Doria made a little gesture—a bit of a shrug—a bit of a resigned flicker of her hands.
"Of course, do as you please, dear Jaffery. I'm quite alone, a woman with nobody to turn to"—she smiled with her lips, but there was no coordination of her eyes—"as I said before, I pass the proofs."
She went quickly through the drawing-room door into the house, leaving Jaffery still scratching a red whisker.
"Oh, Lord!" said he, ruefully, "I've gone and done it now!"
He turned to follow her, but Barbara interposed her small body on the threshold.
"Don't be a silly fool, Jaff. You've pandered quite enough to her morbid vanity. It's your book, isn't it? You have given it birth. You know better than anybody what is vital to it. Just you send those proofs straight back to the publisher. If you let her persuade you to change one word, as true as I'm standing here, I'll tell her the whole thing, and damn the consequences!"
My exquisite Barbara's rare "damns" were oaths in the strictest sense. They connoted the most irrefragable of obligations. She would no more think of breaking a "damn" than her marriage vows or a baby's neck.
"Of course, I'm not going to let her touch the thing," said Jaffery. "But I don't want her to look on me as a bullying brute."
"It would be better, both for you and her, if she did," snapped Barbara. "The ordinary woman's like the dog and the walnut tree. It's only the exceptional woman that can take command."
I, who had been sitting calm, on the low parapet beneath the tenderly sprouting wistaria arbour, broke my philosophic silence.
"Observe the exceptional woman," said I.
For a day or so Doria stood upon her dignity, treating Jaffery with cold politeness. In the mornings she allowed him to wrap her up in her garden chair and attend to her comforts, and then, settled down, she would open a volume of Tolstoi and courteously signify his dismissal. Jaffery with a hang-dog expression went with me to the golf-course, where he drove with prodigious muscular skill, and putted execrably. Had it not been a question of good taste, to say nothing of human sentiment, I would have reminded him that the thing he was hitting so violently was only a little white ball and not poor Adrian's skull. If ever a man was loyal to a dead friend Jaffery Chayne was loyal to Adrian Boldero. But poor old Jaffery was being checked in every vital avenue, not by the memory of the man whom he had known and loved, but by his cynical and masquerading ghost. It is not given to me, thank God! to know from direct speech what Jaffery thought of Adrian—for Jaffery is too splendid a fellow to have ever said a word in depreciation of his once living friend and afterward dead rival; but both I, who do not aspire to these Quixotic heights and only, with masculine power of generalisation, deduce results from a quiet eye's harvest of mundane phenomena, and Barbara, whose rapier intuition penetrates the core of spiritual things, could, with little difficulty, divine the passionate struggle between love and hatred, between loyalty and tenderness, between desire and duty that took place in the soul of this chivalrous yet primitive and vastly appetited gentleman.
You may think I am trying to present Jaffery as a hero of romance. I am not. I am merely trying to put before you, in my imperfect way, a barbarian at war with civilised instincts; a lusty son of Pantagruel forced into the incongruous rôle of Sir Galahad. . . . During the term of his punishment he behaved in a bearish and most unheroic manner. At last, however, Doria forgave him, and, smiling on him once more, permitted him to read Tolstoi aloud to her. Whereupon he mended his manners.
The day following this reconciliation was a Sunday. We had invited Liosha (as we constantly did) to lunch and dine. She usually arrived by an early train in the forenoon and returned by the late train at night. But on Saturday evening, she asked Barbara, over the telephone, for permission to bring a friend, a gentleman staying in the boarding house, the happy possessor of a car, who would motor her down. His name was Fendihook. Barbara replied that she would be delighted to see Liosha's friend, and of course came back to us and speculated as to who and what this Mr. Fendihook might be.
"Why didn't you ask her?" said I.
"It would scarcely have been polite."
We consulted Jaffery. "Never heard of him," he growled. "And I don't like to hear of him now. That young woman's running loose a vast deal too much."
"What an old dog in the manger you are!" cried Barbara; and thus started an old argument.
On Sunday morning we saw Mr. Fendihook for ourselves. I met the car, a two-seater, which he drove himself, at the front door, and perceived between a motoring cap worn peak behind and a tightly buttoned Burberry coat a pink, fleshy, clean shaven face, from the middle of which projected an enormous cigar. I helped Liosha out.
"This is Mr. Fendihook."
"Commonly called Ras Fendihook, at your service," said he.
