"Of course, Thomas stared when he saw who it was, and was going to sneak off without announcing us, and Fossett, who just crossed us in the pa.s.sage, was perfectly comic. Pag said afterwards she was bubbling over with undemonstrativeness, which was clever for him. I simply said to Thomas that I thought he had better announce us, as we weren't expected, and he asked who he was to announce, miss! Actually, I was rather relieved when Pag said, 'Say Mr. and Mrs. Julius Bradshaw.'

I should have laughed, I know. Thomas looked a model of discretion that wouldn't commit itself either way, and did as he was bid in an apologetic voice; but he turned round on the stairs to say to me, 'I suppose you know, msam, there's two ladies and a gentleman been dining here?' Because he began miss and ended ma'am, and then turned scarlet. Pag said after he thought Thomas wanted to caution us against a bigamist mamma was harbouring.

"Papa was very nice, really. His allusion to our little escapade was the only one made, and might have meant nothing at all. 'Well, you're a nice couple of people, upon my word!'

and then, seeing that mamma remained a block (which she can), he introduced Paggy to one of the two ladies as 'My son-in-law, Mr. Julius Bradshaw.' I'm sure mamma gave a wooden snort and was ashamed of it before visitors, because she did another rather more probable one directly after, and pretended it was only that sort. Really, except a peck for me and saying _howd_ and nothing more to Paggy, she kept herself to herself.

But it didn't matter, because of what happened. Really, it quite made me jump--I mean the way the lady Pag was introduced to rushed into his arms. I wasn't sure I hadn't better take him away at once. She was a celebrated German pianiste that had accompanied him in Paris. Mamma was at school with her at Frankfort. She had been inconsolable at the disappearance of the great Carissimi, whose playing of the Kreutzer was the only perfectly sympathetic one she had ever met. Was she never to play it with him again? Alas, no! for she was off to Vienna to-morrow, and then to New York, and if the ship went down she would never play the Kreutzer with Signore Carissimi again!

"I saw papa's eye looking mischievous, and then he pointed to the Strad, where it was lying on the piano--locked up safe; we saw to that--and said there was Paganini's fiddle, why not play the _Cruet-stand_, or whatever you called it, _now_?

Mamma found her voice, but lost her judgment, for she tried to block the performance on a fibby ground. Think how late it was, and how it would be keeping Madame von Hofenhoffer!

She put her head in the lion's mouth there, for the Frau immediately said she would play all night rather than lose a note of Signore Carissimi. The other two went, and n.o.body wanted them. I've forgotten the woman's second husband's name--he's dead--but her son's the man I told you about. Of course, he hadn't expected to meet me, and I hope he felt like a fool. I was so glad it wasn't him, but Paggy. They played right through the Kreutzer, and didn't want the music, which couldn't be found, and then did bits again, and it was absolutely glorious. Even mamma (she's fond of music--it's her only good quality--and where should I get mine from if she wasn't?) couldn't stop quite stony, though she did her best, I promise you. As for papa, he was chuckling so over mamma's dilemma--because she wanted to trample on Paggy, and it _was_ a dilemma--that he didn't care how long it went on. And do you know, dear, it _did_ go on--one thing after another, that Frau glued to the clavier like a limpet not detachable without violence--till nearly one in the morning, having begun at ten about! And there was papa and Egerton and Theeny all sn.i.g.g.e.ring at mamma, I know, in secret, and really proud of the connexion, if the truth were known. Mamma tried to get a little revenge by saying to me freezingly when the Hofenhoffer had gone: 'I suppose you are going home with Mr. Bradshaw, Laet.i.tia? Good-night.' And then she said _goodn_ to Paggy just as she had said _howd_. I thought Paggy behaved so nicely.

However, I'll tell you all about that on Monday.

"Papa was _very_ nice--came out on the doorstep to say good-night, and, do you know--it really _is_ very odd; it must be the sea air--papa said to Paggy as we were starting: 'How's the head--the nerves, you know--eh, Master Julius?' And actually Paggy said: 'Why, G.o.d bless my soul, I had forgotten all about them!' Oh, Sally darling, just think! Suppose they got well, and all because I treated him to a honeymoon! Oh, my gracious, what a long letter!"

"There now! that _is_ a letter and a half. 'With love from us both,'

mine affectionately. And twelve pages! And Tishy's hand's not so large, neither, as all that." This is Sally, as epilogue; but her mother puts in a correction:

"It's thirteen pages. There's a bit on a loose page you haven't read."

Sally has seen that, and it was nothing--so she says; but Fenwick picks it up and reads it aloud:

"P.S.--Just a line to say I've remembered that name. She's Herrick--married a parson in India soon after her Penderfield husband died. She's great on reformatories."

