A Servant of the Public

"Be off," he said with rueful good-nature. "Only don't say I didn't tell you."

Ashley laughed, nodded carelessly, and set off again at his round pace. But presently the round pace became intolerably slow, and he hailed a hansom. He was by way of being economical about hansoms, often pointing out how fares mounted up; but he took a good many. He was soon landed at the little house in Chelsea.

Ora was not in the room when Janet ushered him in. "I'll tell my mistress, sir," said Janet gravely, taking up a smelling-bottle which stood on Ora's little table and carrying it off with her. Blind to this subtle indication that all was not well in the house, Ashley roamed about the room. He noticed with much satisfaction his portrait in the silver frame and his roses in a vase; then he looked at the photographs on the mantel-piece; falling from these, his eyes rested for a moment in idleness on a letter which bore the postmark "Bridgeport, Conn."

"Ah, here she is!" he cried, as a step sounded and the door-handle was turned. Ora entered and closed the door; but she did not advance towards him; the smelling-bottle was in her hand.

"I wrote you a note telling you not to come," she said.

"Thank heaven I didn't get it," he answered cheerfully. "I haven't been home since the morning. You can't send me away now, can you?"

Ora walked slowly towards the sofa; he met her half-way and held out both his hands; she gave him one of hers in a listless despairing fashion.

"Oh, I know!" said he. "You've been making yourself unhappy?"

She waved him away gently, and sat down.

"What was in the note you wrote me?" he asked, standing opposite to her.

"That I could never see you again," she said.

"Oh, come!" Ashley expostulated with a laugh. "That's rather summary, isn't it? What have I done?"

"Irene Kilnorton has been here."

"Ah! And was she disagreeable? She is sometimes – from a sense of duty or what she takes for it."

"Yes, she was disagreeable."

"If that's all – " he began, taking a step forward.

"That's not all," Ora interrupted. "Are my eyes red?"

"You've not been crying?"

"Yes, I have," she retorted, almost angrily. "Oh, why did I go with you on Sunday? Why did you make me go?"

She seemed to be conscience-stricken; he drew up a chair and sat down by her. She did not send him away now but looked at him appealingly. She had something of the air that she had worn in the inn parlour, but there joy had been mingled with her appeal; there was no joy in her eyes now.

"We didn't do much harm on Sunday," he said.

"I believe I'm preventing you doing what you ought to do, what all your friends wish for you, what would be best for you. It's just like me. I can't help it."

"What are you preventing me from doing?"

"Oh, you know. Irene says you are quite getting to like her. And she's so nice."

"But Lady Kilnorton's engaged already."

"You know I don't mean Lady Kilnorton. Don't make fun now, Ashley, don't."

Ashley leant forward suddenly and kissed her cheek.

"Oh, that's not the least use," she moaned disconsolately. "If that was all that's wanted, I know you'd do it." A mournful smile appeared on her lips. "But it only makes it worse. I've made up my mind to something."

"So have I. I've made up my mind that you're the most charming woman in the world, and that I don't care a hang about anything else."

"But you must, you know. We must be reasonable."

"Oh, I see Irene Kilnorton's been very disagreeable!"

"It's not Irene Kilnorton."

"Is it my true happiness, then?"

"No," said Ora, with another fugitive smile. "It's not exactly your true happiness."

"Well, then, I don't know what it is."

Ora was silent for a moment, her dark eyes filled with woe.

"There's a letter on the mantel-piece," she said. "Will you give it to me?"

He rose and took the letter. "This one from America?" he asked. "I say, you're not going off there, starring, are you? Because I shall have to come too, you know."

"No, I'm not going there." She took the letter out of its envelope. "Read it," she said, and handed it to him.

Somehow, before he read a word of it, the truth flashed into his mind. He looked at her and said one word: "Fenning?"

She nodded and then let her head fall back on the sofa. He read the letter carefully and jealously; that it was written by a friend's hand no doubt prevented Jack Fenning from saying more, as he himself hinted; yet the colourlessness and restraint of what he wrote were a comfort to Ashley.

