BEHOLD now Daphne taking, in her new white gown with the green and gold embroidery, the centre of her little stage. Subsidiary characters, Claud, Green Eyes, a grateful Russian, and “That Man” of whom gratitude could not be affirmed. Also her host, unknown, and the unknown other guests. Behold her, secure in the assurance of her mirror that she looks “somebody in particular and not just anybody,” crushing her undisplayed flounces into one hand and holding lightly in the other the not-to-be-crushed outer dress which will, to the world, be her sole covering—all flounces severely unified by its long straight lines. She walks along Percy Street, Tottenham Court Road, Great Russell Street. The pavements are dry and dusty, and her thin bronze shoes will take no harm. Claud walks with her, tall and effective, with a general air of there being nothing to fear while he is with her. Doris, shiny with scented soap—a horribly strong-smelling pink kind shaped like a baby, to buy which in the attractive bazaars of Googe Street she has wheedled her sister out of twopence—lies in her white nightgown determined to keep awake till Daphne comes home from the “real live dinner-party.”
Mrs. Delarue, established by the lamp with a basketful of lumpy, ugly, misshapen balls which are “her gentlemen’s socks,” is equally, though opposedly, determined.
“I’ll sing to you to keep you awake,” she says with simple craft.
And the “Honeysuckle and the Bee” succeeds to the “Old Bull and Bush.” It is “Bill Bailey,” however, with its monotonous demands on one who has cut himself triumphantly free from the life so well indicated by the voice and vocabulary of the implorer, that works the charm. Doris sleeps. Mrs. Delarue watches her, with tears of affectionate admiration.
“Lor, how pretty she do sleep, bless ’er ’eart for a lamb; and I lay her sister sleeps twice as pretty. Her ’air ud be worth a fortune to anyone in that line. Pity there ain’t no one to see her.”
So she muses, and presently, assured that Doris is now indeed sunk deeper than the tide of dreams, goes out softly, with the key of the trap-door’s padlock in her pocket, and seeks a neighbouring house, brightly lit, a house of entertainment, in truth, for man and beast. So Doris is left alone.
Daphne foots it lightly up the long lighted length of Theobald’s Row.
“Won’t you take my arm?” says Winston, “as if it were a secret.”
“I can’t—I haven’t a hand.”
“Then I’ll take yours, may I?” He does, unreproved, intrude a hand among the many soft folds bunched up round her.
“I shall be awfully frightened,” Daphne says.
“Not you. You’ll be the star of the evening. Beautiful star,” he adds pensively.
She laughs. He would rather that she sighed.
“Seddon’s got a surprise for us,” he says. “He’s a rum chap. Everything by turns, and nothing long.”
“Who’s to be there,” asks Daphne for a reason that she has, though she knows the list by heart.
Claud rehearses it, leaving out the name which she wishes to hear spoken. She is not pleased with him.
“Is that all?”
“Oh, there’s Henry, of course. But you never know whether he’ll come or not.”
“Does he know who’s going?”
“Oh, yes. Seddon always consults him—shows him the list. Henry goes through it with a blue pencil.”
“How silly!” Daphne says.
“How silly?” Claud asks.
Her shoe heel twists sideways, and the question slinks away unanswered.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“No—not a bit. We shall be late.”
“I say, Daphne.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t you hate London in summer?”
“No.”
“Wouldn’t you like to see green woods and fields.”
“Ye—yes.”
“Look here – let’s run away for the day. I know a lovely place. We’ll have a picnic. Just us. Do say you will?”
“Just you and me and Doris?”
“Of course I meant Doris,” with a fervour proportioned to the intensity with which he had not meant Doris. “I know a ripping place—Chevening Park, quiet as the Garden of Eden, with trees and lawns and rabbits frisking about. Doris loves rabbits.”
“I should love it,” says Daphne. “And while Doris runs after rabbits you shall tell me all the things you promised.”
“I promised?”
“Yes. Don’t you remember? That first evening. You promised to tell me all your secrets. And you’ve never told me a single one.”
“Oh—you know I have.”
“You promised,” said Daphne, severely, answering the almost imperceptible pressure of fingers on her arm, “you promised to tell me all about the girl you’re in love with.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“Do you really want me to?” very tenderly.
“Yes, very much indeed. I want to know her.”
“You do know her.”
“This is very interesting. Who is she?”
“She’s the most beautiful—the dearest—the loveliest.”
