MARCH HARES
By Harold Frederic
New York: D. Appleton and Company
1896
TO OUR FRIEND JULIA
CONTENTS
MARCH HARES.
CHAPTER I.
On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Mr. David Mosscrop lounged against the low stone parapet of Westminster Bridge, and surveyed at length the unflagging procession of his fellow-creatures plodding past him northward into the polite half of London town.
He had come upon the bridge in a melancholy frame of mind, and had paused first of all gloomily to look down at the water. His thoughts were a burden to him, and his head ached viciously. This was no new experience of a morning, worse luck; he had grown accustomed to these evil opening hours of depression and nausea. The fact that it was his birthday, however, gave uncomfortable point to his reflections. He had actually crossed the threshold of the thirties, and he came into the presence of this new lustrum worse than empty-handed. He had done none of the great things which his youth had promised. He had not even found his way into helpful and cleanly company. The memory of the people with whom he spent his time nowadays—in particular, the recollection of the wastrels and fools with whom he had started out yesterday to celebrate the eve of his anniversary—made him sick. He stared down at the slowly-moving flood, and asked himself angrily why a man of thirty who had learned nothing worth learning, achieved nothing worth the doing; who didn’t even know enough to keep sober over-night, should not be thrown like garbage into the river.
The impulse to jump over the parapet hung somewhere very close to the grasp of his consciousness. His mind almost touched it as his eyes dwelt upon the broad, opaque mass of shifting drab waters. He said to himself that he had never before been so near the possibility of deliberate suicide as he was at this moment.
He did not allow the notion to take any more definite shape, but mused for a while upon the fact of its lying there, vaguely formless at the back of his brain, ready to leap into being at his will. Of course, he would not give the word: it was merely interesting to think that he was in the same street, so to speak, with the spirit of self-murder.
After a little, the effect of this steadily drifting body of water seemed to soothe his vision. He grew less conscious of mental disturbance and physical disgust alike. Then he stood up, yawned, and glanced at the big clock-tower, where the laggard hands still clung to the unreasonable neighbourhood of seven o’clock. For some reason, he felt much better. The sensation was very welcome. He drew a long breath of satisfaction, and, leaning with his back to the stonework, fell to watching the people go past. By a sudden revulsion of mood, he discovered all at once that the excess of the night was now offering him compensations. His brain was extremely clear, and, now that the lees of drink were gone, served him with an eager and almost fluttering acuteness which it was pleasant to follow.
He noted with minute attention the varying types of workmen, shopgirls, clerks, and salesmen as they trooped by in the throng, and found himself devoting to each some appropriate mental comment, some wondering guess into their history, or some flash of speculation as to their future. The instantaneous play of his fancy among these flitting items brought great diversion. He rollicked in it—picking out as they trudged along side by side the book-keeper who was probably short in his accounts, the waiter who had been hacking the wrong horses, the barmaid with the seraph’s face who at luncheon time would be listening unmoved to conversation from City men fit to revolt a dock labourer. It was indeed as good as a play, this marvellous aggregation of human dramatic possibilities surging tirelessly before him. He wondered that he had never thought of seeing it before.
From amusing details his mind lifted itself to larger conceptions. He thought of the mystery of London’s vast economy; of all its millions playing dumbly, uninstructedly, almost like automata, their appointed parts in the strange machinery by which so many droves of butchers’ cattle, so many thousands of tons of food and trucks of clothing and coals and oil were brought in daily, and Babylon’s produce was sent out again in balancing repayment. The miracle of these giant scales being always kept even, of London’s ever-craving belly and the country’s never-failing response, loomed upon his imagination. Then, stifling another yawn, it occurred to him that a brain capable of such flights deserved a better fate than to be banged out by a dirty tide against some slime-stained wharf-pile down the river. Yes, and it merited a nobler lot in life, too, than that of being nightly drenched with poisonous drink. Decidedly he would forswear sack, and live cleanly.
The hour struck in the clock-tower. The boom of the great bell swelled hopefully upon his hearing. The chime of the preceding quarter had saddened him, because he heard in it the knell of thirty wasted years. The louder resonance now bore a different meaning. A birthday exposed a new leaf as well as turned down an old one. The twenties were behind him, and undoubtedly they were not nice. Very well; he turned his hack upon them. The thirties were all before him; and, as Big Ben thundered forth its deep-voiced clamour, he straightened himself, and turned to look them confidently in the face.
His eyes fell upon the figure of a young woman, advancing in a little eddy of isolation from the throng, a dozen feet away. Even on the instant he was conscious of a feeling that his gaze had not distinguished her from the others by mere chance; it was, indeed, as if there were no others. In the concentrated scrutiny which he found himself bending upon her, there was a sense of compulsion. His perceptions raced to meet and envelop her.
She was almost tall, and in carriage made the most of her inches. She had much yellow hair of a noticeable sort, pale flaxen in bulk but picked with lemon in its lights, about her brows. He thought that it was dyed, and in the same breath knew better. He mastered the effect of her fine face—with its regular contour, its self-conscious eyes, its dainty rose-leaf of a chin thrust reliantly forth above a broad, white throat—all in some unnamed fraction of a second.
The impression of her filled every corner of his mind. He tried to think about who and what she was, and only built up scaffoldings of conjecture to knock them down again. She was a girl who tried on mantles and frocks in some big Regent Street place: no, the lack of dignity in such an avocation would be impossible to one who carried her chin so high. A woman journalist? No, she was too pretty for that. What was she—type-writer, restaurant-waitress, saleswoman? No, these all wore black, with white collar and wristbands; and her apparel was of an almost flaring order. Her large-sleeved bodice of flowered blue silk, snug to the belted waist, suggested Henley rather than the high road out of squalid Lambeth. Her straw sailor-hat, jauntily borne on the primrose fluff and coils of hair, belonged, too, not a mile lower on the river than Teddington. She should by rights have a racquet in her hand, and be moving along over the close-shaved lawn of Kanelagh’s park, on a hazy, languid summer afternoon. What on earth was she doing on Westminster Bridge, at this ridiculous hour, in this dismal company?
Then speculation died abruptly. She was close to him now, and he recognized her. She was a young woman whom he had seen in the British Museum reading-room a score of times. Her face was entirely familiar to him. Only the other day he had got down for her, from the county-histories shelves, two ponderous volumes which she had seemed unable to manage by herself. She had thanked him with a glance and a pleasant nod. He seemed to recall in that glance a tacit admission that they were old acquaintances by sight. He looked her square in the eye, meanwhile, the inner muscles of his face preparing and holding in readiness a smile in case she gave a sign of remembering him.
For a moment it appeared that she was passing without recognition. He had the presence of mind to feel that this was a gross and inexcusable mischance. His feet instinctively poised themselves to follow her, as if it were for this, and this only, that they had tarried so long on the bridge.
Before he could take a step, however, she had halted, and, in a wavering fashion, moved sidelong out of the main current of pedestrian-ism. She stood irresolutely by the parapet for a few seconds, with a pretence of being interested in the view of the river and the prim stretch of Parliamentary architecture on its right bank. Then, with a little shrug of decision, she turned to him.
“It is a fine morning,” she said.
He had stepped to her side, and he bent upon her now the smile which had so nearly gone a-begging. “I was afraid you hadn’t noticed me—and I had quite resolved to go after you.”
She flashed inquiry into his face, then let her glance wander vaguely off again. “Oh, I saw you well enough,” she confessed, with a curious intermingling of hesitation and boldness; “but at first I wasn’t going to pretend I did. In fact, I don’t in the least know why I did stop. Or, rather, I do know, but you don’t, and you never will. That is to say, I shan’t tell you!”
“Oh, but I do know,” he answered genially. “How should you imagine me so deficient in discernment? Only—only, I think I won’t tell either.”
She looked at him again with a kind of startled intentness, and parted her lips as if to speak. He fancied that he caught in this gaze the suggestion of a painful and humbled diffidence. But then she tossed her head with a saucy air and smiled archly. “What a tremendous secret we shall carry to our graves!” she laughed. “Tell me, do you sleep on the bridge? One hears such remarkable stories, you know, about the readers at the Museum.”
