it snug--wasn't that the way of it?"

"Ah, that was it, Mo. To keep it all private, and never say a word."
Then Aunt M'riar's answer became bewildering, inexplicable. "Else his
family would have known, and then I should have seen his mother. Seein'
I never did, it's no wonder I didn't know her again. I might have, for
all it's so many years." It was more the manner of saying this than the
actual words, that showed that she was referring to a recent meeting
with her husband's mother.

Uncle Mo sat a moment literally open-mouthed with astonishment. At
length he said:--"Why, when and where, woman alive, did you see his
mother?"

"There now, Mo, see what I said--what a bad one I am at telling of
things! Of course, Mrs. Prichard upstairs, she's Ralph Daverill's
mother, and he's the man who got out of prison in the _Mornin' Star_
and killed the gaoler. And he's the same man came down the Court that
Sunday and Dave see in the Park. That's Ralph Thornton Daverill, and
he's my husband!"

Uncle Mo gave up the idea of answering. The oppression of his
bewilderment was too great. It seemed to come in gusts, checked off at
intervals by suppressed exclamations and knee-slaps. It was a knockdown
blow, with no one to call time. But then, there were no rules, so when a
new inquiry presented itself, abrupt utterance followed:--"Wasn't there
any?... wasn't there any?..." followed by a pause and a difficulty of
word-choice. Then in a lowered voice, an adjustment of its terms, due to
delicacy:--"Wasn't there any consequences--such as one might expect, ye
know?"

Aunt M'riar did not seem conscious of any need for delicacies. "My baby
was born dead," she said. "That's what you meant, Mo, I take it?" Then
only getting in reply:--"That was it, M'riar," she went on:--"None knew
about it but mother, when it was all over and done with, later by a year
and more. I would have called the child Polly, being a girl, if it had
lived to be christened.... Why would I?--because that was the name he
knew me by at The Tun."

Uncle Mo began to say:--"If the Devil lets him off easy, I'll ..." and
stopped short. It may have been because he reflected on the limitations
of poor Humanity, and the futility of bluster in this connection, or
because he had a question to ask. It related to Aunt M'riar's
unaccountable ignorance throughout of Daverill's transportation to
Norfolk Island, and the particular felony that led to it. "If you was
not by way of seeing the police-reports, where was all your friends, to
say never a word?"

"No one said nothing to me," said Aunt M'riar. She seemed hazy as to the
reason at first; then a light broke:--"They never knew his name, ye see,
Mo." He replied on reflection:--"Course they didn't--right you are!" and
then she added:--"I only told mother that; and she's no reader."

A mystery hung over one part of the story--how did she account for
herself to her family? Was she known to have been married, or had
popular interpretation of her absence inclined towards charitable
silence about its causes--asked no questions, in fact, giving up
barmaids as past praying for? She seemed to think it sufficient light on
the subject to say:--"It was some length of time before I went back
home, Mo," and he had to press for particulars.

His conclusion, put briefly, was that this deserted wife, reappearing
at home with a wedding-ring after two years' absence, had decided that
she would fulfil her promise of silence best by giving a false married
name. She had engineered her mother's inspection of her marriage-lines,
so as to leave that good woman--a poor scholar--under the impression
that Daverill's name was Thornton; not a very difficult task. The name
she had chosen was Catchpole; and it still survived as an identifying
force, if called on. But it was seldom in evidence, "Aunt M'riar"
quashing its unwelcome individuality. The general feeling had been that
"Mrs. Catchpole" might be anybody, and did not recommend herself to the
understanding. There was some sort o' sense in "Aunt M'riar."

The eliciting of these points, hazily, was all Uncle Mo was equal to
after so long a colloquy, and Aunt M'riar was not in a condition to tell
more. She relit another half-candle that she had blown out for economy
when the talk set in, and called Uncle Mo's attention to the moribund
condition of his own:--"There's not another end in the house, Mo," said
she. So Uncle Mo had to use that one, or get to bed in the dark.

He had been already moved to heartfelt anger that day against this very
Daverill, having heard from his friend the Police-Inspector the story of
his arrest at The Pigeons, at Hammersmith; and, of course, of the
atrocious crime which had been his latest success with the opposite sex.
This Police-Inspector must have been Simeon Rowe, whom you may remember
as stroke-oar of the boat that was capsized there in the winter, when
Sergeant Ibbetson of the river-police met his death in the attempt to
capture Daverill. Uncle Mo's motive in visiting the police-station had
not been only to shake hands with the son of an old acquaintance. He had
carried what information he had of the escaped convict to those who were
responsible for his recapture.

If you turn back to the brief account the story gave of Maisie
Daverill's--or Prichard's--return to England, and her son's marriage,
and succeed in detecting in Polly the barmaid at the One Tun any trace
of the Aunt M'riar with whom you were already slightly acquainted, it
will be to the discredit of the narrator. For never did a greater change
pass over human identity than the one which converted the _beauté de
diable_ of the young wench just of age, who was serving out stimulants
to the Ring, and the Turf, and the men-about-town of the late twenties,
to that of the careworn, washtub-worn, and needle-worn manipulator of
fine linen and broidery, who had been in charge of Dolly and Dave
Wardle since their mother's death three years before. Never was there a
more striking testimony to the power of Man to make a desolation of the
life of Woman, nor a shrewder protest against his right to do so. For
Polly the Barmaid, look you, had done nothing that is condemned by the
orthodox moralities; she had not even flown in the face of her legal
duty to her parents. Was she not twenty-one, and does not that magic
numeral pay all scores?

The Australian gentleman had one card in his pack that was Ace of Trumps
in the game of Betrayal. He only played it when nothing lower would take
the trick. And Polly got little enough advantage from the sanction of
the Altar, her marriage-lines and her wedding-ring, in so far as she
held to the condition precedent of those warrants of respectability,
that she should observe silence about their existence. The only
duplicity of which she had been guilty was the assumption of a false
married name, and that had really seemed to her the only possible
compromise between a definite breach of faith and passive acceptance of
undeserved ill-fame. And when the hideous explanation of Daverill's long
disappearance came about, and _éclaircissement_ seemed inevitable, she
saw the strange discovery she had made of his relation to Mrs. Prichard,
as an aggravation to the embarrassment of acknowledging his past
relation to herself.

There was one feeling only that one might imagine she might have felt,
yet was entirely a stranger to. Might she not have experienced a
longing--a curiosity, at any rate--to set eyes again on the husband who
had deserted her all those long years ago? And this especially in view
of her uncertainty as to how long his absence had been compulsory? As a
matter of fact, her only feeling about this terrible resurrection was
one of shrinking as from a veritable carrion, disinterred from a grave
she had earned her right to forget. Why need this gruesome memory be
raked up to plague her?

The only consolation she could take with her to a probably sleepless
pillow was the last charge of the old prizefighter to her not to fret.
"You be easy, M'riar. He shan't come a-nigh _you_. I'll square _him_
fast enough, if he shows up down this Court--you see if I don't!" But
when she reached it, there was still balm in Gilead. For was not Dolly
there, so many fathoms deep in sleep that she might be kissed with
impunity, long enough to bring a relieving force of tears to help the
nightmare-haunted woman in her battle with the past?

As for Mo, his threat towards this convicted miscreant had no connection
with his recent interview with his police-officer friend--no hint of
appeal to Law and Order. The anger that burnt in his heart and sent the
blood to his head was as unsullied, as pure, as any that ever Primeval
Man sharpened flints to satisfy before Law and Order were invented.

CHAPTER XXVII

     HOW UNCLE MO MADE THE DOOR-CHAIN SECURE, AND A SUNFLOWER LOOKED ON
     THE WHILE. HOW AUNT M'RIAR STOPPED HER EARS. A BIT OF UNCLE MO'S
     MIND. HOW DOLLY KISSED HIM THROUGH THE DOOR-CRACK, BUT NOT MRS.
     BURR. CONCERNING RATS, TO WHICH UNCLE MO TOOK THE OPPOSITE VIEW. OF
     ONE, OR SOME, WHICH TRAVELLED OUT TO AUSTRALIA WITH OLD MRS.
     PRICHARD. HOW DAVE MET THREE LADIES IN A CARRIAGE, NONE OF WHOM
     KISSED HIM. HOW UNCLE MO WENT UPSTAIRS WITH THE CHILDREN, IN
     CONNECTION WITH THE RATS HE HAD DISCREDITED, AND STAYED UP QUITE A
     TIME. HOW HE INTERVIEWED MR. BARTLETT ABOUT THEM

"You're never fidgeting about _him_?" said Aunt M'riar to Uncle Mo, one
morning shortly after she had told him the story of her marriage. "He's
safe out of the way by now. You may rely on your police-inspectin'
friend to inspect _him_. Didn't he as good as say he was took, Mo?"

"That warn't precisely the exact expression used, M'riar," said Uncle
Mo, who was doing something with a tool-box at the door that opened on
the front-garden that opened on the Court. Dolly was holding his tools,
by permission--only not chisels or gouges, or gimlets, or bradawls, or
anything with an edge to it--and the sunflower outside was watching
them. Uncle Mo was extracting a screw with difficulty, in spite of the
fact that it was all but out already. He now elucidated the cause of
this difficulty, and left the Police Inspector alone. "'Tain't stuck, if
you ask me. I should say there never had been no holt to this screw from
the beginning. But by reason there's no life in the thread, it goes
round and round rayther than come out.... Got it!--wanted a little
coaxin', it did." That is to say, a few back-turns with very light
pressure brought the screw-head free enough for a finger-grip, and the
rest was easy. "It warn't of any real service," said Uncle Mo. "One size
bigger would ketch and hold in. This here one's only so much
horse-tentation. Now I can't get a bigger one through the plate, and I
can't rimer out the hole for want of a tool--not so much as a small
round file.... Here's a long 'un, of a thread with the first. He'll
ketch in if there's wood-backin' enough.... That's got him! Now it'll
take a Hemperor, to get _that_ out." Uncle Mo paused to enjoy a moment's
triumph, then harked back:--"No--the precise expression made use of was,
they might put their finger on him any minute."

"Which don't mean the same thing," said Aunt M'riar.

"No more it don't, M'riar, now you mention it. But he won't trust his
nose down this Court. If he does, and I ain't here, just you do like I
tell you...."

Aunt M'riar interrupted. "I couldn't find it in me to give him up, Mo.
Not for all I'm worth!" She spoke in a quick undertone, with a stress in
her voice that terrified Dolly, who nearly let go a hammer she had been
allowed to hold, as harmless.

"Not if you knew what he's wanted for, this time?"

"Don't you tell me, Mo. I'd soonest know nothing.... No--no--don't you
tell me a word about it!" And Aunt M'riar clapped her hands on her ears,
leaving an iron, that she had been trying to abate to a professional
heat, to make a brown island on its flannel zone of influence. All her
colour--she had a fair share of it--had gone from her cheeks, and Dolly
was in two minds whether she should drop the hammer and weep.

Uncle Mo's reassuring voice decided her to do neither, this time. "Don't
you be frightened, M'riar," said he. "I wasn't for telling you his last
game. Nor it wouldn't be any satisfaction to tell. I was only going to
say that if he was to turn up in these parts, just you put the chain
down--it's all square and sound now--and tell him he'll find me at The
Sun." He closed the door and put the chain he had been revising on its
mettle; adding as he did so, in defiance of Astronomy:--"'Tain't any so
far off, The Sun." Dolly's amusement at the function of the chain, and
its efficacy, was so great as to cause her aunt to rule, as a point of
Law, that six times was plenty for any little girl, and that she must
leave her uncle a minute's peace.

Dolly granting this, Aunt M'riar took advantage of it, to ask what
course Uncle Mo would pursue, if she complied with his instructions. "If
you gave him up to the Police, Mo," she said, "and I'd sent him to you,
it would be all one as if I'd done it."

"I'll promise not to give him to the Police, if he comes to me off of
your sending, M'riar. In course, if he's only himself to thank for
coming my way, that's another pair of shoes."

"But if it was me, what'll you do, Mo?" Aunt M'riar wasn't getting on
with those cuffs.

"What'll I do? Maybe I'll give him ... a bit of my mind."

"No--what'll you do, Mo?" There was a new apprehension in her voice as
she dropped it to say:--"He's a younger man than you, by nigh twenty
years."

The anticipation of that bit of Uncle Mo's mind had gripped his jaw and
knitted his brow for an instant. It vanished, and left both free as he
answered:--"You be easy, old girl! I won't give him a chance to do _me_
no harm." Aunt M'riar bent a suspicious gaze on him for a moment, but it
ended as an even more than usually genial smile spread over the old
prizefighter's face, and he gave way to Dolly's request to be sut out
only dest this once more; which ended in a Pyramus and Thisbe
accommodation of kisses through as much thoroughfare as the chain
permitted. They were painful and dangerous exploits; but it was not on
either of those accounts that Mrs. Burr, coming home rather early,
declined to avail herself of Dolly's suggestion that she also should
take advantage of this rare opportunity for uncomfortable endearments;
but rather in deference to public custom, whose rules about kissing
Dolly thought ridiculous.

The door having to be really shut to release the chain, its reopening
seemed to inaugurate a new chapter, at liberty to ignore Dolly's
flagrant suggestions at the end of the previous one. Besides, it was
possible for Uncle Mo to affect ignorance; as, after all, Dolly was
outside. Mrs. Burr did not tax him with insincerity, and the subject
dropped, superseded by less interesting matter.

"I looked in to see," said Aunt M'riar, replying to a question of Mrs.
Burr's. "The old lady was awake and knitting, last time. First time
she'd the paper on her knee, open. Next time she was gone off sound."

"That's her way, ma'am. Off and on--on and off. But she takes mostly to
the knitting. And it ain't anything to wonder at, I say, that she drops
off reading. I'm sure I can't hold my eyes open five minutes over the
newspaper. And books would be worse, when you come to read what's wrote
in them, if it wasn't for having to turn over the leaves. Because you're
bound to see where, and not turn two at once, or it don't follow on."
Aunt M'riar and Uncle Mo confirmed this view from their own experience.
It was agreed further that small type--Parliamentary debates and the
like--was more soporific than large, besides spinning out the length and
deferring the relaxation of turning over, when in book-form. Short
accidents, and not too prolix criminal proceedings were on the whole
the most palatable forms of literature. It was not to be wondered at
that old Mrs. Prichard should go to sleep over the newspaper at her age,
seeing that none but the profoundest scholars could keep awake for five
minutes while perusing it. The minute Dave came in from school he should
take Dolly upstairs to pay the old lady a visit, and brighten her up a
bit.

