One day it occurred to Leibel that he ought to get married. He went to
Sugarman the Shadchan forthwith.

“I have the very thing for you,” said the great marriage broker.

“Is she pretty?” asked Leibel.

“Her father has a boot and shoe warehouse,” replied Sugarman,
enthusiastically.

“Then there ought to be a dowry with her,” said Leibel, eagerly.

“Certainly a dowry! A fine man like you!”

“How much do you think it would be?”

“Of course it is not a large warehouse; but then you could get your
boots at trade price, and your wife’s, perhaps, for the cost of the
leather.”

“When could I see her?”

“I will arrange for you to call next Sabbath afternoon.”

“You won’t charge me more than a sovereign?”

“Not a groschen more! Such a pious maiden! I’m sure you will be happy.
She has so much way-of-the-country [breeding]. And of course five per
cent on the dowry?”

“H’m! Well, I don’t mind!” “Perhaps they won’t give a dowry,” he
thought with a consolatory sense of outwitting the Shadchan.

On the Saturday Leibel went to see the damsel, and on the Sunday he
went to see Sugarman the Shadchan.

“But your maiden squints!” he cried, resentfully.

“An excellent thing!” said Sugarman. “A wife who squints can never
look her husband straight in the face and overwhelm him. Who would
quail before a woman with a squint?”

“I could endure the squint,” went on Leibel, dubiously, “but she also
stammers.”

“Well, what is better, in the event of a quarrel? The difficulty she
has in talking will keep her far more silent than most wives. You had
best secure her while you have the chance.”

“But she halts on the left leg,” cried Leibel, exasperated.

“Gott in Himmel! Do you mean to say you do not see what an advantage
it is to have a wife unable to accompany you in all your goings?”

Leibel lost patience.

“Why, the girl is a hunchback!” he protested, furiously.

“My dear Leibel,” said the marriage broker, deprecatingly shrugging
his shoulders and spreading out his palms, “you can’t expect
perfection!”

Nevertheless Leibel persisted in his unreasonable attitude. He accused
Sugarman of wasting his time, of making a fool of him.

“A fool of you!” echoed the Shadchan, indignantly, “when I give you a
chance of a boot and shoe manufacturer’s daughter? You will make a
fool of yourself if you refuse. I dare say her dowry would be enough
to set you up as a master tailor. At present you are compelled to
slave away as a cutter for thirty shillings a week. It is most unjust.
If you only had a few machines you would be able to employ your own
cutters. And they can be got so cheap nowadays.”

This gave Leibel pause, and he departed without having definitely
broken the negotiations. His whole week was befogged by doubt, his
work became uncertain, his chalk marks lacked their usual decision,
and he did not always cut his coat according to his cloth. His
aberrations became so marked that pretty Rose Green, the sweater’s
eldest daughter, who managed a machine in the same room, divined, with
all a woman’s intuition, that he was in love.

“What is the matter?” she said, in rallying Yiddish, when they were
taking their lunch of bread and cheese and ginger-beer amid the
clatter of machines, whose serfs had not yet knocked off work.

“They are proposing me a match,” he answered, sullenly.

“A match!” ejaculated Rose. “Thou!” She had worked by his side for
years, and familiarity bred the second person singular. Leibel nodded
his head, and put a mouthful of Dutch cheese into it.

“With whom?” asked Rose. Somehow he felt ashamed. He gurgled the
answer into the stone ginger-beer bottle, which he put to his thirsty
lips.

“With Leah Volcovitch!”

“Leah Volcovitch!” gasped Rose. “Leah, the boot and shoe
manufacturer’s daughter?”

Leibel hung his head–he scarce knew why. He did not dare meet her
gaze. His droop said “Yes.” There was a long pause.

“And why dost thou not have her?” said Rose. It was more than an
inquiry; there was contempt in it, and perhaps even pique.

Leibel did not reply. The embarrassing silence reigned again, and
reigned long. Rose broke it at last.

“Is it that thou likest me better?” she asked.

Leibel seemed to see a ball of lightning in the air; it burst, and he
felt the electric current strike right through his heart. The shock
threw his head up with a jerk, so that his eyes gazed into a face
whose beauty and tenderness were revealed to him for the first time.
The face of his old acquaintance had vanished; this was a cajoling,
coquettish, smiling face, suggesting undreamed-of things.

“Nu, yes,” he replied, without perceptible pause.

“Nu, good!” she rejoined as quickly.

And in the ecstasy of that moment of mutual understanding Leibel
forgot to wonder why he had never thought of Rose before. Afterward he
remembered that she had always been his social superior.

The situation seemed too dream-like for explanation to the room just
yet. Leibel lovingly passed a bottle of ginger-beer, and Rose took a
sip, with a beautiful air of plighting troth, understood only of those
two. When Leibel quaffed the remnant it intoxicated him. The relics of
the bread and cheese were the ambrosia to this nectar. They did not
dare kiss; the suddenness of it all left them bashful, and the smack
of lips would have been like a cannon-peal announcing their
engagement. There was a subtler sweetness in this sense of a secret,
apart from the fact that neither cared to break the news to the master
tailor, a stern little old man. Leibel’s chalk marks continued
indecisive that afternoon, which shows how correctly Rose had
connected them with love.

Before he left that night Rose said to him, “Art thou sure thou
wouldst not rather have Leah Volcovitch?”

“Not for all the boots and shoes in the world,” replied Leibel,
vehemently.

“And I,” protested Rose, “would rather go without my own than without
thee.”

The landing outside the workshop was so badly lighted that their lips
came together in the darkness.

“Nay, nay; thou must not yet,” said Rose. “Thou art still courting
Leah Volcovitch. For aught thou knowest, Sugarman the Shadchan may
have entangled thee beyond redemption.”

“Not so,” asserted Leibel. “I have only seen the maiden once.”

“Yes. But Sugarman has seen her father several times,” persisted Rose.
“For so misshapen a maiden his commission would be large. Thou must go
to Sugarman to-night, and tell him that thou canst not find it in thy
heart to go on with the match.”

“Kiss me, and I will go,” pleaded Leibel.

“Go, and I will kiss thee,” said Rose, resolutely.

“And when shall we tell thy father?” he asked, pressing her hand, as
the next best thing to her lips.

“As soon as thou art free from Leah.”

“But will he consent?”

“He will not be glad,” said Rose, frankly. “But after mother’s death–
peace be upon her–the rule passed from her hands into mine.”

“Ah, that is well,” said Leibel. He was a superficial thinker.

Leibel found Sugarman at supper. The great Shadchan offered him a
chair, but nothing else. Hospitality was associated in his mind with
special occasions only, and involved lemonade and “stuffed monkeys.”

He was very put out–almost to the point of indigestion–to hear of
Leibel’s final determination, and plied him with reproachful
inquiries.

“You don’t mean to say that you give up a boot and shoe manufacturer
merely because his daughter has round shoulders!” he exclaimed,
incredulously.

“It is more than round shoulders–it is a hump!” cried Leibel.

“And suppose? See how much better off you will be when you get your
own machines! We do not refuse to let camels carry our burdens because
they have humps.”

“Ah, but a wife is not a camel,” said Leibel, with a sage air.

“And a cutter is not a master tailor,” retorted Sugarman.

“Enough, enough!” cried Leibel. “I tell you, I would not have her if
she were a machine warehouse.”

“There sticks something behind,” persisted Sugarman, unconvinced.