He regarded her with pleasure beaming in his eyes. “No, I go entirely without sleep,” he replied, with gravity, “and walk about the streets turning a single idea for ever in my mind; and every morning at daybreak—oh, this has gone on for years now—I come here to watch for the beautiful girl with the yellow hair who some time is to come up to me and remark, ‘It is a fine morning.’ A fortuneteller told me, ever so long ago, that this was what I must do, and I’ve never had a moment’s rest since.”
“You must be very tired,” she commented, “and a good deal mixed in your mind, too, especially since yellow hair has come so much into fashion. And did the fortune-teller mention what was to happen after the—the beautiful lady had really appeared?”
“Ah, that is another of my secrets!” he cried, delightedly.
They had begun to stroll together toward the clock-tower. The throng bustling heedlessly past with hurried steps gave them an added sense of detachment and companionship. They kept close together by the parapet, their shoulders touching now and again. When they reached the end of the bridge, and paused to look again upon the river prospect, their manner had taken on the ease of people who have known each other for a long time.
The tide was running out now with an exaggerated show of perturbed activity. The girl bent over, and stared at the hurrying current, sweeping along in swirling eddies under the arch, and sucking at the brown-grey masonry of the embankment wall as it passed. Her silence in this posture stretched out over minutes, and he respected it.
At last she had looked her fill and turned, and they resumed their walk. “I could never understand drowning,” she remarked, musingly; “it doesn’t appeal to me at all, somehow. They talk about its being pleasant after the first minute or so, but I don’t believe it. Do you?”
“There might possibly be some point about it—if one could choose the fluid,” he replied, achieving flippancy with an effort. “Like the Duke of Clarence, for example.”
“How do you mean? The papers all said it was influenza. Oh, I see—you mean the Shakespeare one.” Her good faith was undoubted. “But no, we were speaking of drowning—of suicide.”
“No, we weren’t,” he said, soberly. The memory of his own mood a brief half-hour ago stirred uneasily within him. “And we’re not going to, either. What the mischief have you—young and healthy and happy and pretty as a peach—to do with any such things?”
“In fact,” she went on thoughtfully, as if he had not spoken, “all kinds of death seem an outrage to me. They make me angry. It is too stupid to have to die. What right have other people to say to me, ‘How you must die’? I was born to live just as much as they were, and I have every whit as much right on the earth as they have. And I have a right to what I need to keep me alive, too. That must be so, according to common-sense!” Mosscrop had listened to this declaration of principles but indifferently. A sense of drowsiness had stolen over him, and, yielding to it for the moment, he had hung his head, with an aimless regard upon the pavement. All at once he caught sight of something that roused him. His companion’s little boot, disclosed in movement beneath her skirt, was broken at the side, and almost soleless. He lagged behind for a step or two, and made sure of what he saw. The girl in the silken blouse was shod like a beggar.
“Which way are you going?” he asked, with a pretence of suddenly remembering something. He had halted, and they stood at the corner, looking up Whitehall. He smothered a yawn with a little explanatory laugh. “I made rather a night of it—it’s my birthday to-day—and I’m half asleep. I hadn’t noticed where we’d walked to. I hope I haven’t taken you out of your way.”
The girl hesitated, looked up the broad, stately street, and bit her lip in strenuous thought of some sort.
“Good morning, then!” she blurted out, confusedly, and turned to move away.
The impulse to be quit of her had been very sharply defined in his mind, and had dictated not only his words, but his awkward, half-shamefaced, half-familiar, manner in suggesting a parting. Now it vanished again with miraculous swiftness.
“No, no! You mustn’t go off like that!” he urged, and sprang forward to her side. “I only asked you which was your way.”
She was blinking her eyes in a struggle to regain facial composure. He could see that she had been on the point of tears, and the sight moved him to recklessness. It was not surprising to hear her confess: “Me? I have no way.”
He took charge of her with a fine paternal tone. “Oh yes, you have! Your way is my way. You are going with me. It’s my birthday, you know, and you have come to help me celebrate it. What do you say to beginning with a special breakfast?—or perhaps you’ve spoiled your appetite already. But you can pretend to eat a little.”
The girl laughed aloud, with pathetic irony at some conceit which curled her lip in scornful amusement. “Words rose to her tongue, but she forbore to utter them, and stared up the street.
“You’ll come along, won’t you?” He had held up his hand, and a four-wheeler, with a driver and horse of advanced years and dejected aspect, was crawling diagonally across the roadway toward them.
She took courage to look him frankly in the face. “I shall be very much obliged to you, indeed,” she said, keeping her voice up till the avowal should be finished. “I’ve had no breakfast.”
The ancient cab, with a prodigious rattling of framework and windows for its snail’s progress, bore them along past Trafalgar Square, and westward through narrow streets, already teeming with a busy, foreign-looking life, till it halted before a restaurant in one of the broader thoroughfares of Soho.
When they had alighted, and the sad old driver, pocketing his shilling in scowling silence, had started off, a thought occurred to Mosscrop.
“I tell you what we’ll do,” he broke forth. “Well decree that it’s your birthday, too, so that we can celebrate them together. That will be much more fun. And before we go into breakfast, I must get you a little present of some sort, just to mark the occasion. Come, you haven’t anything to say about it at all. It’s my affair, entirely.”
He led the way along past several shops, and halted in front of a narrow window in which a small collection of women’s boots was displayed. A man in shirt-sleeves and apron had just taken down the shutter, and stood now in the doorway, regarding them with a mercantile yet kindly smile.
“It is the best Parisian of make,” the shoeman affirmed, to help forward Mosscrop’s decision.
“You can see how different they are from ordinary English things,” said David, argumentatively. “The leather is like a glove, and the workmanship—observe that! I don’t believe any lady could have a more unique present than a pair of real French boots.”
The girl had come up, and stood close beside him, almost nestling against his shoulder. He saw in the glass the dim reflection of her pleased face, and moved toward the door as if it were all settled. Then, as he stepped on the threshold, she called to him.
“No—please!” she urged. “I think we won’t, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course we will!” he insisted, turning in the doorway. “Why on earth shouldn’t we? It’s your birthday, you know. Come, child, you mustn’t be obstinate; you must be nice, and do what you’re told.”
As she still hung back, shaking her head, he went out to her. “What’s the matter? You liked the idea well enough a minute ago. I saw you smiling in the window there. Come! don’t let a mere trifle like this spoil the beginning of our great joint-birthday. It’s too bad of you! Won’t you really have the boots—from me?”
“Well,” she made answer, falteringly, “it’s very kind—but if I do, I’d rather you didn’t come into the shop—that is, that you went out while I was trying them on—because—well, it is my birthday, you know, and I must have my own way—a little. You will stop outside, won’t you?”
This struck him as perhaps an excess of maidenly reserve. He smiled impatiently. “By all means, if it is your whim. But—but I’m bound to say—I suppose different people draw the line at different places, but feet always seemed to me to be relatively blameless things, as things go. Still, of course, if it’s your idea.”
“No, if you take it that way,” she said, “we’ll go and get our breakfast, and say no more about it.” She found the fortitude to turn away from the window as she spoke.
“If I take it that way!” The perverseness of this trivial tangle annoyed him. “Why, I consented to stop outside, didn’t I? What more is demanded? Do you want me to pass a vote of confidence, or shall I whistle during the performance, so that you may know I am cheerful, or what? Suppose I told you that I had been a salesman in a boot-shop myself, and had measured literally thousands of pretty little feet—would that reassure you? I might come in, then, mightn’t I?”
“No—you never were that—you are a gentleman.” She stole a perplexed glance up at him, and sighed. “I should dearly love the boots—but you won’t understand. I don’t know how to make you.” Looking into his face, and catching there a reflection of her own dubiety, she burst suddenly into laughter. “You are a gentleman, but you are a goose, too. My stockings are too mournful a patchwork of holes and darning to invite inspection—if you will have it.”
“Poor child!” He breathed relief, as if a profoundly menacing misunderstanding had been cleared up. “Here, take this and run across to that fat Jewess in the doorway there. She will fit you out.”
