ARDILAUN. You say she only works at night.

CYNICUS. And your matutinal repast?

ARDILAUN. My milk and lentils at eight--anyone could manage that----

CYNICUS. And Let.i.tia's coffee and roll in bed at nine, her _dejeuner a la Fourchette_ at eleven, your lunch at one, her snack at four, your tea at five----

ARDILAUN. Come, you're overdrawing it. We should at least have dinner together.

CYNICUS. Yes; Let.i.tia is what you call a flesh-eater and wine-bibber like myself. We'd have a good square meal, finishing up with some fine "fruity." I forgot; in the ideal household the "pug's" noted port would be conspicuous by its absence.

ARDILAUN. Poets don't gamble to fill their cellars.

CYNICUS. So they go empty. Poor Let.i.tia!

ARDILAUN. Let.i.tia would prefer love to the rarest vintage that was ever pressed.

CYNICUS. How about the machinery? The nectar of the G.o.ds won't drive a cog-wheel.

ARDILAUN. I suppose I have machinery, as you call it?

CYNICUS. Greased on special principles, too. Drop your principles and bang goes everything.

ARDILAUN. Puns won't silver your moral bolus. You can't convince me.

CYNICUS. Morally? I don't attempt to, but practically I can show you it is one thing to love flowers, rave over their colour and scent, and another to crack your spine in digging and hoeing, watering, slug-catching, and all the rest of it.

ARDILAUN. You've shifted your premises.

CYNICUS. Pardon me; instead of preaching I used the Kodak. Tableau: Two precious exotics; to right, the "pug," armed with spade and watering-pot; to left, your wife, darning-needle in hand, impaling slugs.

ARDILAUN. Bosh! You're too irritating for words; I'm off. (_Exit in a rage._)

CYNICUS. To develop the negative, eh?

Pain's Pensioners.

"Love's wings are over-fleet, And like the panther's feet The feet of love."

The little travelling clock on his mantel struck with soft, gong-like chime; it seemed to speak from a great way off, like a person facing you, who answers your questions with an absent eye. Half-past six, and he was due from the Continent every moment. His lamp--green-shaded because his vision was weak from over-work--some soda water and a spirit stand were awaiting him on the table, and a small ma.s.s of letters and papers was congregated in front of his chair. All these were tones in the gamut of expectation that found its keynote in myself.

We had been "inseparables" before his going, and we would be so never again I felt convinced. She had absorbed him: mind, desire, future were packed in the little palm of her hand. Yet I was not vulgarly jealous. I loved Aubrey Yeldham better than I could have loved a brother, but I had seen her and had caught the reflection of his sentiment, though in a tempered degree. I had met her but once, for on the day after our chance encounter--in a verdurous Devon lane where she had lost her bearings and we had come to her a.s.sistance--I had been summoned to the bedside of a sick relative in town. Returning to the old haunts, I naturally expected to resume our fishing expeditions in the picturesque valley of the Exe, but I soon discovered Yeldham to have found other pellucid purple depths that interested him superlatively. I had watched the drama from a distance, and administered cautions with the cool pulse of an umpire.

But he was past redemption. I suspected the truth when I made an impressionist sketch of her--milky complexion, dead copper chevelure and pulpy eyelids like some Greuze dreamer--and saw his greedy eyes fixed on the canvas, not daring to name a price, too delicate to crave a charitable dole. I learnt more from the att.i.tude of reverence, almost of awe, wherewith he received the gift from my hands and hurriedly carried it to his own sanctum, hid it from me, the maker of it, as though to veil its charms from alien eye. I knew Aubrey Yeldham well, had shared many of his escapades, and winked apprehensively at others. But here I was of no use, and decided we had come to the supreme moment of life--there is always one--when we must let things slide.

