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Ebook has 1079 lines and 53377 words, and 22 pages

"That's precisely it," Grimshaw said. "That's what I want in Pauline. I don't want to touch her. I want to watch her going through the lancers with that little mouth just open, and the little hand just holding out her skirt, and a little, tender expression of joy. Don't you see--just to watch her? She's a small, light bird. I want to have her in a cage, to chirrup over her, to whistle to her, to give her grapes, and to have her peep up at me and worship me. No, I haven't changed. When I was that boy it didn't occur to me that I could have Katya; we were like brother and sister, so I wanted to watch little Millie Neil. Now I know I might have Katya and I can't, so I want to watch Pauline Leicester. I want to; I want to; I want to."

His tones were perfectly level and tranquil; he used no gesture; his eyes remained upon the sand of the rolled side-walk, but his absolutely monotonous voice expressed a longing so deep, and so deep a hunger that Ellida Langham said:

"Oh, come, cheer up, old Toto; you'll be able to watch her as much as you want. I suppose you will dine with the Leicesters the three times a week that you don't dine with us, and have tea with Pauline every day, won't you?"

"But they're going out of England for a month," Grimshaw said, "and I'm due to start for Athens the day before they come back."

"Oh, poor boy!" Ellida commiserated him. "You won't be able to watch your bird in Leicester's cage for a whole ten weeks. I believe you'd like to cry over her."

"I should like to cry over her," Robert Grimshaw said, with perfect gravity. "I should like to kneel down and put my face in her lap and cry, and cry, and cry."

"As you used to do with me years ago," she said.

"As I used to do with you," he answered.

"Poor--old--Tot," she said very slowly, and he kissed her on her veil over her cheek, whilst he handed her into her coup?. She waved her black-gloved fingers at him out of the passing window, and, his hands behind his back, his shoulders square and his face serious, tranquil, and expressing no emotion, he slowly continued his stroll towards the Albert Memorial. He paused, indeed, to watch four sparrows hopping delicately on their mysterious errands, their heads erect, through the grimy and long grass between the Park railings and the path. It appeared to him that they were going ironically through a set of lancers, and the smallest of them, a paler coloured hen, might have been Pauline Leicester.

THAT was not, however, to be the final colloquy between Robert Grimshaw and Ellida Langham, for he was again upon her doorstep just before her time to pour out tea.

Robert Grimshaw was a man of thirty-five, who, by reason that he allowed himself the single eccentricity of a very black, short beard, might have passed for fifty. His black hair grew so far back upon his brow that he had an air of incipient baldness; his nose was very aquiline and very sharply modelled at the tip, and when, at a Christmas party, to amuse his little niece, he had put on a red stocking-cap, many of the children had been frightened of him, so much did he resemble a Levantine pirate. His manners, however, were singularly unnoticeable; he spoke in habitually low tones; no one exactly knew the extent of his resources, but he was reputed rather "close," because he severely limited his expenditure. He commanded a cook, a parlourmaid, a knife-boy, and a man called Jervis, who was the husband of his cook, and he kept them upon board wages. His habits were of an extreme regularity, and he had never been known to raise his voice. He was rather an adept with the fencing-sword, and save for his engagement to Katya Lascarides and its rupture he had had no appreciable history. And, indeed, Katya Lascarides was by now so nearly forgotten in Mayfair that he was beginning to pass for a confirmed bachelor. His conduct with regard to Pauline Lucas, whom everybody had expected him to marry, was taken by most of his friends to indicate that he had achieved that habit of mind that causes a man to shrink from the disturbance that a woman would cause to his course of life. Himself the son of an English banker and of a lady called Lascarides, he had lost both his parents before he was three years old, and he had been brought up by his uncle and aunt, the Peter Lascarides, and in the daily society of his cousins, Katya and Ellida. Comparatively late--perhaps because as Ellida said, he had always regarded his cousins as his sisters--he had become engaged to his cousin Katya, very much to the satisfaction of his uncle and his aunt. But Mrs. Lascarides having died shortly before the marriage was to have taken place, it was put off, and the death of Mr. Lascarides, occurring four months later, and with extreme suddenness, the match was broken off, for no reason that anyone knew altogether. Mr. Lascarides had, it was known, died intestate, and apparently, according to Greek law, Robert Grimshaw had become his uncle's sole heir. But he was understood to have acted exceedingly handsomely by his cousins. Indeed, it was a fact Mr. Hartley Jenx had definitely ascertained, that upon the marriage of Ellida to Paul Langham, Robert Grimshaw had executed in her benefit settlements of a sum that must have amounted to very nearly half his uncle's great fortune. Her sister Katya, who had been attached to her mother with a devotion that her English friends considered to be positively hysterical, had, it was pretty clearly understood, become exceedingly strange in her manner after her mother's death. The reason for her rupture with Robert Grimshaw was not very clearly understood, but it was generally thought to be due to religious differences. Mrs. Lascarides had been exceedingly attached to the Greek Orthodox Church, whereas, upon going to Winchester, Robert Grimshaw, for the sake of convenience and with the consent of his uncle, had been received into the Church of England. But whatever the causes of the rupture, there was no doubt that it was an occasion of great bitterness. Katya Lascarides certainly suffered from a species of nervous breakdown, and passed some months in a hydropathic establishment on the Continent; and it was afterwards known by those who took the trouble to be at all accurate in their gossip that she had passed over to Philadelphia in order to study the more obscure forms of nervous diseases. In this study she was understood to have gained a very great proficiency, for Mrs. Clement P. Van Husum, junior, whose balloon-parties were such a feature of at least one London season, and who herself had been one of Miss Lascarides' patients, was accustomed to say with all the enthusiastic emphasis of her country and race--she had been before marriage a Miss Carteighe of Hoboken, N.Y.--that not only had Katya Lascarides saved her life and reason, but that the chief of the Philadelphian Institute was accustomed always to send Katya to diagnose obscure cases in the more remote parts of the American continent. It was, as the few friends that Katya had remaining in London said, a little out of the picture--at any rate, of the picture of the slim, dark and passionate girl with the extreme, pale beauty and the dark eyes that they remembered her to have had.

