for I loved him, and now it is over nineteen years since I saw him
last, or heard of him or from him. But he was absolutely blameless.
Unless, indeed, it is to be counted blame to him that he could not
bear what no other man could have borne. I cannot possibly give you
all details. But I wish you to hear this that I have to tell you from
myself. It is painful to me to tell, but it would be far worse that
you should hear it from any one else. I feel sure it is safe to tell
you; that you will not talk of it to others--least of all to that
little chick of mine."

"You may trust me--indeed, you may--without reserve. I see you wish
to tell me no more, so I will not ask it."

"And blame me as little as possible?"

"I cannot blame you."

"Before you say that, listen to as much as I can tell you of the
story. I was a young girl when I went out alone to be married to him
in India. We had parted in England eight months before, and he had
remained unchanged--his letters all told the same tale. I quarrelled
with my mother--as I now see most unreasonably--merely because she
wished to marry again. Perhaps she was a little to blame not to be
more patient with a headstrong, ill-regulated girl. I was both. It
ended in my writing out to him in India that I should come out and
marry him at once. My mother made no opposition." She remained silent
for a little, and her eyes fell. Then she spoke with more effort,
rather as one who answers her own thoughts. "No, I need say nothing of
the time between. It was no excuse for the wrong I did _him_. I can
tell you what that was...." It did not seem easy, though, when it came
to actual words. Fenwick spoke into the pause.

"Why tell me now? Tell me another time."

"I prefer now. It was this way: I kept something back from him till
after we were married--something I should have told him before. Had I
done so, I believe to this moment we should never have parted. But my
concealment threw doubt on all else I said.... I am telling more than
I meant to tell." She hesitated again, and then went on. "That was my
wrong to him--the concealment. But, of course, it was not the ground
of the divorce proceedings." Fenwick stopped her again.

"Why tell me any more? You are being led on--are leading yourself
on--to say more than you wish."

"Well, I will leave it there. Only, Fenwick, understand this: my
husband was young and generous and noble-hearted. Had I trusted him,
I believe all might have gone well, even though he...." She hesitated
again, and then cancelled something unsaid. "The concealment was my
fault--the mistrust. That was all. Nothing else was my _fault_." As
she says the words in praise of her husband she finds it a pleasure
to let her eyes rest on the grave, handsome, puzzled face that, after
all, really is _his_. She catches herself wondering--so oddly do the
undercurrents of mind course about--where he got that sharp white scar
across his nose. It was not there in the old days.

She looks at him until he, too, looks up, and their eyes meet. "Well,
then," she says, "I will tell you no more. Blame me as little as
possible." And to this repetition of her previous words he says again,
"I cannot blame you," very emphatically.

But Mrs. Nightingale felt perplexed at his evident sincerity; would
rather he should have indulged in truisms, we were not all of us
perfect, and so forth. When she spoke again, some bars of the music
later, she took for granted that his mind, like hers, was still
dwelling on his last words. She felt half sorry she had, so to speak,
switched off the current of the conversation.

"If you will think over what I have told you, Fenwick, you will see
that you cannot help doing so."

"How can that be?"

"Surely! My husband sought to divorce me, and was himself absolutely
blameless. How can you do otherwise than blame me?"

"Partly--only partly--because I see you are keeping back
something--something that would exonerate you. I cannot believe you
were to blame."

"Listen, Fenwick! As I said, I cannot tell you the whole; and the
Major, who is the only man alive who knows all the story, will, I
know, refuse to tell you anything, even if you ask him, and that I
wish you not to do."

"I should not dream of asking him."

"Well, he would refuse. I know it. But I want you to know all I can
tell you. I do not want any groundless excuses made for me. I will not
accept any absolution from any one on a false pretence. You see what
I mean."

"I see perfectly. I am not sure, though, that you see my meaning. But
never mind that. Is there anything further you would really like me
to know?"

She waited a little, and then answered, keeping her eyes always fixed
on Fenwick: "Yes, there is."

But at this moment the first movement of Op. 999 came to a perfect
and well thought out conclusion, bearing in mind everything that had
been said on six pages of ideas faultlessly interchanged by four
instruments, and making due allowance for all exceptions each had
courteously taken to the other. But Op. 999 was going on to the
second movement directly, and only tolerated a pause for a few
string-tightenings and trial-squeaks, to get in tune, and the removal
of a deceased fly from a piano-candle. The remark from the back-room
that we could hear beautifully in here seemed to fall flat, the
second violin merely replying "All right!" passionlessly. The
instruments then asked each other if they were ready, and answered
yes. Then some one counted four suggestively, for a start, and life
went on again.

Mrs. Nightingale and Fenwick sat well on into the music before either
spoke. He, resolved not to seem to seek or urge any information at
all; all was to come spontaneously from her. She, feeling the
difficulty of telling what she had to tell, and always oppressed with
the recollection of what it had cost her to make her revelation to
this selfsame man nineteen years ago. She wished he would give the
conversation some lift, as he had done before, when he asked if what
she had to tell referred to her husband. But, although he would gladly
have repeated his assistance, he could see his way to nothing, this
time, that seemed altogether free from risk. How if he were to
blunder into ascribing to her something more culpable than her actual
share in the past? She half guessed this; then, seeing that speech
must come from herself in the end, took heart and faced the position
resolutely. She always did.

"You know this, Fenwick, do you not, that when there is a divorce, the
husband takes the children from their mother--always, when she is in
the wrong; too often, when she is blameless. I have told you I was the
one to blame, and I tell you now that though my husband's application
for a divorce failed, from a technical point of law, all things came
about just as though he had succeeded. Don't analyse it now; take it
all for granted--you understand?"

"I understand. Suppose it so! And then?"

"And then this. That little monkey of mine--that little unconscious
fiddling thing in there"--and as Mrs. Nightingale speaks, the sound of
a caress mixes with the laugh in her voice; but the pain comes back as
she goes on--"My Sallykin has been mine, all her life! My poor husband
never saw her in her childhood." As she says the word _husband_
she has again a vivid _éclat_ of the consciousness that it is
he--himself--sitting there beside her. And the odd thought that mixes
itself into this, strange to say, is--"The pity of it! To think how
little he has had of Sally in all these years!"

He, for his part, can for the moment make nothing of this part of
the story. He can give his head the lion-mane shake she knows him by
so well, but it brings him no light. He is reduced to mere slow
repetition of her data; his hand before his eyes to keep his brain,
that has to think, clear of distractions from without.

"Your husband never saw her. She has been yours all her life. Had she
been your husband's child, he would have exercised his so-called
rights--his _legal_ rights--and taken her away. Are those the
facts--so far?"

"Yes--go on. No--stop; I will tell you. At the beginning of this year
I should have been married exactly twenty years. Sally is
nineteen--you remember her birthday?"

"Nineteen in August. Now, let me think!" Just at this moment the second
movement of Op. 999 came to an end, and gave an added plausibility to
the blank he needed to ponder in. The viola in the next room looked
round across her chair-back, and said, "I say, mother"--to a repetition
of which Mrs. Nightingale replied what did her daughter say? What
she said was that her mother and Mr. Fenwick were exactly like the
canaries. They talked as hard as they could all through the music, and
when it stopped they shut up. Wasn't that true? To which her mother
answered affirmatively, adding, "You'll have to put a cloth over us,
chick, and squash us out."

Fenwick was absorbed in thought, and did not notice this interlude. He
did not speak until the music began again. Then he said abruptly:

"I see the story now. Sally's father was not...."

"Was not my husband." There is not a trace of cowardice or hesitation
in her filling out the sentence. There is pain, but that again dies
away in her voice as she goes on to speak of her daughter. "I do not
connect him with her now. She is--a thing of itself--a thing of herself!
She is--she is Sally. Well, you see what she is."

"I see she is a very dear little person." Then he seems to want to say
something and to pause on the edge of it; then, in answer to a "yes"
of encouragement from her, continues, "I was going to say that she
must be very like him--like her father."

"Very like?" she asks--"or very unlike? Which did you mean?"

"I mean very like as to looks. Because she is so unlike you."

"She is like enough to him, as far as looks go. It's her only fault,
poor chick, and _she_ can't help it. Besides, I mind it less now that
I have more than half forgiven him, for her sake." The tone of her
voice mixes a sob and a laugh, although she utters neither, and is
quite collected. "But she is quite unlike him in character. Sally is
not an angel--oh dear, no!" The laugh predominates. "But----"

"But what?"

"She is not a devil." And as she said this the pain was all back again
in the dropped half-whisper in which she said it. And in that moment
Fenwick made his guess of the whole story, which maybe went nearer
than we shall do with the information we have to go upon. In this
narrative, as we tell it now, that story is _known_ only to its chief
actor, and to her old friend who is now dining at the Hurkaru Club.

The third movement of Op. 999 was not a very long one, and, coming
to an end at this point, seemed to supply a reason for silence that
was not unwelcome in the back drawing-room. The end of a trying
conversation had been attained. Both speakers could now affect
attention to what was going on in the front. This had taken the form
of a discussion between Mr. Julius Bradshaw and Miss Lætitia Wilson,
who was anxious to transfer her position of first violin to that young
gentleman. We regret to have to report that Miss Sally's agreement
with her friend about the desirability had been _sotto voce_'d in
these terms: "Yes, Tishy dear! Do make the shop-boy play the last
movement." And Miss Wilson had then suggested it, saying there was
a bit she knew she couldn't play. "And you expect _me_ to!" said the
owner of the Strad, "when I haven't so much as looked at it for three
years past." To which Miss Sally appended a marginal note, "Stuff
and nonsense! Don't be affected, Mr. Bradshaw." However, after
compliments, and more protestations from its owner, the Strad was
brought into hotchpot, and Lætitia abdicated.

"Won't you come and sit in here, to be away from the music?" said the
back-drawing-room. But Lætitia wanted to see Mr. Bradshaw's fingering
of that passage. We are more interested in the back drawing-room.

Like many other athletic men--and we have seen how strongly this
character was maintained in Fenwick--he hated armchairs. Even in the
uncomfortable ones--by which we mean the ones _we_ dislike--his
restless strength would not remain quiet for any length of time. At
intervals he would get up and walk about the room, exasperating the
sedate, and then making good-humoured concession to their weakness.
Mrs. Nightingale could remember all this in Gerry the boy, twenty
years ago.

If it had not been for that music, probably he would have walked about
the room over that stiff problem in dates he had just grappled with.
As it was, he remained in his chair to solve it--that is, if he did
solve it. Possibly, the moment he saw something important turned on
the date of Sally's birth, he jumped across the solution to the
conclusion it was to lead to. Given the conclusion, the calculation
had no interest for him.

But the story his mind constructed to fit that conclusion stunned him.
It knitted his brows and clenched his teeth for him. It made the hand
that had been hanging loose over the uncomfortable chair-back close
savagely on something--a throat, perhaps, that his imagination
supplied? How like he looked, thought his companion, to himself on one
occasion twenty years ago! But his anger now was on her behalf alone;
it was not so in that dreadful time she hoped he might never recollect.
If only his memory of all the past might remain as now, a book with
a locked clasp and a lost key!

She watched him as he sat there, and saw a calmer mood come back upon
him. Each wanted a _raison d'être_ for a silent pause, and neither was
sorry for the desire each might ascribe to the other of hearing the
last movement of the music undisturbed. Op. 999 was prospering,
there was no doubt of it! Lætitia Wilson was a very fair example of
a creditable career at the R.A.M. But she was not quite equal to this
unfortunate victim of a too nervous system, who could play like an
angel for half an hour, mind you--not more. This was his half-hour;
and it was quite reasonable for Fenwick to take for granted that his
hostess would like to pay attention to it, or _vice-versa_. So both
sat silent.

But as she sat listening to Op. 999, and watching wonderingly the
strange victim of oblivion, of whom she knew--scarcely acknowledging
it always, though--that she had once for a short time called him
husband, her mind went back to an old time when he and she were young:
before the tragic memory that she sometimes thought might have been
lived down had come into her life and his. And a scene rose up before
her out of that old time--a scene of young men, almost boys, and girls
who but the other day were in the nursery, playing lawn-tennis in a
happy garden, with never a thought for anything in this wide world but
themselves, and each other, and the scoring, and how jolly it would be
in the house-boat at Henley to-morrow. And then this garden-scene
a little later in the moonrise, and herself and one of the players,
who was Gerry--this very man--left by the other two to themselves,
on a garden-seat his arm hung over, just as it did now over that
chair-back. How exactly he sat then as he sat now, his other hand in
charge of the foot he had crossed on his knee, just as now, to keep
it from a slip along his lawn-tennis flannels! How well she could
remember the tennis-shoe, with its ribbed rubber sole, in place of
that highly-polished calf thing! And she could remember every word
they said, there in the warm moonlight.

"What a silly boy you are!"

"I don't care. I shall always say exactly the same. I can't help it."

"All silly boys say that sort of thing. Then they change their minds."

"I never said it to any girl in my life but you, Rosey. I never thought
it. I shall never say it again to any one but you."

"Don't be nonsensical!"

"I'm _not_! It's _true_."

"Wait till you've been six months in India, Gerry."

And then the recollection of what followed made it seem infinitely
strange to her that Fenwick should remain, as he had remained,
immovable. If the hand she could remember so well, for all it had
grown so scarred and service-worn and hairy, were to take hers as it
did then, as they sat together on the garden-seat, would it shake now
as formerly? If his great strong arm her memory still felt round her
were to come again now, would she feel in it the tremor of the passion
he was shaken by then; and in caresses such as she half reproved him
for, but had no heart to resist, the reality of a love then young and
strong and full of promise for the days to come? And now--what? The
perished trunk of an uprooted tree: the shadow of a half-forgotten
dream.