Sally reread her letter with a glow of interest on her face and a pa.s.sing approval or echo now and then. She noticed nothing unusual in either her mother or her stepfather; but she did not look up, so absorbed was she.

Had she done so she might have wondered why her mother had gone so pale suddenly, and why there should be that puzzled absent look on the handsome face her eyes remained fixed on across the table; but her own mind was far away, deep in her amus.e.m.e.nt at her friend's letter, full of her image of the disconcerted Dragon and the way Paganini and Beethoven in alliance had ridden rough-shod over Mrs. Grundy and social distinctions. She saw nothing, and finished a cup of coffee undisturbed, and asked for more.

Fenwick, caught by some memory or a.s.sociation he could not define or give its place to, for the moment looked at neither of his companions.

Rosalind, only too clear about all the postscript of the letter had brought before her own mind, saw reason to dread its effect on his.

The linking of the name of Penderfield and that of the clergyman who had married them at Umballa--a name that, two days since, had had a familiar sound to him when she incautiously uttered it--was using Suggestion to bait a trap for Memory. She felt she was steering through shoal-waters perilously near the wind; but she made no attempt to break his reverie. She might do as much harm as good. She only watched his face, feeling its contrast to that of the absorbed and happy merp.u.s.s.y, rejoicing in the fortunate outcome of her friend's anxieties.

It was a great relief when, with a deep breath and a shake, akin to a horse's when the flies won't take a hint, Fenwick flung off the oppression, whatever it was, and came back into the living world on a stepping-stone of the back-talk.

"Well done, Paganini! Nothing like it since Orpheus and Eurydice--only this time it was Proserpine, not Pluto, that had to be put to sleep....

What's the matter, darling? Anything wrong?"

"Nothing at all. I was looking at you."

"Well, _I'm_ all right!" And Sally looked up from her letter for a moment to say, "There's nothing the matter with Jeremiah," and went on reading as before. Sally's att.i.tude about him always implied a kind of proprietorship, as in a large, fairly well-behaved dog. Rosalind felt glad she had not looked at _her_.

Presently Fenwick said: "Now, who's coming for a walk with me?" But Sally was off directly to find the Swiss girl she sometimes bathed with, and Rosalind thought it would be nice in a sheltered place on the beach. She really wanted to be alone, and knew the shortest way to this was to sit still, especially in the morning; but Gerry had better get Vereker to go for a walk. Perhaps she would look in at his mother's later. So Fenwick, after a customary caution to Sally not to drown herself, went away to find Conrad, as he generally called him now.

Rosalind was shirking a problem she dared not face from a cowardly conviction of its insolubility. What would she do if Gerry should, without some warning, identify her? She had to confess to herself that she had no clue at all to the effect it would have, coming suddenly, on him. She could at least imagine aspects, att.i.tudes, tones of voice for him if it came slowly; but she could not supply any image of him, under other circ.u.mstances, not more or less founded on her recollections of twenty years ago. Might she not lose him again, as she lost him then? She _must_ get nearer to safety than she was now.

Was she not relying on the house not catching fire instead of negotiating insurance policies or providing fire extinguishers?

She would go and sit under the shelter of one of the many unemployed machines--for only a few daring spirits would follow Sally's example to-day--and try to think it out. Just a few instructions to Mrs.

Lobjoit, and a word or two of caution to Gerry not to fall over cliffs, or to get run over at level-crossings or get sunstrokes, or get cold, etc., and she would fall back on her own society and think....

Yes, that was the question! Might she not lose him again? And if she did, how live without him?... Oh yes, she would be no worse off than before, in a certain sense. She would have Sally still ... but....

Which would be the worse? The loss of the husband whom every day taught her to love more dearly, or the task of explaining the cause of her loss to Sally? The one she fixed her mind on always seemed intolerable. As for the other contingencies--difficulties of making all clear to friends, and so forth--let them go; they were not worth a thought. But she _must_ be beforehand, and know how to act, how to do her best to avert both, if the thing she dreaded came to pa.s.s....

There now! Here she was settled under the lee of a machine--happily the shadow-side, for the sun was warm--and the white foam of the undertow was guilty of a tremendous glare--the one the people who can't endure the seaside get neuralgia from--and Sally was going to come out of the second machine directly in the Turkey-twill knickers, and find her way through the selvage-wave and the dazzle, or get knocked down and have to try back. Surely Rosalind, instead of saying over and over again that she _must_ be ready to meet the coming evil, possibly close at hand, ought to make a serious effort to become so.