But there was no knowing what religion might not have done for this southern nature if, indeed, religion was the motive of the rupture with Robert Grimshaw; and she was known to have refused to receive from her cousin any of her father's money, so that that, too, had some of the aspect of her having become a nun, or, at any rate, of her having adopted a cloisteral frame of mind, devoting herself, as her sister Ellida said, "to good works." But whatever the cause of the quarrel, there had been no doubt that Robert Grimshaw had felt the blow very severely--as severely as it was possible for such things to be felt in the restrained atmosphere of the more southerly and western portions of London. He had disappeared, indeed, for a time, though it was understood that he had been spending several months in Athens arranging his uncle's affairs and attending to those of the firm of Peter Lascarides and Company, of which firm he had become a director. And even when he returned to London it was to be observed that he was still very "hipped." What was at all times most noticeable about him, to those who observed these things, was the pallor of his complexion. When he was in health, this extreme and delicate whiteness had a subcutaneous flush like the intangible colouring of a China rose. But upon his return from Athens it had, and it retained for some time, the peculiar and chalky opacity. Shortly after his return he engrossed himself in the affairs of his friend Dudley Leicester, who had lately come into very large but very involved estates. Dudley Leicester, who, whatever he had, had no head for business, had been Robert Grimshaw's fag at school, and had been his almost daily companion at Oxford and ever since. But little by little the normal flush had returned to Robert Grimshaw's face; only whilst lounging through life he appeared to become more occupied in his mind, more reserved, more benevolent and more gentle.

It was on observing a return of the excessive and chalk-like opacity in Robert Grimshaw's cheeks that Ellida, when that afternoon he called upon her, exclaimed:

"What's the matter? You know you aren't looking well. One would think Peter was dead."

"You've got," he said, "to put on your things and come and see them off at the station."

"I?" she protested. "What are they to me?"

He passed his hand over his forehead.

"I've got to go," he said. "I don't want to, but I've got to. I've got to see the last of Pauline."

"It's not," he answered, "a question of what you are to them, but of what I am to you. You're the only sister I've got in the world."

Ellida was walking up to him to put her hands upon his shoulders.

"Yes, dear," she was beginning, with the note of tenderness in her voice.

"And," he interrupted her, "you're the only sister that Katya's got in the world. If I've arranged this marriage it's for your sake, to keep myself for Katya."

She gave a little indrawing of the breath:

"Oh, Toto dear," she said painfully, "is it as bad as that?"

"It's as bad as that--it's worse," he answered.

"Then don't go," she pleaded. "Stop away. What's the use of it?"

"I can't," he said numbly. "It's no use, but I can't stop away;" and he added in a fierce whisper: "Get your things on quickly; there's not much time. I can't answer for what will happen if you're not there to safeguard Katya's interests."