As he sat silent, only now and then by some slight sign, some new
knitting of the brow or closing of the hand, showing the tension of the
feeling produced by the version his mind had made of the story half
told to him--as he sat thus, under a kind of feint of listening to
the music, the world grew stranger and stranger to his companion. She
had fancied herself strong enough to tell the story, but had hardly
reckoned with his possible likeness to himself. She had thought that
she could keep the twenty years that had passed clearly in her mind;
could deal with the position from a good, sensible, matter-of-fact
standpoint.

The past was past, and happily forgotten by him. The present had still
its possibilities, if only the past might remain forgotten. Surely she
could rely on herself to find the nerve to go through what was, after
all, a mere act of duty. Knowing, or rather feeling, that Fenwick would
ask her to marry him as soon as he dared--it was merely a question of
time--her duty was plainly to forewarn him--to make sure that he was
alive to the antecedents of the woman he was offering himself to. She
knew _his_ antecedents; as many as she wished to know. If the twenty
years of oblivion concealed irregularity, immorality--well, was she not
to blame for it? Was ever a better boy than Gerry, as she knew him, to
the day they parted? It was her fault or misfortune that had cast
him all adrift. As to that troublesome question of a possible wife
elsewhere, in the land of his oblivion, she had quite made up her mind
about that. Every effort had been made to find such a one, and failed.
If she reappeared, it would be her own duty to surrender Fenwick--if he
wished to go back. If he did not, and his other wife wished to be free,
surely in the _chicane_ of the law-courts there must be some shuffle
that could be for once made useful to a good end.

Mrs. Nightingale had reasoned it all out in cold blood, and she was,
as we have told you, a strong woman. But had she really taken her own
measure? Could she sit there much longer; with him beside her, and his
words of twenty years ago sounding in her ears; almost the feeling of
the kisses she had so dutifully pointed out the lawlessness, and
allowed the repetition of, in that old forgotten time--forgotten by
him, never by her! Was it possible to bear, without crying out, the
bewilderment of a mixed existence such as that his presence and
identity forced upon her, wrenching her this way and that, interweaving
the woof of _then_ with the weft of _now_, even as in that labyrinth of
musical themes and phrases in the other room they crossed and recrossed
one another at the bidding of each instrument as its turn came to tell
its tale? Her brain reeled and her heart ached under the intolerable
stress. Could she still hold on, or would she be, after all, driven
to make some excuse, and run for the solitude of her own room to live
down the tension as best she might alone?

The music itself came to her assistance. Its triumphant strength, in
an indescribable outburst of hope or joy or mastery of Fate, as it drew
near to its final close, spoke to her of the great ocean that lies
beyond the crabbed limits of our stinted lives, the boundless sea our
rivulets of life steal down to, to be lost in; and while it lasted made
it possible for her to be still. She took her eyes from Fenwick, and
waited. When she raised them again, in the silence Op. 999 came to an
end in, she saw that he had moved. His face had gone into his hands;
and as she looked up, his old action of rubbing them into his loose
hair, and shaking it, had come back, and his strong identity with his
boyhood, dependent on the chance of a moment, had disappeared. He got
up suddenly, and after a turn across the room he was in, walked into
the other one, and contributed his share to the babble of felicitation
or comment that followed what was clearly thought an achievement in
musical rendering.

"Oh dear, oh dear!" said Lætitia Wilson. "Was ever a poor girl so sat
upon? I feel quite flat!" This was not meant to be taken too much _au
pied de la lettre_. It was merely a method of praise of Mr. Bradshaw.

"But what a jolly shame you had to give it up!" This was Sally in
undisguised admiration. But in Mr. Julius Bradshaw's eyes, Sally's
identity had undergone a change. Her breezy frankness had made hay of
a _grande passion_, and was blowing the hay all over the field. He had
come close to, and had a good look; but he will hardly go away in a
huff, although he feels a little silly over his public worship of these
past weeks. Just at this moment of the story, however, he is very
apologetic towards Miss Wilson; on whom, if she reports correctly, he
has sat. He tries no pretences with a view to her reinstatement, even
on a par with himself. He knows, and every one knows, they would be
seen through immediately. It is no use assuring her she is a capital
player, of her years. Much better let it alone!

"Are you any the worse, Mr. Bradshaw?" says Dr. Vereker. Obviously, as
a medical authority, it is his duty to "voice" this inquiry. So he
voices it.

"N--no; but that's about as much as I can do, with safety. It won't do
to spoil my night's rest, and be late at the shop." It was easy to talk
about the shop with perfect unreserve after such a performance as that.

"Oh dear! we are so sorry for you!" Thus the two girls. And concurrence
comes in various forms from Vereker, Fenwick, and the pianist, whom we
haven't mentioned before. He was a cousin of Miss Wilson's, and was one
of those unfortunate young men who have no individuality whatever. But
pianists have to be human unless you can afford a pianola. You may
speak of them as Mr. What's-his-name, or Miss Thingummy, but you must
give them tea or coffee or cake or sandwiches, or whatever is brought
in on a tray. This young man's name, we believe, was Elsley--Nobody
Elsley, Miss Sally in her frivolity had thought fit to christen him.
You know how in your own life people come in and go out, and you never
know anything about them. Even so this young man in this story.

"I was very sorry for myself, I assure you"--it is Bradshaw who
speaks--"when I had to make up my mind to give it up. But it couldn't
be helped!" He speaks without reserve, but as of an unbearable subject;
in fact, Sally said afterwards to Tishy, "it seemed as if he was going
to cry." He doesn't cry, though, but goes on: "At one time I really
thought I should have gone and jumped into the river."

"Why didn't you?" asks Sally. "I should have."

"Yes, silly Sally!" says Lætitia; "and then you would have swum like
a fish. And the police would have pulled you out. And you would have
looked ridiculous!"

But Sally is off on a visit to her mother in the next room.

"Tired, mammy darling?"

She kisses her, and her mother answers: "Yes, love, a little," and
kisses her back.

"Doesn't he play _beautifully_, mother?" says Sally.

But her mother says "Yes" absently. Her attention is taken off by
something else. What is wrong with Mr. Fenwick? Sally doesn't think
anything is. It's only his way.

"I'm sure there's something wrong," says Mrs. Nightingale, and gets
up to go into the front-room rather wearily. "I shall go to bed soon,
poppet," she says, "and leave you to do the honours. Is anything wrong,
doctor?" She speaks under her voice to Vereker, looking very slightly
round at Fenwick, who, after the movement that alarmed her--a rather
unusually marked head-shake and pressure of his hands on his eyes--is
standing looking down at the fire, on the rug with his back to her, as
she speaks to Vereker.

"I fancy he's had what he calls a recurrence," says the doctor. "Nothing
to hurt. These half-recollections will go on until the memory comes
back in earnest. It may some time."

"Are you talking about me, doctor?" His attention may have been caught
by a reflection in a glass before him. "Yes, it was a very queer
recurrence. Something about lawn-tennis. Only it had to do with what
Miss Wilson said about the police fishing Sally out of the water." He
looks round for Miss Wilson, but she is at the other end of the room
on a sofa talking to Bradshaw about the Strad, as recorded once before.
Sally testifies:

"Tishy said it wouldn't work--trying to drown yourself if you could
swim. No more it would."

"But why should that make me think of lawn-tennis? It did." He looks
seriously distressed by it--can make nothing out.

"Kitten," says Sally's mother to her suddenly, "I think I shall go away
to bed. I'm feeling very tired."

She says good-night comprehensively, and departs. But she is so clearly
the worse for something that her daughter follows her to see that the
something is not serious. Outside she reassures Sally, who returns. Oh
no, she is only tired; really nothing else.

But what drove her out of the room was a feeling that she must be alone
and silent. Could her position be borne at all? Yes, with patience and
self-control. But that "why should it make me think of lawn-tennis?"
was trying. Not only the pain of still more revived association, but
the fear that his memory might travel still further into the past. It
was living on the edge of the volcano.

Her own memory had followed on, too, taking up the thread of that old
interview in the garden of twenty years ago. She had felt again the
clasp of his arm, the touch of his hand; had heard his voice of
passionate protest--protest against the idea that he could ever forget.
And she had then pretended to make a half-joke of his earnestness. What
would he do now, really, if she were to tell him she preferred his
great friend Arthur Fenwick to him? That was nonsense, he said. She
knew she didn't. Besides, Arthur wanted Jessie Nairn. Why, didn't they
waltz all the waltzes at the party last week?... Well, so did we, for
that matter, all-but.... And just look how they had run away together!
Wasn't that them coming back? Yes, it was; and artificial calm ensued,
and more self-contained manners. But then, before the other two young
lovers could rejoin them, she had time for a word more.

"No, dear Gerry, seriously. If I were to write out _no_ to you in
India--a great big final NO--then what do you think you would do?"

"I know what I _think_ I should do. I should throw myself into the
Hooghly or the Ganges."

"You silly boy! You would swim about, whether you liked or no. And then
Jemadars, or Shastras, or Sudras, or something would come and pull you
out. And then how ridiculous you would look!"

"No, Rosey, because I can't swim. Isn't it funny?"

Then she recollected _his_ friend's voice striking in with: "What's
that? Gerry Palliser swim! Of course he can't. He can wrestle, or run,
or ride, or jump; and he's the best man I know with the gloves on. But
swim he _can't_! That's flat!" Also how Gerry had then told eagerly how
he was nearly drowned once, and Arthur fished him up from the bottom of
Abingdon Lock. The latter went on:

"It was after that we tattooed each other, his name on my arm, my
name on his, so as not to quarrel. You know, I suppose, that men who
tattoo each other's arms can't quarrel if they try?" Arthur showed
"A. Palliser," tattooed blue on his arm. Both young men were very grave
and earnest about the safeguard. And then she remembered a question she
asked, and how both replied with perfect gravity: "Of course, sure to!"
The question had been:--Was it invariable that all men quarrelled if
one saved the other from drowning?

She sits upstairs alone by the fire in her bedroom, and dreams again
through all the past, except the nightmare of her life--_that_ she
always shudders away from. Sally will come up presently, and then she
will feel ease again. Now, it is a struggle against fever.

She can hear plainly enough--for the house is but a London suburban
villa--the strains from the drawing-room of what is possibly the most
hackneyed violin music in the world--the Tartini (so-called) Devil
Sonata--every phrase, every run, every chord an enthralling mystery
still, an utterance none can explain, an inexhaustible thing no age can
wither, and no custom stale. It is so soothing to her that it matters
little if it makes them late. But that young man will destroy his
nerves to a certainty outright.

Then comes the chaos of dispersal--the broken fragments of the
intelligible a watchful ear may pick out. Dr. Vereker won't have a cab;
he will leave the 'cello till next time, and walk. Mr. Bradshaw wants
to get to Bayswater. Of course, that's all in our way--we being Miss
Wilson and the cousin, the nonentity. We can give Mr. Bradshaw a lift
as far as he goes, and then he can take the growler on. Then more
good-nights are wished than the nature of things will admit of before
to-morrow, Fenwick and Vereker light something to smoke, with a
preposterous solicitude to use only one tandsticker between them, and
walk away umbrella-less. From which we see that "it" is holding up.
Then comes silence, and a consciousness of a policeman musing, and
suspecting doors have been left stood open.

And it was then Sally went upstairs and indited her friend for sitting
on that sofa after calling him a shop-boy. And she didn't forget it,
either, for after she and her mother were in bed, and presumably
better, she called out to her.

"I say, mammy!"

"What, dear?"

"Isn't that St. John's Church?"

"Isn't which St. John's Church?"

"Where Tishy goes?"

"Yes, Ladbroke Grove Road. Why?"

"Because now Mr. Bradshaw will go there--public worship!"

"Will he, dear? Suppose we go to sleep." But she really meant "you,"
not "we"; for it was a long time before she went to sleep herself. She
had plenty to think of, and wanted to be quiet, conscious of Sally in
the neighbourhood.

We hope our reader was not misled, as we ourselves were, when Mrs.
Nightingale first saw the name on Fenwick's arm, into supposing that
she accepted it as his real name. She knew better. But then, how was
she to tell him his name was Palliser? Think it over.

CHAPTER XIII

OF A SLEEPLESS NIGHT MRS. NIGHTINGALE HAD, AND HOW SALLY WOKE UP
  AND TALKED

Was it possible, thought Rosalind in the sleepless night that followed,
that the recurrence of the tennis-garden in Fenwick's mind might
grow and grow, and be a nucleus round which the whole memory of his
life might re-form? Even so she had seen, at a chemical lecture, a
supersaturated solution, translucent and spotless, suddenly fill with
innumerable ramifications from one tiny crystal dropped into it. Might
not this shred of memory chance to be a crystal of the right salt
in the solvent of his mind, and set going a swift arborescence to
penetrate the whole? Might not one branch of that tree be a terrible
branch--one whose leaves and fruit were poisoned and whose stem was
clothed with thorns? A hideous metaphor of the moment--call it the
worst in her life--when her young husband, driven mad with the
knowledge that had just forced its way into his reluctant mind, had
almost struck her away from him, and with angry words, of which the
least was traitress, had broken through the effort of her hands to
hold him, and left her speechless in her despair.

It was such a nightmare idea, this anticipation that next time she met
Gerry's eyes she might see again the anger that was in them on that
blackest of her few married days, might see him again vanish from
her, this time never to return. And it spread an ever growing horror,
greater and greater in the silence and the darkness of the night, till
it filled all space and became a power that thrilled through every
nerve, and denied the right of any other thing in the infinite void
to be known or thought of. Which of us has not been left, with no
protection but our own weak resolutions, to the mercy of a dominant
idea in the still hours when others were near us sleeping whom we
might not wake to say one word to save us?

