Jocelyn

“If you will excuse me—I am sure Monsieur Legard has much to say, perhaps later—I may be permitted to bid you good-bye.” He moved slowly to the window, and passed through it on to the terrace.

As he turned round to close the window after him, his immovable face, pale and wrinkled in the glaring sunshine, looked in upon them with weary, half-closed eyes. Behind that mask a consuming rage of jealousy leapt up, and fought to find expression.

CHAPTER XVIII

“Let us go out—I want air. I can’t breathe in here, come!” The words were wild, but she was surprised at the even tones of her own voice. She had thought, if she once opened her lips, she must scream. She took her hat from the table and put it on, even glancing in the glass to set it straight. Her face seemed to her very much the same as usual—that was curious!

She led the way from the room, and into the hotel garden. Legard followed, bewildered and heavy at heart. Jocelyn walked swiftly, taking a little, stony path which ran winding upwards from the garden. Walls hemmed it in, and it was rutted where the water coursed down it in the heavy rains. It led to terraces of olive and almond trees sloping up the hill. She stopped in the shade of an old tree; she felt giddy and faint, and was glad to sit down. Giles threw himself beside her, waiting for her to speak. The brown lizards chased each other among the stones. Bees, hovering over the wild thyme, drummed softly with their wings; a cicala churred harshly from a branch above, and from far away came the faint, shrill strains of a goatherd’s pipe. A thin, brown haze of heat hung over the white buildings of the town below, and the sunlight threw delicate shadows from the trees on to the stone-strewn banks of rough grass.

Presently Jocelyn raised her arm and rested it against the mossy stem of the olive tree. She looked dazed, like one who had received a heavy blow, and she kept glancing from side to side, as if trying to find the way out of some unfamiliar place.

“When did Irma die?” she said suddenly.

Legard winced, he tried to answer steadily and without emotion, but there was fear in his heart, fear of her reading that which lay between him and his conscience.

“On Tuesday afternoon.”

“What did she die of, it was very sudden? Mr. Nielsen told me that—that—she took an overdose of morphia.” She spoke with hesitation, but hurriedly, as if afraid to give him time to deceive her. “Was it true?” she said, without looking at him.

“Yes,” muttered Giles. He also looked away. The mind of each of them was fixed solely upon its own grim terror, neither saw the spectre imaged in the thoughts of the other.

“She knew—everything?” Jocelyn said. It sounded like the expression of a conviction rather than a question.

“I don’t know—perhaps—I think so,” and he looked at her swiftly with a catch in his breath, for the spectre of her thoughts had peeped out at him, and he was very frightened.

“Look at me, darling!” he said pleadingly.

She looked at him, and across his mind fell the shadow of what lay before him.

“Good God! what are you thinking?”

“I am thinking,” said Jocelyn simply, “that I killed her—that’s all.”

It was not her words that frightened him so much as her face. There was a dead look upon it, a dreadful, weary look, of something more than ordinary despair, of something fundamental, the expression of that hopeless taint of inherited fatalism, which he recognised dimly, and feared, as children fear the dark. For he could not comprehend it, his whole nature revolted—it was the point at which their individualities diverged. His instinct was to fight for his happiness, to fight for it with pain and trouble—hers to fold her hands, and let it drift to her or away.

It flashed across his mind that he had seen the same face somewhere, graven in stone, dead, immutable, the face of an image. Where, he could not say, but he had seen it. The thought frightened him the more. He was like a man fighting a nightmare, knowing all the time that it was something unreal, and suffering just the same. He felt that somewhere there must be the words, the words to break the despair of her face, to bring it back to life, to wrest the shadows from below the brown eyes that stared before them, large, lustreless, and pitifully hopeless, if only he could find them. Every man knows that feeling, that desperate search for just the right words, and sometimes they do not exist. He wracked his reason.

“My darling,” he cried, “it’s not true. Do you hear me, it’s not true—don’t yield to such a feeling, it’s dreadful. Fight against it, for God’s sake.”

He took her in his arms, she lay passively in them. He kissed her lips, her eyes, her hair—she yielded soft and unresponsive. Her face never changed.

“It was an accident. I know it, she would never have committed suicide! never! She had strong views about that—she was too religious, besides—” The fatuity of his words choked his utterance. Words! words! of what use were words against the whole bent of a nature? and he clenched his hands in despair. He would have given anything to penetrate for one moment the mystery of her being, to enter in, and share its isolation, to know the very springs of its instincts, that he might learn how to fight them.

In the stillness of the waning day he sat with his head in his hands, thinking, always thinking. The bees droned their dreamy song, and the world was flooded with a mellow, evening light.

It was no help to him that he was fighting an unreality, it only maddened him, made him desperate. In some moments if a man be tender-hearted, everything else goes by the board. He could not bear the sight of her suffering, he felt that he must pierce through that terrible calm, make her feel, it seemed to him a matter of life or death. He saw that there was one chance, suicidal and desperate, a chance that might mean the destruction of her love for him. He would have to take it, he could not sit there looking at the weary despair of that beloved face, feeling the tragedy she would carry away in her heart. He must tell her the truth. Half truths were no good. He must show her the whole, naked, sordid truth. The truth which he had intended should go down with him to the grave. Perhaps she would believe that.

Two lizards, meeting suddenly, began to fight furiously in the sunlight within three paces of them; he noticed them, and wondered dully which would win. Then he began to speak in a low matter of fact voice.

If he must tell her, he thought it should be in a way that would carry conviction. The sun glared into his eyes, and he pulled his hat low upon his forehead, with a feeling that he would, at all events, hide from her the foreboding of defeat that was in them.

“Are you listening to me?” he said.

She bent her head, and he went on—

“I’ll tell you the truth. I never meant to tell you, but I must, because of this dreadful idea you have in your head.” Something clicked in his throat, but he threw up his head and that freed his voice. “D’you remember my leaving you on the road last Tuesday? I was going back then—to see—if I had killed her.”

Jocelyn shivered and made a motion as if she would have stopped him, but he went on speaking fast and evenly.