Leibel shook his head. “Only her hump” he said with a flash of humour.

“Moses Mendelssohn had a hump,” expostulated Sugarman, reproachfully.

“Yes, but he was a heretic,” rejoined Leibel, who was not without
reading. “And then he was a man! A man with two humps could find a
wife for each. But a woman with a hump cannot expect a husband in
addition.”

“Guard your tongue from evil,” quoth the Shadchan, angrily. “If
everybody were to talk like you Leah Volcovitch would never be married
at all.”

Leibel shrugged his shoulders, and reminded him that hunchbacked girls
who stammered and squinted and halted on left legs were not usually
led under the canopy.

“Nonsense! Stuff!” cried Sugarman, angrily. “That is because they do
not come to me.”

“Leah Volcovitch has come to you,” said Leibel, “but she shall not
come to me.” And he rose, anxious to escape.

Instantly Sugarman gave a sigh of resignation. “Be it so! Then I shall
have to look out for another, that’s all.”

“No, I don’t want any,” replied Leibel, quickly.

Sugarman stopped eating. “You don’t want any?” he cried. “But you came
to me for one?”

“I–I–know,” stammered Leibel. “But I’ve–I’ve altered my mind.”

“One needs Hillel’s patience to deal with you!” cried Sugarman. “But I
shall charge you, all the same, for my trouble. You cannot cancel an
order like this in the middle! No, no! You can play fast and loose
with Leah Volcovitch, but you shall not make a fool of me.”

“But if I don’t want one?” said Leibel, sullenly.

Sugarman gazed at him with a cunning look of suspicion. “Didn’t I say
there was something sticking behind?”

Leibel felt guilty. “But whom have you got in your eye?” he inquired,
desperately.

“Perhaps you may have some one in yours!” naively answered Sugarman.

Leibel gave a hypocritic long-drawn “U-m-m-m! I wonder if Rose Green–
where I work–” he said, and stopped.

“I fear not,” said Sugarman. “She is on my list. Her father gave her
to me some months ago, but he is hard to please. Even the maiden
herself is not easy, being pretty.”

“Perhaps she has waited for some one,” suggested Leibel.

Sugarman’s keen ear caught the note of complacent triumph.

“You have been asking her yourself!” he exclaimed, in horror-stricken
accents.

“And if I have?” said Leibel, defiantly.

“You have cheated me! And so has Eliphaz Green–I always knew he was
tricky! You have both defrauded me!”

“I did not mean to,” said Leibel, mildly.

“You did mean to. You had no business to take the matter out of my
hands. What right had you to propose to Rose Green?”

“I did not,” cried Leibel, excitedly.

“Then you asked her father!”

“No; I have not asked her father yet.”

“Then how do you know she will have you?”

“I–I know,” stammered Leibel, feeling himself somehow a liar as well
as a thief. His brain was in a whirl; he could not remember how the
thing had come about. Certainly he had not proposed; nor could he say
that she had.

“You know she will have you,” repeated Sugarman, reflectively. “And
does she know?”

“Yes. In fact,” he blurted out, “we arranged it together.”

“Ah, you both know. And does her father know?”

“Not yet.”

“Ah, then I must get his consent,” said Sugarman, decisively.

“I–I thought of speaking to him myself.”

“Yourself!” echoed Sugarman, in horror. “Are you unsound in the head?
Why, that would be worse than the mistake you have already made!”

“What mistake?” asked Leibel, firing up.

“The mistake of asking the maiden herself. When you quarrel with her
after your marriage she will always throw it in your teeth that you
wished to marry her. Moreover, if you tell a maiden you love her, her
father will think you ought to marry her as she stands. Still, what is
done is done.” And he sighed regretfully.

“And what more do I want? I love her.”

“You piece of clay!” cried Sugarman, contemptuously. “Love will not
turn machines, much less buy them. You must have a dowry. Her father
has a big stocking; he can well afford it.”

Leibel’s eyes lit up. There was really no reason why he should not
have bread and cheese with his kisses.

“Now, if you went to her father,” pursued the Shadchan, “the odds
are that he would not even give you his daughter–to say nothing of
the dowry. After all, it is a cheek of you to aspire so high. As you
told me from the first, you haven’t saved a penny. Even my commission
you won’t be able to pay till you get the dowry. But if I go I do
not despair of getting a substantial sum–to say nothing of the
daughter.”

“Yes, I think you had better go,” said Leibel, eagerly.

“But if I do this thing for you I shall want a pound more,” rejoined
Sugarman.

“A pound more!” echoed Leibel, in dismay. “Why?”

“Because Rose Green’s hump is of gold,” replied Sugarman, oracularly.
“Also, she is fair to see, and many men desire her.”

“But you have always your five per cent, on the dowry.”

“It will be less than Volcovitch’s,” explained Sugarman. “You see,
Green has other and less beautiful daughters.”

“Yes, but then it settles itself more easily. Say five shillings.”

“Eliphaz Green is a hard man,” said the Shadchan instead.

“Ten shillings is the most I will give!”

“Twelve and sixpence is the least I will take. Eliphaz Green haggles
so terribly.”

They split the difference, and so eleven and threepence represented
the predominance of Eliphaz Green’s stinginess over Volcovitch’s.

The very next day Sugarman invaded the Green workroom. Rose bent over
her seams, her heart fluttering. Leibel had duly apprised her of the
roundabout manner in which she would have to be won, and she had
acquiesced in the comedy. At the least it would save her the trouble
of father-taming.

Sugarman’s entry was brusque and breathless. He was overwhelmed with
joyous emotion. His blue bandana trailed agitatedly from his coat-
tail.

“At last!” he cried, addressing the little white-haired master tailor;
“I have the very man for you.”

“Yes?” grunted Eliphaz, unimpressed. The monosyllable was packed with
emotion. It said, “Have you really the face to come to me again with
an ideal man?”

“He has all the qualities that you desire,” began the Shadchan, in a
tone that repudiated the implications of the monosyllable. “He is
young, strong, God-fearing–”

“Has he any money?” grumpily interrupted Eliphaz.

“He will have money,” replied Sugarman, unhesitatingly, “when he
marries.”

“Ah!” The father’s voice relaxed, and his foot lay limp on the
treadle. He worked one of his machines himself, and paid himself the
wages so as to enjoy the profit. “How much will he have?”

“I think he will have fifty pounds; and the least you can do is to let
him have fifty pounds,” replied Sugarman, with the same happy
ambiguity.

Eliphaz shook his head on principle.

“Yes, you will,” said Sugarman, “when you learn how fine a man he is.”

The flush of confusion and trepidation already on Leibel’s countenance
became a rosy glow of modesty, for he could not help overhearing what
was being said, owing to the lull of the master tailor’s machine.

“Tell me, then,” rejoined Eliphaz.

“Tell me, first, if you will give fifty to a young, healthy, hard-
working, God-fearing man, whose idea it is to start as a master tailor
on his own account? And you know how profitable that is!”

“To a man like that,” said Eliphaz, in a burst of enthusiasm, “I would
give as much as twenty-seven pounds ten!”

Sugarman groaned inwardly, but Leibel’s heart leaped with joy. To get
four months’ wages at a stroke! With twenty-seven pounds ten he could
certainly procure several machines, especially on the instalment
system. Out of the corners of his eyes he shot a glance at Rose, who
was beyond earshot.

“Unless you can promise thirty it is waste of time mentioning his
name,” said Sugarman.

“Well, well–who is he?”