“Of course, but who is she?”
“This,” says Claud, “is Gray’s Inn. I hope there’ll be champagne. There generally is at Seddon’s parties. His father’s a wine merchant.”
“I wish my dress wasn’t just muslin,” says Daphne.
“I bet all the other girls will wish it wasn’t whatever it is,” says Claud.
And Daphne, intoxicated with the sparkling draught of anticipated pleasure, says gaily: “How can you be so silly!”
The sombre magnificence of perfect taste which marked Mr. Seddon’s rooms was to Daphne a new note in life’s orchestra. Mahogany, silver, china. What was not Sheraton was Chippendale. What was not Spode was Derby. If anything was not silver it was Sheffield plate. There were bow-fronted sideboards, gleaming wine-coolers and snuffer-trays, wonderfully inlaid chairs, curious black-framed prints, and over all magic candle-light from the sconces of concave mirrors, the twisted splendours of old silver-branched candlesticks. Everyone was in evening dress, it is true, but an evening dress that rhymed, more or less accurately, with the furniture. The host and one or two of the guests wore, instead of the white tie so difficult of successful achievement, black stocks suggesting the youth of David Copperfield. The ladies’ dresses were mostly of the middle Victorian period. Daphne wondered where was the crinoline shop. Her own almost classical draperies struck a new note that was yet not a discord.
The Russian was not there.
The host came forward, head bent, shoulders raised high in an archaic bow that Nicholas Nickleby might have been proud to achieve.
“This is indeed a pleasure,” he said in soft staccato tones. “I have heard so much of Miss Carmichael that I began to fear that she would prove to be the ideal lady—dreamed of but never seen.”
Daphne did not know what to say. The host’s oval clean-shaven chin protruded, his round eyes enlarged as he drew her towards the mantelpiece.
“I lived by faith before,” he said, “but now, face to face!”
Daphne supposed that he meant something; and smiled politely.
“You smile. Why, there’s my picture ready made!” he said. “You ought to sit to Henry. There’s no one else could do it. ‘If I could have that little head of hers, painted upon a background of pure gold!’ But that is not our Henry’s method.”
“You think Mr. Henry clever?” she found herself saying.
“Clever? But that’s not the word, my dearest Miss Carmichael.” (Daphne looked round apprehensively, but all the other guests were talking together. No one was listening.) “Henry is The Man. He is an artist. That is to say he is an inspired craftsman—the noblest work of God. Don’t you think so?”
Daphne managed to say that she had not thought much about it.
“Ah,” said the host, rolling his round eyes impressively, “but it is of these things that we must think – if we would save our souls. Henry has a message, a great message, to the world. He has a great lesson to teach us—the beauty of ugliness and the ugliness of beauty. That seeming paradox elucidates the whole universe—the mystery of evil—secret of salvation. You know Henry?”
“A little.”
“Does it not make you proud?” he asked, “even you—crowned with all the gifts of the gods—to think that you have touched the hand of the Coming Man—the genius who is to revolutionise the world of Ideas—to seek out the lost art of today, poor, degraded, prostituted to the base uses of Jew stockbrokers and their diamond-laden women—and to raise her once more to the pinnacle where she shall stand before the eyes of all, naked—immortal—not to be denied.”
“Yes,” said Daphne. “Oh, yes, of course.” She wished he wouldn’t.
“I shall let you into a little secret, dearest lady,” the host went on. “So far it is a secret to all but me—and now to you—the object of this little dinner. A dinner should always have its object, just as a chaconne has its theme.”
“And do you repeat the object three hundred and sixty times?” asked Daphne.
“Very good,” he answered, laughing conscientiously, “excellent—Minerva as well as Venus (and Diana of course) presided at your birth. No, the motive of my little dinner is One and Only. It is this picture of Henry’s which I have just been fortunate enough to secure. It is no small joy, Miss Carmichael, to reflect that to generations yet unborn, I shall go down—I—with my modest incompetence in all save taste and some poor means of grace—I—even I—shall go down, covered with honour as the patron—the phrase is comic—I mean it so, I assure you—the patron of our Henry.”
Daphne definitely disliked the pronoun.
“The picture?” she asked.
“This,” he said, pointing to a long panel above the mantelpiece.
