And so it came about that Dominic Iglesias followed Poppy St. John upstairs--she moving rapidly, in a way defiantly--followed her into a bedchamber, where a subtle sweetness of orris-root met him; and a fantastic brightness of gaslight and moonlight, coming in through open windows, chequered the handsome dark-polished bra.s.s-inlaid furniture, the green silk coverlet and hangings, the dimly patterned ceiling and walls.

Without hesitation or apology, Poppy walked straight through this apartment, and pa.s.sed out on to the white-planked and white-railed balcony.

The dome of the sky was immense and had become perfectly clear, the great clouds having boiled up during the afternoon only to sink away and vanish at sunset, as is their wont in seasons of drought. North and east the glare of London pulsed along the horizon; and above it the stars were faint, since the radiant first-quarter moon rode high, drenching roadway and palings, the stretch of the polo-ground, the shrubberies and grove of giant elms, with white light blotted and barred, here and there, by black shadow. The air was still, but less oppressive, the cruelty of sun-heat having gone out of it and only a suavity remaining. The _facade_ of the terrace of smirking, self-conscious, much-be-flowered and be-balconied little houses had taken on a certain worth of picturesqueness, suggestive of the bazaar of some far-away Oriental city rather than of a vulgar London suburb, the summer night even here producing an exquisiteness of effect and making itself very sensibly felt. Poppy silently motioned her guest to the further of the two cane deck-chairs set in the recess, arranged a cushion at his back, drew up a little mother-of-pearl inlaid table beside him, poured coffee into two cups. Then she moved across to the rail of the balcony, and stood there, her head thrown back, her hands clasped behind her, facing the moonlight, which covered her slender rounded figure from head to foot as with a pale transparent veil of infinite tenuity. Iglesias could see the rise and fall of her bosom, the flutter of her eyelids, the involuntary movement of her lips as she pressed them together, restraining, as might be divined, words to which she judged it wiser to deny utterance.

And this hardly repressed excitement in Poppy's bearing and aspect, along with the peculiar scene and circ.u.mstances in which he found himself, worked profoundly upon Dominic Iglesias. In pa.s.sing through that scented, half-discovered, fantastically lighted bedchamber and stepping out into the magic of the night, he had stepped out, in imagination, into regions dreamed of in earlier years--when reading poetry or hearing music,--but never fairly entered, still less enjoyed, since all the duties and obligations of his daily life militated against and even forbade such enjoyment. The weariness of his work in the City, the petty annoyances he suffered at Cedar Lodge, the haunting disgust of de Courcy Smyth's presence, fell away from him, becoming for the time as though they were not. He never had been, nor was he now, in any degree self-indulgent or a sentimentalist. The appeal of the present somewhat enchanted hour was to the intellect and the spirit, rather than sensuous, still less sensual.

Nevertheless, an almost pa.s.sionate desire of earthly beauty took him--of the beauty of things seen, of things plastic, beauty of the human form; beauty of far-distant lands and the varied pageant of their aspect and history; of great rivers flowing seaward; of tombs by the wayside; of the glorious terror of the desert's naked face; of languorous fountain-cooled gardens, close hid in the burning heart of ancient cities; beauty of sound, beauty of words and phrases, above all, of the eternal beauty of youth and the illimitable expectation and hope of it.

And it was out of all this, out of the mirage of these vast elusive prospects and apprehensions, that he answered Poppy St. John, as with serious eyes yet smiling lips she turned, and coming across the white floor sat down beside him, saying:

"How goes it, Dominic? Are you rested?"

"Yes," he answered, "I am rested. And more than that, I am alive and awake, strangely awake and full of vision--thanks to you."

Poppy's expression sweetened, becoming protective, maternal. She leaned back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap; yet there was still a certain tension in her expression, an intensity as of inward excitement in her gaze.

"Tell me things, then," she said, "tell me things about yourself, if the gift of seeing is upon you.--There's no one to overhear. The neighbours on both sides are away for the holidays, thank the powers! and their houses stand empty. While the voices and footsteps down in the road only make us more happily alone. So tell me things, Dominic. I am a trifle stirred up with all this affair of the theatre, and you always quiet me. I'm really a very good child. I deserve a treat. And there are things I dreadfully want to know."

"Alas! there is so absurdly little to tell," Iglesias answered, "that, here and now, in face of my existing sense of life and of vision, I am humbled by my own ignorance and poverty of achievement. That poverty, I suppose, is all the more apparent to me, because twice to-day I have been--so I judge, at least--within measurable distance of bidding farewell to this astonishingly wonderful world and the fashion of it. It comes home to me how little I have seen, how little I have profited, how little I know. I would have liked to leave it; it would be more seemly to do so, having profited more largely by my sojourn here."