"Very like she's been extra to-day"--thus Mrs. Burr continued--"by
reason of rats last night, and getting no sleep."

"There ain't any rats in your room, missis," said Uncle Mo. "We should
hear 'em down below if there was."

"What it is if it ain't rats passes me then, Mr. Wardle. I do assure you
there was a loud crash like a gun going off, and we neither of us hardly
got any sleep after."

"Queer, anyhow!" said Uncle Mo. But he evidently doubted the statement,
or at least thought it exaggerated.

"I'll be glad to tell her you take the opposite view to rats, Mr.
Moses," said Mrs. Burr. "For it sets her on fretting when she gets
thinking back. And now she'll never be tired of telling about the rats
on the ship when she was took out to Australia. Running over her face,
and starting her awake in the night! It gives the creeps only to hear."

"There, Dolly, now you listen to how the rats run about on Mrs. Picture
when she was on board of the ship." Thus Aunt M'riar, always with that
haunting vice of perverting Art, Literature, Morals, and Philosophy to
the oppressive improvement of the young. She seldom scored a success,
and this time she was hoisted with her own petard. For Dolly jumped with
delight at the prospect of a romance of fascinating character, combining
Zoölogy and Travel. She applied for a place to hear it, on the knee of
Mrs. Burr, who, however, would have had to sit down to supply it. So she
was forced to be content with a bald version of the tale, as Mrs. Burr
had to see to getting their suppers upstairs. She was rather
disappointed at the size and number of the rats. She enquired:--"Was
they large rats, or small?" and would have preferred to hear that they
were about the size of small cats--not larger, for fear of
inconveniencing old Mrs. Picture. And a circumstance throwing doubt on
their number was unwelcome to her. For it appeared that old Mrs. Picture
slept with her fellow-passengers in a dark cabin, and no one might light
a match all night for fear of the Captain. And rats ran over those
passengers' faces! But it may have been all the same rat, and to Dolly
that seemed much less satisfactory than troops. She was rather cast
down about it, but there was no need to discourage Dave. She could
invent some extra rats, when he came back from school.

Lay down the book, you who read, and give but a moment's thought to the
strangeness of these two episodes, over half a century apart. One, in
the black darkness of an emigrant's sleeping-quarters on a ship
outward-bound, all its tenants huddled close in the stifling air; child
and woman, weak and strong, sick and healthy even, penned in alike to
sleep their best on ranks of shelves, a mere packed storage of human
goods, to be delivered after long months of battle with the seas, ten
thousand miles from home. Or, if you shrink from the thought that
Maisie's luck on her first voyage was so cruel as that, conceive her
interview with those rodent fellow-passengers as having taken place in
the best quarters money could buy on such a ship--and what would _they_
be, against a good steerage-berth nowadays?--and give her, at least, a
couch to herself. Picture her, if you will, at liberty to start from it
in terror and scramble up a companion ladder to an open deck, and pick
her way through shrouds and a bare headway of restless sprits above, and
Heaven knows what of coiled cordage and inexplicable bulkhead underfoot,
to some haven where a merciful old mariner, alone upon his watch, shuts
his eyes to his duty and tolerates the beautiful girl on deck, when he
is told by her that she cannot sleep for the rats. Make the weather
fair, to keep the picture at its best, and let her pass the hours till
the coming of the dawn, watching the mainmast-truck sway to and fro
against the Southern Cross, as the breeze falls and rises, and the
bulwark-plash is soft or loud upon the waters.

And then--all has vanished! That was half a century ago, and more. And a
very little girl with very blue eyes and a disgracefully rough shock of
golden curls has just been told of those rats, and has resolved to add
to their number--having power to do so, like a Committee--when she comes
to retell the tale to her elder brother; and then they will both--and
this is the strangest of all!--they will both go and make a noisy and
excited application to an authority to have it confirmed or
contradicted. And this authority will be that girl who sat on that deck
beneath the stars, and listened to the bells sounding the hours through
the night, to keep the ship's time for a forgotten crew, on a ship that
may have gone to the bottom many a year ago, on its return voyage home
perhaps--who knows?

Before Dave heard Dolly's version of the rats, he had a tale of his own
to tell, coming in just after Mrs. Burr had departed. As he was excited
by the event he was yearning to narrate, he did not put it so lucidly as
he might have done. He said:--"Oy saw the lady, and another lady, and
another lady, all in one carriage. And they see me. And the lady"--he
still pronounced this word _loydy_--"she see me on the poyvement, and
'Stop' she says. And then she says, 'You're Doyvy, oyn't you, that had
the ax-nent?' I says these was my books I took to scrool...."

"Didn't you _say_ you was Davy?" said Uncle Mo. And Aunt M'riar she
actually said:--"Well, I never!--not to tell the lady who you was!"

Dave was perplexed, looking with blue-eyed gravity from one to the
other. "The loydy said I _was_ Doyvy," said he, in a slightly injured
tone. He did not at all like the suggestion that he had been guilty of
discourtesy.

"In course the lady knew, and knew correct," said Uncle Mo, drawing a
distinction which is too often overlooked. "Cut along and tell us some
more. What more did the lady say?"

Dave concentrated his intelligence powerfully on accuracy:--"The loydy
said to the yuther loydy--the be-yhooterful loydy...."

"Oh, there was a beautiful lady, was there?"

Dave nodded excessively, and continued:--"Said here's a friend of mine,
Doyvy Wardle, and they was coming to poy a visit to, to-morrow
afternoon."

"And what did the other lady say?"

Dave gathered himself together for an effort of intense fidelity:--"She
said--she said--'He's much too dirty to kiss in the open street'--she
said, 'and better not to touch.' Yorce!" He seemed magnanimous towards
Gwen, in spite of her finical delicacy.

Aunt M'riar turned his face to the light, by the chin. "What's the child
been at?" said she.

"The boys had some corks," was Dave's explanation. Nothing further
seemed to be required; Uncle Mo merely remarking: "It'll come off with
soap." However, there was some doubt about the identity of these
carriage ladies. Was one of them the original lady of the rings; who had
taken Dave for a drive or _vice versa_. "Not her!" said Dave; and went
on shaking his head so long to give his statement weight, that Aunt
M'riar abruptly requested him to stop, as her nervous system could not
bear the strain. It was enough, she said, to make her eyes come out by
the roots.

"She must have been somebody else. She couldn't have been nobody," said
Uncle Mo cogently. "Spit it out, old chap, Who was she?"

It was easy to say who she was; the strain of attestation had turned on
who she wasn't. Dave became fluent:--"Whoy, the loydy what was a
cistern, and took me in the roylwoy troyne and in the horse-coach to
Granny Marrowbone." For he had never quite dissociated Sister Nora from
ball-taps and plumbings. He added after reflection:--"Only not dressed
up like then!"

At this point Dolly, whose preoccupation about those rats had stood,
between her and a reasonable interest in Dave's adventure, struck in
noisily and rudely with disjointed particulars about them, showing a
poor capacity for narrative, and provoking Uncle Mo to tickling her with
a view to their suppression. Aunt M'riar seized the opportunity to
capture Dave and subject him to soap and water at the sink.

As soon as the boys' corks, or the effect of using them after ignition
as face-pigments, had become a thing of the past, Dave and Dolly were
ready to pay their promised visit to Mrs. Prichard. Uncle Mo suggested
that he might act as their convoy as far as the top-landing. This was a
departure from precedent, as stair-climbing was never very welcome to
Uncle Mo. But Aunt M'riar consented, the more readily that she was all
behind with her work. Uncle Mo not only went up with the children, but
stayed up quite a time with the old lady and Mrs. Burr. When he came
down he did not refer to his conversation with them, but went back to
Dave's encounter with his aristocratic friends in the street.

"The lady that sighted our boy out," said he, "she'll be Miss
What's-her-name that come on at the Hospital--her with the clean white
tucker...." This referred to a vaguely recollected item of the costume
in which Sister Nora was dressed up at the time of Dave's accident. It
had lapsed, as inappropriate, during her nursing of her father in
Scotland, and had not been resumed.

"That's her," said Aunt M'riar. "Sister of Charity--that's what _she_
is. The others are ladyships, one or both. They all belong." The tone of
remoteness might have been adopted in speaking of inhabitants of Mars
and Venus.

"I thought her the right sort, herself," said Uncle Mo, implying that
others of her _monde_ might be safely assumed to be the wrong sort,
pending proof of the contrary. "Anyways, she's coming to pay Dave a
visit, and I'll be glad of a sight of her, for one!"

"Oh, I've no fault to find, Mo, if that's what you mean." Aunt M'riar
was absorbed in her mystery, doing justice to what was probably a lady's
nightgear, of imperial splendour. So she probably had spoken rather at
random; and, indeed, seemed to think apology necessary. She took
advantage of the end of an episode to say, while contemplating the
perfection of two unimpeachable cuffs:--"So long as the others don't
give theirselves no airs." Isolated certainly, as to structure; but,
after all, has speech any use except to communicate ideas?

Uncle Mo presumably understood, as he accepted the form of speech,
saying:--"And so long as we do ourselves credit, M'riar."

"Well, Mo, you never see me do anything but behave."

"That I never did, M'riar. Right you are!" Which ended a little colloquy
that contained or implied a protest against the compulsory association
of classes, expressed to a certain extent by special leniency towards an
exceptional approach from without. Having entered his own share of the
protest, Uncle Mo announced his intention of seeking Mr. Bartlett the
builder, to speak to him about them rats. This saying Aunt M'riar did
not even condemn as enigmatical, so completely did all that relates to
buildings lie outside her jurisdiction.

"I've got my 'ands so full just now," said Mr. Bartlett, when Uncle Mo
had explained the object of his visit, "or I'd step round to cast an eye
on that bressumer. Only you may make your mind easy, and say I told you
to it. If we was all of us to get into a perspiration whenever a board
creaked or a bit of loose parging come down a chimley, we shouldn't have
a minute's peace of our lives. Some parties is convinced of Ghosts the
very first crack! Hysterical females in partic'lar." Mr. Bartlett did
not seem busy, externally; but he contrived to give an impression that
he was attending to a job at Buckingham Palace.

Uncle Mo felt abashed at his implied rebuke. It was not deserved, for he
was guiltless of superstition. However, he had accepted the position of
delegate of the top-floor, which, of course, was an hysterical floor,
owing to the sex of its tenants. For Mr. Bartlett's meaning was the
conventional one, that all women were hysterical, not some more than
others. Uncle Mo felt that his position was insecure; and that he had
better retire from it. Noises, he conceded, was usually nothing at all;
but he had thought he would mention them, in this case.

Mr. Bartlett professed himself sincerely obliged to all persons who
would mention noises, in spite of their equivocal claims to existence.
It might save a lot of trouble in the end, and you never knew. As soon
as he had a half an hour to spare he would give attention. Till Tuesday
he was pretty well took up. No one need fidget himself about the noises
he mentioned; least of all need the landlord be communicated with, as he
was not a Practical Man, but in Independent Circumstances. Moreover, he
lived at Brixton.

CHAPTER XXVIII

     OF A RAID ON DOLLY'S GARDEN. THAT YOUNG DRUITT'S BEHAVIOUR TO HIS
     SISTER. MR. RAGSTROAR'S ACCIDENT, AND HIS MOKE. HOW THE TWO LADIES
     CAME AT LAST. LADY GWENDOLEN RIVERS, AND HOW DOLLY GOT ON HER LAP.
     HOW DAVE WENT UPSTAIRS TO GET HIS LETTER. HOW MRS. PRICHARD HAD
     TAKEN MRS. MARROWBONE TO HEART, AND VICE VERSA. HOW DOLLY GOT A
     LOCK OF GWEN'S HAIR, AND VICE VERSA. HOW DAVE DELAYED AND DOLLY AND
     GWEN WENT TO FETCH HIM. A REMARKABLE SOUND. THEN GOD-KNOWS-WHAT,
     OUTSIDE!

An effort of horticulture was afoot in the front-garden of No. 7, Sapps
Court. Dave Wardle and Dolly were engaged in an attempt to remedy a
disaster that had befallen the Sunflower. There was but one--the one
that had been present when Uncle Mo was adjusting that door-chain.

Its career had been cut short prematurely. For a boy had climbed up over
the end wall of those gardens acrost the Court, right opposite to where
it growed; and had all but cut through the stem, when he was cotched in
the very act by Michael Ragstroar. That young coster's vigorous
assertion of the rights of property did a man's heart good to see,
nowadays. The man was Uncle Mo, who got out of the house in plenty of
time to stop Michael half-murdering the marauder, as soon as he
considered the latter had had enough, he being powerfully outclassed by
the costermonger boy. Why, he was only one of them young Druitts, when
all was said and done! Michael felt no stern joy in him--a foeman not
worth licking, on his merits. But the knife that he left behind, with a
buckhorn handle, was a fizzing knife, and was prized in after-years by
Michael.

The Wardle household had gone into mourning for the Sunflower. Was it
not the same Sunflower as last year, reincarnated? Dolly sat under it,
shedding tears. Uncle Mo showed ignorance of gardening, saying it might
grow itself on again if you giv' it a chance; not if you kep' on at it
like that. Dave disagreed with this view, but respectfully. His Hospital
experience had taught him the use of ligatures; and he kept on at it,
obtaining from Mrs. Burr a length of her wide toyp to tie it in
position. If limbs healed up under treatment, why not vegetation? The
operator was quite satisfied with his handiwork.

