II

THAT was not, however, to be the final colloquy between Robert Grimshaw and Ellida Langham, for he was again upon her doorstep just before her time to pour out tea.

“What is the matter?” she asked; “you know you aren’t looking well, Toto.”

Robert Grimshaw was a man of thirty-five, who, by reason that he allowed himself the single eccentricity of a very black, short beard, might have passed for fifty. His black hair grew so far back upon his brow that he had an air of incipient baldness; his nose was very aquiline and very sharply modelled at the tip, and when, at a Christmas party, to amuse his little niece, he had put on a red stocking-cap, many of the children had been frightened of him, so much did he resemble a Levantine pirate. His manners, however, were singularly unnoticeable; he spoke in habitually low tones; no one exactly knew the extent of his resources, but he was reputed rather “close,” because he severely limited his expenditure. He commanded a cook, a parlourmaid, a knife-boy, and a man called Jervis, who was the husband of his cook, and he kept them upon board wages. His habits were of an extreme regularity, and he had never been known to raise his voice. He was rather an adept with the fencing-sword, and save for his engagement to Katya Lascarides and its rupture he had had no appreciable history. And, indeed, Katya Lascarides was by now so nearly forgotten in Mayfair that he was beginning to pass for a confirmed bachelor. His conduct with regard to Pauline Lucas, whom everybody had expected him to marry, was taken by most of his friends to indicate that he had achieved that habit of mind that causes a man to shrink from the disturbance that a woman would cause to his course of life. Himself the son of an English banker and of a lady called Lascarides, he had lost both his parents before he was three years old, and he had been brought up by his uncle and aunt, the Peter Lascarides, and in the daily society of his cousins, Katya and Ellida. Comparatively late—perhaps because as Ellida said, he had always regarded his cousins as his sisters—he had become engaged to his cousin Katya, very much to the satisfaction of his uncle and his aunt. But Mrs. Lascarides having died shortly before the marriage was to have taken place, it was put off, and the death of Mr. Lascarides, occurring four months later, and with extreme suddenness, the match was broken off, for no reason that anyone knew altogether. Mr. Lascarides had, it was known, died intestate, and apparently, according to Greek law, Robert Grimshaw had become his uncle’s sole heir. But he was understood to have acted exceedingly handsomely by his cousins. Indeed, it was a fact Mr. Hartley Jenx had definitely ascertained, that upon the marriage of Ellida to Paul Langham, Robert Grimshaw had executed in her benefit settlements of a sum that must have amounted to very nearly half his uncle’s great fortune. Her sister Katya, who had been attached to her mother with a devotion that her English friends considered to be positively hysterical, had, it was pretty clearly understood, become exceedingly strange in her manner after her mother’s death. The reason for her rupture with Robert Grimshaw was not very clearly understood, but it was generally thought to be due to religious differences. Mrs. Lascarides had been exceedingly attached to the Greek Orthodox Church, whereas, upon going to Winchester, Robert Grimshaw, for the sake of convenience and with the consent of his uncle, had been received into the Church of England. But whatever the causes of the rupture, there was no doubt that it was an occasion of great bitterness. Katya Lascarides certainly suffered from a species of nervous breakdown, and passed some months in a hydropathic establishment on the Continent; and it was afterwards known by those who took the trouble to be at all accurate in their gossip that she had passed over to Philadelphia in order to study the more obscure forms of nervous diseases. In this study she was understood to have gained a very great proficiency, for Mrs. Clement P. Van Husum, junior, whose balloon-parties were such a feature of at least one London season, and who herself had been one of Miss Lascarides’ patients, was accustomed to say with all the enthusiastic emphasis of her country and race—she had been before marriage a Miss Carteighe of Hoboken, N.Y.—that not only had Katya Lascarides saved her life and reason, but that the chief of the Philadelphian Institute was accustomed always to send Katya to diagnose obscure cases in the more remote parts of the American continent. It was, as the few friends that Katya had remaining in London said, a little out of the picture—at any rate, of the picture of the slim, dark and passionate girl with the extreme, pale beauty and the dark eyes that they remembered her to have had.