Iglesias paused, excitement which his natural sobriety disapproved gaining him, too, through that ache of unrealised beauty. For a moment he struggled with it as with a rising tide, then resigned himself.

"And yet," he added, "in other respects I should not be sorry to hear the hour strike, for curiosity of the unknown is very strong in me.

Opportunity may have been narrow, and one may have been balked of high endeavour and rich experience, by lack of talent and by adverse circ.u.mstances; but in the supreme, the crowning experience, that of death and all which, for joy or sorrow, lies beyond it, even the most obscure, the most uncultured and untravelled must partic.i.p.ate."

"Don't be in too great a deuce of a hurry to satisfy that curiosity, dear man," Poppy put in. "You must contrive to exercise patience for a little while yet, please; always remembering that it is entirely superfluous to run to catch a train which is bound not to start until you are on board of it. And then, too, you see--well, there's me, after all, and I want you."

Iglesias' face grew keen, as he looked at her through that encompa.s.sing whiteness of moonlight.

"I am glad of that," he said very quietly, "because you are to me, dear friend, what no other human being has ever yet been. The saddest thing that could happen to me, save loss of faith, would be that you should cease to want me. I only pray G.o.d, if it is not self-seeking, that you may continue to want me as long as I live."

"But your religion?" she asked, a point of jealousy p.r.i.c.king her.

"My religion forbids sin, whether of body or mind; forbids violation of the eternal spiritual proportion, by any placing of the creature before the Creator in a man's action or in his heart. But my religion enjoins love and stimulates it; since only through loving can we fulfil the highest possibility of our nature, which is to grow into the likeness of Almighty G.o.d."

"You believe that?" Poppy asked again.

"I do more," Iglesias said. "I know it."

Then both fell silent, having reached the place where words hinder rather than help thought. And, as it happened, just then the stillness was sensibly broken up, and the magic of the night encroached upon by the pa.s.sing of a couple of _char-a-bancs_ in the road below, loaded up with trippers faring homewards from a day's outing at Hampton Court. The tired teams jog-trotted haltingly. The wheels whispered hoa.r.s.ely in the m.u.f.fling dust; and voices mingled somewhat plaintively in the singing of a then popular khaki sing--"The Soldiers of the Queen." Hearing all of which, as the refrain died away Londonwards up the great suburban road, the compelling drama and pathos of life as the mult.i.tude lives it--stupidly, without ideas, without any conscious n.o.bility of purpose, yet with a certain blundering and clumsy heroism--took Poppy St. John by the throat. Those who stand aside from that democratic everyday drama, rejecting alike the common joys and common sorrows of it, have need--so it seemed to her--to account for and justify themselves lest they become suspect. Therefore she looked at Dominic Iglesias intently, questioningly, hesitated a moment, and then spoke.

"Still I don't understand you, in your determined detachment of att.i.tude.

Tell me, if you are not afraid of love, why have you never married?" she said.

And he, divining to an extent that which inspired her question, smiled at her somewhat proudly as he answered.

"Be under no misapprehension, dear friend. I am a perfectly normal piece of flesh and blood, with a man's normal pa.s.sions, and his natural craving for wife, and child, home, family, and the like. But during my mother's lifetime I was bound to other service than that of marriage."

"But in these years since her death?" Poppy asked.

"There is a time for everything, as the Preacher testifies, a due and proper time which must be observed if life is to be a reasoned progress, not a mere haphazard stumbling from the weakness of childhood to the incapacity of old age. And, can anything be more objectionably at variance with that wise teaching than the spectacle of amorous uxorious efflorescence in a man of well over fifty?"

Poppy permitted herself a lively grimace.

"All the same you have sacrificed yourself, as usual," she said.

"Not so very greatly, perhaps," Iglesias replied, with a soberly humorous expression. "For I have always been very exacting and have asked very much. I am culpably fastidious. My tastes are far beyond my means, my desires out of all reasonable relation to my station and my merits. And it should be remembered that my circle of acquaintances has been a very limited one, until quite recently--I do not wish to appear more glaringly arrogant or discourteous than I actually am. I had my ideal. It happened that I failed to realise it; and I am very impatient of compromise in matters of intimate and purely personal import. In respect of them I hold I have an unqualified right to consult my own tastes. It has always been easier to me to go without than to accept a second-best."

"In point of fact no woman was good enough! Poor brutes!"

Poppy mused a little, with averted face.

