“Oh, Arthur, how dull you are!” said Jeannie. “He had said or hinted that I knew all about it—in fact, that I was engaged to Mr. Collingwood. He was kind enough to add that it was to be kept private for the present.”
There was silence for a moment. At last Miss Fortescue spoke.
“It was an ill day for the Aveshams,” she said, “when Colonel Raymond’s wife’s sis[132]ter’s husband’s sister married your mother’s brother’s cousin.”
“So that is what that infernal man meant,” said Arthur. “Yesterday evening, in the smoking-room of the club, I heard him say we were all very much excited about it. Then he stopped, and said he had nearly let it out.”
“Well, then, there is some hope yet,” said Jeannie. “Arthur, I want you to go there this afternoon, and tell him he is under a delusion. Mrs. Raymond was with him, so Miss Clifford said, when he announced it.”
“And may I tell him exactly what I think about him?” asked Arthur.
“Tell him what I think,” said Miss Fortescue; “I feel more strongly than you.”
“Oh, no,” said Jeannie. “What is the use of quarrelling with people? Just say he is mistaken. Oh, you might ask who told him. Of course he made it up.”
“Yes, that would be awkward,” said Arthur, appreciatively. “But read me Mrs. Collingwood’s letter.”
Jeannie took it from her pocket, and read:[133]
“The Close, Wroxton.
“Dear Miss Avesham: I can not express to you how shocked and horrified I am at what my son has done. I hurried home directly after I saw that terrible picture in order to write to you and assure you how entirely ignorant I was of the subject of the work which I knew Jack was going to send to the exhibition, and how entirely ignorant, I may add, I have been of him. I passed you and Miss Fortescue, I know, in the gallery, but I could not speak—I was too indignant. I am quite upset, and can neither think nor work.
“With much sympathy,
“Believe me,
“Yours truly,
“Margaret Collingwood.
“P.S.—I have written to my son expressing my views.”
“I should like to see her letter to her son,” said Miss Fortescue, grimly. “An awful woman. Why, you would think that he had committed an assault with violence on Jeannie, or had been garroting her.[134]”
Arthur took a telegram out of his pocket.
 I hope he won’t get the letter before he starts. Also I should like to see him open it.”
“I don’t suppose he would come if he got it first,” said Miss Fortescue. “It would make matters rather simpler if he didn’t.”
“Why?” asked Jeannie.
“Won’t it be rather awkward when he meets you?” asked Aunt Em.
“Not in the least, unless he makes it so for himself.  Of course, if he stares like an owl, and then turns red in the face, it will be. But if he has a grain of tact he will do neither. Now, if he was a woman, he wouldn’t mind in the least.”
“Oh, he’s not a woman,” said Arthur, with conviction.
“Then he probably has no tact. In any case, it is his own doing if it is awkward for him. He has done nothing wrong. He saw a strange girl and a strange dog, and painted them. He painted them well, too; if he had[135] painted them badly it would have been different.”
Arthur got up.
“Well, I must get back to the brewery,” he said. “Afterward I shall go to the club, and get there in time to catch the Colonel before his whist. Oh, he told me he was a relation. Is that so?”
“He explained it to me at some length,” said Miss Fortescue. “I think his wife is your mother’s sister’s husband’s wife’s brother’s sister’s sister-in-law. I followed him so far, I know.”
“What a man!” said Arthur. “I must be off. Are you going to answer Mrs. Collingwood’s note, Jeannie?”
“Yes; she will think I have no delicacy of feeling, but I shall answer it. Also it would be better to let her know that Mr. Collingwood is coming here to-morrow.”
“You’d better send her a quart of mulberry gin at once,” remarked Miss Fortescue.
“Yes, my character is gone,” said Jeannie. “Good-bye, Arthur. Be gentle with our cousin, but be firm.”
“Be what you like, as long as you’re[136] firm,” said Aunt Em. “It will end in a duel in the asparagus-bed, I expect.”
“He and I, Jeannie and Mr. Collingwood,” said Arthur.
Miss Fortescue followed him indoors, leaving Jeannie alone under the trees. She was much annoyed at all that had happened, but she was a little amused, and had a sense of being somewhat ill-used. Though she had defended him, she thought Mr. Collingwood had behaved rather badly, the Colonel had behaved very badly indeed, and Mrs. Collingwood was absurd. However, she was going to deal with that lady, and Arthur was going to deal with the Colonel, and there only remained Mr. Collingwood himself. Jeannie devoutly hoped he would have some glimmerings of tact about him. If he looked awkward and uncomfortable, she would feel so, too, and really there was nothing to be awkward about. If she had done such a picture she would have snapped her fingers at any possible consequences, for she had the greatest respect for achievement of any kind. Certainly the picture was an achievement, and in her secret heart she had a pang of exul[137]tation at the thought that she was like that. Jeannie was singularly free from self-consciousness, and in her nature there was hardly a touch of egotism. But she wondered whether her sight of the picture had not given her some. In a way it had been a piece of self-revelation to her. She had no idea that people saw her like that. Very possibly they did not, but here was a man who did. How could she see him, she wondered?
She had only given him one glance at their one meeting, and she remembered nothing more than a straight, rather tall figure, and a kindled eye. Very likely she would not have known him again if they had met casually. He looked clean and alert, that is all she would have sworn to. But she looked forward with a good deal of interest to his coming next day.
Thus far had run her meditations when they were interrupted by the butler. Miss Clifford was waiting outside to know if she could see Jeannie for a moment, and only if she was disengaged. Jeannie sat up.
“Yes, ask her to come out here,” she said.
It would be hardly possible to conceive a[138] more agonized and embarrassed face than that which Miss Clifford turned to Jeannie, and the latter could not conceive what was the matter.
“I am quite free,” she said, “and delighted to see you. Did you come down on your bicycle?”
“No,” said Miss Clara, “I did not feel up to my bicycle,” and Jeannie noticed that her hands were trembling.
“Do sit down,” she said, gently. “And there is no hurry. Have some coffee? No? Tell me what it is then, just when you feel inclined.”
There was a bitter tension about the corners of poor Miss Clara’s mouth, and twice she tried to speak, but was unable.
“Phœbe,” she began at length, “Phœbe has been very unkind to me, Miss Avesham. And I felt—I felt I could not rest without telling you about it. It was my fault, she said, that—Oh, dear me, dear me!”
And Miss Clifford gasped once or twice, like a person coming up after a long dive, and burst into tears.
In a moment Jeannie was by her.[139]
“Oh, my poor, dear thing!” she said; “please don’t cry. You are upset about something, and speaking makes it worse. Let’s get up and walk quietly to and fro a little, and then if you feel better and still want to tell me, you shall, and if not—why, just don’t tell me. I am sure it is nothing bad, and, whatever it is, remember I forgive you, if it in any way concerns me.”
Miss Clifford tied her face into a series of hard knots, and put on a series of expressions so widely different from each other that she could have made her fortune as an impersonator at a music-hall if any of them had resembled any one else, but they were all of them unique.
In a few minutes, however, she recovered.
“No, I want to tell you, dear Miss Avesham,” she said, “if you will excuse the liberty of my calling you that, and Phœbe was so unkind that I felt I should never be happy again, if she was right, and I never told you. She said I drew Colonel Raymond on to say what he did.”
Jeannie’s companion struggled a moment with a wild spasm of internal laughter at[140] the thought of Miss Clara drawing Colonel Raymond on, and conquered it.
“I don’t quite understand,” she said, “Tell me all about it from the beginning.”
“Well, it was this way,” said Miss Clara, “that picture came to our house, and of course Phœbe and I both recognised it, and Phœbe said it would be very awkward if we exhibited it if it so happened that it had been done without your knowledge. And she suggested—it was she who suggested it—that there might be some understanding between you and Mr. Collingwood.”
“I see,” said Jeannie. “Well?”
“At that moment there came a ring at the door, and it was Colonel and Mrs. Raymond. And Phœbe said how lucky, because Colonel Raymond, being your cousin, would be sure to know if there was anything. So in they came, and I showed the picture to the Colonel. Then there came in what Phœbe blames me for, and she was so unkind I hardly ate a bit of lunch. I can hardly tell you about it.”
“There is no hurry,” said Jeannie again,[141] seeing that Miss Clifford’s face was growing contorted. But after a moment she went on.
“Colonel Raymond recognised it at once,” she said, “and looked up at me. And Phœbe says I looked slyly at him, and prompted him to say what he did. You know, Miss Avesham, Colonel Raymond is rather an odd man in some ways. He can’t bear that any one should hear anything before he knows it himself, and naturally he would feel it more if I knew something about you particularly before he did. He did catch my eye, it is true, and— Oh, yes, I must tell you all; Phœbe was right—I meant that he should. And then he broke out with, ‘How news travels, but of course you must say nothing about it!’ And, oh, dear me, Miss Avesham, if it has all been my fault I shall never, never forgive myself.”
Jeannie got up from her chair, took both Miss Clara’s hands in hers, and kissed her.
“You are a dear, good woman,” she said, “and I love you for telling me. Now we won’t say a single word more about it, unless your sister is unkind again, in which case I shall come flying to the rescue. There is no[142] harm done at all, and as Mr. Collingwood is coming to stay here to-morrow every one will think it perfectly natural that he should have done a picture of me. Give me a kiss.”
Miss Clara’s face had been a perfect study during this last speech of Jeannie’s, and at the close she heaved herself out of her chair, and raised her face to hers like a child, and the joy and honour of kissing and being kissed by an Honourable was entirely submerged in her natural and human affection for the beautiful girl.[143]
Jack Collingwood started from London next morning, before the arrival of his mother’s letter, and travelled with only a Saturday-till-Monday bag as representing the necessaries of life, but with a bicycle and a great number of golf clubs for its luxuries. Arthur had been away when he was at Wroxton only a fortnight before, and he had been delighted to accept the invitation, for he not only very much wished to see Arthur, but he had an affair of some importance to talk over with his mother. His last visit home had been, with the exception of that sultry conversation about Lady Hamilton and the sunset, unusually harmonious, and he was, for his own peace of mind, at present unconscious of the squall which had struck the close on the occasion of the opening of the picture exhibition. He was a person of simple, boyish pleasures, and he found entertainment enough in the express to make him abstain[144] from any search for excitement in the daily papers. He timed the speed of the train with the quarter-of-a-mile posts by the side of the line; he leaned out of the window as they swept through flying stations, and he had the prodigious luck of being stopped by signal just opposite the golf-links, when he saw an angry man in a red coat play an absurdly bad shot into a bunker, and his low, furious exclamation flecked the beauty of the morning. Still unconscious of all that lay before him, he arrived at Bolton Street, and was told that Arthur was not in yet, but that Miss Avesham was out in the garden. He followed the butler through the hall and the little conservatory that lay beyond, and as the door was opened he stopped a moment, with a dizzy, bewildered feeling that all this had happened before.
For there in the middle of the lawn was standing a girl opposite him, with a face full of laughter and anxiety, and with her parasol she kept at bay a small retriever puppy which had just left the water, and, still dripping, was evidently coming to his mistress to shake himself and receive her congratulations.[145]
The whole scene was in brilliant sunlight, and Arthur found himself saying:
“The dog is just going to shake!”
The words were not out of his mouth when the puppy’s head was shaken, and down to his shoulders he was black and curly, set in a shower of spray, but the shake had not yet reached his back and tail, the hair of which was still strong and close.
Next moment he stepped out on to the lawn, and Jeannie, seeing him, came a step forward to meet him.
“How do you do, Mr. Collingwood?” she said. “Arthur will be in in a moment. Toby had just fallen into the fountain in trying to catch a bird. Oh, dear, how extraordinary!”
And as the coincidence struck her she laughed.
Now laughter is certainly the best beginning of a friendship, and Jack hailed the omen.
“It seems fated that I should see you keeping off a wet dog,” he said. “Is not the subject forced on me?”
“Indeed it is,” said Jeannie, who had not[146] meant to allude to it at all, and hoped that he would not. But her first exclamation had been quite voluntary, not in her power to check.
“If I had known it was you,” he went on, not even explaining that he alluded to the picture, “of course I should never have done it. And if any one had told me before I came here to-day that it was you, I doubt if I should have come. Anyhow, I should be apologizing now. But twice! It is beyond my control. I think I won’t even apologize.”
“It would be an impertinence to apologize for so clear a dealing of Providence,” said Jeannie. “I, too, was rather uneasy about this moment; I was afraid you might be awkward, and make me so. But certainly you are not. Am I?”
Jack laughed.
“I had not noticed it,” he said. “And here’s the author of it all come to dry himself against me.”
“Toby, come here at once,” said Jeannie.
“You said that before, too,” remarked Jack.
Jeannie’s eyes grew round.[147]
“I believe I did,” she said. “Then we had tea. What a pity! The chain of coincidence is broken. We are only going to have lunch. Of course you know this place well.”
“I have never been in this house before,” said Jack. “It used to belong to a queer old lady who kept forty cats, when I lived here as a boy. My only connection was that I used to catapult the cats when they came over into our garden.”
“Yes, forty is a considerable number,” said Jeannie. “Oh, here are Arthur and my aunt, Miss Fortescue. Anyhow, you haven’t met her before.”
“Excuse me, she was sitting by your hat,” said Jack.
“On it,” said Jeannie; “it was crushed flat.”
Arthur came back alone toward tea-time; Jack, he said, had gone to see his mother.