I smiled and shook hands and gave the car into the charge of my chauffeur, who appeared from the stable-yard. In the hall, aided by Franklin, Mr. Ras Fendihook divested himself of his outer wrappings and revealed a thickset man of medium height, rather flashily attired. I know it is narrow-minded, but I have a prejudice against a black and white check suit, and a red necktie threaded through a gold ring.
"Against the rules?" he asked, holding up his cigar, a very good one, on which he had retained the band.
"By no means," said I, "we smoke all over the house."
"Tiptop!" He looked around the hall. "You seem to have a bit of all right here."
"I told you you would like it. Everybody does," said Liosha. "Ah, Barbara, dear!" She ran up the stairs to meet her. We followed. Mr. Fendihook was presented. I noticed, with a little shock, that he had kept on his gloves.
"Very kind of you to let me come down, madam. I thought a bit of a blow would do our fair friend good."
Barbara took off Liosha, looking very handsome and fresh beneath the motor-veil, to her room, leaving me with Mr. Fendihook. As he preceded me into the drawing-room I saw a bald patch like a tonsure in the middle of a crop of coarse brown hair. Again he looked round appreciatively and again he said "Tiptop!" He advanced to the open French window.
"Garden's all right. Must take a lot of doing. Who are our friends? The long and the short of it, aren't they?"
He alluded to Jaffery and Doria, who were strolling on the lawn. I told him their names.
"Jaffery Chayne. Why, that's the chap Mrs. Prescott's always talking about, her guardian or something."
"Her trustee," said I, "and an intimate friend of her late husband."
"Ah!" said he, with a twinkle in his eyes which, I will swear, signified "Then there was a Prescott after all!" He waved his cigar. "Introduce me." And as I accompanied him across the lawn—"There's nothing like knowing everybody—getting it over at once. Then one feels at home."
"I hope you felt at home as soon as you entered the house," said I.
"Of course I did, old pal," he replied heartily. "Of course I did." And the amazing creature patted me on the back.
I performed the introductions. Mr. Fendihook declared himself delighted to make the acquaintance of my friends. Then as conversation did not start spontaneously, he once more looked around, nodded at the landscape approvingly, and once more said "Tiptop!"
"That's what I want to have," he continued, "when I can afford to retire and settle down. None of your gimcrack modern villas in a desirable residential neighbourhood, but an English gentleman's country house."
"It's your ambition to be an English gentleman, Mr. Fendihook?" queried Doria.
He laughed good-humouredly. "Now you're pulling my leg."
I saw that he was not lacking in shrewdness.
Susan, never far from Jaffery during her off-time, came running up.
"Hallo, is that your young 'un?" Mr. Fendihook asked. "Come and say how d'ye do, Gwendoline."
Susan advanced shyly. He shook hands with her, chucked her under the chin and paid her the ill compliment of saying that she was the image of her father. Jaffery stood with folded arms holding the bowl of his pipe in one hand and looked down on Mr. Fendihook as on some puzzling insect.
"Do you mind if I take off my gloves?" our strange visitor asked.
"Pray do," said I. The sight of the fellow wandering about a garden bareheaded and gloved in yellow chamois leather had begun to affect my nerves. He peeled them off.
"Look here, Gwendoline Arabella, my dear," he cried. "Catch!"
He made a feint of throwing them.
"Haven't you caught 'em?"
"No."
She stared at the man open-mouthed, for behold, his hands were empty.
"Tut, tut!" said he. "Perhaps you can catch a handkerchief." He flicked a red silk handkerchief from his pocket, crumpled it into a ball and threw; but like the gloves it vanished. "Now where has it gone to?"
Susan, who had shrunk beneath Jaffery's protecting shadow, crept forward fascinated. Mr. Fendihook took a sudden step or two towards a flower bed.
"Why, there it is!"
He stretched out a hand and there before our eyes the handkerchief hung limp over the pruned top of a standard rose.
"Jolly good!" exclaimed Jaffery.
"I hope you don't mind. I like amusing kiddies. Have you ever talked to angels, Araminta? No? Well, I have. Look."
He threw half-crowns up into the air until they disappeared into the central blue, and then held a ventriloquial conversation, not in the best of taste, with the celestial spirits, who having caught the coins announced their intention of sticking to them. But threats of reporting to headquarters prevailed, and one by one the coins dropped and jingled in his hand. We applauded. Susan regarded him as she would a god.
"Can you do it again?" she asked breathlessly.
"Lord bless you, Eustacia, I can keep on doing it all day long."
He balanced his cigar on the tip of his nose and with a snap caught it in his mouth. He turned to me with a grin, which showed white strong teeth. "More than you could do, old pal!"
"You must have practised that a great deal," said Doria.