She shivered a little back from him.

"Oh, Toto," she said, "it's not that I'm thinking of. It's you, if you're in such pain."

"Be quick! be quick!" he insisted.

Whilst she was putting on her furs she sent in to the room the small, dark, laughing and dumb Kitty. With steps of swift delight, with an air at once jolly and elfin, the small, dark child in her white dress ran to catch hold of the lappets of her uncle's coat, but for the first time in his life Robert Grimshaw gazed out unseeing over his niece's head. He brushed her to one side and began to walk feverishly down the room, his white teeth gleaming with an air of fierceness through the bluish-black of his beard and moustache. But even with their haste, it was only by almost running along the platform beside the train that Ellida was able in the dusk to shake the hands of Dudley Leicester and his wife. Grimshaw himself stood behind her, his own hands behind his back. And Ellida had a vision, as slowly the train moved, of a little, death-white, childish face, of a pair of blue eyes, that gazed as if from the face of Death himself, over her shoulder. And then, whilst she fumbled with the flowers in her breast, Pauline Leicester suddenly sank down, her head falling back amongst the cushions, and at the last motion of her hand she dropped on to the platform the small bunch of violets. Ellida leaned forward with a quick and instinctive gesture of rescue.

The train glided slowly and remorselessly from the platform, and for a long time Robert Grimshaw watched it dwindling out of the shadow of the high station into the shadows of the falling November dusk, until they were all alone on the platform. And suddenly Robert Grimshaw ground the little bunch of flowers beneath his heel vindictively, his teeth showing as they bit his lower lip.

His voice came harshly from his throat.

"They were my flowers--my gift. She was throwing them away. Hadn't you the sense to see that?" and his voice was cruel.

She recoiled minutely, but at his next action she came swiftly forward, her hands outstretched as if to stop him. He had picked up the violets, his lips moving silently. He touched with them each of his wrists, each of his eyes, his lips and his heart.

"Serious!" Robert Grimshaw muttered.

"Oh, Robert," she said, "what have you done it for? If she's so frightfully in love with you, and you're so frightfully in love with her ... and you've only got to look at her face to see. I never saw such misery. Isn't it horrible to think of them steaming away together?"

Robert Grimshaw clenched his teeth firmly. "What did I do it for?" he said.

His eyes wandered over the form of a lady who passed them in earnest conversation with a porter. "That woman's going to drop her purse out of her muff," he said; and then he added sharply: "I didn't know what it would mean; no, I didn't know what it would mean. It's the sort of thing that's done every day, but it's horrible."

She stopped, and then she uttered suddenly:

"Oh, Robert, you oughtn't to have done it; no good can come of it."

He turned upon her sharply.

"Upon my word," he said, "you talk like an old-fashioned shopkeeper's wife. Nothing but harm can come of it! What have we arrived at in our day and our class if we haven't learnt to do what we want, to do what seems proper and expedient--and to take what we get for it?"

They turned and went slowly up the long platform.

"Oh, our day and our class," Ellida said slowly. "It would be better for Pauline to be the old-fashioned wife of a small shopkeeper than what she is--if she cared for him."

They were nearly at the barrier, and he said:

"Oh sentimentality, sentimentality! I had to do what seemed best for, us all--that was what I wanted. Now I'm taking what I get for it."

And he relapsed into a silence that lasted until they were nearly at home. And seated beside him in her coup?, Ellida, with the little deep wisdom of the woman of the household, sat beside him in a mood of wonder, of tenderness, and of commiseration.

"And it's always like this," she seemed to feel in her wise, small bones. "There they are, these men of ours. We see them altogether affable, smiling, gentle, composed. And we women have to make believe to their faces and to each other that they're towers of strength and all-wise, as they like to make out that they are. We see them taking action that they think is strong; and forcible, and masculine, and that we know is utterly mad; and we have to pretend to them and to each other that we agree in placid confidence; and then we go home, each one of us with our husbands or our brothers, and the strong masculine creature breaks down, groans and drags us after him hither and thither in his crisis, when he has to pay for his folly. And that's life. And that's love. And that's the woman's part. And that's all there is to it."

It is not to be imagined that Ellida did anything so unsubtle as to put these feelings of hers, even to herself, into words. They found vent only in the way her eyes, compassionate and maternal, rested on his brooding face. Indeed, the only words she uttered, either to herself or to him, were, with deep concern--he had taken off his hat to ease the pressure of the blood in his brows--as she ran her fingers gently through his hair:

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