So, reluctantly turning her eyes from his face and looking ahead into the haze of the rain, she suddenly said: "Are you happy?"

She wasn't surprised that he didn't reply at once. Of course men didn't. They had their usual formalities to go through, of "Why do you ask?" and so forth--a sort of routine before they could answer a plain question. As he began to go through it now she made a little impatient movement. She didn't want all that. Then he deigned to reply to her inferior intelligence. Yes, he was happy.

"You _are_?" she said, with an exultant little leap.

Yes, he was; but again, apparently, he couldn't say a thing and leave it. In the middle of more stupid, logical, masculine things (he seemed to be qualifying his statement with something or other about his conduct to Kitty Windus) she cut him short.

"Tell me," she said, repeating the little impatient gesture, "you killed that boy, didn't you?"

They had been following the railings that divided the Mall from St.

James's Park, but she had stopped to ask her question. And she was looking full at him now. But she could not see him very well; a lamp and a plane-tree made all an obscurity of vague shadows and wet reflections. But then he stepped slowly back, taking her umbrella with him, and twice, as he held the umbrella unsteadily, the light came and went on his cheek and chin; and then, as he took a step farther back still, the umbrella bobbed on the railings, from the points of it came little bright slivers of drops, and she found herself searching under a lamplit sector of alpaca for his eyes.

The danger of asking, actually, a question you have asked, but not actually, a hundred times before, is that your own mere familiarity with it throws you out in your calculation. Now she found herself suddenly hoping that what she felt to be working beyond the umbrella edge--for she felt it rather than saw it--was not fear.

For, of course, she had miscalculated a little--had been stupid to think that it was all as old a story to him as it was to her.

Obviously it would not at once occur to him that there had been nothing to find out, but that instead the whole thing had been merely enacted before her eyes; he was sure to be thinking that on some point of evidence he had been betrayed. What sort of point that could be, unless it had something to do with the black eyes that seemed to haunt Kitty, he might know, but she could not guess; and all at once she had a purely physical shrinking. She would rather not know. She could string herself up to the thought of murder, but the b.e.s.t.i.a.l details--no, not those. Those were his affairs. They were to be taken for granted as things necessarily involved. And already she was on the point of feeling herself a little disappointed in him. For in the shadow of the umbrella her eyes had now found his; his head was a little turned, and she saw the whites of them.

It _was_ fear. She, it seemed, could contemplate unafraid a sacrifice that he quaked to have carried out.

But as, with another little falling of drops from the umbrella, he steadied himself and stepped forward from the railings again, additional light came to her. It was fear, but not that fear, that haunted the amber eyes. The fear was of herself. He feared, not the information she possessed, but her whole understanding and condemnation. He feared lest she also should say: "It was murder; you are here to be judged; me too, with all the world, you must account against you; I set my mark too upon your brow."

And as he appeared sorrowfully to acquiesce in that also, nothing could have seemed lonelier nor more touching than the quietly spoken words with which he held the umbrella over her again:

"You're getting wet."

It was as though he told her that though he went outcast she must not get wet.

Her answer was to put her hand under his sleeve again. They walked on.

But he had not answered her question. Perhaps he thought he had: to all intents and purposes he had; but she wanted, not so much the word, as that he should not withhold the word. He was walking slowly, heavily, like a tower by her side; she had the sense of his fearful overweight; she would give him time. They continued to walk, their mingled shadow on the pavement as they pa.s.sed each lamp creeping away before them as if the beam of some lighthouse had had the sinister property of obscurity.

Then, within a little distance of Buckingham Palace, she stopped again. Again their eyes met under the wet, black mushroom of the umbrella.

"You did kill that boy, didn't you?"

He had a slight start. It seemed to her that he even apologised for having kept her waiting for the answer. Formerly she had seen stratagems in his eyes; now, as he dipped the umbrella for a moment and stood full in the light of another lamp, she looked only into grave, candid depths.

"Yes," he said. "You know I killed him."

"Ah!"

Again her hand slid, as if of itself, back into its place. Again they walked on. The next thing that came to her was another ridiculous yet oddly precious trifle. She wore kid gloves; before, when she had danced with him in an old frock of oyster-grey, she had worn white ones; must she (she wondered) always wear gloves with him, as he always wore old overcoats? She longed to take one glove off; yet she--she, who had met Roy by the stile at night--for very bashfulness dared not. The circ.u.mstance struck her; how was that? Gifts of understanding for her he had: had he that gift too, the gift of her own bashfulness back again? Up went her spirit on wings....

Yes, it was that--or for a night at least she would have it so. As impossibilities are reconciled in a dream, so he seemed, by his mere towerlike presence, to resolve in one large atonement, her own life as it had been and the sweet and virginal and dear smiling thing that it might have been. In no less a miracle than that she seemed to herself to be walking. He could not only have kissed her; he could have had her first kiss. He could not only have turned, as he did turn, leaning against the pillar-box by the Equerries' entrance of the Palace, to look at her again, but he could have received in return--did receive in return--such a look as she knew he also could hardly have had the like of before. And it made no difference--as in a dream such a thing might make no difference--that he had a wife, she a son. Let him have his wife, she her son; she could find room for wives and sons too.