“That afternoon about three o’clock I went into her room. She was asleep—you know she took morphia every day to make her sleep. Every day, when she woke, she had to take a dose of another medicine, I’ve seen it dozens of times. She used to put the morphia under her cushions before going to sleep, for fear of taking it by mistake, I’ve seen that too. She always woke dazed, you see; she knew the danger of taking the wrong; I remember her telling me of it once.” His voice sounded to himself brutally matter of fact. He stared straight in front of him, plucking up the stiff grass by handfuls. “By some accident that day she left the morphia bottle on the table by her side, and”—he cleared his throat—“the other medicine wasn’t there.” Even the humming of the bees seemed to him to have ceased; he must speak the words into the silence of a breathless world. The lizards still fought in the sunshine.

“I—I saw what would happen—I knew it would kill her. I did nothing, I walked out of the room—I left her to die. Then I met you—you remember?” He forced himself to look at her face. There was no sign in it that she had even heard him.

“Don’t you see?” he cried, “I killed her—” And he thought, “Have I gone through this for nothing?”

If she would only speak—move—do something!

“Don’t you believe me?”

“Yes.” The yellow sunlight played upon her face through the leaves, but its expression was unchanged.

He had a sudden, sickening foretaste of the knowledge that the real suffering of man must be worked through in an isolation grim as the grave itself. He had robbed himself for ever of any claim to her respect, to her love, and—for no use. He wondered that she did not shrink from him; he would have rather she did—it would have shown him that her will was still struggling for existence. “Jocelyn,” he cried, “for God’s sake, say something.”

“You did it for me,” she said at last, “it is all the same, you see; she died because of our sin, what does it matter whether it was by her own act, or by yours, or by mine? The shadow will always be there—always—always between us, setting us apart.”

It was a relief to hear her voice, even though the words were dreadful to hear. He got upon his feet, and paced to and fro, his face lined and twisted with thought, his lips quivering below the line of his dark moustache. The lizards, always fighting, darted between the stones.

“What is to be done, then?” he said, stopping in front of her, his tall, black figure between her and the sunlight.

“You must let me go, and forget me,” she said.

“My God! I can’t,” and he threw himself at her feet, his hands clasped on her knees, his eyes fixed on hers with a wild, despairing entreaty. “Jocelyn—darling—I can’t—I can’t!” and the goatherd’s pipe sent back a faint echo to that bitter cry.

She shivered, and her eyes contracted as if with unbearable pain; then she put out her hand, and touched his hair, it calmed him at once, but he clung to her.

“If you love me,” she said in a half choked voice, “be brave. I can’t bear any more. I can’t face it—I must hide. I must go away, and hide from it.”

“My darling, you promised not to shut me away.”

“I can’t help it, I can’t share suffering, it’s not in me. I must bear it by myself—I know it.”

He would have cried again in words of entreaty and reasoning, but she stopped him, rising to her feet.

“Give me an address, I will write to you. I promise to let you know what becomes of me.”

“You promise to tell me truly of yourself—everything—” his voice failed him. There was a film over his eyes, and he staggered from giddiness as he got up.

“Yes—everything,” she said very low, and the words seemed hardly to escape the barrier of her lips.

“Am I never to see you, never? My God! that is hard—”

“I must be away from everything that reminds. I must hide. I will forget. Can’t you see that I shall go mad? I must have time.” Her voice rose hysterically for the first time, and she twisted her hands.

“Yes, sweet! I know, I know—” He soothed her like a child, and, with the need for that soothing, he felt some strength returning to him. He knew that he must use it quickly before it left him again.

“I will send you my address to-night,” he said, “I shall go away to-morrow. You promise to write. Go, dear, I won’t come with you.”

He caught her suddenly in his arms, and held her face to his, kissing it passionately. The tears ran down his face and wetted her cheeks—her eyes were dry.

“God keep you—remember I am always yours, to do as you please with.”

She did not speak. Her mournful eyes were lifted for a moment to his, the shadow of a smile quivered pitifully on the curve of her lips, and she was gone from his arms.

He flung himself upon the ground, and buried his face in the grass.

PART III

CHAPTER XIX

At a little table, where she could catch a full light from the bay window, Mrs. Travis bent over the skeleton of a garment.

“If I take it in in the neck, I must let it out under the arms, and that means taking the sleeves out,” she was saying plaintively.

Jocelyn, from her chair, murmured, “Poor dear!” She always treated her aunt with complacent tenderness, as if she were some kind of elderly child. At the same time, if there were anything to be decided upon, she invariably deferred to her opinion, not from respect, but from an inherent dislike of making herself unpleasant—which her aunt by no means shared. Jocelyn was always plastically under the domination of the nearest personality.

“That comes of not being in Paris,” she went on. “You know you can’t get a jacket in London for that price, which doesn’t want altering. I’ll do it for you presently when the puss is asleep.”

Mrs. Travis, turning the garment this way and that, and screwing up her eyes, broke into fragmentary praise of Parisian dressmakers. They were so smart—so cheap, considering—so chic, pronouncing it so as to leave upon the mind an impression of yellow fluff and broken egg-shell. Jocelyn stroked the kitten’s furry chest softly.

“Why aren’t we in Paris?” she sighed. “I can’t think what made you take this flat for so long! Chelsea’s nice for London, but I’m so sick of London!”

Mrs. Travis sat back in her chair with a faint rustling of silk and a creaking of stays. She said “Oh!” in a funny little voice, fidgeted her hands once or twice on the table, and then folded them over the garment upon her lap. She was not really thick-skinned. If people differed or found fault with her, she suffered severely, until she had time to see that her own view was the right one. She never admitted herself in the wrong. There was no credit due to her for that, she had simply never learned how. Things might seem against her—in fact, they frequently did—but she was always inwardly convinced that she was in the right. If it had appeared to her that the world was flat, she would have admitted the imparted knowledge that it was round, with a complacent “Yes—it may be so,” but she would have known it to be flat all the same.

She had a queer method of argument too. She would admit everything with a tentative “Yes,” propose some remedy that wildly exceeded necessity; and when this was rejected she would fall back upon things as they were. She had a really fine turn of obstinacy, bone-obstinacy. As to the after effect upon her of argument, there was none.

A short and significant silence followed, while her skin hardened.

“You know I haven’t got any money,” she began at last in a smoothly injured voice. “I can’t bear owing anything. I wasn’t brought up to it, and I can’t do it.” Her green eyes seemed to deprecate the possibility of disbelief, but there was nothing except the back of Jocelyn’s head to deprecate, as she leant forward in her chair, and gazed at the fire with moody eyes.