She found herself, even at this early hour of the day, tired with the strain of a misgiving that an earthquake was approaching; and as those who have lived through earthquakes become unstrung at every slightest tremor of the earth's crust beneath them, so she felt that the tension begun with that recurrence of two days ago had grown and grown, and threatened to dominate her mind, to the exclusion of all else. Every little thing, such as the look on her husband's face half an hour ago, made her say to herself, as the earthquake-haunted man says at odd times all through the day and night, "Is this _it_? Has it come?" and she saw before her no haven of peace.

What was it now she really most feared? Simply the effect of the revelation on her husband's mind--an effect no human creature could make terms with. She was not the least afraid of anything he could say or do, delirium apart; but see what delirium had made of him--she was sure it was so--in that old evil hour when he had flung her from him and gone away in anger to try to get her sentence of banishment ratified. How could she guard against a repet.i.tion, in some form or other, of the disastrous errors of that unhappy time?

As we know, she was still in ignorance of all the revived memories he had told to Vereker; but she knew there had been something--disjointed, perhaps, and not to be relied on, as the doctor had said, but none the less to be feared on that account. She had seen the effect of his sleepless night before he went away with Vereker, and knew it to be connected with mental disturbance outside and beyond mere loss of rest; and she had an uneasy sense that something was being kept from her. She could not but believe Gerry's cheerfulness was partly a.s.sumed. Had he been quite at ease about his recollections, surely he would have told them to _her_. Then this had all come on the top of that Kreutzkammer one. The most upsetting thing of all, though, was the change that had come over him suddenly at breakfast, just after he had read aloud the name Herrick--a name he had seemed not free from memory of when her tongue was betrayed into speaking it--and the name Penderfield. If it was due to this last, so much the worse! It was the name of all others that was best for oblivion.

How hard it seemed that it must needs force itself to the fore in this way! Its present intrusion into her life and surroundings was utterly unconnected with anything in the past. Sally's friendship with Laet.i.tia began in a music-cla.s.s six years ago. The Sales Wilsons were people to all appearance as un-Indian as any folk need be. Why must Sally's friend, of all others, be the object of its owner's unwelcome admiration? To think, too, how near she had been to a precipice without knowing it! Suppose she had come face to face with that woman again! To be sure, her intercourse with Ladbroke Grove Road was limited to one stiff exchange of calls in "the season." Still, it might have happened ... but where was the use of begging and borrowing troubles?

Was it, or was it not, the fact, she asked herself, that now, after all these years, she thought of this woman as worse than her husband, the iniquity of the accomplice as more diabolical than that of the princ.i.p.al? She found she could not answer this in the negative off-hand. The paradox was also before her that that incorrigible amphibious treasure of hers, whose voice was even now shouting to her more timorous friend from beyond the selvage-wave she had just contemptuously dived through--that that Sally, inexchangeable for anything she could conceive or imagine, must needs have been something quite other than she was, had she come of any other technical paternity than the accursed one she had to own to. Was there some terrible law in Nature that slow forgiveness of the greatest wrong that can be wrought must perforce be granted to its inflictor, through the gracious survivor of a brutal indifference that would almost add to his crime, if that were possible? If, so, surely the Universe must be the work of an Almighty Fiend, a Demiurgus with a cruel heart, and this the masterstroke of all his cunning. But what, in Heaven's name, was the use of bruising her brains against the conundrums of the great unanswered metaphysical sphinx? Better be contented with the easy vernacular solution of the rhymester:

"Praise G.o.d from whom all blessings flow, Evils from circ.u.mstances grow."

Because she felt she was getting no nearer the solution of her own problem, and was, if anything, wandering from the point.

Another way of looking at the matter was beginning to take form: had hung about her mind and forsaken it more than once. Might it not be better, after all, to dash at the position and capture it while her forces were well under control? To pursue the metaphor, the commissariat might not hold out. Better endure the ills we have--of course, Rosalind knew all that--than fly to others that we know not of. But suppose we have a chance of flying to others we can measure the length and breadth of, and staving off thereby an uncalculable unknown? She felt she almost knew the worst that could come of taking Gerry into her confidence, telling him boldly all about himself, provided she could choose her opportunity and make sure Sally was well out of the way. The concealment from Sally was the achievement whose failure involved the greatest risk. Her husband's mind would bear the knowledge of his story well or ill according to the way in which it reached him; but the necessity of keeping her girl in ignorance of it was a thing absolute. Any idea that Sally's origin could be concealed from her, and her stepfather's ident.i.ty made known, Rosalind dismissed as simply fantastic.

A lady who had established herself below high-water mark with many more books than she could read, and plant capable of turning out much more work than she could do, at this point fled for safety from a rush of white foam. It went back for more, meaning to wet her through next time; but had to bear its disappointment. Mrs. Arkwright--for it was Gwendolen's mamma--being driven from the shadow of the breakwater, cast about her for a new lodgment, and perceived one beside Mrs.