What would his face be like--how would his voice sound--when she saw
him next? Or would some short and cruel letter come to say he had
remembered all, and now--for all the gratitude he owed her--he could
not bear to look upon her face again, hers who had done him such a
wrong! If so, what should she--what could she do?

There was only one counter-thought to this that brought with it a
momentary balm. She would send Sally to him to beg, beseech, implore
him not to repeat his headstrong error of the old years, to swear to
him that if only he could know all he would forgive--nay, more, that
if he could know quite all--the very whole of the sad story--not only
would he forgive, but rather seek forgiveness for himself for the too
harsh judgment he so rashly formed.

What should she say to Sally? how should she instruct her to plead
for her? Never mind that now. All she wanted in her lonely, nervous
delirium was the ease the thought gave her, the mere thought of the
force of Sally's fixed, immovable belief--_that_ she was certain
of--that whatsoever her mother had done was right. Never mind the exact
amount of revelation she would have to make to Sally. She might surely
indulge the idea, just to get at peace somehow, till--as pray Heaven it
might turn out--she should know that Gerry's mind was still unconscious
of its past. The chances were, so she thought mechanically to herself,
that all her alarms were groundless.

And at the first--strange as it is to tell--Sally's identity was only
that of the daughter she had now, that filled her life, and gave her
the heart to live. She was the Sally space was full of for her. _What_
she was, and _why_ she was, merged, as it usually did, in the broad
fact of her existence. But there was always the chance that this _what_
and _why_--two bewildering imps--should flaunt their unsolved conundrum
through her mother's baffled mind. There they were, sure enough in the
end, enjoying her inability to answer, dragging all she prayed daily
to be better able to forget out into the light of the memory they had
kindled. There they were, chuckling over her misery, and hiding--so
Rosalind feared--a worse question than any, keeping it back for a
final stroke to bring her mental fever to its height--how could Sally
be the daughter of a devil and her soul be free from the taint of his
damnation?

If Rosalind had only been well read in the mediæval classics, and had
known that story of Merlin's birth--the Nativity that was to rewrite
the Galilean story in letters of Hell, and give mankind for ever
to be the thrall of the fallen angel his father! And now the babe
at its birth was snatched away to the waters of baptism, and poor
Satan--alas!--obliged to cast about for some new plan of campaign;
which, to say truth, he must have found, and practised with some
success. But Rosalind had never read this story. Had she done so she
might have felt, as we do, that the tears of an absolutely blameless
mother might serve to cleanse the inherited sin from a babe unborn as
surely as the sacramental fount itself.

And it may be that some such thought had woven itself into the story
Fenwick's imagination framed for Rosalind the evening before--that time
that she said of Sally, "She is not a devil!" The exact truth, the
ever-present record that was in her mind as she said this, must remain
unknown to us.

But to return to her as she is now, racked by a twofold mental fever,
an apprehension of a return of Fenwick's memory, and a stimulated
recrudescence of her own; with the pain of all the scars burnt in
twenty years ago revived now by her talk with him of a few hours since.
She could bear it no longer, there alone in the darkness of the night.
She _must_ get at Sally, if only to look at her. Why, that child never
could be got to wake unless shaken when she was wanted. Ten to one she
wouldn't this time. And it would make all the difference just to see
her there, alive and leagues away in dreamland. If her sleep lasted
through the crackle of a match to light her candle, heard through the
open door between their rooms, the light of the candle itself wouldn't
wake her. Rosalind remembered as she lit the candle and found her
dressing-gown--for the night air struck cold--how once, when a
ten-year-old, Sally had locked herself in, and no noise or knocking
would rouse her; how she herself, alarmed for the child, had thereon
summoned help, and the door was broken open, but only to be greeted
by the sleeper, after explanation, with, "Why didn't you knock?"

She was right in her forecast, and perhaps it was as well the girl did
not wake. She would only have had a needless fright, to see her mother,
haggard with self-torment, by her bedside at that hour. So Rosalind
got her full look at the rich coils of black hair that framed up the
unconscious face, that for all its unconsciousness had on it the
contentment of an amused dreamer, at the white ivory skin it set off
so well, at the one visible ear that heard nothing, or if it did,
translated it into dream, and the faint rhythmic movement that vouched
for soundless breath. She looked as long as she dared, then moved away.
But she had barely got her head back on her pillow when "Was that you,
mother?" came from the next room. Her mother always said of Sally that
nothing was certain but the _imprévu_, and ascribed to her a monstrous
perversity. It was this that caused her to sleep profoundly through
that most awakening of incidents, a person determined not to disturb
you, and then to wake up short into that person's self-congratulations
on success.

"Of course it was, darling. Who else could it have been?"

Sally's reply, "I thought it was," seems less reasonable--mere
conversation making--and a sequel as of one reviewing new and more
comfortable positions in bed follows naturally. A decision on the point
does not prohibit conversation, rather facilitates it.

"What did you come for, mammy?"

"Eau-de-Cologne." The voice has a fell intention of instant sleep in it
which Sally takes no notice of.

"Have you got it?"

"Got it? Yes. Go to sleep, chatterbox."

It was true about the eau-de-Cologne, for Rosalind, with a self-acting
instinct that explanation might be called for, had picked up the
bottle on her return journey. You see, she was always practising
wicked deceits and falsehoods, all to save that little chit being made
miserable on her account. But the chit wasn't going to sleep again. She
was going to enjoy her new attitude awake. Who woke her up? Answer that.

"I say, mother!"

"What, kitten? Go to sleep."

"All right--in a minute. Do you remember Mr. Fenwick's bottle of
eau-de-Cologne?"

"Of course I do. Go to sleep."

"Just going. But wasn't it funny?"

"What funny?--Oh, the eau-de-Cologne!"

Rosalind isn't really sleepy, and may as well talk. "Yes, that was very
funny. I wonder where he got it." She seems roused, and her daughter is
repentant.

"Oh dear! What a shame! I've just spoiled your go-off. Poor mother!"

"Never mind, chick! I like to talk a little. It _was_ funny that he
should have a big bottle of eau-de-Cologne, of all things, in his
pocket."

"Yes, but it was rummer still about Rosalind Nightingale--_his_
Rosalind Nightingale, the one he knew." This is dangerous ground, and
Rosalind knows it. But a plea of half-sleep will cover mistakes, and
conversation about the pre-electrocution period is the nearest approach
to taking Sally into her confidence that she can hope for. She is so
weary with her hours of wakefulness that she becomes a little reckless,
foreseeing a resource in such uncertainty of speech as may easily be
ascribed to a premature dream.

"It's not _impossible_ that it should have been your grandmother,
kitten. But we can't find out now. And it wouldn't do us any good that
I can see."

"It would be nice to know for curiosity. Couldn't anything be fished
out in the granny connexion? No documents?"

"Nothing will ever be fished out by me in that connexion, Sally
darling." Sally knows from her mother's tone of voice that they are
approaching an _impasse_. She means to give up the point the moment it
comes fully in view. But she will go on until that happens. She has to
think out what was the name of the Sub-Dean before she speaks again.

"Didn't the Reverend Decimus Ireson grab all the belongings?"

"They were left to him, child. It was all fair, as far as that goes.
I didn't grudge him the things--indeed, I felt rather grateful to him
for taking them. It would only have been painful, going over them.
Different people feel differently about these things. I didn't want
old recollections."

"Hadn't the Reverend Decimus a swarm of brats?"

"Sal--ly _dar_ling!... Well, yes, he had. There were two families. One
of six daughters, I forget which."

"Couldn't they be got at, to see if they wouldn't recollect something?"

"Of course they could. They've married a lawyer--at least, one of them
has. And all the rest, I believe, live with them." At another time Sally
would have examined this case in relation to the Deceased Wife's Sister
Bill. She was too interested now to stop her mother continuing: "But
what a silly chick you are! Why should _they_ know anything about it?"

"Why shouldn't they?"

Her mother's reply is emphasized. "My dear, do consider! I was with
your grandmother till within a month of her marriage with the Reverend,
as you call him, and I should have been ten times more likely to hear
about Mr. Fenwick than ever they would afterwards. Your grandmother had
never even seen them when I went away to India to be married."

"What's the lawyer's name?"

"Bearman, I think, or Dearman. But why?--Oh, no, by-the-bye, I think
it's Beazley."

"Because I could write and ask, or call. Sure to hear something."

"My dear, you'll hear nothing, and they'll only think you mad."
Rosalind was beginning to feel that she had made a mistake. She did not
feel so sure Sally would hear nothing. A recollection crossed her mind
of how one of the few incidents there was time for in her short married
life had been the writing of a letter by her husband to his friend, the
real Fenwick, and of much chaff therein about the eldest of these very
daughters, and her powerful rivalry to Jessie Nairn. It came back to
her now. Sally alarmed her still further.

"Yes, mother. I shall just get Mr. Fenwick to hunt up the address, and
go and call on the Beazleys." This sudden assumption of a concrete form
by the family was due to a vivid image that filled Sally's active brain
immediately of a household of parched women presided over by a dried
man who owned a wig on a stand and knew what chaff-wax meant, which
she didn't. A shop window near Lincoln's Inn was responsible. But to
Rosalind it really seemed that Sally must have had other means of
studying this family, and she was frightened.

"You don't know them, kitten?"

"Not the least. Don't want to." This reflection suggests caution.
"Perhaps I'd better write...."

"Better do nothing of the sort, child. Better go to sleep...."

"All right." But Sally does not like quitting the subject so abruptly,
and enlarges on it a little more. She sketches out a letter to be
written to the lady who is at present a buffer-state between the dried
man and the parched women. "Dear madam," she recites, "you may perhaps
recall--or will perhaps recall--which is right, mother?"

"Either, dear. Go to sleep." But just at this moment Rosalind
recollects with satisfaction that the name was neither Beazley nor
Dearman, but Tressilian Tredgold. She has been thinking of falling
back on affectation of sleep to avoid more alarms, but this makes it
needless.

"I'm sure I've got the name wrong," she says, with revived wakefulness
in her voice.

But Sally is murmuring to herself--"Perhaps recall my mother, Mrs.
Rosalind Nightingale--Rosalind in brackets--by her maiden name of--by
the same name--who married the late Mr. Graythorpe in India--I say,
mother...."

"Yes, little goose."

"How am I to put all that?"

"Go to sleep! I don't think you'll find that family very--coming. My
impression is you had much better leave it alone. What good would it
do you to find out who Mr. Fenwick was? And perhaps have him go away
to Australia!"

"Why Australia?"

Oh dear, what mistakes Rosalind did make! Why on earth need she
name the place she knew Gerry did go to? America would have done just
as well.

"Australia--New Zealand--America--anywhere!" But Sally doesn't
mind--has fallen back on her letter-sketch.

"Apologizing for troubling you, believe me, dear madam, yours
faithfully--or very faithfully, or truly--Rosalind Nightingale.... No;
I should not like Mr. Fenwick to go away anywhere. No more would you.
I want him here, for us. So do you!"

"I should be very sorry indeed for Mr. Fenwick to go away. We should
miss him badly. But fancy what his wife must be feeling, if he has one.
I can sympathize with her." It really was a relief to say anything so
intensely true.

Did the reality with which she spoke impress Sally more than the mere
words, which were no more than "common form" of conversation? Probably,
for something in them brought back her conference with the Major on
Boxing Day morning when her mother was at church. What was that
she had said to him when she was sitting on his knee improving his
whiskers?--that if she, later on, saw reason to suppose his suspicions
true, she would ask her mother point-blank. Why not? And here she was
with the same suspicions, quite, quite independent of the Major. And
see how dark it was in both rooms! One could say anything. Besides, if
her mother didn't want to answer, she could pretend to be asleep. She
wouldn't ask too loud, to give her a chance.

"Mother darling, if Mr. Fenwick was to make you an offer, how should
you like it?"

"Oh dear! _What's_ the child saying? What is it, Sallykin? I was just
going off."

Now, obviously, you can ask a lady Sally's question in the easy course
of flowing chat, but you can't drag her from the golden gates of sleep
to ask it. It gets too official. So Sally backed out, and said she had
said nothing, which wasn't the case. The excessive readiness with which
her mother accepted the statement looks, to us, as if she had really
been awake and heard.

CHAPTER XIV

HOW MILLAIS' "HUGUENOT" CAME OF A WALK IN THE BACK GARDEN. AND HOW
  FENWICK VERY NEARLY KISSED SALLY

In spite of Colonel Lund's having been so betimes in his forecastings
about Mrs. Nightingale and Fenwick (as we must go on calling him for
the present), still, when one day that lady came, about six weeks
after the nocturne in our last chapter, and told him she must have his
consent to a step she was contemplating before she took it, he felt a
little shock in his heart--one of those shocks one so often feels when
one hears that a thing he has anticipated without pain, even with
pleasure, is to become actual.

But he replied at once, "My dear! Of course!" without hearing any
particulars; and added: "You will be happier, I am sure. Why should
I refuse my consent to your marrying Fenwick? Because that's it, I
suppose?" That was it. The Major had guessed right.

"He asked me to marry him, last night," she said, with simple
equanimity and directness. "I told him yes, as far as my own wishes
went. But I said I wouldn't, if either you or the kitten forbade the
banns."

"I don't think we shall, either of us." It was a daughter's
marriage-warrant he was being asked to sign; a document seldom signed
without a heartache, more or less, for him who holds the pen. But his
_coeur navré_ had to be concealed, for the sake of the applicant;
no wet blanket should be cast on her new happiness. He kissed her
affectionately. To him, for all her thirty-nine or forty birthdays,
she was still the young girl he had helped and shielded in her despair,
twenty years ago, he himself being then a widower, near forty years her
senior. "No, Rosa dear," continued the Major. "As far as I can see,
there can be no objection but one--_you_ know!"

"_The_ one?"

