"Well, I wash my hands of them," said Zora with a sigh, as if bereft of dear responsibilities. "No doubt they're happy in their own way."

And that, for a long time, was the end of the matter. The house, cleaned and polished, glittered like the instrument room of a man-of-war, and no master or mistress came to bestow on Wiggleswick's toil the meed of their approbation. The old man settled down again to well-earned repose, and the house grew dusty and dingy again, and dustier and dingier as the weeks went on.

It has been before stated that things happen slowly in Nunsmere, even the reawakening of Zora's nostalgia for the Great World and Life and the Secrets of the Earth. But things do happen there eventually, and the time came when Zora found herself once again too big for the little house. She missed Emmy's periodical visits. She missed the regulation of Septimus. She missed her little motor expeditions with Sypher, who had sold his car and was about to sell "The Kurhaus, Kilburn Priory." The Cure seemed to have transformed itself from his heart to his nerves. He talked of it--or so it appeared to her--with more braggadocio than enthusiasm. He could converse of little else. It was going to smash Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy to the shreds of its ointment boxes. The deepening vertical line between the man's brows she did not notice, nor did she interpret the wistful look in his eyes when he claimed her help. She was tired of the Cure and the Remedy and Sypher's fantastic need of her as ally. She wanted Life, real, quivering human Life. It was certainly not to be found in Nunsmere, where faded lives were laid away in lavender. For sheer sensations she began to tolerate the cynical a.n.a.lysis of the Literary Man from London. She must go forth on her journeyings again. She had already toyed with the idea when, with Septimus's aid, she had mapped out voyages round the world. Now she must follow it in strenuous earnest. The Callenders had cabled her an invitation to come out at once to Los Angeles. She cabled back an acceptance.

"So you're going away from me?" said Sypher, when she announced her departure.

There was a hint of reproach in his voice which she resented.

"You told me in Monte Carlo that I ought to have a mission in life. I can't find it here, so I'm going to seek one in California. What happens in this Sleepy Hollow of a place that a live woman can concern herself with?"

"There's Sypher's Cure--"

"My dear Mr. Sypher!" she laughed protestingly.

"Oh," said he, "you are helping it on more than you imagine. I'm going through a rough time, but with you behind me, as I told you before, I know I shall win. If I turn my head round, when I'm sitting at my desk, I have a kind of fleeting vision of you hovering over my chair. It puts heart and soul into me, and gives me courage to make desperate ventures."

"As I'm only there in the spirit, it doesn't matter whether the bodily I is in Nunsmere or Los Angeles."

"How can I tell?" said he, with one of his swift, clear glances. "I meet you in the body every week and carry back your spirit with me. Zora Middlemist," he added abruptly, after a pause, "I implore you not to leave me."

He leaned his arm on the mantelpiece from which Septimus had knocked the little china dog, and looked down earnestly at her, as she sat on the chintz-covered sofa behind the tea-table. At her back was the long cas.e.m.e.nt window, and the last gleams of the wintry sun caught her hair. To the man's visionary fancy they formed an aureole.

"Don't go, Zora."

She was silent for a long, long time, as if held by the spell of the man's pleading. Her face softened adorably and a tenderness came into the eyes which he could not see. A mysterious power seemed to be lifting her towards him. It was a new sensation, pleasurable, like floating down a stream with the water murmuring in her ears. Then, suddenly, as if startled to vivid consciousness out of a dream, she awakened, furiously indignant.

"Why shouldn't I go? Tell me once and for all, why?"

She expected what any woman alive might have expected save the chosen few who have the great gift of reading the souls of the poet and the visionary; and Clem Sypher, in his way, was both. She braced her nerves to hear the expected. But the poet and the visionary spoke.

It was the old story of the Cure, his divine mission to spread the healing unguent over the suffering earth. Voices had come to him as they had come to the girl at Domremy, and they had told him that through Zora Middlemist, and no other, was his life's mission to be accomplished.

To her it was anticlimax. Reaction forced a laugh against her will. She leaned back among the sofa cushions.

"Is that all?" she said, and Sypher did not catch the significance of the words. "You seem to forget that the role of Mascotte is not a particularly active one. It's all very well for you, but I have to sit at home and twirl my thumbs. Have you ever tried that by way of soul-satisfying occupation?

Don't you think you're just a bit--egotistical?"