But there was no knowing what religion might not have done for this southern nature if, indeed, religion was the motive of the rupture with Robert Grimshaw; and she was known to have refused to receive from her cousin any of her father’s money, so that that, too, had some of the aspect of her having become a nun, or, at any rate, of her having adopted a cloisteral frame of mind, devoting herself, as her sister Ellida said, “to good works.” But whatever the cause of the quarrel, there had been no doubt that Robert Grimshaw had felt the blow very severely—as severely as it was possible for such things to be felt in the restrained atmosphere of the more southerly and western portions of London. He had disappeared, indeed, for a time, though it was understood that he had been spending several months in Athens arranging his uncle’s affairs and attending to those of the firm of Peter Lascarides and Company, of which firm he had become a director. And even when he returned to London it was to be observed that he was still very “hipped.” What was at all times most noticeable about him, to those who observed these things, was the pallor of his complexion. When he was in health, this extreme and delicate whiteness had a subcutaneous flush like the intangible colouring of a China rose. But upon his return from Athens it had, and it retained for some time, the peculiar and chalky opacity. Shortly after his return he engrossed himself in the affairs of his friend Dudley Leicester, who had lately come into very large but very involved estates. Dudley Leicester, who, whatever he had, had no head for business, had been Robert Grimshaw’s fag at school, and had been his almost daily companion at Oxford and ever since. But little by little the normal flush had returned to Robert Grimshaw’s face; only whilst lounging through life he appeared to become more occupied in his mind, more reserved, more benevolent and more gentle.

It was on observing a return of the excessive and chalk-like opacity in Robert Grimshaw’s cheeks that Ellida, when that afternoon he called upon her, exclaimed:

“What’s the matter? You know you aren’t looking well. One would think Peter was dead.”

“You’ve got,” he said, “to put on your things and come and see them off at the station.”

“I?” she protested. “What are they to me?”

He passed his hand over his forehead.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I don’t want to, but I’ve got to. I’ve got to see the last of Pauline.”

Ellida said: “Oh!”

“It’s not,” he answered, “a question of what you are to them, but of what I am to you. You’re the only sister I’ve got in the world.”

Ellida was walking up to him to put her hands upon his shoulders.

“Yes, dear,” she was beginning, with the note of tenderness in her voice.

“And,” he interrupted her, “you’re the only sister that Katya’s got in the world. If I’ve arranged this marriage it’s for your sake, to keep myself for Katya.”

She gave a little indrawing of the breath:

“Oh, Toto dear,” she said painfully, “is it as bad as that?”

“It’s as bad as that—it’s worse,” he answered.

“Then don’t go,” she pleaded. “Stop away. What’s the use of it?”

“I can’t,” he said numbly. “It’s no use, but I can’t stop away;” and he added in a fierce whisper: “Get your things on quickly; there’s not much time. I can’t answer for what will happen if you’re not there to safeguard Katya’s interests.”

She shivered a little back from him.

“Oh, Toto,” she said, “it’s not that I’m thinking of. It’s you, if you’re in such pain.”

“Be quick! be quick!” he insisted.

Whilst she was putting on her furs she sent in to the room the small, dark, laughing and dumb Kitty. With steps of swift delight, with an air at once jolly and elfin, the small, dark child in her white dress ran to catch hold of the lappets of her uncle’s coat, but for the first time in his life Robert Grimshaw gazed out unseeing over his niece’s head. He brushed her to one side and began to walk feverishly down the room, his white teeth gleaming with an air of fierceness through the bluish-black of his beard and moustache. But even with their haste, it was only by almost running along the platform beside the train that Ellida was able in the dusk to shake the hands of Dudley Leicester and his wife. Grimshaw himself stood behind her, his own hands behind his back. And Ellida had a vision, as slowly the train moved, of a little, death-white, childish face, of a pair of blue eyes, that gazed as if from the face of Death himself, over her shoulder. And then, whilst she fumbled with the flowers in her breast, Pauline Leicester suddenly sank down, her head falling back amongst the cushions, and at the last motion of her hand she dropped on to the platform the small bunch of violets. Ellida leaned forward with a quick and instinctive gesture of rescue.