“This—the pride of my life, the desire of my eyes. This masterpiece, my dearest Miss Carmichael, I have had the happiness to secure—and, between ourselves, at a price that twenty years hence will turn the readers of the Burlington of that day green with envy. You, I know, can sympathise with my feelings. You can understand. Every curve of your hair, every movement of your lips, every line of your wonderfully conceived raiment tells me that you at least can understand.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Daphne, intentionally stolid, “is how you make a dinner party out of a picture.”
“Ah, now you’re laughing at me,” he said. “The delicious laughter of the gods! There will be other foods—concessions to the vile body, Miss Carmichael, but the little feast is really sacrificial. It is a love-feast. We meet together to honour genius and incidentally to feed our brother the ass—as dear St Francis so beautifully styles our mortal flesh. I can’t resist my little ideas, ils sont plus forte que moi. You see tonight we have the dinner—such as it is—and overshadowing it, hallowing it, presiding over it, as it were, in a luminous transcendental way, we have the overwhelming presence of this work of genius. You see I have the seven candles ready to light the moment he appears. And incense in this little square bronze vessel with the four crooked legs and the crouched dragon above. That’s symbolical, of course—the earthly breathing homage to the heavenly. And, down below, the Master will be with us, even us—one of us, laying aside his crown and sceptre to taste anchovies and iced asparagus, with his fellows of men (and women,” he added, adrift for an instant in a cross current). “And—what was I saying?”
“Crown and sceptre,” Daphne prompted.
“Yes—oh yes—laying aside his crown and sceptre to feed on life’s common bread and wine with us, his fellow mortals. It’s a beautiful allegory, dearest lady—it is the resplendent contradiction that resolves the discords of all religions. You see with me in this, eye to eye. I am sure that you do.”
Assured by a sidelong glance that Claud was out of earshot, Daphne was disingenuous enough to say: “Yes, indeed.”
The host looked deeply gratified.
“Do you know?” he said, musingly, “the moment that I heard your name something stirred in me—the mystic inwardness that stirs in dry wood when flame draws near? I knew what you would be. I knew it. These intuitions never deceive.”
“Mr. Henry is late, isn’t he?” was absolutely the best Daphne could do on her side.
“Time,” said her astonishing host, “is only a mode of thought. So is space. Is it not wonderful to feel that Henry is here now, in substance, though the accidents we call Henry are probably even now involved in some street accident—the breakdown of a cab, or the sudden soul-sickness of a motor-bus.”
Daphne laughed—aloud. The other guests looked enviously as her. One who could find food for laughter in Seddon’s talk must indeed, they felt, be fresh from the mint of the gods.
“Oh, Mr. Seddon,” she said. “I’m so sorry, but I can’t help it You are so funny, you know.”
“Yes,” he said with a certain gentle sadness, “I know I am. I can’t help it, either. But just then I meant to be funny. These impulses capture and control the will, despite the calmer motions of the soul. This is an exquisite moment. Do you ever, I wonder, feel the whole world poised on a thistledown that a breath can displace? Do you ever hang ensorcelled on the wondrous chance of life’s next happening?”
“Yes, always,” said Daphne recklessly—“at least almost always.”
“If one comes to think of it,” he went on, “each moment of life is full of divine possibilities as a thistle head is full of soft delicious seed-bearing aeroplanes.”
Daphne refused to let her mind dwell on thistles even in their more usual associations.
“I think I see what you mean,” she said. What she really saw was that everyone seemed to look likingly at that white dress of hers with the greeny gold embroidery, and that the hands of the old Dutch clock on the bracket pointed to a quarter-past eight
“Even as we speak,” he went on, smoothing his chin with a hand on which shone an early Italian ring, “even now Destiny, darkly veiled, may be drawing near to us through the wonder and mystery of the hectic London night Who knows what unspeakable miracle may even now be at our gates—”
“Mr. Henry,” said the perfect manservant, and That Man entered.
Daphne had had thoughts of charcoal. Did charcoal, she had wondered, charcoal as ingrained as that, really wash off? It had. That Man looked like any other man, his evening dress perfectly correct, the only personal note the almost savage inaccuracy of his white tie. The atmosphere of the room had, to Daphne, become abruptly changed.
The host whispered to a short, stout friend and rustled forward—so Daphne always declared, though how a man could rustle she never explained—to greet the latecomer.
“Dear master,” he said, “this is indeed good.”
Daphne heard a low, fierce growl, something that sounded like, “I tell you I won’t have it,” and her heart sank—but Seddon was unperturbed.
