Jaffery

Suddenly, as soon as Doria could be moved, Mr. Jornicroft stepped in and carried her to the south of France. Barbara and Jaffery and myself saw her off by the afternoon train at Charing Cross. She was to rest in Paris for the night and the next day, and proceed the following night to Nice. She looked the frailest thing under the sun. Her face was startling ivory beneath her widow's headgear. She had scarcely strength to lift her head. Mr. Jornicroft had made luxurious arrangements for her comfort—an ambulance carriage from St. John's Wood, a special invalid compartment in the train; but at the station, as at Doria's wedding, Jaffery took command. It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with extraordinary sureness and gentleness from the carriage, carried her across the platform and deposited her tenderly on her couch in the compartment. Touched by his solicitude she thanked him with much graciousness. He bent over her—we were standing at the door and could not choose but hear:

"Don't you remember what I said the first day I met you?"

"Yes."

"It stands, my dear; and more than that." He paused for a second and took her thin hand. "And don't you worry about that book. You get well and strong."

He kissed her hand and spoiled the gallantry by squeezing her shoulder—half her little body it seemed to be—and emerging from the compartment joined us on the platform. He put a great finger on the arm of the rubicund, thickset, black-moustached Jornicroft.

"I think I'll come with you as far as Paris," said he. "I'll get into a smoker somewhere or the other."

"But, my dear sir"—exclaimed Mr. Jornicroft in some amazement—"it's awfully kind, but why should you?"

"Mrs. Boldero has got to be carried. I didn't realise it. She can't put her feet to the ground. Some one has got to lift her at every stage of the journey. And I'm not going to let any damned clumsy fellow handle her. I'll see her into the Nice train to-morrow night—perhaps I'll go on to Nice with you and fix her up in the hotel. As a matter of fact, I will. I shan't worry you. You won't see me, except at the right time. Don't be afraid."

Mr. Jornicroft, most methodical of Britons, gasped. So, I must confess, did Barbara and I. When Jaffery met us at the station he had no more intention of escorting Doria to Nice than we had ourselves.

"I can't permit it—it's too kind—there's no necessity—we'll get on all right!" spluttered Mr. Jornicroft.

"You won't. She has got to be carried. You're not going to take any risks."

"But, my dear fellow—it's absurd—you haven't any luggage."

"Luggage?" He looked at Mr. Jornicroft as if he had suggested the impossibility of going abroad without a motor veil or the Encyclopædia Britannica. "What the blazes has luggage got to do with it?" His roar could be heard above the din of the hurrying station. "I don't want luggage." The humour of the proposition appealed to him so mightily that he went off into one of his reverberating explosions of mirth.

"Ho! ho! ho!" Then recovering—"Don't you worry about that."

"But have you enough on you—it's an expensive journey—of course I should be most happy—"

Jaffery stepped back and scanned the length of the platform and beckoned to an official, who came hurrying towards him. It was the station master.

"Have you ever seen me before, Mr. Winter?"

The official laughed. "Pretty often, Mr. Chayne."

"Do you think I could get from here to Nice without buying a ticket now?"

"Why, of course, our agent at Boulogne will arrange it if I send him a wire."

"Right," said Jaffery. "Please do so, Mr. Winter. I'm crossing now and going to Nice by the Côte d'Azur Express to-morrow night. And see after a seat for me, will you?"

"I'll reserve a compartment if possible, Mr. Chayne."

The station master raised his hat and departed. Jaffery, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets, beamed upon us like a mountainous child. We were all impressed by his lordly command of the railway systems of Europe. It was a question of credit, of course, but neither Mr. Jornicroft, solid man that he was, nor myself could have undertaken that journey with a few loose shillings in his possession. For the first time since Adrian's death I saw Jaffery really enjoying himself.

And that is how Jaffery without money or luggage or even an overcoat travelled from London to Nice, for no other purpose than to save Doria's sacred little body from being profaned by the touch of ruder hands.

Having carried her at every stage beginning with the transfer from train to steamer at Folkestone and ending with a triumphant march up the stairs to the third floor of the Cimiez hotel, he took the first train back straight through to London.

He returned the same old grinning giant, without a shadow of grumpiness on his jolly face.

About this time a bolt came from the blue or a bomb fell at our feet—the metaphor doesn't matter so long as it conveys a sense of an unlooked-for phenomenon. True, in relation to cosmic forces, it was but a trumpery bolt or a squib-like bomb; but it startled us all the same. The admirable Mrs. Considine got married. A retired warrior, a recent widower, but a celibate of twenty years standing owing to the fact that his late wife and himself had occupied separate continents (on avait fait continent à part, as the French might say) during that period, a Major-General fresh from India, an old flame and constant correspondent, had suddenly swooped down upon the boarding-house in Queen's Gate and, in swashbuckling fashion, had abducted the admirable and unresisting lady. It was a matter of special license, and off went the tardily happy pair to Margate, before we had finished rubbing our eyes.