The flames licked the logs, and an occasional red spark darted forth, trying to reach her outstretched feet. The kitten purred softly. Jocelyn’s silence was discomfiting to Mrs. Travis; her eloquence felt faint for lack of contradiction. She began to fan herself slowly with a newspaper and to get a little red.

“You should think more of other people,” she began again. “You know I can’t afford to go abroad. That horrid place has ruined me. I’ve never had any money, to spare, since.” When Mrs. Travis lost all her money, her Puritan education enabled her to see that gambling was immoral—until she had some more. Just now she had some more, but not quite enough—a tight place for her principles.

“It’s not like it used to be there. They try to get everything they can out of one. I don’t think it’s right.” These words with her conveyed the acme of disapproval. She began to enlarge upon the possibility of corrupt croupiers, weighted tables, pre-arranged cards—devices with refutation writ large upon their faces—but very dear to her. She pouted her lips as she spoke, her hands moved restlessly, and her green eyes kept glancing from the back of Jocelyn’s head to her own lap—signs that she was agitated. She ended by declaring with decision that she would never go near the place again.

“I am glad of that,” said Jocelyn quietly. She frowned, as she gazed at the dull glow playing fitfully on the charring logs. There was a minute or two of silence. A hundred memories were thronging in the girl’s mind, ghosts of long hours when the sun had blazed, mocking the torment of her spirit, when the star-flecked vault of the heavens had looked down, cold and pitiless, upon her shame and misery. She put her hands over her face.

Presently there came a sudden, uneasy creak from the chair where Mrs. Travis was sitting—one would not have ventured to predict its meaning—and she began to speak.

“You’ve not been looking very well lately, my dear,” she said with a little tentative cough. “I think perhaps we ought to go south for Easter. ‘Monte’ is nice, then, just for a week.”

Jocelyn did not speak for a minute. She could not control her voice, and it trembled when she answered—

“You can go, of course, if you want to, I shall stay here. I hate the place.” She got up. “I thought you said just now you were never going there again!” As she spoke, she walked across to the window. Throwing it open, she stood leaning against it, looking out over the river.

Mrs. Travis sniffed subduedly with surprise and anger. It was unlike her niece to oppose her, it was unlike her to speak with emotion. She collected herself in her chair. On this occasion, it must be confessed, it took her while a person might count ten to see that she had not contradicted herself. Then she rose from her seat, the uncompleted garment in her hand. Throwing her feet out well in front of her, she walked to the door, an imposing figure in black silk.

“It was entirely on your account,” she said with dignity, opening the door, and going out with a rustle of offended petticoats.

Jocelyn, left alone, shrugged her shoulders. The grey kitten had followed her across the room, and was rubbing its arched back against her dress. She stooped, and picked it up.

She felt very lonely. The soft west wind driving the broken sky over the grey, untroubled river, was sweet with the mysterious scent of growing things, of the sap in the trees, of the earth after rain, of the flow of life; the spring scent that seems to tell us to begin again, stirs the blood to vague, unimaged longing, grips our hearts with a sweet aching.

It was the meeting of the lights—the buildings and chimneys loomed from across the river like shadowy monsters, peering into the dusk with reddening eyes. The lighted lamps on the steadfast bridges seemed to her to fling their greetings from one to the other, daring in linked chains the gathering gloom. She counted three barges, huge, amphibious beasts, creeping, black and sluggish, up river against the ebbtide. The dull hoot of a distant steamer, plying westwards, was carried now and again to her ears on the wind. The streets murmured ceaselessly from the back, roosting sparrows twittered sleepily in the trees, and from the square tower of the old church came a chime of Lenten bells. She leaned over the balcony. The bare boughs of the trees in the garden below swayed slowly. One by one the lamps of the embankment flared up; and beyond, under the drift of the restless sky, under the breath of the homeless wind, the river flowed, grey and untroubled, to the sea. The river, grey with the knowledge of the meanness and tragedy of life, untroubled in its strength and in its constancy; a philosopher to whom men confide all secrets, the recoil of the fainting spirit, the stirring of great endeavours; an image of human life, unceasing in the ebbing and flowing tides of surface emotion, whereon the traffic of living shifts to and fro, resistless in its unseen stream which is ever compelled to that mysterious sea where truth lies hidden, where life ends and life begins. Tears started into the girl’s eyes. The vague solemnity of the evening, the soft breath of spring in the air, bewildered her. She had a longing to know what it all meant, to feel the life stirring in that width of darkened water, in the flashing, yellow lights, in the wind that fanned her flushed face. She stretched out her arms with a sudden movement, and thought, “Ah! not to be so terribly alone!” Surely, all that she saw, felt, heard, could give her some companionship!

The wind fanned and passed her by, the lamps shone with a hard light, the river flowed cold and relentless. No truth, no life, no solace! She was alone! She turned away with an aching, as if some one had struck her in the chest.

She sat down at her piano, and began to play, a rhapsody of Brahms. The chords rang full and true under her slender fingers, the passionate throb of unending life seemed to beat in them. It was as though Nature were singing a song of full rejoicing, in the echoes of lofty mountains, in the rustling of yellow cornfields, in the medley of river torrents, and the hush of the unstained sea.

She played with her head bent a little forward, and with parted lips, and her dark eyes seemed trying to reach, beyond the music of the notes, a secret, mysterious and unfathomable. She was lost in the melody which swelled quivering into the room. When she had played the last bar, she left her hands nerveless and cold upon the keys. Suddenly, she bent her head down upon them in an uncontrollable burst of weeping. It seemed to her that all around the pulse of life was throbbing, in herself alone it stood still....

A long ten months of a struggle to forget, spent in the daily society of a lady, kind-hearted, but to whom an inscrutable Providence had given as much spiritual insight as to a sack of potatoes, had told upon her strength and her nerves. She had had no support except in her own indomitable pride. Of acquaintances she had many; of friends, from the wandering manner of her life, few, and those not at hand. Religion was an empty word with her, she had never come into contact with it. She had, indeed, a love for art, but neither energy nor strength of will to study consistently.