“I was just telling Miss Carmichael—you have already the privilege, yes” a guarded bow from Henry, a frozen exaggerated curtsey from Daphne—“the thema—the true inwardness of our little meeting.”
The fat satellite was going along the mantelpiece with a flame-tipped taper from which light leaped to one after another of the seven candles.
Daphne perceived that that right hand, to whose touch no sensible person would have given another thought, was clenched as a man’s is clenched when he means to strike. The smoked topaz eyes, in one instantaneous glance took in, she knew, every detail of her dress, every curve of her hair. And all, as it seemed, aroused in him the same furious distaste.
Seddon’s voice went on and on. A spout of hot scented smoke came from the mouth of the bronze dragon. “And the supreme moment,” he was saying, “when we can bow the head before your work, and offer, in silence, the tribute of the wine-god to the divine in man—the transcendent in human genius.”
“You are an excellent old ass,” said Henry, without moving his lips, and so low that only two heard him.
Seddon smiled with his lips only, as one who must smile or burst into tears. Daphne smiled—but only with her eyes.
Henry was speaking, in a voice not for two only, but for all.
“I am most extravagantly sorry, my dear Seddon,” he said, “but I have only looked in to beg you to excuse me. A dear uncle, almost a father to me, lies at death’s door. I have to hurry away to Upper Tooting to soothe his last moments. Your kind heart, I am sure, will make my excuses.”
“Of course, of course, awfully sorry, my dear chap,” Seddon was fussing round the other like a woman, “anything I can do, you know,” he added vaguely. “You’ll come in later, if you can?”
“If I can,” said Henry, “yes.” And suddenly, in his habitual way, he was not there any more. Slow dramatic exits were not Mr. Henry’s strong point. He was, and was not. That was all.
“I suppose,” said Seddon flatly, in the echo of the banging of his oak, “we may as well have dinner. Miss Carmichael,” he added, struggling like the brave little man he was against overwhelming disappointment, “you will sit by me, and help me to bear this crushing disappointment with equanimity?”
“Equanimity?” murmured Claud, seating himself by Green Eyes.
“Oh, Claud, again,” Green Eyes murmured in her turn.
“It isn’t again,” he said. “It’s the first and only time.”
“It always is,” said Green Eyes abstractedly.
The other guests were scraping their chairs into place on the moss-green pile of the soft carpet.
“After all,” Seddon was saying, as the perfect satellite began to revolve in his orbit, laden with choice hors d’œuvres, “perhaps there’s something more delicate, less voulu, in our little dinner as it is. The poignant beauty of the incomplete. Yes? And we know that he is here with us in spirit.”
Daphne knew, at any rate, in what spirit he had elected to be not with them.
“All the little plans,” Seddon purred, “all the little nuances, that have occupied me ever since I purchased the masterpiece and conceived the master-idea of this dinner party. . . . Ah, don’t refuse an anchovy-olive, Miss Carmichael. They’re from a little recipe of my own. We can find the beautiful in all things. Can we not?”
“Seddon’s got taste, confound him,” Claud was murmuring to Green Eyes.
“He’s got Miss Carmichael at present. Don’t scowl like a bandit. After all, it’s his dinner-party.”
“Well, let him have his beastly dinner—hang it all. Isn’t she ripping tonight?”
“She always is,” said Green Eyes, “no matter what her name is.”
“Ah,” said Claud, “but this is the real thing.”
“I know,” said Green Eyes, “it always is the real thing. I wonder why you all put up with Henry in the way you do? If a man behaved like that to me I should kick him, if I were a man.”
“What’s he been doing now?”
“You don’t mean to say you believed that—about the aunt.”
“Uncle.”
“It was an aunt last time.”
“What was?”
“You don’t see that it was just his way of telling Seddon not to be an ass?”
“Well,” said Claud, taking much lobster salad, “there comes a point every now and again when someone has to tell him that. He works up to it slowly, that point, but he gets there.”
“Oh, but it’s not only that,” said Green Eyes in low tones of intense irritation, “it’s everything. And all the time. Look at that night at your place, the first night Daphne came. Snubbed everyone the minute he got into the room and then sat in the corner with an aunt.”
“An aunt?”
“He called it a headache that night, I believe; but it was the same thing. A transparent excuse for rudeness that no one would ever stand in anyone else.”
“You used to be great pals, I thought.”
“I sat for him, if you mean that. Yes, and he was different then. You hadn’t all spoiled him. He was”
“Isn’t she, Winston?” Seddon’s voice broke in.