It was grossly selfish on the part of Mrs. Considine, said Barbara. She thought her—no; perhaps she didn't think her—God alone knows the convolutions of feminine mental processes—but she proclaimed her anyhow—an unscrupulous woman.

"There's Liosha," she said, "left alone in that boarding-house."

"My dear," said I, "Mrs. Jupp—I admit it's deplorable taste to change a name of such gentility as Considine for that of Jupp, but it isn't unscrupulous—Mrs. Jupp did not happen to be charged with a mission from on High to dry nurse Liosha for the rest of her life."

"That's where you're wrong," Barbara retorted. "She was. She was the one person in the world who could look after Liosha. See what she's done for her. It was her duty to stick to Liosha. As for those two old faggots marrying, they ought to be ashamed of themselves."

Whether they were ashamed of themselves or not didn't matter. Liosha remained alone in the boarding-house. Not all Barbara's indignation could turn Mrs. Jupp into the admirable Mrs. Considine and bring her back to Queen's Gate. What was to be done? We consulted Jaffery, who as Liosha's trustee ought to have consulted us. Jaffery pulled a long face and smiled ruefully. For the first time he realised—in spite of tragic happenings—the comedy aspect of his position as the legal guardian of two young, well-to-do and attractive widows. He was the last man in the world to whom one would have expected such a fate to befall. He too swore lustily at the defaulting duenna.

"I thought it was all fixed up nicely forever," he growled.

"Everything is transitory in this life, my dear fellow," said I. "Everything except a trusteeship. That goes on forever."

"That's the devil of it," he growled.

"You must get used to it," said I. "You'll have lots more to look after before you've done with this existence!"

His look hardened and seemed to say: "If you go and die and saddle me with Barbara, I'll punch your head."

He turned his back on me and, jerking a thumb, addressed Barbara.

"Why do you take him out without a muzzle? Now you've got sense. What shall I do?"

Then Liosha superb and smiling sailed into the room.

I ought to have mentioned that Barbara had convened this meeting at the boarding-house. The room into which Liosha sailed was the elegant "bonbonnière" of a chamber known as the "boudoir." There was a great deal of ribbon and frill and photograph frame and artful feminine touch about it, which Liosha and, doubtless, many other inmates thought mightily refined.

Liosha kissed Barbara and shook hands with Jaffery and me, bade us be seated and put us at our ease with a social grace which could not have been excelled by the admirable Mrs. Considine (now Jupp) herself. That maligned lady had performed her duties during the past two years with characteristic ability. Parenthetically I may remark that Liosha's table-manners and formal demeanour were now irreproachable. Mrs. Considine had also taken up the Western education of the child of twelve at the point at which it had been arrested, and had brought Liosha's information as to history, geography, politics and the world in general to the standard of that of the average schoolgirl of fifteen. Again, she had developed in our fair barbarian a natural taste in dress, curbing, on her emergence from mourning, a fierce desire for apparel in primary colours, and leading her onwards to an appreciation of suaver harmonies. Again she had run her tactful hand over Liosha's stockyard vocabulary, erasing words and expressions that might offend Queen's Gate and substituting others that might charm; and she had done it with a touch of humour not lost on Liosha, who had retained the sense of values in which no child born and bred in Chicago can be deficient.

"I suppose you're all fussed to death about this marriage," she said pleasantly. "Well, I couldn't help it."

"Of course not, dear," said Barbara.

"You might have given us a hint as to what was going on," said Jaffery.

"What good could you have done? In Albania if the General had interfered with your plans, you might have shot him from behind a stone and everyone except Mrs. Considine would have been happy; but I've been taught you don't do things like that in South Kensington."

"Whoever wanted to shoot the chap?"

"I, for one," said Barbara. "What are we to do now?"

"Find another dragon," said Jaffery.

"But supposing I don't want another dragon?"

"That doesn't matter in the least. You've got to have one."

"Say, Jaff Chayne," cried Liosha, "do you think I can't look after myself by this time? What do you take me for?"

I interposed. "Rather a lonely young woman, that's all. Jaffery, in his tactless way, by using the absurd term 'dragon,' has missed the point altogether. You want a companion, if only to go about with, say to restaurants and theatres."

"I guess I can get heaps of those," said Liosha, a smile in her eyes. "Don't you worry!"

"All the more reason for a dragon."

"If you mean somebody who's going to sit on my back every time I talk to a man, I decidedly object. Mrs. Considine was different and you're not going to find another like her in a hurry. Besides—I had sense enough to see that she was going to teach me things. But I don't want to be taught any more. I've learned enough."

"But it's just a woman companion that we want to give you, dear," said Barbara. "Her mere presence about you is a protection against—well, any pretty young woman living alone is liable to chance impertinence and annoyance."