Sugarman bent down, lowering his voice into the father’s ear.

“What! Leibel!” cried Eliphaz, outraged.

“Sh!” said Sugarman, “or he will overhear your delight, and ask more.
He has his nose high enough, as it is.”

“B–b–b–ut,” sputtered the bewildered parent, “I know Leibel myself.
I see him every day. I don’t want a Shadchan to find me a man I know–
a mere hand in my own workshop!”

“Your talk has neither face nor figure,” answered Sugarman, sternly.
“It is just the people one sees every day that one knows least. I
warrant that if I had not put it into your head you would never have
dreamt of Leibel as a son-in-law. Come now, confess.”

Eliphaz grunted vaguely, and the Shadchan went on triumphantly: “I
thought as much. And yet where could you find a better man to keep
your daughter?”

“He ought to be content with her alone,” grumbled her father.

Sugarman saw the signs of weakening, and dashed in, full strength:
“It’s a question whether he will have her at all. I have not been to
him about her yet. I awaited your approval of the idea.” Leibel
admired the verbal accuracy of these statements, which he had just
caught.

“But I didn’t know he would be having money,” murmured Eliphaz.

“Of course you didn’t know. That’s what the Shadchan is for–to point
out the things that are under your nose.”

“But where will he be getting this money from?”

“From you,” said Sugarman, frankly.

“From me?”

“From whom else? Are you not his employer? It has been put by for his
marriage day.”

“He has saved it?”

“He has not spent it,” said Sugarman, impatiently.

“But do you mean to say he has saved fifty pounds?”

“If he could manage to save fifty pounds out of your wages he would be
indeed a treasure,” said Sugarman. “Perhaps it might be thirty.”

“But you said fifty.”

“Well, you came down to thirty,” retorted the Shadchan. “You cannot
expect him to have more than your daughter brings.”

“I never said thirty,” Eliphaz reminded him. “Twenty-seven ten was my
last bid.”

“Very well; that will do as a basis of negotiations,” said Sugarman,
resignedly. “I will call upon him this evening. If I were to go over
and speak to him now, he would perceive you were anxious, and raise
his terms, and that will never do. Of course you will not mind
allowing me a pound more for finding you so economical a son-in-law?”

“Not a penny more.”

“You need not fear,” said Sugarman, resentfully. “It is not likely I
shall be able to persuade him to take so economical a father-in-law.
So you will be none the worse for promising.”

“Be it so,” said Eliphaz, with a gesture of weariness, and he started
his machine again.

“Twenty-seven pounds ten, remember,” said Sugarman, above the whir.

Eliphaz nodded his head, whirring his wheel-work louder.

“And paid before the wedding, mind.”

The machine took no notice.

“Before the wedding, mind,” repeated Sugarman. “Before we go under the
canopy.”

“Go now, go now!” grunted Eliphaz, with a gesture of impatience. “It
shall all be well.” And the white-haired head bowed immovably over its
work.

In the evening Rose extracted from her father the motive of Sugarman’s
visit, and confessed that the idea was to her liking.

“But dost thou think he will have me, little father?” she asked, with
cajoling eyes.

“Any one would have my Rose.”

“Ah, but Leibel is different. So many years he has sat at my side and
said nothing.”

“He had his work to think of. He is a good, saving youth.”

“At this very moment Sugarman is trying to persuade him–not so? I
suppose he will want much money.”

“Be easy, my child.” And he passed his discoloured hand over her hair.

Sugarman turned up the next day, and reported that Leibel was
unobtainable under thirty pounds, and Eliphaz, weary of the contest,
called over Leibel, till that moment carefully absorbed in his
scientific chalk marks, and mentioned the thing to him for the first
time. “I am not a man to bargain,” Eliphaz said, and so he gave the
young man his tawny hand, and a bottle of rum sprang from somewhere,
and work was suspended for five minutes, and the “hands” all drank
amid surprised excitement. Sugarman’s visits had prepared them to
congratulate Rose; but Leibel was a shock.

The formal engagement was marked by even greater junketing, and at
last the marriage day came. Leibel was resplendent in a diagonal
frockcoat, cut by his own hand; and Rose stepped from the cab a medley
of flowers, fairness, and white silk, and behind her came two
bridesmaids,–her sisters,–a trio that glorified the spectator-strewn
pavement outside the synagogue. Eliphaz looked almost tall in his
shiny high hat and frilled shirt-front. Sugarman arrived on foot,
carrying red-socked little Ebenezer tucked under his arm.

Leibel and Rose were not the only couple to be disposed of, for it was
the thirty-third day of the Omer–a day fruitful in marriages.

But at last their turn came. They did not, however, come in their
turn, and their special friends among the audience wondered why they
had lost their precedence. After several later marriages had taken
place a whisper began to circulate. The rumour of a hitch gained
ground steadily, and the sensation was proportionate. And, indeed, the
rose was not to be picked without a touch of the thorn.

Gradually the facts leaked out, and a buzz of talk and comment ran
through the waiting synagogue. Eliphaz had not paid up!

At first he declared he would put down the money immediately after the
ceremony. But the wary Sugarman, schooled by experience, demanded its
instant delivery on behalf of his other client. Hard pressed, Eliphaz
produced ten sovereigns from his trousers-pocket, and tendered them on
account. These Sugarman disdainfully refused, and the negotiations
were suspended. The bridegroom’s party was encamped in one room, the
bride’s in another, and after a painful delay Eliphaz sent an emissary
to say that half the amount should be forthcoming, the extra five
pounds in a bright new Bank of England note. Leibel, instructed and
encouraged by Sugarman, stood firm.

And then arose a hubbub of voices, a chaos of suggestions; friends
rushed to and fro between the camps, some emerging from their seats in
the synagogue to add to the confusion. But Eliphaz had taken his stand
upon a rock–he had no more ready money. To-morrow, the next day, he
would have some. And Leibel, pale and dogged, clutched tighter at
those machines that were slipping away momently from him. He had not
yet seen his bride that morning, and so her face was shadowy compared
with the tangibility of those machines. Most of the other maidens were
married women by now, and the situation was growing desperate. From
the female camp came terrible rumours of bridesmaids in hysterics, and
a bride that tore her wreath in a passion of shame and humiliation.
Eliphaz sent word that he would give an I O U for the balance, but
that he really could not muster any more current coin. Sugarman
instructed the ambassador to suggest that Eliphaz should raise the
money among his friends.

And the short spring day slipped away. In vain the minister, apprised
of the block, lengthened out the formulae for the other pairs, and
blessed them with more reposeful unction. It was impossible to stave
off the Leibel-Green item indefinitely, and at last Rose remained the
only orange-wreathed spinster in the synagogue. And then there was a
hush of solemn suspense, that swelled gradually into a steady rumble
of babbling tongues, as minute succeeded minute and the final bridal
party still failed to appear. The latest bulletin pictured the bride
in a dead faint. The afternoon was waning fast. The minister left his
post near the canopy, under which so many lives had been united, and
came to add his white tie to the forces for compromise. But he fared
no better than the others. Incensed at the obstinacy of the
antagonists, he declared he would close the synagogue. He gave the
couple ten minutes to marry in or quit. Then chaos came, and
pandemonium–a frantic babel of suggestion and exhortation from the
crowd. When five minutes had passed a legate from Eliphaz announced
that his side had scraped together twenty pounds, and that this was
their final bid.