“It was kinder,” he remarked, “to let him know that a letter had been written, as he had not received it yet, and I did so. He is remarkably brave. He is as bold as a dragoon. He will talk it out, he says.”
“Mrs. Collingwood will rub it in,” said[148] Miss Fortescue. “I am sorry for that young man. Oh, did he behave decently when he met you, Jeannie?”
Jeannie looked up, absently.
“Oh, quite decently,” she said. “It was not at all awkward. He has tact, I think; or, if he hasn’t, I have. Anyhow there was enough tact about for two.”
“No one person has tact for two,” said Miss Fortescue, decidedly. “He must have had some.”
Whatever he looked, Jack Collingwood did not feel nearly as brave as a dragoon, unless dragoons are timid things, when he entered the house in the close. But it was not in anticipation of a cool reception due to the picture which made him distrustful of what the next hour would bring. He hardly gave that a thought, for he had seen Jeannie, and it mattered but little what the rest of the world thought, as long as she had an uninjured mind on the subject. Her frank welcome of him, her utter insouciance on the subject—above all, though he scarcely knew it yet himself, the fact that he had met again that vision by the river, combined to make[149] him almost exultantly happy on that score. His errand to his mother, however, was far different, and full of difficulty.
She met him with a kind, Christian expression. He had received, so she supposed, her note, and the desire to see her after that was filial and laudable, for the note had been strongly expressed. Not that Mrs. Collingwood regretted that: the occasion demanded strong speaking, and her duty dictated to her.
“I am staying with the Aveshams,” he said, “and I remain over the Sunday. Mother, Arthur tells me you have written to me about that picture. I have not received the letter yet, as I started early this morning, but no doubt it will be forwarded to me. Shall we, then, dismiss that for the present, until I have read your note?”
“Certainly, if you wish it,” said Mrs. Collingwood, freezing a little. “But if you came here to talk about that, it is better you should know at once what I think.”
“I didn’t come to talk about that,” said Jack. “I came to ask your advice and your help about a very different matter.[150]”
“I shall be delighted to give it you,” said Mrs. Collingwood, sitting very upright
“It is a very sad story I have to tell you,” he said, “and I want experienced advice about it. You can give it me.”
Mrs. Collingwood relaxed a little. One of the chief businesses of her life was directing and advising, and she enjoyed it.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Do you remember a fellow who stayed here once with me from Oxford,” he asked, “called Frank Bennett?”
Mrs. Collingwood unbent a little more. She had approved of the young man in question.
“Yes, I remember him perfectly,” she said. “He had a beautiful voice, and sang Nazareth after dinner. He sang with great feeling, I remember, and we talked about the aims and career of an oratorio singer.”
Jack could not help smiling. Frank had a unique talent, he had always considered, of adaptability. It was exactly like him to sing Nazareth. He sang other things as well, if not better.
“Yes,” he said, “I see you remember him.[151] He was one of my closest friends. He is dead.”
“Oh, Jack,” she said, “I am so sorry! I liked him so much for himself. Does the advice you want concern him in any way?”
“Yes, very closely.”
Jack paused.
“It concerns him very closely,” he said. “He had a child. No, he was not married——”
He looked steadily at his mother as he said this, and saw the sympathy and warmth die out of her face.
“The girl is also dead,” he continued. “The baby is about ten days old.”
“I should recommend an orphanage,” said Mrs. Collingwood. “I can give you a letter to one.”
“He was an awfully good fellow,” said Jack.
Mrs. Collingwood drew her mouth very tight. There was no reply necessary. Jack rose.
“The girl died suddenly a few days ago,[152]” he said, “only a week after the birth of the baby. Frank died in May last. He appointed me executor of his will, and I see by it that he leaves all he has to his—to this girl in trust for the child. He meant to marry her, he had told me that; of course he ought to have.”
“Of course he ought to have!” said Mrs. Collingwood.
If you can imagine such a thing as a malignant echo, you will know how she spoke.
“You suggest nothing else?” asked Jack, still lingering. “I have already a promise of a place in an orphanage. Of course the child does not want that. There is plenty of money.”
“There is nothing else to suggest,” said Mrs. Collingwood, in a perfectly business-like manner. “I cannot see why you wanted my advice if you already have a place for the child.”
“No; I was wrong,” said Jack.
There was a moment’s silence. All that was righteous and hard in Mrs. Collingwood surged to the surface; all that was human in[153] Jack struggled for utterance. She was the first to speak.
“Jack, how can you come to me with such a story?” she said. “You knew already all that I could possibly say, and that without examining into the merits of the case I could not even recommend it. Do you realize what the case is? There are hundreds such, less fortunate, because for them there is no money. It is a bad case, this. The father was rich. If, then, for these hundreds there is no excuse, what excuse is there here? I do not say that the sin is less, if there has been no marriage, because there was no means of supporting possible children, but, if we can weigh anything against that, that is the more excusable. You spoke of him as a ‘very good fellow.’ Have you thought?”
Jack stood quite still during his mother’s speech.
“I have thought,” he said. “Frank was honest, kindly, generous, and he had hot blood. He would always help a friend in trouble: once he helped me. I should always[154] have gone to him if I was in a difficulty. Thus I owe him a debt. Please God, I will repay it. He committed a fault, or sin, what you will. I have made it my business, as far as I humanly can, to repair that. I do not wish that the sins of the father should be visited on the child. I beg your pardon, mother, I have put that in a way that will offend you. Let me put it like this: I want the child to have as good a chance as possible. I thought perhaps you might help me.”
“How could I help you?” said Mrs. Collingwood.
Jack paused. Then:
“I meant to bring up the child myself,” he said. “I should have told you that earlier if you had encouraged me at all. I thought even that you might suggest—no, I scarcely thought it—that the child should live here. I was wrong. I ought never to have come.”
Again there was a silence. Again all that was best and most human in the man burst out:
“Mother,” he said, “do not blame me. There was a bad business—I knew it. I only thought to repair it as far as I could. You[155] do not agree with me. Very well, let us forget it. Why should this, too, come between us?”
His eyes had the glimmer of tears in them, and he took an unresisting hand.
“I said ‘this too,’” he went on. “I know that there is much in me that you do not approve. You would have had me choose a different way of life. That, I am afraid, cannot be remedied. Shall we not accept it? And, such as I am, I have tried to be a good son to you and father.”
The hand that lay unresistingly in his tightened its grasp. He looked up, but his mother only shook her head.
“Go, Jack,” she said; “kiss me, then go.”
He kissed her, and left the room without another word. Mrs. Collingwood sat quite still for a moment. Then her wide mouth widened, and she burst into tears.
Jack had been more moved by his interview with his mother than was convenient for social purposes, and he did not go straight back to the Aveshams, but took a stroll through the town first. He had not expected that his mother would suggest any arrange[156]ment other than an orphanage for the child, but he had thought it possible. What had moved him was the sudden deepening of their talk; in a moment they had gone from the instance to the great eternal principles of things, to sin and love and death. From that the talk had veered as suddenly to personal relations, the relations between his mother and himself. Deep down in him he knew what an empty place there was in his heart, a place empty and garnished, but ready and with the door open for the entering in of that exquisite presence, not less sacred and entrancing than any, the sympathetic, comprehending love between mother and son. All his life long he had missed that. His mother would never have committed a reckless, unconsidered act for his sake; the mere fact of motherhood, as in so many women, was not to her enough for that. For the glory of motherhood lies in this: that the child will instinctively take from her without question, and without question she gives. The joy of self-surrender must be made without question. And he, on his side, had missed the son’s part. His joys and troubles were not[157] self-despatched presents to her; she would not have known what to do with them, they would have been to her like strange, savage implements of which she did not know the use. She might indeed have tried to find a use for them, and thus missed their significance. To use them at all was their abuse.
Jack wandered down the High Street and hung on the parapet of the stone bridge that crosses the river. This strange unrest was new to him. He had never been of the nature that toils in the soil of other human souls, or even of his own, and delves thereout so much that is worthless, and sometimes an unconjectured jewel. He had not ever been in the habit of considering life as a serious business. He got through his day’s work with cheerfulness and honesty, and the day’s work brought its own raptures. He was not carnal, but emphatically he was not spiritual. To him the tastes and the rewards of life lay in artistic and intellectual achievement; about them he had a store-house of kaleidoscopic theories and much sober practice; but as for[158] problems of life and being, all such were an algebra to him. Being of a clean mind, and holding—a low gospel it may be, but an excellent working hypothesis—that sensuality means the death of the intellect, he had never troubled his head to make out moral codes. The tragedy of Frank Bennett’s life and death did not make him shudder and wince. He called him a fool, but with tenderness, and whether he was a knave or not did not concern him.
He was roused from his meditations by a short, staccato bark at his heels, and found the round retriever pup staggering up to him. Toby had an inability to walk straight; he rolled along like a drunken man with a jovial boisterousness. He had a large wire muzzle on, and the tip of his pink tongue hung through it.
“Oh, are you looking at the water?” said Jeannie, sympathetically. “That’s so nice of you. I have to look at running water every day. It clears one’s brain out, I think. Toby is shortly to have his bath.”
“It is a shame making him wear a muzzle while he has still his milk-teeth,” said Jack.[159]
“It isn’t a muzzle,” said Jeannie, “it is his hat. Toby is rather proud of it. But don’t you agree with me about water?”
“Yes; I was having a wash myself. I have had rather an agitating talk.”
Jeannie knew that he had been to see his mother, and did not see her way to any reply. She supposed that the picture was at the bottom of it.
“It was about a friend of mine,” continued Jack, “who got into great trouble. We disagreed hopelessly, my mother and I. It is a bore. Oh, I want washing!” he cried, and turned to look at the water again.
Jeannie had a sort of fleeting idea that she had only seen this young man for the first time that morning, and that convention would call confidences premature. But convention meant little to her; she did not wilfully neglect it, but she simply forgot its existence.
“Oh, but we must expect to disagree with people,” she said. “Think how extraordinarily tame the world would be if we didn’t! We should spend our whole lives in admiring the views of other people which tallied so exactly with our own.[160]”
“But do you like disagreeing with people who are very near you?” he asked.
Jeannie considered a moment.
“I don’t suppose I have agreed with Aunt Em about anything for five years,” she said.
Jack laughed.
“But you have not disagreed—not radically, I mean.”
Jeannie turned half round and looked at him. But before she could reply there swept by Colonel Raymond, followed by a string of straggling children, returning from their “good, brisk walk.” He saw her, stared, stared also at her companion, and passed on.
“Oh, dear me,” thought Jeannie, “Arthur has evidently seen him. That was one of the most complete cuts I ever received.”
She paused a moment to bring her thoughts back to the point from which they had strayed.
“No, you are right; not radically,” she said. “And if your disagreement has been radical, and it is not impertinent of me, do let me offer you my sympathy. It is rather a common word, but sincerity makes common things real.[161]”
She looked divinely beautiful. The soft, wistful expression of her face was altogether womanly, the brightness and vivacity belonged to girlhood. Spring trembled on the verge of summer, an entrancing moment. Admirable as his sketch had been, like her as it was, Jack found it but a pale parody of the deeper beauty which shone on him. Sympathy like an electric spark had passed from her, and the face he had thought only so admirable in its amused anxiety became a face which showed a beautiful soul. The lamp within had been lit, and the light showed through the fair carving of the lantern.
“Thank you for that,” he said at length, gravely. “Tattered banners of words are hung in sacred places.”
She turned and looked at the water again.
“Are our brains cleaner?” she said. “If so, let us go and give Toby his bath. Won’t you come with me, Mr. Collingwood? We can stroll along the river and go back home round through the close.”
It was at that divine hour when day and evening meet. The sun was low and level, and its light, instead of coming from one[162] spot and dazzling the eyes, was diffused through a golden haze. The heat and stress of summer, one would have said, was over or not yet come, and it might have been a day from early May or from late September. The fulness of the stream argued the former, but a certain mellowness of colour showed the other. Jack, inclined as an artist is to be very indolent except when he is very industrious, was under the spell of the evening, under the spell, too, of the sympathy which had floated to him across the airy bridge by which soul spans the otherwise inaccessible gulf which divides it from any other soul. He was a man, lovable; she was a lovable woman; heaven is there, and all is said.
Toby staggered round them, occasionally dashing away after interesting smells, and barking hoarsely and rudely at passers-by in a state of self-importance not unmixed with nervousness. He enjoyed his bath when once he was in the water, but he was a little distrustful of it; the self-importance was due to the fact that he considered this daily walk by the river to be taken entirely on his[163] account. He had something, in fact, of the air of Colonel Raymond about him, and Jeannie wondered what he would make of this sight of herself and Jack together lounging on the bridge.[164]
That prodigious observer had not failed to notice them, and though Arthur’s interview with him had been quite remarkably frank and outspoken, the Colonel was not to be taken in that way. Indeed, the fact that Arthur had denied with such directness the truth of that brilliant conjecture the Colonel had made when he saw the picture of Jeannie rather tended to confirm his belief in his own acuteness. “Meant to put me off the scent, sir, meant to put me off the scent!” he said, angrily, as he waited to let his three daughters catch him up at the Guildhall. And he added, savagely, looking at Maria, who was near collapse: “But he doesn’t take me in that way!”