From time to time she gave herself up to music, working from morning till night at Brahms, Schumann, Chopin, or Bach to the great discomfort of her aunt, who fidgeted in her seat at Brahms or Chopin, well-nigh howled at Bach, and would plaintively murmur requests for “The Bee’s Wedding,” upon which she had been brought up. She went to as many concerts as she could, and even once persuaded Mrs. Travis to accompany her. That lady sat through a magnificent performance with resigned placidity, saying from time to time “Very nice” in a drooping voice; and as they came out, gathered her black silk skirts vigorously in both hands, and stepping, large and brisk, through the crowd, remarked with relief, “There’ll be just time to call at Louise’s about my new bonnet!”

Jocelyn had never the heart to ask her to go again. All the same, a few days afterwards Mrs. Travis had suddenly passed a criticism upon an intricate passage of the music—a criticism which just missed being masterly. An astounding lady!

At first, it seemed long ago now, when memory was roused in her, Jocelyn had shrunk from the violent despair of her own moods; they were followed by days of headache and exhaustion, when nothing seemed to matter at all, except to feel well. Then would come days, and even weeks, when she would fling herself into the life of the passing moment, and almost forget; but always there seemed a blight over life—nothing, not even music, had any meaning; everything passed her by and left her untouched, with a sense of incompleteness. She recalled the old days, when each event and each pleasure had been, as it were, stamped with its meaning in large surface letters, and wondered.

She had kept her promise to Giles. She wrote once a month, giving him a bare chronicle of her movements and doings, at a great cost to herself; and yet, perhaps for that very reason, she would not willingly have given up writing. She would think of him sometimes with pity, often with longing, again with a wayward and inconsistent anger.

Why did he not write?

She had begged him in her first letter not to answer; and he had obeyed. The pessimism of her native distrust always besieged her.

He could not care—no man would care for so long! She wanted him, and she did not want him. For the last month she had not written; she had no longer those violent moods of despair, but she had felt too profoundly discouraged.

She had grown thinner and paler, and her face was hardly ever without its look of defeat. Her aunt’s personality seemed altogether too much for her in these days; she had a feeling of suffocation and of great loneliness.

She would sit at the window sometimes for hours, watching the river, longing to get away upon it to the sea, far away to the East, to countries where no one knew her, where the sun was bright, and she might begin her life again. At other times she knew that even that could not give her what she wanted, or fill the vague longing within her. The winter months in London had been dreary and terrible, but her heart had never ached as now, when the spring wind stirred, and the sap coursed in the budding trees....

Presently she lifted her face, flushed and tear-stained. She went to the glass and arranged her hair—she had a horror of public emotion. Her aunt would be coming back! She took up a piece of work, and began passing the needle mechanically in and out—it was almost too dark to see.

The door was opened. She expected to hear her aunt’s smoothly offended voice, but the servant announced—

“Mr. Nielsen!”

CHAPTER XX

Nielsen bowed low over her hand with his elaborate courtesy. There was an air of prosperity about him. He was tightly buttoned into a smart, grey overcoat, and wore an orchid in his buttonhole. He carried in his hand a hat of exceptional glossiness, to which a mourning band only succeeded in giving an additional air of festivity. His face was rather fatter, his moustache seemed, if anything, tawnier. His eyeglass was carefully screwed into his eye, and he regarded Jocelyn through it with an expression of admiring benevolence.

“I am verry fortunate! verry fortunate,” he kept repeating, purring his r’s and spitting his t’s. “What a prretty room! How well you are looking!”

Her face was burning, and her eyes dark and soft after the flow of tears.

“I’m very glad to see you again,” she said. “Come and sit down.” She took the hat out of his hand, put it on the table, and turned a chair for him to the fire, talking all the time. In the restless and excited state of her nerves, he was a godsend to her.

“And how is the dear aunt?” he said, with his old pathetic emphasis. Jocelyn began to laugh. She could not help it—she had been waiting for the words. She struggled with her laughter and laughed the more. Nielsen looked at her rather puzzled, and then began to laugh too. He had not the least idea why, except that she looked so charming, with the bright colour in her cheeks, with her brown eyes dancing, and her white teeth showing as she swayed gracefully backwards and forwards in her chair.

“I am so sorry!” she gasped. “What is the matter with me? Auntie’s very well, she always is, you know. Now tell me all about yourself, every little last thing.”

“Place aux dames, my dear young lady! You will have a grreat deal of news to tell me, I am sure.”

“Oh no! I’ve no news, except that I’m bored—terribly bored with London. Now come, begin! First of all—how is the ‘system’?”

She leant forward, in an attitude of correct listening with a perfectly grave face.

Nielsen spread his fingers, and then gave his moustache a prolonged twist.

“Ah! rien ne va plus! That is all over,” he said mournfully, with a little shake of his head. “I am quite lost without it. Mais que voulez-vous? My uncle dies—I told you of him—my uncle—did I not?—ah! the good old fellow! He leaves me a little—but yes, a little fortune. Can one go on playing a ‘system’? One has one’s brread and butter.” He spread his fingers again. “It is inconceivable, don’t you know.”

“That’s very good news, I’m so glad!”

Nielsen shrugged his shoulders gently, his head a little on one side.

“It gives me the good fortune to see you again,” he said, “but for the rrest, I am not sure. It was a verry good ‘system’; and now, you know, I have nothing to do. I am not used to that.”

Jocelyn smiled, the death of the “system” amused her. “I don’t think you will be idle long,” she said, “you are busy by nature.”

Nielsen bowed.

“And you?” he said. “Where have you been all this long time? Mon Dieu! Is it possible it is not yet a year?”

“We came to London first. Then in August we went to Whitby, and stayed six weeks, and got shrivelled by the winds. Then we were in Paris a month, and we’ve been here ever since November. How long have you been in England?”

“I arrived yesterday. I have been in Stockholm. One of my cousins had got into a—what do you call it—a hole, une affaire de cœur. I had a grreat deal of trouble to extrract him.” He talked of his cousin as if he had been a tooth, and soon found himself giving her an account of delicate matters in which a woman figured discreditably. Jocelyn was so sympathetic a listener, and so devoid of prudery, that insensibly one told her almost anything. She inspired a sense of comradeship.

He finished, however, by saying: “I suppose I should not have told you this yarrn. It has been on my mind a grreat deal, you see, so you must forgive me.”

