Man and Maid

“The book is great,” she said; “you have done something.”

“Yes. But for those two days I stayed in my rooms in St James’s Street, and I thought, and thought, and thought, and there was no one to care where I went or what I did, except a girl who was fond of me when she was little, and she had gone away and wasn’t fond of me any more. Oh, Sybil – I feel like a lunatic – I mean you, of course; but you never cared. And I went to a house agent’s and got the house unfurnished, and I bought the furniture – there’s nothing much except what you’ve seen, and a bed and a bath, and some pots and kettles; and I’ve lived alone in that house, and I’ve written that book, with Death sitting beside me, jogging my elbow every time I stopped writing, and saying, ‘Hurry up; I’m waiting here for you, and I shall have to take you away, and you’ll have done nothing, nothing, nothing.’”

“But you’ve done the book,” said Sybil again. The larch and the garden beyond were misty to her eyes. She set her teeth. He must be comforted. Her own agony – that could be dealt with later.

“I’ve ridden myself with the curb,” he said. “I thought it all out – proper food, proper sleep, proper exercise. I wouldn’t play the fool with the last chance; and I pulled it off. I wrote the book in four months; and every night, when I went to sleep, I wondered whether I should ever wake to go on with the book. But I did wake, and then I used to leap up and thank God, and set to work; and I’ve done it. The book will live – every one says it will. I shan’t have lived for nothing.”

“Rupert,” she said, “dear Rupert!”

“Thank you,” he said forlornly; “you’re very kind.” And he drew his limp hand from hers, and leaned his elbows on the grass and his chin on his hands.

“Oh, Rupert, why didn’t you write and tell me?”

“What was the use of making you sad? You were always sorry for maimed things – even the worms the gardener cut in two with his spade.”

She was struggling with a growing desire to scream and shriek, and to burst out crying and tear the grass with her hands. He no longer loved her – that was the lesser evil. She could have borne that – have borne anything. But he was going to die! The intensity of her belief that he was going to die caught her by the throat. She defended herself instinctively.

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Don’t believe what?”

“That you’re going to die.”

He laughed; and when the echo of that laugh had died away in the quiet garden, she found that she could no longer even say that she did not believe.

Then he said: “I am going to die, and all the values of things have changed places. But I have done something: I haven’t buried my talent in a napkin. Oh, my Pretty, go away, go away! You make a fool of me again! I had almost forgotten how to be sorry that you couldn’t love me. Go away, go away! Go, go!”

He threw out his hands, and they lay along the grass. His face went down into the tangled green, and she saw his shoulders shaken with sobs. She dragged herself along the grass till she was close to him; then she lifted his shoulders, and drew his head on to her lap, and clasped her arms round him.

“My darling, my dear, my own!” she said. “You’re tired, and you’ve thought of nothing but your hateful book – your beautiful book, I mean – but you do love me really. Not as I love you, but still you do love me. Oh, Rupert, I’ll nurse you, I’ll take care of you, I’ll be your slave; and if you have to die, I shall die too, because there’ll be nothing left for me to do for you.”

He put an arm round her. “It’s worth dying to hear that,” he said, and brought his face to lie against her waist.

“But you shan’t die. You must come back to London with me now – this minute. The best opinion – ”

“I had the best,” he said. “Kiss me, my Pretty; oh, kiss me now that it does mean something! Let me dream that I’m going to live, and that you love me.”

He lifted his face, and she kissed him.

“Rupert, you’re not going to die. It can’t be true. It isn’t true. It shan’t be true.”

“It is; but I don’t mind now, except for you. I’m a selfish beast. But this is worth it all, and I have done something great. You told me to.”

“Tell me,” she said, “who was the doctor? Was he really the best?”

“It was Strongitharm,” he said wearily.

She drew a long breath and clasped him closer. Then she pushed him away and sprang to her feet.

“Stand up!” she said. “Let me look at you!”

He stood up, and she caught him by the elbows and stood looking at him. Twice she tried to speak, and twice no voice obeyed; then she said softly, huskily: “Rupert, listen! It’s all a horrid dream. Wake up. Haven’t you seen the papers? Strongitharm went mad several months ago. It was drink. He told all his patients they were going to die of this new disease of his that he’d invented. It’s all his madness. You’re well – I know it. Oh, Rupert, you aren’t going to die, and we love each other! Oh, God is very good!”

He drew a long breath.