But our strategist was not quite certain how to act. The secret joy of knowing he was right, and had seen through all these flimsy attempts to baffle him, was gratifying,[165] but it was like money locked up, which he could not use. On the other hand, he had not enjoyed that moment when, in the presence of his wife, Arthur had spoken of the absurd and foolish report which some busybody had invented, and which, so he had heard, had reached Colonel Raymond. People, so thought the Colonel bitterly, talked so, and let things get about, and if he again alluded to what he knew so well about Arthur and Jack Collingwood another interview might occur between Arthur and himself. It was bad enough when only Mrs. Raymond was present, but the Colonel turned quite cold at the thought that the next rendezvous might be at the club, in the presence of all his old cronies. It was only a timely and unhesitating retreat which had perhaps saved him the other day on the question of cousinship, and even then he was far from certain that the others had not suspected some awkwardness.
Colonel Raymond began to feel ill-used. Why should these Aveshams, particularly that insolent Arthur, come and settle in Wroxton and render precarious the Colonel’s im[166]memorial position as cousin and friend of noble families? Why, if they must come, could they not have treated him more like a cousin, and have told him the truth about this affair, rather than try to hoodwink him with denials? “Why, the thing was as plain as the nose on my face!” stormed the Colonel as he ascended the club steps (and indeed his nose was not beautiful), “and to go and tell me that Jeannie had never seen young Collingwood, when the very next day I see them with my own eyes lounging in the public street together, is an insult to me and a disgrace to them!”
The party at Bolton Street were happily ignorant of these thunderings, and their tranquility was undisturbed. Jeannie had, indeed, told Arthur that the Colonel had seen herself and Jack together that afternoon, and they wondered with some amusement what he would make of it.
“I made myself pretty clear to him yesterday,” said Arthur, thoughtfully; “but he is a poisonous sort of animal. He is given, I notice, to repeating himself. I hope he won’t do so, Jeannie, on this occasion; other[167]wise I shall have to repeat myself to him. Yet you say he cut you. That makes the question simpler.”
“Why a gossip is a gossip is more than I can understand,” said Jeannie. “And where the pleasure of repeating as true what you made up yourself comes in is altogether beyond me.”
“It is one of the pleasures of the imagination,” said Arthur, taking off his coat. “Go away and dress, Jeannie, and leave me to do the same. We shall be late.”
“We always are,” said Jeannie, still lingering. “Isn’t it odd—” and she paused.
Arthur began unlacing his boots.
“Well?”
“Isn’t it odd that Mrs. Collingwood should be Mr. Collingwood’s mother?”
“It would be odder if she wasn’t,” remarked Arthur.
Miss Fortescue had taken rather a fancy to Jack, and she showed it by treating him as she treated her nephew and niece—that is to say, she was rude to him. It was a bad sign for Miss Fortescue to be polite to any one; it implied she did not like him. But[168] no one could have called her polite to Jack. She had asked him several questions on very different subjects during dinner, and to each he had returned an answer showing he knew something of the various questions. That was Miss Fortescue’s test.
“Yes, you seem to know,” she said; “in fact, I think you know too much, Mr. Collingwood.  It is like a curiosity-shop, full of odds and ends which are of no use to anybody.”
Jeannie and Arthur burst out laughing.
“Answer her back,” said Arthur; “she won’t mind.”
Jack was sensible enough to know that Miss Fortescue could not be so rude, if her object was to be rude.
 It is like a new jerry-built villa unfurnished.’”
“Just so,” said Miss Fortescue, “and the owner calls it a desirable mansion.”
“But what is one to do?” said Jack.[169] “Either one knows about a thing or one does not. It is a choice between being a jerry-built villa or a curiosity-shop.”
“Some people,” said Miss Fortescue, “fill their villa with curiosities. It is possible to be well informed and completely uneducated.”
“Go it, Jack,” said Arthur; “she’s beginning to hit wildly.”
“Am I to apply that to myself?” asked Jack, turning to Miss Fortescue.
“Oh, that is so like an Englishman,” said she. “Whenever you suggest an idea to an Englishman he cannot consider it in the abstract; he has to think whether it applies to him.”
“Aunt Em never does that,” observed Jeannie; “she goes on the opposite tack. If you tell her she is being offensive, quite personally, she considers offensiveness in the abstract, and makes remarks about true courtesy.”
“Have some hare, Aunt Em?” said Arthur. “I shot it two days ago.”
“Did you kill it at once?” asked Miss Fortescue.[170]
“No, I wounded it,” said Arthur, quite regardless of truth. “It screamed.”
“Butcher!” said Aunt Em.
“Shall I give you some?” repeated Arthur.
Miss Fortescue glanced at the menu-card.
“Only a very little,” she said.
“But where is the proper mean, Miss Fortescue?” resumed Jack. “How can one avoid both being well informed and being ignorant?”
“Well-informed people are those who know about the wrong things,” she said.
“I and the pearl-oysters, for instance?”
Aunt Em groaned.
“The Englishman again,” she said. “The Englishman abroad! How well that expresses the Englishman’s attitude toward ideas.”
“And the Englishman at home is the Englishman slaughtering innocent beasts, I suppose,” said Arthur. “I’ve only given you a very small piece, Aunt Em.”
“Yes, dear, you have taken me at my word,” said Miss Fortescue, inspecting her plate. “That is very English, too. We are[171] the heaviest, most literal nation that ever disgraced this planet.”
“Poor planet!” said Jeannie. “How the people in Mars must look down on us.”
“And rightly,” sighed Miss Fortescue. “How many Philistines one sees.”
“I’m one,” said Arthur, cheerfully. “Philistia, be thou glad of me!”
Miss Fortescue shook her head.
“Tell me any one you know who is not a Philistine,” said Jack.
Miss Fortescue raised her eyes to the ceiling, but Jack did not understand the signal.
“Can’t you think of one?” he repeated.
“When Aunt Em raises her eyes,” said Jeannie, “we talk of something else. Don’t apologize, Mr. Collingwood; you couldn’t have known.”
“A little more hare, Arthur,” said Aunt Em; “about as much as you gave me before.”
Frank Bennett, Jack, and Arthur had all been up at Magdalen together, and when the two were left in the smoking-room together Arthur, who only knew vaguely the story, asked Jack about it.
“You wrote to me, I remember, after his[172] death in May, and told me about the woman he had lived with. What happened further?”
Jack got up.
“It is all very terrible,” he said. “The girl died only about ten days ago, in giving birth to a baby. The baby is living. It was about that that I went to see my mother this afternoon.”
“What did she suggest?”
“An orphanage,” said Jack. “It had been suggested before, and I think it is quite out of the question. The case is not an orphanage case. There is plenty of money. I hoped—no, I hardly hoped—that my mother would suggest that the baby should be brought up in her house, for I owe a great deal to Frank, and as he is dead without my being able to pay it, I owe it to his memory. But she did not suggest it. So I think I shall take the child and bring it up myself.”
He paused.
“Yes, I know there are objections,” he said. “To begin with, people will talk. Luckily, however, there is nothing in the world which matters so little as what such[173] people say. The other objections are more important. It would be better for the child not to be in London. But I dare say things will work out somehow. For the present, at any rate, I shall certainly do that. It is bad enough for a child to be fatherless and nameless.  And what a good one!”
“What was the girl like?” asked Arthur. “Did you know her?”
“Yes, but very slightly. Oh, I can’t talk about it. She was nice. Frank meant to marry her—that I know.”
“One means so much,” said Arthur.
“My dear fellow, don’t attempt to be cynical. You make a poor hand of it; and really I know that he did mean to. But, as my mother pointed out, that is no excuse.”
Arthur was silent a moment.
“I apologize,” he said; “I am sure you are right. I have an idea—no, never mind. Have some whisky.”
They sat smoking for a spell without speech.
“You ought to be awfully happy here,” said Jack, at length. “You have a charming[174] house, and nothing particular to do. How I wish I had been born a loafer. I have great inclinations that way, but no gift at all. The real loafer is born, not made. I am always wanting to settle down, or finish up, or get to work.”
“I want none of these things,” said Arthur, with conviction. “Settling down, I suppose, means marrying. Are you going to marry, by the way?”
“I am going to do everything that there is to be done,” said Jack, “and after that I shall find more things to do.”
“And all this in the near future?” he asked.
“You ask as many questions as Miss Fortescue,” said Jack. “I am in dread of appearing well informed, so I shall not answer them.”
“Don’t. As soon as I know the answer to a question I lose all interest in it.”
“It’s lucky, then, that you have still so many questions,” observed Jack. “By the way, your sister did not mind about the picture, did she? She set me so thoroughly at my ease about it that until this evening it[175] really never occurred to me that she easily might.”
“No, I’m sure she didn’t,” said Arthur.
“Good. I shall go to bed. When is breakfast?”
Arthur got up and lit a couple of candles.
“Breakfast is when you come down,” he said. “We bind ourselves to nothing.[176]”
The Avesham family manner of attending Cathedral was characteristic. Miss Fortescue was always the first to start, and she reached her seat in the choir five minutes before service began. She took with her a Bible, a prayer-book, and a large tune hymn-book, and frowned abstractedly at them all. Jeannie started about seven minutes after her, and was almost invariably just late, so that she had to sit in the nave close to the choir. Arthur considered it sufficient to arrive during the first lesson, and he sat at the far end of the nave, where he could hear nothing but the singing. It followed, therefore, as a corollary that he left before the sermon. Jack on this particular morning proposed to stay at home and go to the afternoon service. Thus, when Arthur came through the garden on his way to the first lesson, he found him[177] in a large chair underneath the mulberry-tree. He paused a moment.
“Would it seem more hospitable if I didn’t go to Cathedral?” he asked. “Remember, I rank hospitality very high among the cardinal virtues.”
“Be honest,” said Jack.
“Then perhaps I had better go to Cathedral,” he said. “But you might have made it easier for me to stop. Well, good-bye; I shall come out before the sermon.”
“I shall devote the time to silent meditation,” said Jack. “Where shall I find cigarettes? I’ve run out.”
“In the smoking-room. But it’s distinctly bad manners to talk about cigarettes to a fellow on his way to church. Have a novel and an iced drink, too, won’t you? Don’t mind me.”
Arthur made his reluctant way across the lawn and disappeared. If Jack had been obliged to be perfectly honest too he would have had to confess that he bore the prospect of a solitary hour with perfect equanimity. He had several things to think about, and he could do it best alone. In the first place, he[178] had received that morning a note from his mother asking him to tear up the letter she had written him, when he received it, unread. Also she would like to see him again before he left Wroxton. This note occupied Jack’s thoughts not a little. When Jeannie had broken in upon his meditations on the bridge the evening before he was doing his best not to draw conclusions, not to formulate in his own mind what his relations with his mother were. He had not known how their talk had moved her, and it was only natural that he should not. For Mrs. Collingwood’s deepest emotions were founded on the cardinal virtues, and the more she was moved the more passionately she felt and expressed horror of what was wrong, and to Jack, with his antipodal nature, this had appeared like hardness. He had wronged her, but his mistake was excusable. For with him, the more his emotions were touched the more human and indulgent he became—a dangerous development, no doubt, but, luckily for the kindliness of the world, a common one, and certainly one that is lovable if we are not too censoriously moral. That Frank should so have[179] failed to act up to the proper reasonable code made him feel the more tenderly toward him, though he regretted it. It was otherwise with his mother. A lapse of this kind blotted tenderness from her mind; had it happened to one she loved, the more complete would have been her horror. The attitude of neither mother nor son is ideal, but the resultant leaves nothing wanting.
This request, then, to tear up the letter unread seemed to him of good omen. His mother, he knew, had felt strongly about this picture of Jeannie, and her letter would not have been pleasant reading.  She was never unkind from carelessness or anger; or, rather, if she was unkind from anger, the anger was never of a brutish or selfish sort. Thus he hoped that their interview would develop her idea that the letter should be unread.
But this was not the sum of the task of meditation. More intricate even and more absorbing was the remainder. He assured[180] himself, and believed his own assurance, that he was not falling in love; but when a man has to tell himself that it is doubtful whether he is any longer a fit person to decide. That radiant presence he had first met on the plank bridge was no longer a subject for sketches. She had stepped down (or up) from the platform of “subjects,” and had taken him by the hand. She had become, in fact, that ever agitating thing, a woman. Jack had been often agitated before, and took it as a doubtful boon. He had never indulged in those maudlin sentiments which place our human emotions on a pedestal, as it were, in an otherwise empty room. To be married ideally did not, according to him, mean an ideal life, if all else was to be sacrificed for that; and the man who gave up the whole world for a woman he loved was as incomplete as a man who gave up the woman he loved for the whole world. Still less was love a plaything to him. If it was not all-absorbing, it was not therefore nothing more than a pleasant amusement. More hopeless still was the common case of men who seem to regard it as a mere amusement, and yet devote their whole[181] life to it. Never did extremes meet more deplorably.
The truth lay beyond and between all these things. Every man had his work to do in the world; Jack at any rate made no question about that. To certain men and women came a great gift, a gift no less than the completion of their nature by fusion with another. It did not come to all, and whether it came or not there remained the stubborn fact that one had still one’s work to do. It was no use saying that love is the greatest thing in the world, or that it is stronger than death. For so, if we look at it aright, is the steam-engine. It must not be supposed that these chill reflections were rehearsed in Jack’s mind as he sat under the mulberry-tree that morning. They are given here merely to show the outcome of his previous thoughts on the subject, that the reader may be enabled to realize the starting-point from which his meditations began racing, the ground-colour of the piece on which perhaps the gold thread would be traced, the nature of the soil from which the mysterious seed would draw its nourishment. In intellectual and artistic matters he was[182] vivid, quick, fastidious, but sympathetic and, above all, almost incapable of accepting a thing as proved unless he had practical experience of it. And just as he would have denied with his utmost cheerfulness the claim of Raphael to be a great painter, unless he so considered him after looking at his pictures, so he would take no ideal of love as his own because it had been the ideal of great and good men.