At this moment tea arrived, followed by Mrs. Travis. She had changed her costume for a robe having a breastplate of many colours, and came in smiling affably above it. She greeted Nielsen with a smoothly dignified cordiality. She managed at the same time, by refusing to look at her niece above the waist, to convey to her a sense of unforgiven injury. For a large lady she was inimitably quick of expression—she never wasted time. She began to talk to Nielsen of old days and mutual friends; no allusion was made to the Legards, but in the middle of the conversation Jocelyn rose, and, on the pretence of drawing the blinds, went to the window. She dreaded to hear Giles’s name, fearing for her self-command.

It was almost dark now. Through the dim shapes of the tree branches the black water was seen spangled with the reflections of lights. The deep rumble of a heavy cart absorbed all other sounds. The wind had dropped, and a soft grey haze was creeping downwards from the clouds.

Nielsen came over presently, and stood beside her.

“That is verry interresting,” he said. “Nothing is plain except the black water beyond. Ah! it is like the attitude of our minds looking out into life, don’t you know.”

Jocelyn was faintly surprised; it was a remark unlike what she knew of him, but before she could answer he was saying good-bye.

“Good night! my dear young lady. It is verry late. If you will permit me, I will say au revoir. I shall be at your disposal whenever you wish for an escort. I hope you will take pity upon me now that I have lost my occupation. I should like to see some pictures, and hear some music again; it is so long since I have heard any good music. Some day I trust you will come with the dear aunt and dine with me. I am staying at the Grrand, don’t you know—the cooking might be better, but then in London!”

He spread his fingers and departed.

. . . . . . . .

During the weeks that followed they saw a good deal of Nielsen. He generally contrived to present himself, by arrangement or otherwise, in the course of the day. He appeared to divide his time between visiting them, and running all over London in search of old acquaintances whom he had known in the days when, as Bohemian and journalist, he had maintained a hand-to-mouth existence. He had lived in London for several years; he had shoals of these acquaintances, and the larger number of them, from the tales which he confided to Jocelyn, seemed to have holes in their personalities which required patching. He would get as far as the holes in his confidences, indeed he would enlarge upon them pathetically, but it was only by inference that she gathered the patches. The patching, moreover, was not confined to money transactions. He had a knack, in the service of other people, of rushing in where angels feared to tread.

Upon one occasion, when they had been lunching with him at a distinguished restaurant, they were mildly astounded by the waiter, who brought them coffee, touching their host gently upon the shoulder. Nielsen had stared at the man for a short time in a gradually dissolving indignation, risen abruptly from his seat, shaken him warmly by the hand, and retired with him into a corner of the room, where an animated conversation had ensued. He had presently come back to them, to say with his customary smooth languor—

“I am so sorry, don’t you know. A dear old frriend of mine—poor fellow!—he has had grreat misfortunes; and here figurez vous?—here! he is verry badly trreated. If you will excuse me a minute?”

A few seconds later, they had a glimpse of him in perspective through the open door, twirling his moustache, while he held a button of the proprietor’s coat and talked to him evidently for his good. The only words that faintly reached their ears sounded suspiciously like—“damned scoundrrel, don’t you know?”

He rejoined them, perfectly suave and apologetic, finished his coffee with an air of exhaustion, and paid the bill. As they left the room the proprietor bowed before them low and obsequious. And yet, if a cabman drove over his toes, or a crossing-sweeper bespattered him with mud, the chances were that he would apologise to them for being in the way.

Jocelyn had a much kindlier feeling for him than she had had in the old days. His companionship took her out of herself. She brooded less, regained much of her spirits. She could not shake off the feeling of being alone, of being lost in a forest of uncompanionable trees, but the fear became more shadowy—less substantial.

They went about a good deal by themselves. Jocelyn had always been, both by nature and education, unconventional in such matters, and now a kind of recklessness possessed her. Mrs. Travis indeed had a high sense of the proprieties, but she had a higher sense of comfort; she did not care at all for music or pictures, not much for theatres, so she contented herself and salved her conscience with those entertainments where one ate.

As for Nielsen, he had expanded with prosperity. In his relations with Jocelyn, he seemed to have more time, no longer any reason to cramp his emotions into a small space. He found it pleasant to play with the sensation of being alone in the field—with a newly-born feeling of comradeship. Also, he was always beset with a sense of enigma, of something in the girl which had not formerly been there—in an impersonal sort of way he felt he would like to find out what it was; just as, when he was a small boy, he had cut open his toys to see what was inside. It would have been wrong to say he was not in love with her, he was—but the attitude of his mind was leisurely.

One day they were driving down Sloane Street on their way to a theatre. At the edge of the pavement, as they passed, a shop assistant in an apron and grey flannel shirt sleeves was twirling a red-bristled mop. If his life had depended on it, his puckered visage could not have expressed a more concentrated emotion. Jocelyn plucked Nielsen’s sleeve: “Look what a limited thing the human face is!” she said, with a sudden little shiver. “If that man had committed a murder he couldn’t look more dreadful, and he’s only twisting a mop!” The hansom whirled close past the man with the sound of frequent hoofs and jingled bell, and Nielsen only had a glimpse of a momentarily suspended mop, and a pale, expressionless visage. Having missed the effect, he looked at his companion’s face instead as she leaned forward in the cab. It was very white, and the brows were drawn together as if she were in sudden pain. He had a gleam of recollection, and for the first time since seeing her again, all the old, painful sense of a barrier between them.

Jocelyn looked at him.

“Ah!” she said, with sudden inspiration, “you are thinking you would like to read my thoughts, to know what’s behind the mask, but you never will, you see. We’re all alone—always alone—aren’t we?”

She spoke quietly enough, rather like a child asking for information, but somehow he had the impression that she was frightened. He put one of his gloved hands soothingly upon hers. It was the first time he had touched her except in the exchange of ordinary greeting, and he was surprised and confused by the sudden vehemence with which she snatched her hand away, and folding her arms, leant back in her corner of the cab, almost as if he had struck her.

He said nothing—he had nothing to say. She was as gentle and friendly to him as usual all the rest of the afternoon.