Liosha's dark eyes flashed. "I'd like to see any man try to annoy me. He wouldn't try twice. You ask Mrs. Jardine"—Mrs. Jardine was the keeper of the boarding-house—"she'll tell you a thing or two about my being able to keep men from annoying me."

Barbara did, afterwards, ask Mrs. Jardine, and obtained a few sidelights on Liosha's defensive methods. What they lacked in subtlety they made up in physical effectiveness. There were not many spruce young gentlemen who, after a week's residence in that establishment, did not adopt a peculiarly deferential attitude towards Liosha.

"Still," said Jaffery, "I think you ought to have somebody, you know."

"If you're so keen on a dragon," replied Liosha defiantly, "why not take on the job yourself?"

"I? Good Lord! Ho! ho! ho!"

Jaffery rose to his feet and roared with laughter. It was a fine joke.

"There's a lot in Liosha's suggestion," said Barbara, with an air of seriousness.

"You don't expect me to come and live here?" he cried, waving a hand to the frills and ribbons.

"It wouldn't be a bad idea," said I. "You would get all the advantages and refining influences of a first-class English home."

He pivoted round. "Oh, you be—"

"Hush," said Barbara. "Either you ought to stay here and look after Liosha more than you do—"

He protested. Wasn't he always looking after her? Didn't he write? Didn't he drop in now and then to see how she was getting on?

"Have you ever taken the poor child out to dinner?" Barbara asked sternly.

He stood before her in the confusion of a schoolboy detected in a lapse from grace, stammering explanations. Then Liosha rose, and I noticed just the faintest little twitching of her lip.

"I don't want Jaff Chayne to be made to take me out to dinner against his will."

"But—God bless my soul! I should love to take you out. I never thought of it because I never take anybody out. I'm a barbarian, my dear girl, just like yourself. If you wanted to be taken out, why on earth didn't you say so?"

Liosha regarded him steadily. "I would rather cut my tongue out."

Jaffery returned her gaze for a few seconds, then turned away puzzled. There seemed to be an unnecessary vehemence in Liosha's tone. He turned again and approached her with a smiling face.

"I only meant that I didn't know you cared for that sort of thing, Liosha. You must forgive me. Come and dine with me at the Carlton this evening and do a theatre afterwards."

"No, I wont!" cried Liosha. "You insult me."

Her cheeks paled and she shook in sudden wrath. She looked magnificent. Jaffery frowned.

"I think I'll have to be a bit of a dragon after all."

I recalled a scene of nearly two years before when he had frowned and spoken thus roughly and she had invited him to chastise her with a cleek. She did not repeat the invitation, but a sob rose in her throat and she marched to the door, and at the door, turned splendidly, quivering.

"I'm not going to have you or any one else for a dragon. And"—alas for the superficiality of Mrs. Considine's training—"I'm going to do as I damn well like."

Her voice broke on the last word, as she dashed from the room. I exchanged a glance with Barbara, who followed her. Barbara could convey a complicated set of instructions by her glance. Jaffery pulled out pouch and pipe and shook his head.

"Woman is a remarkable phenomenon," said he.

"A more remarkable phenomenon still," said I, "is the dunderheaded male."

"I did nothing to cause these heroics."

"You asked her to ask you to ask her out to dinner."

"I didn't," he protested.

I proved to him by all the rules of feminine logic that he had done so. Holding the match over the bowl of his pipe, he puffed savagely.

"I wish I were a cannibal in Central Africa, where women are in proper subjection. There's no worry about 'em there."

"Isn't there?" said I. "You just ask the next cannibal you meet. He is confronted with the Great Conundrum, even as we are."

"He can solve it by clubbing his wife on the head."

"Quite so," said I. "But do you think the poor fellow does it for pleasure? No. It worries him dreadfully to have to do it."

"That's specious rot, and platitudinous rubbish such as any soft idiot who's been glued all his life to an armchair can reel off by the mile. I know better. A couple of years ago Liosha would have eaten out of my hand, to say nothing of dining with me at the Canton. It's all this infernal civilisation. It has spoiled her."

"You began this argument," said I, "with the proposition that woman was a remarkable phenomenon—a generalisation which includes woman in fig-leaves and woman in diamonds."

"Oh, dry up," said Jaffery, "and tell me what I ought to do. I didn't want to hurt the girl's feelings. Why should I? In fact I'm rather fond of her. She appeals to me as something big and primitive. Long ago, if it hadn't been that poor old Prescott—you know what I mean—I gave up thinking of her in that way at once—and now I just want to be friends—we have been friends. She's a jolly good sort, and, if I had thought of it, I would have taken her about a bit. . . . But what I can't stand is these modern neurotics—"

"You called them heroics—"

"All the same thing. It's purely artificial. It's cultivated by every modern woman. Instead of thinking in a straight line they're taught it's correct to think in a corkscrew. You never know where to have 'em."