“Are you sure? It’s like coming back from chloroform; and yet it hurts, and yet – but I wrote the book! Oh, Sybil, I shall never write another great book!”

“Ah yes, you will – you shall,” she said, looking at him with wet eyes.

“I have you,” he said. “Oh, thank God, I have you! but I shall never write another great book.”

And he never has.

But he is very happy. And Sybil cannot see that his later works are not in the same field with the first. She thinks the critics fools. And he loves her the more for her folly.

XIII

ALCIBIADES

“Oh, do let me have him in the carriage with me; he won’t hurt any one, he’s a perfect angel.”

“Angels like him travels in the dog-box,” said the porter.

Judy ended an agonised search for her pocket.

“Would you be offended,” she said, “if I offered you half-a-crown?”

“Give the guard a bob, Miss.” The hand curved into a cup resting on the carriage window, answered her question. “It’s more’n enough for him, being a single man, whereas me, I’m risking my situation and nine children at present to say no more, when I – ”

The turn of a railway key completed the sentence.

Judy and the angel were alone. He was a very nice angel – long-haired and brownly-black – his race the Aberdeen, his name Alcibiades. He put up a respectful and adoring nose, and his mistress kissed him between the eyes.

“How could they try to part us,” she asked, “when there’s only us two left?”

Alcibiades, with swimming eyes, echoed in a little moan of true love the question: “How could they?”

The question was put again by both later in the day. Judy was to stay with an aunt while her mother sailed to Madeira to meet there the father returning from South Africa, full of wounds and honour, and to spend on the Island what was left of the winter. Now it was December.

A thick fog covered London with a veil of ugliness; the cabman was aggrieved and aggrieving – Alcibiades had tried to bite him – and Judy was on the verge of tears when the fog at last lifted, and allowed her to be driven to her aunt’s suburban house, yellow brickish, with a slate roof and a lean forecourt, wherein cypresses, stunted and blackened, spoke eloquently of lives more blank than the death whose emblem they were.

Through the slits of the drab Venetian blinds, gaslight streamed into the winter dusk.

“There’ll be tea, anyhow,” sighed Judy, recklessly overpaying the cabman.

Inside the house where the lights were, the Aunt was surrounded by a dozen ladies of about her own age and station; “Tabbies” the world might have called them. All were busy with mysteries of many coloured silks and satins, lace and linen; at least all held such in their hands. The gathering was in fact a “working party” for the approaching bazaar. But the real work of bazaars is not done at parties.

“Yes,” the Aunt was saying, “so nice for dear Julia. I’m truly glad that she should begin her visit with a little gaiety. In parting or sorrow we should always seek to distract the mind, should we not, dear Mrs Biddle?”

“The young are all too easily distracted by the shows of this world,” said dear Mrs Biddle heavily.

And several ladies murmured approval.

“But you can’t exactly call a church bazaar the shows of this world, can you?” urged the Aunt, sitting very upright, all black and beady.

“It’s the thin end of the Rubicon sometimes,” said Mrs Biddle.

“Then why – ” began the youngest Tabby – and then the door bell rang, and every one said: “Here she is!”

The prim maid announced her, and she took two steps forward, and stood blinking in the gaslight with her hat on one side, and no gloves. Every one noticed that at once.

“Come in, my dear,” said the Aunt, rustling forward. “I have a few friends this afternoon, and – Oh, my gracious, what has happened!”

What had happened was quite simple. In her rustling advance some wandering trail of the Aunt’s black beadiness had caught on the knotted fringe of the table-cloth, and drawn this after her. A mass of silk and lace and ribbon lay sprinkled along the edges of the table where the Tabbies sat; a good store of needles, scissors, and cotton reels mingled with it. Now all this swept to the floor on the moving table-cloth, at the very instant when a rough brownly-black, long-eared person with a sharp nose and very muddy paws bounded into the room, to the full length of his chain. His bound landed him in the very middle of the ribbon-lace-cotton-reel confusion. Judy caught the dog up in her arms, and her apologies would have melted my heart, or yours, dear reader, in an instant. But Tabbies are Tabbies, and a bazaar is a bazaar. No more sewing was done that day; what was left of the afternoon proved all too short for the disentangling, the partial cleansing of the desecrated lace-cotton-reel-silk-muddle. And Alcibiades was tied up in the back-kitchen to the wheel of the patent mangle; he howled without ceasing.

