[Ill.u.s.tration: There seemed to him something almost unearthly about this woman with her soft grey gown and marble face]

Presently she came and sat down beside him.

"Forgive me!" she murmured. "It does me so much good to have you here.

I am very foolish!"

"Tell me about it!"

She frowned very slightly, and looked away at a star.

"It is nothing! It is beginning to seem less than nothing! I have written a book for women, for the sake of women, because my heart ached for their sufferings, and because I too have felt the fire. I wonder whether it was really an evil book," she added, still looking away from him at that single star in the dark sky. "People say so! The newspapers say so! Yet it was a true book! I wrote it from my soul,--I wrote it with my own blood. I have not been a good woman, but I have been a pure woman! When I wrote it, I was lonely; I have always been lonely. But I thought, now I shall know what it is like to have friends. Many women will understand that I have suffered in doing this thing for their sakes! For it was my own life which I lay bare, my own life, my own sufferings, my own agony! I thought, they will come to me and they will thank me for it! I shall have sympathy and I shall have friends.... And now my book is written, and I am wiser. I know now that woman does not want her freedom! Though they drag her down into h.e.l.l, the chains of her slavery have grown around her heart and have become precious to her! Tell me, are those pure women who willingly give their souls and their bodies in marriage to men who have sinned and who will sin again? They do it without disguise, without shame, for position, or for freedom, or for money! yet there are other women whom they call courtesans, and from whose touch they s.n.a.t.c.h away the hem of their skirts in horror! Oh, it is terrible! There can be no corruption worse than this in h.e.l.l!"

"Yours has been the common disappointment of all reformers," he said gravely. "Grat.i.tude is the rarest tribute the world ever offers to those who have laboured to cleanse it. When you are a little older you will have learnt your lesson. But it is always very hard to learn....

Tell me about to-night!"

She raised her head a little. A faint spot of colour stained her cheek.

"There was one woman who praised me, who came to see me, and sent me cards to go to her house. To-night I went. Foolishly I had hoped a good deal from it! I did not like Lady Truton herself, but I hoped that I should meet other women there who would be different! It was a new experience to me to be going amongst my own s.e.x. I was like a child going to her first party. I was quite excited, almost nervous. I had a little dream,--there would be some women there--one would be enough--with whom I might be friends, and it would make life very different to me to have even one woman friend. But they were all horrid. They were vulgar, and one woman, she took me on one side and praised my book. She agreed, she said, with every word in it! She had found out that her husband had a mistress,--some chorus-girl,--and she was repaying him in his own coin. She too had a lover--and for every infidelity of his she was repaying him in this manner. She dared to a.s.sume that I--I should approve of her conduct; she asked me to go and see her! My G.o.d! it was hideous."

Matravers laid his hand upon hers, and leaned forward in his chair.

"Lady Truton's was the very worst house you could have gone to," he said gently. "You must not be too discouraged all at once. The women of her set, thank G.o.d, are not in the least typical Englishwomen.

They are fast and silly,--a few, I am afraid, worse. They make use of the free discussions in these days of the relations between our s.e.xes, to excuse grotesque extravagances in dress and habits which society ought never to pardon. Do not let their judgments or their misinterpretations trouble you! You are as far above them, Berenice, as that little star is from us."

"I do not pretend to be anything but a woman," she said, bending her head, "and to stand alone always is very hard."

"It is very hard for a man! It must be very much harder for a woman.

But, Berenice, you would not call yourself absolutely friendless!"

She raised her head for a moment. Her dark eyes were wonderfully soft.

"Who is there that cares?" she murmured.

He touched the tips of her fingers. Her soft, warm hand yielded itself readily, and slid into his.

"Do I count for no one?" he whispered.

There was a silence in the little room. The yellow glare had faded from the sky, and a night wind was blowing softly in. A clock in the distance struck one. Together they sat and gazed out upon the darkness. Looking more than once into her pale face, Matravers realized again that wonderful change. His own emotions were curiously disturbed. He, himself, so remarkable through all his life for a changeless serenity of purpose, and a fixed masterly control over his whole environment, felt himself suddenly like a rudderless ship at the mercy of a great unknown sea. A sense of drifting was upon him.

They were both drifting. Surely this little room, with its dim light and shadows and its faint odour of roses, had become a hotbed of tragedy. He had imagined that death itself was something like this,--a dissolution of all fixed purposes. And with it all, this remnant of life, if it were but a remnant, seemed suddenly to be flowing through his veins with all the rich, surpa.s.sing sweetness of some exquisite symphony!

"You count for a great deal," she said. "If you had not come to me, I think that I must have died.... If I were to lose you ... I think that I should die."