CHAPTER XXI

Jocelyn was in one of her most vivid moods. As was usual with her when in high spirits, words rippled from her lips in a way quite irresponsible and very charming. She walked briskly with a springing step, as straight as a dart, her small head thrown slightly back between her shoulders, her eyes dancing and a smile on her lips. She always dressed in a manner peculiar to her own desires, yet she never seemed behind the times—a problem for analytical dressmakers. To-day she had had the whim to put on a black dress, with some creamy lace round the neck and in the front of the bodice. Thus attired and with a black hat, she appealed irresistibly to Nielsen’s sense of the fitness of things. Her small face seemed to gleam out of its black and white setting like a jewel. He squared his figure as he walked, and held his head up with a feeling of pride.

In the Studio groups of people stood, in a subdued light, discussing the pictures in low tones. The spirit of allegory stared out upon them from the walls. Imagination laid a spell upon the eye, and upon the tongue. Jocelyn’s face had become suddenly grave and earnest. The brilliancy went out of her brown eyes, they grew profound, dark, and reverent; her impressionable, artistic nature was at once under the master’s influence. She did not, indeed, lose her sense of criticism, her discrimination, but she seemed to have become in immediate sympathy with the painter’s views and aims, judging him, as it were, from his own standpoint. Nielsen, on the other hand, though by no means unimpressed, retained his own point of view. With his head a little upon one side, and his hand caressing his moustache, he appeared to discuss with himself the merits of each picture in an adjusted see-saw of pro and con. For a few minutes they became separated, and when Nielsen came back to her side, he found her standing before the wonderful picture of Paolo and Francesca. Her hands were clasped in front of her, her face was very still, and there were tears in her eyes.

Nielsen said nothing, but stood and looked at the picture too.

He had never seen it before. The tragedy in it arrested him—the measureless tragedy of that man and woman whirled through space in the resistless rush of a linked unrest—the unspeakable, compassionate anguish on the man’s lips, the undying love in his shadowed eyes, the suffering, and the eternal, wistful faith of the woman’s face. If ever the truth of life has been revealed in art, surely it is in that picture. There, is all the joy of life, and all its suffering, endless motion, and triumphant love.

Nielsen experienced a kind of indignation—it was unpleasantly disturbing. He swallowed a lump in his throat and turned away abruptly, he did not care to look at it too long. It was a relief to hear a man behind him remark to a woman that the “glass” was going down. After all, those were the things that mattered, luckily, more than a hundred dismal pictures. The “glass” was going down! That was infinitely satisfactory. He put his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and worked them gently up and down. He felt much better. Then he wiped his eyeglass, and looked at Jocelyn.

She was still standing in front of the picture, looking as if she were going to faint. All his indignation returned. He went and got her a chair, put it down with its back to the picture, and made her sit in it. His eyes glowed angrily, and he twisted his moustache fiercely. Then he expressed his feelings—

“I should like to get that Monsieur Watts, and hang him on the walls of his own studio as a—a—pr-recept.” When he had caught the word, he hissed it from under his moustache.

“I consider it is quite indecent, don’t you know—the—the—confounded picture has made you ill.”

A rush of colour had come into Jocelyn’s cheeks, and, as she got up from her chair, she said—

“It’s very stupid of me! Don’t abuse the picture, please, I love it. It’s only coming into this hot room after the walk. I’m all right now.” She insisted on going round the studio again, and even upon discussing the merits of the various pictures, but they both avoided the “Paolo and Francesca,” and Nielsen knew by the tone of her voice that she was not herself.

On the way home in a cab, she hardly spoke at all, and leant back gazing straight in front of her. Nielsen became garrulous; he did not in the least understand what was the matter, but he considerately wished by chatter to divert her thoughts.

“Prrogress, civilisation!” he said, spreading his fingers out of the cab into an inattentive space, and bending forward with puckered eyes, “Ah! The ‘artist!’ He is nowhere. It is all ‘the man of action,’ don’t you know. He leads the way—he is the cause. The other fellow is only the effect, you see; he exists because there is somebody there already to hold him out his brread and butter. Look at the Romans! Ah! There you have the rreal Philistine. But look at his civilisation; look at his rroads, look at his baths, he—wăshed! They were men of action, and they held the brread and butter in their hands, don’t you know, for the other fellows to come and eat. Look at this country! Here you have more frreedom, more comfort, more justice than anywhere else that I have been; and yet you are barbarous men of action, don’t you know. Not one in a hundred of you has any sense of form or colour, but you manage to have as much art and as much music and literature, on the whole, as any other country. It is all a case of brread and butter, you see. You can pay the—how do you say it—the piper, so you call the tune.”

Jocelyn shook her head gently and said, “There are two sides to that.”

“Certainly, my dear young lady, there are two sides to every question. I am quite willing to hear the other side—but to me music—pictures—books, they are all frrills, charrming frrills. They don’t begin till the garment is completed. They rrise out of leisure, and there is not any leisure, don’t you see, until there is alrready a civilisation. After all, a man must eat—that comes first.” He nodded his head mournfully, as if the fact were painful to him.

But all his efforts to draw her into argument were of no avail; the drive ended silently, and he left her at the door of the Mansions. He walked away slowly eastwards, looking absently at the grey water running through the dark arches of the bridge, and every now and then shaking his head gravely.

Jocelyn climbed the two flights of stairs to the flat, and let herself in with her key. She went straight to her bedroom, the thought of her aunt’s society at that moment was intolerable to her, and she muffled her footsteps as she passed the drawing-room.

She took off her hat and gloves, and flung herself into a chair in front of the empty fireplace. She sat there for some minutes, rocking herself to and fro, with her hands crossed in her lap.

She was haunted by that picture, its endless whirlwind of motion, its anguish. In the face of Paolo something reminded her of Giles. It seemed to her that she read in the picture, for herself and for him, the cruel denial of rest, the resistless decree of an eternal punishment through immeasurable space.

She sprang to her feet, and paced to and fro the length of her room, pressing her hands to her throbbing temples. After a time, the soft monotony of her own footsteps on the carpet soothed her; she paused in front of the window, and flung it open. The air was sweet and warm, and there was a faint sound of raindrops plashing gently on the young leaves of the trees. The church clock was striking “five.” She shut her eyes and listened—another and another echoed the refrain, till the world seemed full of a wistful chiming. It ceased. She reached her hand out along the window, leaning against the half-opened casement. Some drops of rain fell upon her face.

The paroxysm of her pain had passed away, she only felt alone—very tired, and alone.

Presently she bathed her face with cold water, changed her dress, and went to the drawing-room pale and quite calm.