In fact, Dave and Dolly both foresaw a long and prosperous life for the
flower. They rejected Aunt M'riar's suggestion, that it should be cut
clear off and stood in water, as a timid compromise--a stake not worth
playing for. And Michael Ragstroar endorsed the flattering tales Hope
told, citing instances in support of them derived from his own
experience, which appeared to have been exceptional. As, for instance,
that over-supplies of fruit at Covent Garden were took back and stuck on
the stems again, as often as not. "I seen 'em go myself," said he. "'Ole
cartloads!"

"Hark at that unblushing young story!" said Aunt M'riar, busy in the
kitchen, Michael being audible without, lying freely. "He'll go on like
that till one day it'll surprise me if the ground don't open and swallow
him up."

But Uncle Mo had committed himself to an expression of opinion on the
vitality of vegetables. He might condemn exaggeration, but he could
scarcely repudiate a principle he had himself almost affirmed. He took
refuge in obscurity. "'Tain't for the likes of us, M'riar," said he,
shaking his head profoundly, "to be sayin' how queer starts there mayn't
be. My jiminy!--the things they says in lecters, when they gets the
steam up!" He shook his head a little quicker, to recover credit for a
healthy incredulity, and arranged a newspaper he was reading against
difficulties, to gain advantages of position and a better discrimination
of its columns.

"If it was the freckly one with the red head," said Aunt M'riar,
referring back to the fracas of the morning, "all I can say is, I'm
sorry you took Micky off him." From which it appeared that this culprit
was not unknown. Indeed, Aunt M'riar was able to add that Widow Druitt
his mother couldn't call her soul her own for that boy's goings on.

"He'd got a tidy good punishing afore I got hold of the scruff of my
man's trousers," said Uncle Mo, who seemed well contented with the
culprit's retribution; and, of course, _he_ knew. "Besides," he added,
"he had to get away over them bottles." That is to say, the wall-top,
bristling with broken glass. Humanity had paved the way for the enemy's
retreat. Uncle Mo added inquiry as to how the freckly one's behaviour to
his family had come to the knowledge of Sapps Court.

"You can see acrost from Mrs. Prichard's. He do lead 'em all a life,
that boy! Mrs. Burr she saw him pour something down his sister's back
when she was playing scales. Ink, she says, by the look. But, of course,
it's a way off from here, over to Mrs. Druitt's."

"Oh--she's the one that plays the pyanner. Same tune all through--first
up, then down! Good sort of tune to go to sleep to!"

"'Tain't a tune, Mo. It's _scales_. She's being learned how. One day
soon she'll have a tune to play. An easy tune. Mrs. Prichard says _she_
could play several tunes before she was that girl's age. Then she hadn't
no brother to werrit her. I lay that made a difference." Aunt M'riar
went on to mention other atrocities ascribed by Mrs. Burr to the freckly
brother. His behaviour to his musical sister had, indeed, been a matter
of serious concern to the upstairs tenants, whose window looked directly
upon the back of Mrs. Druitt's, who took in lodgers in the main street
where Dave had met with his accident.

The boy Michael was suffering from enforced leisure on the day of this
occurrence, as his father's cart had met with an accident, and was under
repair. Its owner had gone to claim compensation personally from the
butcher whose representative had ridden him down; not, he alleged, by
misadventure, but from a deep-rooted malignity against all poor but
honest men struggling for a livelihood. No butcher, observe, answers
this description. Butchers are a class apart, whose motives are
extortion, grease, and blood. They wallow in the last with joy, and
practise the first with impunity. If they can get a chance to run over
you, they'll do it! Trust them for that! Nevertheless, so hopeless would
this butcher's case be if his victim went to a lawyer, that it was worth
having a try at it afore he done that--so Mr. Rackstraw put it, later.
Therefore, he had this afternoon gone to High Street, Clapham, to apply
for seven pun' thirteen, and not take a penny less. Hence his son's
ability to give attention to local matters, and a temporary respite to
his donkey's labours in a paddock at Notting Hill. As for Dave, and for
that matter the freckly boy, it was not term-time with them, for some
reason. Dave was certainly at home, and was bidden to pay a visit to
Mrs. Prichard in the course of the afternoon, if those lady-friends of
his whom he met in the street yesterday did not come to pay _him_ a
visit. It was not very likely they would, but you never could tell. Not
to place reliance!

Uncle Mo kept looking at his watch, and saying that if this here lady
meant to turn up, she had better look alive. Being reproved for
impatience by Aunt M'riar, he said very good, then--he'd stop on to the
hour. Only it was no use runnin' through the day like this, and nothing
coming of it, as you might say. This was only the way he preferred of
expressing impatience for the visit. It is a very common one, and has
the advantages of concealing that impatience, putting whomsoever one
expects in the position of an importunate seeker of one's society, and
suggesting that one is foregoing an appointment in the City to gratify
him. Uncle Mo did unwisely to tie himself to the hour, as he became
thereby pledged to depart, he having no particular wish to do so, and no
object at all in view.

But he was not to be subjected to the indignity of a recantation. As the
long hand of his watch approached twelve, and he was beginning to feel
on the edge of an embarrassment, Dave left off watering the Sunflower,
and ran indoors with the news that there were two ladies coming down the
Court, one of whom was Sister Nora, and the other "the other lady."
Dave's conscience led him into a long and confused discrimination
between this other lady and the other other lady, who had shared with
her the back-seat in that carriage yesterday. It was quite unimportant
which of the two had come, both being unknown to Dave's family.
Moreover, there was no time for the inventory of their respective
attributes Dave wished to supply. He was still struggling with a detail,
in an undertone lest it should transpire in general society, when he
found himself embraced from behind, and kissed with appreciation. He had
not yet arrived at the age when one is surprised at finding oneself
suddenly kissed over one's shoulder by a lady. Besides, this was his old
acquaintance, whom he was delighted to welcome, but who made the
tactical mistake of introducing "the other lady" as Lady Gwendolen
Rivers. Stiffness might have resulted, if it had not been for the
conduct of that young lady, which would have thawed an iceberg. It was
not always thus with her; but, when the whim was upon her, she was
irresistible.

"I know what Dave was saying to you when we came in, Mr. Wardle," said
she, after capturing Dolly to sit on her knee, and coming to an anchor.
"He was telling you exactly what his friend had said to him about me. He
was Micky. I've heard all about Micky. This chick's going to tell me
what Micky said about me. Aren't you, Dolly?" She put Dolly at different
distances, ending with a hug and a kiss, of which Dolly reciprocated the
latter.

Dolly would have embarked at once on a full report, if left to herself.
But that unfortunate disposition of Aunt M'riar's to godmother or
countersign the utterances of the young, very nearly nipped her
statement in the bud. "There now, Dolly dear," said the excellent
woman, "see what the lady says!--you're to tell her just exactly what
Micky said, only this very minute in the garden." Which naturally
excited Dolly's suspicion, and made her impute motives. She retired
within herself--a self which, however, twinkled with a consciousness of
hidden knowledge and a resolution not to disclose it.

Gwen's tact saved the position. "Don't you tell _them_, you know--only
me! You whisper it in my ear.... Yes--quite close up, like that." Dolly
entered into this with zest, the possession of a secret in common with
this new and refulgent lady obviously conferring distinction.

Sister Nora--not otherwise known to Sapps Court--was resuming history
during the past year for the benefit of Uncle Mo. She had seen nothing
of Dave, or, indeed, of London, since October; till, yesterday, when she
got back from Scotland, whom should she see before she had been five
minutes out of the station but Dave himself! Only she hardly knew him,
his face was so black. Here Uncle Mo and Aunt M'riar shook penitential
heads over his depravity. Sister Nora paid a passing tribute to the
Usages of Society, which rightly discourage the use of burnt cork on the
countenance, and proceeded. She had heard of him, though, having paid a
visit to Widow Thrale in the country, where he got well after the
Hospital.

This was a signal for Dave to find his voice, and he embarked with
animation on a variegated treatment of subjects connected with his visit
to the country. A comparison of his affection for Widow Thrale and
Granny Marrable, with an undisguised leaning to the latter; a reference
to the lady with the rings, her equipage, and its driver's nose; Farmer
Jones's bull, and its untrustworthy temper; the rich qualities of
duckweed; the mill-model on the mantelshelf, and individualities of his
fellow-convalescents. This took time, although some points were only
touched lightly.

Possibly Uncle Moses thought it might prove prolix, as he said:--"If I
was a young shaver now, and ladies was to come to see me, I should get a
letter I was writing, to show 'em." The delicacy and tact with which
this suggestion was offered was a little impaired by Aunt
M'riar's:--"Yes, now you be a good boy, Dave, and ..." and so forth.

Many little boys would not have been so magnanimous as Dave, and would
have demurred or offered passive resistance. Dave merely removed Sister
Nora's arm rather abruptly from his neck, saying:--"Storp a minute!" and
ran up the stairs that opened on the kitchen where they were sitting.
There was more room there than in the little parlour.

Uncle Moses explained:--"You see, ladies, this here young Dave, for all
he's getting quite a scholar now, and can write any word he can spell,
yet he don't take to doing it quite on his own hook just yet a while. So
he gets round the old lady upstairs, for to let him set and write at her
table. Then she can tip him a wink now and again, when he gets a bit
fogged."

"That's Mrs. Picture," said Gwen, interested. But she did not speak loud
enough to invite correction of her pronunciation of the name, and Sister
Nora merely said:--"That's her!" and nodded. Dolly at once launched into
a vague narrative of a misadventure that had befallen her putative
offspring, the doll that Sister Nora had given her last year. Struvvel
Peter had met with an accident, his shock head having got in a
candle-flame in Mrs. Picture's room upstairs, so that he was quite
smooth before he could be rescued. The interest of this superseded other
matter.

"Davy he's a great favourite with the ladies," said Uncle Mo, as
Struvvel Peter subsided. "He ain't partic'lar to any age. Likes 'em a
bit elderly, if anythin', I should say." He added, merely to generalise
the conversation, and make talk:--"Now this here old lady in the country
she's maybe ten years younger than our Mrs. Prichard, but she's what you
might call getting on in years."

"Prichard," said Gwen, for Sister Nora's ear. "I thought it couldn't be
Picture."

"Prichard, of course! How funny we didn't think of it--so obvious!"

"Very--when one knows! I think I like Picture best."

Aunt M'riar, not to be out of the conversation, took a formal exception
to Uncle Mo's remark:--"The ladies they know how old Old Mrs. Marrable
in the country is, without your telling of 'em, Mo."

"Right you are, M'riar! But they don't know nothing about old Mrs.
Prichard." Uncle Mo had spoken at a guess of Mrs. Marrowbone's age, of
which he knew nothing. It was a sort of emulation that had made him
assess _his_ old lady as the senior. He felt vulnerable, and changed the
conversation. "That young Squire's taking his time, M'riar. Supposin'
now I was just to sing out to him?"

But both ladies exclaimed against Dave being hurried away from his old
lady. Besides, they wanted to know some more about her--what sort of
classification hers would be, and so on. There were stumbling-blocks in
this path. Better keep clear of classes--stick to generalities, and hope
for lucky chances!

"What made Dave think the old souls so much alike, Mrs. Wardle?" said
Sister Nora. "Children are generally so sharp to see differences."

"It was a kind of contradictiousness, ma'am, no better I do think,
merely for to set one of 'em alongside the other, and look at." Aunt
M'riar did not really mean contradictiousness, and can hardly have meant
_contradistinction_, as that word was not in her vocabulary. We incline
to look for its origin in the first six letters, which it enjoys in
common with contrariwise and contrast. This, however, is Philology, and
doesn't matter. Let Aunt M'riar go on.

"Now just you think how alike old persons do get, by reason of change.
'Tain't any fault of their own. Mrs. Prichard she's often by way of
inquiring about Mrs. Marrowbone, and I should say she rather takes her
to heart."

"How's that, Mrs. Wardle? Why 'takes her to heart'?" A joint question of
the ladies.

"Well--now you ask me--I should say Mrs. Prichard she wants the child
all to herself." Aunt M'riar's assumption that this inquiry had been
made without suggestion on her own part was unwarranted.

"_I'll_ tell you, ladies," said Uncle Mo, rolling with laughter. "The
old granny's just as jealous as any schoolgirl! She's _that_, and you
may take my word for it." He seemed afraid this might be interpreted to
Mrs. Prichard's disadvantage; for he added, recovering gravity:--"Not
that I blame her for it, mind you!"

"Do you hear _that_, Gwen?" said Sister Nora. "Mrs. Picture's jealous of
Granny Marrowbone.... I must tell you about that, Mrs. Wardle. It's
really as much as one's place is worth to mention Mrs. Prichard to Mrs.
Marrable. I assure you the old lady believes I-don't-know-what about
her--thinks she's a wicked old witch who will make the child as bad as
herself! She does, indeed! But then, to be sure, Goody Marrable thinks
everyone is wicked in London.... What's that, Gwen?"

"We want a pair of scissors, Dolly and I do. Do give us a pair of
scissors, Aunt Maria.... Yes, go on, Clo. I hear every word you say. How
very amusing!... Thank you, Aunt Maria!" For Gwen and Dolly had just
negotiated an exchange of locks of hair, which had distracted the full
attention of the former from the conversation. She had, however, heard
enough to confirm a half-made resolution not to leave the house without
seeing Mrs. Prichard.

"Ass! Vis piece off vat piece," says Dolly, making a selection from the
mass of available gold, which Gwen snips off ruthlessly.

"Well!" says Aunt M'riar, with her usual record of inexperience of
childhood. "I never, never did, in all my christened days!"

"Quip off a bid, bid piece with the fidders," says Dolly, delighted at
the proceeding. "A bid piece off me at the vethy top." The ideal in her
mind is analogous to the snuffing of a candle. A lock of a browner gold
than the one she gives it for is secured--big enough, but not what she
had dreamed of.

Uncle Mo was seriously concerned at Dave's prolonged absence. Not that
he anticipated any mishap!--it was only a question of courtesy to
visitors. Supposing Aunt M'riar was to go up and collar Dave and fetch
him down, drastically! Uncle Mo always shirked stair-climbing, partly
perhaps because he so nearly filled the stairway. He overweighted the
part, aesthetically.

Gwen perceived her opportunity. "Please do nothing of the sort, Aunt
Maria," said she. "Look here! Dolly and I are going up to fetch him.
Aren't we, Dolly?"