He laid the letter down on the table and looked for a moment at his own picture. Ora's eyes were on him; he leant forward, took her hand, and raised it to his lips.

"Poor dear!" said he. Then he folded the letter, put it in its envelope, laid the envelope on the mantel-piece, read Bridgeport, Conn., again on the postmark, and, turning, stood looking down on her. He had not got quite home to the heart of the situation. All that day long, as it seemed to him, there had been ineffectual efforts to stop him, to turn him from his path, and to rescue him from the impulses which were carrying him along. The Buckingham Palace Road proposal, Irene Kilnorton's hints, Alice Muddock's presence, had all been as it were suggestions to him; he had not heeded the suggestions. Now came something more categorical, something which must receive attention and insisted on being heeded. Mr. Fenning had suddenly stepped out of vagueness into definiteness, out of a sort of hypothetical into a very real and pressing form of existence. He was now located in space at Bridgeport, Connecticut; he was palpable in his written message; he became urgent for consideration by virtue of his proposal. Ashley had, in his heart, not taken Mr. Fenning very seriously; now Mr. Fenning chose to upset his attitude in that respect in a most decisive fashion. For whatever Ora decided to do, there must from now be a difference; Ashley could not doubt that. She might accept her husband's proposal; in that case her whole life was changed and his with it. She might refuse to have anything to do with it; but then would not the discarded but legitimate claimant on her affections and her society force her and him out of the compromise under which they now sheltered themselves? Either way, Jack Fenning must now be reckoned with; but which was to be the way?

With a curious sense of surviving ignorance, with an uncomfortable recognition that he was only at the beginning of the study and on the outskirts of a knowledge of the woman whom he already loved and held nearest to him of anybody in the world, Ashley discovered that he had no idea in which way Ora would face the situation, what would be her temper, or what her decision. For the first time in their acquaintance a flash of discomfort, almost of apprehension, shot across his mind. Was she as alien, as foreign, as diverse from him as that? But he would not admit the feeling, would not have it or recognise it; it was absurd, he told himself, to expect to foresee her choice, when he knew so little of the factors which must decide it. Did he know Fenning, had he been privy to their married life? Not in her but in the nature of the case lay the puzzle. He dismissed his doubt and leant down towards the sad beautiful face beside him.

"Well, dear?" he asked, very gently.

"I'm going to tell him to come," said she.

CHAPTER IX

RENUNCIATION: A DRAMA

The words in which Ora declared her intention of recalling Jack Fenning to her side and of taking up again the burden of married life sounded like the statement of a firm, unalterable, and independent resolution; after them it seemed as though Ashley had only to bow his head and go his ways; his task would be, if not easy, yet plain and simple. But with the brave sound came the appealing glance; the words were uttered more like a prayer than a decree. She had thrown herself on his mercy in the inn parlour on the Sunday; she appeared to throw herself on his mercy again now, and in reality to await his determination rather than announce her own. But she was eager to win from him the verdict that she suggested; she was not hoping for a refusal while she satisfied appearances by asking. The appeal was full of fear and doubt, but it was genuine and sincere. Her eyes followed him as he walked to the window and as he came back and stood again before her; she watched the struggle in him with anxiety. Once she smiled faintly as though to show her understanding and her sympathy with what was passing in his mind. "I feel all that too," she seemed to say.

"Have you quite made up your mind?" he asked her at last. "You've realised what it means? I don't know him, of course, and you do. Well, can you do it?"

"I must do it. I ought to do it," she said pathetically. "You know I ought to do it."

He shrugged his shoulders; probably she was right there, unless Jack Fenning were a much worse calamity than he had any good reason for supposing; certainly everybody would hold her right, everybody who had not queer theories, at least.

"You must help me," she said. He was silent. She rose and came to stand by him, speaking to him in a low whisper. "Yes, you must help me, you must make me able to do it. I can do it if you help me, Ashley. It is right, you know."

A hint of amusement shewed itself in his face.

"Perhaps, but I shouldn't have thought I could help you much," he said. "Unless you mean by going away and staying away?"