Mrs. Travis, upright in her chair, with watchful green eyes and a silver-grey dress, was playing “Patience.” Jocelyn shivered a little.

CHAPTER XXII

A brig, with sails set, was sidling out of the harbour against a head wind. A row of fishermen and loafers, barelegged or booted, with swarthy faces, and blue clothing, came running down the jetty, stretching a tow-rope hove to them from the brig, and shouting in a babel of uncouth words. Legard, with his hands in his pockets, and his cap drawn over his eyes, turned his back against the rail, and watched them idly.

They strained on the rope, laughing and talking in a strange medley of words and dialects. Then, as if by consent, they ceased hauling, and paused in relaxed attitudes, shouting irrelevantly at the brig a jumble of foreign words. A bearded man, in a peaked cap, standing on the poop, put his hand to his mouth, and the hail came with a steady ring over the water, “Pūlley! Hāūley!”

The words had an inflection, as of a man speaking to children, a kind of compassionate superiority. The chain of men strained forward again upon the rope, and, with a clatter of feet and voices, went surging up the pier.

“Pulley! Hauley!” Words comprehended of every nation under the sun, words by the aid of which men make shift to go through the business of life. They struck a chord in Legard’s heart that had not sounded for many years. They roused in him a longing for action, and a feeling of pride, such as one has when one reads of some gallant feat done by a countryman. He watched the Union Jack stream out in the wind as the brig cleared the end of the jetty with a queer feeling, that made him shuffle his feet on the tarred boards, and swear softly to himself. Then he took out a cigar, and bit the end very hard, looking into the distance over the sea.

The men, broken up now into groups, lolled on the jetty sides, or lounged back up the pier talking and spitting. They looked at him as they passed, with dark eyes, curious or indifferent, and exchanged remarks in low voices. He was a strange bird to them; an English traveller did not often find his way to their town.

Gradually, under the brassy sun, the jetty resumed its look of desolation.

Giles took his cap off, and wiped his forehead. His face, which was tanned a deep sallow brown, had somewhat hardened and set; the features looked as if always held in a vice of constraint. There was no trace of the old languor in his eyes, they looked up clear and straight from under his brows, but they had a rather wistful expression, as if always seeking for something. His dark hair had grown very grey at the sides of his head and on his temples. In his thin flannel suit his tall figure looked lean to emaciation, but his muscles, from constant hard exercise, were like whipcord. He had that day returned to the town, whence he had started a month before on a restless wander through a wild part of Spain.

He replaced his cap, and began to pace uneasily up and down the jetty, stopping every now and then to take a long look under his hand towards the town. He muttered to himself at intervals. He had begun rather to have the habit of talking to himself—a habit which tells of much loneliness....

The test of a man’s temperament is the way in which he manages himself under trouble. Legard had managed himself in solitude. A hundred times in those ten months he had been impelled to seek distraction in society, dissipation, excitement—to try and forget, for it was his nature to fly from pain; but something in him had always revolted at the last moment, and he had shrunk back. He had, deeply rooted, the feeling that if he even tried to rid himself of his suffering and his desolation, he would lose loyalty, the one thing which remained to him. If he gave that up, he felt that he must go under—irretrievably under. It was not choice so much as instinct that compelled him to hold on to his bitter, regretful longing; and with his grip fast on that plank, he felt his head still above water. Of the memory of his wife’s death he tried not to be mindful. At times a sudden spasm of self-loathing and of superstitious horror caught him, as it were, by the throat, but there was a certain gravity in his mind which helped him—the ballast of his own egotism, his matter-of-fact conviction of the futility of regret, and his feeling for what was of use in the future. That same feeling of loyalty, to which he clung so tenaciously, blunted, even at times negatived, the bite of remorse. It became a sort of painful pleasure to him to reason the thing out with a grim analysis. The evil did not seem to him to lie in the wrong he had done to the woman he loved, nor in the guilty inaction by which he had sought to repair that wrong, it lay further back, in the fibre of his own nature and the infirmity of his will—he felt that he had suffered for it, was always suffering. If repentance be suffering—he repented; if it be knowledge of self—he repented, for he was getting to know his own limitations as he had never known them before; but if it be that feeling which says, “Give me the past again, that I may act otherwise!” he did not repent, for he was not sure that he would act differently. The thing was over and done with, he had behaved like a coward and a scoundrel, but regret was of no use—he looked to the future, to the time, if it ever came, when he should see Jocelyn again; and in long reveries over smoky camp fires, on the decks of ships under starry skies, beneath the burning sun of the desert, and the unfallen snow-clouds of mountains, his face became gradually and indelibly stamped with that drawn expression of constraint. He had wandered about unceasingly, in the Austrian highlands, in Turkey, Algeria, Spain, anywhere, indeed, where he could get hard physical exertion, and be unlikely to meet people. He would have gone to the East, or to South Africa, but he would not put himself out of reach of his letters. Time would surely have done more for him, if he would have cut himself completely adrift, but he would not. Every month he received a letter from Jocelyn; it was never anything but a bare record of doings, smelling of violets, scanty and formal, and very precious to him. It began without any prefix, ended simply “Jocelyn”—it would be hard to say the amount of comfort he derived from that solitary and dumb confession of a link between them....

At this moment, as he strode across and across the jetty gnawing his moustache, the cigar, still unlit, between his fingers, he was waiting for Jacopo’s return from the post-office. It was nine weeks since he had received a letter, and even he had not realised how much they meant to him, till they had ceased to come. He had put off the day of his return to the coast, in sheer dread of not getting one, and now he had not had the courage to go and see for himself. He felt sick with suspense. He threw away his cigar unsmoked. Two seagulls swooped on it, shrieking discordantly. A faint, muffled sound of voices came down to him from a group of men and women at the far end of the jetty, and the salt wind fanned his cheek gently. He gazed towards the shore, where the world seemed to stand still in hot, hard lines.

A figure presently detached itself at the end of the jetty, and came towards him. He recognised Jacopo by his light clothes and wide-brimmed hat, and by the dog with him.

He forced himself to stand still and wait, his hands crossed behind his back, his limbs and every feature of his face quivering with the strain of repression. He was thinking: supposing there were no letter!—what then? There must be one!

Jacopo was walking fast. In the same breath he seemed to Giles to be years arriving, and to come with the swiftness of a wind. When he was within fifty yards the boy’s hand went to his pocket, and the dog, breaking from him, ran to his master and thrust his pointed nose up against his legs.