"Two hours a day solid year in and year out—not that trick alone, of course. Here!" he burst into a laugh. "I'm blowed if you know who I am—I'm the One and Only Ras Fendihook—Illusionist, Ventriloquist, and General Variety Artist. Haven't you ever seen my turn?"
We confessed, with regret, that we had missed the privilege.
"Well, well, it's a queer world," he said philosophically. "You've never heard of me—and perhaps you two gentlemen are big bugs in your own line—and I've never heard of you. But anyhow, I never asked you, Mr. Chayne, to catch my gloves."
"I haven't your gloves," said Jaffery, with his eye on Susan.
"You have. You've got 'em in your pocket."
And diving into Jaffery's jacket pocket, he produced the wash-leather gloves.
"There, Petronella," said he, "that's the end of the matinée performance."
Susan looked at him wide-eyed. "I'm not at all tired."
"Aren't you? Then don't let that big black dog there chase the little one."
He pointed with his finger and from behind the old yew arbour came the shrill clamour of a little dog in agony. It brought Barbara flying out of the house. Liosha followed leisurely. The yelping ceased. Mr. Ras Fendihook went to meet his hostess. Doria, Jaffery and I looked at one another in mutual and dismayed comprehension.
"Old pal," quoted Doria.
I glanced apprehensively across the strip of lawn. "I hope, for his sake, he's not calling Barbara 'old girl.'"
"He calls everybody funny names," Susan chimed in. "See what a lot he called me."
"Does your Royal Fairy Highness approve of him?" asked Jaffery.
"I should think so, Uncle Jaff," she replied fervently. "He's—he's marvelious!"
"He is," said Jaffery, "and even that jewel of language doesn't express him."
"My dear," said I, "you stick close to him all day, as long as mummy will let you."
I have never got the credit I deserved for the serene wisdom of that suggestion. All through lunch, all through the long afternoon until it was Susan's bedtime, her obedience to my command saved over and over again a tense situation. To the guest in her house Barbara was the perfection of courtesy. But beneath the mask of convention raged fury with Liosha. A woman can seldom take a queer social animal for what he is and suck the honey from his flowers of unconventionality. She had never heard a man say "Right oh!" to a butler when offered a second helping of pudding. She had never dreamed of the possibility of a strange table-neighbour laying his hand on hers and requesting her to "take it from me, my dear." It sent awful shivers down her spine to hear my august self alluded to as her "old man." She looked down her nose when, to the apoplectic joy of Susan (supposed to be on her primmest behaviour at meals), he, with a significant wink, threw a new potato into the air, caught it on his fork and conveyed it to his mouth. Her smile was that of the polite hostess and not of the enthusiastic listener when he told her of triumphs in Manchester and Cincinnati. To her confusion, he presupposed her intimate acquaintance with the personalities of the World of Variety.
"That's where I came across little Evie Bostock," he said confidentially. "A clipper, wasn't she? Just before she ran off with that contortionist—you know who I mean—handsome chap—what's his name?—oh, of course you know him."
My poor Barbara! Daughter of a distinguished Civil servant, a K.C.B., assumed to be on friendly terms with a Boneless Wonder!
"But indeed I don't, Mr. Fendihook," she replied pathetically.
"Yes, yes, you must." He snapped his fingers. "Got it. Romeo! You must have heard of Romeo."
I sniggered—I couldn't help it—at Barbara's face. He went on with his reminiscences. Barbara nearly wept, whilst I, though displeased with Liosha for introducing such an incongruous element into my family circle, took the rational course of deriving from the fellow considerable entertainment. Jaffery would have done the same as myself, had not his responsibility as Liosha's guardian weighed heavily upon him. He frowned, and ate in silence, vastly. Doria, like my wife, I could see was shocked. The only two who, beside myself, enjoyed our guest were Susan and Liosha. Well, Susan was nine years old and a meal at which a guest broke her whole decalogue of table manners at once—to say nothing of the performance of such miracles as squeezing an orange into nothingness, without the juice running out, and subsequently extracting it from the neck of an agonised mother—was a feast of memorable gaudiness. Susan could be excused. But Liosha? Liosha, pupil of the admirable Mrs. Considine? Liosha, descendant of proud Albanian chieftains who had lain in gory beds for centuries? How could she admire this peculiarly vulgar, although, in his own line, peculiarly accomplished person? Yet her admiration was obvious. She sat by my side, grand and radiant, proud of the wondrous gift she had bestowed on us. She acclaimed his tricks, she laughed at his anecdotes, she urged him on to further exhibition of prowess, and in a magnificent way appeared unconscious of the presence at the table of her trustee and would-be dragon, Jaffery Chayne.