“My dear,” said the Aunt, when tea was over, and the last Tabby had found her goloshes and gone home in them, “you are most welcome under any roof of mine, but – (may I ask you to close the baize door at the top of the kitchen stairs – thank you – and now this one – I am obliged. One cannot hear oneself speak for that terrible animal) – you must get rid of the cur to-morrow.”

“Oh, Aunt! he’s not a cur – he’s pure-bred.”

“Thank you,” said the Aunt, “I believe I am as good a judge of dogs as any lady. My own dear Snubs has only been dead a year and two months last Tuesday. I know that a well-bred dog should have smooth hair, at any rate – ”

The mother of Snubs had been distantly related to a family of respectable middle-class fox-terriers.

“I am very sorry,” said Judy. She meant apology, but the Aunt took it for sympathy, and softened somewhat.

“A nice little smooth-coated dog now,” she said, “a fox-terrier, or an Italian greyhound; you see I am not ignorant of the names of various patterns of dog. I will get you one myself; we will go to the Dogs’ Home at Battersea, where really nice dogs are often sold quite cheap. Or perhaps they might take your poor cur in exchange.”

Judy began to cry.

“Yes, cry, my dear,” said the Aunt kindly; “it will do you a world of good.”

When the Aunt was asleep – she had closed her ears to the protests of Alcibiades with wadding left over from a handkerchief sachet – Judy crept down in her woolly white dressing-gown, and coaxed the kitchen fire back to life. Then she sat in front of it, on the speckless rag carpet, and nursed Alcibiades and scolded him, and explained that he really must be a good dog, and that we all have something to put up with in this life.

“You know, Alby dear,” she said, “it’s not very nice for me either, but I don’t howl and try to upset mangles. Don’t you be afraid, dear: you shan’t go to the Dogs’ Home.”

So kindly, yet strongly, did she urge her point that Alcibiades, tied to the leg of the kitchen table, consented to sleep quietly for the rest of the night.

Next day, when the Aunt enquired searchingly as to Judy’s powers of fancywork, and what she would do for the bazaar, Judy declared outright that she did not know one end of a needle from the other.

“But I can paint a little,” she said, “and I am rather good at wood-carving.”

“That will be very nice.” The Aunt already saw, in fancy, her stall outshine those of all other Tabbies, with glories of sabots and tambourines decorated with rosy sprays “hand-painted,” and carved white wood boxes just the size to hold nothing useful.

“And I’ll do you some,” said Judy; “only I can’t work if I’m distracted about Alby – my dog, you know. Oh, Aunt, do let him stay! He really is valuable, and he hasn’t made a bit of noise since last night.”

“It is quite useless,” the Aunt was sternly beginning – then suddenly her voice changed. “Is the cur really valuable?” she asked.

“Uncle Reggie gave five guineas for him when he was a baby boy,” said Judy eagerly, “and he’s worth much more now.”

“But he must be very old – when your Uncle Reggie was a boy – ”

“I mean when Alcibiades was a boy.”

“And who is Alcibiades?”

Judy began all over again, and urged one or two new points.

“I don’t want to be harsh,” said the Aunt at last, “you shall have the little breakfast room to paint and carve in as you suggest. Of course I couldn’t have shavings and paint pots lying about all over the dining-room and drawing-room. And you shall keep your cur.”

“Oh, Aunty,” cried Judy, “you are a darling!”

“Yes,” the Aunt went on complacently, “you shall keep your cur till the bazaar, and then we will sell it for the benefit of the Fund for the Amelioration of the Daughters of the Country Clergy.”

And from this decision no tears and no entreaties would move her.

Judy made a den for herself and Alcibiades in the little breakfast room. There was no painting light – so she looked out a handful of the sketches that she had done last summer and framed them. Most of her time she spent in writing to her friends to know whether any one could take care of a darling dog, who was a perfect angel. And alas! no one could – or would.

With the connivance of the cook, Alcibiades had a bed in a box in the den, and from the very first he would at a word conceal himself in it the moment the step of the Aunt sounded on the oil-cloth-covered stairs. The sketches were framed, and some of the frames were lightly carved. The Aunt was enchanted, but, on the subject of Alcibiades, adamant.

And now it was the day of the bazaar. Judy had run wires along the wall of the schoolroom behind her Aunt’s stall, and from it hung the best of the sketches. She had arranged the stall herself, glorifying it with the Eastern shawls and draperies that her father had sent her from India. It did far outshine any other stall, even that of Lady Bates, the wife of the tallow Knight. The Aunt was really grateful – truly appreciative. But her mind was made up about the “cur.”