To-morrow, perhaps, it would not be so; to-morrow might be like yesterday again; but to-night--to-night--oh, the first garden was not less trodden than these rainy streets, the Barracks, Gorringes', and Grosvenor Road! Her hand moving again on his sleeve was telling him even now, if he would but listen, that though man may not know that it is not good for him to be alone, woman knows it, and maybe still remembers it out of her knowledge of the place whence she came later than he.

And he too understood now, for she was not so rapt but that she remembered that he asked her, somewhere between a sandbin and a street lamp, whether she was happy too, and that, looking up at him, she smilingly whispered: "Yes, now." And she was not so rapt but that she remembered telling him, flatly and with another happy and laughing and triumphant look: "You can't prevent it!" But she was so rapt that of much else that he and she said she had no very clear recollection.

Words that seemed unforgettable when they came had eluded her almost in their own echo. But she knew that she gave him the liberty of herself with no more reserve than she had claimed that of him. She knew that because, later, but she did not know when, he muttered, in some street or other, she did not know where: "G.o.d bless your boy."

Well, if she forgot things now, there would be many days to come in which she would remember them.

Merely because it must be very late--she had no idea what time it was--she grudged the going of the moments almost angrily. Already she was becoming as hungry again as if she had not broken that long, long fast. But she admitted that it was not unnatural that he should think of his own concerns a little too, and want to ask her questions. She began to answer the questions hurriedly, to get them over.--Kitty Windus? Oh (she told him) he might leave Kitty to her; she'd answer for Kitty!--His wife and her complete ignorance? (His wife's ignorance appeared to be complete.)--Miriam Levey? (Oh, why would he not be quick, and she so hungry!)--And then back to his wife again; what about her? (he wanted to know). Louie wondered a little that he should consider her to be his wife's keeper also, but she answered his questions. That, she told him, was his private affair; but, if he really wanted to know what Louie thought about it, Louie could not conceive of a marriage with so huge a secret in it continuing undisclosed. _Voila_; there he had it; and _now_ might she please be permitted to enter into her own happiness again?

She was back into it, bathing in it again, almost before she was aware. A minute before she had not known what street they were in; now she saw the Chelsea Hospital on the other side of the road. On this side was a row of houses; she knew one of them; a painter for whom she had sat lived there; his studio was in the yard at the back. The thought of a studio was all that was needed. She thrilled again.

No more studios! So poignantly did she burn that she could hardly imagine that her glowing did not communicate itself. Studios, after that beautiful, beautiful sketch of Billy's? Good gracious, no! She was going to Billy's to fetch that sketch on the morrow; she would like to see Billy deny it to her! And that poor, poor old oyster-grey!

Just because he had seen her in it once she had mooned over it, smiled over it, sighed over it; but it could go now--she had a richer memory!... Furtively during the last few minutes she had been working off her right glove; it slipped from her hand to the pavement; but she was afraid to stop. Let it stay; somebody would turn it over with the point of a walking-stick in the morning and perhaps wonder who had lost it.... She stole another look at him; her hand crept along his sleeve; the tips of her fingers were on his wrist; her lips shaped his name: "Jim!"

Then, unexpectedly, it rushed upon her in full measure. She knew these streets familiarly; they were in Swan Walk now; and the thing happened all in a moment. Again, during those anxious questions of his about Kitty Windus, Miriam Levey, his wife, she had that sense of his terrible overweight: now, pa.s.sing a doorway, he suddenly reeled. He began to sink....

In an instant her arms were about him. Not the unfelt, immaterial arms of her mothering vision in Billy's studio, not that other breast, offered but impressed, sustained him; she held him within her two arms of flesh and blood, upon that firm, warm bosom that changed its shape to his weight upon it--the bosom he had seen yesterday, white hives, all their honey his.... She bent and kissed the shoulder of his coat.

Oh, if he might but faint, quite, that she might carry him somewhere, or, if she could not carry him, stay with him where he was--she cared not--rest by his side through an endless night! Her heart, yes, her lips too, called him; a whisper might not reach him; she called him aloud:

"Oh, come, come! Come, come!"

Afterwards she thought of it as a hail from a ship to another ship across a stretch of water so narrow that it was all but a stepping aboard. How could such a hail be a farewell also? They were not pa.s.sing; as they glided side by side together, either seemed stationary. Other things, the whole offing of Life, were in motion; these slipped past, as it were sky, sh.o.r.e, shipping; but for a s.p.a.ce he and she spoke from bridge to bridge. And he heard the hail too, for he opened his eyes. Though they never looked on her again they did so now, relinquishing all to her. Was there anything she had not known?

There was nothing she might not know--now----

By-and-by she had helped him to a seat on the Embankment and had made him sit down. She took off his tie and collar; she smiled as he thanked her. "That was absurd," he said.

Then he asked her where she lived.

It was over.