After lunch Susan obeyed my instructions and stuck very close to Mr. Fendihook. Doria retired for her afternoon rest. Jaffery, having invited Liosha to go for a long walk with him and she having declined, with a polite smile, on the ground that her best Sunday-go-to-meeting long gown was not suitable for country roads, went off by himself in dudgeon. Barbara took Liosha aside and cross-examined her on the subject of Mr. Fendihook and as far as hospitality allowed signified her non-appreciation of the guest. After a time I took him into the billiard room, Susan following. As he was a brilliant player, giving me one hundred and fifty in two hundred and running out easily before I had made thirty, he found less excitement in the game than in narrating his exploits and performing tricks for the child. He did astonishing things with the billiard balls, making them run all over his body like mice and balancing them on cues and juggling with them five at a time. I think that day he must have gone through his whole répertoire.
The party assembled for tea in the drawing-room. Fendihook's first words to Liosha were:
"Hallo, my Balkan Queen, how have you been getting on?"
"Very well, thank you," smiled Liosha.
He turned to Jaffery. "She's not up to her usual form to-day. But sometimes she's a fair treat! I give you my word."
He laughed loudly and winked. Jaffery, whose agility in repartee was rather physical than mental, glowered at him, rumbled something unintelligible beneath his breath, and took tea out to Doria, who was established on the terrace.
"Seems to have got the pip," Mr. Fendihook remarked cheerfully.
Barbara, with icy politeness, offered him tea. He refused, explaining that unless he sat down to a square meal, which, in view of the excellence of his lunch, he was unable to do, he never drank tea in the afternoon.
"Could I have a whisky and soda, old pal?"
The drink was brought. He pledged Barbara—"And may I drink to the success of that promising little affair"—he jerked a backward thumb—"between our pippy friend and the charming widow?"
Barbara had passed the gasping stage.
"Mr. Chayne," she said in the metallic voice that, before now, had made strong men grow pale, "Mr. Chayne stands in the same relation of trustee to Mrs. Boldero as he does to Mrs. Prescott."
But Fendihook was undismayed. "Some fellows have all the luck! Here's to him, and here's to you, Sheba's Queen."
He nodded to Liosha and pulled at his drink. But Liosha did not respond. A hard look appeared in her eyes and the knuckles of her hand showed white. Presently she rose and went onto the terrace, where she found Jaffery fixing a rebellious rug round Doria's feet. And this is what happened.
"Jaff Chayne," she said, "I want to have a word with you. You'll excuse me, Doria, but Jaff Chayne's as much my trustee as he is yours. I have business to talk."
Doria eyed her coldly. "Talk as much business as you like, my dear girl. I'm not preventing you." Jaffery strode off with Liosha. As soon as they were out of earshot, she said:
"Are you going to marry her?"
"Who?"
"Doria."
Jaffery bent his brows on her. He was not in his most angelic mood.
"What the blazes has that got to do with you? Just you mind your own business."
"All right," she retorted, "I will."
"Glad to hear it," said he. "And now I want a word with you. What do you mean by bringing that howling cad down here?"
"It's you who howl, not he. He's a very kind gentleman and very clever and he makes me laugh. He's not like you."
"He's a performing gorilla," cried Jaffery.
They were both exceedingly angry, and having walked very fast, they found themselves in front of the gate of the walled garden. Instinctively they entered and had the place to themselves.
"And a confounded bounder of a gorilla at that!" Jaffery continued.
"How dare you speak so of my friend?"
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for having such a friend. And you're just going to drop him. Do you understand?"
"Shan't!" said Liosha.
"You shall. You're not going to be seen outside the house with him."
There was battle clamorous and a trifle undignified. They said the same things over and over again. Both had worked themselves into a fury.
"I forbid you to have anything to do with the fellow."
"You, Jaff Chayne, told me to mind my own business. Just you mind yours."
"It is my business," he shouted, "to see that you don't disgrace yourself with a beast of a fellow like that."
"What did you say? Disgrace myself?" She drew herself up magnificently. "Do you think I would disgrace myself with any man living? You insult me."
"Rot!" cried Jaffery. "Every woman's liable to make a blessed fool of herself—and you more than most."
"I know one that's not going to make a fool of herself," she taunted, and flung an arm in the direction of the house.
Jaffery blazed. "You leave me alone."
"And you leave me alone."
