"Perhaps you're right, dear; he was cruel to you! And"--she rushed into another extemporisation--"I don't know that I would give him a present, after all. If one can't forgive an injury one can't, and it's no good pretending. He did wrong you, and perhaps he oughtn't to be let off, after all. I won't send him one either."

She said it because it was better to confine Kitty to her own wrongs than to allow her to approach a number of frightening unknown possibilities that began with black eyes. And apparently she succeeded. Kitty fell back on her own injury, and became a little calmer.

"Oh," she said cunningly, "but you'd have to send yours, and Miriam Levey'd have to send hers too--then, don't you see, I should be the only one who didn't, and he'd notice it! I just hope he does notice it. Serve him right. I wasn't as hard up for a fellow as all that--I carried on with a fellow at that breaking-up party. I did--you ask Mr.

Mackie.... You _do_ think Jeff never intended to marry me at all, don't you, Louie?" She peered curiously at Louie.

Well, better that, Louie thought. "I don't think he meant to for a single moment," she replied.

"Oh, the _rotter_. Come on, let's send your present now. We'll show him!..."

She was quite eager about it; but Louie kept her in the bedroom a little longer. Kitty began to speak of texts again. Again she wondered why "Come" was written in green and "Unto" in red and "Me" in purple, and why all texts had Oxford frames. "You haven't any, I see," she said, glancing again round the brown-papered walls. "You ought to have 'Remember thy Creator,' you know, Louie; it always reminds you, you see. What's this?"

It was one of Billy Izzard's etchings. Kitty examined it with her head a little on one side.

"It's very nice, whatever it is," she conceded; "but where's the other one? I always think pictures look better in pairs. But you can get odd ones cheap sometimes; Mr. Mackie had a great sale of Art Engravings one day in one of those Oxford Street places--you can hear his voice right across the street--and _he_ said they were cheap because they weren't pairs, but they'd do splendidly for the middle of anywhere, like over a mantelpiece. And what a nice looking-gla.s.s! Really, you're quite comfortable here!"

She seemed to have forgotten all about Mr. Jeffries again. She walked round Louie's bedroom, bestowing encomiums and preening herself on her own pound a week.

At midday Buck came, but Louie did not join the party; she sent Celeste and Jimmy, and herself stayed with Kitty. She hoped Kitty would not stay long; she wanted to lie down and think--think. Nor did Kitty stay very long; but before she went she returned to the subject of the crochet. She wanted the article--it was a teacloth--sent immediately; she would run out and post it herself, she said; and _then_, when he got presents from Miriam and Louie and none from herself, _that_ would be rather a nasty one for Mr. Jeffries!

"Do pack it up. _I'll_ show him I'm not to be trampled on like the dirt under his feet!" she persisted vindictively; and another approach to the subject of black eyes caused Louie to yield hurriedly. She folded the cloth and found a piece of brown paper; Kitty did not notice that she enclosed no message.

But suddenly Louie had an odd little hesitation. She knew it to be ridiculous and a sentimentality, but while she did not want to send a particular message, she yet did not want to send the teacloth entirely without one. The opportunity for the little secret luxury would probably not occur again.... Kitty was condescendingly appraising her furniture again; on the mantelpiece lay a piece of blank card; it seemed to be there almost for a purpose, and furtively Louie took it.

She scrawled an "L" upon it and slipped it into the parcel.

A few minutes later Kitty left, taking the wedding present with her.

Left at last alone, Louie once more went into her bedroom and threw herself on her bed. She lay with her hands clasped behind her head, her gaze now resting on Billy's etching, now straying idly over the brown-papered walls.

So they were to be married. And after that?

Well, she thought that on the whole she was glad. The curtain was about to fall on that drama that had begun at the Business School in Holborn, and so there would be an end of _that_.... What now? What about those fancy pictures with which she had beguiled herself as she had ridden on buses and trams and worked at her crochet during the rests? What about those half-whispered, nonsensical conversations?

What about those drowsy, secret quarters of an hour out of which she had come with slight starts to smile at herself? They were to be married. What next?

The answer came as if for months it had been merely awaiting her pleasure. It was as plain as day that she could now have as much of these as ever she pleased. For what it was worth, the freedom of her cuckoo-cloud-land was about to be definitely made over to her. Because nothing else was hers, that was all the more hers.... Kitty's tidings brought it so sharply home to her that she forgot that those sweet hours of licence were no new thing. She forgot that it was no new thing to walk, in fancy, the woods of Mallard Bois and the lanes of Rainham Parva with him by her side, no new thing to call his name down the remembered glades--"Jim!" (not, as others called him, "Jeff"). She forgot that it was old and outworn already; she saw in it only newness and liberty and delight. A Jim of sorts was now hers, ineluctably and for ever--a Jim who did not fool predestined spinsters--a Jim who would know better than blunder into a blind and stupid marriage--a Jim whose relentless hand had not--had not--had not----

But here, as she paused, the colour that had made her cheeks rosy ebbed as if a brush loaded with white had been pa.s.sed over them. His ruthless hand had--had--almost certainly had----

It was as if, in her fancy, a prison bell had tolled and a black flag had been run up in the morning breeze----

He was certainly a murderer; over the threshold of that hideous fact she must step before she could enter her palace of insubstantial delights. Stained she must take even the phantom of his hand, or not at all. Suppose the joy were to leave her, but the horror to remain?

She closed her eyes.

But she opened them again. She faced it. Say he was--that; what then?

The joy and the horror were fatally one. A man capable of all--all--even of that--and her lover! Oh, the moment the shudder had pa.s.sed the worst was over! He had killed; yes, but for a cause! He had been horribly to be feared; yes, but without the dread of him too she would not have had the whole of him, and she wanted the whole of him.