"Yes. It is all a _terra incognita_. He _may_ have a wife elsewhere,
seeking for him. Who can tell?"

"It is a risk to be run. But I am prepared to run it"--she was going
to add "for his sake," but remembered that her real meaning for these
words would be, "for the sake of the man I wronged," and that the Major
knew nothing of Fenwick's identity. She had not been able to persuade
herself to make even her old friend her confidant. Danger lay that way.
She _knew_ silence would be safe against anything but Fenwick's own
memory.

"Yes, it is a risk, no doubt," the Major said. "But I am like him. I
cannot conceive a man forgetting that he had a wife. It seems an
impossibility. He has talked about you to me, you know."

"In connexion with his intention about me?"

"Almost. Not quite definitely, but almost. He knew I understood what he
meant. It seemed to me he was fidgeting more about his having so little
to offer in the way of worldly goods than about any possible wife in
the clouds."

"Dear fellow! Just fancy! Why, those people in the City would take him
into partnership to-morrow if he had a little capital to bring in. They
told him so themselves."

"And you would finance him? Is that the idea? Well, I suppose as I'm
your trustee, if the money was all lost, I should have to make it up,
so it wouldn't matter."

"Oh, Major dear! is _that_ what being a trustee means?"

"Of course, my dear Rosa! What did you think it meant?"

"Do you know, I don't know what I _did_ think; at least, I thought it
would be very nice if you were my trustee."

The conversation has gone off on a siding, but the Major shunts the
train back. "That was what you and little fiddle-stick's-end were
talking about till three in the morning, then?"

"Oh, Major dear, did you hear us? And we kept you awake? What a _shame_!"

For on the previous evening, Sally being out musicking and expected
home late, Fenwick and Mrs. Nightingale had gone out in the back-garden
to enjoy the sweet air of that rare phenomenon--a really fine spring
night in England--leaving the Major indoors because of his bronchial
tubes. The late seventies shrink from night air, even when one means to
be a healthy octogenarian. Also, they go away to bed, secretively, when
no one is looking--at least, the Major did in this case. Of course, he
was staying the night, as usual.

So, in the interim between the Major's good-night and Sally's
cab-wheels, this elderly couple of lovers (as they would have worded
their own description) had the summer night to themselves. As the Major
closed his bedroom window, he saw, before drawing down the blind, that
the two were walking slowly up and down the gravel path, talking
earnestly. No impression of mature years came to the Major from that
gravel path. A well-made, handsome man, with a bush of brown hair and
a Raleigh beard, and a graceful woman suggesting her beauty through the
clear moonlight--that was the implication of as much as he could see,
as he drew the inference a word of soliloquy hinted at, "Not Millais'
Huguenot, so far!" But he evidently expected that grouping very soon.
Only he was too sleepy to watch for it, and went to bed. Besides, would
it have been honourable?

"It's no use, Fenwick," she said to him in the garden, "trying to keep
off the forbidden subject, so I won't try."

"It's not forbidden by me. Nothing could be, that _you_ would like
to say."

Was that, she thought, only what so many men say every day to so many
women, and mean so little by? Or was it more? She could not be sure
yet. She glanced at him as they turned at the path-end, and her
misgivings all but vanished, so serious and resolved was his quiet face
in the moonlight. She was half-minded to say to him, "Do you mean that
you love me, Fenwick?" But, then, was it safe to presume on the
peculiarity of her position, of which he, remember, knew absolutely
nothing.

For with her it was not as with another woman, who expects what is
briefly called "an offer." In _her_ case, the man beside her was her
husband, to whose exorcism of her love from his life her heart had
never assented. While, in his eyes, she differed in no way in her
relation to him from any woman, to whom a man, placed as he was,
longs to say that she is what he wants most of all mortal things, but
stickles in the telling of it, from sheer cowardice; who dares not risk
the loss of what share he has in her in the attempt to get the whole.
_She_ grasped the whole position, _he_ only part of it.

"I am glad it is so," she decided to say. "Because each time I see you,
I want to ask if nothing has come back--no trace of memory?"

"Nothing! It is all gone. Nothing comes back."

"Do you remember that about the tennis-court? Did it go any further,
or die out completely?"

He stopped a moment in his walk, and flicked the ash from his cigar;
then, after a moment's thought, replied:

"I am not sure. It seemed to get mixed with my name--on my arm. I
think it was only because tennis and Fenwick are a little alike." His
companion thought how near the edge of a volcano both were, and
resolved to try a crucial experiment. Better an eruption, after all,
or a plunge in the crater, than a life of incessant doubt.

"You remembered the name Algernon clearly?"

"Not _clearly_. But it was the only name with an 'A' that felt right.
Unless it was Arthur, but I'm sure my name never was Arthur!"

"Sally thought it was hypnotic suggestion--thought I had laid an unfair
stress upon it. I easily might have."

"Why? Did you know an Algernon?"

"My husband's name was Algernon." She herself wondered how any voice
that spoke so near a heart that beat as hers did at this moment could
keep its secret. Yet it betrayed nothing, and so supreme was her
self-control that she could say to herself, even while she knew she
would pay for this effort later, that the pallor of her face would
betray nothing either; he would put that down to the moonlight. She
_was_ a strong woman. For she went steadily on, to convince herself
of her own self-command: "I knew him very little by that name, though.
I always called him Gerry."

He merely repeated the name thrice, but it gave her a moment of keen
apprehension. Any stirring of memory over it might be the thin end of
a very big wedge. But if there was any, it was an end so thin that
it broke off. Fenwick looked round at her.

"Do you know," he said, "I rather favour the hypnotic suggestion
theory. For the moment you said the name Gerry, I fancied I too knew
it as the short for Algernon. Now, that's absurd! No two people ever
made Gerry out of Algernon. It's always Algy."

"Always. Certainly, it would be odd."

"I am rather inclined to think," said Fenwick, after a short silence,
"that I can understand how it happened. Only then, perhaps, my name may
not be Algernon at all. And here I have been using it, signing with it,
and so on."

"What do you understand?"

"Well, I suspect this. I suspect that you did lay some kind of stress,
naturally, on your husband's name, and also on its abbreviation. It
affected me somehow with a sense of familiarity."

"Is it so _very_ improbable that you were familiar with the name Gerry
too? It might be----"

"Anything might be. But surely we almost know that two accidental
adoptions of Gerry as a short for Algernon would not come across each
other by chance, as yours and mine have done."

"What is 'almost knowing'? But tell me this. When I call you
Gerry--Gerry ... there!--does the association or impression repeat
itself?" She repeated the name once and again, to try. There was a good
deal of nettle-grasping in all this. Also a wish to clinch matters, to
drive the sword to the hilt; to put an end, once and for all, to the
state of tension she lived in. For surely, if anything could prove his
memory was really gone, it would be this. That she should call him by
his name of twenty years ago--should utter it to him, as she could not
help doing, in the tone in which she spoke to him then, and that her
doing so should arouse no memory of the past--surely this would show,
if anything could show it, that that past had been finally erased
from the scroll of his life. She had a moment only of suspense after
speaking, and then, as his voice came in answer, she breathed again
freely. Nothing could have shown a more complete unconsciousness than
his reply, after another moment of reflection:

"Do you know, Mrs. Nightingale, that convinces me that the name
Algernon _was_ produced by your way of saying it. It _was_ hypnotic
suggestion! I assure you that, however strange you may think it, every
time you repeat the name Gerry, it seems more familiar to me. If you
said it often enough, I have no doubt I should soon be believing in the
diminutive as devoutly as I believe in the name itself. Because I am
quite convinced of Algernon Fenwick. Continually signing _per-pro_'s
has driven it home." He didn't seem quite in earnest over his
conviction, though--seemed to laugh a little about it.

But a sadder tone came into his voice after an interval in which his
companion, frightened at her own temerity, resolved that she would not
call him Gerry again. It was sailing too near the wind. She was glad he
went back from this side-channel of their talk to the main subject.

"No, I have no hope of getting to the past through my own mind. I feel
it is silence. And that being so, I should be sorry that any
illumination should come to me out of the past, throwing light on
records my mind could not read--I mean, any proof positive of what my
crippled memory could not confirm. I would rather remain quite in the
dark--unless, indeed----"

"Unless what?"

"Unless the well-being of some others, forgotten with my forgotten
world, is involved in--dependent on--my return to it. That would be
shocking--the hungry nestlings in the deserted nest. But I am so
convinced that I have only forgotten a restless life of rapid
change--that I _could_ not forget love and home, if I ever had
them--that my misgivings about this are misgivings of the reason
only, not of the heart. Do you understand me?"

"Perfectly. At least, I think so. Go on."

"I cannot help thinking, too, that a sense of a strong link with a
forgotten yesterday would survive the complete effacement of all its
details in the form of a wish to return to it. I have none. My to-day
is too happy for me to wish to go back to that yesterday, even if I
could, without a wrench. I feel a sort of shame in saying I should be
sorry to return to it. It seems a sort of ... a sort of disloyalty to
the unknown."

"You might long to be back, if you could know. Think if you could see
before you now, and recognise the woman who was once your wife." There
was nettle-grasping in this.

"It is a mere abstract idea," he replied, "unaccompanied by any image
of an individual. I perceive that it is dutiful to recognise the fact
that I should welcome her _if_ she appeared as a reality. But it is a
large _if_. I am content to go on without an hypothesis--that is really
all she is now. And my belief that, if she had ever existed, I should
not be _able_ to disbelieve in her, underlies my acceptance of her in
that character."

Mrs. Nightingale laughed. "We are mighty metaphysical," said she.
"Wouldn't it depend entirely on what she was like, when all's said
and done? I believe I'm right. We women are more practical than men,
after all."

"You make game of my metaphysics, as you call them. Well, I'll drop the
metaphysics and speak the honest truth." He stopped and faced round
towards her, standing on the garden path. "Only, you must make me one
promise."

She stopped also, and stood looking full at him.

"What promise?"

"If I tell you all I think in my heart, you will not allow it to come
between me and you, to undermine the only strong friendship I have in
the world, the only one I know of."

"It shall make no difference between us. You may trust me."

They turned and walked again slowly, once up and down. Then Fenwick's
voice, when he next spoke, had an added earnestness, a growing tension,
with an echo in it, for her, of the years gone by--a ring of his young
enthusiasm, of his passionate outburst in the lawn-tennis garden twenty
years ago. He made no more ado of what he had to say.

"I can form no image in my mind, try how I may, of any woman for whose
sake I would give up one hour of the precious privilege I now enjoy.
I have no right to--to assess it, to make a definition of it. But
I _have_ it now. I could not resume my place as the husband of a now
unknown wife--you know what I mean--and not lose the privilege of
being near _you_. It may be--it is conceivable, I mean; no more--that
a revelation to me of myself, a light thrown on what I am, would bring
me what would palliate the wrench of losing what I have of you. It _may_
be so--it _may_ be! All I know is--all I can say is--that I can now
_imagine_ nothing, no treasure of love of wife or daughter, that would
be a make-weight for what I should lose if I had to part from you." He
paused a moment, as though he thought he was going beyond his rights of
speech, then added more quietly: "No; I can imagine _no_ hypothetical
wife. And as for my hypothetical daughter, I find I am always utilising
Sally for her."

Mrs. Nightingale murmured in an undertone the word "Sallykin," as she
so often did when her daughter was mentioned, with that sort of caress
in her voice. This time it was caught by a sort of gasp, and she
remained silent. What Sally _was_ had crossed her mind--the strange
relation in which she stood to Fenwick, born in _his_ wedlock, but no
daughter of his. And there he was, as fond of the child as he could be.

Fenwick may have half misunderstood something in her manner, for when
he spoke again his words had a certain aspect of recoil from what he
had said, at least of consideration of it in some new light.

"When I speak to you as freely as this, remember the nature of the
claim I have to do so--the only apology I can make for taking an
exceptional licence."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean I do not count myself as a man--only a sort of inexplicable
waif, a kind of cancelled man. A man without a past is like a child,
or an idiot from birth, suddenly endowed with faculties."

"What nonsense, Fenwick! You have brooded and speculated over your
condition until you have become morbid. Do now, as Sally would say,
chuck the metaphysics."

"Perhaps I was getting too sententious over it. I'm sorry, and please
I won't do so any more."

"Don't then. And now you'll see what will happen. You will remember
everything quite suddenly. It will all come back in a flash, and oh,
how glad you will be! And think of the joy of your wife and children!"

"Yes, and suppose all the while I am hating them for dragging me away
from you----"

"From me and Sally?"

"I wasn't going to say Sally, but I don't want to keep her out. You
and Sally, if you like. All I know is, if their reappearance were to
bring with it a pleasure I cannot imagine--because I cannot imagine
_them_--it would cut across my life, as it is now, in a way that would
drive me _mad_. Indeed it would. How could I say to myself--as I say
now, as I dare to say to you, knowing what I am--that to be here with
you now is the greatest happiness of which I am capable."

"All that would change if you recovered them."

"Yes--yes--maybe! But I shrink from it; I shrink from _them_! They are
strangers--nonentities. You are--you are--oh, it's no use----" He
stopped suddenly.

"What am I?"

"It's no use beating about the bush. You are the centre of my life as
it is, you are what I--all that is left of me--love best in the world!
I cannot _now_ conceive the possibility of anything but hatred for what
might come between us, for what might sever the existing link, whatever
it may be--I care little what it is called, so long as I may keep it
unbroken...."

"And I care nothing!" It was her eyes meeting his that stopped him. He
could read the meaning of her words in them before they were spoken.
Then he replied in a voice less firm than before:

"Dare we--knowing what I am, knowing what may come suddenly, any hour
of the day, out of the unknown--_dare_ we call it love?" Perhaps in
Fenwick's mind at this moment the predominant feeling was terror of the
consequences to her that marriage with him might betray her into. It
was much stronger than any misgiving (although a little remained) of
her feelings toward himself.

