"Stop, Jeremiah!" it said. "It wasn't at K. Villa."

"Why not, chick?"

"Because Pickwick's _lost_! It was lent to those impossible people at Turnham Green, and they stole it. I know they did. Name like Marylebone."

"The Haliburtons? Why, that's ever so long ago." Thus Rosalind.

"Of course it is. It's been gone ages. I'm going to sleep.

Good-night!" And Jeremiah said good-night once more and departed.

Sally didn't go straight to sleep, but she made a start on her way there. It was not a vigorous start, for she had hardly begun upon it when she desisted, and sat up in bed and listened.

"What's that, mother? Nothing wrong, is there?"

"No, darling child, what should be wrong? Go to sleep."

"I thought I heard you gasp, or snuffle, or sigh, or sob, or click in your throat. That's all. Sure you didn't?"

"Quite sure. Now, do be a reasonable kitten, and go to sleep; I shall be in bed in half-a-second."

And Sally subsides, but first makes a stipulation: "You _will_ sleep in your hair, mother darling, won't you? Or, at least, do it up, and not that hateful nightcap?"

But though Rosalind felt conscientiously able to disclaim any of the sounds Sally had described, something audible had occurred in her breathing. Sally's first word had gone nearest, but it was hardly a full-grown gasp.

Her husband's question about "Pickwick" had scarcely taken her attention off an exciting story-climax, and she really did want to know why the Archbishop turned pale as death when the Countess kissed him. Gerry was looking well and cheerful again, and there was nothing to connect his inquiry with any reminiscence of "B.C." So, as soon as he had gone, she reopened her book--not without a mental allusion to a dog in Proverbs--and went on where she had left off. The writer had not known how to manage his Archbishop and Countess, and the story went flat and slushy like an ill-whipped _zabajone_. She put the book aside, and wondered whether "Pickwick" really _had_ been alienated by the impossible Haliburtons; sat thinking, but only of the thing of _now_--nothing of buried records.

So she sat, it might be for two minutes. Then, quite suddenly, she had bitten her lip and her brows had wrinkled. And her eyes had locked to a fixed look that would stay till she had thought this out. So her face said, and the stillness of her hand.

For she had suddenly remembered when and where it was she had read to that man about Mary and the fat boy. It was in the garden at her mother's twenty-two years ago. She remembered it well now, and quite suddenly. She could remember how Gerry, young-man-wise, had tried to utilise Thackeray to show his greater knowledge of the world--had flaunted Piccadilly and Pall Mall before the dazzled eyes of an astonished suburban. She could remember how she read it aloud to him, because, when he read over her shoulder, she always turned the page before he was ready. And his decision that d.i.c.kens's characters were never gentlemen, and her saying perhaps that was why he was so amusing. And then how he got the book from her and went on reading while she went away for her lawn-tennis shoes, and when she came back found he had only two more pages to read, and then he would come and play.

But it spoke well for her husband's chances of a quiet time to-night that he should hold this memory in his mind, and yet be secure against a complete resurrection of the past. Nothing else might grow from it.

He evidently thought the reading had been at Shepherd's Bush. He would hardly have said, "the kitten wasn't there," unless his ideas had been glued to that spot. But then--and Rosalind's mind swam to think of it--how very decisively the kitten was "not there" in that other garden two-and-twenty years ago.

It was at that moment the gasp, or sigh, or sob, or whatever it was, awoke Sally. Her mother had been strong against the mere memory of the happy hour of thoughtless long ago; but then, this that was to come--this thing the time was thoughtless of! Was it not enough to force a gasp from self-control itself? a cry from any creature claiming to be human? "_The kitten wasn't there!_" No, truly she was not.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

HOW MEMORY CREPT BACK AND BACK, AND FENWICK KEPT HIS OWN COUNSEL.

ROSALIND NEED NEVER KNOW IT. OF A JOLLY BIG BLOB OF MELTED CANDLE, AND SALLY'S HALF-BROTHER. OF FENWICK'S IMPROVED GOOD SPIRITS

That was a day of many little incidents, and a fine day into the bargain. Perhaps the next day was helped to be a flat day by the barometer, which had shown its usual untrustworthiness and gone down.