"That's their artfulness," said I. "Who can blame them?"

Meanwhile Liosha, pursued by Barbara, had rushed to her bedroom, where she burst into a passion of tears. Jaff Chayne, she wailed, had always treated her like dirt. It was true that her father had stuck pigs in the stockyards; but he was of an old Albanian family, quite as good a family as Jaff Chayne's. It had numbered princes and great chieftains, the majority of whom had been most gloriously slain in warfare. She would like to know which of Jaff Chayne's ancestors had died out of their feather beds.

"His grandfather," said Barbara, "was killed in the Indian Mutiny, and his father in the Zulu War."

Liosha didn't care. That only proved an equality. Jaff Chayne had no right to treat her like dirt. He had no right to put a female policeman over her. She was a free woman—she wouldn't go out to dinner with Jaff Chayne for a thousand pounds. Oh, she hated him; at which renewed declaration she burst into fresh weeping and wished she were dead. As a guardian of young and beautiful widows Jaffery did not seem to be a success.

Barbara, in her wise way, said very little, and searched the paraphernalia on the dressing table for eau-de-cologne and such other lotions as would remove the stain of tears. Holding these in front of Liosha, like a stern nurse administering medicine, she waited till the fit had subsided. Then she spoke.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Liosha, going on like a silly schoolgirl instead of a grown-up woman of the world. I wonder you didn't announce your intention of assassinating Jaffery."

"I've a good mind to," replied Liosha, nursing her grievance.

"Well, why don't you do it?" Barbara whipped up a murderous-looking knife that lay on a little table—it was the same weapon that she had lent the Swiss waiter. "Here's a dagger." She threw it on the girl's lap. "I'll ring the bell and send a message for Mr. Chayne to come up. As soon as he enters you can stick it into him. Then you can stick it into me. Then if you like you can go downstairs and stick it into Hilary. And having destroyed everybody who cares for you and is good to you, you'll feel a silly ass—such a silly ass that you'll forget to stick it into yourself."

Liosha threw the knife into a corner. On its way it snicked a neat little chip out of a chair-back.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Clean your face," said Barbara, and presented the materials.

Sitting on the bed and regarding herself in a hand-mirror Liosha obeyed meekly. Barbara brought the powder puff.

"Now your nose. There!" For the first time Barbara smiled. "Now you look better. Oh, my dear girl!" she cried, seating herself beside Liosha and putting an arm round her waist. "That's not the way to deal with men. You must learn. They're only overgrown babies. Listen."

And she poured into unsophisticated but sympathetic ears all the duplicity, all the treachery, all the insidious cunning and all the serpent-like wisdom of her unscrupulous sex. What she said neither I nor any of the sons of men are ever likely to know! but so proud of belonging to that nefarious sisterhood, so overweening in her sex-conceit did she render Liosha, that when they entered the little private sitting-room next door whither, according to the instructions conveyed by Barbara's parting glance downstairs, I had dragged a softly swearing Jaffery, she marched up to him and said serenely:

"If you really do want me to dine with you, I'll come with pleasure. But the next time you ask me, please do it in a decent way."

I saw mischief lurking in my wife's eye and shook my head at her rebukingly. But Jaffery stared at Liosha and gasped. It was all very well for Doria and Barbara to be ever putting him in the wrong: they were daughters of a subtle civilisation; but here was Liosha, who had once asked him to beat her, doing the same—woman was a more curious phenomenon than ever.

"I'm sorry if my manners are not as they should be," said he with a touch of irony. "I'll try to mend 'em. Anyhow, it's awfully good of you to come."

She smiled and bowed; not the deep bow of Albania, but the delicate little inclination of South Kensington. The quarrel was healed, the incident closed. He arranged to call for her in a taxi at a quarter to seven. Barbara looked at the clock and said that we must be going. We rose to take our leave. Maliciously I said:

"But we've settled nothing about a remplaçante for Mrs. Considine."

"I guess we've settled everything," Liosha replied sweetly. "No one can replace Mrs. Considine."

I quite enjoyed our little silent walk downstairs. Evidently Jaffery's theory of primitive woman had been knocked endways; and, to judge by the faint knitting of her brow, Barbara was uneasily conscious of a mission unfulfilled. Liosha had gained her independence.