"What else can we call it? It is a good old word." She said this quite
calmly, with a very happy face one could see the flush of pleasure
and success on even in the moonlight, and there was no reluctance,
no shrinking in her, from her share of the outcome the Major had not
waited to see. "Millais' Huguenot" was complete. Rosalind Graythorpe,
or Palliser, stood there again with her husband's arm round her--her
husband of twenty years ago! And in that fact was the keynote of what
there was of unusual--of unconventional, one might almost phrase it--in
her way of receiving and requiting his declaration. It hardly need be
said that _he_ was unconscious of any such thing. A man whose soul
is reeling with the intoxication of a new-found happiness is not
overcritical about the exact movement of the hand that has put the
cup to his lips.

The Huguenot arrangement might have gone on in the undisturbed
moonlight till the chill of the morning came to break it up if a
cab-wheel _crescendo_ and a _strepitoso_ peal at the bell had not
announced Sally, who burst into the house and rushed into the
drawing-room tumultuously, to be corrected back by a serious word from
Ann, the door-opener, that Missis and Mr. Fenwick had stepped out in
the garden. Ann's parade of her conviction that this was _en règle_,
when no one said it wasn't, was suggestive in the highest degree.
Professional perjury in a law-court could not have been more
self-conscious. Probably Ann knew all about it, as well as cook. Sally
saw nothing. She was too full of great events at Ladbroke Grove
Road--the sort of events that are announced with a preliminary, What
_do_ you think, N or M? And then develop the engagement of O to P, or
the jilting of Q by R.

There was just time for a dozen words between the components of the
Millais group in the moonlight.

"Shall we tell Sally?" It was the Huguenot that asked the question.

"Not just this minute. Wait till I can think. Perhaps I'll tell her
upstairs. Now say good-bye before the chick comes, and go." And the
chick came on the scene just too late to criticise the _pose_.

"I say, mother!" this with the greatest _empressement_ of which
humanity and youth are capable. "I've got something I _must_ tell you!"

"What is it, kitten?"

"Tishy's head-over-ears in love with the shop-boy!"

"Sh-sh-sh-shish! You noisy little monkey, do consider! The neighbours
will hear every word you say." So they will, probably, as Miss Sally's
voice is very penetrating, and rings musically clear in the summer
night. Her attitude is that she doesn't care if they do.

"Besides they're only cats! And _nobody_ knows who Tishy is, or the
shop-boy. I'll come down and tell you all about it."

"We're coming up, darling!" You see, Sally had manifestoed down into
the garden from the landing of the stair, which was made of iron
openwork you knocked flower-pots down and broke, and you have had to
have a new one--that, at least, is how Ann put it. On the stair-top
Mrs. Nightingale stems the torrent of her daughter's revelation
because it's so late and Mr. Fenwick must get away.

"You must tell him all about it another time."

"I don't know whether it's any concern of his."

"Taken scrupulous, are we, all of a sudden?" says Fenwick, laughing.
"That cock won't fight, Miss Pussy! You'll have to tell me all about
it when I come to-morrow. Good-night, Mrs. Nightingale." A sort of
humorous formality in his voice makes Sally look from one to the
other, but it leads to nothing. Sally goes to see Fenwick depart,
and her mother goes upstairs with a candle. In a minute or so
Sally pelts up the stairs, leaving Ann and the cook to thumbscrew
on the shutter-panels of the street door, and make sure that
housebreaker-baffling bells are susceptible.

"Do you know, mamma, I really _did_ think--what do you think I thought?"

"What, darling?"

"I thought Mr. Fenwick was going to kiss me!" In fact, Fenwick had only
just remembered in time that family privileges must stand over till
after the revelation.

"Should you have minded if he had?"

"_Not a bit!_ Why should _anybody_ mind Mr. Fenwick kissing them? You
wouldn't yourself--you know you wouldn't! Come now, mother!"

"I shouldn't distress myself, poppet!" But words are mere wind; the
manner of them is everything, and the foreground of her mother's manner
suggests a background to Sally. She has smelt a rat, and suddenly fixes
her eyes on a tell-tale countenance fraught with mysterious reserves.

"Mother, you _are_ going to marry Mr. Fenwick!" No change of type could
do justice to the emphasis with which Sally goes straight to the point.
Italics throughout would be weak. Her mother smiles as she fondles her
daughter's excited face.

"I am, darling. So you may kiss him yourself when he comes to-morrow
evening."

And Tishy's passion for the shop-boy had to stand over. But, as the
Major had said, the mother and daughter talked till three in the
morning--well, past two, anyhow!

CHAPTER XV

CONCERNING DR. VEREKER AND HIS MAMMA, WHO HAD KNOWN IT ALL ALONG. HOW
  SALLY LUNCHED WITH THE SALES WILSONS, AND GOT SPECULATING ABOUT HER
  FATHER. HOW TISHY LET OUT ABOUT MAJOR ROPER. HOW THERE WAS A WEDDING

The segment of a circle of Society that did duty for a sphere, in the
case of Mrs. Nightingale and Sally, was collectively surprised when it
heard of the intended marriage of the former, having settled in its own
mind that the latter was the magnet to Mr. Fenwick's lodestone. But
each several individual that composed it had, it seemed, foreseen
exactly what was going to happen, and had predicted it in language that
could only have been wilfully mistaken by persons interested in proving
that the speaker was not a prophet. Exceptional insight had been
epidemic. The only wonder was (to the individual speaker) that Mrs.
Nightingale had remained single so long, and the only other wonder was
that none of the other cases had seen it. They had evidently only taken
seership mildly.

Dr. Vereker had a good opportunity of studying omniscience of a
malignant type in the very well marked case of his own mother. You may
remember Sally's denunciation of her as an old hen that came wobbling
down on you. When her son (in the simplicity of his heart) announced
to her as a great and curious piece of news that Mr. Fenwick was
going to marry Mrs. Nightingale, she did not even look up from her
knitting to reply: "What did I say to you, Conny?" For his name was
Conrad, as Sally had reported. His discretion was not on the alert on
this occasion, for he incautiously asked, "When?"

The good lady laid down her knitting on her knees, and folded her
hands, interlacing her fingers, which were fat, as far as they would
go, and leaning back with closed eyes--eyes intended to remain closed
during anticipated patience.

"Fancy asking me that!" said she.

"Well, but--hang it!--_when?_"

"Do not use profane language, Conrad, in your mother's presence. Can
you really ask me, 'When?' Try and recollect!"

Conrad appeared to consider; but as he had to contend with the problem
of finding out when a thing had been said, the only clue to the nature
of which was the date of its utterance, it was no great wonder that his
cogitations ended in a shake of the head subdivided into its
elements--shakes taken a brace at a time--and an expression of face as
of one who whistles _sotto voce_. His questioner must have been looking
between her eyelids, which wasn't playing fair; for she indicted him on
the spot, and pushed him, as it were, into the dock.

"_That_, I suppose, means that I speak untruth. Very well, my dear!"
Resignation set in.

"Come, mother, I say, now! Be a reasonable maternal parent. When did
I say anybody spoke untruth?"

"My dear, you _said_ nothing. But if your father could have heard what
you did _not_ say, you know perfectly well, my dear Conrad, what he
would have _thought_. Was he likely to sit by and hear me insulted?
Did he ever do so?"

The doctor was writing letters at a desk-table that he used for
miscellaneous correspondence as much as possible, in order that this
very same mother of his should be left alone as little as possible. He
ended a responsible letter, and directed it, and made it a thing of the
past with a stamp on it in a little basket on the hall-table outside.
Then he came back to his mother, and bestowed on her the kiss, or peck,
of peace. It always made him uncomfortable when he had to go away to
the hospital under the shadow of dissension at home.

"Well, mother dear, what was it you really did say about the Fenwick
engagement?"

"It would be more proper, my dear, to speak of it as the Nightingale
engagement. You will say it is a matter of form, but...."

"All right. The Nightingale engagement...."

"My dear! So abrupt! To your mother!"

"Well, dear mammy, what was it, really now?" This cajolery took effect,
and the Widow Vereker's soul softened. She resumed her knitting.

"If you don't remember what it was, dear, it doesn't matter." The
doctor saw that nothing short of complete concession would procure
a tranquil sea.

"Of course, I remember perfectly well," he said mendaciously. He knew
that, left alone, his mother would supply a summary of what he
remembered. She did so, with a bound.

"I said, my dear (and I am glad you recollect it, Conrad)--I said from
the very first, when Mr. Fenwick was living at Krakatoa--(it was all
_quite_ right, my dear. Do you think I don't know? A grown-up daughter
and two servants!)--I said that any one with eyes in their head could
see. And has it turned out exactly as I expected, or has it not?"

"Exactly."

"Very well, dear. I'm glad you say so. Now, don't contradict me
another time."

The close observer of the actual (whom we lay claim to be) has
occasionally to report the apparently impossible. We do not suppose
we shall be believed when we say that Mrs. Vereker added: "Besides,
there was the Major."

Professor Sales Wilson, Lætitia's father, was _the_ Professor Sales
Wilson. Only, if you had seen that eminent scholar when he got outside
his library by accident and wanted to get back, you wouldn't have
thought he was _the_ anybody, and would probably have likened him to
a disestablished hermit-crab--in respect, that is, of such a one's desire
to disappear into his shell, and that respect only. For no hermit-crab
would ever cause an acquaintance to wonder why he should shave at all
if he could do it no better than that; nor what he was talking to
himself about so frequently; nor whether he polished his spectacles so
long at a time to give the deep groove they were making across his nose
a chance of filling up; nor whether he would be less bald if he rubbed
his head less; nor what he had really got inside that overpowering
phrenology of brow, and behind that aspect of chronic concentration.
But about the retiring habits of both there could be no doubt.

He lived in his library, attired by nature in a dressing-gown and
skull-cap. But from its secret recesses he issued manifestoes which
shook classical Europe. He corrected versions, excerpted passages,
disallowed authenticities, ascribed works to their true authors, and
exposed the pretensions of sciolists with a vigour which ought to have
finally dispersed that unhallowed class. Only it didn't, because they
are a class incapable of shame, and will go on madly, even when they
have been proved to be _mere_, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Perhaps
they had secret information about the domestic circumstances of their
destroyer, and didn't care. If Yamen had had private means of knowing
that Vishnu was on uncomfortable terms with his wife, a corrected
version of the whole Hindu mythology might have been necessary.

However, so far as can be conjectured, the image the world formed of
the Professor was a sort of aggregate of Dr. Johnson, Bentley, Grotius,
Mezzofanti, and a slight touch of, say Conington, to bring him well
up to date. But so much of the first that whenever the _raconteur_
repeated one of the Professor's moderately bon-mots, he always put
"sir" in--as, for instance, "A punster, sir, is a man who demoralises
two meanings in one word;" or, "Should you call that fast life, sir?
_I_ should call it slow death." The _raconteur_ was rather given to
making use of him, and assigning to him _mots_ which were not at all
_bons_, because they only had the "sir" in them, and were otherwise
meaningless. He was distressed, not without reason, when he heard that
he had said to Max Müller, or some one of that calibre, "There is no
such thing, sir, as the English language!" But he very seldom heard
anything about himself, or any one else; as he passed his life, as
aforesaid, in his library, buried in the Phoenician Dictionary he
hoped he might live to bring out. He had begun the fourth letter;
but _we_ don't know the Phoenician alphabet. Perhaps it has only four
letters in it.

He came out of the library for meals, of course. But he took very
little notice of anything that passed at the family board, and read
nearly the whole time, occasionally saying something forcible to
himself. Indeed, he never conversed with his family unless deprived
of his book. This occurred on the occasion when Sally carried the
momentous news of her mother's intended marriage to Ladbroke Grove
Road, the second day after they had talked till two in the morning.
Matrimony was canvassed and discussed in all its aspects, and the
particular case riddled and sifted, and elucidated from every point of
the compass, without the Professor being the least aware that anything
unusual was afoot, until Grotefend got in the mayonnaise sauce.

"Take your master's book away, Jenkins," said the lady of the house.
And Jenkins, the tender-hearted parlourmaid, allowed master to keep
hold just to the end of the sentence. "Take it away, as I told you,
and wipe that sauce off!"

Sally did so want to box that woman's ears--at least, she said so
after. She was a great horny, overbearing woman, was Mrs. Sales Wilson,
and Sally was frightened lest Lætitia should grow like her. Only,
Tishy's teeth never _could_ get as big as that! Nor wiggle.

The Professor, being deprived of his volume, seemed to awake
compulsorily, and come out into a cold, unlearned world. But he
smiled amiably, and rubbed his hands round themselves rhythmically.

"Well, then!" said he. "Say it all again."

"Say what, papa?"

"All the chatter, of course."

"What for, papa?"

"For me to hear. Off we go! _Who's_ going to be married?"

"You see, he was listening all the time. _I_ shouldn't tell him, if
I were you. Your father is really unendurable. And he gets worse."
Thus the lady of the house.

"What does your mother say?" There is a shade of asperity in the
Professor's voice.

"Says you were listening all the time, papa. So you were!" This is
from Lætitia's younger sister, Theeny. Her name was Athene. Her brother
Egerton called her "Gallows Athene"--an offensive perversion of the
name of the lady she was called after. Her mother had carefully taught
all her children contempt for their father from earliest childhood. But
toleration of his weaknesses--etymology, and so on--had taken root in
spite of her motherly care, and the Professor was on very good terms
with his offspring. He negatived Theeny amiably.

"No, my dear, I was like Mrs. Cluppins. The voices were loud, and
forced themselves upon my ear. But as you all spoke at once, I have
no idea what anybody said. My question was conjectural--purely
conjectural. _Is_ anybody going to marry anybody? _I_ don't know."