“If it really is worth anything we’ll sell it. If not – ” She paused on the dark hint, and Judy’s miserable fancy lost itself among ropes and rivers and rat-poison.

To Alcibiades the bazaar was as much a festival as to any Tabby of them all. He had been washed, which is terrible at the time, but makes you self-respecting afterwards, a little puffed-up even. He had been allowed to come out by the front door, with his mistress in her beautiful dress that reminded him of rabbits. No one but Alcibiades himself will ever know what tortures of shame and misery, fighting with joy and affection, he had endured on those other occasions when he had been smuggled out of the back door in the early morning to take the damp air with his beloved lady and she had worn a shabby mackintosh and a red tam-o-shanter. To-day he wore a blue ribbon; it was uncomfortable, but he knew it spelt distinction. He rode in a carriage. It was not like the little governess-cart which had carried him and his mistress through the lanes about Maidstone; but it was a carriage, and a large horse was his slave. His mistress herself had tied his blue ribbon; it was she, too, who adjusted the chain that attached him to a strong staple driven in just above the schoolroom wainscotting. The chain allowed him to sit at her feet as she stood by the stall waiting for purchasers, and scanning the face of each newcomer in an eager anxiety to find there the countenance of some one who really loved dogs.

But the people were most awful, and she had to own it to herself. There were Tabbies by the dozen, and young ladies by the score – young ladies all dressed differently, yet all alike in the fashion of the year before last; all vacant-faced, smiling agreeably because they knew they ought to smile – the young of the Tabby kind – Tabby kittens, in fact. No doubt they were really worthy and interesting, but they did not seem so to Judy.

There was a sprinkling of men – middle-aged mostly, and bald. There were a few youths; by some fatality all were fair, and reminded Judy of pork. A Tabby stopped at her stall, turned over all things and bought a beaded table-napkin ring. The purchase and the purchaser seemed to Judy to typify her whole life and surroundings. All her soul reached out to the Island. She sighed, then she looked up. The crowd had thickened since she last surveyed it. Four steps led down to the schoolroom from the outer world: on the top step was a lady, well dressed – oh! marvel! – and beside her a man – a gentleman. Well, Judy supposed all these poor dear people were gentlefolk, but these two were of her world. As she gazed her eyes and those of the man met; the lady was lost in the crowd, and Judy saw her no more. The man made straight for the stall where were the framed sketches, the white dress, fur-trimmed, the russet hair and green eyes of Judy, and the brownly-black, blue-ribboned Alcibiades. But before he reached them a wave of buyers broke on the shore of Judy’s stall, and he had been watching her for nearly half an hour before a young woman’s long-deferred choice of a Christmas gift for a grandfather fell happily on a pair of purple bed-socks, and, for the moment, Judy breathed free.

“I told you so,” said the Aunt, rattling money in a leather bag; “I knew just before Christmas was the time. Everybody has to give Christmas presents to all their relations. You see! the things are going like wildfire.”

“Yes, Aunt,” said Judy. Alcibiades took advantage of the momentary calm to lick her hand exhaustively. Judy wondered wearily what had become of the man, the only man in that cheerless assembly who looked as though he liked dogs. “He must have been trying to get somewhere else,” she said; “he just looked in here by mistake, and when he saw the sort of people we were, he – well – I don’t wonder,” she sighed, and, raising her eyes, met his.

“I beg your pardon,” said he. He meant apology.

She took it for enquiry, and smiled. “Do you want to buy something?” she asked.

Her smile was more tired than she knew.

“I suppose I do,” he said; “one does at bazaars, don’t you know.”

“Do you want a Christmas present?” asked Judy, businesslike; “if so, and if you will tell me what kind of relation you want it for, perhaps I can find something that they’d like.”

“Could you? Now, that is really good. I want things for two aunts, three cousins, a little sister, and my mother – but I needn’t get hers here unless you’ve got something you think really – By Jove!” – his eyes had caught the sketches – “are those for sale?”

“That is rather the idea,” said Judy. Her spirits were rising, though she couldn’t have told you why. “Things at a bazaar are usually for sale, aren’t they?”

“Everything?” said he – and he stroked the not resentful neck of Alcibiades; “this good little beast isn’t in the market, I’m afraid?”