She threw herself back in her chair with a gesture of complete abandonment. Her arms hung loosely down over its sides. The moonlight, which had been gradually gathering strength, shone softly upon her pale face and on the soft, l.u.s.trous pearls at her throat. Her dark, wet eyes seemed touched with smouldering fire. She looked at him. He sprang to his feet and walked restlessly up and down the room. His forehead was hot and dry, and his hands were trembling.

"There is not any reason," he said, halting suddenly in front of her, "why we should lose one another. I was coming to-morrow morning to make a proposition to you. If you accept it, we shall be forced to see a great deal of one another."

"Yes?"

"You perhaps did not know that I had any ambitions as a dramatic author. Yet my first serious work after I left Oxford was a play; I took it up yesterday."

"You have really written a play," she murmured, "and you never told me."

"At least I am telling you now," he reminded her; "I am telling you before any one, because I want your help."

"You want what?"

"I want you to help me by taking the part of my heroine. I read it yesterday by appointment to Fergusson. He accepted it at once on the most liberal terms. I told him there was one condition--that the part of my heroine must be offered to you, if you would accept it. There was a little difficulty, as, of course, Miss Robinson is a fixture at the Pall Mall. However, Fergusson saw you last night from the back of the dress circle, and this morning he has agreed. It only remains for you to read, or allow me to read to you the play."

"Do you mean to say that you are offering me the princ.i.p.al part in a play of yours--at the Pall Mall--with Fergusson?"

"Well, I think that is about what it comes to," he a.s.sented.

She rose to her feet and took his hands in hers.

"You are too good--much too good to me," she said softly. "I dare not take it; I am not strong enough."

"It will be you, or no one," he said decidedly. "But first I am going to read you the play. If I may, I shall bring it to you to-morrow."

"I want to ask you something," she said abruptly. "You must answer me faithfully. You are doing this, you are making me this offer because you think that you owe me something. It is a sort of reparation for your attack upon Herdrine. I want to know if it is that."

"I can a.s.sure you," he said earnestly, "that I am not nearly so conscientious. I wrote the play solely as a literary work. I had no thought of having it produced, of offering it to anybody. Then I saw you at the New Theatre; I think that you inspired me with a sort of dramatic excitement. I went home and read my play. Bathilde seemed to me then to speak with your tongue, to look at me with your eyes, to be clothed from her soul outwards with your personality. In the morning I wrote to Fergusson."

"I want to believe you," she said softly; "but it seems so strange. I am no actress like Adelaide Robinson; I am afraid that if I accept your offer, I may hurt the play. She is popular, and I am unknown."

"She has talent," he said, "and experience; you have genius, which is far above either. I am not leaving you any choice at all. To-morrow I shall bring the play."

"You may at least do that," she answered. "It will be a pleasure to hear it read. Come to luncheon, and we will have a long afternoon."

Matravers took his leave with a sense of relief. Their farewell had been cordial enough, but unemotional. Yet even he, ignorant of women and their ways as he was, was conscious that they had entered together upon a new phase of their knowledge of each other. The touch of their fingers, the few conventional words which pa.s.sed between them, as she leaned over the staircase watching him descend, seemed to him to savour somehow of mockery. He pa.s.sed out from her presence into the cool, soft night, dazed, not a little bewildered at this new strong sense of living, which had set his pulses beating to music and sent his blood rushing through his body with a new sweetness. Yet with it all he was distressed and unhappy. He was confronted with the one great influence of life against which he had deliberately set his face.

CHAPTER VIII

Matravers began to find himself, for the first time in his life, seriously attracted by a woman. He realized it in some measure as he walked homeward in the early morning, after this last interview with Berenice; he knew it for an absolute fact on the following evening as he walked through the crowded streets back to his rooms with the ma.n.u.script of the play which he had been reading to her in his pocket. He felt himself moving in what was to some extent an unreal atmosphere. His senses were tingling with the excitement of the last few hours--for the first time he knew the full fascination of a woman's intellectual sympathy. He had gone to his task wholly devoid of any pleasurable antic.i.p.ation. It spoke much for the woman's tact that before he had read half a dozen pages he was not only completely at his ease, but was experiencing a new and very pleasurable sensation. The memory of it was with him now--he had no mind to disturb it by any vague alarm as to the future of their relationship.

In Piccadilly he met Fergusson, who turned and walked with him.

"I have been to your rooms, Matravers," the actor said. "I want to know whether you have arranged with your friend?"

"I have just left her," Matravers replied. "She appears to like the play, and has consented to play Bathilde."

The actor smiled. Was Matravers really so simple, or did he imagine that an actress whose name was as yet unknown would hesitate to play with him at the Pall Mall Theatre. Yet he himself had been hoping that there might be some difficulty,--he had a "Bathilde" of his own who would take a great deal of pacifying. The thing was settled now however.

"I should like," he said, "to make her acquaintance at once."