"What is your father talking about over there? _Is_ he going to help
that tongue or not? Ask him." For a peculiarity in this family was that
the two heads of it always spoke to one another through an agent. So
clearly was this understood that direct speech between them, on its
rare occasions, was always ascribed by distant hearers to an outbreak
of hostilities. If either speaker had addressed the other by name, the
advent of the Sergeant-at-Arms would have been the next thing looked
for. On this occasion Lætitia's literal transmission of "_Are_ you
going to help the tongue or not, papa?" recalled his wandering mind
to his responsibilities. Sally's liver-wing--she was the visitor--was
pleading at his elbow for its complement of tongue.

But soon a four-inch space intervened between the lonely tongue-tip
on the dish and what had once been, in military language, its base
of operations. Everybody that took tongue had got tongue.

"Well, then, how about who's married whom?" Thus the Professor,
resuming his hand-rubbing, and neglecting the leg of a fowl.

"Make your father eat his lunch, Lætitia. We _cannot_ be late again
this afternoon." Whereon every one ate too fast; and Sally felt very
glad the Professor had given her such a big slice of tongue, as she
knew she wouldn't have the courage to have a second supply, if offered,
much less ask for it.

"Do you hear, papa? I'm to make you eat your lunch," says Lætitia;
and her mother murmurs "That's right; make him," as though he were an
anaconda in the snake-house, and her daughter a keeper who could go
inside the cage. Lætitia then adds briefly that Mrs. Nightingale is
going to marry Fenwick.

"Ha! Mercy on us!" says the Professor quite vaguely, and, even more so,
adds: "Chicken--chicken--chicken--chicken--chicken!" Though what he
says next is more intelligible, it is unfortunate and ill-chosen: "And
who _is_ Mrs. Nightingale?"

The sphinx is mobility itself compared with Mrs. Wilson's intense
preservation of her _status quo_. The import of which is that the
Professor's blunders are things of everyday occurrence--every minute,
rather. She merely says to Europe, "You see," and leaves that continent
to deal with the position. Sally, who always gets impatient with the
Wilson family, except the Professor himself and Lætitia--though _she_
is trying sometimes--now ignores Europe, and gets the offender into
order on her own account.

"Why, Professor dear, don't you know Mrs. Nightingale's my mother?
I'm Sally Nightingale, you know!"

"I'm not at all sure that I did, my dear. I think I thought you were
Sally Something-else. My mind is very absent sometimes. You must
forgive me. Sally Nightingale! To be sure!"

"Never mind, Professor dear!" But the Professor still looks vexed at
his blunder. So Sally says in confirmation, "I've forgiven you. Shake
hands!" And doesn't make matters much better, for her action seems
unaccountable to the absent-minded one, who says, "Why?" first, and
then, "Oh, ah, yes--I see. Shake hands, certainly!" On which the
Sphinx, at the far end of the table, wondered whether the ancient
Phoenicians were rude, under her breath.

"I'm so absent, Sally Nightingale, that I didn't even know your father
wasn't living." Lætitia looks uncomfortable, and when Sally merely
says, "I never saw my father," thinks to herself what a very discreet
girl Sally is. Naturally she supposes Sally to be a wise enough child
to know something about her own father. But the Wilson family were not
completely in the dark about an unsatisfactory "something queer" in
Sally's extraction; so that she credits that unconscious young person
with having steered herself skilfully out of shoal-waters; but she
is not sure whether to class her achievement as intrepidity or cheek.
She is wanted in the intelligence department before she can decide
this point.

"Perhaps, if you try, Lætitia, you'll be able to make out whether your
father is or is not going to eat his lunch."

But as this appeal of necessity causes the Professor to run the risk
of choking himself before Lætitia has time to formulate an inquiry, she
can fairly allow the matter to lapse, as far as she is concerned. The
dragon, her mother--for that was how Sally spoke of the horny one--kept
an eye firmly fixed on the unhappy honorary member of most learned
societies, and gave the word of command, "Take away!" with such
promptitude that Jenkins nearly carried off the plate from under his
knife and fork as he placed them on it.

A citation from the Odyssey was received in stony silence by the
Dragon, who, however, remarked to her younger daughter that it was no
use talking about Phineus and the Harpies, because they had to be at
St. Pancras at 3.10, or lose the train. And perhaps, if the servants
were to be called Harpies, your father would engage the next one
himself. They were trouble enough now, without that.

Owing to all which, the reference to Sally's father got lost sight of;
and she wasn't sorry, because Theeny, at any rate, wasn't wanted to
know anything about him, whatever Lætitia and her mother knew or
suspected.

But, as a matter of fact, Sally's declaration that she "never saw" him
was neither discretion, nor intrepidity, nor cheek. It was simple
Nature. She had always regarded her father as having been accessory
to herself before the fact; also as having been, for some mysterious
reason, unpopular--perhaps a _mauvais sujet_. But he was Ancient
History now--had joined the Phoenicians. Why should _she_ want to know?
Her attitude of uninquiring acquiescence had been cultivated by her
mother, and it is wonderful what a dominant influence from early
babyhood can do. Sally seldom spoke of this mysterious father of hers
in any other terms than those she had just used. She had never had an
opportunity of making his acquaintance--that was all. In some way,
undefined, he had not behaved well to her mother; and naturally she
sided with the latter. Once, and once only, her mother had said to her,
"Sally darling, I don't wish to talk about your father, but to forget
him. I have forgiven him, because of you. Because--how could I have
done without you, kitten?" And thereafter, as Sally's curiosity was
a feeble force when set against the possibility that its gratification
might cause pain to her mother, she suppressed it easily.

But now and again little things would be said in her presence that
would set her a-thinking--little things such as what the Professor
has just said. She may easily have been abnormally sensitive on the
point--made more prone to reflection than usual--by last night's
momentous announcement. Anyhow, she resolved to talk to Tishy about
her parentage as soon as they should get back to the drawing-room,
where they were practising. All the two hours they ought to have played
in the morning Tishy would talk about nothing but Julius Bradshaw.
And look how ridiculous it all was! Because she _did_ call him
"shop-boy"--you know she did--only six weeks ago. Sally didn't see why
_her_ affairs shouldn't have a turn now; and although she was quite
aware that her friend wanted her to begin again where they had left off
before lunch, she held out no helping hand, but gave the preference to
her own thoughts.

"I suppose my father drank," said Sally to Tishy.

"If you don't know, dear, how should I?" said Tishy to Sally. And that
did seem plausible, and made Sally the more reflective.

The holly-leaves were gone now that had been conducive to thought at
Christmas in this same room when we heard the two girls count four
so often, but Sally could pull an azalea flower to pieces over her
cogitations, and did so, instead of tuning up forthwith. Lætitia was
preoccupied--couldn't take an interest in other people's fathers, nor
her own for that matter. She tuned up, though, and told Sally to look
alive. But while Sally looks alive she backs into a conversation of
the forenoon, and out of the pending discussion of Sally's paternity.
Their two preoccupations pull in opposite directions.

"You _will_ remember not to say anything, won't you, Sally dear? Do
promise."

"Say anything? Oh no; _I_ shan't say anything. I never do say things.
What about?"

"You know as well as I do, dear--about Julius Bradshaw."

"Of course I shan't, Tishy. Except mother; she doesn't count. I say,
Tishy!"

"Well, dear. Do look alive. I'm all ready."

"All right. Don't be in a hurry. I want to know whether you really
think my father drank."

"Why should I, dear? I never heard anything about him--at least, I
never heard anything myself. Mamma heard something. Only I wasn't to
repeat it. Besides, it was nothing whatever to do with drink." The
moment Lætitia said this, she knew that she had lost her hold on
her only resource against cross-examination. When the difficulty of
concealing anything is thrown into the same scale with the pleasure of
telling it, the featherweights of duty and previous resolutions kick
the beam. Then you are sorry when it's too late. Lætitia was, and
could see her way to nothing but obeying the direction on her music,
which was _attacca_. To her satisfaction, Sally came in promptly in
the right place, and a first movement in B sharp went steadily through
without a back-lash. There seemed a chance that Sally hadn't caught
the last remark, but, alas! it vanished.

"What was it, then, if it wasn't drink?" said she, exactly as if there
had been no music at all. Lætitia once said of Sally that she was
a horribly direct little Turk. She was very often--in this instance
certainly.

"I suppose it was the usual thing." Twenty-four, of course, knew more
than nineteen, and could speak to the point of what was and wasn't
usual in matters of this kind. But if Lætitia hoped that vagueness
would shake hands with delicacy and that details could be lubricated
away, she was reckoning without her Turk.

"What _is_ the usual thing?"

"Hadn't we better go on to the fugue? I don't care for the next
movement, and it's easy----"

"Not till you say what you mean by 'the usual thing.'"

"Well, dear, I suppose you know what half the divorce-cases are about?"

"_Tishy!_"

"What, dear?"

"There was _no_ divorce!"

"How do you know, dear?"

"I _should_ have known of it."

"How do you know that?"

"You might go on for ever that way. Now, Tishy dear, do be kind and
tell me what you heard and who said it. _I_ should tell _you_. You
_know_ I should." This appeal produces concession.

"It was old Major Roper told mamma--with blue pockets under his eyes
and red all over, creeks and wheezes when he speaks--do you know him?"

"No, I don't, and I don't want to. At least, I've just seen him at
a distance. I could see he was purple. _Our_ Major--Colonel Lund, you
know--says he's a horrible old gossip, and you can't rely on a word he
says. But what _did_ he say?"

"Well, of course, I oughtn't to tell you this, because I promised not.
What he _said_ was that your mother went out to be married to your
father in India, and the year after he got a divorce because he was
jealous of some man your mother had met on the way out."

"How old was I?"

"Gracious me, child! how should _I_ know. He only said you were a baby
in arms. Of course, you must have been, if you think of it." Lætitia
here feels that possible calculations may be embarrassing, and tries to
avert them. "Do let's get on to the third movement. We shall spend all
the afternoon talking."

"Very well, Tishy, fire away! Oh, no; it's me." And the third movement
is got under way, till we reach a _pizzicato_ passage which Sally
begins playing with the bow by mistake.

"That's _pits_!" says the first violin, and we have to begin again at
the top of the page, and the Professor in his library wonders why on
earth those girls can't play straight on. The Ancient Phoenicians are
fidgeted by the jerks in the music.

But it comes to an end in time, and then Sally begins again:

"I _know_ that story's all nonsense now, Tishy."

"Why?"

"Because mother told me once that my father never saw me, so come now!
Because the new-bornest baby that ever was couldn't be too small for
its father to see." Sally pauses reflectively, then adds: "Unless he
was blind. And mother would have said if he'd been blind."

"He couldn't have been blind, because----"

"Now, Tishy, you see! You're keeping back lots of things that old
wheezy squeaker said. And you _ought_ to tell me--you know you ought.
Why couldn't he?"

"You're in such a hurry, dear. I was going to tell you. Major Roper
said he never saw him but once, and it was out shooting tigers, and he
was the best shot for a civilian he'd ever seen. There was a tiger was
just going to lay hold of a man and carry him off when your father
shot him from two hundred yards off----"

"The man or the tiger? I'm on the tiger's side. I always am."

"The tiger, stupid! You wouldn't want your own father to aim at a tiger
and hit a man?"

Sally reflects. "I don't think I should. But, I say, Tishy, do you mean
to say that Major Roper meant to say that he was out shooting with my
father and didn't know what his name was?"

"Oh, no. He said his name, of course. It was Palliser ... that was
right, wasn't it?"

"Oh dear, no; it was Graythorpe. Palliser indeed!"

"It was true about the tiger though, because Major Roper says he's got
the skin himself now."

"Only it wasn't my father that shot it. That's quite clear." Sally was
feeling greatly relieved, and showed it in the way she added: "Now,
doesn't that just show what a parcel of nonsense the whole story is?"

Sally had never told her friend about her mother's name before she
took that of Nightingale. Very slight hints had sufficed to make her
reticent about Graythorpe. Colonel Lund had once said to her: "Of
course, your mother was Mrs. Graythorpe when she came to England; that
was before she changed her name to Nightingale, you know?" She
knew that her mother's money had come to her from a "grandfather
Nightingale," whose name had somehow accompanied it, and had been (very
properly, as it seemed to her) bestowed on herself as well as her
mother. They were part and parcel of each other obviously. In fact, she
had never more than just known of the existence of the name Graythorpe
in her family at all, and it had been imputed by her to this unpopular
father of hers, and put aside, as it were, on a shelf with him. Even if
her mother had not suggested a desire that the name should lapse, she
herself would have accepted its extinction on her own account.

But now this name came out of the past as a consolation. Palliser
indeed! How could mamma have been Mrs. Graythorpe if her husband's name
had been Palliser? Sally was not wise enough in worldly matters to know
that divorced ladies commonly fall back on their maiden names. And she
had been kept, or left, so much in the dark that she had taken for
granted that her mother's had been Nightingale--that, in fact, she had
retaken her maiden name at her father's wish, possibly as a censure
on the misbehaviour of a husband who drank or gambled or was otherwise
reprobate. Her young mind had been manipulated all one way--had been
in contact only with its manipulators. Had she had a sister or brother,
they would have canvassed the subject, speculated, run conclusions to
earth, and demanded enlightenment. She had none but her mother to go
to, unless it were Colonel Lund; and the painful but inevitable task of
both was to keep her in the dark about her parentage at all hazards.
"If ever," said the former to the latter, "my darling girl has a child
of her own, I may be able to tell her her mother's story." Till then,
it would be impossible.