_Not_ kill, with such a reason? Withhold death, with something approaching that was worse than death? Oh, Louie knew all about that; Miss Cora had told her....

A murder? There were things by the side of which a murder, once you had made up your mind to it, was a trifle!

Are women so? Is it so that they will place their soft hands, like willow-leaves, in those other hands that may be black with dreadful work, red with destruction, yet, seeing less than man and more than man, they care not? Is it so that they will set their lips, as if for a kiss, against the mouth of war itself with its ten thousand deaths?

It seems to be so. Their loved ones, when they die, do not do so of fevers and shattered tissues, but of their own clear and trusted heroism. "Go," they say to the next one, even to the little Jimmy, "go--and come back if you may--and, though wooden props keep you together, you shall be beautiful to the mother who bore you--to the wife whose task it must be to take you to pieces and put you together again--to the woman who, because of her own heavenly dreaming, cannot think of the fiend you were in that hour when the call sounded and you dropped the point of your lance to the charge."

But one thing was clear: her dreams must remain dreams. If she would keep what was left her, she must never, never, never see him now!

PART V

THE CONSOLIDATION

I

The habit of sitting for artists leaves its mark on a woman. This mark is the lack of mystery--the "looked at" appearance. But it has its compensations. Chief of these are a physical unconsciousness, an absence of coquetry, and a liberation of the mind so complete that a sudden recall has all the effects of shock. Thus, a model posing for a whole cla.s.s of men has been known to faint because she has been seen through the skylight by a "man" who mended the roof.

In some such state of liberation Louie, on an afternoon late in the June of 1900, posed for Billy Izzard. It was in Billy's new studio, a large upper room in Camden Town, opposite the Cobden Statue. The place was so light that Billy had actually had to cut some of the light off.

The upper part of the far window, that towards which Louie's face was turned, was darkened by a linen blind; the lower part of it was shrouded with tissue paper. The whole corner was enclosed by a screen.

It was there that Billy did his etching. Behind another screen was Billy's bed. At present Louie's clothes lay on it.

It was half-past five, but the best light of a changeable day. They had had tea; the tray with the tea-things lay on the floor; and, except that he grunted occasionally, "Raise your hand a bit," or "Head a bit more round," Billy's absorption in his work was complete. He had even worked through the short rests. During these intervals Louie had crocheted. The crochet, only a little whiter than the foot near it, lay on the throne now.

Louie was not thinking; you can hardly call it thought when any trifle on which your eyes rest gives your mind its cue. Louie's eyes, the only parts of her that moved, had rested on the crochet, and that had brought Celeste into her mind. Celeste was leaving her; it had something to do with phylloxera and a brother's vines; Celeste, between two loves, must leave the boy and return to Provence. Then Louie's eyes fell on the chair in which Billy etched, and presently Kitty occupied her--Kitty, who liked her etchings in pairs, but surmised that odd ones came cheaper. Louie had really no choice but to do what she was going to do about Kitty. Jimmy must have somebody during the day, and Louie, moreover, must have ten shillings a week from somewhere. As a matter of fact, Kitty had agreed to pay her fifteen shillings, and, in the intervals of looking after Jimmy, proposed to type. Then, as her eyes moved to the screen round the bed, she remembered that her boots must be resoled. They would carry another sole, and it had been raining off and on during the greater part of the day. And then something else brought little Jimmy into her mind again.

For a wonder, she had not thought of a bigger Jimmy all the afternoon.

But on other afternoons she had. Billy sometimes remarked on a pa.s.sing tender colour; she always had to restrain a smile at that. Her tender colour? There was not a particle of that looked-at superficies of hers that, often and often, did not answer to a secret thought.... Perhaps Billy, plain common-sense man, could have told her what those secret thoughts really meant. Perhaps Billy, sensitive painter, could have told her how sweet and pale and charming things must shun comparison with the robuster stuff. As, in some delicate pastoral or _fete galante_, art might turn its happy eyes inward on itself, so that the putting on of a slipper and the nymph's hand trembling in a silken fold and the promised favour of a smiling look hardly die because they hardly live, so Louie too turned her eyes inwards. What she found within herself still sufficed her.

"Better rest a bit," said Billy, looking up as he began to scrub in a background.

Louie stepped down from the throne, cast a wrap about her shoulders, and began to crochet again.

Again she hoped she was not doing an unwise thing in having Kitty to come and live with her. But the flat was at last taken. It was a top one in the New King's Road. A Board School now blocks out the pretty view that Louie presently had at night, of the distant cupful of light that was Earls Court, with the illuminated advertis.e.m.e.nt of the Big Wheel appearing and disappearing as the structure slowly turned. Well, Kitty's fifteen shillings would pay the rent, and the experiment would be a good thing for Kitty also. Louie had furniture enough--in fact, it would be a very good thing--all round.

"Come along--time," Billy grunted. "And I say, can you stop a bit later to-night? I've got to go out, but if I don't finish this thing to-day I never shall----"

Louie mounted the throne again, and again the silence was broken only by Billy's stepping back from his canvas and forward again.

The light began to fail, and Billy began to work the more furiously.

"Give me just another ten minutes," he muttered, a brush between his teeth; "this'll make some of 'em sit up, I think; it's _painting_, this is!... But I don't know, perhaps I'd better let it go as it is; it's a job, anyway. All right, Louie, thanks.... Right-o, Jeffries; I didn't think it was so late."

The last words were spoken to the man who had knocked at the door and, without waiting for a reply, walked in.

Louie had heard the steps on the stairs; perhaps--she could not tell--she had already thought it unusual that the steps had not stopped at the water-tap on the landing below that was the supply for the two upper floors. Billy used that tap when he washed his brushes; he was looking for his palette-knife now.