"Oh, no, no," she cried in terror. "You mustn't go away, you mustn't leave me alone, I should die if you did that now. It's a thing for both of us to do; we must help one another. We shall make one another stronger. Don't you see what I mean? You won't go?"

He had not fathomed her mood yet, but only one answer to her prayer was possible.

"I won't go as long as you want me," he said.

"You promise? You promise me that?" she insisted.

"Yes, I promise," he assured her with another smile.

"And you'll make it easy for me?" She, in her turn, smiled a moment. "I mean you won't make it too difficult? I must be good, you must let me be good. Some people say you're happy when you're good. I wonder! I shall be very miserable, I know."

The tears were standing in her eyes; she looked indeed very miserable; he kissed her.

"Yes," she murmured, as though he had told her in words that he pitied her very much; she preserved that childlike sort of attitude towards caresses; to Ashley it seemed to make kissing her almost meritorious. She saw no inconsistency between accepting his kisses and holding to her heroic resolution; it seemed almost as though she must be kissed to enable her to hold to her resolution; it was the sympathy, or even the commendation, without which her virtue could not stand.

"I can do it," she said plaintively. Then she drew herself up a little. "Yes, I can," she repeated proudly, "I'm sure I can. We can do what we ought, if we try. Oh, but how I shall hate it! If only it had come a little sooner – before – before our Sunday! It wouldn't have been so bad, then."

"No, it wouldn't," he said.

"Poor Ashley!" she said, pressing his hand. "Will it be very hard for you?"

He answered with the shamefaced brevity and reserve with which men, trained as he had been, confess to emotion.

"I shan't like it, naturally."

"But you must be strong too," she urged. "We must make each other strong." She returned with evident comfort to this idea of their helping one another; they were to fight as allies, in a joint battle, not each to support a solitary unaided struggle. To most people it would have seemed that they would make one another weak. Ora was sure of the contrary; they would make one another strong, support one another against temptation, and applaud one another's successes. She could be good, could be even heroic, could perform miracles of duty and resignation, if she had the help of Ashley's sympathy and the comfort of his presence. And he would feel the same, she thought; she could soften the trial to which she was obliged to subject him; she could console him; her tender grief and her love, ardent while renouncing, would inspire him to the task of duty. She grew eager as this idea took shape in her mind; she pressed it on him, anxious to make him see it in the aspect in which she saw it, to understand the truth and to appreciate the beauty that lay in it. She was sure it was true. It surprised her to find this beauty also in it. But if they separated now, cut themselves adrift from one another, and went off their different ways, all that drew her in the picture would be destroyed, and she would be left without the balm of its melancholy sweetness. She tried by every means in her power to enlist him on her side and make him look at the question as she looked at it.

Always obedient to her pleading orders, never able openly to reject what she prayed him to accept, Ashley feigned to fall in with an idea which his clearsightedness shewed very much in its real colours and traced to its true origin. It had begun in the instinctive desire not to lose him yet, to put off the day of sacrifice, to reconcile, so far as might be possible, two inconsistent courses, to pay duty its lawful tribute and yet keep a secret dole for the rebel emotion which she loved. Up to this point she was on ground common enough, and did only what many men and women seek and strive to do. Her individual nature shewed itself in the next step, when the idea that she had made began to attract her, to grow beautiful, to shape itself into a picture of renunciatory passion, moving and appealing in her eyes. But there must be other eyes; he too must see; by interchange of glances they must share and heighten their appreciation of what they were engaged on. Her morality, her effort to be, as she put it, good, must not only be liberally touched by emotion; it must be supported and stimulated by sympathetic applause. Reluctantly and almost with a sense of ungenerousness, as though he were criticising her ill-naturedly, he found himself applying to her the terms of her own art, beginning to see her in effective scenes, to detect an element of the theatrical in her mood. This notion came to him without bringing with it any repugnance and without making him impute to her any insincerity. She was sincere enough, indeed absolutely engrossed in her emotion and in the picture her emotion made. But the sincerity was more of emotion than of purpose, and the emotion demanded applause for the splendid feat of self-abnegation which it was to enable her and him to achieve. He was quite incapable of casting this glamour round his own share in the matter, but he strove to feel and perceive it in hers as she pleaded softly with him that he should not leave her to struggle in grim solitude. And he was glad of any excuse for not leaving her.