Leibel wavered; the long day’s combat had told upon him; the reports
of the bride’s distress had weakened him. Even Sugarman had lost his
cocksureness of victory. A few minutes more and both commissions might
slip through his fingers. Once the parties left the synagogue, it
would not be easy to drive them there another day. But he cheered on
his man still: one could always surrender at the tenth minute.

At the eighth the buzz of tongues faltered suddenly, to be transposed
into a new key, so to speak. Through the gesticulating assembly swept
that murmur of expectation which crowds know when the procession is
coming at last. By some mysterious magnetism all were aware that the
BRIDE herself–the poor hysteric bride–had left the paternal camp,
was coming in person to plead with her mercenary lover.

And as the glory of her and the flowers and the white draperies loomed
upon Leibel’s vision his heart melted in worship, and he knew his
citadel would crumble in ruins at her first glance, at her first
touch. Was it fair fighting? As his troubled vision cleared, and as
she came nigh unto him, he saw to his amazement that she was speckless
and composed–no trace of tears dimmed the fairness of her face, there
was no disarray in her bridal wreath.

The clock showed the ninth minute.

She put her hand appeallingly on his arm, while a heavenly light came
into her face–the expression of a Joan of Arc animating her country.

“Do not give in, Leibel!” she said. “Do not have me! Do not let them
persuade thee! By my life, thou must not! Go home!”

 

So at the eleventh minute the vanquished Eliphaz produced the balance,
and they all lived happily ever afterward.

I

She came ‘to meet John Lefolle’, but John Lefolle did not know he was
to meet Winifred Glamorys. He did not even know he was himself the
meeting-point of all the brilliant and beautiful persons, assembled in
the publisher’s Saturday Salon, for although a youthful minor poet, he
was modest and lovable. Perhaps his Oxford tutorship was sobering. At
any rate his head remained unturned by his precocious fame, and to meet
these other young men and women–his reverend seniors on the slopes of
Parnassus–gave him more pleasure than the receipt of ‘royalties’. Not
that his publisher afforded him much opportunity of contrasting the two
pleasures. The profits of the Muse went to provide this room of old
furniture and roses, this beautiful garden a-twinkle with Japanese
lanterns, like gorgeous fire-flowers blossoming under the white
crescent-moon of early June.

Winifred Glamorys was not literary herself. She was better than a
poetess, she was a poem. The publisher always threw in a few realities,
and some beautiful brainless creature would generally be found the
nucleus of a crowd, while Clio in spectacles languished in a corner.
Winifred Glamorys, however, was reputed to have a tongue that matched
her eye; paralleling with whimsies and epigrams its freakish fires and
witcheries, and, assuredly, flitting in her white gown through the dark
balmy garden, she seemed the very spirit of moonlight, the subtle
incarnation of night and roses.

When John Lefolle met her, Cecilia was with her, and the first
conversation was triangular. Cecilia fired most of the shots; she was
a bouncing, rattling beauty, chockful of confidence and high spirits,
except when asked to do the one thing she could do–sing! Then she
became–quite genuinely–a nervous, hesitant, pale little thing.
However, the suppliant hostess bore her off, and presently her rich
contralto notes passed through the garden, adding to its passion and
mystery, and through the open French windows, John could see her
standing against the wall near the piano, her head thrown back, her eyes
half-closed, her creamy throat swelling in the very abandonment of
artistic ecstasy.

‘What a charming creature!’ he exclaimed involuntarily.

‘That is what everybody thinks, except her husband,’ Winifred laughed.

‘Is he blind then?’ asked John with his cloistral naivete.

‘Blind? No, love is blind. Marriage is never blind.’

The bitterness in her tone pierced John. He felt vaguely the passing of
some icy current from unknown seas of experience. Cecilia’s voice soared
out enchantingly.

‘Then, marriage must be deaf,’ he said, ‘or such music as that would
charm it.’

She smiled sadly. Her smile was the tricksy play of moonlight among
clouds of faery.

‘You have never been married,’ she said simply.

‘Do you mean that you, too, are neglected?’ something impelled him to
exclaim.

‘Worse,’ she murmured.

‘It is incredible!’ he cried. ‘You!’

‘Hush! My husband will hear you.’

Her warning whisper brought him into a delicious conspiracy with her.
‘Which is your husband?’ he whispered back.

‘There! Near the casement, standing gazing open-mouthed at Cecilia. He
always opens his mouth when she sings. It is like two toys moved by the
same wire.’

He looked at the tall, stalwart, ruddy-haired Anglo-Saxon. ‘Do you mean
to say he–?’

‘I mean to say nothing.’

‘But you said–’

‘I said “worse”.’

‘Why, what can be worse?’

She put her hand over her face. ‘I am ashamed to tell you.’ How adorable
was that half-divined blush!

‘But you must tell me everything.’ He scarcely knew how he had leapt
into this role of confessor. He only felt they were ‘moved by the same
wire’.

Her head drooped on her breast. ‘He–beats–me.’

‘What!’ John forgot to whisper. It was the greatest shock his recluse
life had known, compact as it was of horror at the revelation, shamed
confusion at her candour, and delicious pleasure in her confidence.

This fragile, exquisite creature under the rod of a brutal bully!

Once he had gone to a wedding reception, and among the serious presents
some grinning Philistine drew his attention to an uncouth club–’a
wife-beater’ he called it. The flippancy had jarred upon John terribly:
this intrusive reminder of the customs of the slums. It grated like
Billingsgate in a boudoir. Now that savage weapon recurred to him–for a
lurid instant he saw Winifred’s husband wielding it. Oh, abomination of
his sex! And did he stand there, in his immaculate evening dress, posing
as an English gentleman? Even so might some gentleman burglar bear
through a salon his imperturbable swallow-tail.

Beat a woman! Beat that essence of charm and purity, God’s best gift to
man, redeeming him from his own grossness! Could such things be? John
Lefolle would as soon have credited the French legend that English wives
are sold in Smithfield. No! it could not be real that this flower-like
figure was thrashed.

‘Do you mean to say–?’ he cried. The rapidity of her confidence alone
made him feel it all of a dreamlike unreality.

‘Hush! Cecilia’s singing!’ she admonished him with an unexpected smile,
as her fingers fell from her face.

‘Oh, you have been making fun of me.’ He was vastly relieved. ‘He beats
you–at chess–or at lawn-tennis?’

‘Does one wear a high-necked dress to conceal the traces of chess, or
lawn-tennis?’

He had not noticed her dress before, save for its spiritual whiteness.
Susceptible though he was to beautiful shoulders, Winifred’s enchanting
face had been sufficiently distracting. Now the thought of physical
bruises gave him a second spasm of righteous horror. That delicate
rose-leaf flesh abraded and lacerated!

‘The ruffian! Does he use a stick or a fist?’

‘Both! But as a rule he just takes me by the arms and shakes me like a
terrier a rat. I’m all black and blue now.’

‘Poor butterfly!’ he murmured poetically.

‘Why did I tell you?’ she murmured back with subtler poetry.

The poet thrilled in every vein. ‘Love at first sight’, of which he had
often read and often written, was then a reality! It could be as mutual,
too, as Romeo’s and Juliet’s. But how awkward that Juliet should be
married and her husband a Bill Sykes in broad-cloth!