Her name was Ruth Lascelles, and she was a widow; that was the sum total of our knowledge of her. She might have been twenty, but we estimated her age at twenty-five, deducing our theory from a certain fatigued languor of voice and expression that accorded ill with the girlish satin of her skin. This was arrived at on the first day of our meeting--we had not discussed her since. I had not been Yeldham's friend, his disciple, a mental sitter at his feet, without learning to walk warily where the fuse of his pa.s.sions flickered. For some time there was a tacit agreement to ignore the impending danger, to talk of trivialities, wheeling round the central idea without ever settling there. But one morning when he had called at the little farm cottage where she lived and had found her flown without a word or a regret, his despair had been too much for him. The whole story rolled from his lips: his love for her, her seeming reciprocity, their wanderings in the woods, her reliant, trusting att.i.tude--which had taught him to wish himself some knight of the Round Table and not a mere besmirched man of many pa.s.sions--her flutterings of childish gaiety and sombre philosophy that had tinted her speech garishly as rainbows on thunder-clouds: he gave forth all, and asked, with an expression jejune as Sahara, what the sudden flight could mean.

I was so out of it, as the phrase is, that I could volunteer small elucidation: that she was a coquette of the first order seemed the most feasible solution, and I offered it. He derided the notion--it was apparently so frivolous a venture that it failed to anger him--he never set hands on the cudgels for defence. "She is not shallow," he had merely said, and his poor brain had tackled the enigma so often and to so little purpose that its purport had become an unmeaning and vacuous reiteration. But one day, after we had returned to town and were working well in harness, he with his book, I with my ill.u.s.trations for it, he burst out afresh.

"She unintentionally let out where she lived: it is a little village on the coast of France. She must have returned."

"Well?" I said, suspending my work and pretending to extract a hair from the fine point of my drawing-pen.

"Well," he burst out, "the world is our oyster, and if we shirk opening it we can't hope to filch pearls!"

"That means?" I hinged expectantly.

"That means, in plain words, that I don't intend to give up the biggest pearl that G.o.d ever sent to make a man rich."

"You intend to follow her?" I questioned--needlessly, indeed, for his kindling eye contained a fire of decision and energy that for fourteen days, since the sorry one of her disappearance, had smouldered.

"Yes, follow her, make her love me by every art, divine or devilish--I don't care which, so long as she loves me--and keep her till the same grave closes over us."

And he went.

He had been absent but a week when I received the telegram announcing his intended return. I stood--with my back against the mantel, and hands warming themselves behind my sheltering coat-tails--eager to recognise his rampant mount of the stairs, to feel the clasp of his hand or its thump on my shoulder-blade, and hear his cheery "Congratulate me, old fellow!" that I knew must come. A cab stopped outside, and a key turned in the lock. Then a slow, heavy tread ascended. We met in the pa.s.sage.

There was no need for more than a glance at him to abridge the exuberance of welcome that had bubbled to my lips. I settled with the cabman, and in a cowardly fashion lingered unduly outside among the rugs and the travelling impedimenta. I felt somehow that he would prefer to come face to face with his home in silence. He drank a pretty stiff dose of brandy before sitting down, and moved the lamp away from his eyes.

"Letters," I indicated.

"Bother letters! Open them or throw them in the fire."

I did neither, but transferred them to his bureau. Then, seeing he was disinclined for conversation, I relit my old briar pipe that had been suffered to go out, and lolled in an arm-chair facing the fender.

Presently I surveyed him from the side of an eye. His chin was sunk on his chest, he was staring at his boots with the blank look of a gambler who has staked his last. There was something in his att.i.tude that made me wish myself a dog or a woman, that I might lick, or croon, or croodle some softness into that stony mask. The silence was so long--so pregnant with unsyllabled anguish--that at last I closed a warm hand over his fingers as they clasped the arm-end of his chair.

"Well?"

"Well," he said, huskily, starting a little from his coma and poking a coal with the toe of his boot, "it's over."

"So I suppose; and the pearl was not----"

"Not for my handling," he interrupted. "I knew you'd think something hard of her, but you won't, you won't when I tell you----"

He stretched his hand to his gla.s.s and emptied it before continuing.

"It came about sooner than I intended--the horizon was so serene I wanted to lay-to for a bit--but it was no use. We were talking of something--I forget what--and I made a quotation. You know the chap who said, 'Show me a woman's clothes at different periods of her life and I will tell you her history'?"

"Yes; I forget his name, but I think it was a Frenchman."

"Well, I quoted him. Pretended to a like perspicacity: it was a sneaking, cowardly ruse to know more of her."

"Had she told you nothing?"

"All this week I had known no more than what we both knew or surmised--that there was a secret panel somewhere."

"And in your tapping for hollows----?"