“She’s fainted!” she exclaimed. “Oh, poor child!”

The train glided slowly and remorselessly from the platform, and for a long time Robert Grimshaw watched it dwindling out of the shadow of the high station into the shadows of the falling November dusk, until they were all alone on the platform. And suddenly Robert Grimshaw ground the little bunch of flowers beneath his heel vindictively, his teeth showing as they bit his lower lip.

“Toto!” Ellida exclaimed in a tone of sharp terror and anguish, “why did she throw them to you? She shouldn’t have. But why do you do that?”

His voice came harshly from his throat.

“They were my flowers—my gift. She was throwing them away. Hadn’t you the sense to see that?” and his voice was cruel.

She recoiled minutely, but at his next action she came swiftly forward, her hands outstretched as if to stop him. He had picked up the violets, his lips moving silently. He touched with them each of his wrists, each of his eyes, his lips and his heart.

“Oh, don’t,” she said. “You aren’t serious—you can’t be serious!” for, as it seemed to her, semi-ironically her cousin was going through a Greek incantation that they had been told of by their old Greek nurse. “You can’t want to retain that poor little thing’s affections.”

“Serious!” Robert Grimshaw muttered.

“Oh, Robert,” she said, “what have you done it for? If she’s so frightfully in love with you, and you’re so frightfully in love with her ... and you’ve only got to look at her face to see. I never saw such misery. Isn’t it horrible to think of them steaming away together?”

Robert Grimshaw clenched his teeth firmly. “What did I do it for?” he said.

His eyes wandered over the form of a lady who passed them in earnest conversation with a porter. “That woman’s going to drop her purse out of her muff,” he said; and then he added sharply: “I didn’t know what it would mean; no, I didn’t know what it would mean. It’s the sort of thing that’s done every day, but it’s horrible.”

“It’s horrible,” Ellida repeated. “You oughtn’t to have done it. It’s true I stand for Katya, but if you wanted that child so much and she wanted you so dreadfully, wasn’t it your business to have made her happy, and yourself? If I’d known, I shouldn’t have stood in the way, not even for Katya’s sake. She’s no claim—none that can be set against a feeling like that. She’s gone away; she’s shown no sign.”

She stopped, and then she uttered suddenly:

“Oh, Robert, you oughtn’t to have done it; no good can come of it.”

He turned upon her sharply.

“Upon my word,” he said, “you talk like an old-fashioned shopkeeper’s wife. Nothing but harm can come of it! What have we arrived at in our day and our class if we haven’t learnt to do what we want, to do what seems proper and expedient—and to take what we get for it?”

They turned and went slowly up the long platform.

“Oh, our day and our class,” Ellida said slowly. “It would be better for Pauline to be the old-fashioned wife of a small shopkeeper than what she is—if she cared for him.”

They were nearly at the barrier, and he said:

“Oh sentimentality, sentimentality! I had to do what seemed best for, us all—that was what I wanted. Now I’m taking what I get for it.”

And he relapsed into a silence that lasted until they were nearly at home. And seated beside him in her coupé, Ellida, with the little deep wisdom of the woman of the household, sat beside him in a mood of wonder, of tenderness, and of commiseration.