“Isn’t who?”
“Miss Carmichael.”
“Don’t—what nonsense,” said Daphne.
“Isn’t Miss Carmichael what?”
“Exactly like that splendid St. George—you know—in the”
“Exactly,” said Winston: “we always remarked it in my cousin from a child.”
“Miss Carmichael your cousin?” said Seddon, fussily. “I should never, never have believed it—no, no, my dear fellow,” he insisted, through the laughter that broke out all round the table, “you know what I mean. Such a different type, you know. Now Winston’s exactly like Waterhouse’s Hylas.”
“Sorry you spoke?” Green Eyes murmured’ in the red ear of Claud.
“And you,” said. Seddon, to Green Eyes, “are exactly like the nymphs.”
“All of them, Mr. Seddon?”
“Every single one.”
“If that chap,” said Claud in a low voice, “ever meets a Botticelli girl, he’ll marry her the next day.”
“If she’ll have him,” Green Eyes provided.
“Oh, a Botticelli girl would have him right enough. She’d have anybody. She’d know it was her only chance.”
It was Daphne’s first dinner-party. And it all seemed very grand to her. The menu, a little unconventional, seemed to her the height of luxurious delicacy. The champagne was good, but not so good as the glass that held it, old Venetian, slender stemmed and opal-tinted. The strawberries, too, were served in Venetian glass, wonderful greens and rose-pinks with threads of gold serpentining through them. The dinner service was Lowestoft; the coffee service Worcester. Daphne was, as Claud had foretold, the guest of the evening. At dessert, after the cloth had been drawn in the old way, and the fruit and decanters and pointed candle-flames were mirrored in the brown mahogany, Mr. Seddon made a little speech, almost all about Henry, and wound up, quite unexpectedly, by asking the company to drink the health—not of Henry, as everyone confidently expected—but of Daphne, to whom he alluded as “Our Lady of Consolation.”
“Not very polite to the rest of us,” murmured Green Eyes, as the men rose.
“Oh, he means well,” said Claud, “but it’s rather horrid for her. It’ll be your turn soon, don’t you worry. He’ll come round and tell you how exactly you resemble Burne-Jones’s Beggar Maid.”
Which was precisely what the little man did. When the guests dispersed about the large, panelled room he was careful to spend with each a few moments filled generously with compliments inoffensive and impersonal as the words of an oft-repeated ritual. He owed a duty to his guests and this seemed to him to be payment. But it was with a little flutter of haste that he crossed the room to where Daphne stood before Henry’s picture—for an instant alone. Claud had been appealed to to settle some point about a dance that was to happen in the autumn.
“Ah,” Seddon said, looking reverently up, a little out of breath, at the picture, “I have felt all the evening, dear Miss Carmichael, that yours is the only heart here tonight that really beats in unison with my own.”
Daphne drew back a step. The little man was amusing. But there were limits.
“In all this little company,” he went on, “you and I alone really feel the hard hand of Fate laid upon Henry’s uncle. The others—have enjoyed themselves.”
“I’m sure they have. So have I.”
“Almost as well as though our Henry had been here. But you and I Why, they have hardly even looked at the picture. But I saw your eyes on it again and again during our little meal.”
“The others had seen it before, perhaps.”
“They never will see it—as you and I see it. And they’ll never see Henry as you and I see him.”
If a Punchinello wagging bells at the end of a stick in a child’s hand had suddenly opened its wide painted lips and discoursed of Destiny and the heart of things Daphne could not, in the face of it, have felt more helpless than she did in the face of this silly, emotional, too astute little nouveau-riche.
“I—I know Mr. Henry so very slightly,” was all she found to say.
“Friendship isn’t measured by its length, like crêpe-de-Chine,” he said. “I insist, dearest Miss Carmichael, that the fineness of your nature has, in no matter how short a time, pierced to the shrine to which I have won my clumsy way, after blundering years misspent before other altars.”
The absurd little man. The horribly acute clear-sighted little man!
“Everyone,” said Miss Carmichael, “must admire Mr. Henry’s genius.”
“And he is the best of fellows.” Seddon, to Daphne’s breathless relief, got away on this from the associative personal note. “That casual way of his—oh, it hides a heart of gold. I could tell you tales.”
Daphne wished he would.
“Tales of unselfishness, of extravagant nobility, of chivalrous courtesy.”