The wind's grievance--very perceptible to the leeward of keyholes and window-cracks--may have been against this instability. It had been looking forward to a day's rest, and here this meteorology must needs be fussing. Neptune on the contrary was all the fresher for his half-holiday, and was trotting out tiny white ponies all over his fields, who played bo-peep with each other in and out of the valleys of the plough-land. But they were grey valleys now, that yesterday were smiling in the sun. And the sky was a mere self-coloured sky (a modern expression, as unconvincing as most of its congeners), and wanted to make everything else as grey as itself. Also there came drifts of fine rain that wetted you through, and your umbrella wasn't any good. So a great many of the visitors to St. Sennans thought they would stop at home and get those letters written.

Sally wouldn't admit that the day was flat _per se_, but only that it had become so owing to the departure of Laet.i.tia and her husband. She reviewed the latter a good deal, as one who had recently been well under inspection and had stood the test. He was really a very nice fellow, haberdasher or no, wasn't he, mother? To which Rosalind replied that he was a very nice fellow indeed, only so quiet. If he had had his violin with him, he would have been much more perceptible.

But she supposed it was best to travel with it as little as possible.

For it had been decided, all things considered, that the precious Strad should be left locked up at home. "It's got an insurance policy all to itself," said Sally, "for three hundred pounds." She was quite awestruck by the three hundred golden sovereigns which these pounds would have been if they had had an existence of their own off paper.

"_You_ ought to have an insurance policy all to yourself, Sarah," said Fenwick. "Only I don't believe any office would accept you. Fancy your swimming out like that yesterday! How far did you go?"

"Round the buoy and aback again. I say, Jeremiah, if ever I get drowned, mind you rush to the bathing-machine and see if there's a copy of 'Ally Sloper' or 't.i.t-Bits'. Because there'd be fifty pounds for each. Think of that!" Sally is delighted with these sums, too, to the extent of quite losing sight of the sacrifice necessary for their acquisition.

"Two whole fifties!" Fenwick says, adding after consideration: "I think we had sooner keep our daughter, eh, Rosey?" And Rosalind agreed. Only she really was a shocking madcap, the kitten!

Had some flavour of Fenwick's mental history got in the air, that Sally, presumably with no direct information about its last chapter, should say to him suddenly: "It _is_ such a puzzle to me, Jeremiah, that you've never recollected the railway-carriage"? He was saved from telling fibs in reply--for he _had_ recollected the railway-carriage, and left it, as it were, for Mr. Harrisson--by Sally continuing: "When you were Mr. Fenwick, and I wasn't at liberty to kiss you." She did so to ill.u.s.trate.

"I don't see how I could reasonably have resented your kissing me, Sarah. And I'm Mr. Fenwick now."

"On the contrary, you're Jeremiah. But if you were he ever so, I'm puzzled why Mr. Fenwick _now_ can't remember Mr. Fenwick _then_."

"He _can't_, Sarah dear. He can no more remember Mr. Fenwick _then_ than if no such person had ever existed." It was a clever equivocation, for though he had so far made nothing of the name on his arm, he was quite clear he came back to England Harrisson. His gravity and sadness as he said it may have been not so much duplicity as a reflection from his turgid current of thought of the last two days.

It imposed on Sally, who decided in her own mind on changing the topic as soon as she could do it without a jerk. Meanwhile, a stepping-stone was available--extravagant treatment of the subject with a view to help from laughter.

"I wonder what Mr. Fenwick _then_ would have thought if I had kissed him in the railway-carriage."

"He'd have thought you must be Sally, only he hadn't noticed it.

_He_ wouldn't have made a rumpus on high moral grounds, I'm sure. But I don't know about the old c.o.c.k that talked about the terms of the Company's charter...."

"Hullo!" Sally interrupts him blankly. He had better have let it alone. But it wouldn't do to admit anything.

"What's 'hullo,' Sarah?"

"See how you're recollecting things! Jeremiah's recollecting the railway-carriage, mother--the electrocution-carriage."

"Are you, darling?" Rosalind, coming behind his chair, puts her hands round his neck. "What have you recollected?"

"I don't think I've recollected anything the kitten hasn't told me,"

says Fenwick dreamily. But Sally is positive she never told him anything about the terms of the Company's charter.

Rosalind adheres to her policy of keeping Sally out of it as much as possible. In this case a very small fib indeed serves the purpose: "You must have told him, chick; or perhaps I repeated it. I remember your telling _me_ about the elderly gentleman who was in a rage with the Company." Sally looked doubtful, but gave up the point.

