other Isles, she asked for news of her old friend. And the rumour did not satisfy her. She had had time to think – there was plenty of time to think in those Islands whose real name escapes me – and she knew very much more than she had known on the evening when Rupert had broken her pet fan and asked for a kiss which he had not taken. She found herself quite fervently disbelieving in the grand tour theory – and the disbelief was so strong that it distorted life and made everything else uninteresting. Sybil took to novel-reading as other folks have in their time taken to drink. She was young, and she could still lose herself in a book. One day she lost herself most completely in a new novel from Mudie’s, a book that every one was talking about. She lost herself; and suddenly, in a breathless joy that was agony too, she found him. This was his book. No one but Rupert could have written it – all that description of the park, and the race when she rode the goat and he rode the pig – and – she turned the pages hastily. Ah yes, Rupert had written this! She put the book down and she dressed herself as prettily as she knew how, and she went in a hansom cab to the office of the publisher of that book, and on the way she read. And more and more she saw how great a book it was, and how no one but Rupert could have written just that book. Thrill after thrill of pride ran through her. He had done this for her– because of what she had said.
Arrived at the publisher’s, she was met by a blank wall. Neither partner was visible. The senior clerk did not know the address of the author of “Work While it is Yet Day,” nor the name of him; and it was abundantly evident that even if he had known, he would not have told.
Sybil’s prettiness and her charm so wrought upon this dry-as-dust person, however, that he volunteered the address of the literary agent through whom the book had been purchased. And Sybil found him on a first floor in one of those imposing new buildings in Arundel Street. He was very nice and kind, but he could not give his client’s name without his client’s permission.
The disappointment was bitter.
“But I’ll send a letter for you,” he tried to soften it with.
Sybil’s self-control almost gave way. A tear glistened on her veil.
“I do want to see him most awfully,” she said, “and I know he wants to see me. It was I who rode the goat in the book, you know – ”
She did not realise how much she was admitting, but the literary agent did.
“Look here,” he said smartly, “I’ll wire to him at once; and if he says I may, I’ll give you the address. Can you call in an hour?”
Sybil wandered on the Embankment for a conscientious hour, and then went back.
The literary agent smiled victory.
“The answer is ‘Yes,’” he said, and handed her a slip of paper —
“Three Chimneys,
Near Paddock Wood,
Kent.”
“Have you a time-table?” asked she.
The dusty, hired fly lumbered and jolted along the white roads, and in it, as in the train, Sybil read the novel, the book every one was talking about – the great book – and her heart was full to overflowing of joy and pride and other things.
The carriage shook itself fiercely and stopped, and she looked up from the last page of the book with eyes that swam a little, to find herself at the broken wooden gate of a low, white house, shabbily blindless, and a long way off its last painting and whitewashing.
She paid for the carriage and dismissed it. She would walk back to the station with him. She passed in at the rickety gate and up the flagged path, and a bell in answer to her touch jangled loudly, as bells do in empty houses.
Her dress was greeny, with lace about it of the same colour as very nice biscuits, and her hat seemed to be made entirely of yellow roses. She was not unconscious of these facts.
Steps sounded within, and they, like the bell, seemed to sound in an empty house. The door opened, and there was Rupert. Sybil’s lips were half-parted in a smile that should match the glow of gladness that must shine on his face when he saw her – Her – the unattainable, the unapproachable, at his very door. But her smile died away, for his face was grave. Only in his eyes something that was bright and fierce and like a flame leapt up and shone a moment.
“You!” he said.
And Sybil answered as most people do to such questions: “Yes, me.” There was a pause: her eyes wandered from his to the blank face of the house, the tangle of the untidy garden. “Mayn’t I come in?” she asked.
“Yes; oh yes, come in!”
She crossed the threshold – the doorstep was dank with green mould – and followed him into a room. It was a large room, and perfectly bare: no carpet, no curtains, no pictures. Loose bricks were arranged as a fender, and dead embers strewed the hearth. There was a table; there was a chair; there were scattered papers, pens, and ink. From the window one saw the neglected garden, and beyond it the round shoulders of the hills.
He drew forward the one chair, and she sat down. He stood with his back to the fireless grate.
“You are very, very pretty,” he said suddenly. And the explanation of his disappearance suddenly struck her like a blow between the eyes. But she was not afraid. When all a woman’s thoughts, day and night for a year, have been given to one man, she is not afraid of him; no, not even if he be what Sybil for one moment feared that this man was. He read the fear in her eyes.
“No, I’m not mad,” he said. “Sybil, I’m very glad you came. Come to think of it, I’m very glad to see you. It is better than writing. I was just going to write out everything, as well as I could. I expect I should have sent it to you. You know I used to care for you more than I did for any one.”
Sybil’s hands gripped the arms of the windsor chair. Was he really – was it through her that he was —
“Come out,” she said. “I hate this place; it stifles me. And you’ve lived here – worked here!”
“I’ve lived here for eleven months and three days,” he said. “Yes, come out.”
So they went out through the burning July sun, and Sybil found a sheltered spot between a larch and a laburnum.
“Now,” she said, throwing off her hat and curling her green, soft draperies among the long grass. “Come and sit down and tell me – ”
He threw himself on the grass.
“Sure it won’t bore you?” he asked.
She took his hand and held it. He let her take it; but his hand did not hold hers.
“I seem to remember,” he said, “the last time I saw you – you were going away, or something. You told me I ought to do something great; and I told you – or, anyway, I thought to myself – that there was plenty of time for that. I’d always had a sort of feeling that I could do something great whenever I chose to try. Well – yes, you did go away, of course; I remember perfectly – and I missed you extremely. And some one told me I looked ill; and I went to my doctor, and he sent me to a big swell, and he said I’d only got about a year to live. So then I began to think.”
Her fingers tightened on the unresponsive hand.
“And I thought: Here I’ve been thirty years in this world. I’ve the experience of twenty-eight and a half – I suppose the first little bit doesn’t count. If I’d had time, I meant to write another book, just to show exactly what a man feels when he knows he’s only got a year to live, and nothing done – nothing done.”
“I won’t believe it,” she said. “You don’t look ill; you’re as lean as a greyhound, but – ”
“It may come any day now,” he went on quietly; “but I’ve done something. The book – it is great. They all say so; and I know it, too. But at first! Just think of gasping out your breath, and feeling that all the things you had seen and known and felt were wasted – lost – going out with you, and that you were going out like the flame of a candle, taking everything you might have done with you.”