He got up from his chair and looked out over the shining garden. The quiet peacefulness of a Sunday morning was in the air; hardly a breath of wind swayed the tall single dahlias, and the heavy heads of the sunflowers drooped. The great, quiet trees of the close, old but unaged, seemed a guarantee for the safety of the world, and the gray Cathedral numbered centuries to their decades. Yet, in spite of the suggestion of secure tranquility which the whole view offered, Jack felt excited and almost frightened.
“Who knows, who knows?” he said, half aloud. He paused a moment, and then walked forward, half laughing at himself.
“Falling in love is a common enough ex[183]perience,” he thought, “and it is not to be treated as a tragedy. But I cannot think of it as a comedy.”
Miss Fortescue, it appeared at lunch, had thought deeply on questions of ritual, or if she had not previously thought deeply, it apparently did not stand in the way of her speaking strongly. A reredos, it seemed, was a synonym for idolatry, and the absence of an extra candle on the altar was the only plank, so to speak, which saved the English Church from being immerged in the bottomless sea of Romanism. She proposed, as an experiment, to make an offer to the chapter that she would present to the Cathedral a small chapel in honour of St. Joseph, to be erected at her expense, if they would build a corresponding one to the Virgin, and felt no doubt that the thanks and acquiescence of the Cathedral body would be accorded to her and her proposal. The ingenuity with which she twisted the arguments of the other side to tell in her favour was truly remarkable, and when, at the end of a hot half-hour, she raised her eyes to the ceiling, she was not the only person present who was grateful for a[184] respite. She had already reduced Jack to such confusion of mind that he had founded some theory on the seven veils of the Jewish sanctuary, and though he had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, Miss Fortescue had, and convinced him out of his own mouth of being a friend to the detestable enormities of the Pope of Rome.
“You say you are going to see your mother at tea-time,” she said. “Very well, tell her what I have said.”
Jack was discreet, but not provident.
“I am sure she will agree with you,” he admitted, eagerly.
“In that case,” said Miss Fortescue, “it is her duty to use her influence with your father to get these things remedied.”
Jeannie laughed.
“Give it up, Mr. Collingwood,” she advised. “It’s no use. We always give it up when Aunt Em feels strongly at church on Sundays. You will, too, when you know her better.”
There were several people at tea when Jack came into his mother’s drawing-room, and when he entered he saw that they had[185] been talking on some point which concerned him, for there was a lull in the conversation, and yet every one looked interested and rather eager, which showed that the conversation had been suddenly broken off. Mrs. Vernon, the gushing wife of another canon, more distinguished for a vague æsthetic loquacity than for tact, appealed to him at once.
“We were talking about your picture of Miss Avesham,” she said. “I maintain—and do agree with me, Mr. Collingwood—that it is not the function of art to be photographic. You have seized, it is true, a moment (oh, such a dear, delicious moment!), but you have given us, have you not, what I called the story of the moment?”
Jack looked a little puzzled.
“I don’t quite understand,” he said.
“Oh, Mr. Collingwood, you are laughing at me!” she cried. (This was very unjust, and not appreciative of Jack’s gravity, which was creditable to him.) “You are laughing at me. You want me to involve myself. I mean that you could never have given us such a wonderful moment if you had not known the ancestry, if I may say so, of it.  To know and to show us exactly how she looked when that dear little puppy was shaking (In Danger, too—what a delightful title!)—you must have made a thousand sketches of her. For surely it is impossible to paint a portrait—a real portrait, I mean—without knowing the face and the character!”
Jack stirred his tea.
“Your theories are admirable, Mrs. Vernon,” he said, “and I agree with them entirely. But I must confess that my portrait in this instance was a rank contradiction of them. Until the moment that I saw Miss Avesham standing as I represented her I never saw her before. And I finished the sketch before I ever saw her again. I can only say that I am luckier than I deserve in having done something which you are kind enough to consider as being like her.”
Something of the interest died out of Mrs. Vernon’s face, and it occurred to Jack for the moment that she had a theory at stake more interesting to her than her theory about the true method of painting portraits. He[187] flushed a little, and was annoyed at himself for doing so.
“I am afraid it may seem to you that I did a very rude thing,” he said; “but the facts are these: I was walking down by the river, about three weeks ago, and suddenly saw what I tried to paint. I had no idea that it was Miss Avesham, for, as I have told you, I had never seen her before. And without sufficiently considering, I confess, whether the girl, whoever she was, would see the picture, and whether if she did she would object to it, I painted it. I saw Miss Avesham again yesterday for the second time. I am staying with her brother and her for the Sunday.”
“I am sure she would be charmed and flattered at your picture,” said Mrs. Vernon.
“I don’t know about her being charmed and flattered,” said Jack. “But certainly she was very kind about it, considering what a liberty I had taken.”
“Rather what a compliment you had paid her,” exclaimed Mrs. Vernon, effusively. “What a sweet girl she is! So simple and kindly. You are staying there, are you not?”
“Yes, for the Sunday,” said Jack, with all[188] his teeth on edge. “I knew Arthur well at Oxford.”
“And did Miss Avesham talk to you about the portrait?” continued Mrs. Vernon. “I am told she is so artistic.”
“Oh, yes, she spoke about it,” said Jack. “Indeed, it was a curious coincidence, for just as I arrived she was out in the garden, and again the puppy was shaking himself, having fallen into the fountain.”
Mrs. Vernon gave a titter of laughter, like a chromatic scale.
“There seems to be a fate in such things,” she exclaimed. “How exciting, and how romantic! Thank you, one more cup of this delicious tea.”
Before long the others left, and shortly after Canon Collingwood retired to the garden.  You received my letter?”
“Yes, this morning. I tore it up, as you asked me to, without reading it.”
Mrs. Collingwood was silent a moment.[189]
“Thank you,” she said at length, simply. “My reason was this—I wrote hastily. I could not but think that Miss Avesham would consider your painting of that portrait as a great liberty. It appears she did not, and that you are excellent friends. So I was wrong about her attitude.”
Mrs. Collingwood took a chair closer to Jack.
“Jack, you were right in what you said yesterday,” she went on. “You and I are made very differently. We must accept it. I have been too much given to judging you, to disapproving, and disapproval does no good. But you must not judge me either. You have your own life to live. You can not grasp my point of view, and if I am tempted to disapprove of you, I will be careful in the future not to do that, but to simply say that I do not understand.”
Jack looked up; his mother’s voice was trembling.
“Ah, my dear,” she went on, “in the Father’s house are many mansions, and it is likely there are many mansions of His on earth. And if the windows of some look out[190] on to beautiful things and others on to austere surroundings, suffering perhaps, and sin, those in the different chambers must not judge each other. That is what I wanted to say to you. But I have to go on in my own way. We can only do what we think right. There, that is all. But tell me, what do you intend to do about this baby?”
“I shall have it to live with me, I think,” said Jack; “that is, unless something else turns up. Mother, you don’t know how you have touched me, and how glad you have made me that you have spoken, and how ashamed.”
“No, Jack, not ashamed,” she said. “But I had to talk to you about it. I have thought of nothing else since I saw you yesterday.  I must leave you; I have an evening class. Good-bye, my dear.”
She kissed him with a tenderness that was new to her, and left him.
But it is not in the nature of those who have lived in a groove lightly to get out of it.[191] Habit becomes nature, and to look permanently at one view would, no doubt, if continued for forty years, tend to make the observer believe that the world contained no other.
This was the case with Mrs. Collingwood. Her humanized interview with Jack had jolted her as a stone on the line may jolt a train for a moment without causing it to leave the metals. The direction in which it had been running, its speed, and its weight have all to be overcome, and with her long-continued convictions had given her great momentum, and an address she delivered three days afterward at a Mothers’ Union showed no speck of apostasy.[192]
Jeannie threw herself into the life of the place with amazing energy, and she had her hands very full. In the first place, the house in Bolton Street had a new inhabitant—none other than the baby of Frank Bennett. It had occurred to Arthur when Jack was telling him about it that here was a possible situation, at any rate for the present, and before a week had elapsed he had written to Jack to say that if he wished they would give the child a home as long as the present régime of Bolton Street continued. Jack had accepted the offer with the most thankful alacrity: to live there was much better for the child; also (this he hardly admitted to himself) he could run down with reasonable frequency to see how it throve.
Jeannie had wanted no persuading, and Miss Fortescue hardly more. She had opposed the scheme at first on the same grounds[193] as she opposed everything, in order to see how the thing looked from the other side. That such a plan was somewhat out of the way, and that it would give Wroxton a good deal to talk about, she did not consider at all a disadvantage to them, and a distinct benefit to Wroxton.
“We shall hear less of the S. P. C. K.,” she remarked.
The baby was to Jeannie of absorbing interest. The same instinct which had led her when a child to make dramatic the lives of her dolls, and to watch over them with an anxious benignity of which saw-dust and wax were really not worthy, had here a sort of fruition. A doll had come to life, the inventions of her childhood were being played over again in the theatre of living, her play was become true. Arthur, who was the youngest of them, was only a year younger than herself; she had thus never known a baby in the house, and she found an ineffable charm in it.
But the baby, in being at least, was only a relaxation to be enjoyed in odds and ends of time, for the solid hours were full. She[194] seemed to have taken on her shoulders the responsibility for the whole of Wroxton. She had already written a paper for the Literary Ladies, which had caused a kind of revolution in that gentle society, and Mrs. Collingwood had left the room in a marked manner in the middle. It is true that she came back again, and spoke venomously about it, but that was an after-thought, for by going away she expressed her silent disapproval, which she repeated not at all silently in the discussion that followed. Indeed, she might well be horror-struck, for Jeannie, taking as her text that notorious and scandalous novel, The Sheltered Life, had made remarks about “realism” and artistic treatment which made Mrs. Collingwood not exactly blush, but bristle. In the first place, the hero of the work was a professed unbeliever, and though, if we are to believe the author, he sought for light, and lived a sober and innocent life, there was no doubt about his religious opinions. It is unnecessary to go into details of the rest of the story; that one fact was enough for Mrs. Collingwood. But Jeannie seemed hardly to have noticed it. Instead, she spoke of the[195] admirable development of his characters, of the sobriety and reticence of the narrative; of the skilled surgical dissection of the man’s actions, and the exhibition of the real forces that swayed them, partly the result of heredity, partly of early training and circumstance, and the one thing that, according to Mrs. Collingwood, condemned the book, even had it been written by Shakespeare and corrected by Milton, she passed over with the remark that the description of the struggle of the reason against a faith his reason could not accept was wonderfully rendered.
Dead silence followed her reading; and the Literary Ladies, who for the most part had followed her with great interest, saw Mrs. Collingwood enter again (she came in so punctually as Jeannie sat down that it seemed almost as if she had been listening at the door) and cowered. Most of them looked guilty, but it was noticed that Miss Clara, in her place as president, sat bolt upright, and looked as brave as a lion. Indeed, several times during the lecture she had applauded with her silver pencil-case on the table. Miss Fortescue, who sat next Jeannie, also ap[196]peared unterrified, but, as her niece sat down, she said in a whisper to her:
“You’ve done it now, dear. There’s war in that woman’s eye. But I’ll see you through.”
Miss Fortescue was right. There was war in Mrs. Collingwood’s eye; there was crusade in her eye, and she marched out to attack the hosts of the infidel like Cœur de Lion. She made no parleying with the enemy, and though she alluded to Jeannie’s speech as “most suggestive and clever,” it was only to point out to her hearers how dangerous cleverness was. She hurled texts at their heads: the house built on sand, the kings who did evil, the captivity, the fall of Babylon, the mark of the beast, the seven foolish virgins, the man who put his hand to the plough and looked back, the seed on the dry ground, the pitcher broken at the well, the woman of Samaria—all these, if rightly understood, proclaimed how abhorrent was The Sheltered Life! Jeannie as she listened was first angry, and ended by being amused. There had been a seven days’ storm; Mrs. Collingwood had sent in her resignation, and[197] Jeannie, hearing of it, sent in hers, provided that Mrs. Collingwood would remain. It ended in Jeannie’s calling on Mrs. Collingwood, in answer to the almost tearful request of Miss Clifford, and talking it out with her. She explained that she had not been criticising the data of the book, but the treatment of certain data, and made her points with such sweetness of temper and apparent inability to take offence that Mrs. Collingwood was charmed in spite of herself.
“But these things are the most serious in the world, Miss Avesham,” she had said at parting. “You do not, I now believe, take them lightly, but that was the impression your very clever speech made on me. I was wrong, I am willing to confess that.”
Then Jeannie started a musical society, at the meetings of which the Miss Cliffords quavered an uncertain alto, and Colonel Raymond thundered an approximate bass. They met originally once a week at Bolton Street, to sing glees for an hour, under the severe guidance of Miss Fortescue, who taught them by degrees not so much what good part singing was, as what it was not. Then they won[198] their way to the passable. Her teaching seemed almost hair-splitting at first, especially when she insisted on the middle of a note being sung, and allowed nothing which to the ordinary mind was allowable enough, and insisted on the existence of notes intermediate between semitones.
“Because a piano has black notes and white notes,” she observed once, “you think that there is no interval between. If you think you are lower than A flat, and higher than G sharp, you must be singing A. The chances are strongly against it. The basses again, please.”