II

Mrs. Glamorys herself gave ‘At Homes’, every Sunday afternoon, and so, on
the morrow, after a sleepless night mitigated by perpended sonnets, the
love-sick young tutor presented himself by invitation at the beautiful
old house in Hampstead. He was enchanted to find his heart’s mistress
set in an eighteenth-century frame of small-paned windows and of high
oak-panelling, and at once began to image her dancing minuets and
playing on virginals. Her husband was absent, but a broad band of velvet
round Winifred’s neck was a painful reminder of his possibilities.
Winifred, however, said it was only a touch of sore throat caught in the
garden. Her eyes added that there was nothing in the pathological
dictionary which she would not willingly have caught for the sake of
those divine, if draughty moments; but that, alas! it was more than a
mere bodily ailment she had caught there.

There were a great many visitors in the two delightfully quaint rooms,
among whom he wandered disconsolate and admired, jealous of her
scattered smiles, but presently he found himself seated by her side on
a ‘cosy corner’ near the open folding-doors, with all the other guests
huddled round a violinist in the inner room. How Winifred had managed it
he did not know but she sat plausibly in the outer room, awaiting
newcomers, and this particular niche was invisible, save to a determined
eye. He took her unresisting hand–that dear, warm hand, with its
begemmed artistic fingers, and held it in uneasy beatitude. How
wonderful! She–the beautiful and adored hostess, of whose sweetness and
charm he heard even her own guests murmur to one another–it was her
actual flesh-and-blood hand that lay in his–thrillingly tangible. Oh,
adventure beyond all merit, beyond all hoping!

But every now and then, the outer door facing them would open on some
newcomer, and John had hastily to release her soft magnetic fingers and
sit demure, and jealously overhear her effusive welcome to those
innocent intruders, nor did his brow clear till she had shepherded them
within the inner fold. Fortunately, the refreshments were in this
section, so that once therein, few of the sheep strayed back, and the
jiggling wail of the violin was succeeded by a shrill babble of tongues
and the clatter of cups and spoons. ‘Get me an ice, please–strawberry,’
she ordered John during one of these forced intervals in manual
flirtation; and when he had steered laboriously to and fro, he found a
young actor beside her in his cosy corner, and his jealous fancy almost
saw their hands dispart. He stood over them with a sickly smile, while
Winifred ate her ice. When he returned from depositing the empty saucer,
the player-fellow was gone, and in remorse for his mad suspicion he
stooped and reverently lifted her fragrant finger-tips to his lips. The
door behind his back opened abruptly.

‘Goodbye,’ she said, rising in a flash. The words had the calm
conventional cadence, and instantly extorted from him–amid all his
dazedness–the corresponding ‘Goodbye’. When he turned and saw it was Mr.
Glamorys who had come in, his heart leapt wildly at the nearness of his
escape. As he passed this masked ruffian, he nodded perfunctorily and
received a cordial smile. Yes, he was handsome and fascinating enough
externally, this blonde savage.

‘A man may smile and smile and be a villain,’ John thought. ‘I wonder
how he’d feel, if he knew I knew he beats women.’

Already John had generalized the charge. ‘I hope Cecilia will keep him
at arm’s length,’ he had said to Winifred, ‘if only that she may not
smart for it some day.’

He lingered purposely in the hall to get an impression of the brute, who
had begun talking loudly to a friend with irritating bursts of laughter,
speciously frank-ringing. Golf, fishing, comic operas–ah, the Boeotian!
These were the men who monopolized the ethereal divinities.

But this brusque separation from his particular divinity was
disconcerting. How to see her again? He must go up to Oxford in the
morning, he wrote her that night, but if she could possibly let him
call during the week he would manage to run down again.

       *       *       *       *       *

‘Oh, my dear, dreaming poet,’ she wrote to Oxford, ‘how could you
possibly send me a letter to be laid on the breakfast-table beside The
Times! With a poem in it, too. Fortunately my husband was in a hurry to
get down to the City, and he neglected to read my correspondence. (The
unchivalrous blackguard,’ John commented. ‘But what can be expected of a
woman beater?’) Never, never write to me again at the house. A letter,
care of Mrs. Best, 8A Foley Street, W.C., will always find me. She is my
maid’s mother. And you must not come here either, my dear handsome
head-in-the-clouds, except to my ‘At Homes’, and then only at judicious
intervals. I shall be walking round the pond in Kensington Gardens at
four next Wednesday, unless Mrs. Best brings me a letter to the contrary.
And now thank you for your delicious poem; I do not recognize my humble
self in the dainty lines, but I shall always be proud to think I
inspired them. Will it be in the new volume? I have never been in print
before; it will be a novel sensation. I cannot pay you song for song,
only feeling for feeling. Oh, John Lefolle, why did we not meet when I
had still my girlish dreams? Now, I have grown to distrust all men–to
fear the brute beneath the cavalier….’

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Best did bring her a letter, but it was not to cancel the
appointment, only to say he was not surprised at her horror of the male
sex, but that she must beware of false generalizations. Life was still a
wonderful and beautiful thing–vide poem enclosed. He was counting the
minutes till Wednesday afternoon. It was surely a popular mistake that
only sixty went to the hour.

This chronometrical reflection recurred to him even more poignantly in
the hour that he circumambulated the pond in Kensington Gardens. Had she
forgotten–had her husband locked her up? What could have happened? It
seemed six hundred minutes, ere, at ten past five she came tripping
daintily towards him. His brain had been reduced to insanely devising
problems for his pupils–if a man walks two strides of one and a half
feet a second round a lake fifty acres in area, in how many turns will
he overtake a lady who walks half as fast and isn’t there?–but the
moment her pink parasol loomed on the horizon, all his long misery
vanished in an ineffable peace and uplifting. He hurried, bare-headed,
to clasp her little gloved hand. He had forgotten her unpunctuality, nor
did she remind him of it.

‘How sweet of you to come all that way,’ was all she said, and it was a
sufficient reward for the hours in the train and the six hundred minutes
among the nursemaids and perambulators. The elms were in their glory,
the birds were singing briskly, the water sparkled, the sunlit sward
stretched fresh and green–it was the loveliest, coolest moment of the
afternoon. John instinctively turned down a leafy avenue. Nature and
Love! What more could poet ask?

‘No, we can’t have tea by the Kiosk,’ Mrs. Glamorys protested. ‘Of course
I love anything that savours of Paris, but it’s become so fashionable.
There will be heaps of people who know me. I suppose you’ve forgotten
it’s the height of the season. I know a quiet little place in the High
Street.’ She led him, unresisting but bemused, towards the gate, and
into a confectioner’s. Conversation languished on the way.

‘Tea,’ he was about to instruct the pretty attendant.

‘Strawberry ices,’ Mrs. Glamorys remarked gently. ‘And some of those nice
French cakes.’

The ice restored his spirits, it was really delicious, and he had got so
hot and tired, pacing round the pond. Decidedly Winifred was a practical
person and he was a dreamer. The pastry he dared not touch–being a
genius–but he was charmed at the gaiety with which Winifred crammed
cake after cake into her rosebud of a mouth. What an enchanting
creature! how bravely she covered up her life’s tragedy!

The thought made him glance at her velvet band–it was broader than
ever.

‘He has beaten you again!’ he murmured furiously. Her joyous eyes
saddened, she hung her head, and her fingers crumbled the cake. ‘What is
his pretext?’ he asked, his blood burning.

‘Jealousy,’ she whispered.

His blood lost its glow, ran cold. He felt the bully’s blows on his own
skin, his romance turning suddenly sordid. But he recovered his
courage. He, too, had muscles. ‘But I thought he just missed seeing me
kiss your hand.’