Presently she returned, with beaming eyes, and an air of shyness linked with complacent self-approbation which he found delightful.
“Oh, I should simply insist on your coming in now,” she cried gaily, at the door of the boot-shop, in answer to his mock look of deferential inquiry.
CHAPTER II
There surely was never such another breakfast in the world!
She spoke with frank sincerity. Upon afterthought she added: “I don’t believe any woman could order a meal like that. You men always know so much about eating.” Mosscrop leant back in his chair, crossed his knees, and took a cigar from his pocket. His mind ran in pleasurable retrospect over the dishes—a fragrant omelette with mushrooms, a sole Marguerite, a delicate little steak that had been steeped in oil over night, a pulpy Italian cheese which he never got elsewhere than here. The tall-shouldered, urnshaped green bottle on the table still held a little Capri, and he poured it into her glass.
“Yes,” he assented, “I find myself paying more attention to food as I get older. It is the badge of advancing years. It is a good little restaurant, isn’t it? I come here a great deal.”
“And that is how you are able to order such wonderful breakfasts for hungry young ladies. It comes of practice. Do they all enjoy it as much as I have?”
“You mustn’t ask things like that,” he remonstrated, smilingly, as he lit a match. “I hope you don’t mind?—thanks.” He regarded her contemplatively through the dissolving haze of the first mouthful of smoke. They had the small upstairs dining-room to themselves, and she, from her seat by the window, let her glances wander from him to the street below, and back again, with a charming, child-like effect of being delighted with everything. The sight of her opposite him stirred new emotions in his being. He imported a gentle gravity into his smile, and dropped the jesting tone from his voice. “No—we must play that I have never breakfasted with anybody before—like this—either here or anywhere else. Let us both start fresh on our birthday. We wipe everything off the slate, and make a clean beginning. First of all, you haven’t told me your name.”
“My name is Vestalia Peaussier.”
“Then you are not English? I could have sworn you were the most typically English girl I’d ever laid eyes on.”
“My father was a French gentleman—an officer, and a man of position. He died—killed in a duel—when I was very young. I do not remember him at all. My mother brought me away from France at once. She was dreadfully crushed, poor lady. She was the daughter of a very old Scottish house—it had been a runaway love match—and her people, my grandparents——”
“What part of Scotland? What was their name? I am a Scot myself, you know.”
Vestalia paused briefly, and sipped at her wine. “I was going to say—my grandparents behaved so unfeelingly to my mother that she never permitted herself to mention their name. I do not know it myself. I gathered as a child from poor mother’s words that they were extremely wealthy and proud, and had a title in the family. It is not probable that I shall ever learn more. I should not wish to, either, for it was their hard cruelty which broke my mother’s heart. She died two years ago. Poor unhappy lady!”
Mosscrop nodded sympathetically. “And were you left without anything?”
“My mother’s private fortune had been diminished to almost nothing by bad investments and the treachery of others before her death. I had no one to advise me—I was all alone—and the lawyers and others probably robbed me cruelly. Only a few of her old family jewels were left to me—and one by one I had to part with these. Some of them, I daresay, were of great antiquity and priceless value, if I had only known, but I was forced to sell them for a song. There were wonderful signet-rings among them, all with the crest of the family—I suppose it must have been her family—and at first I thought of using it to trace them—but then my girlish pride——”
“What was the crest?” asked David. “Perhaps it wouldn’t be too late, now.”
Again Vestalia hesitated. Then she shook her head. “No; dear mamma’s wishes are sacred to me. I do not wish to learn what she thought it best to keep from me.”
“Well—and when the jewels were all sold?”
“Long before that I had begun to work for my living. I write a good hand naturally. I got employment as a copyist, but that did not last very long. I was ambitious, and I thought I might work my way into literature. But it is a very disheartening career, you know.”
Mosscrop had lifted his brows in some surprise. He nodded again, with a cursory “Ay!”
“The editors were not at all kind to me,” she went on. “I toiled like a slave, but I hardly ever got anything accepted, and then you had to wait months for your pay, and perhaps not get it at all. I should have starved long ago, if I hadn’t met an American woman at the Museum who was over here getting up pedigrees. Oh, not for herself. She made a regular business of it. Rich Americans paid her to hunt up their English ancestors, in genealogies and old records, and on tombstones and so on. I was her assistant for nearly a year, and things went fairly well with me. But three months ago she was taken ill and had to go home, and there I was stranded again. I tried to go on with some of the jobs she left unfinished, but the people had gone away, or hadn’t confidence in so young a person, and well—that’s all. My landlady turned me out at six o’clock this morning, and she has seized the few poor things I had left—and here I am.”
The young man lifted his glass, and clinked it against hers. “I am very glad that you are here,” he said; and they smiled wistfully into each other’s eyes as they finished the Capri.
“It is a heavenly little break in the clouds, anyway,” she went on, dreamily. “It isn’t like real life at all: it is the way things happen in fairy stories.”
“Quite so. Why shouldn’t we have a fairy story all by ourselves? It is every whit as easy as the stupid, humdrum other thing, and a million times nicer. Oh, I’m on the side of the fairies, myself.”
She looked out, in an absent fashion, at the windows across the way. The light began to fade from her countenance, and the troubled lines returned. “Every day for a fortnight I have been answering advertisements,” she went on, pensively; “some by letter, some in person. There were secretaries’ places, but you had to know shorthand, and the typewriter, and all that. Then somehow all the vacancies for shop-women got filled before I applied, or else people with experience in the business were preferred to me. I even went in for the ‘lady-help’ thing—a kind of domestic servant, you know, only you get less pay and don’t wear a cap—but nobody would have me. My hair was too good and my boots were too bad. The lady of the house just stared at these two things, every place I applied at, and said she was afraid I wouldn’t answer.”
The picture she drew was painful to Moss-crop, and he made an effort to lighten it with levity. “I confess I didn’t think very highly of your boots, myself,” he said, cheerily, “but I admire your hair immensely.”
“Oh, but you are a man!”
He chuckled amiably at the implication of her retort, and she laughed a little, too, in a reluctant way. “It occurs to me,” he ventured, pausing over his words, “that men seem to have played no part whatever in the story of your life.”
“No, absolutely none,” she answered, with prompt decision. “I have never before been beholden to a man for so much as a biscuit or a shoe-button. I don’t know that you will believe me when I tell you, but I’ve never even been alone in a room with a man before in my life.”
“Of course, I believe what you say. It is remarkably interesting, though. Come! First impressions are the very salt of life. I should dearly like to know what you think of the novel experience, as far as you’ve gone.”
She seemed to take him seriously. Placing her elbows on the table, and poising her chin between thumbs and forefingers, she bestowed a frank scrutiny upon his face, as intent and dispassionate as the gaze which a professor of palmistry fastens upon the lines of the client’s hand.
“First of all,” she said, deliberately, “I am not so afraid of you as I was.”
“Delightful!” he cried. “Then I did inspire terror at the outset. It has been the dream of my life to do that—if only just once. I feared I should never succeed. My dear lady, you have rescued me from my own contempt. My career is not a blank failure after all. We must have coffee and a liqueur after that!”
He pressed the bell at his side. She frowned a little at his merry exuberance.
“I am not joking,” she complained. “You asked me to say just what I felt.”
He nodded his contrition as the waiter left the room.
“Yes, do,” he urged. “I will keep as still as a mouse.”
“I am not as afraid of you as I was,” she repeated, dogmatically. “But I think, even if I knew you ever so well, I should always be just the least weeny bit afraid. I can see that you are very kind—my Heavens! nobody else has ever been a hundredth part as kind to me as you are—but all the same—yes, there is a but if I can explain it to you—I get a feeling that you are being kind because it affords you yourself pleasure, rather than because it helps me. No—that is not quite what I mean either. It seems to me that a man will be much kinder than any woman knows how to be, so long as he feels that way; but when he doesn’t feel that way any more—well, then he’ll chuck the whole thing, and never give it another thought.”
“That is very intelligent,” said Mosscrop.