"I can't think yet of what it will be like when he's come," she said. "I mustn't think of that, or – or I couldn't go on. I must just do it now; that's what we've got to do, isn't it? We must get it done, Ashley, and leave all the rest. We must just do what's right without looking beyond it."

"There's no particular good in looking forward," he admitted ruefully. "You're quite clear about it?"

"Oh, yes, aren't you? I'm sure you are." She looked at him apprehensively. "You mustn't turn against me. I can be strong with you to help me; I couldn't be strong against you." Her voice fell even lower. "Not for an hour," she ended in a whisper.

Again she threw herself on his mercy; again he could not fail her or be deaf to her prayer.

"If you think it right, I can say nothing against it," he said.

"No. You wouldn't be happy if you did; I mean if you did persuade me to anything else. I know there aren't many men like you, capable of doing what you're going to do for me. But you can do it."

He perceived the glamour encircling him now as well as her; quarrelling with his own words, still he said to himself that his part also was to be an effective one; she was liberal to him and shewed no desire to occupy all the stage; her eyes would be as much for him as for herself.

"And because you're strong, I can be strong," she went on. "We shall both be glad afterwards, shan't we?"

"Let's rest in the consciousness of virtue, and never mind the gladness," he suggested.

Ora discarded the gladness almost eagerly.

"Yes," she said. "Because we shall both be terribly unhappy. We've got to face that. We aren't doing it blindly. We know what it means."

He doubted greatly whether she knew what it meant; she could not realise its meaning so long as she refused to look forward or to consider the actual state of things when Jack Fenning had arrived, so long as she preferred to concentrate all her gaze on the drama of renunciation which was to precede and bring about his coming. But in all this there was only an added pathos to him, a stronger appeal to his compassion, and an insuperable difficulty in the way of even trying to make her understand; such an attempt seemed brutal in his eyes. He could comfort her now; he could not tell her that when the moving scene ended with the entrance of Jack Fenning he would be able to comfort her no more.

The same mood which prevented her from looking forward made her reluctant to talk of her husband as he actually was. Under pressure of Ashley's questions she told him that she had begun by loving Jack and had gone on liking him for some little while; but that he bore poverty badly and yet was indolent; that he often neglected her and sometimes had been unkind; that he was very extravagant, got into terrible money difficulties, and had been known to turn to the bottle for relief from his self-created troubles. But she became very distressed with the subject and obviously preferred to leave Jack Fenning vague, to keep him to the part of a husband in the abstract. This was all the drama needed – a husband accepted in duty but no longer loved or desired; the personal characteristics or peculiarities of the particular husband were unessential and unimportant. Ashley was surprised to find how little he had learnt about Mr. Fenning. But he was learning more about Mr. Fenning's wife.

"It's not what he is," urged Ora, "it's what we've got to do."

By now Ashley felt irrevocably coupled with her in a common task; and to him at least the precise character of the husband was not important. They were to act on the high plane of duty; Jack's past misdeeds or present defects were to be of no moment except in so far as they might intensify the struggle and enhance the beauty of renunciation. Ashley was so far infected with her spirit that he was glad to be left with a number of impressions of Jack Fenning all vaguely unfavourable.

"Nothing will ever alter or spoil the memory of our Sunday," she said. "It'll be there always, the one sweet and perfect thing in life. I think we shall find it even more perfect because of what we're going to do. I shall think about it every day as long as I live. I think it helps to have been happy just once, don't you? It'll never be as if we hadn't known we loved one another."