It would have needed presence of mind to invent obstacles to prevent
this, and neither Uncle Mo nor Aunt M'riar showed it, each perhaps
expecting Action on the other's part. Moreover, Dolly's approval took
such a tempestuous form that opposition seemed useless. Besides, there
was that fatal assurance about Gwen that belongs to young ladies who
have always had their own way in everything. It cannot be developed in
its fulness late in life.

Aunt M'riar's protest was feeble in the extreme. "Well, I should be
ashamed to let a lady carry me! That I should!" If Aunt M'riar had known
the resources of the Latin tongue, she might have introduced the
expression _ceteris paribus_. No English can compass that amount of
slickness; so her speech was left crude.

Uncle Mo really saw no substantial reason why this beautiful vision
should not sweep Dolly upstairs, if it pleased her. He may have felt
that a formal protest would be graceful, but he could not think of the
right words. And Aunt M'riar had fallen through. Moreover, his memory
was confident that he had left his bedroom-door shut. As to miscarriage
of the expedition into Mrs. Prichard's territory, he had no misgiving.

Miss Grahame was convinced that the incursion would have better results
if she left it to its originator, than if she encumbered it with her own
presence. After all, the room could be no larger than the one she sat
in, and might be smaller. Anyhow, they could get on very well without
her for half an hour. And she wanted a chat with Dave's guardians; she
did not really know them intimately.

"The two little ones must be almost like your own children to you, Mr.
Wardle," said she, to broach the conversation.

"Never had any, ma'am," said Uncle Mo, literal-minded from
constitutional good-faith.

"If you _had_ had any was what I meant." Perhaps the reason Miss
Grahame's eye wandered after Aunt M'riar, who had followed Gwen and
Dolly--to "see that things were straight," she said--was that she felt
insecure on a social point. Uncle Mo's eye followed hers.

"Nor yet M'riar," said he, seeing a precaution necessary. "Or perhaps I
should say _one_. Not good for much, though! Born dead, I believe--years
before ever my brother married her sister. Never set eyes on M'riar's
husband! Name of Catchpole, I believe.... That's her coming down." He
raised his voice, dropped to say this, as she came within
hearing:--"Yes--me and M'riar we share 'em up, the two young characters,
but we ain't neither of us their legal parents. Not strickly as the Law
goes, but we've fed upon 'em like, in a manner of speaking, from the
beginning, or nigh upon it. Little Dave, he's sort of kept me a-going
from the early days, afore we buried his poor father--my brother David,
you see. He died down this same Court, four year back, afore little
Dolly was good for much, to look at.... They all right, M'riar?"

"They're making a nice racket," said Aunt M'riar. "So I lay there ain't
much wrong with _them_." She picked up a piece of work to go on with,
and explored a box for a button to meet its views. Evidently a garment
of Dolly's. Probably this was a slack season for the higher needlework,
and the getting up of fine linen was below par.

Uncle Mo resumed:--"So perhaps you're right to put it they are like my
own children, and M'riar's." He was so chivalrously anxious not to
exclude his co-guardian from her rights that he might have laid himself
open to be misunderstood by a stranger. Miss Grahame understood him,
however. So she did, thoroughly, when he went on:--"I don't take at all
kindly, though, to their growing older. Can't be helped, I suppose.
There's a many peculiar starts in this here world, and him as don't
like 'em just has to lump 'em. As I look at it, changes are things one
has to put up with. If we had been handy when we was first made, we
might have got our idears attended to, to oblige. Things are fixtures,
now."

Miss Grahame laughed, and abstained consciously from referring to the
inscrutable decrees of Providence which called aloud for recognition.
"Of course, children shouldn't grow," she said. "I should like them to
remain three, especially the backs of their necks." Uncle Mo's
benevolent countenance shone with an unholy cannibalism, as he nodded a
mute approval. There was something very funny to his hearer in this old
man's love of children, and his professional engagements of former
years, looked at together.

Aunt M'riar took the subject _au serieux_. "Now you're talking silly,
Mo," she said. "If the children never grew, where would the girls be?
And a nice complainin' you men would make then!"

Miss Grahame made an effort to get away from abstract Philosophy. "I'm
afraid it can't be helped now, anyhow," said she. "Dave _is_ growing,
and means to be a man. Oh dear--he'll be a man before we know it. He'll
be able to read and write in a few months."

Uncle Mo's face showed a cloud. "Do ye really think that, ma'am?" he
said. "Well--I'm afeared you may be right." He looked so dreadfully
downcast at this, that Miss Grahame was driven to the conclusion that
the subject was dangerous.

She could not, however, resist saying:--"He _must_ know _some_ time, you
know, Mr. Wardle. Surely you would never have Dave grow up uneducated?"

"Not so sure about that, ma'am!" said Uncle Mo, shaking a dubious head.
"There's more good men spiled by schoolmasters than we hear tell of in
the noospapers." What conspiracy of silence in the Press this pointed at
did not appear. But it was clear from the tone of the speaker that he
thought interested motives were at the bottom of it.

Now Miss Grahame was said by critical friends--not enemies; at least,
they said not--to be over-anxious to confer benefits of her own
selection on the Human Race. Her finger-tips, they hinted, were itching
to set everyone else's house in order. Naturally, she had a strong bias
towards Education, that most formidable inroad on ignorance of what we
want to know nothing about. Uncle Mo regarded the human mind, if not as
a stronghold against knowledge, at least as a household with an
inalienable right to choose its guests. Miss Grahame was in favour of
invitations issued by the State, and _visé'd_ by the Church. Everything
was to be correct, and sanctioned. But it was quite clear to her that
these views would not be welcome to the old prizefighter, and she was
fain to be content with the slight protest against Obscurantism just
recorded. In short, Miss Grahame found nothing to say, and the subject
had to drop.

She could, however, lighten the air, and did so. "What on earth are they
about upstairs?" said she. "I really think I might go up and see." And
she was just about to do so, with the assent of Aunt M'riar, when the
latter said suddenly:--"My sakes and gracious! What's that?" rather as
though taken aback by something unaccountable than alarmed by it.

Uncle Mo listened a moment, undisturbed; then said,
placidly:--"Water-pipes, _I_ should say." For in a London house no
sound, even one like the jerk of a stopped skid on a half-buried
boulder, is quite beyond the possible caprice of a choked supply-pipe.

Miss Grahame would have accepted the sound as normal, with some
reservation as to the strangeness of everyday noises in this house, but
for Aunt M'riar's exclamation, which made her say:--"Isn't that right?"

It was not, and the only human reply to the question was a further
exclamation from Aunt M'riar--one of real alarm this time--at a
disintegrating cracking sound, fraught with an inexplicable sense of
insecurity. "_That_ ain't water-pipes," said Uncle Mo.

Then something--something terrifying--happened in the Court outside.
Something that came with a rush and roar, and ended in a crash of
snapping timber and breaking glass. Something that sent a cloud of dust
through the shivered window-panes into the room it darkened. Something
that left behind it no sound but a sharp cry for help and moaning cries
of pain, and was followed by shouts of panic and alarm, and the tramp of
running feet--a swift flight to the spot of helpers who could see it
without, the thing that had to be guessed by us within. Something that
had half-beaten in the door that Uncle Mo, as soon as sight was
possible, could be seen wrenching open, shouting loudly,
inexplicably:--"They are underneath--they are underneath!"

_Who_ were underneath? The children? And underneath what?

A few seconds of dumb terror seemed an age to both women. Then, Gwen on
the stairs, and her voice, with relief in its ring of resolution. "Don't
talk, but come up _at once_! The old lady _must_ be got down,
_somehow_! Come up!" A consciousness of Dolly crying somewhere, and of
Dave on the landing above, shouting:--"Oy say, oy say!" more, Miss
Grahame thought, as a small boy excited than one afraid; and then, light
through the dust-cloud. For Uncle Mo, with a giant's force, had released
the jammed door, and a cataract of brick rubbish, falling inwards, left
a gleam of clear sky to show Gwen, beckoning them up, none the less
beautiful for the tension of the moment, and the traces of a rough
baptism of dust.

What was it that had happened?

CHAPTER XXIX

     OF A LADY AND GENTLEMAN ON THE EDGE OF A LONG VOYAGE TOGETHER.
     SHALL THEY TAKE THE TICKETS? HOW MR. PELLEW HEARD SEVERAL CLOCKS
     STRIKE ONE. HOW HE CALLED NEXT DAY, AND HEARD ABOUT THE CHOBEY
     FAMILY. THE PROFANITY OF POETS, WHEN PROFANE. HOW MR. PELLEW
     SOMETIMES WENT TO CHURCH. THE POPULAR SUBJECT OF LOVE, IN THE END.
     MRS. AMPHLETT STARFAX'S VIEWS. KISSING FROM A NEW STANDPOINT. HOW
     MR. PELLEW FORGOT, OR RECOLLECTED, HIMSELF. BONES, BELOW, AND HIS
     BAD GUESSING. HOW THE CARRIAGE CAME BACK WITH A FRIEND IT HAD
     PICKED UP, WHOM MR. PELLEW CARRIED UPSTAIRS. UNEQUIVOCAL SIGNS OF
     AN ATTACHMENT WHICH

Had Gwen really been able to see to the bottom of her cousin's, the Hon.
Percival's mind, she might not have felt quite so certain about his
predispositions towards her adopted aunt. The description of these two
as wanting to rush into each other's arms was exaggerated. It would have
been fairer to say that Aunt Constance was fully prepared to consider an
offer, and that Mr. Pellew was beginning to see his way to making one.

The most promising feature in the lady's state of mind was that she was
formulating consolations, dormant now, but actively available if by
chance the gentleman did not see his way. She was saying to herself that
if another flower attracted this bee, she herself would thereby only
lose an admirer with a disposition--only a slight one perhaps, but still
undeniable--to become corpulent in the course of the next few years. She
could subordinate her dislike of smoking so long as she could suppose
him ever so little in earnest; but, if he did waver by any chance, what
a satisfaction it would be to dwell on her escape from--here a mixed
metaphor came in--the arms of a tobacco shop! She could shut her eyes,
if she was satisfied of the sincerity of a redeeming attachment to
herself, to all the contingencies of the previous life of a middle-aged
bachelor about town; but they would no doubt supply a set-off to his
disaffection, if that was written on the next page of her book of Fate.
In short, she would be prepared in that case to accept the conviction
that she was well rid of him. But all this was subcutaneous. Given only
the one great essential, that he was not merely philandering, and then
neither his escapades in the past, nor his cigars, nor even his
suggestions towards a corporation, would stand in the way of a
whole-hearted acceptance of a companion for life who had somehow managed
to be such a pleasant companion during that visit at the Towers. At
least, she would be better off than her four sisters. For this lady had
a wholesome aversion for her brothers-in-law, tending to support the
creed which teaches that the sacrament of marriage makes of its
votaries, or victims, not only parties to a contract, but one flesh, and
opens up undreamed-of possibilities of real fraternal dissension.

The gentleman, on the other hand, was in what we may suppose to be a
corresponding stage of uncertainty. He too was able to perceive, or
affect a perception, that, after all, if he came to the scratch and the
scratch eventuated--as scratches do sometimes--in a paralysis of
astonishment on the lady's part that such an idea should ever have
entered into the applicant's calculations, it wouldn't be a thing to
break his heart about exactly. He would have made rather an ass of
himself, certainly. But he was quite prepared not to be any the worse.

This was, however, not subcutaneous, with him. He said it to himself,
quite openly. His concealment of himself from himself turned on a sort
of passive resistance he was offering to a growing reluctance to hear a
negative to his application. He was, despite himself, entertaining the
question:--Was this woman whom he had been assessing and wavering over,
_more masculino_, conceivably likely to reject him on his merits? Might
she not say to him:--"I have seen your drift, and found you too pleasant
an acquaintance to condemn offhand. But now that you force me to ask
myself the question, 'Can I love you?' you leave me no choice but to
answer, 'I can't.'" And he was beginning to have a misgiving that he
would very much rather that that scratch, if ever he came to it, should
end on very different lines from this. All this, mind you, was under the
skin of his reflections.

As he walked away slowly in the moonlight, with the appointment fresh in
his mind to return next day on a shallow archaeological pretext, he may
have been himself at a loss for his reason for completing a tour of the
square, and pausing to look up at the house before making a definite
start for his Club, or his rooms in Brook Street. Was any reason
necessary, beyond the fineness of the night? He had an indisputable
right to walk round Cavendish Square without a reason, and he exercised
it. He rather resented the policeman on his beat saying goodnight to
him, as though he were abnormal, and walked away in the opposite
direction from that officer, who was searchlighting areas for want of
something to do, with an implication of profound purpose. He decided on
loneliness and a walk exactly the length of a cigar, throwing its last
effort to burn his fingers away on his doorstep. He carried the
animation of his thoughts on his face upstairs to bed with him, for it
lasted through a meditation at an open window, through a chorus of cats
about their private affairs, and the usual controversy about the hour
among all the town-clocks, which becomes embittered when there is only
one hour to talk about, and compromise is impossible. Mr. Pellew heard
the last opinion and retired for the night at nine minutes past. But he
first made sure that that _Quarterly Review_ was in evidence, and
glanced at the Egyptian article to confirm his impression of the
contents. They were still there. He believed all his actions were sane
and well balanced, but this was credulity. One stretches a point
sometimes, to believe oneself reasonable.

It was a model September afternoon--and what can one say more of
weather?--when at half-past three precisely Mr. Pellew's hansom overshot
the door of 102, Cavendish Square, and firmly but amiably insisted on
turning round to deposit its fare according to the exact terms of its
contract. Its proprietor said what he could in extenuation of its
maladroitness. They shouldn't build these here houses at the corners of
streets; it was misguiding to the most penetrating intellect. He
addressed his fare as Captain, asking him to make it another sixpence.
He had been put to a lot of expense last month, along of the strike, and
looked to the public to make it up to him. For the cabbies had struck,
some weeks since, against sixpence a mile instead of eightpence. Mr.
Pellew's heart was touched, and he conceded the other sixpence.