He had the appearance of turning it over in his mind, and liking it the more upon consideration. “Yes, that is soundly reasoned. I can well believe your mother was a Scots lass.”
Vestalia flushed, no doubt with pride.
“Well, then, hear me out,” she said, with a pleasant little assumption of newly-gained authority. “Now, I’ve hardly known a man to speak to—that is, a gentleman, as a friend, you know—if I’m justified in calling you so on such short acquaintance—or no, I mustn’t say that, must I? We are friends—but it’s a new experience, quite, to me. As you say, I have my first impression of what it is like to have a man for a friend.”
The waiter, pushing the door open with his foot, brought in a tray with white cups and silver pots, and wee tinted glasses, and a tall, shapeless bottle encased in a basket-work covering of straw.
“I ordered maraschino,” remarked Moss-crop, as the man poured the coffee. “If you prefer any other, why, of course——”
“Oh no; whatever you say is good, I take with my eyes shut.”
She sipped at the little glass he had filled for her, and then, with a movement of lips and tongue, mused upon the unaccustomed taste. An alert glance shot at him from her eyes.
“I hope——” she began to say, and stopped short.
“You hope what?”
“No; I won’t say what I was going to. It would have been a very ungrateful speech. Only, you must bear in mind that I hardly know one wine from another, and I am leaving myself absolutely in your hands. You will see to it, won’t you, that—that I don’t drink more than I ought.”
Mosscrop waved his hand in smiling reassurance.
“But now for that famous first impression of yours.”
She narrowed her eyelids to look at him, and he found her glance invested with something like tenderness of expression. Her head was tilted a bit to one side, so that the light from the window fell full upon the face. It was a more beautiful face than he had thought, with exquisitely faint and shell-like gradations of colour upon the temples and below the ears, where the strange but lovely primrose hair began. A soft rose-tint had come into her cheeks, which had seemed pallid an hour before. The whole countenance was rounded and mellowed and beautified in his eyes, as he answered her lingering, approving gaze.
“My impression?” she spoke slowly, and with none of the assurance which had marked her earlier deliverance. “Well, you know, I don’t feel as if I knew men any more than I did before. I only know one man—a very, very little. I don’t believe that other men are at all like him, or else we should hear about it. The world would be full of it. No one would talk of anything else. But the man I do know—that is, a little—well, I’d rather know him than all the women that ever were born, even if I had to be afraid of him all the while into the bargain.”
Mosscrop laughed.
“We did well to label it in advance as a first impression. It is the judgment of a babe just opening its eyes. My dear child, I’m afraid this isn’t your birthday, after all. You’re clearly not a year old yet.”
“You always joke, but I’m in sober earnest.” She indeed spoke almost solemnly, and with an impressive fervour in her voice. “You do impress me just like that. I wish you’d believe that I’m saying exactly what I feel. Mind, I expressly said, I don’t suppose for a minute that other men are like you.”
“No, you’re right there,” he broke in. Her manner, even more than the speech, affected him curiously. He drained his liqueur at a gulp, stared out of the window, fidgetted on his chair, finally rose to his feet.
“You’re right there!” he reiterated, biting his cigar and thrusting his hands deep in his pockets. She would have risen also, but he signed to her to sit still. “Other men are not like me, and they can thank God that they’re not. They know enough to keep sober; I don’t. They are of some intelligent use in the world; I’m not. They lead cleanly and decent lives, they control themselves, they make names for themselves, they do things which are of some benefit at least to somebody. Ah-h! You hit the nail on the head. They are different from, me!”
She gazed up at him, dumb with sheer surprise. He took a few aimless steps up and down, halted to scowl out of the window at the signs opposite, and then flung himself into the chair again. Sprawling his elbows on the table, he bent forward and fastened upon her a look of such startled intensity that she trembled under it and drew back.
“Why, do you know, you foolish little girl,” he began, in a hoarse, declamatory voice, “that a few minutes before you came along, there on the bridge, I was going to throw myself into the river, because I wasn’t fit to live. Do you realize that I had sat in judgment upon myself, and condemned myself to death—death, mind you!—because I was an utterly hopeless creature, a waste product, a drunkard, a sterile fool and loafer, a veritable human swine? That is the truth! Do you know where I spent last night—where I woke up, sick with disgust for myself, this morning? No, you don’t; and there’s no need that I should tell you.”
“I don’t care!” The girl’s lips propelled the words forth with extraordinary swiftness, but the eyes with which she regarded her companion, and the rest of her face, grown pale once more, remained unmoved.
“No, you don’t care!” he groaned out a long sigh, and went on with waning vigour. “But I care! It is something to one that I am what I am; that I have wasted my life, that I have done nothing, and worse than nothing, with my chances, that I——”
“You misunderstand me,” Vestalia interposed, with a perturbed simulation of calm. “What I meant was that whatever happened last—that is, at any time before this morning—makes no difference whatever in my—my liking for you.” Her eyes brightened at the thought of something. “It was you yourself who said we would wipe the slate clean, and begin all over again quite fresh. Don’t you remember? And we were to have our own fairy story, all to ourselves. You do remember, don’t you?”
He still breathed heavily, but the gloom upon his face began to abate as he looked at her. He moved one of his hands forward on the table to the neighbourhood of hers, and stroked the cloth gently as if it were her hand he touched. A weary smile, born in his eyes, strengthened and spread to soften his whole countenance.
“Yes, I remember everything,” he mused, with a kind of forlorn gladness in his tone. It seemed an invitation to silence, and they sat without words for a little.
With a constrained air of having convinced herself by argument that it was the right thing to do, Vestalia all at once lifted her hand, and laid it lightly on his. He fancied that it trembled a little. His own certainly shook, though he pressed it firmly upon the table.
“Now the bad spirits have all gone,” he said; “it is fairyland again.”
“Ah, we must keep it so,” she answered, and pressed his hand softly before she withdrew her own. The black mood had fled from him as swiftly as it came. Vestalia’s eyes beamed at the sight of his restored good-humour with himself, and she nodded gay approbation.
“I fancy we’ve about exhausted the delights of this place,” he remarked, after a brief silence filled for both of them with a pleasantly sufficient sense of friendship at its ease. “I’ll pay the bill, and we’ll toddle.”
She glanced about her. “I shall always remember this dear little stuffy old room. I almost hate to leave it at all. I want to fix in my mind just how it looks.”
“Oh, we’ll come often again,” he remarked, lightly. Then it occurred to him that this assurance contained perhaps an element of rashness. “Have you got anything special to do to-day?” he asked, with awkward abruptness.
The question puzzled and troubled her. “I was going to celebrate my birthday,” she murmured, with a wistful, flickering smile ready to fade into depression.
“Of course you are; that’s all settled,” he responded, making up by the heartiness of his tone for the forgetful stupidity of his query. “What I meant was—what were you thinking of doing before—before you knew you had a birthday on hand?”
Vestalia examined the bottom of her coffee-cup, and poked at it with the spoon. “Me? Oh, I had several things to do,” she made reply, hesitatingly. “I had to find something to eat, and contrive how to earn some money, and hunt up a new lodging, and see how I was going to feed myself to-morrow, and—and other small matters of that sort.”
His comment was prefaced with a kind, sad little laugh.
“You must go to the old place, and get your things,” he said. “How much do you owe?”
“I’d rather not go back at all.” She ventured to look up at him now. “I don’t want ever to lay eyes on that old hag again.”
“But your things. If I sent a commissionaire, would she give them up?—on payment of the bill, of course.”
“They’re not worth a bus-fare—they’re really not. You see,” she went on with her reluctant confidences, “I had to pawn everything. These clothes I have on are every rag I have left.”
Mosserop, regarding her with a sympathetic gaze, recalled very clearly the gown she used to wear at the Museum. It was a queer colour—a sort of rusty greenish-blue; it was of common stuff, and made without a waist, in some outlandish Grosvenor Gallery fashion novel to his eye. The practical side of him stumbled at this memory. “But if you had to pawn things,” he said, “I should have thought these silks you have on would have gone first. That frock you used to wear at the Museum, for instance—you could only have raised a few pence on that—whereas these things—I’m afraid, my young friend, that you haven’t a good business head.”