Our friends carried out the evening's programme. Liosha behaved with extreme propriety, modelling her outward demeanour upon that of Mrs. Considine, and her attitude towards Jaffery on a literal interpretation of Barbara's reprehensible precepts. She was so dignified that Jaffery, lest he should offend, was afraid to open his mouth except for the purpose of shovelling in food, which he did, in astounding quantity. From what both of us gathered afterwards—and gleefully we compared notes—they were vastly polite to each other. He might have been entertaining the decorous wife of a Dutch Colonial Governor from whom he desired facilities of travel. The simple Eve travestied in guile took him in completely. Aware that it was her duty to treat him like an overgrown baby and mould him to her fancy and twist him round her finger and lead him whithersoever she willed, making him feel all the time that he was pointing out the road, she did not know how to begin. She sat tongue-tied, racking her brains to loss of appetite; which was a pity, for the maître d'hôtel, given a free hand by her barbarously ignorant host, had composed a royal menu. As dinner proceeded she grew shyer than a chit of sixteen. Over the quails a great silence reigned. Hers she could not touch, but she watched him fork, as it seemed to her, one after the other, whole, down his throat: and she adored him for it. It was her ideal of manly gusto. She nearly wept into her Fraises Diane—vast craggy strawberries (in March) rising from a drift of snow impregnated by all the distillations of all the flowers of all the summers of all the hills—because she would have given her soul to sit beside him on the table with the bowl on her lap and feed him with a tablespoon and, for her share of it, lick the spoon after his every mouthful. But it had been drummed into her that she was a woman of the world, the fashionable and all but incomprehensible world, the English world. She looked around and saw a hundred of her sex practising the well-bred deportment that Mrs. Considine had preached. She reflected that to all of those women gently nurtured in this queer English civilisation, equally remote from Armour's stockyards and from her Albanian fastness, the wisdom that Barbara had imparted to her a few hours before was but their A.B.C. of life in their dealings with their male companions. She also reflected—and for the reflection not Mrs. Considine or Barbara, only her woman's heart was responsible—that to the man whom she yearned to feed with great tablespoonfuls of delight, she counted no more than a pig or a cow—her instinctive similes, you must remember, were pastoral—or that peculiar damfool of a sister of his, Euphemia.

When I think of these two children of nature, sitting opposite to one another in the fashionable restaurant trying to behave like super-civilised dolls, I cannot help smiling. They were both so thoroughly in earnest; and they bored themselves and each other so dreadfully. Conversation patched sporadically great expanses of silence and then they talked of the things that did not interest them in the least. Of course they smiled at each other, the smirk being essential to the polite atmosphere; and of course Jaffery played host in the orthodox manner, and Liosha acknowledged attentions with a courtesy equally orthodox. But how much happier they both would have been on a bleak mountain-side eating stew out of a pot! Even champagne and old brandy failed to exercise mellowing influences. The twain were petrified in their own awful correctitude. Perhaps if they had proceeded to a musical comedy or a farce or a variety entertainment where Jaffery could have expanded his lungs in laughter, their evening as a whole might have been less dismal. But a misapprehension as to the nature of the play had caused Jaffery to book seats for a gloomy drama with an ironical title, which stupefied them with depression.

When they waited for the front door of the house in Queen's Gate to open to their ring, Liosha in her best manner thanked him for a most enjoyable evening.

"Most enjoyable indeed," said Jaffery. "We must have another, if you will do me the honour. What do you say to this day week?"

"I shall be delighted," said Liosha.

So that day week they repeated this extraordinary performance, and the week after that, and so on until it became a grim and terrifying fixture. And while Jaffery, in a fog of theory as to the Eternal Feminine, was trying to do his duty, Liosha struggled hard to smother her own tumultuous feelings and to carry out Barbara's prescription for the treatment of overgrown babies; but the deuce of it was that though in her eyes Jaffery was pleasantly overgrown, she could not for the life of her regard him as a baby. So it came to pass that an unnatural pair continued to meet and mystify and misunderstand each other to the great content of the high gods and of one unimportant human philosopher who looked on.

"I told you all this artificiality was spoiling her," Jaffery growled, one day. "She's as prim as an old maid. I can't get anything out of her."

"That's a pity," said I.

"It is." He reflected for a moment. "And the more so because she looks so stunning in her evening gowns. She wipes the floor with all the other women."

I smiled. You can get a lot of quiet amusement out of your friends if you know how to set to work.

It was a gorgeous April day—one of those days when young Spring in madcap masquerade flaunts it in the borrowed mantle of summer. She could assume the deep blue of the sky and the gold of the sunshine, but through all the travesty peeped her laughing youth, the little tender leaves on the trees, the first shy bloom of the lilac, the swelling of the hawthorn buds, the pathetic immature barrenness of the walnuts.

And even the leafless walnuts were full of alien life, for in their hollow boles chippering starlings made furtive nests, and in their topmost forks jackdaws worked with clamorous zeal. A pale butterfly here and there accomplished its early day, and queen wasps awakened from their winter slumber in cosy crevices, the tiniest winter-palaces in the world, sped like golden arrow tips to and from the homes they had to build alone for the swarms that were to come. The flower beds shone gay with tulips and hyacinths; in the long grass beyond the lawn and under the trees danced a thousand daffodils; and by their side warmly wrapped up in furs lay Doria on a long cane chair.