There at the door was Miss Grahame's open landaulet, and there were she
and Gwen in it, just starting to see the former's little boy. That was
how Dave was spoken of, at the risk of creating a scandal. They
immediately lent themselves to a gratuitous farce, having for its
object the liberation of Mr. Pellew and Miss Dickenson from external
influence.

"Constance _was_ back, wasn't she?" Thus Miss Grahame; and Gwen had the
effrontery to say she was almost certain, but couldn't be quite sure. If
she wasn't there, she would have to go without that pulverised Pharaoh,
as Sir Somebody Something's just yearnings for his _Quarterly_ were not
to be made light of. "Don't you let Maggie take the book up to her,
Percy. You go up in the sitting-room--you know, where we were playing
last night?--and if she doesn't turn up in five minutes don't you wait
for her!" Then the two ladies talked telegraphically, to the exclusion
of Mr. Pellew, to the effect that Aunt Constance had only gone to buy a
pair of gloves in Oxford Street, and was pledged to an early return. The
curtain fell on the farce, and a very brief interview with Mary at the
door ended in Mr. Pellew being shown upstairs, without reservation. So
he and Aunt Constance had the house to themselves.

To do them justice, the attention shown to the covering fiction of the
book-loan was of the very smallest. It could not be ignored altogether;
so Miss Dickenson looked at the article. She did not read a word of it,
but she looked at it. She went further, and said it was interesting.
Then it was allowed to lie on the table. When the last possible book has
been printed--for even Literature must come to an end some time, if Time
itself does not collapse--that will be the last privilege accorded to
it. It will lie on the table, while all but a few of its predecessors
will stand on a bookshelf.

"It's quite warm out of doors," said Mr. Pellew.

"Warmer than yesterday, I think," said Miss Dickenson. And then talk
went on, stiffly, each of its contribuents execrating its stiffness, but
seeing no way to relaxation.

"Sort of weather that generally ends in a thunderstorm."

"Does it? Well--perhaps it does."

"Don't you think it does?"

"I thought it felt very like thunder an hour ago."

"Rather more than an hour ago, wasn't it?"

"Just after lunch--about two o'clock."

"Dessay you're right. I should have said a quarter to." Now, if this
sort of thing had continued, it must have ended in a joint laugh, and
recognition of its absurdity. Aunt Constance may have foreseen this,
inwardly, and not been prepared to go so fast. For she accommodated the
conversation with a foothold, partly ethical, partly scientific.

"Some people feel the effect of thunder much more than others. No doubt
it is due to the electrical condition of the atmosphere. Before this was
understood, it was ascribed to all sorts of causes."

"I expect it's nerves. Haven't any myself! Rather like tropical storms
than otherwise."

Here was an opportunity to thaw the surface ice. The lady could have
done it in an instant, by talking to the gentleman about himself. That
is the "Open Sesame!" of human intercourse. She preferred to say that in
their village--her clan's, that is--in Dorsetshire, there was a sept
named Chobey that always went into an underground cellar and stopped its
ears, whenever there was a thunderstorm.

Mr. Pellew said weakly:--"It runs in families." He had to accept this
one as authentic, but he would have questioned its existence if
anonymous. He could not say:--"How do you know?" to an informant who
could vouch for Chobey. Smith or Brown would have left him much freer.
The foothold of the conversation was giving way, and a resolute effort
was called for to give it stability. Mr. Pellew thought he saw his way.
He said:--"How jolly it must be down at the Towers--day like this!"

"Perfectly delicious!" was the answer. Then, in consideration of the
remoteness of mere landscape from personalities, it was safe to
particularise. "I really think that walk in the shrubbery, where the
gentian grew in such quantity, is one of the sweetest places of the kind
I ever was in."

"I know I enjoyed my ..." Mr. Pellew had started to say that he enjoyed
himself there. He got alarmed at his own temerity and backed out ... "my
cigars there," said he. A transparent fraud, for the possessive pronoun
does not always sound alike. "My," is one thing before "self," another
before "cigars." Try it on both, and see. Mr. Pellew felt he was
detected. He could slur over his blunder by going straight on; any topic
would do. He decided on:--"By-the-by, did you see any more of the dog?"

"Achilles? He went away, you know, with Mr. Torrens and his sister, a
few days after."

"I meant that. Didn't you say something about seeing him with the
assassin--the old gamekeeper--what was his name?"

"Old Stephen Solmes? Yes. I saw them walking together, apparently on the
most friendly terms. Gwen told me afterwards. They were walking towards
his cottage, and I believe Achilles saw him safe home, and came back."

"Just so. Torrens told me about the dog when old Solmes came to say
good-bye to him, and do a little more penance in sackcloth and ashes. I
am using Torrens's words. The old chap made a scene--went down on his
knees and burst out crying--and the dog tried to console him. Torrens
seemed quite clear about what was passing in the dog's mind."

"What did he say the dog meant? Can you remember?" Miss Dickenson was
settling down to chat, perceptibly.

"Pretty well. Achilles had wished to say that he personally, so far from
finding fault with Mr. Solmes for trying to shoot him, fully recognised
that he drew trigger under a contract to do so, given circumstances
which had actually come about. He would not endeavour to extenuate his
own conduct, but submitted that he was entitled to a lenient judgment,
on the ground that a hare, the pursuit of which was the indirect cause
of the whole mishap, had jumped up from behind a stone.... Well--I
suppose I oughtn't to repeat all a profane poet thinks fit to say...."

"Please do! Never mind the profanity!" It really was a stimulus to the
lady's curiosity.

Mr. Pellew repeated the apology which the collie's master had ascribed
to him. Achilles had only acted in obedience to Instincts which had been
Implanted in him in circumstances for which he was not responsible, and
which might, for anything he knew, have been conceived in a spirit of
mischief by the Author of all Good. This levity was stopped by a shocked
expression on the lady's face. "Well," said the gentleman, "you mustn't
blow _me_ up, Miss Dickenson. I am only repeating, as desired, the words
of a profane poet. He had apologized, he told me, for what he said, when
his sister boxed his ears."

"Serve him right. But what was his apology?"

"That he owed it to Achilles, who was unable to speak for himself, to
lay stress on what he conceived to be the dog's Manichaean views, which
he had been most unwillingly forced to infer from his practice of
suddenly barking indignantly at the Universe, in what certainly seemed
an unprayerful spirit."

"It was only Mr. Torrens's nonsense. He wanted to blaspheme a little,
and jumped at the opportunity. They are all alike, Poets. Look at Byron
and Shelley!"

Mr. Pellew, for his own purposes no doubt, managed here to insinuate
that he himself was not without a reverent side to his character. These
fillahs were no doubt the victims of their own genius, and presumably
Mr. Torrens was a bird of the same feather. He himself was a stupid
old-fashioned sort of fillah, and couldn't always follow this sort of
thing. It was as delicate a claim as he could make to sometimes going
to Church on Sunday, as was absolutely consistent with Truth.

To his great relief, Miss Dickenson did not catechize him closely about
his religious views. She only remarked, reflectively and vaguely:--"One
hardly knows what to think. Anyone would have said my father was a
religious man, and what does he do but marry a widow, less than three
years after my mother's death!"

Certainly the coherency of this speech was not on its surface. But Mr.
Pellew accepted it contentedly enough. At least, it clothed him with
some portion of the garb of a family friend; say shoes or gloves, not
the whole suit. Whichever it was, he pulled them on, and felt they
fitted. He began to speak, and stopped; was asked what he was going to
say, and went on, encouraged:--"I was going to say, only I pulled up
because it felt impertinent...."

"Not to me! Please tell me exactly!"

"I was going to ask, how old is your father? Is he older than me?"

"Why, of course he is! I'm thirty-six. How old are you? Tell the truth!"
At this exact moment a funny thing happened. The _passée_ elderly young
lady vanished--she who had been so often weighed, found wanting, and
been put back in the balance for reconsideration. She vanished, and a
desirable _alter ego_--Mr. Pellew's, as he hoped--was looking across at
him from the sofa by the window, swinging the tassel of the red blind
that kept the sun in check, and hushed it down to a fiery glow on the
sofa's occupant waiting to know how old he was.

"I thought I had told you. Nearly forty-six."

"Very well, then! My father is five-and-twenty years your senior."

"If you had to say exactly _why_ you dislike your father's having
married again, do you think you could?"

"Oh dear, no! I'm quite sure I couldn't. But I think it detestable for
all that."

"I'm not sure that you're right. You may be, though! Are you sure it
hasn't something to do with the ... with the party he's married?"

"Not at all sure." Dryly.

"Can't understand objecting to a match on its own account. It's always
something to do with the outsider that comes in--the one one knows least
of."

"You wouldn't like this one." It may seem inexplicable, that these words
should be the cause of the person addressed taking the nearest chair to
the speaker, having previously been a nomad with his thumbs in the
armholes of his waistcoat. Close analysis may connect the action with an
extension of the family-friendship wardrobe, which it may have
recognised--a neckcloth, perhaps--and may be able to explain why it
seemed doubtful form to the Hon. Percival to keep his thumbs in those
waistcoat-loops. To us, it is perfectly easy to understand--without any
analysis at all--why, at this juncture, Miss Dickenson said:--"I suppose
you know you may smoke a cigarette, if you like?"

In those days you might have looked in tobacconist's shopwindows all day
and never seen a cigarette. It was a foreign fashion at which sound
smokers looked askance. Mossoos might smoke it, but good, solid John
Bull suspected it of being a kick-shaw not unconnected with Atheism. He
stuck to his pipe chiefly. Nevertheless, it was always open to skill to
fabricate its own cigarettes, and Mr. Pellew's aptitude in the art was
known to Miss Dickenson. The one he screwed up on receipt of this
licence was epoch-making. The interview had been one that was going to
last a quarter of an hour. This cigarette made its duration
indeterminate. Because a cigarette is not a cigar. The latter is like a
chapter in a book, the former like a paragraph. At the chapter's end
vacant space insists on a pause for thought, for approval or
condemnation of its contents. But every paragraph is as it were kindled
from the last sentence of its predecessor; as soon as each ends the next
is ready. The reader aloud is on all fours with the cigarette-smoker. He
doesn't always enjoy himself so much, but that is neither here nor
there.

It was not during the first cigarette that Mr. Pellew said to Aunt
Constance:--"Where is it they have gone to-day, do you know?" That first
one heard, if it listened, all about the lady's home in Dorsetshire and
her obnoxious stepmother. It may have wondered, if it was an observant
cigarette, at the unreserve with which the narrator took its smoker into
the bosom of her confidence, and the lively interest her story provoked.
If it had--which is not likely, considering the extent of its
experience--a shrewd perception of the philosophy of reciprocity,
probably it wondered less. It heard to the end of the topic, and Mr.
Pellew asked the question above stated, as he screwed up its successor,
and exacted the death-duty of an ignition from it.

"They ought to be coming back soon," was the answer. "I told them I
wouldn't have tea till they came. They're gone to see a _protégée_ of
Clotilda's, who lives down a Court. It's not very far off; under a mile,
I should think. We saw him in the street, coming from the
railway-station. He looked a nice boy. That is to say, he would have
looked nice, only he and his friends had all been blacking their faces
with burnt cork."

"What a lark! Why didn't you go to the Court?... I'm jolly glad you
didn't, you know, but you might have...." This was just warm enough for
the position. With its slight extenuation of slang, it might rank as
mere emphasized civility.

It was Miss Dickenson's turn to word something ambiguous to cover all
contingencies. "Yes, I should have been very sorry if you had come to
bring the book, and not found me here." This was clever, backed by a
smile. She went on:--"They thought two would be quite enough,
considering the size of the Court."

A spirit of accommodation prevailed. Oh yes--Mr. Pellew quite saw that.
Very sensible! "It don't do," said he, "to make too much of a descent on
this sort of people. They never know what to make of it, and the thing
don't wash!" But he was only saying what came to hand; because he was
extremely glad Miss Dickenson had not gone with the expedition. How far
he perceived that his own visit underlay its arrangements, who can say?
His perception fell short of being ignorant that he was aware of it.
Suppose we leave it at that!

Still, regrets--scarcely Jeremiads--that she had not been included would
be becoming, all things considered. They could not be misinterpreted. "I
was sorry not to go," she said. "His father was a prizefighter and seems
interesting, according to Clotilda. Her idea is to get Gwen enthusiastic
about people of this sort, or any of her charitable schemes, rather than
dragging her off to Switzerland or Italy. Besides, she won't go!"

"That's a smasher! The idea, I suppose, is to get her away and let the
Torrens business die a natural death. Well--it won't!"

"You think not?"

"No thinking about it! Sure of it! I've known my cousin Gwen from a
child--so have you, for that matter!--and I know it's useless. If she
will, she will, you may depend on't; and if she won't she won't, and
there's an end on't. You'll see, she'll consent to go fiddling about for
three months or six months to Wiesbaden or Ems or anywhere, but she'll
end by fixing the day and ordering her trousseau, quite as a matter of
course! As for _his_ changing--pooh!" Mr. Pellew laughed aloud. Miss
Dickenson looked a very hesitating concurrence, which he felt would bear
refreshing. He continued:--"Why, just look at the case! A man loses his
eyesight and is half killed five minutes after seeing--for the first
time, mind you, for the first time!--my cousin Gwen Rivers, under
specially favourable circumstances. When he comes to himself he finds
out in double quick time that she loves him? _He_ change? Not he!"

"Do tell me, Mr. Pellew.... I'm only asking, you know; not expressing
any opinion myself.... Do tell me, don't you think it possible that it
might be better for both of them--for Gwen certainly, if it ... if it
never...."

"If it never came off? If you ask me, all I can say is, that I haven't
an opinion. It is so absolutely their affair and nobody else's. That's
my excuse for not having an opinion, and you see I jump at it."

"Of course it is entirely their affair, and one knows. But one can't
help thinking. Just fancy Gwen the wife of a blind country Squire. It is
heartbreaking to think of--now isn't it?"

But Mr. Pellew was not to be moved from his position. "It's their own
look out," said he. "Nobody else's!" He suddenly perceived that this
might be taken as censorious. "Not finding fault, you know! You're all
right. Naturally, you think of Gwen."