“Oh, better than you think,” she retorted, with downcast eyes. Her further words cost her a visible effort. “I thought it all out, and I saw that my only chance was to hang on to these clothes. If people didn’t happen to look at my boots, I was all right. Men don’t notice such things much—you yourself didn’t at first. And my skirt would hide them, more or less.”
He looked at her averted face, slowly assimilating the meaning of what she said. Then he hastily turned his chair sidewise, rang the bell for the waiter, lit a fresh cigar, and blew out the match with a sigh which deepened into an audible groan.
“What else could I do?” she faltered, with a flushing cheek, and a tear-dimmed stare out of the window. “Nothing but throw myself into the river. And that I won’t do. They have no right to insist upon my doing that. If I was old and horrid, it wouldn’t matter so much. But I’m young, and I want to live. That’s all I ask—just the chance to live. And that I won’t let them rob me of, if I can help it.”
The waiter, counting out the change, embraced the couple in a series of calm, sidelong glances. He expressed polite thanks for the shilling pushed aside toward him, and closed the door behind him when he left the room with an emphasized firmness of touch.
Mosscrop rose. “Come, child,” he said, briskly. “Cheer up! Look up at me—let’s sec a smile on your face. A little brighter, please—that’s more like it. How we have wiped the slate clean! We begin absolutely fresh. Dry your eyes, and we’ll make a start. We’ve got those celebrated birthdays of ours to look after—and it’s high time we set about it.”
She stood up, and smilingly obeyed him by dabbing the napkin against her nose and brows. She moved across to the mirror above the mantel, and smiled again at what she saw. Then she looked down at her boots, and her face took on a radiance, which it kept, as she descended close behind him the narrow stairway.
CHAPTER III.
There was a bar at the front of the restaurant—a cheerful, domestic bar of the Italian sort, with a bright-eyed, smiling, middle-aged woman in charge. She knew Mosscrop, and flashed a kindly glance of southern comradeship at him as he came forward, and stopped and drew his cheque-book from his pocket. There were also two girls in the bar, and they knew him too, and grinned gently at his salute. Vestalia watched them narrowly, and fancied that one of them also winked.
“I had to stop and get some more money,” he explained, when they were in the street together. “There isn’t another place in these parts where they would change a cheque.”
“I noticed that they seemed to know you,” she replied, with reserve.
“Dear people that they are!” he cried. “The sight of them in the morning is always delightful to me. Did you observe it—the extraordinary cheerfulness of them all? You saw how the girls chaffed the ice-man, and how the fellow who brought in the soda-water cases had his joke with the waiters, and how madame clucked and chuckled like a good hen, as if they were all her brood, and everybody seemed to like everybody else?”
“I didn’t get the notion that they were very keen about me,” remarked Vestalia. “As a matter of sober fact, they scowled.”
“Nonsense! Of course they were deferential to you—you represented a sort of dignified unaccustomedness to them, and they were afraid to beam at you. But bless you, they’re as simple and as sweet-hearted as children. They laugh and smile at people just out of pure native amiability. The place is as good as a tonic to me of a morning when I am feeling blue and out of sorts.”
“But you are not this morning,” she reminded him.
For answer he drew her hand through his arm. They fell into step, and moved along at a sauntering gait on their way toward Oxford Street.
It was mid-August, and there had been a shower overnight. The pavement still showed damp in its crevices, and the air was clear and fresh. A pale hazy sunshine began to mark out shadows in the narrow thoroughfares. By-and-by it would be hot and malodorous here, but just now the sense of summer’s charm found them out even in Soho.
She had asked him about himself. The question had risen naturally enough to her lips, and she had propelled it without diffidence. But when the words actually sounded in her own ears, they frightened her. The inquiry seemed all at once personal to the point of rudeness. The possibility of his resenting her curiosity rose in her mind, and on the instant flared upward into painful certainty.
“Oh, forgive me; I had no business to ask you!” she hurriedly added.
He laughed, and patted her arm. “Why on earth shouldn’t you?”
“I spoke without thinking,” she faltered. “I suppose—that is, it occurs to me—perhaps gentlemen don’t like to be questioned—what I mean is, you didn’t answer, and I was afraid——”
“Afraid nothing!” he reassured her. “You mustn’t dream of being stand-offish with me. I shall get vexed with you if you do. My dear little lady, there isn’t anything in the world that you’re not as free as air to say to me, or ask me. I only hesitated because”—he began, smiling in a rueful, whimsical way down at her—“because it’s too complicated and sinister a recital to rush lightly into. My name is David Mosscrop, and I am an habitual criminal by profession. That will do to start with.”
Vestalia looked earnestly into his face for some sign that he was jesting. It was a clean-shaven face, cast by nature in a mould of gravity. The eyes had seemed a pleasant grey to her first cursory examination; but now, on closer scrutiny, there might be a hardness as of steel in their colour. The lips and chin, too, had a sharpness of line that could mean unamiable things. And yet, how could she credit his words? It was true, she recalled, that by all accounts many superior gamblers, burglars, and other evil characters were in private life most kindly persons—of notoriously generous impulses. Pictures of the outlaws of romance, from Robin Hood to Dick Ryder, crowded upon her mental vision. The countenance into which she tremulously stared might have belonged to any of them—a little blurred by the effects of recent drink, a trifle stained in its lower parts by the need of a razor, yet adventurous, subtle, courageous; above all, commanding. Her heart fluttered at the thought of her own temerity in leaning on his arm, and she shot a swift glance forward toward the big thoroughfare they were nearing, where there would be crowds of people to see her. Then she tightened her hold, and said to herself that she didn’t mind a bit.
“You said I might ask anything I liked,” she found herself saying. “What is your special line of crime?”
“Well, specifically, I don’t know just how they would define me. I am not quite a confidence-man, because nobody ever reposes an atom of confidence in me. Mine is a peculiar sort of case. I cannot be said to deceive any one by my game, and yet, undoubtedly, I come under the general head of impostors. I make my living by obtaining money under false pretences.”
The girl was frankly mystified. This sounded so poor and mean that her instincts fluttered back to the original notion that he was joking. Sure enough, she could see the laughter latent in his eyes, now that she looked again.
“You’re just fooling!” she protested, and tugged admonishingly upon his arm. “Tell me what it is you do, quick!”
“How do you know I do anything?” he demanded. He hugged her arm against his side, to show what great fun it all was.
“Why shouldn’t I be a gentleman at large? There are such things, you know.”
She shook her head. “Gentlemen at large don’t read hard at the Museum in August. I never understood they were much given to reading at any time of year, for that matter. No, I know you do something. You are in a profession; I can see that. You are not a doctor; you are too polite and kind-mannered for that. I thought at first that you were a journalist, but they don’t have cheque-books. Oh, tell me, please!”
He laughed gaily. “Ten thousand guesses and you’d never hit it. My dear lady, I profess Culdees.”
Vestalia pondered the information with gravity for a little, stealing sidelong glances to learn if this was more of his fun. “You can see how ignorant I am,” she remarked at last. “You will recognise presently that you are wasting your time with me. What are Culdees? Or is it a thing? I assure you I haven’t the remotest notion.”
“It is a secret,” he assured her, in tones which strove to be serious, but revealed a jocose note to her ear.
She shook his arm gleefully. “As if we could have secrets on our birthday!” she cried. “Tell me instantly all about Culdees! I insist.”
“But I don’t know anything about them. That is the secret—nobody knows anything about them. I draw a salary for devoting three weeks each year to explaining to a class of young men who desire to know nothing whatever about the Culdees, that if they did wish to learn about them they couldn’t possibly do it.”
“Are there any more jobs like that, that you know of?” inquired the girl. “It would just suit me.” Then she spoke less flippantly. “I’m afraid you’ve already discovered how shallow and ill-informed I am. You do not think it is worth while to talk seriously with me!”
He seemed much affected by her rebuke. “My dear lady——” he began, in earnest disclaimer.