She could not literally dance with the daffodils as I had prophesied, for her full strength had not yet returned, but there she was among them, and she smiled at them sympathetically as though they were dancing in her honour. She was, however, restored to health; the great circles beneath her eyes had disappeared and a tinge of colour shewed beneath her ivory cheek. Beside her, in the first sunbonnet of the year, sat Susan, a prim monkey of nine. . . . Lord! It scarcely seemed two years since Jaffery came from Albania and tossed the seven year old up in his arms and was struck all of a heap by Doria at their first meeting. So thought I, looking from my study-table at the pretty picture some thirty yards, away. And once again—pleasant self repetition of history—Jaffery was expected. Doria, fresh from Nice, had spent a night at her father's house and had come down to us the evening before to complete her convalescence. She had wanted to go straight to the flat in St. John's Wood and begin her life anew with Adrian's beloved ghost, and she had issued orders to servants to have everything in readiness for her arrival, but Barbara had intervened and so had Mr. Jornicroft, a man of limited sympathies and brutal common sense. All of us, including Jaffery, who seemed to regard advice to Doria as a presumption only equalled by that of a pilgrim on his road to Mecca giving hints to Allah as to the way to run the universe, had urged her to give up the abode of tragic memories and find a haven of quietude elsewhere. But she had indignantly refused. The home of her wondrous married life was the home of her widowhood. If she gave it up, how could she live in peace with the consciousness ever in her brain that the Holy of Holies in which Adrian had worked and died was being profaned by vulgar tread? Our suggestions were callous, monstrous, everything that could arise from earth-bound non-percipience of sacred things. We could only prevail upon her to postpone her return to the flat until such time as she was physically strong enough to grapple with changed conditions.

The pink sunbonnet was very near the dark head; both were bending over a book on Doria's knee—Les Malheurs de Sophie, which Susan, proud of her French scholarship, had proposed to read to Doria, who having just returned from France was supposed to be the latest authority on the language. I noticed that the severity of this intellectual communion was mitigated by Susan's favourite black kitten, who, sitting on its little haunches, seemed to be turning over pages rather rapidly. Then all of a sudden, from nowhere in particular, there stepped into the landscape (framed, you must remember, by the jambs of my door) a huge and familiar figure, carrying a great suit-case. He put this on the ground, rushed up to Doria, shook her by both hands, swung Susan in the air and kissed her, and was still laughing and making the welkin ring—that is to say, making a thundering noise—when I, having sped across the lawn, joined the group.

"Hello!" said I, "how did you get here?"

"Walked from the station," said Jaffery. "Came down by an earlier train. No good staying in town on such a morning. Besides—" He glanced at Doria in significant aposiopesis.

"And you lugged that infernal thing a mile and a half?" I asked, pointing to the suit-case, which must have weighed half a ton. "Why didn't you leave it to be called for?"

"This? This little sachet?" He lifted it up by one finger and grinned.

Susan regarded the feat, awe-stricken. "Oh, Uncle Jaff, you are strong!"

Doria smiled at him admiringly and declared she couldn't lift the thing an inch from the ground with both her hands.

"Do you know," she laughed, "when he used to carry me about, I felt as if I had been picked up by an iron crane."

Jaffery beamed with delight. He was just a little vain of his physical strength. A colleague of his once told me that he had seen Jaffery in a nasty row in Caracas during a revolution, bend from his saddle and wrench up two murderous villains by the armpits, one in each hand, and dash their heads together over his horse's neck. But that is the sort of story that Jaffery himself never told.

Barbara, who, flitting about the house on domestic duty, had caught sight of him through a window, came out to greet him.

"Isn't it glorious to have her back?" he cried, waving his great hand towards Doria. "And looking so bonny. Nothing like the South. The sunshine gets into your blood. By Jove! what a difference, eh? Remember when we started for Nice?"

He stood, legs apart and hands on hips, looking down on her with as much pride as if he had wrought the miracle himself.

"Get some more chairs, dear," said Barbara.

By good fortune seeing one of the gardeners in the near distance, I hailed him and shouted the necessary orders. That is the one disadvantage of summer: during the whole of that otherwise happy season, Barbara expects me to be something between a scene-shifter and a Furniture Removing Van.

The chairs were fetched from a far-off summer house and we settled down. Jaffery lit his pipe, smiled at Doria, and met a very wistful look. He held her eyes for a space, and laid his great hand very gently on hers.

"I know what you're thinking of," he said, with an arresting tenderness in his deep voice. "You won't have to wait much longer."

"Is it at the printer's?"

"It's printed."

Barbara and I gave each a little start—we looked at Jaffery, who was taking no notice of us, and then questioningly at each other. What on earth did the man mean?

