I hesitated, and Sylvia interrogated me with a King's Ransom smile.

"Treat her as she deserves," I said. "If she were my wife, ward or daughter, I should slap her and send her to bed. So would you, so would any man worthy of the name."

"Would you, Seraph?"

He was helping her into her cloak and did not answer the question.

Suddenly she turned round and looked into his eyes.

"Would you, Seraph?" I heard her repeat.

"I shall treat you--as you deserve to be treated," he answered slowly.

"That's not an answer," she objected.

"What's the good of asking him?" I said as the rest of our party joined us.

In the absence of Joyce I spent large portions of a dull and interminably long night smoking excessive cigarettes and leaning against a wall to watch the dancers. Towards three o'clock I discovered an early edition of an evening paper and read it from cover to cover. Canadian Pacifics were rising or falling, and some convulsion was taking place in Rio Tintos.

The only other news of interest I found in the Cause List. I remember the case of Wylton _v._ Wylton and Sleabury was down for trial one day towards the end of that week.

CHAPTER VII

A CAUSE CeLeBRE

"Conventional women--but was not the phrase tautological?"

GEORGE GISSING: "Born in Exile."

I always look back with regret to our return to London after Commemoration. Our parting at the door of the Rodens' house in Cadogan Square was more than the dispersal of a pleasant, youthful, light-hearted gathering; it marked out a definite end to my first careless, happy weeks in England, and foreshadowed a period of suspense and heart-burning that separated old friends and strained old alliances. As we shook hands and waved adieux, we were slipping unconsciously into a future where none of us were to meet again on our former frank, trustful footing.

I doubt if any of us recognised this at the time--not even the Seraph, for a man is notoriously a bad judge in his own cause. Looking back over the last six months, I appreciate that the seeds of trouble had already been sown, and that I ought to have been prepared for much that followed.

To begin with, the astonishing acrimony of speech and writing that characterised both parties in the Suffrage controversy should have warned me of the futility of trying to retain the friendship of Joyce Davenant on the one hand and the Rodens on the other. Bitter were their tongues and angry their hearts in the old, forgotten era of demonstrations and hecklings; the bitterness increased with the progress of the arson campaign, and its prompt, ruthless reprisals; but I remember no political sensation equalling the suppressed, vindictive anger of the days when the abduction policy was launched, and no clue could be found to incriminate its perpetrators. I suffered the fate of most neutral powers, and succeeded in arousing the suspicions of both belligerents.

Again, the Wylton divorce proved--if proof were ever needed--that when English Society has ostracised a woman, her sympathisers gain nothing for themselves by championing her cause. They had better secure themselves greetings in the market-place by leading the chorus of moral condemnation. Elsie Wylton would scarcely have noticed the two added voices, and the Seraph and I might have spared ourselves much unnecessary discomfort. He was probably too young to appreciate that Quixotism does not pay in England, while I--well, there is no fool like a middle-aged fool.

Lastly, I ought to have seen the shadow cast by Sylvia's tropical intimacy with the Seraph at Oxford. She was unquestionably _intriguee_, and I should have seen it and been on my guard. Resist as she might, there was something arresting in his other-world, somnambulant attitude towards life; for him, at least, his dreams were too real to be lightly dismissed. And his sensitive feminine sympathy was something new to her, something strangely stimulating to a girl who but half understood her own moods and ambitions. I have no doubt that in their solitary passage back to Oxford she had unbent and revealed more to him than to any other man, had unbent as far as any woman of reserve can ever unbend to a man. Equally, I have no doubt that in cold retrospect her passionate, uncontrolled pride exaggerated the significance of her conduct, and magnified the moment of unaffected friendliness into an humiliating self-betrayal.

The Seraph--it is clear--had not responded. I know now--indeed, I knew at the time--that Sylvia had made an indelible impression on his receptive, emotional nature. Her wilful, rebellious self-confidence had galvanised him as every woman of strong character will galvanise a man of hesitations and doubts, reservations, and self-criticism.

Knowing Sylvia, I find no difficulty in understanding the ascendancy she had established over his mind; knowing him, I can well appreciate his exasperating diffidence and self-depreciation. It never occurred to him that Sylvia could forget his relative poverty, obscurity, and their thousand points of conflict; it never dawned on her that he could be held back by honourable scruples from accepting what she had shown herself willing to offer. The Seraph came back from Oxford absorbed and pre-occupied with haunting memories of Sylvia; with his curious frankness he told her in so many words that she possessed his mind to the exclusion of every other thought. There he had stopped short--for no reason she could see, and it was not possible for her to go further to meet him. Next to the Capitol stands the Tarpeian Rock.

I ought to have remembered that with Sylvia it was now crown or gibbet, and that there was no room for platonic admirers.