With the dismissal of the topic of Jack Fenning's character and the acceptance of the position that they were not to look forward beyond the act of renunciation, Ora had grown composed, cheerful, and at moments almost gay. Already she seemed to have triumphed in her struggle, or their struggle as she always called it; already she was minded to exchange congratulations with her ally. Her mere presence was such a charm to him as to win him to happiness, even while they were agreeing that happiness was impossible; the sense of loss, of deprivation, and of emptiness was postponed and could not assert itself while she moved before his eyes in the variety of her beauty and grace. Though he could accord but a very half-hearted adhesion to the scheme she had planned, again he welcomed it, because for the time at least it left her to him; nor could he be altogether sorrowful when she made her great and confessed love for him the basis on which the whole plan rested, the postulate that gave to the drama all its point and to the sacrifice all its merit. If she were triumphing in renunciation, he triumphed in a victory no less great, and hardly less sweet because the fruits of it were denied to him, because it was to rank as a memory, and not to become a perpetual joy. At least she loved him, trusted him, depended on him; he was to her more than any man; he was her choice. He would not have changed parts with Jack Fenning although he had to go out of her life and Jack was coming into it again. Surely to be desired is more than to possess?

"I suppose people suspect about us," she said. "I'm sure Irene does, and I think Miss Muddock does. But we've nothing to be ashamed of; we can't help loving one another and we're going to do right." She paused a moment, and then, looking at him with a timid smile, added, "How awfully surprised everybody will be when they hear that Jack's coming back! I think a lot of them hardly believed in him."

No doubt she divined accurately the nature of a considerable body of opinion.

"I daresay not," said Ashley. "You'll tell people what's going to happen?"

"Just my friends. It would look so odd if he came without any warning."

It could not be denied that she was interested in thinking of the effect which her news would create. She saw herself telling it to people.

"Of course I shall announce it as if it was the most ordinary thing," she went on. "You must do the same; say I told you about it. They'll be rather puzzled, won't they?"

"Oh, my dear!" said he, half laughing, half groaning, as he took her hand for a moment and pressed it lightly. "Yes, I daresay they'll be puzzled," he added with a rueful smile.

"We mustn't shew we notice anything of that sort," pursued Ora. "Nobody must see what it is we're really doing. They won't know anything about it." Her eyes fixed themselves on his. "I daresay they'll suspect," she ended. "We can't help that, can we?"

"We must keep our own counsel."

"Yes. If they like to talk, they must, that's all."

She had more to say of this secret of theirs, talked about, guessed at, canvassed, but not fully understood and never betrayed; it was to be something exclusively their own, hidden and sacred, a memory for ever between them, a puzzle to all the rest of the world.

"I daresay they'll guess that we care for one another," she said, "but they'll never know the whole truth. I expect they wouldn't believe in it if they did. They wouldn't think we could do what we're going to."

Not till he prepared to go did her sorrow and desolation again become acutely felt. She held his arms and prayed him not to leave her.

"You must rest a little while and eat something before you go to the theatre," he reminded her.

"No, no, don't leave me. Stay with me, do stay with me. Why can't I always have you with me? Why shouldn't I? How cruel it is!" She was almost sobbing. "Ashley, don't go," she whispered.

"Well, I won't go," he said. "I'll stay and dine with you and take you to the theatre."

"And fetch me home afterwards?"

"No, I don't think I'll do that as well."

"Why not?" she asked resentfully. Ashley shook his head. After a long look at him Ora sighed deeply. "I suppose you'd better not," she admitted. "But you'll stay now, won't you?" She ran across to the bell and rang it; her tone was gay as she told Janet that Mr. Mead would dine with her; between being left now and being left two hours hence a gulf of difference yawned.

"I'm afraid there's not much dinner, ma'am," said Janet in a discouraging, perhaps a disapproving, way.

"Oh, you won't mind that, will you?" she cried to Ashley, and when Janet went out she sighed, "It's so nice to have you." His smile had mockery in it as well as love. "It's for such a little while too," she went on. "Presently I shan't have you at all."

The little meal that they took together – Ashley ignoring an engagement to dine with friends, Ora seeming unmindful of things much harder to forget – was not a sorrowful feast. The shadow of the great renunciation did not eclipse Ora's gaiety, but tempered it with a soft tenderness. None of her many phases had charmed her friend more; never had she seemed stronger in her claim on his service, more irresistible in the weakness with which she rested her life on his. His taste, his theoretical taste, had not been for women of this type, but rather, as he used to put it, for a woman with a backbone, a woman like Alice Muddock; theoretical preferences exist to be overthrown.