Sally had had a narrow escape of knowing more about this story when
the veteran Sub-Dean qualified himself for an obituary in the "Times,"
which she chanced upon and read before her mother had time to detect
and suppress it. Luckily, a reasonable economy of type had restricted
the names and designations of all the wives he had driven tandem, and
no more was said of his third than that she was Rosalind, the widow
of Paul Nightingale. So, as soon as Sally's mother had read the text
herself, she was able to say to the Major, quite undisturbedly, that
the old Sub-Dean had gone at last, leaving thirteen children. The name
Graythorpe had not crept in.

But we left Sally with a question unanswered. Didn't that show what
nonsense old Major Roper's story was? Lætitia was rather glad to
assent, and get the story quashed, or at least prorogued _sine die_.

"It did seem rather nonsense, Sally dear. Major Roper was a stupid old
man, and evidently took more than was good for him." Intoxicants are
often of great service in conversation.

In this case they contributed to the reinstatement of Mr. Bradshaw.
Dear me, it did seem so funny to Sally! Only the other day this young
man had been known to her on no other lines than as an established
fool, who came to stare at _her_ out of the corners of his dark eyes
all through the morning service at St. Satisfax. And now it was St.
John's, Ladbroke Grove Road, and, what was more, he was being tolerated
as a semi-visitor at the Wilsons'--a visitor with explanations in an
undertone. This was the burden of Lætitia, as soon as she had contrived
to get Sally's troublesome parent shelved.

"Why mamma needs always to be in such a furious fuss to drag in his
violin, I do _not_ know. As if he needed to be accounted for! Of
course, if you ask a Hottentot to evenings, you have to explain him.
But the office-staff at Cattley's (which is really one of the largest
firms in the country) are none of them Hottentots, but the contrary....
Now I know, dear, you're going to say what's the contrary of a
Hottentot, and all the while you know perfectly well what I mean."

"Cut away, Tishy! What next?"

"Well--next, don't you think it very dignified of Mr. Bradshaw to be
_able_ to be condescended to and explained in corners under people's
breaths and not to show it?"

"He's got to lump it, if he doesn't like it." Sally, you see, has
given up her admirer readily enough, but, as she herself afterwards
said, it's quite another pair of shoes when you're called on to give
three cheers for what's really no merit at all! What does the young
man expect?

"Now, that's unkind, Sally dear. You wouldn't like _me_ to. Anyhow,
that's what mamma _does_. Takes ladies of a certain position or with
expectations into corners, and says she hates the expression gentleman
and lady, but _they_ know what she means...."

"_I_ know. And they goozle comfortably at her, like Goody Vereker."

"Doesn't it make one's flesh creep to have a mother like that? I do get
to hate the very sight of shot silk and binoculars on a leg when she
goes on so. But I suppose we never shall get on together--mamma and I."

"What does the Professor think about him?"

"Oh--papa? Of course, papa's _perfectly hopeless_! It's the only true
thing mamma ever says--that he's _perfectly hopeless_. What do you
suppose he did that Sunday afternoon when Julius Bradshaw came and had
tea and brought the Strad--the first time, I mean?... Why, he actually
fancied he had come from the shop with a parcel, and never found out he
couldn't have when he had tea in the drawing-room, and only suspected
something when he played Rode's 'Air with Variations for Violin and
Piano.' Just fancy! He wanted to know why he shouldn't have tea when
every one else did, and offered him cake! And Sunday afternoon and
a Stradivarius! _Do_ say you think my parents trying, Sally dear!"

Sally assented to everything in an absent way; but that didn't matter
as long as she did it. Lætitia only wanted to talk. She seemed, thought
Sally, improved by the existing combination of events. She had had to
climb down off the high stilts about Bradshaw, and had only worked in
one or two slight _Grundulations_ (a word of Dr. Vereker's) into her
talk this morning. Tishy wasn't a bad fellow at all (Sally's
expression), only, if she hadn't been taught to strut, she wouldn't
have been any the worse. It was all that overpowering mother of hers!

Before she parted with her friend that afternoon Sally had a sudden
access of Turkish directness:

"Tishy dear, _are_ you going to accept Julius Bradshaw if he asks you,
or _not_?"

"Well, dear, you know we must look at it from the point of view of what
he would have been if it hadn't been for that unfortunate nervous
system of his. The poor fellow couldn't help it."

"But are you, or not? That's what _I_ want an answer to."

"Sally dear! Really--you're just like so much dynamite. What would you
do yourself if you were me? I ask you."

"I should do exactly whatever you settle to do if I were you. It stands
to reason. But what's it going to be? That's the point."

"He hasn't proposed yet."

"That has nothing whatever to do with it. What you've got to do is
to make--up--your--mind." These last four words are very _staccato_
indeed. Tishy recovers a dignity she has rather been allowing to lapse.

"By the time you're my age, Sally dear, you'll see there are ways
and ways of looking at things. Everything can't be wrapped up in a
nutshell. We're not Ancient Phoenicians nowadays, whatever papa may
say. But you're a dear, impulsive little puss."

The protest was feeble in form and substance, and quite unworthy of
Miss Sales Wilson, the daughter of _the_ Professor Sales Wilson. No
wonder Sally briefly responded, "Stuff and nonsense!" and presently
went home.

Of course, the outer circle of Mrs. Nightingale's society (for in this
matter we are all like Regents Park) had their say about her proposed
marriage. But they don't come into our story; and besides, they had too
few data for their opinions to be of any value. What a difference it
would have made if old Major Roper had met Fenwick and recalled the
face of the dead shot who, it seemed, had somehow ceded his tiger-skin
to him. But no such thing happened, nor did anything else come about
either to revive the story of the divorce or to throw a light on the
identity of Palliser and Fenwick. Eight weeks after the latter (or the
former?) had for the second time disclosed his passion to the same
woman, the couple were married at the church of St. Satisfax, and,
having started for the Continent the same afternoon, found themselves,
quite unreasonably happy, wandering about in France with hardly a
thought beyond the day at most, so long as a letter came from Sally at
the _postes-restantes_ when expected. And he had remembered nothing!

CHAPTER XVI

OF A WEDDING PARTY AND AN OLD MAN'S RETROSPECT. A HOPE OF RETRIBUTIVE
  JUSTICE HEREAFTER. CHARLEY'S AUNT, AND PYRAMUS AND THISBE. HOW SALLY
  TRIED TO PUMP THE COLONEL AND GOT HALF A BUCKETFUL

And thus it came about that Rosalind Palliser (_née_ Graythorpe) stood
for the second time at the altar of matrimony with the same bridegroom
under another name. The absence of bridesmaids pronounced and accented
the fact that the bride was a widow, though, as there were very few of
the congregation of St. Satisfax who did not know her as such, the
announcement was hardly necessary. Discussion of who her late husband
was, or was not, had long since given way to a belief that he was a bad
lot, and that the less that was said about him the better. If any one
who was present at the wedding was still constructing theories about
his identity--whether he had divorced his wife, was divorced himself,
or was dead--certainly none of those theories connected themselves with
the present bridegroom. As for Sally, her only feeling, over and above
her ordinary curiosity about her father, was a sort of paradoxical
indignation that his intrusion into her mother's life should have
prevented her daughter figuring as a bridesmaid. It would have been so
jolly! But Sally was perfectly well aware that widows, strong-nerved
from experience, stand in no need of official help in getting their
"things" on, and acquiesced perforce in her position of a mere
unqualified daughter.

The Major--that is to say, Colonel Lund--stayed on after the wedding,
under a sort of imputation of guardianship necessary for Sally--an
imputation accepted by her in order that the old boy should not feel
lonesome, far more than for any advantage to herself. She wasn't sure
it did him any good though, after all, for the wedding-party (if it
could be called one, it was so small), having decided that its
afternoon had been completely broken into, gave itself up to
dissipation, and went to see "Charley's Aunt." The old gentleman did
not feel equal to this, but said if Sally told him all about it
afterwards it would be just as good, and insisted on her going. He said
he would be all right, and she kissed him and left him reading "Harry
Lorrequer," or pretending to.

The wedding-party seemed to have grown, thought the Major, in contact
with the theatrical world when, on its return, it filled the summer
night with sound, and made the one-eyed piebald cat who lived at The
Retreat foreclose an interview with a peevish friend acrimoniously.
Perhaps it was only because the laughter and the jests, the good-nights
mixed with echoes of "Charley's Aunt," and reminders of appointments
for the morrow, broke in so suddenly on a long seclusion that the Major
seemed to hear so many voices beyond his expectation.

The time had not hung heavy on his hands though--at least, no heavier
than time always hangs on hands that wore gloves with no fingers near
upon eighty years ago. The specific gravity of the hours varies less
and less with loneliness and companionship as we draw nearer to the
last one of all--the heaviest or lightest, which will it be? The old
boy had been canvassing this point with another old boy, a real Major,
our friend Roper, at the Hurkaru Club not long before, and, after he
had read a few pages of "Harry Lorrequer" he put his spectacles in to
keep the place, and fell back into a maze of recurrence and reflection.

Was he honest, or was it affectation, when he said to that pursy and
purple old warrior that if the doctor were to tell him he had but an
hour to live he should feel greatly relieved and happy? Was his heart
only pretending to laugh at the panic his old friend was stricken with
at the mere mention of the word "death"--he who had in his time faced
death a hundred times without a qualm? But then that was military
death, and was his _business_. Death the civilian, with paragraphs in
the newspapers to say "the worst" was feared, and the fever being kept
down, and the system being kept up, and smells of carbolic acid and
hourly bulletins--that was the thing he shrank from. Why, the Major
could remember old Jack Roper at Delhi, in the Mutiny, going out in
the darkness to capture those Sepoy guns--what was that place
called--Ludlow Castle?--and now!...

"Oh dammy, Colonel! Why, good Lard! who's dyin' or goin' to die? Time
enough to talk about dyin' when the cap fits. You take my advice, and
try a couple of Cockle's anti-bilious. My word for it, it's liver!..."
And then old Jack followed this with an earthquake-attack of coughing
that looked very much as if the cap was going to fit. But came out of
it incorrigible, and as soon as he could speak endorsed his advice
with an admonitory forefinger: "You do as I tell you, and try 'em."

But the fossil, who was ten years his senior, answered his own question
to himself in the affirmative as he sat there listening to the distant
murmur of wheels on the Uxbridge Road and the music of the cats
without. Yes, he was quite honest about it. He had no complaint to
make of life, for the last twenty years at any rate. His dear little
_protégée_--that was how he thought of Sally's mother--had taken
good care of that. But he had some harsh indictments against earlier
years--or rather _had_ had. For he had dismissed the culprits with
a caution, and put the records on a back-shelf.

He could take them down now and look at them without flinching. After
all, he was so near the end! What did it matter?

There they all were, the neglected chronicles, each in its corner of
his mind. Of his school-days, a record with all the blots and errors
worked into the text and made to do duty for ornaments. Not a blemish
unforgiven. It is even so with us, with you; we all forgive our
schools. Of his first uniform and his first love, two records with
a soil on each. For a chemical brother spilt sulphuric acid over the
first, and the second married a custom-house officer. Of his first
great cloud--for, if he did not quite forget his first love, he soon
got a second and even a third--a cloud that came out of a letter that
reached him in camp at Rawal Pindi, and told him that his father,
a solicitor of unblemished character till then, had been indicted for
fraudulent practices, and would have to stand his trial for
misdemeanour. Of a later letter, even worse, that told of his acquittal
on the score of insanity, and of how, when he went back two years
after on his first leave, he went to see his father in an asylum; who
did not know him and called him "my lord," and asked him to "bring his
case before the house." Then of a marriage, like a dream now, with
a wife who left him and a child that died; and then of many colourless
years of mere official routine, which might have gone on till he fell
down in harness, but for the chance that threw in his way the daughter
of an old friend in sore trouble and alone. Not until her loneliness
and want of a protector on her voyage home suggested it did the harness
come off the old horse. And then, as we have seen, followed the
happiest fourth part of his life, as he accounted it, throughout which
he had never felt so willing to die as he had done before. Rosalind
Graythorpe grew into it as a kind of adopted daughter, and brought with
her the morsel of new humanity that had become Sally--that would be
back in an hour from "Charley's Aunt."

And now Rosey had found a guardian, and was provided for. It would be
no way amiss now for the Major to take advantage of death. There is
so much to be said for it when the world has left one aching!

His confidence that his _protégée_ had really found a haven was no
small compliment to Fenwick. For the latter, with his strange unknown
past, had nothing but his personality to rely on; and the verdict of
the Major, after knowing him twelve months, was as decisive on this
point as if he had known him twelve years. "He may be a bit
hot-tempered and impulsive," said he to Sally. "But I really couldn't
say, if I were asked, _why_ I think so. It's a mere idea. Otherwise,
it's simply impossible to help liking him." To which Sally replied,
borrowing an expression from Ann the housemaid, that Fenwick was a cup
of tea. It was metaphorical and descriptive of invigoration.

But the Major's feeling that he was now at liberty to try Death after
Life, to make for port after stormy seas, had scarcely a trace in it
of dethronement or exclusion from privileges once possessed. It was not
his smallest tribute to Fenwick that he should admit the idea to his
mind at all--that he might have gained a son rather than lost a
daughter. At least, he need not reject that view of the case, but it
would not do to build on it. _Unberufen!_ The Major tapped three times
on the little table where the lamp stood and "Harry Lorrequer" lay
neglected. He pulled out his watch, and decided that they would not be
very long now. He would not go to bed till he had seen the kitten--he
usually spoke of her so to her mother. He had to disturb the kitten's
cat, who was asleep on him, to get at the watch; who, being selfish,
made a grievance of it, and went away piqued after stretching. Well,
he was sorry of course, but it would have had to come, some time. And
he hadn't moved for ever so long!

"I wonder," half said, half thought he to himself, "I wonder who or
what he really is?... If only we could have known!... Was I right not
to urge delay?... Only Rosey was so confident.... _Could_ a woman of
her age feel so sure and be misled?"