They glared inimically into each other's eyes. Liosha turned, marched superbly away, opened the garden door and, passing through, slammed it in his face. It had been a very pretty, primitive quarrel, free from all subtlety. Elemental instinct flamed in Jaffery's veins. If he could have given her a good sound thrashing he would have been a happy man. This accursed civilisation paralysed him. He stood for a few moments tearing at whiskers and beard. Then he started in pursuit, and overtook her in the middle of the lawn.
"Anyhow, you'll take the infernal fellow away now and never bring him here again."
"It's Hilary's house, not yours," she remarked, looking straight before her.
"Well, ask him."
"I will. Hilary!"
At her hail and beckon I left the terrace where Mr. Fendihook had been discoursing irrepressibly on the Bohemian advantages of widowhood to a quivering Doria, and advanced to meet her, a flushed and bright-eyed Juno.
"Would you like me to bring Ras Fendihook here again?"
"Tell her straight," said Jaffery.
Even Susan, looking from one to the other, would have been conscious of storms. I took her hand.
"My dear Liosha," said I, "our social system is so complicated that it is no wonder you don't appreciate the more delicate ramifications—"
"Oh! Talk sense to her," growled Jaffery.
"Mr. Fendihook is not quite"—I hesitated—"not quite the kind of person, my dear, that we're accustomed to meet."
"I know," said Liosha, "you want them all stamped out in a pattern, like little tin soldiers."
"I see the point of your criticism, and it's true, as far as it goes."
"Oh, go on—" Jaffery interrupted.
"But—" I continued.
"You'd rather not see him again?"
"No," roared Jaffery.
"I'm talking to Hilary, not you," said Liosha. She turned to me. "You and Barbara would like me to take him away right now?"
I still held her hand, which was growing moist—and I suppose mine was too—and I didn't like to drop it, for fear of hurting her feelings. I gave it a great squeeze. It was very difficult for me. Personally, I enjoyed the frank, untrammelled and prodigiously accomplished scion of a vulgar race. As a mere bachelor, isolated human, meeting him, I should have taken him joyously, if not to my heart, at any rate to my microscope and studied him and savoured him and got out of him all that there was of grotesqueness. But to every one of my household, save Susan who did not count, he was—I admit, deservedly—an object of loathing. So I squeezed Liosha's hand.
"The beginning and end of the matter, my dear," said I, "is that he's not quite a gentleman."
"All right," said Liosha, liberating herself. "Now I know."
She left me and sailed to the terrace. I use the metaphor advisedly. She had a way of walking like a full-rigged ship before a breeze.
"Ras Fendihook, it's time we were going."
Mr. Fendihook looked at his watch and jumped up.
"We must hook it!"
Barbara asked conventionally: "Won't you stay to supper?"
"Great Scott, no!" he exclaimed. "No offence meant. You're very kind. But it's Ladies' Night at the Rabbits and I'm Buck Rabbit for the evening and the Queen of Sheba's coming as my guest."
"Who are the Rabbits?" asked Doria.
Even I had heard of this Bohemian confraternity; and I explained with a learned inaccuracy that evoked a semi-circular grin on the pink, fleshy face of Mr. Ras Fendihook.
"Ouf! Thank goodness!" said Barbara as the two-seater scuttered away down the drive.
"Yes, indeed," said Doria.
Jaffery shook his fist at the disappearing car.
"One of these days, I'll break his infernal neck!"
"Why?" asked Doria, on a sharp note of enquiry.
"I don't like him," said Jaffery. "And he's taking her out to dine among all that circus crowd. It's damnable!"
"For the lady whose father stuck pigs in Chicago," said Doria. "I should think it was rather a rise in the social scale."
And she went indoors with her nose in the air. To every one save the puzzled Jaffery it was obvious that she disapproved of his interest in Liosha.
CHAPTER XVI
"The Greater Glory" came out in due season, puzzled the reviewers and made a sensation; a greater sensation even than a legitimate successor to "The Diamond Gate" dictated by the spirit of Tom Castleton. The contrast was so extraordinary, so inexplicable. It was generally concluded that no writer but Adrian Boldero, in the world's history, had ever revealed two such distinct literary personalities as those that informed the two novels. The protean nature of his genius aroused universal wonder. His death was deplored as the greatest loss sustained by English letters since Keats. The press could do nothing but hail the new book as a masterpiece. Barbara and myself, who, alone of mortals, knew the strange history of the two books, did not agree with the press. In sober truth "The Greater Glory" was not a work of genius; for, after all, the only hallmark of a work of genius that you can put your finger on is its haunting quality. That quality Tom Castleton's work possessed; Jaffery Chayne's did not. "The Greater Glory" vibrated with life, it was wide and generous, it was a capital story; but, unlike "The Diamond Gate," it could not rank with "The Vicar of Wakefield" and "David Copperfield." I say this in no way to disparage my dear old friend, but merely to present his work in true proportion. Published under his own name it would doubtless have received recognition; probably it would have made money; but it could not have met with the enthusiastic reception it enjoyed when published under the tragic and romantic name of Adrian Boldero.