“No; what I mean is—” she interrupted him—pleased by his show of contrition, but even more interested in the flow of her own ideas, and the sound of her own voice, which had taken on musical intonations, and delicately-measured cadences since breakfast that were novel to her delighted hearing—“what I mean is, men do not have any real intellectual respect for women; they do not think of them in their deep-down thoughts as their mental equals; they still regard them, as their ancestors did thousands of years ago, as mere toys, playthings, creatures to pat on the cheek and talk pleasant nonsense to, when there is nothing better to do. And the worst of it is that so many women—a large majority—are contented with this, and aspire to nothing higher, and they set the rules for the rest; and hence young women who have ambitions, and do desire to make themselves the equals of men, and set up high ideals of intellectual life, they—they find themselves—find themselves——”
“Find themselves being regarded with much very genuine liking and friendship by those to whom they are good enough to give their company,” Mosscrop finished the sentence for her. He smiled to himself as he pressed her arm still more closely. The girl was not accustomed to drink, and the Capri and maraschino had gone to her tongue. He was pleasantly conscious of their influences himself, and upon second thought he liked his companion all the more for the innocent fearlessness with which she had followed his example. The charm of the whole experience strengthened its hold upon him. He looked down with tenderness upon her. “Yes, very genuine friendship—and gratitude,” he reiterated, with ardour in his low voice.
She did not conceal the enjoyment she had in both look and tone. “The idea of real companionship is so precious in my eyes,” she murmured—“a true communion of minds. There is nothing else in life worth living for. Do you think there can be any real friendship without genuine intellectual respect?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t lay too much stress on that myself,” he answered, lightly. “I find that the fellows I really like the most—the men that I take the most solid comfort in putting in time with—are tremendous duffers from any intellectual point of view, but of course”—he found himself hastily adding—“that is among men. I have never known anything at all about women friends—that is, of what one may honestly call friends. But I am learning fast. I have reached the point of forming an ideal: she must be tall, with her hat just brushing above my collar. She must have the most wonderful pale yellow hair in the world, and the prettiest face, and new French boots—and——”
“You don’t care in the least what kind of a mind she has,” put in Vestalia, dolefully.
“Ah, you didn’t let me finish. She will have a spirit brave and yet tender, a mind broad and capable yet without arrogance, a temperament attuning itself to each passing mood, sunny, shadowed, merry, pensive, adventurous, timid—all as full of sweet little turns and twists and unexpected things in general as an April day. I don’t want her learned: I should hate her to be logical. I like her just as she is: I wouldn’t have her changed for the world.”
In details the definition perhaps left something to be desired. But its form of presentation brought a flush of satisfaction to Ves-talia’s cheek. She nestled closer still against his shoulder for a dozen paces or so, and when she drew away then, let him feel that it was because they were at Oxford Street, and for no other reason.
“Oh, the beautiful day!” was all she said.
They turned to the right, and sauntered aimlessly along down the broad pavement, pausing now and again to glance over some tradesman’s display, then drifting onward again, close together. Before a bookseller’s window at a corner they made a more considerable halt. Mosscrop scanned the rows of titles minutely, talking as he did so. Thus between comments on the volumes they looked at, and idle remarks on subjects which these suggested, she picked up this further account of her new friend’s affairs.
“I told you I was a Scotchman,” he said. “I was the son of a factor, a sort of steward over a biggish estate, and I never did anything but go to school from the earliest moment I can remember. It is as if I was born in a class-room, and cradled on a blackboard. It is a terrible land for that; tuition broods over it like a pestilence. Their idea is to make of each child’s brain a sort of intellectual haggis; the more different kinds of stuff there are in it, the greater the fame of the teacher and the pride of the parents. I shudder now when I think how much I knew at the age of twelve. As for my eighteenth year, when I took the Strathbogie exhibition, Confucius, John Knox, and Lord Bacon rolled in one would have been frightened of me. My information was appalling. My mother died from sheer excess of astonishment at having given birth to such a prodigy. My father took to drink. The magnificence of my attainments not only threw him off his balance—it debauched the entire district. It is the law of history, you know, that communities and nations progress to a certain point, achieve some crowning deed in a golden age of splendid productiveness, and then wither and go off to seed. Well, my parish, having produced me, reached its climax. Industry flagged, enterprise died down; the very land ceased to grow as much corn to the acre as formerly. The people could do nothing but congregate at the taverns and discuss with bated breath my meteoric progress across the academic heavens. Oh, I was a most remarkable young man!
“It happened that there was also a remarkable old man in my neighbourhood. He came from nobody in particular, and went away young. People had long since forgotten that there had been such a lad, when one day he returned to us, well along in years, and infamously rich. I don’t mean that he had come wrongfully by his money. God knows how he got it; the story ran that it had something to do with smoked fish. Whatever its source, his wealth was wanton, preposterous, criminal in its dimensions. He had no kith or kin remaining to him. Of course we knew he would build and endow an educational establishment. All rich old Scotchmen do that, as an ordinary matter. They have reared for us such myriads of brand-new colleges and seminaries on every hillside that I marvel even the rabbits and pheasants can escape learning to spell. There are logarithms in the very atmosphere.
“But this old man was not to be put off with a mere academy. He piled up a veritable castle of instruction, a first-class fortress of learning. And he had an idea of something which should be unique among all the schools of the world. It was all his own idea. Even in Scotland it had not occurred to anyone else. You must know that in early Scotch ecclesiastical history, say from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, there are occasional mentions of some bounders called Culdees, who seem to have run a little sacerdotal show of their own, something between hermits and canons-regular—it is absolutely impossible now to make out just what they were. But this extraordinary old man was quite clear in his mind about them. He had reasoned it all out for himself. He said that ‘Culdees’ was, of course, a mere popular corruption of ‘Chaldees.’ He loved to argue this with all comers, and he did so,—my word for it, he did! How nobody in Scotland ever agrees with any view or opinion advanced by any other person, but the art of disagreeing has been reduced, by ages of use, to a delicately-modulated system. Everybody disputed his ridiculous notion of the ‘Chaldees’—they would have fought it just as stoutly if it had been a wise one—but he was a very rich man, and he had benevolent intentions toward the district, and so they ‘roared him gently as any sucking dove.’ They couldn’t admit his contention, oh no, but they let him feel that they were thinking about it, that it had made an impression on their minds, that in due time they might see it differently.
“The upshot was that the old fool established a Culdee Chair in the faculty of his new college, and made it worth more money than any other professorship of the lot. The celebrity of my performances at school was fresh then, and reached his ears. He gave the billet to me, and confirmed it to me in his will when he died, a year later—and that is all.”
“And you actually only work three weeks a year? And get paid a whole year’s salary for that?”
Vestalia regarded him with astonishment, as she put the question.
They had strolled meanwhile down the great thoroughfare, crossed it, and passed into a narrower lateral by-way.
“It is hardly even three full weeks’ work,” he replied. “There is nothing to do in the way of fresh discovery. Reeves and Skene and other fellows have gleaned the last spear of straw in the stubble. I do go through the form of getting up some lectures each Autumn, but it is really such dreadful humbug that I’m ashamed to look the students in the face, let alone my fellow-professors. Fortunately, most of the latter are clergymen, and that makes it a little easier. They know that they are as big frauds as I am, in their own line of goods, and so we say nothing about it.”
“What struck me,” she began, hesitatingly, “you spoke rather—what I mean is, you don’t appear to be very grateful to the old gentleman who arranged all this for you—and to me it seems the most wonderful thing I ever heard of. I should thank his memory on my bended knees every day of my life if I were the Professor of Culdees. I couldn’t find it in my heart to poke fun at him; I should think of him and revere him as my benefactor, always!”
“Hm—m!” said Mosscrop. “I’m not sure I don’t wish he’d never been born, or had choked on a bone of one of his own damned Finnan baddies, before ever he came back to us!”
The ring in his voice, like a surly rattling of chains, brought back to her vividly the scene of his despondency at the restaurant.
She made haste to lay her hand upon his arm.
“Oh, do you see where we are?” she cried, vivaciously, snatching at the chance of diversion.