"How beastly cheap they'd all feel--I've not forgotten the undulating and aspiring withered leaf--if they knew how mightily they all fell short!"

she added naughtily. Suddenly she looked round at Dominic Iglesias. Her eyes were as stars, but her lips trembled. "Bless me, but you've extensively original methods of conveying information! It's lucky for me I've a steady head. So--so it comes to this--I reign all alone?" she said.

"Yes, dear friend, save for my love for my mother--such as the throne is or ever has been--you reign alone," Iglesias answered quietly.

Poppy rested her elbows upon her knees, dropped her face into her hands, and sat thus bowed together in the whiteness of the moonlight.

"Ah, dear!" she murmured presently, brokenly, "I've got my answer. It's better and--worse, than I expected. All the same I'm content--that's to say, the best of me is--royally, consummately content.--Thank you a thousand times, thrice-beloved and very most exceedingly unworldy-wise one," she said.

Then for a while both were silent, wrapped about by, and resting in, the magic of the summer night. When Poppy roused herself at last to speak, it was in a different key, studiously matter-of-fact.

"Look here, dear man, do you in the least realise how extremely far gone you were when I arrived to you on Barnes Common this evening? Because I tell you plainly I didn't in the very least like it. In my opinion it is high time you gave up dragging that Barking Brothers & Barking cart."

"I shall give up doing so very soon," Iglesias replied. "Just now I am acting as manager. Sir Abel is at Marienbad, and the other partners are out of town."

"I like that--lazy animals!" Poppy said.

"But the situation is in process of righting itself--has practically righted itself already."

"Thanks to you."

"In part, no doubt. There was a disposition to panic, which rendered it exceedingly difficult to get accurate and definite information at first.

However, I arrived at the necessary data with patience and diplomacy, and was able to draw out a clear detailed statement. This proved so far satisfactory that Messrs. Gommee, Hills, Murray & Co. and Pavitt's Bank have considered themselves justified in undertaking to finance Barking Brothers until business in South Africa has resumed its ordinary course."

"Then the elderly plungers are saved?"

"Yes, I believe, practically they are saved," Iglesias said. "And, therefore, as soon as Sir Abel has finished his cure and returns I shall retire."

Poppy rose, clapping her hands together with irritation.

"Sir Abel's cure be hanged!" she cried. "What do I care about his idiotic old liver or his gout, or anything else. Let him pay the price of steadily over-eating himself for more than half a century. I've no use for him.

What I have a use for is you, dear man; more than ever now, don't you see," her voice softened, became caressing, "after our recent little explanation. And you shan't kill yourself. I won't have it. I won't allow it. Therefore be reasonable, my good dear. Put away your mania of self-immolation--or keep it exclusively for my benefit. Write and tell the Barking man to hurry up with his liver and his gout. Tell him you're being sweated to death dragging his rotten old banking cart, and that he's just got to come home and set you free, and get between the shafts and do the dragging and sweating himself.--Ah, there's the hansom. You must go. I'd no notion it was so late."

And so it came about that, once more, Dominic Iglesias followed the Lady of the Windswept Dust into the faintly scented bedchamber, where fantastic brightness of gaslight and moonlight chequered the polished surfaces of the dark furniture, the green silk coverlet and hangings, the dimly-patterned ceiling and walls. His instinct was to pa.s.s on, as quickly as might be, to the secure commonplace of the landing without. But half-way across the room, at the foot of the low-pillared and bra.s.s-inlaid bedstead, Poppy St. John stopped, and turned swiftly, barring his pa.s.sage with extended arms.

"Stay a minute, for probably we shall never meet in this poor little house again, best beloved one," she said. "It is too far out. I must move into town. Lionel puts the play into rehearsal next week, and I must live near the theatre. And then, too--well, you know, since I've made up my mind, it's best to clean the slate even in respect of one's dwelling-place.

Memories stick, stick like a leech; and they raise emotions of a slightly disturbing character sometimes. I am sure of myself; and yet I know it's safest to make a clean sweep of whatever reminds me of all the forbidden dear d.a.m.ned lot. I regret nothing--don't imagine that. I'm keen on my work. The artist, after all, is the strongest thing in me. I'm quite happy, now I have made up my mind. My nose is in the air. I can look creation in the face without winking an eyelid. I can respect myself. And I'm tremendously grateful to Lionel Gordon for taking me on spec, and to Fallowfeild for greasing the creature's Caledonian-Teutonic-Hebraic palm for me. Still--still--you can imagine, can't you, that, take it all round, it's not precisely a Young Woman's Christian a.s.sociation blooming picnic party for me just at present?"