Nevertheless, Fenwick felt certain in his own heart that "the terms of the Company's charter" was a bit of private recollection of his own. And Rosalind had never heard of it before. But it was true she had heard of the elderly gentleman. Near enough!

As to the crowd of memories that kept coming, some absolutely clear, some mere phantoms, into the arena of Fenwick's still disordered mind, they would have an interest, and a strong one, for this story if its object were the examination of strange freaks of memory. But the only point we are nearly concerned with is the rigid barrier drawn across the backward pathway of his recollection at some period between ten and fifteen years ago. Till this should be removed, and the dim image of his forgotten marriage should acquire force and cohesion, he and his wife were safe from the intrusion of their former selves on the scene of their present happiness--safe possibly from a power of interference it might exercise for ill--safe certainly from risk of a revelation to Sally of her mother's history and her own parentage--but safe at a heavy cost to the one of the three who alone now held the key to their disclosure.

However vividly Fenwick had recalled the incidents of his arrival in England, and however convinced he was that no part of them was mere dream, they all belonged for him to that buried Harrisson whose ident.i.ty he shrank from taking on himself--_would_ have shrunk from, at the cost that was to be paid for it, had the prize of its inheritance been ten times as great. Still, one or two connecting links had caught on either side, the chief one being Sally, who had actually spoken with him whilst still Harrisson--although it must be admitted she had not kissed him--and the one next in importance, the cabman. The p.a.w.nbroker made a very bad third--in fact, scarcely counted, owing to his own moroseness or reserve. But the cabman! Why, Fenwick had it all now at his fingers' ends. He could recall the start from New York, the wish to keep the secret of his gold-mining success to himself on the ship, and his satisfaction when he found his name printed with one _s_ in the list of cabin pa.s.sengers. Then a pleasant voyage on a summer Atlantic, and that nice young American couple whose acquaintance he made before they pa.s.sed Sandy Hook, every penny of whose cash had been stolen on board, and how he had financed them, careless of his own ready cash. And how then, not being sure if he should go to London or to Manchester, he decided on the former, and wired his New York banker to send him credit, prompt, at the bank he named in London; and then Livermore's Rents, 1808, and the joy of the cabman; and then the Twopenny Tube; and then Sally. He tried what he could towards putting in order what followed, but could determine nothing except that he stooped for the half-crown, and something struck him a heavy blow. Thereupon he was immediately a person, or a confusion, sitting alone in a cab, to whom a lady came whom he thought he knew, and to this lady he wanted to say, "Is that you?" for no reason he could now trace, but found he could scarcely articulate.

Recalling everything thus, to the full, he was able to supply links in the story that we have found no place for so far. For instance, the loss of a small valise on the boat that contained credentials that would have made it quite unnecessary for him to cable to New York for credit, and also an incident this reminded him of--that he had not only parted with most of his cash to the young Americans, but had given his purse to the lady to keep her share of it in, saying he had a very good cash pocket, and would have plenty of time to buy another, whereas _they_ were hurrying through to catch the tidal boat for Calais. This accounted for that little new pocket-book without a card in it that had given no information at all. He could remember having made so free with his cards on the boat and in the train that he had only one left when he got to Euston.

He found himself, as the hours pa.s.sed, better and better able to dream and speculate about the life he now chose to imagine was Harrisson's property, not his; and the more so the more he felt the force of the barrier drawn across the earlier part of it. Had the barrier remained intact, he might ultimately have convinced himself, for all practical purposes, that Harrisson's life was all dream. Yes, all a dream! The cold and the gold of the Klond.y.k.e, the French Canadians at Ontario, four years on a cattle-ranch in California, five of unsuccessful attempts to practise at the American Bar--all, all a dream of another man named Harrisson, dreamed by Algernon Fenwick, that big hairy man at the wine-merchant's in Bishopsgate, who has a beautiful wife and a daughter who swims like a fish. One of the many might-have-beens that were not! But a decision against its reality demanded time, and his revival of memory was only forty-eight hours old so far.

Of course, he would have liked, of all things, to make full confession, and talk it all out--this quasi-dream--to Rosalind; but he could not be sure how much he could safely bring to light, how much would be best concealed. He could not run the _slightest_ risk when the thing at stake was her peace of mind. No, no--Harrisson be hanged!

Him and his money, too.