But in spite of, or perhaps because of, this severity the club prospered. The instinct for perfection is commoner than one thinks, even among those who never attain more than mediocrity, and those new facts about intervals were as fascinating as X-rays. Mrs. Collingwood even joined, for she valued music among the higher relaxations. The apostles of this art she held were Mendelssohn and Handel—these were the moons. And the greater stars were Barnby, Stainer, and the Rev. P. Henley, whose chant in E flat she[199] ranked among the noblest productions of the world of art. A memorable evening indeed came, when Mrs. Collingwood sang also in a drinking-song, without turning a hair. She professed her willingness in a spuriously fugal passage “to drink a bowl wi’ thee” fortissimo, though there was no foot-note stating specifically that the bowl contained a non-alcoholic beverage. A charity performance was to be given at Christmas, in which the drinking-song would be performed, and Mrs. Collingwood knew it. But she made no protest, and practised “drinking her bowl” every Tuesday evening with gusto.
And Jeannie had classes of all sorts. She interested herself in the girls of the soap manufactory at Wroxton, and taught them that there were more things in the world than factory and followers. Some showed botanical tendencies, and she would bury herself in Sowerby’s Plants in order to be able to take them further in their hobby. Two others had violins, and Jeannie made night hideous by bringing them to Bolton Street two evenings in the week and accompanying their vagrant strains. There was another who sang, and a[200] fifth who had a mania for wood-carving. Jeannie weaned her from the reproduction of imagining ferns tied together by amorphous ribbons, and persuaded her to copy the lines of real leaves and flowers. All these various elements were amalgamated on Sunday afternoon, when a large room over the stables, which she had appropriated for her purposes, was thronged with the wood-carvers, the musicians, and the botanists. On these occasions she read to them and gave them tea. The readings were not strictly Sabbatical, and Arthur, spying out the land one Sunday after they had gone, found a large number of perfectly secular books with markers in them. Jeannie, when confronted with them, only laughed.
“The point is to interest them in something,” she said. “Look what lives they live. But the dreadful difficulty is that two of Mrs. Collingwood’s Sunday afternoon class seceded to me. I didn’t know what to do.”
Arthur laughed.
“You should have tried to interest them in Mrs. Collingwood,” he said.
Jeannie frowned.[201]
“I know. But it is so difficult,” she said. “I read them a story out of Plain Tales from the Hills instead.”
The girls’ class led on to a boys’ class, and Wroxton was again convulsed. For it was known that Jeannie allowed her boys, if they were allowed to smoke at home, to smoke when they came to her class, and her rule that not more than four might smoke simultaneously, for the sake of the atmosphere, was clearly not directed against smoking in general. This class was held on Saturday evening, in order to keep them out of the public-houses, for “the boys” were for the most part grown men, and several fathers of families had tried to steal surreptitiously into it. This Jeannie had stopped with good-humoured firmness.
“Go and sit with your wives,” she said, “and help to amuse the children.”
But the smoking was the root of offence, and Mrs. Collingwood stumbled heavily over it. She and her husband were dining at the Aveshams one Saturday evening, and Jeannie, who had dressed before the class in order not to break it up sooner than usual, came in,[202] and, Mrs. Collingwood said, “reeking of the pot-house.” But even Mrs. Collingwood, who had been accustomed all her life to express things strongly, felt that her expression fully met the enormities of the case.
The ramifications of the boys’ class and the girls’ class were innumerable. There was the case of the girl who played the violin, and the boy who professed to do the same. It was natural that they should be taken together. But when it appeared that the boy in question was a follower of the girl in question, Jeannie’s indignation knew no bounds. “I would not play gooseberry to the Czar of Russia,” she exclaimed.
Then it happened that between the Literary Ladies and the glee club, the boys’ class and the girls’ class, the violins, botany, and singing lessons, Jeannie had not any hour of her own. There were also, as Miss Fortescue said, several hours a week to be devoted to the suppression of scandal. An instance of this occurred when Mrs. Vernon overheard an animated conversation between Jeannie and a draper’s assistant in the High Street.[203] Jeannie’s voice carried, and the tones were audible to passers-by.
“Do come round this evening about nine,” she said, “because the others are dining out, and I shall be alone. Mind you come.”
He came.
One evening, about the end of October, Jeannie had had an unexpected respite. The policeman who was learning botany had to go on unexpected duty, owing to the illness of one of the staff, and she had an evening free. It would be false to say that she was relieved, for the patient was another of her boys, and she was anxious about him; but she certainly ran up the stairs, two at a time, to the nursery, where the evening toilet of the baby was going on. The baby was in his bath, worshipping his toes. He crowed with delight when he saw Jeannie, and when the bath was over the warm, wet body was blanketed and hoisted into her lap. Jeannie was long ago initiated into the mysteries of the evening meal, and the nurse, having mixed the patent food, went by Jeannie’s request to her own supper, without any sense of shift[204]ing responsibility on to untrustworthy shoulders.
It was a brisk, frosty evening, and the fire prospered in the grate. Jeannie drew the nurse’s rocking-chair close to the fender and adjusted the bottle. The baby was warm and hungry, and her thoughts turned inward, soothed and driven there by the dear, helpless presence, and she meditated nonsensically, so she told herself, as if she had been talking alone to the baby.
“What do you know,” she thought, “of to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow? Boys’ class to-morrow, and girls’ class the day after. Somebody will play the violin a little less villainously, and some one will perhaps not cut his finger at all. Oh, baby, it is a world where things go slow. First the seed, and then the stalk, and who knows about the corn? Supposing a storm comes in June? Ah, when will June come? How I long for June!
“Poor little fatherless mite, are we so much better off than you? Oh, baby, Heaven prevent us from getting morbid! Yes, those toes are quite beautiful, and all your own.[205] Nobody has any more toes than you, and what a consolation that ought to be. But nobody has any less. There is always that. We are all very average, and we have no right to expect extraordinary happiness. Yet I do, and so do you; you think that you will always have some one to hold you like this, and have a fire to look at. But what if the fire goes out, and somebody drops you?”
Jeannie’s face had got quite grave over these unconsidered possibilities. But her brow unclouded quickly.
“You tell me that there is the other side of the question,” she went on, “and that somebody else whom you like better may come and sit here, ready to take you when the first person is tired. So they may, so they may. And if ever you prefer anybody else to me I will bite you.”
She closed her lips gently on a little pink shell ear that peeped out from the blanket.
“I will bite you,” she went on, “and I will not hurt you. How should I hurt you? You would have your avengers if I did. Many of them, many of them, and myself among the first. Others also, one other par[206]ticularly. Oh, baby, I assure you that you are not in bad hands. That is a very good man who comes to see you sometimes, that man whom I think you recognise. He is clever, too, and once he painted a picture of a girl and a puppy dog, which was quite extraordinarily like.”
Jeannie paused a moment, and adjusted the bottle again.
“What an impertinence, was it not? And I was very angry. You should have seen us meet! He walked into the garden one day not long after, and I told him what I thought. I said he was a cad; I troubled him not to do that sort of thing again. I said it stamped a man, and he would have done better to take example by his blessed mother, and write tracts for the G. F. S., instead of spoiling good canvas and wasting his time in trying to paint. He had no idea of line, I told him, and less of colour. Did I really say all these things? I can not be quite sure: it is so long ago.”
There was a step on the stairs, and the moment after the door opened gently.
“May I come in?” said a voice.[207]
Jeannie turned round quickly.
“Yes, come in, Mr. Collingwood,” she said. “I didn’t expect you till the later train. Baby and I are having a talk, and I can’t get in a word edgeways.”
“I caught the earlier train,” he said. “But I, too, didn’t expect to find you here. Isn’t it the policeman’s night?”
Jeannie laughed.
“What an awful memory you have!” she said. “Isn’t it a great responsibility? How did you think, to begin with, that it was the policeman’s night?”
“I came a fortnight ago, you remember,” he said, “and you were late for dinner because of the policeman.”
“Yes, that is quite true,” said Jeannie; “but poor Williams has a bad headache and a touch of fever, and so Rankin is on duty.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jack. “But baby and I are the gainers.”
Jeannie pointed to the little pink face.
“Fast asleep, do you see,” she said, “two minutes after a heavy meal. He always does that. Fancy falling fast asleep over dessert,[208] and sleeping on till eight next morning over the dinner-table. I must put him to bed.”
Jack stood by the fire watching Jeannie tuck the baby into its cot with deft fingers. All her movements were sharp and decided; her fingers seemed to have an intelligence of their own.
“I must sit here till nurse comes up from her supper,” she said. “Look at that seraph!”
“I think he has his share of luck, after all,” said Jack.
Jeannie sat down again in the rocking-chair.
“Oh, but the responsibility!” she sighed. “We all share it. I believe so much of the happiness of one’s life depends on the happiness of one’s babyhood. The first glimpses of consciousness are what make the temperament.”
“He has a good chance, then.”
“It is a crying shame if he doesn’t,” said Jeannie. “It is the easiest thing in the world to make that child crow with delight. If you laugh, he laughs. Oh, we mustn’t talk so loud. We’ve awoke him.[209]”
Jeannie slipped softly to the side of the cot and began crooning a little baby-song:
Jack watched her intently, and a sudden thrill of passion throbbed in him. There was something in the sight of the girl bending over the baby and crooning in that low voice that stirred all his nature. Her exquisite fitness there, her absorbing joy in the young thing was a flash of revelation to him. Her dormant potential motherhood suddenly became divine and real to him. Every vein in his body seemed to have sent all the blood it contained in one great bound to his heart, and it stood still on the top of its beat. A long-drawn breath hung suspended in his lungs, and it was as if every particle of the warm, brisk air of the nursery was bubbling[210] intoxicating fire. The next moment all that was within him bowed and fell and worshipped.
That moment of incorporeal existence must have been short, for Jeannie had not got to the end of the second silly little verse when he was aware of himself again, like a man who has come round after an anæsthetic, feeling as if he had travelled swiftly from very far away. But he did not come back to his normal consciousness; the world he awoke to was different, and Jeannie filled it.
Almost simultaneously the nurse came softly in, and Jeannie got up quietly.
“He is sleeping again now,” she said; “step gently, Mr. Collingwood.”
It was long past dressing time, and they went straight to their rooms. During dinner Miss Fortescue was unusually vitriolic, and afterward they played a game called Adverbs. Jack had only a confused recollection of going out of the room, and being totally unable to guess what was required of him on his return. Soon after this Jeannie and her aunt went upstairs.
“I think you must have overworked yourself,” she said. “Be careful.”
She took several turns up and down her bed-room before ringing for her maid. As she pulled the bell:
“Head over ears,” she remarked.[212]
Long-continued drought had marked this summer-time, and when in September no rain fell the papers had been full of acrimonious comments on the ways of water-companies. The water-company at fault was really no earthly controller, and the most intelligent body of men can not milk the clouds. But the British public is not happy without its grievance, and just now it was certainly enjoying itself immensely.
Wroxton had hitherto suffered less than other towns, but by the beginning of October the supply began to cause uneasiness. But the water-company had another spring up its sleeve, and, to quiet complaints, about the second week in the month it was drawn upon, and the intelligent public was deprived of its right to grumble.
The weather was hot and unseasonable, with the heat not of an invigorating sun, but[213] of the closed and vitiated atmosphere of a packed room. Day after day a blanket of gray cloud covered the earth as with a lid, yet the rain came not. A windless, suffocating calm environed the earth; it was rank weather for man and beast. The perennial green of the great downs faded to an unwholesome yellow, like a carpet that is losing its colour from the sun, and the nights were dewless. The heavenly forces that temper the frosts of winter with a benigant sun and the heats of summer with the cool dews of night seemed to have been struck dead. Clouds overset the earth, but neither dispersed nor discharged. It was as if the vitality of the seasons had failed, as if the earth was abandoned to decay.
Jeannie was immune from the assaults of climate, and Miss Fortescue went out so seldom that she found no great disagreeableness in the stagnation of the air. But Colonel Raymond felt it acutely, and said it was like waiting for the rains in India. Miss Clara Clifford could no more write poetry than she could play the mandolin, and Miss Phœbe would have as soon thought of playing the[214] mandolin as of embarking on an epic. But the Colonel gave up the brisk walks while such dispiriting weather lasted, and though Mrs. Raymond dwindled and paled, she found her consolation in seeing the children play hide-and-seek among the gooseberry bushes.
Ten days after the new spring had been drawn upon certain ill-defined cases of illness began to appear in the town. For the most part they were among children, and the doctors for a day or two considered them as only a natural outcome of this long-continued sultriness and inclement air. But they were not wholly at their ease about it, and as the cases increased day by day it was no longer possible to exclude the idea that this was an epidemic. By this time some of the first cases, which were now five or six days old, began to look grave, and before the week was out it was generally known that typhoid had appeared in many houses.
Several of Jeannie’s various classes were ill with the hitherto unspecified fever, and she had been visiting them daily at their homes. She was up in the nursery making[215] herself agreeable to the baby one morning when Miss Fortescue came in, looking grave.
“Jeannie, some of your girls have been ill, have they not?” she asked.
“Yes, four or five of them and several of the boys. I am just going out to see them.”
“Leave the child,” said Miss Fortescue, “and come.”
Jeannie followed her, and a howl followed Jeannie.
“What is it, Aunt Em?” she asked, when they were outside.
“It is typhoid,” said Miss Fortescue.