"From to-morrow onwards, till publication, the press will be flooded with paragraphs about Adrian Boldero's new book. I fixed it up with Wittekind, as a sort of welcome home to you."

"That was very kind, Jaffery," said Doria; "but was it necessary? I mean, couldn't Wittekind have done it before?"

"It was necessary in a way," said Jaffery. "We wanted you to pass the proofs."

Doria smiled proudly. "Pass Adrian's proofs? I? I wouldn't presume to do such a thing."

"Well, here they are, anyway," said Jaffery.

And to the bewilderment of Barbara and myself, he snapped open the hasps of his suit-case and drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs fastened by a clip at the left hand top corner, which he deposited on Doria's lap. She closed her eyes and her eyelids fluttered as she fingered the precious thing. For a moment we thought she was going to faint. There was breathless silence. Even Susan, who had been left out in the cold, let the black kitten leap from her knee, and aware that something out of the ordinary was happening, fixed her wondering eyes on Doria. Her mother and I wondered even more than Susan, for we had more reason. Of what manuscript, in heaven's name, were these the printed proofs? Was it possible that I had been mistaken and that Jaffery, in the assiduity of love, had made coherence out of Adrian's farrago of despair?

Jaffery touched Doria's hand with his finger tips. She opened her eyes and smiled wanly, and looked at the front slip of the long proofs. At once she sat bolt upright.

"'The Greater Glory.' But that wasn't Adrian's title. His title was 'God.' Who has dared to change it?"

When, by way of comforting Jaffery, I criticised Doria's outburst, he fell upon me as though about to devour me alive. After what he had done for her, said I, given up one of the great chances of his career, carried her bodily from London to Nice, and made her a present of a brilliant novel so as to save Adrian's memory from shame, she ought to go on her knees and pray God to shower blessings on his head. As it was, she deserved whipping.

Jaffery called me, among other things, an amazing ass—he has an Eastern habit of, facile vituperation—and roared about the drawing-room. The ladies, be it understood, had retired.

"You don't seem to grip the elements of the situation. You haven't the intelligence of a rabbit. How in Hades could she know I've written the rotten book? She thinks it's Adrian's. And she thinks I've spoiled it. She's perfectly justified. For the little footling services I rendered her on the journey, she's idiotically grateful—out of all proportion. As for Persia, she knows nothing about it—"

"She ought to," said I.

"If you tell her, I'll break your neck," roared Jaffery.

"All right," said I, desiring to remain whole. "So long as you're satisfied, it doesn't much matter to me."

It didn't. After all, one has one's own life to live, and however understanding of one's friends and sympathetically inclined towards them one may be, one cannot follow them emotionally through all their bleak despairs and furious passions. A man doing so would be dead in a week.

"It doesn't seem to strike you," he went on, "that the poor girl's mental and moral balance depends on the successful carrying out of this ghastly farce."

"I do, my dear chap."

"You don't. I wrote the thing as best I could—a labour of love. But it's nothing like Tom Castleton's work—which she thinks is Adrian's. To keep up the deception I had to crab it and say that the faults were mine. Naturally she believes me."

"All right," said I, again. "And when the book is published and Adrian's memory flattered and Doria is assured of her mental and moral balance—what then?"

"I hope she'll be happy," he answered. "Why the blazes do you suppose I've worried if it wasn't to give her happiness?"

I could not press my point. I could not commit the gross indelicacy of saying: "My poor friend, where do you come in?" or words to that effect. Nor could I possibly lay down the proposition that a living second husband—stretching the imagination to the hypothesis of her taking one—is but an indifferent hero to the widow who spends her life in burning incense before the shrine of the demigod husband who is dead. We can't say these things to our friends. We expect them to have common sense as we have ourselves. But we don't, and—for the curious reason, based on the intense individualism of sexual attraction, that no man can appreciate, save intellectually, another man's desire for a particular woman—we can't realize the poor, fool hunger of his heart. The man who pours into our ears a torrential tale of passion moves us not to sympathy, but rather to psychological speculation, if we are kindly disposed, or to murderous inclinations if we are not. On the other hand, he who is silent moves us not at all. In any and every case, however, we entirely fail to comprehend why, if Neæra is obdurate, our swain does not go afield and find, as assuredly he can, some complaisant Amaryllis.

I confess, honestly, that during this conversation I felt somewhat impatient with my dear, infatuated friend. There he was, casting the largesse of his soul at the feet of a blind woman, a woman blinded by the bedazzlement of a false fire, whose flare it was his religion to intensify. There he was doing this, and he did not see the imbecility of it! In after time we can correlate incidents and circumstances, viewing them in a perspective more or less correct. We see that we might have said and done a hundred helpful things. Well, we know that we did not, and there's an end on't. I felt, as I say, impatient with Jaffery, although—or was it because?—I recognised the bald fact that he was in love with Doria to the maximum degree of besottedness.