With his genius for the unexpected the Seraph disappeared from our ken for an entire week after our return to London. Gladys and I were always running over to the Rodens' or receiving visits from Sylvia and Philip; it appeared that he had forsaken Cadogan Square as completely as Pont Street, and the unenthusiastic tone in which the information was volunteered did not tempt me to prosecute further inquiries. On about the fifth day I did pluck up courage to ask Lady Roden if he had yet come to the surface, but so far from receiving an intelligible answer I found myself undergoing rigorous examination into his antecedents. "Who _is_ this Mr. Aintree?" I remember her asking in her lifeless, faded voice. "Has he any relations? There used to be a Sir John Aintree who was joint-master of the Meynell."

After a series of unsuccessful inquiries over the telephone, I set out to make personal investigation. Sylvia had carried Gladys off to Ranelagh, and as Robin offered his services as escort to the girls, I felt no scruples in resigning my ward to her charge. For Sylvia, I am glad to say, my responsibility had ceased, and I was at liberty to proceed to Adelphi Terrace, and ascertain why at any hour of the day or night I was met with the news that Mr. Aintree was in town, but away from his flat, and had left no word when he would be back. I called in at the club before trying his flat. The Seraph was not there, but I found the polyglot Culling explaining for Gartside's benefit certain of the more obvious drolleries of the current "Vie Parisienne."

"Where did ye pick up yer French accent, Bob?" I heard him inquire with feigned admiration. "In Soho? I wonder who dropped it there?"

Then he caught sight of me, and his face assumed an awful solemnity.

"'Corruptio optimi pessima!' I wonder ye've the courage to show yerself among respectable men like me and Gartside."

I inquired if either of them knew of the Seraph's whereabouts, but the question appeared to add fuel to Culling's indignation.

"Where is the Seraph?" he exclaimed. "Well ye may ask! His wings are clipped, there's a dint in his halo, and his harp has its strings broken. The Heavenly Choir----" He paused abruptly, seized a sheet of foolscap and resumed his normal tone. "This'll be rather good--the Heavenly Choir and our Seraph flung out like a common drunk same as Gartside here.

'To bottomless perdition, there to dwell-- Why can't the club afford a decent pen?

You're our committeeman, Bob, you're to blame.

I always use blank verse for my complaints.-- To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire.'"

JOHN MILTON: "Paradise Lost, Liber One."

I watched the Heavenly Choir being sketched. In uniform and figure the Archangel Gabriel presented a striking resemblance to any Keeper of the Peace at any Music Hall. An official braided coat bulged at the shoulders with the pressure of two cramped wings, his peaked cap had been knocked over one eye, and his halo--in Culling's words--was "all anyhow." As the artist insisted on a companion picture to show the Seraph's reception in Bottomless Perdition, I turned to Gartside for enlightenment.

"It's been going on long enough to be getting serious," I was told. "A solid week now."

"_What's_ been going on?" I exclaimed in despair. "Where are we? Above all, where's the Seraph?"

"Isn't it telling you we are?" protested Culling. "It started on the day you returned from your godless wanderings and prowled through London like a lion seeking whom you might devour. 'Portrait of a Gentleman--well known in Society--seeking whom he may devour,'" he murmured to himself, stretching forth a hand for fresh foolscap. "And it's been going on ever since. And nobody's had the courage to speak to him about it. There you have the thing in a nutshell."

I turned despairingly to Gartside, and in time was successful in extracting and piecing together an explanation of his dark references to the Seraph. "Once upon a time," he began.

"When pigs were swine," Culling interrupted, "and monkeys chewed tobacco."

"Shut up, Paddy! Once upon a time a girl named Elsie Davenant married a man called Arnold Wylton. Perhaps she knows why she did it, but I'm hanged if anybody else did. She was a nice enough girl by all accounts, and Wylton--well, I expect you've heard some queer stories about him, they're all true. After they'd been married--how long was it, Paddy?"

"Oh, a few years--by the calendar," said Culling, eagerly taking up the parable. "It's long enough she must have found 'em! Wylton used to work in little spells of domesticity in the intervals of being horse-whipped out of other people's houses, and disappearing abroad while sundry little storms blew over. Morgan and Travers took in a new partner and started a special 'Wylton Department' for settling his actions out of court...."

"This is all fairly ancient history," I interposed.

"It's the extenuating circumstance," said Gartside.

Culling warmed oratorically to his work.

"In the fulness of time," he went on in the manner of the Ancient Mariner, "Mrs. Wylton woke up and said, 'This is a one-sided business.' Toby, ye're a bachelor. Let me tell you that married life is a _mauvais quart d'heure_ made up of exquisite week-ends. While Wylton dallied unobtrusively in Buda Pesth, giving himself out to be the Hungarian correspondent of the _Baptist Family Herald_, Mrs.

Wylton spent her exquisite week-end at Deauville."

He paused delicately.

"Girls will be girls," sighed Gartside.

"A gay cavalry major, with that way they have in the army, made a flying descent on Deauville. He'd been seen about with her in London quite enough to cause comment. Good-natured friends asked Wylton why he was vegetating in Pesth when he might be in Deauville; he came, he saw, he stayed in the self same hotel as his wife...."

"Which curiously enough had been already chosen by the gay cavalry major."

Culling shook his head over the innate depravity of human nature.