Sure enough, a section of the Museum’s stately front lay before them, filling to topheaviness the perspective of the small street. They had wandered instinctively toward this pre-natal rendezvous of their friendship. Their eyes softened now as they looked at the grey, pillared block of masonry stretching across the end of their by-way.
“It draws us like a magnet,” said Moss-crop. “Come, what do you say? Shall we go in for an hour, and wander about as if we were nice rural people come up to London to see the sights? I should like to myself.”
“The dear old place!” sighed Vestalia, with mellow tones.
CHAPTER IV.
It was a long hour that the Museum claimed from them.
“This is what always attracts me most of all,” said Mosscrop upon entering. He turned to the left, and led the way into the little gallery of the Roman portrait-busts. “Very often I never go any farther than this. The modernness of these fellows is a perpetual marvel to me. It is as if we met them every day. Look at Caracalla and Septimius Severus; they are exactly like Irish members. And see Pertinax, here; I know at least ten old farmers about Elgin who might be his own brothers. Observe this man Hadrian. He is the absolute image of Francis the First. You know the portraits of him at Hampton Court—what? never been there? Ah, that’s a place we will go to together. There is one picture of Francis there—he is very drunk, apparently, and has got hold of the hand of the Duchess of Some-thing-or-other, and she is in her cups, too, and the inane, leering, almost simian happiness of the two—oh, it is worth a long journey just to see that one picture.”
“It doesn’t sound very inviting,” commented Vestalia. “Tipsy women are repulsive, whether they are duchesses or not.”
Mosscrop chuckled. “Oh, but you must make allowances for the period. It was the Renaissance, the joyful, exuberant, devil-may-care Renaissance. If once you catch the inner spirit of it, you will feel that it was the most glorious of periods. And Francis the First was the living, breathing type of it. There was a man for you! He celebrated his birthday all the year round. And in this particular instance, why, I daresay it was the Duchess’s birthday too. I should have thought you would take a more lenient view of such a pleasing double anniversary.”
Vestalia looked doubtfully at him. “I hope you don’t mean that I am in my cups, as you call it,” she said.
He laughed her suspicion down. “No, I won’t let you hint at such an absurd thing. My dear friend, I must cultivate your sense of humour. The roots exist, but the growth is choked by the weeds of Lambeth—or was it Kennington? We must have them up.”
“But I don’t know when you are joking,” she protested. “Besides, I always understood that the Scotch were not a joking people.”
“Ah, you confuse two things. It is said of us, with some justice, that we are slow to comprehend the jokes of others. But of the making of jokes by ourselves there is no end. And—ah, here is Nero. I love Nero!”
“Is that a joke, too?”
“Ah, no,” he answered, more seriously. “It is in my nature to love all the people whom history has picked out to condemn. If you knew the sort of creatures who wrote the histories—the old chronicles and records and so on—you would understand my point of view. They were full of all meannesses and narrow bigotries; they calumniated everybody they couldn’t blackmail. Take the case of Richard Lionheart and his brother John, in your own English history. The former was a ferocious and turbulent blackguard, who neglected all his duties of kingship without shame, plundered his own subjects by torture and rapine, and was altogether a curse to his own people and everybody else. The mere trick of his having a taste for songs and music saved him. He buttered up the bards, and they fastened him in history as a hero. It is precisely the same thing that is done now by politicians who take pains to make friends with the newspapers. On the other hand, John was a model monarch, diligent, hardworking, extraordinarily attentive to his duties, travelling for ever up and down the country to hold courts of justice, and right the wrongs poor people suffered at the hands of the barons and the abbots and other powerful ruffians. It is plain enough that the poor people loved him; after all these centuries his name continues to be the most popular baptismal name among them. But the bards and monkish chroniclers were in the pay of the barons and abbots, and they paint John for us as the most evil scoundrel in English history. That’s the way it has always been done. I should like to have Nero’s side of his story. I know he must have been a splendid fellow, to have got the historians so violently against him. I shouldn’t be surprised if he was really almost as fine as Richard the Third.”
“How amusing!” said Vestalia at this point, and Mosscrop was swift to take the hint. They moved on through the Greek rooms, where the girl had more of a chance. She had known a few of the students who are accustomed on giving days to offer up sacrifices of time and crayons and good white paper in front of the more fashionable statues, and this had provided her with what seemed to her companion an exhaustive familiarity with Hellenic art. This advantage followed and remained with her amid the sombre and lofty fragments of the Mausoleum, and shone about her when they confronted the frieze of the Parthenon.
“It is not my subject,” he remarked, delightedly. “This is a Hermes, you say, and that a Winged Goddess of Victory. Ah, and this is a River God. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. It is charming—to come with you. We supplement each other. Sure enough, I ought to have foreseen that you would know about Greek art. It is just the field that would attract a beautiful young woman. It fits you—it belongs to you.”
“How—now!” she admonished him, holding up a finger in playful protest.
“Oh,” he urged, “if I’m not to say that you are beautiful, we might as well not have any birthday at all. That is its most elementary fact—lying at the very foundation of everything. To ignore it would be like trying to celebrate the Fifth of November without a guy.”
Again she shot a glance of dubiety at him. “I don’t know in the least how to take that,” she confessed, with a quiver on her lip.
He laughed outright at this, and gaily patted her on the shoulder. “This unnatural Attic levity of mine is all the fault of the frieze. I’m a cat in a strange garret here. Hasten with me to the Assyrian rooms, if you want to see the utmost height of solemnity it is given to mortals to attain.”
He was not quite as good as his word, when they began loitering along before the carved tablets from Nineveh and Khorsabad. Instruction he could not help piling upon his companion, for this was his subject, but he found himself seasoning it with all sorts of sprightly commentaries on the serious text. Of grave and sportive alike he had so much to say that Vestalia took his arm, and leant upon it as they made their slow progress through the long corridors. The contact was exhilarating to him. He could not be sure that she was assimilating any large proportion of his discourse, but her pretence of interest at least was very pretty, and the touch of her arm in his was full of inspiration to his tongue.
Down in the basement, or crypt, he stood before the lions of Assur-Banipal, and talked at length. She said she had read Byron’s “Sardanapalus,” and he told her how those detestable linguists, the Greeks, had altered the name, and how the Assyrian legends of a great warrior and sovereign had become twisted in the Hellenic after-version to depict a sublimation of debauched effeminacy and luxury run mad. She listened with her shoulder against his—but now he had other auditors as well.
“Excuse me, sir,” the urgent and anxious voice of a stranger said close behind him, “but you seem to be extraordinarily well posted indeed on these sculptures here. I hope you will not object to my daughter and me standing where we can hear your remarks.”
Mosscrop turned, and saw before him an elderly man, with a mild expression, and hair and beard of extreme whiteness. He was soberly attired, and carried in his hand a broad-brimmed hat of woven white straw. He bowed courteously, and indicated by a gentle gesture the young lady standing at his side.
“I should delight, sir, to have my daughter be privileged to profit by your remarks,” he repeated, and bowed again.
The daughter was a dark, well-rounded girl, dressed with much elegance. Her face was strikingly Oriental in type, with coal-black tresses drawn low over the temples, and a skin of a uniform ivory hue. She said nothing, but looked at Vestalia’s hair.
Mosscrop spoke somewhat abruptly. “You are certainly welcome, but it happens that I have finished my remarks, as you call them.”
“That is too bad,” replied the stranger, with a sigh of resignation. “I overheard enough to convince me that they were first-rate. It is our misfortune, sir, mine and my daughter’s, to have arrived too late. I presume, sir, that you have given special attention to this branch of study?”
The Professor of Culdees nodded briefly.
“And may I take the liberty of inquiring, sir,” the old man persisted, “whether you are professionally engaged in transmitting to others the knowledge which you have thus acquired?”
A stormy grin began twitching at the corners of Mosscrop’s mouth. He nodded again.
“My purpose in putting the question is not one of idle curiosity, sir,” the other went on. “My life-long desire to visit Europe, and behold its venerable ruins and its remarkable accumulations of objects of historical and artistic interest, has attained fulfilment at a period, unfortunately, when the burden of my years, while not incapacitating me from the enjoyments of the mind, renders me less capable of searching out new information than I should once have been. It also, I see only too clearly, unfits me to act as a guide and interpreter, amid these treasures of the storied past, to a young mind so much fresher and more eager than my own. I recognise this, sir, frankly, and I should be glad to discuss some possible arrangement, with the proper persons, by which my deficiencies might be supplied in this connection.”