Fenwick, whom she thought very well for the seaside, but not to leave cards on. _Might_ she come up there, beside you? Rosalind didn't want her, but had to pretend she did, to encourage her advent. It left behind it a track of skeins and volumes, which had trickled from the fugitive, but were recovered by a domestic, and p.r.o.nounced dry.

Besides, they were only library books, and didn't matter.

"I haven't seen you since the other day on the pier, Mrs. Fenwick, or I wanted to have asked you more about that charming young couple, the Julian Attwoods. Oh dear! I knew I should get the name wrong....

_Bradshaw!_ Yes, of course." Her vivid perception of what the name really is, when apprised of it, almost amounts to a paroxysm. You see, on the pier that day, she made a bad blunder over those Bradshaw people, and though she had consoled her conscience by admitting to her husband that she had "_mis le pied dans le plat_," still, she thought, if she was actually going to plump down on Mrs. Fenwick's piece of beach, she ought to do a little more apology. By-the-bye, why is it that ladies of her sort always resort to snippets of French idiom, whenever they get involved in a quagmire of delicacy--or indelicacy, as may be? Will Gwendolen grow like her mother? However, that doesn't concern us now.

A little stiffness on Rosalind's part was really due to her wish to be by herself, but Mrs. Arkwright ascribed it to treasured resentment against her blunders of two days since. Now, she was a person who could never let anything drop--a tugging person. She proceeded to develop the subject.

"Really a most interesting story! I need hardly say that my informants had given me no particulars. Very old friends of my husband's. Quite possible they really knew nothing of this young gentleman's musical gifts. Simply told my husband the tale as I told it to you. Just that the daughter of an old friend of theirs, Professor Sales Wilson--_the_ Professor Sales Wilson--of course, quite a famous name in literature--scholarship--that sort of thing--had run away with a shopman! That was what my husband heard, you know. _I_ merely repeated it."

"Wasn't it, as things go, rather a malicious way of putting it--on their part?"

Mrs. Arkwright gave sagacious nods, indicative of comfortable "_we_-know-the-world-we-live-in-and-won't-pretend" relationships between herself and the speaker. They advertised perfect mutual understanding on a pinnacle of married experience. Fancy there being any need for anything else between _us_! they said. Their editor then supplied explanatory text: "Of course there may have been a _soupcon_ of personal feeling in the case--bias, pique, whatever one likes to call it. _You_ know, dear Mrs. Fenwick?" But Mrs. Fenwick waited for further illumination. "Well, you know ... I suppose it's rather a breach of confidence, only I know I shall be safe with _you_...."

"Don't tell me any secrets, Mrs. Arkwright. I'm not safe." But Mrs.

Arkwright was not a person to be put off in this way. Not she! She meant elucidation, and nothing short of bayonets would stop her.

"Well, really, perhaps I'm making it of too much importance to talk of breaches of confidence. After all, it only amounts to a gentleman having been disappointed. Of course, his relations would ... don't you see?..."

"Was it some man that was after Tishy?" asked Rosalind, wondering how many more rejected suitors were wearing the willow about the haberdasher's bride. She had heard of one, only last night. She was not putting two and two together.

"I dare say everybody knows it, and it's only my nonsensical caution.

But one does get _so_ timorous of saying anything. _You_ know, dear Mrs. Fenwick! However, it's better to say it out now--of course, quite between ourselves, you know. It was Mrs. Samuel Herrick's son, Sir Charles Penderfield. He's the present baronet, you know. Father was in the army--rather distinguished man, I fancy. Her second husband was a clergyman...." Here followed social a.n.a.lysis, some of which Rosalind could have corrected. The speaker floundered a little among county families, and then resumed the main theme. "Mrs. Herrick is a sort of connexion of my husband's (I don't exactly know what; but then, I never _do_ know--family is such a bore), and it was _she_ told _him_ all about this. I always forget these things when they're told _me_.

But I can quite understand that the young man's mother, in speaking of it ... _you_ understand?..."

"Oh, of course, naturally. I think my daughter's coming out. I saw her machine-door move." Rosalind began collecting herself for departure.

"But, of course, you won't repeat any of this--but, of course, I know I can rely upon you--but, of course, it doesn't really matter...."

A genial superior tone of toleration for mankind's foibles as seen by the two speakers from an elevation comes in at this point juicily. It meets an appreciative response in the prolonged first syllable of Rosalind's "_Cer_tainly. I never should dream," etc., whose length makes up for an imperfect finish--a dispersal of context from which a farewell good-morning emerges clear, hand-in-hand with a false statement that the speaker has enjoyed sitting there talking.

Rosalind had not enjoyed it at all. She was utilising the merp.u.s.s.y's return to land as a means of escape, because, had there been no Mrs.