Of course Jaffery beamed with delight. His forlorn hope had succeeded beyond his dreams. He had fulfilled the immediate needs of the woman he loved. He had also astonished himself enormously.
"It's darned good to let you and Barbara know," said he, "that I'm not a mere six foot of beef and thirst, but that I'm a chap with brains, and"—he turned over a bundle of press-cuttings—"and 'poetic fancy' and 'master of the human heart' and 'penetrating insight into the soul of things' and 'uncanny knowledge of the complexities of woman's nature.' Ho! ho! ho! That's me, Jaff Chayne, whom you've disregarded all these years. Look at it in black and white: 'uncanny knowledge of the complexities of a woman's nature'! Ho! ho! ho! And it's selling like blazes."
It did not enter his honest head to envy the dead man his fresh ill-gotten fame. He accepted the success in the large simplicity of spirit that had enabled him to conceive and write the book. His poorer human thoughts and emotions centred in the hope that now Adrian's restless ghost would be laid forever and that for Doria there would open a new life in which, with the past behind her, she could find a glory in the sun and an influence in the stars, and a spark in her own bosom responsive to his devotion. For the tumultuous moment, however, when Adrian's name was on all men's tongues, and before all men's eyes, the ghost walked in triumphant verisimilitude of life. At all the meetings of Jaffery and Doria, he was there smiling beneath his laurels, whenever he was evoked; and he was evoked continuously. Either by law of irony or perhaps for intrinsic merit, the bridges to whose clumsy construction Jaffery, like an idiot, had confessed, had been picked out by many reviewers as typical instances of Adrian Boldero's new style. Such blunders were flies in Doria's healing ointment. She alluded to the reviewers in disdainful terms. How dared editors employ men to write on Adrian's work who were unable to distinguish between it and that of Jaffery Chayne?
One day, when she talked like this, Barbara lost her temper.
"I think you're an ungrateful little wretch. Here has Jaffery sacrificed his work for three months and devoted himself to pulling together Adrian's unfinished manuscript and making a great success of it, and you treat him as if he were a dog."
Doria protested. "I don't. I am grateful. I don't know what I should do without Jaffery. But all my gratitude and fondness for Jaffery can't alter the fact that he has spoiled Adrian's work; and when I hear those very faults in the book praised, I am fit to be tied."
"Well, go crazy and bite the furniture when you're all by yourself," said Barbara; "but when you're with Jaffery try to be sane and civil."
"I think you're horrid!" Doria exclaimed, "and if you weren't the wife of Adrian's trusted friend, I would never speak to you again."
"Rubbish!" said Barbara. "I'm talking to you for your good, and you know it."
Meanwhile Jaffery lingered on in London, in the cheerless little eyrie in Victoria Street, with no apparent intention of ever leaving it. Arbuthnot of The Daily Gazette satirically enquiring whether he wanted a job or still yearned for a season in Mayfair he consigned, in his grinning way, to perdition. Change was the essence of holiday-making, and this was his holiday. It was many years since he had one. When he wanted a job he would go round to the office.
"All right," said Arbuthnot, "and, in the meantime, if you want to keep your hand in by doing a fire or a fashionable wedding, ring us up."
Whereat Jaffery roared, this being the sort of joke he liked.
The need of a holiday amid the bricks and mortar of Victoria Street may have impressed Arbuthnot, but it did not impress me. I dismissed the excuse as fantastic. I tackled him one day, at lunch, at the club, assuming my most sceptical manner.
"Well," said he, "there's Doria. Somebody must look after her."
"Doria," said I, "is a young woman, now that she is in sound health, perfectly capable of looking after herself. And if she does want a man's advice, she can always turn to me."
"And there's Liosha."
"Liosha," I remarked judiciously, "is also a young woman capable of looking after herself. If she isn't, she has given you very definitely to understand that she's going to try. Have you had any more interesting evenings out lately?"
"No," he growled. "She's offended with me because I warned her off that low-down bounder."
"I think you did your best," said I, "to make her take up with him."
He protested. We argued the point, and I think I got the best of the argument.