Well, perhaps more would have been more than she could have borne.

But when she sat at last alone in the hansom he had called, conscious that she was wet to the skin and that her boots needed to be resoled, she still had the image of the ships before her eyes, gliding together side by side, with all else in quiet, relentless motion behind them.

She held fast to it. She could not have endured to think that of that night's long wandering all that would remain on the morrow would be yet another dream and a wet glove left behind in an empty Chelsea street.

III

Louie Causton would have been more than human had she not frequently thought, as her life became a moving from pillar to post again, that there was an exasperating proportion of absence in her heart's story.

But at first she was not petulant. Some absences are brimful, as other presences are mere vacancy, and, now that she no longer sat, she had other things, plenty of them, to think of.

There was little money in the sale of crochet; there was not much more in sitting in costumes hired from the Models' Club. From both these things she quickly turned. Perhaps she turned from them the more quickly because of Kitty Windus--for Kitty was now with her in the flat in the New Kings Road, and the way in which Kitty, without spoken words, paid over her weekly fifteen shillings, was in itself a spur. Not that Kitty always spared her the words either. Two words at least that she did not always spare her were "rise" and "permanency."

Often Louie felt all the amazement, and now quite without any leaven of amus.e.m.e.nt, that she had felt when first she had entered the Business School in Holborn; but she was not keeping Kitty (or Kitty keeping her) either for love of Kitty or her own mere necessity. To keep Kitty was part and parcel of that absence she was already beginning to resent. It was merely safer to keep Kitty than to have anybody else keep her. Besides, as long as she kept Kitty, she had only to write a note, justifying it afterwards as best she could, and two ships (so to speak) would come together again. She delayed to write the note; none the less it was in her power to do so.

So (to turn for a moment to that moving background of Life in the offing) the September of 1900 found her answering the advertis.e.m.e.nt of a Bayswater seedsman and discovering the precise market value of her old Rainham Parva training. But by the end of the same month she was temporarily installed at the clerk's table of an exhibition of French paintings at a Mayfair gallery, and glad of the job. Say (the question is hardly worth going into) that it was the influence of the paintings themselves that once more caused a manager to propose that Louie's wages should be substantially increased, for a consideration; it didn't matter; Louie, who did not now throw away jobs for nothing, merely told the man not to be silly--than which, as it happened, she could have done no better thing, for at the close of the exhibition the manager, now looking upon her almost as a dear daughter, found her another place, this time at a gallery academic both artistically and morally, warned her against dangerous young men, and kissed Louie on both her laughing cheeks. After that her French again served her turn, for she entered the office of an ill.u.s.trated weekly; or if it was not entirely the French that did it, so much the luckier Louie to possess even yet a frock that was a rest to the proprietor's eyes after a succession of applicants in walking skirts and white muslin blouses.

This job Louie actually kept till June 1901; then an amalgamation took place that threw her out of work again. Three weeks later, after a severe trial of her temper by Kitty, she was a "carpet designer"--that is to say, she coloured, in an upper room near St. Paul's Churchyard, pieces of paper so minutely chequered that sometimes for an hour or two she could not get the flicker out of her eyes. She made a grace of retiring from this occupation as soon as she saw that if she did not do so her employer would retire from the office of paymaster. After that she was reduced to sitting again, in costume. Nothing else offered. Jimmy must eat, Kitty's fifteen shillings be covered. The female figure in "The Two-stringed Bow," which caused such a (journalistic) sensation in the Academy of the following year, is Louie. Chaff did not recognise it. Billy Izzard, who had seen the costume at the Models' Club, did. He persecuted Louie to sit for him again as before.

Of the Models' Club she was still a member, and she got on well with the girls. Once she took Kitty Windus there, but only once; a black-and-white man, knowing nothing of Kitty's pound a week, asked her to sit to him as Miss Tox, in "Dombey and Son"; and Kitty, presently reading the book, treated Louie for some days with marked superciliousness. That came of making yourself cheap, her manner seemed to say; and she reported Miriam Levey, whom she met near Piccadilly Circus one day, as having said, "Vell, vat do you expect?"

Louie did not much like this meeting with Miriam Levey. She remembered the Jewess's pertinacity and curiosity for curiosity's sake. Many such meetings between Kitty and Miriam Levey might easily complicate her own life.

There were two bedrooms in the flat in the New Kings Road. In the larger one, that at the back that Louie shared with Jimmy, there hung at first the sketch she had begged ("stolen" was Billy's word) after she had ceased to sit. When Louie took this down one day and put it out of sight, she told herself that she did so on Jimmy's account; but perhaps those absences that she had to convert into presences as best she could had something to do with it too. Perhaps, if she did not see the thing for a time, its first freshness would return.

Sometimes she thought these absences really too bad; she began to think so with increasing frequency as Kitty's fits of patronage became no rarer. Really it didn't seem fair that she should be asked to bear them. The least Jim could have done, since she bore them for him, would have been to let her know that he still existed. She did not much mind looking after Kitty, but it was a little too much that on his part _all_ should be absence!