He relaxed the tension of his att.i.tude with a sigh, thrust his hands into his pockets and sat down.

"I suppose I am. When a man wants something with all the strength of his being and thinks of nothing else day or night, he develops a colossal selfishness. It's a form of madness, I suppose. There was a man called Bernard Palissy who had it, and made everybody sacrifice themselves to his idea. I've no right to ask you to sacrifice yourself to mine."

"You have the right of friendship," said Zora, "to claim my interest in your hopes and fears, and that I've given you and shall always give you.

But beyond that, as you say, you have no right."

He rose, with a laugh. "I know. It's as logical as a proposition of Euclid.

But all the same I feel I have a higher right, beyond any logic. There are all kinds of phenomena in life which have nothing whatsoever to do with reason. You have convinced my reason that I'm an egotistical dreamer. But nothing you can do or say will ever remove the craving for you that I have here "--and he thumped his big chest--"like hunger."

When he had gone Zora thought over the scene with more disturbance of mind than she appreciated. She laughed to herself at Sypher's fantastic claim.

To give up the great things of the world, Life itself, for the sake of a quack ointment! It was preposterous. Sypher was as crazy as Septimus; perhaps crazier, for the latter did not thump his chest and inform her that his guns or his patent convertible bed-razor-strop had need of her "here."

Decidedly, the results of her first excursion into the big world had not turned out satisfactorily. Her delicate nose sniffed at them in disdain.

The sniff, however, was disappointingly unconvincing. The voices of contemptible people could not sound in a woman's ears like the drowsy murmuring of waters. The insane little devil that had visited her in Clem Sypher's garden whispered her to stay.

But had not Zora, in the magnificence of her strong womanhood, in the hunger of her great soul, to find somewhere in the world a Mission in Life, a fulness of existence which would accomplish her destiny? Down with the insane little devil and all his potential works! Zora laughed and recovered her serenity. Cousin Jane, who had had much to write concerning the elopement, was summoned, and Zora, with infinite baggage in the care of Turner, set sail for California.

The New World lay before her with its chances of real, quivering, human Life. Nunsmere, where nothing ever happened, lay behind her. She smiled graciously at Sypher, who saw her off at Waterloo, and said nice things to him about the Cure, but before her eyes danced a mirage in which Clem Sypher and his Cure were not visible. The train steamed out of the station.

Sypher stood on the edge of the platform and watched the end buffers until they were out of sight; then he turned and strode away, and his face was that of a man stricken with great loneliness.

CHAPTER XII

It never occurred to Septimus that he had done a quixotic thing in marrying Emmy, any more than to pat himself on the back for a monstrously clever fellow when he had completed a new invention. At the door of the Registry Office he took off his hat, held out his hand, and said good-by.

"But where are you going?" Emmy asked in dismay.

Septimus didn't know. He waved his hand vaguely over London, and said, "Anywhere."

Emmy began to cry. She had pa.s.sed most of the morning in tears. She felt doubly guilty now that she had accepted the sacrifice of his life; an awful sense of loneliness also overwhelmed her.

"I didn't know that you hated me like that," she said.

"Good heavens!" he cried in horror. "I don't hate you. I only thought you had no further use for me."

"And I'm to be left alone in the street?"

"I'll drive you anywhere you like," said he.

"And then get rid of me as soon as possible? Oh! I know what you must be feeling."

Septimus put his hand under her arm, and led her away, in great distress.

"I thought you wouldn't be able to bear the sight of me."

"Oh, don't be silly!" said Emmy.

Her adjuration was on a higher plane of sentiment than expression. It comforted Septimus.

"What would you like me to do?"

"Anything except leave me to myself--at any rate for the present. Don't you see, I've only you in the world to look to."

"G.o.d bless my soul," said he, "I suppose that's so. It's very alarming. No one has ever looked to me in all my life. I'd wander barefoot for you all over the earth. But couldn't you find somebody else who's more used to looking after people? It's for your own sake entirely," he hastened to a.s.sure her.

"I know," she said. "But you see it's impossible for me to go to any of my friends, especially after what has happened." She held out her ungloved left hand. "How could I explain?"

"You must never explain," he agreed, sagely. "It would undo everything. I suppose things are easy, after all, when you've set your mind on them--or get some chap that knows everything to tell you how to do them--and there's lots of fellows about that know everything--solicitors and so forth.