It was _her_ certainty that had dragged his judgment along a path it
might otherwise have shrunk from. He could not know her reasons, but
he felt their force in her presence. Now she was gone, he doubted. Had
he been a fool after all?

"Well--well; it can't be altered now. And she would have done it just
the same whatever I said.... I suppose she was like that when she was
a girl.... I wish I had even seen that husband of hers.... So odd they
should both be Algernon! Does he know, I wonder, that the other was
Algernon?" For the Major had religiously adhered to his promise not to
say anything to Fenwick about the old story. He knew she had told it,
or would tell it in her own time.

Then his thoughts turned to revival of how and where he found her
first, and, as it all came back to him, you could have guessed, had you
seen his face, that they had lighted on the man who was the evil cause
of all, and the woman who had abetted him. The old hand on the table
that had little more strength in it than when it wore a hedger's glove
near eighty years ago, closed with the grip of all the force it had,
and the lamp-globe rang as the tremor of his arm shook the table.

"Oh, I pray God there is a hell," came audibly from as kind a heart as
ever beat. "_How_ I pray God there is a hell!" Then the stress of his
anger seemed to have exhausted him, for he lay back in his armchair
with his eyes closed. In a few moments he drew a long breath, and as
he wiped the drops from his brow, said aloud to himself: "I wish the
kitten would come." He seemed happier only from speaking of her. And
then sat on and waited--waited as for a rescue--for Sally to come and
fill up the house with her voice and her indispensable self.

Something of an inconsistency in the attitude of his mind may have
struck across the current of his reflections--something connected with
what this indispensable thing actually was and whence--for his thoughts
relented as the image of her came back to him. Where would those eyes
be, conspirators with the lids above them and the merry fluctuations of
the brows; where would those lips be, from which the laughter never
quite vanished, even as the ripple of the ocean's edge tries how small
it can get but never dies outright; where the great coils of black hair
that would not go inside any ordinary oilskin swimming-cap; where the
incorrigible impertinence and flippancy be we never liked to miss a
word of; where, in short, would Sally be if she had never emerged from
that black shadow in the past?

Easy enough to say that, had she not done so, something else quite as
good might have been. Very likely. How can we limit the possible to the
conditional-præter-pluperfect tense? But then, you see, it wouldn't
have been Sally! That's the point.

Sally's mother had followed such thoughts to the length of almost
forgiving the author of her troubles. But she could not forgive him
considered also as the author of her husband's. The Major could not
find any forgiveness at all, though the thought of Sally just sufficed
to modify the severity of his condemnation. Leniency dawned.

"Yes--yes; I was wrong to say that. But I couldn't help it." So said
the old man to himself, but quite as though he spoke to some one else.
He paused a little, then said again: "Yes; I was wrong. But oh, what
a damned scoundrel! And _what_ a woman!" Then, as though he feared a
return of his old line of thought, "I wish Sally would come." And
a dreadful half-thought came to him, "Suppose there were a fire at
the theatre, and I had to wire ... why--that would be worst of all!"

So, almost without a pause between, he had prayed for a hell to punish
a crime, and for the safety of the treasured thing that was its
surviving record--a creature that but for that crime would never have
drawn breath.

His reading-lamp had burned out its young enthusiasm, and was making up
its mind to go out, only not in any hurry. It would expire with dignity
and leave a rich inheritance of stench. Meanwhile, its decadence was
marked enough to frank the Major in neglecting "Harry Lorrequer" for
the rest of the time, and also served to persuade him that he had
really been reading. Abstention from a book under compulsion has
something of the character of perusal. Gibbon could not have collected
his materials on those lines, certainly. But the Major felt his
conscience clearer from believing that he meant to go on where he had
been obliged to stop. He cancelled "Harry Lorrequer," put him back in
the bookcase to make an incident, then began actively waiting for the
return of the playgoers. Reference to his watch at short intervals
intensified their duration, added gall to their tediousness. But so
convinced was he that they "would be here directly" that it was at
least half-an-hour before he reconsidered this insane policy and
resumed his chair with a view to keeping awake in it. He was convinced
he was succeeding, had not noticed he was dozing, when he was suddenly
wrenched out of the jaws of sleep by the merry voices of the
home-comers and the loss of the piebald cat's temper as aforesaid.

"Oh, Major dear, you haven't gone to bed! You will be so tired! Why
didn't you go?"

"I've been very happy, chick. I've been reading 'Harry Lorrequer.'
I like Charles Lever, because I read him when I was a boy. What's
o'clock?" He pulled out his watch with a pretence, easy of detection,
that he had not just done so ten minutes before. It was a lie about
"Harry Lorrequer," you see, so a little extra didn't matter.

"It's awfully late!" Sally testified. "Very nearly as late as it's
possible to be. But now we're in for it, we may as well make it
a nocturnal dissipation. Ann!--don't go to bed; at least, not before
you've brought some more fresh water. This will take years to hot up.
Oh, Major, Major, why _didn't_ you make yourself some toddy? I never
go out for five minutes but you don't make yourself any toddy!"

"I don't want it, dear child. I've been drinking all day--however, of
course, it was a wedding...."

"But you must have some now, anyhow. Stop a minute, there's some one
coming up the doorsteps and Ann's fastened up.... No, it's not the
policeman. _I_ know who it is. Stop a minute." And then presently the
Major hears Sally's half of an interview, apparently through a keyhole.
"I shan't open the door ... two bolts and a key and a chain--the idea!
What is it?... My pocky-anky?... Keep it, it won't bite you ... send it
to the wash!... No, really, do keep it if you don't mind--keep it till
Brahms on Thursday. Remember! Good-night." But it isn't quite
good-night, for Sally arrests departure. "Stop! What a couple of idiots
we are!... What for?--why--because you might have stuffed it in the
letter-box all along." And the incident closes on the line indicated.

"It was only my medical adviser," Sally says, returning with
explanations. "Found my wipe in the cab."

"Dr. Vereker?"

"Yes. Dr. Him. Exactly! We bawled at each other through the keyhole like
Pyramus and Trilby----" She becomes so absorbed in the details of the
toddy that she has to stand a mere emendation over until it is ready.
Then she completes: "I mean Thisbe. I wonder where they've got to?"

"Pyramus and Thisbe?"

"No, mother and her young man.... No, I won't sit on you. I'll sit
here; down alongside--so! Then I shan't shake the toddy overboard."

Her white soft hand is so comforting as it lies on the Major's on the
chair-arm that he is fain to enjoy it a little, however reproachful
the clock-face may be looking. You can pretend your toddy is too hot,
almost any length of time, as long as no one else touches the tumbler;
also you can drink as slow as you like. No need to hurry. Weddings
don't come every day.

"Was it very funny, chick?"

"Oh, wasn't it! But didn't mamma look _lovely_?... I've seen it twice
before, you know." This last is by way of apology for giving the
conversation a wrench. But the Major didn't want to talk over the
wedding--seemed to prefer "Charley's Aunt."

"He dresses up like his aunt, doesn't he?"

"Oh yes--it's glorious fun! But _do_ say you thought mamma looked
lovely."

"Of course she did. She always does. But had the others seen 'Charley's
Aunt' before?"

"Tishy and her Bradshaw? Oh yes--at least, I suppose so."

"And Dr. Vereker?"

"Oh, of course _he_ had--twice at least. The times we saw it, mother
and I. He went too.... We-e-e-ell, there's nothing in that!" (We can
only hope again our spelling conveys the way the word _well_ was
prolonged.)

"Nothing at all. Why should there be? What a nice fellow Vereker is!"

"My medical adviser? Oh, _he's_ all right. Never mind him; talk about
mother."

"They must be very nearly at Rheims by now." This is mere obedience
to orders on the Major's part. He feels no real interest in what he
is saying.

"How rum it must be!" says Sally, with grave consideration. And the
Major's "What?" evolves that "it" means marrying a second husband.

"Going through it all over again when you've done it once before,"
continues this young philosopher. The Major thinks of asking why it
should be rummer the second time than the first, but decides not to,
and sips his toddy, and pats the hand that is under his. In a hazy,
fossil-like way he perceives that to a young girl's mind the "rumness"
of a second husband is exactly proportionate to the readiness of its
acceptance of the first. Unity is just as intrinsic a quality of
a first husband as the colour of his eyes or hair. Moreover, he is
expected to outlive you. Above all, he is perfectly natural and a
matter of course. We discern in all this a sneaking tribute to an
idea of a hereafter; but the Major didn't go so far as that.

"She looked very jolly over it," said he, retreating on generalities.
"So did he."

"Gaffer Fenwick? I should think so indeed! Well he might!" Then, after
a moment's consideration: "He looked like my idea of Sir Richard
Grenville. It's only an idea. I forget what he did. Elizabethan
johnny."

"What do you call him? Gaffer Fenwick? You're a nice, respectable young
monkey! Well, he's not half a bad-looking fellow; well set up." But
none of this, though good in itself, is what Sally sat down to talk
about. A sudden change in her manner, a new earnestness, makes the
Major stop an incipient yawn he is utilising as an exordium to a hint
that we ought to go to bed, and become quite wakeful to say: "I will
tell you all I can, my child." For Sally has thrust aside talk of the
day's events, making no more of the wedding ceremony than of "Charley's
Aunt," with: "_Why_ did my father and mother part? You _will_ tell me
now, won't you, Major dear?"

Lying was necessary--inevitable. But he would minimise it. There was
always the resource of the legal fiction; all babes born in matrimony
are legally the children of their mother's husband, _quand-même_. He
must make that his sheet-anchor.

"You know, Sallykin, your father and mother fell out before you were
born. And the first time I saw your mother--why, bless my soul, my
dear! you were quite a growing girl--yes, able to get a staff-officer's
thumb in your mouth, and bite it. Indeed, you did! It was General
Pellew; they say he's going to be made a peer." The Major thinks he
sees his way out of the fire by sinking catechism in reminiscences. "I
can recollect it all as if it were yesterday. I said to him, 'Who's the
poor pretty little mother, General?' Because he knew your mother, and
I didn't. 'Don't you know?' said he. 'She's Mrs. Graythorpe.' I asked
about her husband, but Pellew had known nothing except that there was
a row, and they had parted." The Major's only fiction here was that he
substituted the name Graythorpe for Palliser. "Next time I saw her we
picked up some acquaintance, and she asked if I was a Lincolnshire
Lund, because her father always used to talk of how he went to Lund's
father's, near Crowland, when he was a boy. 'Stop a bit,' said I; 'what
was your father's name?' 'Paul Nightingale,' says she." Observe that
nothing was untrue in this, because Rosey always spoke and thought of
Paul Nightingale as her father.

"That was my grandfather?" Sally was intent on accumulating
facts--would save up analysis till after. The Major took advantage of
a slight choke over his whiskey to mix a brief nod into it; it was a
lie--but, then, he himself couldn't have said which was nod and which
was choke; so it hardly counted. He continued, availing himself at
times of the remains of the choke to help him to slur over difficult
passages.

"He was the young brother of a sort of sweetheart of mine--a silly
boyish business--a sort of calf-love. She married and died. But he was
her great pet, a favourite younger brother. One keeps a recollection
of this sort of thing."--The Major makes a parade of his powers of
oblivion, and his failure to carry it out sits well upon him.--"Of
course, my romantic memories"--the Major smiles derision of Love's
young dream--"had something to do with my interest in your mother, but
I hope I should have done the same if there had been no such thing.
Well, the mere fact of your father's behaviour to your mother...." He
stopped short, with misgivings that his policy of talking himself out
of his difficulties was not such a very safe one, after all. Here he
was, getting into a fresh mess, gratuitously!

"Mamma won't talk about that," says Sally, "so I suppose I'm not to ask
_you_." The Major must make a stand upon this, or the enemy will swarm
over his entrenchments. Merely looking at his watch and saying it's
time for us to be in bed will only bring a moment's respite. There is
nothing for it but decision.

"Sally dear, your mother does not tell you because she wishes the whole
thing buried and forgotten. Her wishes must be my wishes...."

He would like to stop here--to cut it short at that, at once and for
good. But the pathetic anxiety of the face from which all memories of
"Charley's Aunt" have utterly vanished is too much for his fortitude;
and, at the risk of more semi-fibs, he extenuates the sentence.

"One day your mother may tell you all about it. She is the proper
person to tell it--not me. Neither do I think I know it all to tell."

"You know if there was or wasn't a divorce?" The Major feels very sorry
he didn't let it alone.

"I'll tell you that, you inquisitive chick, if you'll promise on honour
not to ask any more questions."

"I promise."

"Honour bright?"

"Honest Injun!"

"That's right. Now I'll tell you. There was no divorce, but there was
a suit for a divorce, instituted by him. He failed to make out a case."
Note that the expression "your father" was carefully excluded. "She was
absolutely blameless--to my thinking, at least. Now that's plenty for
a little girl to know. And it's high time we were both in bed and
asleep."

He kisses the grave, sad young face that is yearning to hear more, but
is too honourable to break its compact. "They'll be at Rheims by now,"
says he, to lighten off the conversation.

CHAPTER XVII

SALLY'S LARK. AND HOW SHE TOOK HER MEDICAL ADVISER INTO HER CONFIDENCE
  AFTER DIVINE SERVICE

Though Sally cried herself to sleep after her interview with her
beloved but reticent old fossil, nevertheless, when she awoke next
morning and found herself mistress of the house and the situation, she
became suddenly alive to the advantages of complete independence. She
was an optimist constitutionally; for it _is_ optimism to decide that
it is "rather a lark" to breakfast by yourself when you have just
dried the tears you have been shedding over the loss of your morning
companion. Sally came to this conclusion as she poured out her tea,