“Is it infectious?” she asked; “I mean, can I carry it?”
“I don’t know,” said Miss Fortescue. “Jeannie, what is the matter with you?”

“I may have given it to the baby,” she said.
“Jeannie, don’t be foolish,” said Miss Fortescue. “Oh, my dear, be sensible. I[216] have already written to Dr. Maitland saying that you had been with probable typhoid cases, and asking what precautions one ought to take. I thought it probable that you would be uneasy about the baby, so I also asked whether it was possible that you had carried infection. That was about half an hour ago; I expect the answer every moment.”
“Oh, Aunt Em,” said Jeannie, coming close to her, “you think it is all right, don’t you?  “Ah, here is Pool.”
The butler came upstairs and handed Miss Fortescue a note; she glanced at it quickly.
“Such a risk of carrying typhoid as the one you mention is inconceivable,” she read, “and a baby of a few months old having it at all is unknown to the medical profession.”
She passed the note to Jeannie, who glanced at it.
“Oh, thank God, thank God!” she cried. “Aunt Em, I am going to see Dr. Maitland at once.[217]”
“The Avesham nerves,” sighed Miss Fortescue. “Surely the note is clear enough.”
“Yes, it is not that,” said Jeannie; “but if this increases they will be short of hands. I heard that all the nurses in the hospital were working double time. I am going to say that I wish to help in any way that he will allow me.”
Miss Fortescue looked at her a moment, and neither surprise nor criticism was in her eye.
“We will go together,” she said; “let us go at once.”
“Why should you come?” asked Jeannie.
“Because I wish to. I know something about nursing, though I have never nursed typhoid, which is more than you do, Jeannie.”
Jeannie looked surprised.
“I didn’t know—” she began.
“You know very little about me, dear,” said Miss Fortescue, “and that’s a fact.  I suppose I ought to forbid you to visit or help in any way, even forbid you suggesting it. But there are certain risks on certain occasions which every one is bound to run. Whether the risk in[218] your case is too great to be allowed I do not know. That is what we are going to Dr. Maitland to find out. I remember only that people who are fortunate enough to be as old as I are practically immune. I hear there are fifty fresh cases this morning.”
They found that Dr. Maitland was out and up at the hospital, where they followed him. After they had waited for a few minutes in a bare, dismal room, of which the principal furniture was a weighing-machine, a stethoscope, and a bottle labelled “poison,” he came in, looking grave, florid, and anxious.
“Yes, it is typhoid beyond a doubt,” he said, “and epidemic. Please sit down. Personally I am disposed to think it may be traced to the water-supply of the town, which has come since the drought was so bad from an open spring in the Gresham fields. I am making a bacteriological examination of it. Till that is settled I should advise you not to drink it, or even use it for washing, except after boiling.”
“Are you very short of nurses?” asked Miss Fortescue.
“Yes, I am at my wit’s end to know what[219] to do. My wife has volunteered to help, and, I hear, two other ladies. There are some coming from London and Shrewsbury to-day, but we have fifty fresh cases reported this morning, and there will be certainly more I have not yet heard of.”
“Miss Avesham and I have come to offer our help,” said Miss Fortescue. “I have been six months in a London hospital, and know something about it, though I have never nursed typhoid.”
“That is very kind of you,” said Dr. Maitland, “and I accept your offer most gladly. But it is right to tell you that you run some risk. As far as we can see, the disease is of the most malignant type. Several have died already, which is rare in the first week. In your case, Miss Fortescue, the risk is light, but for younger people it must not be disregarded. There is a risk.”
Miss Fortescue looked at Jeannie.
“I suppose many of the nurses are quite young,” said Jeannie.
“No doubt; but it is their profession.”
“Aunt Em, there is really no choice,” said Jeannie. “I am afraid I may not be of[220] much use, Dr. Maitland, but please let me do what I can.”
Dr. Maitland was not given to gushing any more than Miss Fortescue.
“I will certainly do so,” he said. “But you must remember that the work is tiring and demands incessant watchfulness and patience, for typhoid, above all other diseases depends on nursing. Please remember what I told you about boiling and filtering water. If you cannot trust your servants, see it done yourselves. There is no precaution half so necessary.”
“And the baby?” asked Jeannie. “Is it quite safe that it should remain here?”
Dr. Maitland had a merry eye.
“Perfectly,” he said. “But you will probably not think so. If you are in any way likely to worry about it, send it away at once. I can not have my nurses thinking about any thing but their patients. That is all, I think. If you will be here again by half past two I will have arranged about your duties.”
He shook hands with them, and went hurriedly back to his work. Miss Fortescue and Jeannie came out again into the hot, drowsy[221] atmosphere, and walked a little way in silence.
“Think it over, Jeannie,” said the other at length. “I quite understand that you are not frightened for yourself, and I never expected you would be. But you have to consider your duty toward your brother and other people who are fond of you. Me, for instance,” she added, with an unusual burst of emotion.
“There is no choice,” said Jeannie. “I must help if I can, and I am sure you see that. But what about the baby? Shall we send it away? No doubt it is stupid of me, but I think I should be happier if it was not here.”
“It shall go this afternoon,” said Miss Fortescue. “We will telegraph to Jack Collingwood.”
“Don’t alarm him,” said Jeannie, and stopped abruptly.
Miss Fortescue devoted several seconds to the consideration of this remark, and then smiled on the side of her mouth away from Jeannie.
“How could he be alarmed?” she asked.[222] “I shall say, of course, what Dr. Maitland said, that typhoid is unknown in babies.”
“Yes, that will be all right,” said Jeannie, rather absently. “But don’t make the outbreak too serious.”
And her enigmatic aunt smiled again.
Arthur had got in to lunch when they got back. He, too, had heard the news about the typhoid.
 “What do they say there? Is it very serious?”
“Yes,” said Miss Fortescue. “The baby goes to Jack Collingwood this afternoon. Not that there is the least risk, but Jeannie is foolish. She and I are going to help in nursing.”
He had not expected anything else, for he knew Jeannie. Aveshams were not demonstrative, and he only looked at her quietly a moment.
“I supposed you would,” he said. “I suppose it is right. Is there much risk?”
“Ordinary risk,” said Jeannie. “Dr. Maitland allowed it.”
“Yes, one wants to be of some use in such[223] cases,” said Arthur. “I hear the state of things in the lower part of the town is awful. The brewery stops working to-day; there are over twenty men down with it. I wonder if I could help?”
“No, Arthur, you mustn’t,” said Jeannie, quickly. “I wish you would go away. Go up to Mr. Collingwood’s with the baby for a week or two. Dr. Maitland said that for younger people the risk was greater.”
“Then we will ask him whether a man of twenty-three is much more liable to infection than a girl of twenty-four,” he said. “It sounds highly probable. Let’s come in to lunch. I am famished.”
Miss Fortescue went upstairs to tell nurse to pack and be ready to start in the afternoon, and write a telegram to Jack Collingwood; and having written it she paused for a moment, looking out of her window.
“It is a fine breed,” she said, “and it is not in my heart to stop either of them. They will walk into the wards and feverful houses as if they were going out to tea.”
Directly after lunch the two women turned out their wardrobes to find some thin[224] washing stuff suitable for their dresses. Jeannie could only lay her hands on a pale-blue cotton, and though she was still in deep mourning she put it on without question. As Miss Fortescue had said, neither she nor Arthur regarded any possible risk for themselves any more than they would have reckoned on the danger of a ceiling falling on them as they sat at dinner. Personal fear was unknown to them, though they both heartily wished the other would stop securely at home or go with the baby. The three went up together to the hospital. Dr. Maitland was there, and came to them at once, looking a little less florid, and a little graver.
“Twenty more cases,” he said, “and two have died in hospital in the last three hours, Miss Fortescue. Ah, how do you do, Mr. Avesham? What can I do for you? I hope you haven’t come to get your temperature taken?”
Arthur laughed.
“No, not yet,” he said; “I only came with my aunt and sister to see if you could find anything for me to do.”
“Certainly I can, and any one else also[225] who comes. Start with Cowley Street this afternoon—all that district is the worst—and see that all the drinking-water in the houses is boiled. It is no use giving them advice. See the pot on the fire. Don’t frighten them; encourage them, and tell them they are perfectly safe if they will do what you tell them. Go first to the dispensary here, and say I sent you, and tell the man to give you plenty of bicarbonate of mercury, and instruct you how it is to be used. Distribute it at the houses you visit, and show them how to use it. Be sure they don’t put it into their drinking-water. By the way, have you a room to spare?”
“Yes; at your disposal.”
“You see, I take you at your word when you offer to help,” said Dr. Maitland. “Two friends of mine are coming from Guy’s to assist me, but I can’t put them both up. May I send one on to you?”
“By all means,” said Arthur.
“Thank you very much,” said he. “There is no time nor need, I think, to tell you how grateful I feel for your kindness. By the way, Mr. Avesham, can you use a clinical[226] thermometer? No? That’s bad. When you go to the dispensary tell them to give you one, and take your own temperature and the dispensary man’s temperature several times, under the tongue. Get a thirty-second thermometer, and your temperature is 97·6°. Take it until it is right. Then you know how to use one. In the houses you visit, if you see a man, woman, or child ill, insist on taking their temperature. If the thermometer registers as much as half a degree over 99 take their names and addresses and tell me when you come back. Also, after taking each temperature, if there is any fever, dip the thermometer into a solution of the mercury and wipe it carefully. Good-bye, and many thanks. The dispensary is the second door on the right.”
As soon as he was gone Dr. Maitland turned to the others.
“A fine absence of nervousness,” he said; “he looked as if he was going to pay a call. And I don’t see any nervousness here, either. Miss Fortescue, I think you said you knew something about nursing, so I have put you with Nurse James in charge of the first ward.[227] In a day or two she will have put you in the way of your work, and then probably I shall ask you to look after certain houses, or take charge of patients by yourself. Miss Avesham also is under her in the same ward. You have about forty cases, some very serious. Please put yourselves entirely in her hands: she is admirable. There is no need to tell you that on your care and watchfulness many lives depend. You will both have day nursing only. This way, please.[228]”
The weeks that followed were the most terrible and most wearing that Jeannie had ever known. During the first day or two she showed a real aptitude for her work; she was gentle, firm, and untiring, and as the epidemic increased Miss Fortescue was soon moved to help in a larger ward, and a dozen cases in a smaller ward, off the one under Nurse James, were put under Jeannie. The head nurse was thus always at hand in case she wanted her, but otherwise Jeannie had to manage her patients alone. It was a constant matter of anxiety to Jeannie as to whether she ought or ought not to summon the other. At first the slightest rise in a patient’s temperature seemed to her enough grounds on which to ask the inspection of the elder woman, for she had been told she could not be too careful. Nurse James herself was worked almost to death; and on Jeannie’s calling her one day[229] to look at a patient she had exclaimed, snappishly:
“It would be less trouble to look after them myself.”
Jeannie flushed slightly, but said nothing, and went back to her work. Nurse James hurried out of the room, but returned a moment later.
“You must forgive me, Miss Avesham,” she said, “but I am worried to death. What we should do without you and Miss Fortescue I don’t know. But the temperature always goes up a little in the afternoon; it is only the very sudden rise or sudden falls, particularly the latter, which need alarm you.”
Jeannie smiled.
“I see; I will try to remember,” she said. “You are very patient with me.”
The work was terribly severe to any one unaccustomed to it. In her ward were women and girls only, who were easier to manage than the men, but who were more hopeless and apathetic, and Jeannie often thought that she would sooner have them fretful and irritable if they only would be less despond[230]ent. One woman, who was having the attack very slightly, and getting through with it very well, would spend half the day in sulky tears, pitying herself, and moaning over the cruelty of Jeannie, who, in obedience to her orders, did not, of course, let her have a crumb of any solid food. Sometimes when she was giving her a wash in the morning she would be called away by another trying to raise herself in bed or wanting to be attended to in some way, and when she came back there would be nothing but querulous complaints of the time she had been left; she felt sure she would catch a cold; Jeannie had not dried her properly before she went. At another time she would beg for food with tears, saying how she had read a story in which was described an epidemic of typhoid, where a charitable lady in the village had sat by her patients and fed them with cooling fruits. Jeannie had laughed at this, out of the superiority of her ten days’ knowledge.
 “Look how thin I have grown with a fortnight of this. Oh, for God’s sake, Miss, give me just a crust of bread!”
Jeannie had finished washing her, and covered her up gently.
“Now I am leaving you, and I shall come again to you in two hours with your milk,” she said. “Look, you have two hours before you. Just say your prayers, and thank God for getting over this. And ask Him to make you more sensible and more patient. You are more trouble than all the rest of the ward put together.”
Jeannie took down the woman’s temperature-chart, which hung over her bed, and put down the ten o’clock register.
“You are doing very well,” she said. “Just think over what I have said.”
The next case was as bad as a case can be. It was a girl not more than sixteen years old, and even now, when the second week of the fever was only just beginning, her strength was terribly exhausted by the continued high fever. The afternoon before Jeannie had spent two hours sponging her[232] with iced water, and had only succeeded in bringing it down to 102°. She came on duty herself at eight in the morning, and as she put the thermometer into the child’s mouth she looked at the temperature-chart. It had been 102° again at six in the morning, when it should have been lowest, and she looked anxiously at the face. It was very wan and thin, and the skin looked hard and tight as if it had been stretched. Below the eyes were deep hollows, and though they were wide open it was clear that the girl was scarcely conscious. She waited a full half minute, and then drew the thermometer gently out of her mouth and looked at it. It registered only 98°. She frowned and put it into her mouth again, hoping there might have been some mistake. Then when she saw it a second time she hurried into the next ward.