You see, when you say to a man: "Why do you let the woman kick you?" and he replies, with a glare of indignation: "She has deigned to touch my unworthy carcass with her sacred boot!" what in the world are you to do, save resume the interrupted enjoyment of your cigar? This I did. I also found amusement in comparing his meek wooing, like that of an early Italian amorist, with his rumbustious theories as to marriage by capture and other primitive methods of bringing woman to heel.

Doria, seeing him unresentful of kicking, continued to kick (when Barbara wasn't looking—for Barbara had read her a lecture on the polite treatment of trustees and executors) and made him more her slave than ever. He fetched and carried. He read poetry. He was Custodian of the Sacred Rubbers, when the grass was damp. He shielded her from over-rough incursions on the part of Susan. He chanted the responses in her Litany of Saint Adrian. He sacrificed his golf so that he could sit near her and hold figurative wool for her to unwind. It was very pretty to watch them. The contrast between them made its unceasing appeal. Besides, Doria did not kick all the time; there were long spells during which, touched by the giant's devotion, she repaid it in tokens of tender regard. At such times she was as fascinating an elf as one could wish to meet on a spring morning. He could bring, like no one else, the smile into her dark, mournful eyes. There is no doubt that, in her way and as far as her Adrian-bound emotional temperament permitted, she felt grateful to Jaffery. She also felt safe in his company. He was like a great St. Bernard dog, she declared to Barbara.

These idyllic relations continued unruffled for some days, until a letter arrived from the eminent novelist to whom, with Doria's approval, Jaffery had sent the proofs.

"A marvellous story," was the great man's verdict; "singularly different from 'The Diamond Gate,' only resembling it in its largeness of conception and the perfection of its kind. The alteration of a single word would spoil it. If an alien hand is there, it is imperceptible."

At this splendid tribute Jaffery beamed with happiness. He tossed the letter to Barbara across the breakfast table.

"No alien hand perceptible. Ho! ho! ho! But it's stunning, isn't it? I do believe the old fraud of a book is going to win through. This ought to satisfy Doria, don't you think so?"

"It ought to," said Barbara. "I'll send it up to her room."

But Doria with Adrian's impeccability on the brain—and how could a work of Adrian's be impeccable when an alien hand, however imperceptible, had touched it?—was not satisfied. Towards noon, when she came downstairs, she met Jaffery on the terrace, with a familiar little knitting of the brow before which his welcoming smile faded.

"It's all right up to a point," she said, handing him back the letter. "Nobody with the rudiments of a brain could fail to recognise the merits of Adrian's work. But no novelist is possessed of the critical faculty."

"Then why," asked Jaffery, after the way of men, "did you ask me to send him the novel?"

"I took it for granted he had common sense," replied Doria, after the way of women.

"And he hasn't any?"

"Read the thing again."

Jaffery scanned the page mechanically and looked up: "Well, what's to be done now?"

"I should like to compare the proofs with Adrian's original manuscript. Where is it?"

Here was the question we had all dreaded. Jaffery lied convincingly.

"It went to the printers, my dear, and of course they've destroyed it."

"I thought everything was typed nowadays."

"Typing takes time," replied Jaffery serenely. "And I'm not an advocate of feather-beds and rose-water baths for printers. As I wanted to rush the book out as quickly as possible, I didn't see why I should pamper them with type. Have you the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"

"No," said Doria.

"Well—don't you see?" said Jaffery, with a smile.

For the first time I praised Old Man Jornicroft. He had brought up his daughter far from the madding mechanics of the literary life. To my great relief, Doria swallowed the incredible story.

"It was careless of you not to have given special instructions for the manuscript to be saved, I must say. But if it's gone, it's gone. I'm not unreasonable."

"I think you are," said Barbara, who had been arranging flowers in the drawing-room, and had emerged onto the terrace. "You made Jaffery submit his careful editing to an expert, and you're honourably bound to accept the expert's verdict."

"I do accept it," she retorted with a toss of her head and a flash of her eyes. "Have I ever said I didn't? But I'm at liberty to keep to my own opinion."

Jaffery scratched his whiskers and beard and screwed up his face as he did in moments of perplexity.

"What exactly do you want changed?" he asked.

"Just those few coarse touches you admit are yours."

"Adrian wanted to get an atmosphere of rye-whisky and bad tobacco—not tea and strawberries." The eminent novelist's encomium had aroused the artist's pride in his first-born. An altered word would spoil the book. "My dear girl," said he, stretching out his great hand, from beneath which she wriggled an impatient shoulder, "my dear Doria," said he, very gently, "the possessor of the Order of Merit is both a critic and a man of common sense. Anyway, he knows more about novels than either of us do. If it weren't for him I would give you the proofs to blue pencil as much as you liked. But I'm sure you would make a thundering mess of it."