"Whom ought I to think of? Oh, I see what you mean. It's true I don't
know Mr. Torrens--have hardly seen him!"

"I saw him a fairish number of times--one time with another. He's a sort
of fillah ... a sort of fillah you can't exactly describe. Very unusual
sort of fillah!" Mr. Pellew held his cigarette a little way off to look
at it thoughtfully, as though it were the usual sort of fellow, and he
was considering how he could distinguish Mr. Torrens from it.

"You mean he's unusually clever?"

"Yes, he's that. But that's not exactly what I meant, either. He's
clever, of course. Only he doesn't give you a chance of knowing it,
because he turns everything to nonsense. What I wanted to say was, that
whatever he says, one fancies one would have said it oneself, if one had
had the time to think it out."

Miss Dickenson didn't really identify this as a practicable shade of
character, but she pretended she did. In fact she said:--"Oh, I know
exactly what you mean. I've known people like that," merely to lubricate
the conversation. Then she asked: "Did you ever talk to the Earl about
him?"

"Tim? Yes, a little. He doesn't disguise his liking for him, personally.
He's rather ... rather besotted about him, I should say."

"_She_ isn't." How Mr. Pellew knew who was meant is not clear, but he
did.

"Her mother, you mean," said he. "Do you know, I doubt if Philippa
dislikes him? I shouldn't put it that way. But I think she would be glad
for the thing to die a natural death for all that. Eyes apart, you
know." When people begin to make so very few words serve their purpose
it shows that their circumferences have intersected--no mere tangents
now. A portion of the area of each is common to both. Forgive geometry
this intrusion on the story, and accept the metaphor.

"Yes, that's what it is," said Aunt Constance. And then in answer to a
glance that, so to speak, asked for a confirmation of a telegram:--"Oh
yes, I know we both mean the same thing. You were thinking of that old
story--the old love-affair. I quite understand." She might have added
"this time," because the last time she knew what Mr. Pellew meant she
was stretching a point, and he was subconscious of it.

"That's the idea," said he. "I fancy Philippa's feelings must be rather
difficult to define. So must his papa's, I should think."

"I can't fancy anything more embarrassing."

"Of course Tim has a mighty easy time of it, by comparison."

"Does he necessarily know anything about it?"

"He must have heard of it. It wasn't a secret, though it wasn't
announced in the papers. These things get talked about. Besides, she
would tell him."

"Tell him? Of course she would! She would tell him that that young
Torrens was a 'great admirer' of hers."

"Yes--I suppose she _would_ make use of some expression of that sort.
Capital things, expressions!"

Aunt Constance seemed to think this phrase called for some sort of
elucidation. "I always feel grateful," said she, "to that
Frenchman--Voltaire or Talleyrand or Rochefoucauld or somebody--who said
language was invented to conceal our thoughts. That was what you meant,
wasn't it?"

"Precisely. I suppose Sir Torrens--this chap's papa--told the lady he
married ..."

"She was a Miss Abercrombie, I believe."

"Yes--I believe she was.... Told her he was a great admirer of her
ladyship once on a time--a boyish freak--that sort of thing! Pretends
all the gilt is off the gingerbread now. Wish I had been there when Sir
Hamilton turned up at the Towers, after the accident."

"I _was_ there."

"Well! And then?"

"Nothing and then. They were--just like anybody else. When I saw them
was after his son had begun to pull round. Till then I fancy neither he
nor the sister ..."

"Irene. ''Rene,' he calls her. Jolly sort of girl, and very handsome."

"Neither Irene nor her father came downstairs much. It was after you
went away."

"And what did they say?--him and Philippa, I mean."

"Oh--say? What _did_ they say? Really I can't remember. Said what a long
time it was since they met. Because I don't believe they _had_ met--not
to shake hands--for five-and-twenty years!"

"What a rum sort of experience! Do you know?... only of course one can't
say for certain about anything of this sort ..."

"Do I know? Go on."

"I was going to say that if I had been them, I should have burst out
laughing and said what a couple of young asses we were!" The Hon.
Percival was very colloquial, but syntax was not of the essence of the
contract, if any existed.

Aunt Constance was not in the mood to pooh-pooh the _tendresses_ of a
youthful passion. She was, if you will have it so, sentimental. "Let me
think if I should," said she, with a momentary action of closing her
eyes, to keep inward thought free of the outer world. In a moment they
were open again, and she was saying:--"No, I should not have done
anything of the sort. One laughs at young people, I know, when they are
so very inflammatory. But what do we think of them when they are not?"
She became quite warm and excited about it, or perhaps--so thought Mr.
Pellew as he threw his last cigarette-end away through that open
window--the blaze of a sun that was forecasting its afterglow made her
seem so. Mr. Pellew having thrown away that cigarette-end
conscientiously, and made a pretence of seeing it safe into the front
area, was hardly bound to go back to his chair. He dropped on the sofa,
beside Miss Dickenson, with one hand over the back. He loomed over her,
but she did not shy or flinch.

"What indeed!" said he seriously, answering her last words. "A young man
that does not fall in love seldom comes to any good." He was really
thinking to himself:--"Oh, the mistakes I should have been saved in
life, if only this had happened to me in my twenties!" He was not making
close calculation of what the lady's age would have been in those days.

She was dwelling on the abstract question:--"You know, say what one may,
the whole of their lives is at stake. And we never think them young
geese when the thing comes off, and they become couples."

"No. True enough. It's only when it goes off and they don't."

"And what is so creepy about it is that we never know whether the couple
is the right couple."

"Never know anything at all about anything beforehand!" Mr. Pellew was
really talking at random. Even the value of this trite remark was
spoiled. For he added:--"Nor afterwards, for that matter!"

Miss Dickenson admitted that we could not lay too much stress on our own
limitations. But she was not in the humour for platitudes. Her mind was
running on a problem that might have worried Juliet Capulet had she
never wedded her Romeo and taken a dose of hellebore, but lived on to
find that County Paris had in him the makings of a lovable mate. Quite
possible, you know! It was striking her that if a trothplight were
nothing but a sort of civil contract--civil in the sense of courteous,
polite, urbane, accommodating--an exchange of letters through a callous
Post Office--a woman might be engaged a dozen times and meet the males
implicated in after-life, without turning a hair. But even a hand-clasp,
left to enjoy itself by its parents--not nipped in the bud--might poison
their palms and recrudesce a little in Society, long years after! While,
as for lips....

Something crossed her reflections, just on the crux of them--their most
critical point of all. "There!" said she. "Did you hear that? I knew we
should have thunder."

But Mr. Pellew had heard nothing and was incredulous. He verified his
incredulity, going to the window to look out. "Blue sky all round!" said
he. "Must have been a cart!" He went back to his seat, and the
explanation passed muster.

Miss Dickenson picked up her problem, with that last perplexity hanging
to it. No, it was no use!--- that equable deportment of Sir Hamilton and
Philippa remained a mystery to her. She, however--mere single Miss
Dickenson--could not of course guess how these two would see themselves,
looking back, with all the years between of a growing Gwen and Adrian;
to her, it was just the lapse of so much time, nothing more--a year or
so over the time she had known Philippa. For Romeo and Juliet were
metaphors out of date when she came on the scene, and Philippa was a
Countess.

She was irritated by the inability she felt to comment freely on these
views of the position. It would have been easier--she saw this--to do so
had Mr. Pellew gone back to his chair, instead of sitting down again
beside her on the sofa. It was her own fault perhaps, because she could
not have sworn this time that she had not seemed to make room. That
unhappy sex--the female one--lives under orders to bristle with
incessant safeguards against misinterpretation. Heaven only knows--or
should we not rather say, Hell only knows?--what latitudes have claimed
"encouragement" as their excuse! That lady in Browning's poem never
should have looked at the gentleman so, had she meant he should not love
her. So _he_ said! But suppose she saw a fly on his nose--how then?

Therefore it would never have done for Miss Dickenson to go into close
analysis of the problems suggested by the meeting of two undoubted
_fiancés_ of years long past, and the inexplicable self-command with
which they looked the present in the face. She had to be content with
saying:--"Of course we know nothing of the intentions of Providence. But
it's no use pretending that it would not feel very--queer." She had to
clothe this word with a special emphasis, and backed it with an implied
contortion due to teeth set on edge. She added:--"All I know is, I'm
very glad it wasn't _me_." After which she was clearly not responsible
if the topic continued.

Mr. Pellew took the responsibility on himself of saying with deep-seated
intuition:--"I know precisely what you mean. You're perfectly right.
Perfectly!"

"A hundred little things," said the lady. The dragging in of ninety-nine
of these, with the transparent object of slurring over the hundredth,
which each knew the other was thinking of, merely added to its
vividness. Aunt Constance might just as well have let it alone, and
suddenly talked of something else. For instance, of the Sun God's
abnormal radiance, now eloquent of what he meant to do for the
metropolis when he got a few degrees lower, and went in for setting, in
earnest. Or if she shrank from that, as not prosaic enough to dilute the
conversation down to mere chat-point, the Ethiopian Serenaders who had
just begun to be inexplicable in the Square below. But she left the
first to assert its claim to authorship of the flush of rose colour that
certainly made her tell to advantage, and the last to account for the
animation which helped it. For the enigmatic character of South Carolina
never interferes with a certain brisk exhilaration in its bones. She
repeated in a vague way:--"A hundred things!" and shut her lips on
particularisation.

"I don't know exactly how many," said Mr. Pellew gravely. He sat drawing
one whisker through the hand whose elbow was on the sofa-back, with his
eyes very much on the flush and the animation. "I was thinking of one in
particular."

"Perhaps _I_ was. I don't know."

"I was thinking of the kissin'."

"Well--so was I, perhaps. I don't see any use in mincing matters." She
had been the mincer-in-chief, however.

"Don't do the slightest good! When it gets to kissin'-point, it's all
up. If I had been a lady, and broken a fillah off, I think I should have
been rather grateful to him for getting out of the gangway. Should have
made a point of getting out, myself."

The subject had got comfortably landed, and could be philosophically
discussed. "I dare say everyone does not feel the point as strongly as I
do," said Miss Dickenson. "I know my sister Georgie--Mrs. Amphlett
Starfax--looks at it quite differently, and thinks me rather a ... prig.
Or perhaps _prig_ isn't exactly the word. I don't know how to put
it...."

"Never mind. I know exactly what you mean."

"You see, the circumstances are so different. Georgie had been engaged
six times before Octavius came on the scene. But, oh dear, how I _am_
telling tales out of school!..."

"Never mind Georgie and Octavius. They're not your sort. You were saying
how you felt about it, and that's more interesting. Interests me more!"
Conceive that at this point the lady glanced at the speaker ever so
slightly. Upon which he followed a slight pause with:--"Yes, why are you
a _prig_, as she thought fit to put it?"

"Because I told her that if ever I found a young man who suited me--and
_vice versa_--and it got to ... to what you called just now
'kissing-point,' I should not be so ready as she had been to pull him
off like an old glove and throw him away. That was when I was very
young, you know. It was just after she jilted Ludwig, who afterwards
married my sister Lilian--Baroness Porchammer; my eldest sister...."

"Oh, _she_ jilted Ludwig, and _he_ married your sister Lilian, was that
it?" Mr. Pellew, still stroking that right whisker thoughtfully, was
preoccupied by something that diverted interest from this family
history.

Aunt Constance did not seem to notice his abstraction, but talked on.
"Yes--and what is so funny about Georgie with Julius is that they don't
seem to mind kissing now from a new standpoint. Georgie particularly. In
fact, I've seen her kiss him on both sides and call him an old stupid.
However, as you say, the cases are not alike. Perhaps if Philippa's old
love had married her sister--Lady Clancarrock of Garter, you
know--instead of Uncle Cosmo, as they call him, they could have got used
to it, by now. Only one must look at these things from one's own point
of view, and by the light of one's experience." A ring on her right hand
might have been one of the things, and the sun-ray through the
blind-slip the light of her experience, as she sat accommodating the
flash-light of the first to the gleam of the second.

If everyone knew to a nicety his or her seeming at the precise point of
utterance of any speech, slight or weighty, nine-tenths of our wit or
profundity would remain unspoken. Man always credits woman with knowing
exactly what she looks like, and engineering speech and seeming towards
the one desired end of impressing him--important Him! He acquits himself
of studying the subject! Probably he and she are, as a matter of fact,
six of the one and half a dozen of the other. Of this one thing the
story feels certain, that had Miss Dickenson been conscious of her
neighbour's incorporation into a unit of magnetism--he being its
victim--of her mere outward show in the evening light with the
subject-matter of her discourse, this little lecture on the ethics of
kissing would never have seen the light. But let her finish it. Consider
that she gives a pause to the ring-gleam, then goes on, quite in
earnest.

"It's very funny that it should be so, I know--but there it is! If I had
ever been engaged, or on the edge of it--I never have, really and
truly!--and the infatuated youth had ... had complicated matters to that
extent, I never should have been able to wipe it off. That's an
expression of a small niece of mine--three-and-a-quarter.... Oh
dear--but I never _said_ you might!..."

For the gentleman's conduct had been extraordinary! unwarranted,
perhaps, according to some. According to others, he may only have
behaved as a many in his position would have behaved half an hour
sooner. "I am," said he, "the infatuated youth. Forgive me, Aunt
Constance!" For he had deliberately taken that lady in his arms and
kissed her.

The foregoing is an attempt to follow through an interview the
development of events which led to its climax--a persistent and
tenacious attempt, more concerned with its purpose than with inquiring
into the interest this or that reader may feel who may chance to light
upon this narrative. No very close analysis of the sublatent impulses
and motives of its actors is professed or attempted; only a fringe of
guesswork at the best. But let a protest be recorded against the
inevitable vernacular judgment in disfavour of the lady. "Of
course--the minx! As if she didn't know what she was about the whole
time. As if she wasn't leading him on!" Because that is the attitude of
mind of the correct human person in such a case made and provided. That
is, if an inevitable automatic action can be called an attitude of mind.
Is rotation on its axis an attitude of a wheel's mind? To be sure,
though, a wheel may turn either of two ways. A ratchet-wheel is needed
for this metaphor.