She thought of the charwoman at whom he swore. Of someone else whom unseen he had welcomed with damnation.
“Of patient kindness.”
She thought of the Russian.
“But,” added Seddon disappointingly, “honour seals my lips.”
“I really hardly know him at all,” said Daphne again.
“You will,” said Seddon, his earnest eyes bulging almost unbearably. “You and he were made for each other.”
Daphne cast an agonised glance round the room. No: they were all talking. No one was listening.
“Made for each other,” he repeated impressively. “He must paint you. Does he want to?”
“He—he hasn’t said so.”
“He will. I have the collector’s eye, Miss Carmichael—I can tell a pair. Others may overlook minute differences—tiny discrepancies. I don’t. And I assure you that you and Henry were made for each other. Oh, it may never come to anything. In the old days when I was at the mercy of Mammon I have seen a Chelsea figure in Great Portland Street—another in the Mile End Road. And I have had no skill to bring them together. But they were a pair, none the less—none the less. And Fate, limited no doubt by—by its own—its own—er—limitations—may never bring you two together. But I know. In these things I am a sort of clairvoyant.” He laughed a soft soprano laugh.
She glanced at him; behind his light, prominent eyes shone the shifting, unearthly light that illumines life to the visionary. He was suddenly no longer absurd.
“Look at me,” he said, very quietly.
Her right elbow was on the high mantelpiece, her hand shading her eyes from the gleam of the silver-branched candelabra, and from the other eyes in the room. He had put his elbow also on the mantelpiece, and his eyes, too, were shaded. She turned her blue eyes full on him, and his held them while one might have counted twenty—slowly, as a tall clock counts.
“Yes,” he said, in a breathless undertone. “I was right. You were made for each other. And you know it.”
His voice broke the spell of his eyes. Daphne dropped her handkerchief and stooped for it.
“Allow me,” Seddon’s voice was quite normal as he stooped to the shed cambric. “Dear lady, your handkerchief is scented with the dreams of the garden where the flower of your life has grown.”
“It’s—it’s only lavender,” said she.
“Exactly,” said he.
“Mr. Seddon,” she writhed, restive, in a chain of discomfort and unrest, “you really oughtn’t to talk as you do. It’s”
“It is?”
“It’s—it’s disconcerting. And of course it’s really nonsense.”
“Is it?” he said, and met her eyes again.
She found it incredible that she should be in these deep, strange waters with this little man whom she had tenderly despised through a whole evening.
“Is it really nonsense? Do you really believe that there are truths—immense, penetrating truths—that are hidden from the wise and revealed to—to people at whom everybody laughs?”
“You know that?”
“That they laugh? Oh, yes. But who minds being laughed at—if he’s loved, too?”
“You know that people love you?”
“How can one help knowing? And one loves so many people—so intensely. It’s only tonight that I see you—but I love you—you feel that, don’t you? It’s the kind of love that makes life possible. I don’t ask anything of you—I don’t even want anything of you. I only want the assurance of your happiness. That kind of love sets life to music.”
“I am,” said Daphne, “very happy.”
“Yes. It radiates from you. I feel it as one feels the beautiful light-heat of a gipsy’s wood fire in a sunlit meadow. But I am afraid for you. When two people are made for each other, like you and he”
“Well?” Daphne asked, breathless.
“One dreads that one of them may stay forever in Great Portland Street, and the other in the Mile End Road. Don’t resist if East and West seem to draw together.”
“Mr. Seddon,” said Daphne determinedly, “do you talk like this to everyone?”
“No,” said he.
“I mean,” she went on, flat-footed in her resolution to know the worst, “it’s bad enough your talking to me like this. But do you talk about people like this—to other people?”
The pale, prominent eyes took on a look like that of a child chidden unjustly.
“You’re slipping away from me,” he said helplessly. “A moment ago, and we were face to face. Stay here a moment. Do not bury yourself in any of the conventional hiding-places. Ah, stay! I could never talk to anyone about anyone else. Only when I see, it is laid upon me to speak—I—Ah, stay here—don’t take refuge in that outer place where one laughs at these things. I am like the prophets. ‘It shall be given me in that hour what I shall speak.’ And this is what I say. You were made for each other—you and Henry. If ever anything in your relations with him is in your hands, use those hands strongly—firmly. Don’t be afraid of blame or shame, or the word of the world, or your own pride—self-respect, you will call it. Go to him with you heart in your hand, and you will save his soul and yours.”