She opened her eyes wide. ‘It wasn’t you, you darling old dreamer.’

He was relieved and disturbed in one.

‘Somebody else?’ he murmured. Somehow the vision of the player-fellow
came up.

She nodded. ‘Isn’t it lucky he has himself drawn a red-herring across
the track? I didn’t mind his blows–you were safe!’ Then, with one of
her adorable transitions, ‘I am dreaming of another ice,’ she cried with
roguish wistfulness.

‘I was afraid to confess my own greediness,’ he said, laughing. He
beckoned the waitress. ‘Two more.’

‘We haven’t got any more strawberries,’ was her unexpected reply.
‘There’s been such a run on them today.’

Winifred’s face grew overcast. ‘Oh, nonsense!’ she pouted. To John the
moment seemed tragic.

‘Won’t you have another kind?’ he queried. He himself liked any kind,
but he could scarcely eat a second ice without her.

Winifred meditated. ‘Coffee?’ she queried.

The waitress went away and returned with a face as gloomy as Winifred’s.
‘It’s been such a hot day,’ she said deprecatingly. ‘There is only one
ice in the place and that’s Neapolitan.’

‘Well, bring two Neapolitans,’ John ventured.

‘I mean there is only one Neapolitan ice left.’

‘Well, bring that. I don’t really want one.’

He watched Mrs. Glamorys daintily devouring the solitary ice, and felt a
certain pathos about the parti-coloured oblong, a something of the
haunting sadness of ‘The Last Rose of Summer’. It would make a graceful,
serio-comic triolet, he was thinking. But at the last spoonful, his
beautiful companion dislocated his rhymes by her sudden upspringing.

‘Goodness gracious,’ she cried, ‘how late it is!’

‘Oh, you’re not leaving me yet!’ he said. A world of things sprang to
his brain, things that he was going to say–to arrange. They had said
nothing–not a word of their love even; nothing but cakes and ices.

‘Poet!’ she laughed. ‘Have you forgotten I live at Hampstead?’ She
picked up her parasol.

‘Put me into a hansom, or my husband will be raving at his lonely
dinner-table.’

He was so dazed as to be surprised when the waitress blocked his
departure with a bill. When Winifred was spirited away, he remembered
she might, without much risk, have given him a lift to Paddington. He
hailed another hansom and caught the next train to Oxford. But he was
too late for his own dinner in Hall.

III

He was kept very busy for the next few days, and could only exchange a
passionate letter or two with her. For some time the examination fever
had been raging, and in every college poor patients sat with wet towels
round their heads. Some, who had neglected their tutor all the term, now
strove to absorb his omniscience in a sitting.

On the Monday, John Lefolle was good-naturedly giving a special audience
to a muscular dunce, trying to explain to him the political effects of
the Crusades, when there was a knock at the sitting-room door, and the
scout ushered in Mrs. Glamorys. She was bewitchingly dressed in white,
and stood in the open doorway, smiling–an embodiment of the summer he
was neglecting. He rose, but his tongue was paralysed. The dunce became
suddenly important–a symbol of the decorum he had been outraging. His
soul, torn so abruptly from history to romance, could not get up the
right emotion. Why this imprudence of Winifred’s? She had been so
careful heretofore.

‘What a lot of boots there are on your staircase!’ she said gaily.

He laughed. The spell was broken. ‘Yes, the heap to be cleaned is rather
obtrusive,’ he said, ‘but I suppose it is a sort of tradition.’

‘I think I’ve got hold of the thing pretty well now, sir.’ The dunce
rose and smiled, and his tutor realized how little the dunce had to
learn in some things. He felt quite grateful to him.

‘Oh, well, you’ll come and see me again after lunch, won’t you, if one
or two points occur to you for elucidation,’ he said, feeling vaguely a
liar, and generally guilty. But when, on the departure of the dunce,
Winifred held out her arms, everything fell from him but the sense of
the exquisite moment. Their lips met for the first time, but only for an
instant. He had scarcely time to realize that this wonderful thing had
happened before the mobile creature had darted to his book-shelves and
was examining a Thucydides upside down.

‘How clever to know Greek!’ she exclaimed. ‘And do you really talk it
with the other dons?’

‘No, we never talk shop,’ he laughed. ‘But, Winifred, what made you come
here?’

‘I had never seen Oxford. Isn’t it beautiful?’

‘There’s nothing beautiful here,’ he said, looking round his sober
study.

‘No,’ she admitted; ‘there’s nothing I care for here,’ and had left
another celestial kiss on his lips before he knew it. ‘And now you must
take me to lunch and on the river.’

He stammered, ‘I have–work.’

She pouted. ‘But I can’t stay beyond tomorrow morning, and I want so
much to see all your celebrated oarsmen practising.’

‘You are not staying over the night?’ he gasped.

‘Yes, I am,’ and she threw him a dazzling glance.

His heart went pit-a-pat. ‘Where?’ he murmured.

‘Oh, some poky little hotel near the station. The swell hotels are
full.’

He was glad to hear she was not conspicuously quartered.

‘So many people have come down already for Commem,’ he said. ‘I suppose
they are anxious to see the Generals get their degrees. But hadn’t we
better go somewhere and lunch?’

They went down the stone staircase, past the battalion of boots, and
across the quad. He felt that all the windows were alive with eyes, but
she insisted on standing still and admiring their ivied picturesqueness.
After lunch he shamefacedly borrowed the dunce’s punt. The necessities
of punting, which kept him far from her, and demanded much adroit
labour, gradually restored his self-respect, and he was able to look the
uncelebrated oarsmen they met in the eyes, except when they were
accompanied by their parents and sisters, which subtly made him feel
uncomfortable again. But Winifred, piquant under her pink parasol, was
singularly at ease, enraptured with the changing beauty of the river,
applauding with childish glee the wild flowers on the banks, or the
rippling reflections in the water.

‘Look, look!’ she cried once, pointing skyward. He stared upwards,
expecting a balloon at least. But it was only ‘Keats’ little rosy
cloud’, she explained. It was not her fault if he did not find the
excursion unreservedly idyllic.

‘How stupid,’ she reflected, ‘to keep all those nice boys cooped up
reading dead languages in a spot made for life and love.’

‘I’m afraid they don’t disturb the dead languages so much as you think,’
he reassured her, smiling. ‘And there will be plenty of love-making
during Commem.’

‘I am so glad. I suppose there are lots of engagements that week.’

‘Oh, yes–but not one per cent come to anything.’

‘Really? Oh, how fickle men are!’

That seemed rather question-begging, but he was so thrilled by the
implicit revelation that she could not even imagine feminine
inconstancy, that he forebore to draw her attention to her inadequate
logic.

So childish and thoughtless indeed was she that day that nothing would
content her but attending a ‘Viva’, which he had incautiously informed
her was public.

‘Nobody will notice us,’ she urged with strange unconsciousness of her
loveliness. ‘Besides, they don’t know I’m not your sister.’

‘The Oxford intellect is sceptical,’ he said, laughing. ‘It cultivates
philosophical doubt.’