“Why? Would you buy him?”

“I’d think twice before I said no. My mother is frightfully fond of dogs.”

Quite unreasonably Judy felt that she did not want to sell Alcibiades as a present to any one’s mother.

“The sketches,” she said.

“The sketches,” said he; “why, there’s Maidstone Church and Farley and Teston Lock and Allington. How much are they?”

She told him.

“I must have some. May I have a dozen? They’re disgracefully cheap, and I feel like an American pork man buying works of art by the dozen – for they are jolly good – and it brings back old times. I was quartered there once.”

“I knew it,” she said to herself. Alcibiades stood up with his paws on her arm. “Be quiet,” she said to him; “you mustn’t talk now, I’m busy.”

Alcibiades gave her a reproachful look, and lay down.

The stranger smiled; a very jolly smile, Judy thought.

“Ripping little beast, isn’t he?” said the stranger.

“I suppose you’re invalided home?” she said. She couldn’t help it. A man in the Service. One who had been quartered at Maidstone, her own dear Maidstone. He was no longer a stranger.

“Yes,” he said; “beastly bore. But I shall be all right in two or three months; I hope the fighting won’t be all over by then.”

“Have you sold this gentleman anything?” said the Aunt firmly, “because Mrs Biddle wants to look at some d’oyleys.”

“I’m just selling something,” answered Judy. Then she turned to him and spoke softly. “I say, do you really like dogs?” said she.

“Of course I do.” The young man opened surprised grey eyes at her, as who should say: “Now, do I look like a man who doesn’t like dogs?”

“Well, then,” she said, “Alcibiades is for sale.”

“Is that his name? Why?”

“Oh, surely you know: wasn’t it Alcibiades who gave up being dictator or something rather than have his dog’s ears cut off?”

“I seem to remember something of the sort,” he said.

“Well,” said she, “his price is twenty guineas, but – ”

He whistled very softly.

“Yes – I know,” she said, “but I’ll – yes, Aunt, in one moment!” She went on in an agonised undertone: “His price is twenty guineas. Say you’ll have him. Say it loud. You won’t really have to pay anything for him – No, I’m not mad.”

“I’ll give you twenty guineas for the dog,” said the man, standing straight and soldierly against the tumbled mass of mats and pin-cushions and chair-backs.

The Aunt drew a long breath and turned to minister to Mrs Biddle’s deep need of d’oyleys.

“Come and have tea,” said the stranger; “you’re tired out.”

“No – I can’t. Of course I can’t – but I’ll take you over to Mrs Piddock’s stall and – ” She led him away. “Look here,” she said, “I’m sure you’re a decent sort. Here’s the money to pay for him. My aunt says if I don’t sell him she’ll have him killed. Will you keep him for me till my people come home? Oh, do – he really is an angel. And give me your name and address. You must think me a maniac, but I am so horribly fond of him. Will you?”

“Of course I will,” he said heartily, “but I shall pay for him. I’ll write a cheque: you can pay me when you get him back. Thank you – yes, I am sure that pin-cushion would delight my aunt.”

Judy, with burning cheeks, found her way back to her stall.

“Oh, Alcibiades,” she said, unfastening the blue ribbon, “I’m sure he’s nice. Don’t bite him, there’s a dear!”

A cheque signed “Richard Graeme” and a card with an address came into Judy’s hands, and the chain of Alcibiades left them.

“I know you’ll be good to him,” she said; “don’t give him meat, only biscuit, and sulphur in his drinking water. But you know all that. You’ve got me out of a frightful hole, and I’ll bless you as long as I live. Good-bye.” She stooped to the Aberdeen, now surprised and pained. “Good-bye, my dear old boy!”

And Alcibiades, stubborn resistance in every line of his figure, in every hair of his coat, was dragged away through the crowded bazaar.

Judy went to bed very tired. The bazaar had been a success, and the success had been talked over and the money counted till late in the evening – nearly eleven, that is, which is late for Tabbies – yet she woke at four. Some one was calling her. It was – no, he was gone – her eyes pricked at the thought – yet – surely that could be the voice of no other than Alcibiades? She sat up in bed and listened. It was he! That was his dear voice whining at the side gate. Those were his darling paws scratching the sacred paint off it.

Judy swept down the stairs like a silent whirlwind, turned key, drew bolts, and in a moment she and the cur were “sobbing in each other’s arms.”