The elaborate and deferential courtesy with which the old gentleman spoke made a curt answer impossible. Mosscrop looked from father to daughter with a puzzled smile.
“You are Americans, I take it?”
“We are from Paris, sir.” He made haste to add, “From Paris, Kentucky. I obtrude the explanation, because I find that among foreigners there is frequently a tendency to confuse our city with the celebrated metropolis on the Continent, which bears the same name, but is a place of an entirely different character. To a scholar like yourself, however, I might have realised that such an error would be impossible. I ask your pardon, sir.”
“Oh, don’t mention it,” replied Mosscrop, lightly. He could not recall ever having heard of such a place before, and for a moment was tempted to say so. But there was an effect of sweet simplicity in the old man’s face and manner which restrained his tongue. “Well,” he said instead, “what is it that you wish? I am not sure that I have entirely caught your idea. Do you want some one to go round with you and show you things?”
“Not in the ordinary meaning which would attach to that description,” the other answered. “We do not require to have things shown to us in the literal sense of the word, but I had thought that if we were attended in our inspection of the various objects of interest for which Europe is justly famous, by some person of erudition and also of an exceptional style of delivery, the experience would be of much greater practical value to my daughter. Of course, sir, I am aware that professional assistance of this high character is not to be obtained without commensurate compensation, but that is a consideration which presents no obstacles to my mind.”
David felt Vestalia’s hand trembling upon his arm.
“I can see,” he said, more amiably, “that such a relation might be extremely welcome to many deserving and very capable men. But at the moment I regret to say I can think of none to recommend to you. Besides, you don’t know me from Adam; so how could I give a character to any one else?”
“I beg your pardon sir,” rejoined the old gentleman, “but we took the liberty of following close behind you all through the last two long hallways. You were apparently so engrossed with your subject that our proximity escaped your attention, but we have listened with the deepest interest, and I may say improvement as well, to everything which has fallen from your lips. I have thus, sir, been able to form an estimate of your individual characteristics not less than of your acquirements. I may add, sir, that I am especially impressed by the fact that my daughter, from first to last, displayed an exceptional eagerness to miss nothing of your discourse. As the principal object of my visit to Europe, as, indeed, of my whole existence, is to provide the highest forms of intellectual pleasure and edification for my daughter, I cannot close my eyes to the discovery that your remarks upon Assyrian history produced a much more profound impression upon her young mind than anything which it has been within the scope of my own diminishing powers to produce for her consideration. I have rarely seen her so absorbed, even at our best lectures.”
David stifled a yawn, and made a little bow in which, as he turned, he strove to include the young American lady whoso culture was the object of so much solicitude. His movement surprised upon her countenance an expression of scornful weariness, which seemed to render the whole face alert and luminous with feeling. At sight of his eyes, her sultana-like features composed themselves again to an almost stolid tranquillity. She regarded him with indolence for an instant, then looked calmly away at things in general. There was to be read in that transient glance a challenge which stirred his blood.
“Well, what you say is, beyond doubt, flattering,” he remarked to the father, in a slightly altered voice. “It might be that—that I could find some one for you.”
The old gentleman bowed ceremoniously. “Permit me to say, sir, that I have found the some one—a person possessing unique qualifications for the position which I have outlined. I need nothing now but the power to influence his decision in a manner favourable to my aspirations.” He turned to Vestalia. “I am emboldened, madame, to crave your assistance in reconciling your husband to my project.”
Vestalia’s hand fluttered sharply on David’s arm, and she parted her lips to speak. At the moment, there was audible a derisive sniff from the daughter.
“It is my rule never to interfere,” Vestalia answered with sudden decision, and in a coldly distinct voice. “He is quite capable of settling such matters for himself.” She looked from father to daughter and back with an impressive eye.
Mosscrop laughed uneasily. “Well—I’m afraid you must take it that this is settled—I scarcely see my way to avail myself of your very complimentary offer.”
The American caught the note of hesitation in his voice. “Perhaps you will turn it over in your mind,” he said, fumbling with a hand in his inner breast-pocket. “Allow me, sir, to hand you my card. Adele, you have a pencil? Thank you. I will inscribe upon it the name of the hotel at which we are residing.”
Mosscrop took the card, glanced at it, and nodded. “In the extremely improbable event of my changing my mind, I will let you know,” he said. “Good day.”
As they were parting, the father seemed to read in the daughter’s eye that he was forgetting something. He hesitated for a brief space; then his kindly face brightened. “Excuse me, sir,” he observed, “but I have neglected to inform myself as to your identity—if I may presume to that extent.”
David felt vainly in his pocket. “I haven’t a card with me. My name is David Mosscrop. The Barbary Club will find me. I will write it for you.”
The old man scrutinized the scrawl in his note-book, and then, after more bows, led his daughter away. She walked after him in a proudly indifferent fashion, with her head in the air, and something almost like a swagger in the movements of her form.
Mosscrop watched them with a ruminating eye till they had left the room. Then he glanced at the card, and gave a little laugh. “Mr. Laban Skinner, Paris, Kentucky.—Savoy Hotel,” he read aloud.
“Skinner? Is their name Skinner?” demanded Vestalia with eagerness.
“None other. Why? It’s a good name for them, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes—good enough,” the girl replied, speaking now with exaggerated nonchalance.
“Quaint people these Americans are!” commented Mosscrop. “If I were to put that old chap’s speeches down literally in a book nobody would credit them. Fancy the fate of a young woman condemned to be dragged around the globe chained to a preposterous old phonograph like that! It really wrings one’s heart to think of it. Mighty good-looking girl too.”
Vestalia withdrew her arm. “Perhaps,” she said, icily, “if you were to make haste you might overtake them. I must insist on your not allowing me to detain you, if you are so interested. I shall do quite well by myself.” Mosscrop gathered her meaning slowly, after a grave scrutiny of her flushed and perturbed face. When it came to him, he shouted his merriment. A glance around the chamber showed him that they were alone with the lions and carved effigies of Sardanapalus.
He thrust an arm about Vestalia’s waist, and gave it a boisterous though fleeting squeeze.
“Why, you dear little canary-bird of a creature, do you suppose I’ve been forgetting you?” he cried. “Haven’t I been thinking every minute of the touch of your arm in mine? Haven’t I been cursing that old windbag ceaselessly because he was interrupting our birthday? Look up at me! Truly now, aren’t you ashamed?”
She suffered him to raise her face, his finger under her chin, and she made a brave effort to smile hack at the glance he bent upon her. “If it is truly—oh, ever so truly—still our birthday—the same as it was before,” she made wistful answer.
“It is a hundred times more our birthday than ever!” he protested stoutly.
An elderly keeper in uniform shuffled his way into the room.
“Well then,” whispered Vestalia, “let’s go somewhere else to celebrate the rest of it. All these stone animals and images and mummies—I don’t feel as if they brought me luck on my birthday.”
So they wandered forth into the sunshine again, and Mosscrop confessed himself glad of the change. Where should they go? He found himself empty of suggestion. Responsibility for the decorous entertainment of a young lady in the daytime was a novel experience, and he said so.
“Oh, let us just stroll about,” she urged. “I love these old Bloomsbury Squares. They are so stupid.”
Luncheon hour came, and presented itself to Mosscrop as a welcome pretext to take a hansom. A certain formless apprehension of meeting some one he knew—though why this should be dreaded he could not for the life of him have told—had alloyed the pleasure of his ramble. They drove to another restaurant, this time a larger place in a more pretentious quarter—and though they had a little table to themselves, the room was full of others.
David knew about luncheons as well as breakfasts. He gave the waiter very minute instructions about having a grouse split and grilled, and he ran his eye over the list of champagnes with the confident discrimination of an expert. “I will give that number 34a one more trial,” he said to the butler. “Cool it to 48, and we will see what it is like then.”