“And it’s always like this,” she seemed to feel in her wise, small bones. “There they are, these men of ours. We see them altogether affable, smiling, gentle, composed. And we women have to make believe to their faces and to each other that they’re towers of strength and all-wise, as they like to make out that they are. We see them taking action that they think is strong; and forcible, and masculine, and that we know is utterly mad; and we have to pretend to them and to each other that we agree in placid confidence; and then we go home, each one of us with our husbands or our brothers, and the strong masculine creature breaks down, groans and drags us after him hither and thither in his crisis, when he has to pay for his folly. And that’s life. And that’s love. And that’s the woman’s part. And that’s all there is to it.”

It is not to be imagined that Ellida did anything so unsubtle as to put these feelings of hers, even to herself, into words. They found vent only in the way her eyes, compassionate and maternal, rested on his brooding face. Indeed, the only words she uttered, either to herself or to him, were, with deep concern—he had taken off his hat to ease the pressure of the blood in his brows—as she ran her fingers gently through his hair:

“Poor old Toto!”

He remained lost in his abstraction, until they were almost at her door. Then he squared his shoulders and resumed his hat.

“Yet I’m sure I was right,” he said. “Just consider what it was up to me to do. You’ve got to think that I don’t by any means care for Katya less. I want her for myself. But I want to see to it that Pauline has a good time, and I want to see her having it.”

“How can she have it if you’ve given her Dudley Leicester when she wants you?”

“My dear child,” he answered, and he had become again calm, strong, and infinitely lofty. “Don’t you understand that’s how Society has to go on? It’s the sort of thing that’s got to happen to make us the civilized people that we are. Dudley’s the best fellow in the world: I’m sure he’s the best fellow in the world. I know everything he’s ever done and every thought he’s ever thought for the last twenty years, and everything that Pauline wants to do in this world he’ll do. She’ll make a man of him. She’ll give him a career. He’ll be her life’s work. And if you can’t have what you want, the next best thing is to have a life’s work that’s worth doing, that’s engrossing, that keeps you from thinking about what you haven’t got.”

Ellida refrained from saying that what a different thing it was, and with his air of tranquil wisdom he went on:

“We’re all—all of us, in our class and our day, doing the same thing. Every one of us really wants the moon, and we’ve got somehow to get on with just the earth, and behave ourselves. I suppose what I really want is both Katya and Pauline. That sort of thing is probably in our blood—yours and mine—and no doubt in the great days of our race I should have had both of them, but I’ve got to sacrifice physical possession of one of them to the amenities of a civilization that’s pleasant enough, and that’s taken thousands of years to bring together. We’re the children of the age and of all the ages, and if at times it’s painful, we’ve got to get over the pain somehow. This is done with. You won’t see me wince again, not ever. It’s my business in life just to wait for Katya, and to see that Pauline has a good time.”

Ellida did not say: “You mean, in fact, to keep as much as you want of both of them?” She said instead: “What’s wanted is that Katya should come back from Philadelphia to look after you. You need to be looked after by a woman, and I’m going to get her.”

“Oh yes, I need to be looked after,” he said. And he added:

“But you know, dear, you do it splendidly.”

She nodded in the very least.

“Yes,” she said, “but you need to be looked after by at least two of us, and to have the whole time of at least one. I’ve got Paul and I’ve got Kitty as well as you.” She added to herself: “Katya will be able to manage you with my hints. I don’t believe she could without, if she is anything like the passionate darling she used to be.” And she concluded out loud: “It’s Kitty that’s going to bring her back from Philadelphia. I’ve had my trump card up my sleeve for some time, but I haven’t wanted to interfere in matters with two such volcanoes as you and she really are. It seemed too much of a responsibility. And I’ve sort of felt that a little person like Pauline was the person who ought to have married you. I know it now. You ought to have married Pauline and given her a good time. Then you could have gone on waiting for Katya till the end of the chapter.”

Robert Grimshaw said “Oh!”

“But you’re in,” she shut him up, “such a hopeless pickle as it is that I don’t believe even Katya, darling as she is, could make you any worse. So that if she comes back you’d better just take her on her own terms, and make the very best of it.”