Man and Maid

He laughed; and when the echo of that laugh had died away in the quiet garden, she found that she could no longer even say that she did not believe.

Then he said: “I am going to die, and all the values of things have changed places. But I have done something: I haven’t buried my talent in a napkin. Oh, my Pretty, go away, go away! You make a fool of me again! I had almost forgotten how to be sorry that you couldn’t love me. Go away, go away! Go, go!”

He threw out his hands, and they lay along the grass. His face went down into the tangled green, and she saw his shoulders shaken with sobs. She dragged herself along the grass till she was close to him; then she lifted his shoulders, and drew his head on to her lap, and clasped her arms round him.

“My darling, my dear, my own!” she said. “You’re tired, and you’ve thought of nothing but your hateful book – your beautiful book, I mean – but you do love me really. Not as I love you, but still you do love me. Oh, Rupert, I’ll nurse you, I’ll take care of you, I’ll be your slave; and if you have to die, I shall die too, because there’ll be nothing left for me to do for you.”

He put an arm round her. “It’s worth dying to hear that,” he said, and brought his face to lie against her waist.

“But you shan’t die. You must come back to London with me now – this minute. The best opinion – ”

“I had the best,” he said. “Kiss me, my Pretty; oh, kiss me now that it does mean something! Let me dream that I’m going to live, and that you love me.”

He lifted his face, and she kissed him.

“Rupert, you’re not going to die. It can’t be true. It isn’t true. It shan’t be true.”

“It is; but I don’t mind now, except for you. I’m a selfish beast. But this is worth it all, and I have done something great. You told me to.”

“Tell me,” she said, “who was the doctor? Was he really the best?”

“It was Strongitharm,” he said wearily.

She drew a long breath and clasped him closer. Then she pushed him away and sprang to her feet.

“Stand up!” she said. “Let me look at you!”

He stood up, and she caught him by the elbows and stood looking at him. Twice she tried to speak, and twice no voice obeyed; then she said softly, huskily: “Rupert, listen! It’s all a horrid dream. Wake up. Haven’t you seen the papers? Strongitharm went mad several months ago. It was drink. He told all his patients they were going to die of this new disease of his that he’d invented. It’s all his madness. You’re well – I know it. Oh, Rupert, you aren’t going to die, and we love each other! Oh, God is very good!”

He drew a long breath.

“Are you sure? It’s like coming back from chloroform; and yet it hurts, and yet – but I wrote the book! Oh, Sybil, I shall never write another great book!”

“Ah yes, you will – you shall,” she said, looking at him with wet eyes.

“I have you,” he said. “Oh, thank God, I have you! but I shall never write another great book.”

And he never has.

But he is very happy. And Sybil cannot see that his later works are not in the same field with the first. She thinks the critics fools. And he loves her the more for her folly.

XIII

ALCIBIADES

“Oh, do let me have him in the carriage with me; he won’t hurt any one, he’s a perfect angel.”

“Angels like him travels in the dog-box,” said the porter.

Judy ended an agonised search for her pocket.

“Would you be offended,” she said, “if I offered you half-a-crown?”

“Give the guard a bob, Miss.” The hand curved into a cup resting on the carriage window, answered her question. “It’s more’n enough for him, being a single man, whereas me, I’m risking my situation and nine children at present to say no more, when I – ”

The turn of a railway key completed the sentence.

Judy and the angel were alone. He was a very nice angel – long-haired and brownly-black – his race the Aberdeen, his name Alcibiades. He put up a respectful and adoring nose, and his mistress kissed him between the eyes.

“How could they try to part us,” she asked, “when there’s only us two left?”

Alcibiades, with swimming eyes, echoed in a little moan of true love the question: “How could they?”

The question was put again by both later in the day. Judy was to stay with an aunt while her mother sailed to Madeira to meet there the father returning from South Africa, full of wounds and honour, and to spend on the Island what was left of the winter. Now it was December.

A thick fog covered London with a veil of ugliness; the cabman was aggrieved and aggrieving – Alcibiades had tried to bite him – and Judy was on the verge of tears when the fog at last lifted, and allowed her to be driven to her aunt’s suburban house, yellow brickish, with a slate roof and a lean forecourt, wherein cypresses, stunted and blackened, spoke eloquently of lives more blank than the death whose emblem they were.

Through the slits of the drab Venetian blinds, gaslight streamed into the winter dusk.

“There’ll be tea, anyhow,” sighed Judy, recklessly overpaying the cabman.

Inside the house where the lights were, the Aunt was surrounded by a dozen ladies of about her own age and station; “Tabbies” the world might have called them. All were busy with mysteries of many coloured silks and satins, lace and linen; at least all held such in their hands. The gathering was in fact a “working party” for the approaching bazaar. But the real work of bazaars is not done at parties.

“Yes,” the Aunt was saying, “so nice for dear Julia. I’m truly glad that she should begin her visit with a little gaiety. In parting or sorrow we should always seek to distract the mind, should we not, dear Mrs Biddle?”

“The young are all too easily distracted by the shows of this world,” said dear Mrs Biddle heavily.

And several ladies murmured approval.

“But you can’t exactly call a church bazaar the shows of this world, can you?” urged the Aunt, sitting very upright, all black and beady.

“It’s the thin end of the Rubicon sometimes,” said Mrs Biddle.

“Then why – ” began the youngest Tabby – and then the door bell rang, and every one said: “Here she is!”

The prim maid announced her, and she took two steps forward, and stood blinking in the gaslight with her hat on one side, and no gloves. Every one noticed that at once.

“Come in, my dear,” said the Aunt, rustling forward. “I have a few friends this afternoon, and – Oh, my gracious, what has happened!”

What had happened was quite simple. In her rustling advance some wandering trail of the Aunt’s black beadiness had caught on the knotted fringe of the table-cloth, and drawn this after her. A mass of silk and lace and ribbon lay sprinkled along the edges of the table where the Tabbies sat; a good store of needles, scissors, and cotton reels mingled with it. Now all this swept to the floor on the moving table-cloth, at the very instant when a rough brownly-black, long-eared person with a sharp nose and very muddy paws bounded into the room, to the full length of his chain. His bound landed him in the very middle of the ribbon-lace-cotton-reel confusion. Judy caught the dog up in her arms, and her apologies would have melted my heart, or yours, dear reader, in an instant. But Tabbies are Tabbies, and a bazaar is a bazaar. No more sewing was done that day; what was left of the afternoon proved all too short for the disentangling, the partial cleansing of the desecrated lace-cotton-reel-silk-muddle. And Alcibiades was tied up in the back-kitchen to the wheel of the patent mangle; he howled without ceasing.

“My dear,” said the Aunt, when tea was over, and the last Tabby had found her goloshes and gone home in them, “you are most welcome under any roof of mine, but – (may I ask you to close the baize door at the top of the kitchen stairs – thank you – and now this one – I am obliged. One cannot hear oneself speak for that terrible animal) – you must get rid of the cur to-morrow.”

“Oh, Aunt! he’s not a cur – he’s pure-bred.”

“Thank you,” said the Aunt, “I believe I am as good a judge of dogs as any lady. My own dear Snubs has only been dead a year and two months last Tuesday. I know that a well-bred dog should have smooth hair, at any rate – ”

The mother of Snubs had been distantly related to a family of respectable middle-class fox-terriers.