However, the correct human person may be expressing a universal opinion.
This is only the protest of the story, which thinks otherwise. But even
if it were so, was not Miss Dickenson well within her rights? The story
claims that, anyhow. At the same time, it records its belief that
four-fifths of the _dénouement_ was due to Helios. The magic golden
radiance intoxicated Mr. Pellew, and made him forget--or
remember--himself. The latter, the story thinks. That ring perhaps had
its finger in the pie--but this may be to inquire too curiously.

One thing looks as though Miss Dickenson had not been working out a
well-laid scheme. Sudden success does not stop the heart with a jerk, or
cause speechlessness, even for a moment. Both had happened to her by the
time she had uttered her _pro forma_ remonstrance. Her breath lasted it
out. Then she found it easiest to remain passive. She was not certain it
would not be correct form to make a show of disengaging herself from the
arms that still held her. But--she didn't want to!

This may have justified Mr. Pellew's next words:--"You do forgive me,
don't you?" more as assertion than inquiry.

She got back breath enough to gasp out:--"Oh yes--only don't talk! Let
me think!" And then presently:--"Yes, I forgive you in any case.
Only--I'll tell you directly. Let's look out of the window. I want to
feel the air blow.... You startled me rather, that's all!"

Said Mr. Pellew, at the window, as he reinstated an arm dispossessed
during the transit:--"I did it to ... to _clinch_ the matter, don't you
see? I thought I should make a mess of it if I went in for eloquence."

"It was as good as any way. I wasn't the least angry. Only...."

"Only what?"

"Only by letting you go on like this"--half a laugh came in here--"I
don't consider that I stand committed to anything."

"I consider that _I_ stand committed to everything." The arm may have
slightly emphasized this.

"No--that's impossible. It _must_ be the same for both."

"Dearest woman! Just as you like. But I know what I mean." Indeed, Mr.
Pellew did seem remarkably clear about it. Where, by-the-by, was that
_passée_ young lady, and that middle-aged haunter of Clubs? Had they
ever existed?

Bones was audible from below, as they stood looking out at the west,
where some cirro-stratus clouds were waiting to see the sun down beyond
the horizon, and keep his memory golden for half an hour. Bones was
affecting ability to answer conundrums, asked by an unexplained person
with a banjo, who treated him with distinction, calling him "Mr. Bones."
Both were affecting an air of high courtesy, as of persons familiar with
the Thrones and Chancelleries of Europe. The particulars of these
conundrums were inaudible, from distance, but the scheme was clear.
Bones offered several solutions, of a fine quality of wit, but wrong. He
then produced a sharp click or snap, after his kind, and gave it up. His
friend or patron then gave the true solution, whose transcendent humour
was duly recognised by Europe, and moved Bones to an unearthly dance,
dryly but decisively accompanied on his instrument. A sudden outburst of
rhythmic banjo-thuds and song followed, about Old Joe, who kicked up
behind and before, and a yellow girl, who kicked up behind Old Joe. Then
the Company stopped abruptly and went home to possible soap and water.
Silence was left for the lady and gentleman at No. 102 to speak to one
another in undertones, and to wonder what o'clock it was.

"They ought to be back by now," says she. "I wonder they are so late.
They are making quite a visitation of it."

Says he:--"Gwen is fascinated with the old prizefighter. Just like her!
I don't care how long they stop; do you?"

"I don't think it matters," says she, "to a quarter of an hour. The
sunset is going to be lovely." This is to depersonalise the position. A
feeble attempt, under the circumstances.

It must have been past the end of that quarter of an hour, when--normal
relations having been resumed, of course--Miss Dickenson interrupted a
sub-vocal review of the growth of their acquaintance to say, "Come in!"
The tap that was told to come in was Maggie. Was she to be making the
tea? Was she to lay it? On the whole she might do both, as the delay of
the absentees longer was in the nature of things impossible.

But, subject to the disposition of Mr. Pellew's elbows on the
window-sill, they might go on looking out at the sunset and feel
_réglés_. Short of endearments, Maggie didn't matter.

The self-assertion of Helios was amazing. He made nothing of what one
had thought would prove a cloud-veil--tore it up, brushed it aside. He
made nothing, too, of the powers of eyesight of those whose gaze dwelt
on him over boldly.

"It _is_ them," said Miss Dickenson, referring to a half-recognised
barouche that had turned the corner below. "But who on earth have they
got with them? I can't see for my eyes."

"Only some friend they've picked up," said Mr. Pellew. But he rubbed his
own eyes, to get rid of the sun. Recovered sight made him exclaim:--"But
what are the people stopping for?... I say, something's up! Come along!"
For, over and above a mysterious impression of the unusual that could
hardly be set down to the bird's-eye view as its sole cause, it was
clear that every passer-by was stopping, to look at the carriage.
Moreover, there was confusion of voices--Gwen's dominant. Mr. Pellew did
not wait to distinguish speech. He only repeated:--"Come along!" and was
off downstairs as fast as he could go. Aunt Constance kept close behind
him.

She was too bewildered to be quite sure, offhand, why Gwen looked so
more than dishevelled, as she met them at the stairfoot, earnest with
excitement. Not panic-struck at all--that was not her way--but at
highest tension of word and look, as she made the decision of her voice
heard:--"Oh, there you are, Mr. Pellew. Make yourself useful. Go out and
bring her in. Never mind who! Make haste. And Maggie's to fetch the
doctor." Mr. Pellew went promptly out, and Miss Dickenson was
beginning:--"Why--what?..." But she had to stand inquiry over. For
nothing was possible against Gwen's:--"Now, Aunt Connie dear, don't ask
questions. You shall be told the whole story, all in good time! Let's
get her upstairs and get the doctor." They both followed Mr. Pellew into
the street, where a perceptible crowd, sprung from nowhere, was already
offering services it was not qualified to give, in ignorance of the
nature of the emergency that had to be met, and in defiance of a
policeman.

Mr. Pellew had taken his instructions so quickly from Miss Grahame,
still in the carriage, that he was already carrying the doctor's
patient, whoever and whatever she was, but carefully as directed, into
the house. At any rate it was not Miss Grahame herself, for that lady's
voice was saying, collectedly:--"I don't think it's any use Maggie
going, Gwen, because she doesn't know London. James must fetch him, in
the carriage. Dr. Dalrymple, 65, Weymouth Street, James! Tell him he
_must_ come, at once! Say _I_ said so." It was then that Aunt Constance
perceived in the clear light of the street, that not only was the
person Mr. Pellew was carrying into the house--whom she could only
identify otherwise as having snow-white hair--covered with dust and
soiled, but that Gwen and Miss Grahame were in a like plight, the latter
in addition being embarrassed by a rent skirt, which she was fain to
hold together as she crossed the doorstep. Once in the house she made
short work of it, finishing the rip, and acquiescing in the publicity of
a petticoat. It added to Aunt Constance's perplexity that the carriage
and James appeared in as trim order as when they left the door three
hours since. These hours had been eventful to her, and she was really
feeling as if the whole thing must be a strange dream.

She got no explanation worth the name at the time of the incident. For
Gwen's scattered information after the old snow-white head was safe on
her own pillow--she insisted on this--and its owner had been guaranteed
by Dr. Dalrymple, was really good for very little. The old lady was
Cousin Clo's little boy's old Mrs. Picture, and she was the dearest old
thing. There had been an accident at the house while they were there,
and a man and a woman had been hurt, but no fatality. The man had not
been taken to the Hospital, as his family had opposed his going on the
ground of his invulnerability. The old prizefighter was uninjured, as
well as those two nice children. They might have been killed. But as to
the nature of the accident, it remained obscure, or perhaps the
ever-present consciousness of her own experience prevented Aunt
Constance getting a full grasp of its details. The communication,
moreover, was crossed by that lady's exclamation:--"Oh dear, the events
of this afternoon!" just at the point where the particulars of the
mishap were due, to make things intelligible.

At which exclamation Gwen, suddenly alive to a restless conscious manner
of Aunt Constance's, pointed at her as one she could convict without
appeal, saying remorselessly:--"Mr. Pellew has proposed and you have
accepted him while we were away, Aunt Connie! Don't deny it. You're
engaged!"

"My dear Gwen," said Miss Dickenson, "if what you suggest were true, I
should not dream for one moment of concealing it from you. But as for
any engagement between us, I assure you there is no such thing. Beyond
showing unequivocal signs of an attachment which...."

Gwen clapped the beautiful hands, still soiled with the dirt of Sapps
Court, and shook its visible dust from her sleeve. Her laugh rang all
through the House. "_That's_ all right!" she cried. "He's shown
unequivocal signs of an attachment which. Well--what more do you want?
Oh, Aunt Connie, I'm _so_ glad!"

All that followed had for Miss Dickenson the same dream-world character,
but of a dream in which she retained presence of mind. It was needed to
maintain the pretext of unruffled custom in her communications with her
male visitor; the claim to be, before all things, normal, on the part of
both, in the presence of at least one friend who certainly knew all
about it, and another who may have known. Because there was no trusting
Gwen. However, she got through it very well.

Regrets were expressed that Sir Somebody Something had not got his
_Quarterly_ after all; but it would do another time. Hence consolation.
After Mr. Pellew had taken a farewell, which may easily have been a
tender one, as nobody saw it, she heard particulars of the accident,
which shall be told here also, in due course.

Some embarrassment resulted from Gwen's headstrong action in bringing
the old lady away from the scene of this accident. She might have been
provided for otherwise, but Gwen's beauty and positiveness, and her
visible taking for granted that her every behest would be obeyed, had
swept all obstacles away. As for her Cousin Clotilda, she was secretly
chuckling all the while at the wayward young lady's reckless incurring
of responsibilities towards Sapps Court.

CHAPTER XXX

     THE LETTER GWEN WROTE TO MR. TORRENS, TO TELL OF IT. MATILDA, WHO
     PLAYED SCALES, BUT NOT "THE HARMONIOUS BLACKSMITH." THE OLD LADY'S
     JEALOUSY OF GRANNY MARROWBONE, AND DAVE'S FIDELITY TO BOTH. HOW
     BEHEMOTH HICCUPPED, AND DAVE WENT TO SEE WHAT WAS BROKEN. THE
     EARTHQUAKE AT PISA. IT WAS OWING TO THE REPAIRS. HOW PETER JACKSON
     APPEARED BY MAGIC. HOW MR. BARTLETT SHORED NO. 7 UP TEMPORY, AND
     THE TENANTS HAD TO MAKE THE BEST OF WHAT WAS LEFT OF IT. UNCLE MO's
     ENFORCED BACHELOR LIFE

If love-letters were not so full of their writers' mutual satisfaction
with their position, what a resource amatory correspondence would be to
history!

In the letters to her lover with which Gwen at this time filled every
available minute, the amatory passages were kept in check by the hard
condition that they had to be read aloud to their blind recipient. So
much so that the account which she wrote to him of her visit to Sapps
Court will be very little the shorter for their complete omission.

It begins with a suggestion of suppressed dithyrambics, the suppression
to be laid to the door of Irene. But with sympathy for her, too--for how
can she help it? It then gets to business. She is going to tell "the
thing"--spoken of thus for the first time--in her own way, and to take
her own time about it. It is not even to be read fast, but in a
leisurely way; and, above all, Irene is not to look on ahead to see what
is coming; or, at least, if she does she is not to tell. Quite enough
for the present that he should know that she, Gwen, has escaped without
a scratch, though dusty. She addresses her lover, most unfairly, as "Mr.
Impatience," in a portion of the letter that seems devised expressly to
excite its reader's curiosity to the utmost. The fact is that this young
beauty, with all her inherent stability and strength of character, was
apt to be run away with by impish proclivities, that any good, serious
schoolgirl would have been ashamed of. This letter offered her a rare
opportunity for indulging them. Let it tell its own tale, even though we
begin on the fifth page.

"I must pause now to see what sort of a bed Lutwyche has managed to
arrange for me, and ring Maggie up if it isn't comfortable. Not but what
I am ready to rough it a little, rather than that the old lady should be
moved. She is the dearest old thing that ever was seen, with the
loveliest silver hair, and must have been surpassingly beautiful, I
should say. She keeps on reminding me of someone, and I can't tell who.
It may be Daphne Palliser's grandmother-in-law, or it may be old Madame
Edelweissenstein, who's a _chanoinesse_. But the nice old lady on the
farm I told you of keeps mixing herself up in it--and really all old
ladies are very much alike. By-the-by, I haven't explained her yet.
Don't be in such a hurry!... There now!--my bed's all right, and I
needn't fidget. Clo says so. The old lady is asleep with a stayed pulse,
says Dr. Dalrymple, who has just gone. And anything more beautiful than
that silver hair in the moonlight I never saw. Now I really must begin
at the beginning.

"Clo and I started on our pilgrimage to Sapps Court at half-past three,
without the barest suspicion of anything pending, least of all what I'm
going to tell. Go on. We left Mr. Percival Pellew on the doorstep,
pretending he was going to leave a book for Aunt Constance, and go away.
Such fun! He went upstairs and stopped two hours, and I do believe
they've got to some sort of decorous trothplight. Only A. C. when
accused, only says he has shown unmistakable evidence of something or
other, I forget what. Why on earth need people be such fools? There they
both _are_, and what more _can_ they want? She admits, however, that
there is 'no engagement'! When anybody says _that_, it means they've
been kissing. You ask Irene if it doesn't. Any female, I mean. Now go
on.

"A more secluded little corner of the world than Sapps Court I never
saw! Clo's barouche shot us out at the head of the street it turns out
of, and went to leave a letter at St. John's Wood and be back in half an
hour. We had no idea of a visitation, then. Besides, Clo had to be at
Down Street at half-past five. There is an arch you go in by, and we
nearly stuck and could go neither way. I was sorry to find the houses
looked so respectable, but Clo tells me she can take me to some much
better ones near Drury Lane. Dave, the boy, and his Uncle and Aunt, and
a little sister, Dolly, whom I nearly ate, live in the last house down
the Court. When we arrived Dolly was watering a sunflower, almost
religiously, in the front-garden eight feet deep. It would die vethy
thoon, she said, if neglected. She told us a long screed, about Heaven
knows what--I think it related to the sunflower, which a naughty boy had
chopped froo wiv a knife, and Dave had tighted on, successfully.