“That girl, Number 8,” she said to Nurse James, “had a six-o’clock temperature of 102°. It has sunk to 98°.”
Nurse James hardly looked up; she was watching a man who lay quite still, but tried every other moment to get up in bed.
“Dr. Maitland is in the next ward,” she[233] said; “go and tell him at once. It may be perforation. Then, when you have finished your round, if all the rest are doing well, I wish you would come here while I finish. I can’t leave this man alone. You can hear any sound in your ward from his bed.”
Jeannie hurried on and told Dr. Maitland. He came at once, looked at the girl, and shook his head.
“You did quite right to send for me, Miss Avesham,” he said. “Yes, she is as bad as she can be. I can do nothing.”
At moments like these Jeannie felt sick and utterly helpless, and almost inclined to say that she could bear it no longer. But she said nothing, and went on to the next bed.
The next patient was a robust woman of about thirty with a baritone voice. She proclaimed loudly that she was perfectly well, and was being starved. Her gray Irish eyes used to plead with Jeannie for something to eat, and she badly resented being washed. But this morning she took it in silence, and thanked Jeannie.
“She’s bad?” she asked, looking hard to the next bed.[234]
“Yes, very bad,” said Jeannie, hardly able to speak. She took the woman’s chart down from the wall and indicated the ten-o’clock temperature on it.
“You’re nearly through, I hope,” she said. “Yes, quite normal this morning. Now all you have to do is to lie very quiet, and you will get stronger every day. The doctor said you might have beef-tea this morning instead of milk.”
She smiled at her rather sadly, and was passing on, but the woman seized her hand.
“It’s cruel hard on ye,” said she; “but don’t mind so, don’t mind so. An’ me worrying you and all. I’ll bite out me tongue before I say another hasty word to ye.”
Then came two or three very bad cases. One was a frail, tired-looking woman, who glanced at Jeannie wistfully as she examined the thermometer.
“I’m no better?” she asked.
Jeannie smiled, but with a heavy heart. The woman, she felt sure, could not last through very many days of this.
“How do you feel?” she said.[235]
“Weak and tired—oh, so tired! And I have a pain in my back.”
“Do you cough at all?” asked Jeannie.
“I couldn’t sleep for it last night,” said the woman, “and that makes a body weary.”
“Keep yourself warm, then,” she said, “and lie still.”
“But I’m no better?” she asked again.
“That was one of the questions which we settled not to ask,” said Jeannie. “When you are quite well you will get up. Till then, nothing, nothing.”
Half an hour more sufficed to finish the round, and she went into the next ward to watch the man who was so restless. For nearly an hour she had to sit close by his bedside, with her hands continually pressing on his shoulders to prevent his getting up. He was more than half unconscious and wandering in his talk, saying things now and then which ten days ago would have made Jeannie turn from him in horror and disgust. But now she had nothing of that left, only pure pity and the one great end in view to let none of these poor people die.
Then when Nurse James had finished her[236] round she came back to her, and by then it was time to get the patients’ food. Some of the more advanced and progressing cases were already allowed Mellin’s Food, but for the most it was still only milk and beef-tea.
At mid-day she had a couple of hours’ interval, usually returned home to lunch, and went afterward for a walk. But to-day she felt too fagged and too sick at heart to do more than sit in the garden and beneath the pitiless leaden cowl of the sky. The effort of appearing cheerful and remaining cheering was too great, and when alone she abandoned herself to a sort of resigned hopelessness. Just before leaving the ward she had seen the terrible screen put up round the bed of the girl who was dying. That was all the privacy that could be given her. She almost hoped that when she got back the end would have come; only two days before she had sat in the still and awe-struck ward while a woman passed through her last hours. She had heard the wandering, inarticulate cries; she had counted her breaths through the long, pitiless silences; she had shut her teeth hard to bear, without screaming audibly, that one[237] last exclamation in which the spirit clutches with unavailing hands not to be torn away from the inert body, the one last convulsive breath in which the body tries to retain it, and she thought she could hardly bear it again. Then she cudgelled and contemned herself for her paltry, selfish cowardice. Was there ever, she thought, a girl so puny-spirited?
During these ten days in which she had been nursing the epidemic had showed no signs of abatement. Sometimes for a couple of days the return of the fresh cases was suddenly diminished, and once when Jeannie went to the hospital at eight in the morning to take up her duties they told her that there had been no fresh cases reported since the night before. But on all these occasions the lull was only temporary, and in the next twelve hours there would perhaps be seventy more reported. She pictured the disease to herself like some hideous monster which would lie down to sleep for a few hours after one of its gigantic meals, and then, when the victims were digested, would rise up again and clutch at them with his hot hands.[238] Once as she was leaving the hospital Dr. Maitland had called her into his consulting-room to ask her a question about one of her patients, and as she rose to go he had said:
“Would you like to see what is the matter with all these people?”
He pointed to a microscope which stood on the table, and Jeannie looked through it at the drop of water which was beneath the lenses.
“There are a quantity of typhoid bacilli in that,” he said; “they are long and black, with one pointed end, rather like pencils.”
He adjusted the light for her, and among the infinitesimal denizens of the water she saw five or six little dark lines seemingly as lifeless as the rest. She drew back with a shudder.
“I thought of it as some terrible beast with claws and teeth,” she said; “but this is the more terrible.”
Never before had she realized on what a hair-breadth path this precarious life of ours pursues its way. The strength and the wit and the beauty of man were slaves and puppets in the hands of this minute organism.[239]  And the father is but one among the uncounted dead.
This afternoon, as she sat under the trees in the garden after her lunch, thoughts like these flitted bat-like through the gloomy chambers of the brain. How insignificant and insecure was life! It was like some ill-constructed clock which might stop any moment. And how mean and trivial were all its best aims. Here was she, with a fair average of birth and brains and heart, and life held for her no more heroic task than to wage war—and, oh, how hopelessly!—with an infinitesimal atom. The peace and sheltered security of Wroxton, the busy tranquility she had fashioned for herself here, were all knocked in the dust. Everything was at the mercy of the bacillus.
Luckily for her peace of mind these unfruitful imaginings were interrupted by[240] Pool. She did not hear his step on the soft grass, and his voice spoke before she knew he was there.
“Mr. Collingwood is here, Miss,” he said, “and wants to know if you can see him.”
Jeannie did not move, but her voice trembled a little.
“Yes, ask him to come out here,” she said; “and bring another chair.”
She rose to meet him.
“Ah, how do you do?” she said. “Tell me, the baby is quite well?”
“Quite well,” he said, and then there was silence.
Pool brought out another chair, and still in silence they sat down. Jeannie’s heart had suddenly begun to beat furiously.
“I heard from Arthur this morning,” he said, “and that is why I am here. I knew, of course, from the papers that there was an epidemic of typhoid here, and I was frightened. But his letter told me more. It told me that you spent all your days in nursing at the hospital. And I could not bear it.”
Jeannie said nothing, but a great, pervading peace took possession of her troubled[241] soul. It was as if she had suddenly passed from a stormy, mountainous sea round into a harbour, and the bacilli resumed their real dimensions.
“I could not bear it,” he said, again looking at her.
No word of explanation passed between them. His right to question what she did Jeannie did not dispute, and he did not miss the significance of that.
“I could not help myself,” she said. “It was impossible for me not to do what I could. Oh, it has been a terrible time, and we are not at the end of it yet. Oh, these poor people!”
“Leave the place, come away,” he began, suddenly and passionately, but then stopped, for he saw in Jeannie’s face the light of pity, divine and human and womanly, and all that was selfish in his love for her, all that said “I cannot live without her,” died.
“Do not leave the place,” he resumed. “Do all that your heart prompts you to do. But promise me this—promise that you will leave no precaution untaken to minimize the risk to yourself. I know there is no need to[242] ask you that, because that is your duty as much as the other, but it will comfort me to hear you say it.”
“I promise you that,” said Jeannie, simply.
The divine deed was done, and the word yet unspoken had changed all. Three minutes before there had been only a leaden sky, the withered, drought-yellowed grass round her, but the grass was become the paved sapphire of the courts of heaven, and the sky was the sky. Each of them was so utterly in tune with the other that Jack felt no desire to speak directly, nor did Jeannie wish it. The pause out of which music should issue was theirs.
“And what is to be done with me?” he asked, in a lighter tone. “May I stop here?”
“No, Jack,” she said, and the utter unconsciousness with which she spoke his name smote him with sweetness. “No, you are to go back to your work, too. We have all got our work; nothing can refute that. Tell me about the baby.”
“He cries for you,” said Jack.[243]
“Kiss him for me then, and pray for us. Oh, let me tell you about it all. It will do me good, and I am too heart-sick to talk it over with the others. If I tell Aunt Em about my cases it is a double burden for her, and if she tells me about hers it is double for me. Arthur behaves splendidly. He goes his rounds all day, like a milkman, he says, with cans of disinfectants.”
“Ah, he helps too, does he?” said Jack. “He never mentioned that in his letter.”
“No? That is so like the dear boy. He has found lots of cases which they were trying to keep dark, for they hate going to hospital, and he alone of us all remains perfectly cheerful. But it is terrible at the hospital. I have about a dozen cases almost entirely under me.  It is so awful to work and work and work, and with what result?  Is it not enough to find that little silver line on the thermometer a little lower than it was at the same time yesterday, and perhaps a degree lower than it was the day before? But one feels so helpless. And it is[244] all on account of a little invisible demon which the carelessness of dirty people allowed to get into the water-supply. People talk of the horror of war. The horror of water-companies seems to me the more frightful.”
Jeannie paused a moment.
“But I would not have gone through it, and I would not be now going through it for the kingdoms of the world,” she said. “The mischief has been done, and it is an inestimable privilege to be allowed to help in minimizing the results. It is giving me a new view of life, Jack. Here in this sheltered, peaceful town I was in danger, I think, of becoming a sort of ruminating animal, sleek, and living in the meadows like a sort of cow.”
“I didn’t gather you were in danger of that,” remarked Jack. “You did happen to hold some classes in your meadow, did you not?”
“Yes, classes of other cows. We were all cows together—at least I was. But out of all this suffering there comes, I know not what—certainly despondency; but I do not be[245]lieve that that is the permanent net result. One learns what a little thing is life, and how great. Also it seems as if I was learning to be egoistic.”
She got up out of her chair.
“Oh, you have done me good!” she cried. “Look, what was that?”
Jack had seen it, too; it was as if the sky had winked. They waited in silence, and in a few minutes came the growl of answering thunder. Jeannie stretched out her arms with a great sigh.
“Thunder!” she cried. “Perhaps there will be rain. How I have prayed for that. You don’t know what it may mean to us. Well, what is it, Pool?”
“Mrs. Raymond is here, Miss,” said he, “and would like to speak to you.”
“Very well, I will come in. Wait here, Mr. Collingwood; I will see what she wants.”
Jeannie went indoors with a new briskness of step and found Mrs. Raymond standing helplessly in the middle of the drawing-room.
“Oh, Miss Avesham,” she said, “will you[246] come? Maria is ill, and I can’t find any doctor in. So I thought, if you would be so kind, you would come and look at her, as I heard you have been working at the hospital.”
“When was she taken ill?” asked Jeannie.
“She wasn’t well yesterday at lunch, and had no appetite.  She was very bad last night, but he said she would be all right in the morning, and now she’s no better.”
Jeannie gave a little exclamation of impatience, and looked at her watch.
“Yes, I’ve just got time before I go back to the hospital,” she said. “Have you a carriage here?”
“Yes, it’s waiting,” said Mrs. Raymond.
“Very good; get in. I’ll follow you in a moment.”
She went quickly into the garden again.
“I must go,” she said to Jack. “I have to see a girl before I go back to the hospital.”
“And I am to go back to paint my silly little pictures?” he asked.[247]
“Yes; you don’t paint badly, you know!”
“I will try and paint better. But I may come again?”
Jeannie shook hands with him.
“Yes, do come again,” she said.[248]
They drove quietly through the dusty, sultry streets, and came in a few minutes to Lammermoor. Mrs. Raymond conversed all the time in a low, monotonous voice, like the tones of some one talking in their sleep, chiefly in defence of her husband, though Jeannie had said no word about him.
“Colonel Raymond is so very strong himself,” she said, “and I think sometimes that he doesn’t quite make allowance for the children. But he disagrees with me, and I dare say he is right. He always finds a good walk, he says, the best cure for a headache or a feeling of tiredness; he says such things are best walked off. But with children, you know, it may be different; they are so easily tired, and the Colonel always walks very fast. But Maria’s walk yesterday certainly did her no good, and my husband was as anxious as myself to-day that some one should see her,[249] and the doctors were all out. That was why I came for you, and it is so good of you to come. Colonel Raymond is terrified for the child; he does not at all like illness in the house. He has seen so much illness in In—in his service. And here we are!”
Jeannie followed Mrs. Raymond up the narrow gravel walk and up the three stone steps, with balls at the top and bottom, into Lammermoor. A strong smell of tobacco and camphor was apparent in the hall.
“Colonel Raymond says smoking is the best disinfectant,” explained his wife, “and he has been sprinkling camphor about in the study and in the dining-room. He says camphor is a good disinfectant, too.”
Jeannie sniffed.