"Well, anyhow," he said with an air of infantile satisfaction, "she can't marry him."
"Who's going to prevent her, if she wants to?"
"The law of England." He laughed, mightily pleased. "The beggar is married already. I've found that out. He's got three or four wives in fact—oh, a dreadful hound—but only one real one with a wedding ring, and she lives up in the north with a pack of children."
"All the more dangerous for Liosha to associate with such a villain."
He waved the suggestion aside. No fear of that, said he. It was not Liosha's game. Hers was an Amazonian kind of chastity. Here I agreed with him.
"All the less reason," said I, "for you to stay in London, so as to look after her."
"But I don't like her to be seen about in the fellow's company. She'll get a bad name."
"Look here," said I, "the idea of a vast, hairy chap like you devoting his life to keeping a couple of young widows out of mischief is too preposterous. Try me with something else."
Then, being in good humour, he told me the real reason. He was writing another book.
He was writing another novel and he did not want any one to know. He was getting along famously. He had had the story in his head for a long time. Glad to talk about it; sketched the outline very picturesquely. Perhaps I was more vitally interested in the development of the man Jaffery than in the story. A queer thing had happened. The born novelist had just discovered himself and clamoured for artistic self-expression. He was writing this book just because he could not help it, finding gladness in the mere work, delighting in the mechanics of the thing, and letting himself go in the joy of the narrative. What was going to become of it when written, I did not enquire. It was rather too delicate a matter. Jaffery Chayne could be nothing else than Jaffery Chayne. A new novel published by him would resemble "The Greater Glory" as closely as "Pendennis" resembles "Philip." And then there would be the deuce to pay. If he published it under his own name, he would render himself liable to the charge of having stolen a novel from the dead author of "The Greater Glory," and so complicate this already complicated web of literary theft; and if he threw sufficient dust into the eyes of Doria to enable him to publish under Adrian's name, he would be performing the task of the altruistic bees immortalised by Virgil.
Anyhow, there he was, perfectly happy, pegging away at his novel, looking after Doria, pretending to look after Liosha, and enjoying the society of the few cronies, chiefly adventurous birds of passage like himself, who happened to be passing through London. Being a man of modest needs, save need of mere bulk of simple food, he found his small patrimony and the savings from his professional earnings quite adequate for amenable existence. When he wanted healthy, fresh air he came down to us to see Susan; when he wanted anything else he went to see Doria, which was almost daily.
Doria was living now in the flat surrounded by the Lares and Penates consecrated by Adrian. Now and then for purposes of airing and dusting, she entered the awful room—neither servants nor friends were allowed to cross the threshold; but otherwise it was always locked and the key lay in her jewel case. Adrian was the focus of her being. She put heavy tasks on Jaffery. There was to be a fitting monument on Adrian's grave, over which she kept him busy. In her blind perversity she counted on his coöperation. It was he who carried through negotiations with an eminent sculptor for a bust of Adrian, which in her will, made about that time, she bequeathed to the nation. She ordered him to see to the inclusion of Adrian in the supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography. . . . And all the time Jaffery obeyed her sovereign behests without a murmur and without a hint that he desired reward for his servitude. But, to those gifted with normal vision, signs were not wanting that he chafed, to put it mildly, under this forced worship of Adrian; and to those who knew Jaffery it was obvious that his one-sided arrangement could not last forever. Doria remained blind, taking it for granted that every one should kiss the feet of her idol and in that act of adoration find august recompense. That the man loved her she was fully aware; she was not devoid of elementary sense; but she accepted it, as she accepted everything else, as her due, and perhaps rather despised Jaffery for his meekness. Why, again, she disregarded what her instinct must have revealed to her of the primitive passions lurking beneath the exterior of her kind and tender ogre, I cannot understand. For one thing, she considered herself his intellectual superior; vanity perhaps blinded her judgment. At all events she did not realise that a change was bound to come in their relations. It came, inevitably.
One day in June they sat together on the balcony of the St. John's Wood flat, in the soft afternoon shadow, both conscious of queer isolation from the world below, and from the strange world masked behind the vast superficies of brick against which they were perched. Jaffery said something about a nest midway on a cliff side overlooking the sea. He also, in bass incoherence, formulated the opinion that in such a nest might he found true happiness. The pretty languor of early summer laughed in the air. Their situation, 'twixt earth and heaven, had a little sensuous charm. Doria replied sentimentally:
"Yes, a little house, covered with clematis, on a ledge of cliff, with the sea-gulls wheeling about it—bringing messages from the sunset lands across the blue, blue sea—" Poor dear! She forgot that sea lit by a westering sun is of no colour at all and that the blue water lies to the east; but no matter; Jaffery, drinking in her words, forgot it likewise. "Away from everything," she continued, "and two people who loved—with a great, great love—"
Her eyes were fixed on the motor omnibuses passing up and down Maida Vale at the end of her road. Her lips were parted—the ripeness of youth and health rendered her adorable. A flush stained her ivory cheek—you will find the exact simile in Virgil. She was too desirable for Jaffery's self-control. He bent forward in his chair—they were sitting face to face, so that he had his back to the motor omnibuses—and put his great hand on her knee.