"The old prizefighter is just like Dr. Johnson, and I thought he was
going to hug Clo, he was so delighted to see her, and so affectionate.
So was Aunt Maria, a good woman who has lost her looks, but who must
have had some, twenty years ago. I got Dolly on my knee, and _we_ did
the hugging, Dolly telling me secrets deliciously, and tickling. She is
four next birthday, a fact which Aunt Maria thought should have produced
a sort of what the _Maestro_ calls _precisione_. I preferred Dolly as
she was, and we exchanged locks of hair.

"We had only been there a very short time when Uncle Moses suggested
that Dave should fetch a letter he was writing, from 'Old Mrs.
Prichard's Room' upstairs, and Dave--who is a dear little chap of six or
seven or eight--rushed upstairs to get it. I forgot how much I told you
about the family, but I know I said something in yesterday's letter.
Anyhow, 'old Mrs. Prichard' was not new to me, and I was very curious to
see her. So when more than five minutes had passed and no Dave
reappeared, I proposed that Dolly and I should go up to look for him,
and we went, Aunt Maria following in our wake, to cover contingencies.
She went back, after introducing me to the very sweet old lady in a
high-backed chair, who comes in as the explanation of the beginning of
this illegible scrawl. How funny children are! I do believe Uncle Moses
was right when he said that Dave, if anything, preferred his loves to be
'a bit elderly.' I am sure these babies see straight through wrinkles
and decay and toothless gums to the burning soul the old shell
imprisons, and love it. Do you recollect that picture in the Louvre we
both had seen, and thought the same about?--the old man with the sweet
face and the appalling excrescence on the nose, and the little boy's
unflinching love as he looks up at him. Oh, that nose!!! However, there
is nothing of that in old Mrs. Picture, as Dave called her, according to
her own spelling. _Her_ face is simply perfect.... There!--I went in to
look at it again by the moonlight, and I was quite right. And as for her
wonderful old white hair!... I could write for ever about her.

"I think our incursion must have frightened the old soul, because she
had lived up there by herself, except for her woman-friend who is out
all day, and Aunt Maria and the children now and then, since she came to
the house; so that a perfect stranger rushing in lawlessly--well, can't
you fancy? However, she really stood it very well, considering.

"'I have heard of you, ma'am, from Dave. He's told me all about your
rings. Where is the boy?... Haven't you, Dave--told me all about the
lady's rings?'

"Dave came from some absorbing interest at the window, to say:--'It
wasn't her,' with a sweet, impressive candour. He went back immediately.
Something was going on outside. I explained, as I was sharp enough to
guess, that my mother was the lady with the rings. I got into
conversation with the old lady, and we soon became friends. She was very
curious about 'old Mrs. Marrable' in the country. Indeed, I believe
Uncle Mo was not far wrong when he said she was as jealous as any
schoolgirl. It is most amusing, the idea of these two octogenarians
falling out over this small bone of contention!

"While we talked, Dave and Dolly looked out of the window, Dave
constantly supplying bulletins of the something that was going on
without. I could not make it out at first, and his interjections of 'Now
she's took it off'--'Now she's put it on again'--made me think he was
inspecting some lady who was 'trying on' in the opposite house. It
appeared, however, that the thing that was taken off and put on was not
a dress, but some sort of plaister or liniment applied to the face of a
boy, the miscreant who had made a raid on Dave's garden that morning,
and spoiled his sunflower (see _ante_). It was because Dave had become
so engrossed in this that he had not come downstairs again with his
letter.

"The old lady, I am happy to say, was most amiable, and took to me
immensely. I couldn't undertake to say now exactly how we got on such
good terms so quickly. We agreed about the wickedness of that boy,
especially when Dave reported ingratitude on his part towards the
sister, who was tending him, whom he smacked and whose hair he pulled.
To think of his smacking that dear girl that played the piano so nicely
all day! And pulling her back-tails so she called out when she was
actually succouring his lacerated face. I gathered that her name may
have been Matilda, and that she wore plaits.

"'I think her such a nice, dear girl,' said old Mrs. Picture--I like
that name for her--'because she plays the piano all day long, and I sit
here and listen, and think of old times.' I asked a question. 'Why, no,
my dear!--I can't say she knows any tunes. But she plays her scales all
day, very nicely, and makes me think of when my sister and I played
scales--oh, so many years ago! But we played tunes too. I sometimes
think I could teach her "The Harmonious Blacksmith," if only we was a
bit nearer.' I could see in her old face that she was back in the Past,
listening to a memory. How I wished I had a piano to play 'The
Harmonious Blacksmith' for her again!

"I got her somehow to talk of herself and her antecedents, but rather
stingily. She married young and went abroad, but she seemed not to want
to talk about this. I could not press her. She had come back home--from
wherever she was--many years after her husband's death, with an only
son, the survivor of a family of four children. He was a man, not a boy;
at least, he married a year or so after. She 'could not say that he was
dead.' Otherwise, she knew of no living relative. Her means of
livelihood was an annuity 'bought by my poor son before....'--before
something she either forgot to tell, or fought shy of--the last, I
think. 'I'm very happy up here,' she said. 'Only I might not be, if I
was one of those that wanted gaiety. Mrs. Burr she lives with me, and it
costs her no rent, and she sees to me. And my children--I call 'em
mine--come for company, 'most every day. Don't you, Dave?'

"Dave tore himself away from the pleasing spectacle of his enemy in
hospital, and came to confirm this. 'Yorce!' said he, with emphasis. 'Me
and Dolly!' He recited rapidly all the days of the week, an appointment
being imputed to each. But he weakened the force of his rhetoric by
adding:--'Only not some of 'em always!' Mrs. Picture then said:--'But
you love your old granny in the country better than you do me, don't
you, Davy dear?' Whereupon Dave shouted with all his voice:--'I
_doesn't_!' and flushed quite red, indignantly.

"The old lady then said, most unfairly:--'Then which do you love best,
dear child? Because you must love _one_ best, you know!' I thought
Dave's answer ingenious:--'I loves whichever it _is_, best.' If only all
young men were as candid about their loves, wouldn't they say the same?

"Dolly had picked up the recitation of the days of the week for her own
private use, and was repeating it _ad libitum_ in a melodious undertone,
always becoming louder on Flyday, Tackyday, Tunday. She was hanging over
the window-sill watching the surgical case opposite. How glad I am now
when I recollect my impulse to catch the little maid and keep her on my
knee! Dolly's good Angel prompted this, and had a hand in my inspiration
to tell the story of Cinderella, with occasional refrains of song which
I do believe old Mrs. Picture enjoyed as much as the two smalls. I
shudder as I think what it would have been if they had still been at the
window when it came--the thing I have been so long postponing.

"It came without any warning that it would have been possible to act
upon. We might certainly have shouted to those below to stand clear, _if
we had ourselves understood_. But how _could_ we? You can have no idea
how bewildering it was.

"When something you can't explain portends Heavens-know-what, what
on earth can you do? Pretend it's ghosts, and very curious and
interesting? I think I might have done so this time, when an alarming
noise set all our nerves on the jar. It was not a noise capable of
description--something like Behemoth hiccuping goes nearest. Only I
didn't want to frighten the babies, so I said nothing about the ghosts.
Dolly said it wasn't her--an obvious truth. Old Mrs. Picture said it
must have been her chair--an obvious fallacy. She then deserted her
theory and suggested that Dave should 'go down and see if anything was
broken,' which Dave immediately started to do, much excited.

"I felt very uncomfortable and creepy, for it recalled the shock of
earthquake Papa and I were in at Pisa two years ago--it is a feeling one
never gets over, that _terremotitis_, as Papa called it. I believe I was
more alarmed than Dolly, and as for Dave, I am sure that so far he
thought the whole thing the best fun imaginable. Picture to yourself, as
he slams the door behind him and shouts his message to the world below,
that I remain seated facing the light, while Dolly on my knee listens
to a postscript of Cinderella. My eyes are fixed on the beauty of the
old side-face I see against the light. Get this image clear, and then I
will tell you what followed.

"Even as I sat looking at the old lady, that noise came again, and
plaster came tumbling down from the ceiling, obscuring the window
behind. As I fixed my eyes upon it, falling, I saw beyond it what really
made me think at first that I was taking leave of my senses. The houses
opposite seemed to shoot straight up into the air, as though they were
reflections in a mirror which had fallen forward. An instant after, I
saw what had happened. It was the window that was moving, not the
houses.

"It was so odd! I had time to see all this and change my mind, before
the great crash came to explain what had happened. For until the roar of
a cataract of disintegrated brickwork, followed by a cloud of choking
dust, showed that the wall of the room had fallen outwards, leaving the
world clear cut and visible under a glorious afternoon sky until that
dust-cloud came and veiled it, I could not have said what the thing was,
or why. There seemed to be time--good solid time!--between the sudden
day-blaze and the crash below, and I took advantage of it to wonder what
on earth was happening.

"Then I knew it all in an instant, and saw in another instant that the
ceiling was sagging down; for aught I knew, under the weight of a
falling roof.

"Old Mrs. Picture was not frightened at all. 'You get this little Dolly
safe, my dear,' said she to me. 'I can get myself as far as the landing.
But don't you fret about me. I'm near my time.' She seemed quite alive
to the fact that the house was falling, but at eighty, what did that
matter? She added quite quietly:--'It's owing to the repairs.' Dolly
suddenly began to weep, panic-struck.

"I saw that Mrs. Picture could not rise from her chair, though she
tried. But what could I do? Any attempt of mine to pick her up and carry
her would only have led to delay. I saw it would be quicker to get help,
and ran for it, overtaking Dave on the stairs.

"Below was chaos. The kitchen where I had left my cousin talking with
Uncle Mo and Aunt Maria was all but darkened, and the place was a cloud
of dust. I could see that Uncle Mo was wrenching open the street-door,
which seemed to have stuck, and then that it opened, letting in an
avalanche of rubbish, and some light. Cries came from outside, and Aunt
Maria called out that it was Mrs. Burr. Thereon Uncle Mo, crying 'Stand
clear, all!' began flinging the rubbish back into the room with
marvellous alacrity for a man of his years, and no consideration at all
for glass or crockery. I felt sick, you may fancy, when it came home to
me that someone was crying aloud with pain, buried under that heap of
fallen brickwork.

"But we could be of no use yet a while, so I told Clo and Aunt Maria to
come upstairs and help to get the old lady down. They did as they were
bid, being, in fact, terrified out of their wits, and quite unable to
make suggestions. A male voice came from within the room where I had
just left Mrs. Picture by herself. I took it quite as a matter of
course.

"'You keep out on that landing, some of you, till I tell you to come in.
This here floor won't carry more than my weight.' This was what I heard
a man say, speaking from where the window had been, mysteriously. I was
aware that he had stepped from some ladder on to the floor of the room,
jumping on it recklessly as though to test its bearing power. Then that
he had gathered up my old new acquaintance in a bundle, carefully made
in a few seconds, and had said:--'Come along down!' to all whom it might
concern. He shepherded us, all three women and the two children, into a
back-bedroom below, and went away, leaving his bundle on the bed;
saying, after glancing round at the cornice:--'You'll be safe enough
here for a bit, just till we can see our way.' He had a peculiar hat or
cap, and I saw that he was a fireman. I did not know that firemen held
any intercourse with human creatures. It appears that they do
occasionally, under reserves.

"Then it was that I became alarmed about my old lady. Her face had lost
what colour it had, and her finger-tips had become blue and lifeless.
But she spoke, faintly enough, although quite clearly, always urging us
to go to a safer place, and leave her to her luck. This was, of course,
nonsense. Nor was there any safer place to go to, so far as I understood
the position. Aunt Maria went down to find brandy, if possible, in the
heart of the confusion below. She found half a wineglassful somewhere,
and brought back with it a report of progress. They had to be cautious
in removing the rubbish, so that no worse should come to the sufferer it
had half buried. We kept it from the old lady that this was her
fellow-lodger, Mrs. Burr, and made her take some brandy, whether she
liked it or no. I then went down to see for myself, and Clo came too.

"The police had taken prompt possession of the Court, and only a
limited force of volunteers were allowed to share in the removal of the
rubbish. Uncle Mo and the fireman, who seemed to be a personal friend,
were attacking the ruin from within, throwing the loose bricks back into
the kitchen, and working for the dear life.

"As we came in they halted, in obedience to, 'Easy a minute, you inside
there. Gently does it,' from the spontaneous leading mind, whoever he
was, without. Uncle Mo, streaming with perspiration, and forgetful of
social niceties, turned to me saying:--'You go back, my dear, you go
back! 'Tain't for you to see. You go back!' I replied:--'Nonsense, Mr.
Wardle! What do you take me for?' For had I not stood beside _you_, my
darling, when you lay dead in the Park?

"I could see what had taken place. The woman had been just about to
knock at the door when the wall fell from above. Nothing had struck her
direct, else she would almost surely have been killed. The ruin had
fallen far enough from the house to avoid this, but the recoil of its
disintegration (I'm so proud of that expression) had jammed her against
the wall and choked the door.... I'm so sleepy I can't write another
word."

No doubt the sequel described how Mrs. Burr, rescued alive, but
insensible, was borne away on a stretcher to the Hospital, and how the
party were released from the house, whose complete collapse must have
presented itself to their excited imaginations as more than a
possibility. No doubt also obscure points were made plain; as, for
instance, the one which is prominent in the short newspaper report,
which runs as follows:--"A singular fall of brickwork, the consequences
of which might easily have proved fatal, occurred on Thursday last at
Sapps Court, Marylebone, when the greater part of the front-wall of No.
7 fell forward into the street, blocking the main entrance and causing
for a time the greatest alarm to the inhabitants, who, however, were all
ultimately rescued uninjured. A remarkable circumstance was that the
cloud of dust raised by the shower of loose brickwork was taken for
smoke and was sufficient to cause an alarm of fire; as a matter of fact,
two engines had arrived before the circumstances were explained. The