“I should recommend you to open all the doors and windows in the house and let in some fresh air,” she said. “Fresh air is better than either camphor or tobacco.”
“I will tell my husband what you say,” said Mrs. Raymond. “Will you step into the drawing-room a moment, Miss Avesham? I know Robert would like to see you.[250]”
“I really haven’t time,” said Jeannie. “I must be back at the hospital at three.”
“Then perhaps you will come upstairs straight?” said the other.
The house reeked of the Colonel’s disinfectants as they mounted the stairs. On the first floor the door into his dressing-room was just open, disclosing a view of him putting some clothes into a small valise, with a cigar in his mouth, and in his shirt-sleeves.
“Oh, here is Robert,” said Mrs. Raymond, in her thin voice. “Robert, here is Miss Avesham very kindly come to see Maria. What are you doing, dear?”
The Colonel treated Jeannie to his best military bow, and took the cigar out of his mouth, but his usual heartiness was absent from his greeting.
“Very kind of you, very kind, I am sure, Miss Avesham,” he said, “to come and see our poor little Maria. The hot weather—she feels the hot weather, poor child.”
A curious, grim look came into Jeannie’s face. Like most people who have the salt of courage necessary for the conduct of life she felt unkindly toward cowardice. She noticed[251] also that this bluff and gallant gentleman did not advance to meet her, but rather retreated farther into his room. She remembered also the confidence that Miss Clifford had made her on the stair-case, and she hardened her heart.
“How do you do, Colonel Raymond?” she said, still advancing toward him, but the Colonel retreated behind his open luggage.
“What are you doing, Robert?” asked his wife again, in the same voice.
Colonel Raymond did not reply at once, and Jeannie did not break his silence.
“Well, I’m packing,” he said, at length. “If there’s illness in the house a man is only in the way. Better make myself scarce, you know; better make myself scarce.”
Jeannie looked at him fixedly for a moment. Then, breaking into a smile:
“You need not be frightened,” she said. “For any one well over forty there is really no risk, even when typhoid is about. And I thought you said it was only the hot weather that had tried your daughter. Well, Mrs. Raymond, I have to be back at the hospital[252] very soon, and I think we had better go and see your daughter at once.”
She turned her back on the Colonel, and followed Mrs. Raymond to a higher story.
“My husband is very careful about infection,” said the latter as they mounted the stairs. “That is so right, is it not? But I did not know he was thinking of going away.”
“He is quite right to be careful of infection,” said Jeannie. “But there is no need for him to go; and, indeed, we do not know if there is any reason yet.”
Maria slept in the same room with one of her sisters, the eldest having the dignity of a room to herself. Jeannie cast one glance at the little haggard, fevered face, and took out her thermometer.
“Put it under your tongue, dear,” she said, “and keep it there till I take it away. Don’t bite it. No, it’s not medicine; it doesn’t taste nasty.”
She glanced at it at the end of half a minute.
“That’s all right,” she said, reassuringly. “How do you feel?[253]”
“Headache,” piped the little feeble voice from the bed.
“We’ll soon make that all right then,” said Jeannie.
“No, you shall stay in bed and rest.
Jeannie closed the door when they came out.
“Yes, she has high fever,” she said to Mrs. Raymond. “Go and sit with her, and don’t let her raise herself in bed. I am afraid it is typhoid, but we can’t tell yet. I will see you again before I leave the house. I am just going to speak to your husband, unless you will take the responsibility of what you do.”
“You must speak to him, then,” said Mrs. Raymond. “But please remember, dear Miss Avesham, how careful he is about infection.”
“Yes, I will remember,” said Jeannie.
The dressing-room door was shut when[254] she went downstairs again, and she knocked at it. It flew open, and it seemed to Jeannie that the Colonel thought he was opening to his wife.
“I want to speak to you, Colonel Raymond,” she said. “Oh, please don’t apologize for the state of your room. I have only a minute, and you need not come downstairs.”
“You have seen Maria?” asked the Colonel.
“Yes; she is ill. She must be treated as if she had typhoid.”
“God bless my soul!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Why, I have seen men die of it like flies!”
“They are dying of it like flies here,” said Jeannie. “Now I don’t want to dissuade you from going away, though for a man of your age there is really no risk. Still there is no telling what fright will do. If you were frightened of whooping-cough you might still catch it. But I want to know this. Will you send your daughter to the hospital? She will be as well looked after there as here; it will take anxiety off your wife, and you[255] can take the other two children away with you. Might I trouble you to open the window? This mixture of camphor and cigar is overpowering.”
“She would go as a paying patient?” asked the Colonel.
“Of course,” said Jeannie.
“Then, upon my soul, Miss Avesham, I think we’ll keep her here. She’ll be better looked after in her own home. My wife is an excellent nurse, and any little delicacies she might require will be more easily supplied at home.”
“As you will,” said Jeannie. “If, as I am afraid, it is typhoid, you will of course have to have two trained nurses, by day and night. Mrs. Raymond told me the decision would be with you.”
Colonel Raymond looked undecided, and slipped on his coat.
“Very difficult to decide,” he said, “very difficult. Which do you recommend, Miss Avesham?”
“It is difficult to choose,” said Jeannie. “Ah, it lightened again; I hope we shall have rain. As you say, perhaps she would[256] be more comfortable here. Please tell me at once. I am going straight back to the hospital, and I will tell them to send an ambulance if you decide she should go.”
“Well, she shall go, she shall go,” said the Colonel. “Nothing like proper treatment.”
“I think you have decided right,” said Jeannie. “The other child who sleeps in the same room must, of course, be removed at once. You have a spare room? If not, no doubt you could make her a bed here in your dressing-room.”
“That would be possible,” said the Colonel.
“And since the case is removed,” said Jeannie, “it will no longer be necessary for you to go away. Please don’t trouble to come down, as I can let myself out.”
As Jeannie left the house she noticed that the south was black with cloud. The texture of it was different to what it had been during the last fortnight of congested weather. The sky was no longer leaden and dry, but moist and dark with imminent rain.  Already in the air was the hint of a change; her heart was lighter, for the two hours had been like a caress to her troubled spirit. She had been worn with fruitless effort; the collar of the suffering world chafed her, but one hand brought healing to her, and her heart was holpen.
She reported the case of probable typhoid to a doctor, and went back to her ward. Nurse James met her with a smiling face, and when Nurse James smiled it was not without reason.
“That girl you left so ill this morning is no worse,” she said. “If anything, she is a little stronger. Dr. Maitland thinks that the sudden drop in the temperature may be after all a sudden turn for the better. He says it occasionally happens. Certainly if there had been perforation we should have known by now. Watch her very carefully.”
All the afternoon remote lightning winked distantly in the sky, and the answering thunder got ever gradually louder and more continuous. The wind had veered into[258] the north-west, and was coming in sudden claps and buffets of hot air, and the storm, a distant rack of coppery, hard-edged cloud, distinct and different from the heavy, soft vapours overhead, was approaching slowly from the opposite quarter. The oppression of the air was as intolerable as ever, and strangely more acute, the remote heavens seemed to be pressing down on the earth like a hot lid over a stewing pot. But in the ward there was a general feeling of cheerfulness, easy to perceive, hard to define, a survival doubtless in man of the curious instinct in animals which makes them smell an approaching storm and warns the domestic sort that an earthquake is coming. The earth and the fever-stricken town were waiting for a change, which could not be for the worse. Of them all, only the girl who had been almost despaired of that morning lay quite still and apathetic, and again and again Jeannie went to her bedside betwixt hope and fear.
About five the storm burst in riotous elements. For an hour before that the strain had been almost unbearable. The forked flashes of lightning, the dry growl of the[259] thunder had approached nearer and nearer, and all the earth seemed to pause, finger on lip, for the catastrophe.  Then suddenly the heavens burst, a ribbon of blue fire leaped downward from the zenith, and the noise of the thunder was as if the sky had cracked. One woman half raised herself in bed and cried, “Lord, have mercy!” but at the end of the words came a sound as if a thousand snakes had hissed in the street outside, the blessed whisper of rain, and all was changed.
The girl who was so ill moved slightly and laid one hand outside the bed-clothes; the woman who had cried aloud lay back in bed smiling; Jeannie felt a pulse rise in her throat and subside again, and outside the hiss of the snakes changed to a drumming on the roof, which got gradually louder and more insistent. Perpendicularly it fell, like rods of steel, and as the seconds added themselves into minutes the roofs, drains, and gutter-pipes began to gurgle and chuckle to them[260]selves, and never was there a song so sweet. These guttural sounds grew ever fuller, and in a few minutes, with a great splash, they choked and overflowed in bubbling laughter. Again and yet again the lightning tore a path through the clouds, and at each reverberation in the baptism of fire the earth grew regenerate and young. The hot, stifling smell of the last six weeks turned to something infinitely fresh and vigorous, and down the pavements and over the roads began to flow the flushing streams.
Five was the hour of the afternoon milk and beef-tea, and Carmel hour, as it seemed to Jeannie, of the evening sacrifice. Food and the healing rain were poured out, a sign of His hand, abundant, health-giving. Exultantly she went her rounds, and found smiling faces. One only did not smile, for the girl lay in deep, natural sleep, as if the racket and tumult outside were a lullaby to her. Outside it had grown very dark; the wind had ceased; but as if to compensate for the darkness, from moment to moment an intolerable brilliance of lightning made a tenfold brightness. It was as if the town was be[261]leaguered by the artillery of the sky, and from right and left fired unceasingly the guns of heaven. In the intervals between the flashes colour was blotted out from the world, dark roofs and black trees huddled together to meet a sky scarcely more luminous. Then in a moment the colour would be restored. The geraniums in the boxes outside the window, black before, leaped into their scarlet liveries; the black elm-tops, a dark blob, became an outlined company of green leaves, and the tiled roofs of the houses were red once more. A noise as of a hundred sacks of marbles poured out on to a wooden floor endorsed the truths, and once again the world became shadow and the click of gutters.
By six the first violence of the storm was momentarily abated. Sullen, blessed rain-clouds hung ready to burst, but when Jeannie and Miss Fortescue came to leave the hospital they passed unwetted down to Bolton Street. In Jeannie’s head an easy melody of love and joy bubbled and repeated, and listening to it she was silent. But Aunt Em spoke.
“I wish I had brought goloshes,” she said.[262] “But I am glad this rain has come; it will flush the drains.”
It was Miss Fortescue’s habit, though those who knew her best least suspected it, to commend herself and those she loved to the special care of God every night. Though she never talked about religion, there was nothing in the world more real to her than her communion with things unseen. But she never lost sight of her undoubted connection also with things seen, and to-night her devotions were tepid. For at dinner Jeannie had been altogether unaccountable, the obsession of gravity and responsibility which had beleaguered her during the past week was altogether absent, and Miss Fortescue wondered what had driven it away. She had laughed and spilled things with the mastery of custom, and after dinner she had stopped in the dining-room with Arthur, smoking a cigarette.
Now Jeannie’s cigarette was, properly speaking, not a cigarette at all, but a barometer. It argued a very rare content and an almost passionate acceptance of the present circumstances of life. For weeks past, and more especially since this epidemic had come[263] to the town, Jeannie could no more have smoked than she could have flown, and something, so argued Miss Fortescue, must have occurred to send her needle up this sky-high weather. The thunder-storm and the clearing of the air no doubt were predisposing causes, and so also might be reckoned the wonderful turn for the better of the case of the girl whose life had been despaired of that morning. But Miss Fortescue was not content to accept these alone as sufficient reasons. They would have occasioned relief, but no more, and this sudden rise in the barometer was due to the removal of a more marked depression. So, instead of going to bed, she put on her dressing-gown, and knocked softly at Jeannie’s door, and receiving no answer went in.
The room was brilliantly lighted. Jeannie seemed to have lit all the candles she could find, and she herself was standing far from the door by the wide-flung window and looking out into the night. She too had taken off her dress and put on a short-sleeved dressing-gown, which left her arms bare to nearly the shoulder. Her hair was hanging down her back in a great black river as far[264] as her waist, and her face, nearly in profile, was cut like a cameo against the dark square of the night.  Just as Miss Fortescue stood at the door the blackness outside turned to a sheet of blue flame, and the thousand rods of the rain became for a moment a prism of colour. Jeannie started, and turning half round saw her aunt. A smile of great happiness played round her mouth, and she held up her head, listening. In another half second came the great gongs of thunder in answer to the lightning, and she laughed with pleasure.
“Hear them, hear them!” she cried. “Oh, Aunt Em, isn’t it splendid? And the rain! Oh, the rain! Have you come for a talk? That is good also, for I cannot go to bed yet. Let us pull out our chairs to the window.”
Now, Miss Fortescue hated thunder-storms and snakes and German bands, but she hated thunder-storms the most. But Jeannie’s happiness was too infectious to be denied, and she sat down in the chair by her.[265]
“Oh, I am so happy!” cried Jeannie. “Listen at the rivers down the gravel walks. There won’t be a flower in the garden to-morrow.”
“I don’t know that that is altogether an advantage,” said Aunt Em. “Haven’t you got a better reason than that?”
“Hundreds,” said Jeannie. “I am sane again. I was looking at things awry, and I have been put right.”
“Who put you right?” asked Aunt Em.
“Why, Mr. Collingwood!” said Jeannie. “He was here this afternoon.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Miss Fortescue.
Jeannie looked at her with frank surprise.
“That never occurred to me,” she said. “Now I come to think of it, you couldn’t have known. He came just after lunch, and we talked together for about half an hour.”