In spite of himself he turned away, grasped the jetty rail hard, and stood, looking, with eyes that saw nothing, at the horizon.

Jacopo came up to him, cool and silent.

“Well?” said Giles without turning.

“There are letters, Signore—three.”

Still leaning over the rail, Legard put out his hand, his fingers closed on the letters, and he said—

“Thank you, Jacopo, you have been rather long.” He spoke with the idea of gaining time.

“Si, Signore, the man at the post was very stupid.”

“You are sure these are all?”

“Si, Signore, sure.”

“Thank you, wait at the end of the pier till I call you.”

Jacopo moved away; Giles, clutching the letters, looked blankly after his retreating figure. Shikari rubbed a wet nose suddenly against his hand, and then stretched his body at full length, placing his forepaws on the rail, and working his nostrils from side to side with a snuffle at the unconscious sea. Giles bit his lips, raised his hand quickly, and without glancing at the outsides tore open the letters one by one. He dropped them unread into his pocket, lifted his cap, and ran his hand through his hair.

Nothing! He took a rapid turn across the jetty and back again, followed solemnly by the dog. Nothing! He muttered to himself one or two commonplaces. “Very awkward thing! Odd! Very odd!” Words absolutely inexpressive of his feelings, but somehow comforting.

He took Shikari’s forepaws, and drew them on to his chest, put them down again, and took another turn across the jetty. He stood, and looked out on the other side, and said, “My God!” in a low voice. He drew another cigar out of his case, bit it, and put it back again.

Nothing. Nine weeks! She had ceased to write! What did it mean? Was she ill?

He called suddenly “Jacopo!”

The boy came quickly, his slight figure in its nankeen suit, at once alert and watchful.

“Go, and find out when there is a train to join the main line for England. Get a carriage and horses; have the things ready—we shall start for it at the earliest minute, do you understand?”

“Si, Signore!” The boy whistled to Shikari, and vanished down the pier at a long stealthy trot.

Giles crammed his cap down over his eyes, as if he were riding at a fence, and shut his teeth together with a snap. He must act! He must know. Phew! That was a relief. He twisted the slight ends of his dark moustache fiercely upwards, and took a glance all round him.

Westwards the brig’s sails were glistening under the sun like the snow of a mountain peak.

Thrusting his hands into the pockets of his coat he walked rapidly down the pier.

CHAPTER XXIII

After he had seen to the necessities of his servant and his dog, he dined; and when he came out into the hall it was already nine o’clock. He lit a cigar, but he found it quite impossible to sit and smoke it quietly. He was very tired from his long journey, but he could not sit still. He was possessed by that feeling of restlessness which haunts one who has come a long way for a certain purpose, and finds at the end a gap of inaction intervening. He walked out of the hotel, and stood on the pavement staring blankly up the lighted avenue of Portland Place.

The restless roar of traffic from Regent Street attracted him, it was companionable—it suited his mood. He began to walk slowly towards it. The warm air was full of the smell of tobacco smoke and patchouli, and of other odours. On either hand of the street the lamps sent forth shafts of white or golden light upon the constant streams of passengers, motley and white-faced, who thronged the pavements. The curve of the quadrant bent in a clear-cut line against the impalpable loom of the purple heavens; and, through the streets, the traffic ran like blood through the veins of a strong man.

Giles walked on slowly, smoking. The electricity in the air, the intense stir of life around him, made upon his tired and unaccustomed faculties a profound impression. He felt benumbed, like a man in a nightmare. At Piccadilly Circus he stopped, and stood, staring about him. A brake filled with a pleasure party passed close. Girls leaning out of it swung in their hands coloured lanterns, which lit up their flushed faces and disordered hair. It was gone in a medley of song-snatches, rattling hoofs, empty laughter, and twinkling lights. A string of policemen filed by, solemn and bulky, each one a ridiculous embodiment of the earnestness of life. Out of the blare and turmoil of the street a fire-engine charged towards him, swaying from side to side, with the thunder of wheels and a harsh incessant shouting.

As he stood there a woman touched him on the arm and leered up at him; some one blew a whiff of tobacco in his face; black-hatted, shiny-booted men languidly held the pavement with gingerly steps; in front of him the coloured letters of an advertisement went in and out; newspaper men, like ghouls battening meagrely upon the misfortunes of other people, yelled dismally; and the bells of cabs and bicycles sounded swiftly, vanishing into chaos on this side and that. Coming after the silence of lonely places, it was strange. Every one had something to do, and was doing it with solemn fury; even the drunken man lurching at the gutter was earnestly drunk. It was curious after the south; yet instinctively, and without thinking about it, he understood it very well, much better than all that he had lived with for so many years. At this moment, with nothing to do but wait, kill time, and deaden the suspense in his mind, he was waiting very earnestly. He was of the same blood and the same grain as all that mass of humanity around him, which surged ceaselessly to and fro upon its business.

With an effort he roused himself, and made his way across Piccadilly. He formed the resolution, suddenly, to put an end to his suspense. It would be too late to see Jocelyn in any event, but he could at least find out something about her, where she was, perhaps how she was. At all events it would kill some time. He chose the slowest means of progression, and climbed on to a Chelsea omnibus. He sat in front, leaning forward, with his long legs drawn back under the seat, his shoulders high and square, and his soft felt hat covering his forehead. As the ’bus rumbled along Piccadilly in the stream of the traffic, past a narrow red streak of stationed cab lights and the overhanging trees of the Green Park, the driver, a man with a permanent cold, looked round at him curiously. The tanned, drawn face, with its thin, black moustache above the set jaw, had a queer look to his insular eyes. He would have volunteered remarks, but, as he afterwards observed hoarsely to his mate—

“That furrin’ lookin’ gent as sat be’ind o’ me lawst trip ’ad a mug on ’im as dried the words in yer mouth. Looked as if ’e were kind o’ settin’ on ’ot bricks, ’e did, and knowed it too; a rum bird ’e was.”

“Right,” returned the mate, a cockney, “’e was English, though—asked me the w’y to Cheeyne Walk an’ giv’ me a bob—quite the gent—there ain’t too many of ’is sort abaout.”

“Oh! ay! A right eno’ gent—’igher rup!”