"Why not we two?"
It was silly, sentimental, schoolboyish—what you please; but every man's first declaration of love is bathos—the zenith of his passion connoting perhaps the nadir of his intelligence. Anyhow the declaration was made, without shadow of mistake.
Doria switched her knee away sharply, as her vision of sunset and gulls and blue sea and a clematis-covered house vanished from before her eyes, and she found herself on her balcony with Jaff Chayne.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"You know very well what I mean."
He rose like a leviathan and made a step towards her. The three-foot balustrade of the balcony seemed to come to his ankles. She put out a hand.
"Oh, don't do that, Jaff. You might fall over. It makes me so nervous."
He checked himself and stood up quite straight. Again he felt as if she had dealt him a slap in the face.
"You know very well what I mean," he repeated. "I love you and I want you and I'll never be happy till I get you."
She looked away from him and lifted her slender shoulders.
"Why spoil things by talking of the impossible?"
"The word has no meaning. Doesn't exist," said Jaffery.
"It exists very much indeed," she returned, with a quick upward glance.
"Not with an obstinate devil like me."
He leaned against the low balustrade. She rose.
"You'll drive me into hysterics," she cried and fled to the drawing-room.
He followed, impatiently. "I'm not such an ass as to fall off a footling balcony. What do you take me for?"
"I take you for Adrian's friend," she said, very erect, brave elf facing horrible ogre—and, either by chance or design, her hand touched and held the tip of a great silver-framed photograph of her late husband.
"I think I've proved it," said Jaffery.
"Are you proving it now? What value can you attach to Adrian's memory when you say such things to me?"
"I'm saying to you what every honest man has the right to say to the free woman he loves."
"But I'm not a free woman. I'm bound to Adrian."
"You can't be bound to him forever and ever."
"I am. That's why it's shameful and dishonourable of you,"—his blue eyes flashed dangerously and he clenched his hands, but heedless she went on—"yes, mean and base and despicable of you to wish to betray him. Adrian—"
"Oh, don't talk drivel. It makes me sick. Leave Adrian alone and listen to a living man," he shouted, all the pent-up intellectual disgusts and sex-jealousies bursting out in a mad gush. "A real live man who would walk through Hell for you!" He caught her frail body in his great grasp, and she vibrated like a bit of wire caught up by a dynamo. "My love for you has nothing whatever to do with Adrian. I've been as loyal to him as one man can be to another, living and dead. By God, I have! Ask Hilary and Barbara. But I want you. I've wanted you since the first moment I set eyes on you. You've got into my blood. You're going to love me. You're going to marry me, Adrian or no Adrian."
He bent over her and she met the passion in his eyes bravely. She did not lack courage. And her eyes were hard and her lips were white and her face was pinched into a marble statuette of hate. And unconscious that his grip was giving her physical pain he continued:
"I've waited for you. I've waited for you from the moment I heard you were engaged to the other man. And I'll go on waiting. But, by God!"—and, not knowing what he did, he shook her backwards and forwards—"I'll not go on waiting for ever. You—you little bit of mystery—you little bit of eternity—you—you—ah!"
With a great gesture he released her. But the poor ogre had not counted on his strength. His unwitting violence sent her spinning, and she fell, knocking her head against a sofa. He uttered a gasp of horror and in an instant lifted her and laid her on the sofa, and on his knees beside her, with remorse oversurging his passion, behaved like a penitent fool, accusing himself of all the unforgivable savageries ever practised by barbaric male. Doria, who was not hurt in the least, sat up and pointed to the door.
"Go!" she said. "Go. You're nothing but a brute."
Jaffery rose from his knees and regarded her in the hebetude of reaction.
"I suppose I am, Doria, but it's my way of loving you."
She still pointed. "Go," she said tonelessly. "I can't turn you out, but if Adrian was alive—Ha! ha! ha!—" she laughed with a touch of hysteria. "How do you dare, you barren rascal—how do you dare to think you can take the place of a man like Adrian?"