But, putting a bold face on the matter, and assuming a fraternal air, he
took her to the torture-chamber, in which candidates sat dolefully on a
row of chairs against the wall, waiting their turn to come before the
three grand inquisitors at the table. Fortunately, Winifred and he were
the only spectators; but unfortunately they blundered in at the very
moment when the poor owner of the punt was on the rack. The central
inquisitor was trying to extract from him information about Becket,
almost prompting him with the very words, but without penetrating
through the duncical denseness. John Lefolle breathed more freely when
the Crusades were broached; but, alas, it very soon became evident that
the dunce had by no means ‘got hold of the thing’. As the dunce passed
out sadly, obviously ploughed, John Lefolle suffered more than he. So
conscience-stricken was he that, when he had accompanied Winifred as
far as her hotel, he refused her invitation to come in, pleading the
compulsoriness of duty and dinner in Hall. But he could not get away
without promising to call in during the evening.

The prospect of this visit was with him all through dinner, at once
tempting and terrifying. Assuredly there was a skeleton at his feast, as
he sat at the high table, facing the Master. The venerable portraits
round the Hall seemed to rebuke his romantic waywardness. In the
common-room, he sipped his port uneasily, listening as in a daze to the
discussion on Free Will, which an eminent stranger had stirred up. How
academic it seemed, compared with the passionate realities of life. But
somehow he found himself lingering on at the academic discussion,
postponing the realities of life. Every now and again, he was impelled
to glance at his watch; but suddenly murmuring, ‘It is very late,’ he
pulled himself together, and took leave of his learned brethren. But in
the street the sight of a telegraph office drew his steps to it, and
almost mechanically he wrote out the message: ‘Regret detained. Will
call early in morning.’

When he did call in the morning, he was told she had gone back to London
the night before on receipt of a telegram. He turned away with a bitter
pang of disappointment and regret.

IV

Their subsequent correspondence was only the more amorous. The reason
she had fled from the hotel, she explained, was that she could not
endure the night in those stuffy quarters. He consoled himself with the
hope of seeing much of her during the Long Vacation. He did see her once
at her own reception, but this time her husband wandered about the two
rooms. The cosy corner was impossible, and they could only manage to
gasp out a few mutual endearments amid the buzz and movement, and to
arrange a rendezvous for the end of July. When the day came, he
received a heart-broken letter, stating that her husband had borne her
away to Goodwood. In a postscript she informed him that ‘Quicksilver was
a sure thing’. Much correspondence passed without another meeting being
effected, and he lent her five pounds to pay a debt of honour incurred
through her husband’s ‘absurd confidence in Quicksilver’. A week later
this horsey husband of hers brought her on to Brighton for the races
there, and hither John Lefolle flew. But her husband shadowed her, and
he could only lift his hat to her as they passed each other on the
Lawns. Sometimes he saw her sitting pensively on a chair while her lord
and thrasher perused a pink sporting-paper. Such tantalizing proximity
raised their correspondence through the Hove Post Office to fever heat.
Life apart, they felt, was impossible, and, removed from the sobering
influences of his cap and gown, John Lefolle dreamed of throwing
everything to the winds. His literary reputation had opened out a new
career. The Winifred lyrics alone had brought in a tidy sum, and though
he had expended that and more on despatches of flowers and trifles to
her, yet he felt this extravagance would become extinguished under daily
companionship, and the poems provoked by her charms would go far towards
their daily maintenance. Yes, he could throw up the University. He would
rescue her from this bully, this gentleman bruiser. They would live
openly and nobly in the world’s eye. A poet was not even expected to be
conventional.

She, on her side, was no less ardent for the great step. She raged
against the world’s law, the injustice by which a husband’s cruelty was
not sufficient ground for divorce. ‘But we finer souls must take the law
into our own hands,’ she wrote. ‘We must teach society that the ethics
of a barbarous age are unfitted for our century of enlightenment.’ But
somehow the actual time and place of the elopement could never get
itself fixed. In September her husband dragged her to Scotland, in
October after the pheasants. When the dramatic day was actually fixed,
Winifred wrote by the next post deferring it for a week. Even the few
actual preliminary meetings they planned for Kensington Gardens or
Hampstead Heath rarely came off. He lived in a whirling atmosphere of
express letters of excuse, and telegrams that transformed the situation
from hour to hour. Not that her passion in any way abated, or her
romantic resolution really altered: it was only that her conception of
time and place and ways and means was dizzily mutable.

But after nigh six months of palpitating negotiations with the adorable
Mrs. Glamorys, the poet, in a moment of dejection, penned the prose
apophthegm, ‘It is of no use trying to change a changeable person.’

V

But at last she astonished him by a sketch plan of the elopement, so
detailed, even to band-boxes and the Paris night route via Dieppe,
that no further room for doubt was left in his intoxicated soul, and he
was actually further astonished when, just as he was putting his
hand-bag into the hansom, a telegram was handed to him saying: ‘Gone to
Homburg. Letter follows.’

He stood still for a moment on the pavement in utter distraction. What
did it mean? Had she failed him again? Or was it simply that she had
changed the city of refuge from Paris to Homburg? He was about to name
the new station to the cabman, but then, ‘letter follows’. Surely that
meant that he was to wait for it. Perplexed and miserable, he stood with
the telegram crumpled up in his fist. What a ridiculous situation! He
had wrought himself up to the point of breaking with the world and his
past, and now–it only remained to satisfy the cabman!

He tossed feverishly all night, seeking to soothe himself, but really
exciting himself the more by a hundred plausible explanations. He was
now strung up to such a pitch of uncertainty that he was astonished for
the third time when the ‘letter’ did duly ‘follow’.

       *       *       *       *       *

‘Dearest,’ it ran, ‘as I explained in my telegram, my husband became
suddenly ill’–(’if she had only put that in the telegram,’ he
groaned)–’and was ordered to Homburg. Of course it was impossible to
leave him in this crisis, both for practical and sentimental reasons.
You yourself, darling, would not like me to have aggravated his illness
by my flight just at this moment, and thus possibly have his death on my
conscience.’ (’Darling, you are always right,’ he said, kissing the
letter.) ‘Let us possess our souls in patience a little longer. I need
not tell you how vexatious it will be to find myself nursing him in
Homburg–out of the season even–instead of the prospect to which I had
looked forward with my whole heart and soul. But what can one do? How
true is the French proverb, ‘Nothing happens but the unexpected’! Write
to me immediately Poste Restante, that I may at least console myself
with your dear words.’

The unexpected did indeed happen. Despite draughts of Elizabeth-brunnen
and promenades on the Kurhaus terrace, the stalwart woman beater
succumbed to his malady. The curt telegram from Winifred gave no
indication of her emotions. He sent a reply-telegram of sympathy with
her trouble. Although he could not pretend to grieve at this sudden
providential solution of their life-problem, still he did sincerely
sympathize with the distress inevitable in connection with a death,
especially on foreign soil.

He was not able to see her till her husband’s body had been brought
across the North Sea and committed to the green repose of the old
Hampstead churchyard. He found her pathetically altered–her face wan
and spiritualized, and all in subtle harmony with the exquisite black
gown. In the first interview, he did not dare speak of their love at
all. They discussed the immortality of the soul, and she quoted George
Herbert. But with the weeks the question of their future began to force
its way back to his lips.

‘We could not decently marry before six months,’ she said, when
definitely confronted with the problem.

‘Six months!’ he gasped.

‘Well, surely you don’t want to outrage everybody,’ she said, pouting.

At first he was outraged himself. What! She who had been ready to
flutter the world with a fantastic dance was now measuring her
footsteps. But on reflection he saw that Mrs. Glamorys was right once
more. Since Providence had been good enough to rescue them, why should
they fly in its face? A little patience, and a blameless happiness lay
before them. Let him not blind himself to the immense relief he really
felt at being spared social obloquy. After all, a poet could be
unconventional in his work–he had no need of the practical outlet
demanded for the less gifted.