Through the intense silence that closed round his ceased speech ripples of laughter from the others broke lightly, yet very far off.
“Wake up,” said Daphne, low and strenuous, and without at all meaning to say it. “Wake up. You’re dreaming.”
He drew his ring-laden hand across those round light eyes, and looked at the hand inquiringly. He drew a long breath.
“Dear Miss Carmichael,” he said. “I fear I have been very remiss. I fell into a reverie. Do you not know those moments when the whole world recedes—with all that is most precious in it—like a withdrawing tide, and your soul lies alone on some wild shore whose outline you cannot remember when the tide suddenly laps round you again?”
Next moment he was assuring me gazelle-eyed lady that she was—did not merely resemble, but was, a perfect Murillo, and Daphne, still leaning on the mantelpiece, was asking herself whether it were really possible for a sane person to dream convincing, incredible words that had never been seen or heard.
Claud was at her elbow.
“You will walk home with me, won’t you—cousin?” he was saying.
“Yes, of course,” said Daphne. “That is if you won’t talk to me. My eyes are dropping out of my head.”
“Where—where?” The student who leaned against walls had strolled up and now scrutinised the carpet with explanatory intensity.
“With tiredness,” Daphne went on. “Can we go now—politely? It’s been a lovely party, but I am so tired.”
“Has Seddon been asking you to look in the crystal?” asked the leaning student “The very idea of it tires me.”
“Oh, no,” said Daphne, “he said nothing about crystals.”
Seddon was making himself laboriously agreeable to Green Eyes and the Gazelle Lady. They could hear his careful allusions to the masterpieces of great artists.
“Don’t let him mesmerize you,” said the young man with the drooping lock. “I know a girl he did that to—and—really, you know, she’s never been the same since.”
“I won’t,” said Daphne, still trying to make memory rhyme with the possible. Had he mesmerised her? Was that the explanation of this tumultuous, tortured feeling of having been stripped to the bone, regarded, loved, advised, counselled, at last liberated? “Let’s go—go now,” she added, less calmly than she thought. So, with many elaborate courtesies of farewell, they went.
“Did you enjoy it?” asked Claud, in Holborn. “It was a nice party, wasn’t it? He always does everything so awfully well. He’s a dear old duffer, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Daphne. “I like him.”
“Take my arm,” said Claud, as though it were more a secret than ever. The others were going the same way, but in discreet twos and threes, dissociated from, yet connected with, this pair. The dress did not matter now. She crushed petticoat and dress into one hand and took the proffered arm.
“I hoped you wouldn’t loathe him,” said Winston, wishing deeply that he could dare to press that cool limp hand to his side.
“I didn’t,” said Daphne. “Don’t talk. Do you mind?”
“Is your head very bad?”—a wild impulse to add “dear.” Resisted.
“Yes—no—I’m tired. I like walking at night One gets the most out of it like that.”
Claud, conscious, in every fibre, of that hand on his arm, took this as he wished to take it.
“Yes,” he said, and ventured a pressure so slight as to leave Daphne unconscious of it “Yes, one does.”
So they walked on in silence—a silence that lent her room to breathe in this new atmosphere of mystery and portent, and wrapped him in the bright light mists of the dawn of a new love.
“You won’t forget,” he said on the stairs.
“No—never. What do you mean?” she asked as one suddenly awakened.
“About our picnic,” said he.
“Of course not,” she said. “Good night, cousin.” Something in his face, showing in the light of the gas from his room improvidently blazing, drew from her: “I am so glad I met you that night! Where would everything have been if I hadn’t!”
“Where indeed—for me?” said Winston.
Daphne climbed the last flight of stairs alone. It was late, and Mrs. Delarue would be tired of waiting.
The trap-door was open. The lamp-light made its resting place a bright square.
“I’m afraid I’m very late, Mrs. Delarue,” she said to the figure that sat by the bed in the dim light of one candle. “I’m so sorry.”
“Mrs. Delarue has gone home,” said the figure, rising and coming toward her—a figure in a dream, in a dream that had been Daphne’s nightmare for weeks. For the figure was a ghost from the past—from that too recent past whose setting was Laburnum Villa.
Daphne caught up the candle and held it so that the light fell full on the ghost’s face. And it was, beyond doubt and without the possibility of mistake, not a ghost at all, but, convincingly in the flesh, pale and trembling exceedingly, Cousin Jane Claringbold!