VI

They scarcely met at all during the next six months–it had, naturally,
in this grateful reaction against their recklessness, become a sacred
period, even more charged with tremulous emotion than the engagement
periods of those who have not so nearly scorched themselves. Even in her
presence he found a certain pleasure in combining distant adoration with
the confident expectation of proximity, and thus she was restored to
the sanctity which she had risked by her former easiness. And so all was
for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

When the six months had gone by, he came to claim her hand. She was
quite astonished. ‘You promised to marry me at the end of six months,’
he reminded her.

‘Surely it isn’t six months already,’ she said.

He referred her to the calendar, recalled the date of her husband’s
death.

‘You are strangely literal for a poet,’ she said. ‘Of course I said
six months, but six months doesn’t mean twenty-six weeks by the clock.
All I meant was that a decent period must intervene. But even to myself
it seems only yesterday that poor Harold was walking beside me in the
Kurhaus Park.’ She burst into tears, and in the face of them he could
not pursue the argument.

Gradually, after several interviews and letters, it was agreed that they
should wait another six months.

‘She is right,’ he reflected again. ‘We have waited so long, we may as
well wait a little longer and leave malice no handle.’

The second six months seemed to him much longer than the first. The
charm of respectful adoration had lost its novelty, and once again his
breast was racked by fitful fevers which could scarcely calm themselves
even by conversion into sonnets. The one point of repose was that
shining fixed star of marriage. Still smarting under Winifred’s reproach
of his unpoetic literality, he did not intend to force her to marry him
exactly at the end of the twelve-month. But he was determined that she
should have no later than this exact date for at least ‘naming the day’.
Not the most punctilious stickler for convention, he felt, could deny
that Mrs. Grundy’s claim had been paid to the last minute.

The publication of his new volume–containing the Winifred lyrics–had
served to colour these months of intolerable delay. Even the reaction of
the critics against his poetry, that conventional revolt against every
second volume, that parrot cry of over-praise from the very throats that
had praised him, though it pained and perplexed him, was perhaps really
helpful. At any rate, the long waiting was over at last. He felt like
Jacob after his years of service for Rachel.

The fateful morning dawned bright and blue, and, as the towers of
Oxford were left behind him he recalled that distant Saturday when he
had first gone down to meet the literary lights of London in his
publisher’s salon. How much older he was now than then–and yet how much
younger! The nebulous melancholy of youth, the clouds of philosophy, had
vanished before this beautiful creature of sunshine whose radiance cut
out a clear line for his future through the confusion of life.

At a florist’s in the High Street of Hampstead he bought a costly
bouquet of white flowers, and walked airily to the house and rang the
bell jubilantly. He could scarcely believe his ears when the maid told
him her mistress was not at home. How dared the girl stare at him so
impassively? Did she not know by what appointment–on what errand–he
had come? Had he not written to her mistress a week ago that he would
present himself that afternoon?

‘Not at home!’ he gasped. ‘But when will she be home?’

‘I fancy she won’t be long. She went out an hour ago, and she has an
appointment with her dressmaker at five.’

‘Do you know in what direction she’d have gone?’

‘Oh, she generally walks on the Heath before tea.’

The world suddenly grew rosy again. ‘I will come back again,’ he said.
Yes, a walk in this glorious air–heathward–would do him good.

As the door shut he remembered he might have left the flowers, but he
would not ring again, and besides, it was, perhaps, better he should
present them with his own hand, than let her find them on the hall
table. Still, it seemed rather awkward to walk about the streets with a
bouquet, and he was glad, accidentally to strike the old Hampstead
Church, and to seek a momentary seclusion in passing through its avenue
of quiet gravestones on his heathward way.

Mounting the few steps, he paused idly a moment on the verge of this
green ‘God’s-acre’ to read a perpendicular slab on a wall, and his face
broadened into a smile as he followed the absurdly elaborate biography
of a rich, self-made merchant who had taught himself to read, ‘Reader,
go thou and do likewise,’ was the delicious bull at the end. As he
turned away, the smile still lingering about his lips, he saw a dainty
figure tripping down the stony graveyard path, and though he was somehow
startled to find her still in black, there was no mistaking Mrs.
Glamorys. She ran to meet him with a glad cry, which filled his eyes
with happy tears.

‘How good of you to remember!’ she said, as she took the bouquet from
his unresisting hand, and turned again on her footsteps. He followed her
wonderingly across the uneven road towards a narrow aisle of graves on
the left. In another instant she has stooped before a shining white
stone, and laid his bouquet reverently upon it. As he reached her side,
he saw that his flowers were almost lost in the vast mass of floral
offerings with which the grave of the woman beater was bestrewn.

‘How good of you to remember the anniversary,’ she murmured again.

‘How could I forget it?’ he stammered, astonished. ‘Is not this the end
of the terrible twelve-month?’

The soft gratitude died out of her face. ‘Oh, is that what you were
thinking of?’

‘What else?’ he murmured, pale with conflicting emotions.

‘What else! I think decency demanded that this day, at least, should be
sacred to his memory. Oh, what brutes men are!’ And she burst into
tears.

His patient breast revolted at last. ‘You said he was the brute!’ he
retorted, outraged.

‘Is that your chivalry to the dead? Oh, my poor Harold, my poor Harold!’

For once her tears could not extinguish the flame of his anger. ‘But you
told me he beat you,’ he cried.

‘And if he did, I dare say I deserved it. Oh, my darling, my darling!’
She laid her face on the stone and sobbed.

John Lefolle stood by in silent torture. As he helplessly watched her
white throat swell and fall with the sobs, he was suddenly struck by the
absence of the black velvet band–the truer mourning she had worn in the
lifetime of the so lamented. A faint scar, only perceptible to his
conscious eye, added to his painful bewilderment.

At last she rose and walked unsteadily forward. He followed her in mute
misery. In a moment or two they found themselves on the outskirts of the
deserted heath. How beautiful stretched the gorsy rolling country! The
sun was setting in great burning furrows of gold and green–a panorama
to take one’s breath away. The beauty and peace of Nature passed into
the poet’s soul.

‘Forgive me, dearest,’ he begged, taking her hand.

She drew it away sharply. ‘I cannot forgive you. You have shown yourself
in your true colours.’

Her unreasonableness angered him again. ‘What do you mean? I only came
in accordance with our long-standing arrangement. You have put me off
long enough.’

‘It is fortunate I did put you off long enough to discover what you
are.’

He gasped. He thought of all the weary months of waiting, all the long
comedy of telegrams and express letters, the far-off flirtations of the
cosy corner, the baffled elopement to Paris. ‘Then you won’t marry me?’

‘I cannot marry a man I neither love nor respect.’

‘You don’t love me!’ Her spontaneous kiss in his sober Oxford study
seemed to burn on his angry lips.

‘No, I never loved you.’

He took her by the arms and turned her round roughly. ‘Look me in the
face and dare to say you have never loved me.’

His memory was buzzing with passionate phrases from her endless letters.
They stung like a swarm of bees. The sunset was like blood-red mist
before his eyes.

‘I have never loved you,’ she said obstinately.

‘You–!’ His grasp on her arms tightened. He shook her.

‘You are bruising me,’ she cried.

His grasp fell from her arms as though they were red-hot. He had become
a woman beater.