III

THAT night Robert Grimshaw dined at the Langhams’. Little Kitty was still at Brighton with Katya, and the room, in the pleasant shade of a hanging-lamp above the table, was tranquil and soothing. Paul Langham, who was the director of a bank doing most of its business with the Orient, was a blond gentleman with a high nose, able to pass from the soup to the coffee without speaking a word. And having that afternoon purchased at a railway bookstall an engineer’s puzzle, by means of which sixteen crescents of orange-coloured cardboard could be made to fit the form of a perfect circle into a square box, Ellida was more engaged with these little coloured objects than with either of her companions.

And suddenly Mr. Held was in the room. He had the air of springing from the dark floor into the little circle of light that the lamp cast. His black hair hung down over his ears, his great black eyes were luminous and very open, and his whole gentle being appeared to be pervaded by some deep excitement.

“I thought if you’d just come round,” he said in a deep voice, with extreme embarrassment. Robert Grimshaw was already half out of his chair, but to his, “What is it?” Mr. Held replied only, “I don’t know that it’s anything, but I should like you just to come round.”

Robert Grimshaw was in the hall and then in the street beside the figure of Mr. Held, who, with his dancing and hurrying step and his swarthy but extreme leanness, had the grotesque appearance of an untried tragic actor. It wasn’t that Dudley was any worse, he said, and it wasn’t—no, certainly it wasn’t, that he’d made any attack upon Pauline. It was simply that he would like Mr. Grimshaw just to come round.

In the drawing-room in Curzon Street Pauline was sitting chafing Dudley Leicester’s hands between her own, and Robert Grimshaw never quite understood what it was that had led the young man to call him in. By cross-questioning him a great deal later he discovered that young Mr. Held had conceived a mournful but enormous tenderness for Pauline. It was, indeed, enough to see how from a distance his enormous eyes pored like a spaniel’s over her tiny figure, or to see how, like a sprinter starting to make a record, he would spring from one end of the drawing-room to fetch her a footstool before she could even select a chair upon which to sit down. It couldn’t be said that he did not brood over Dudley Leicester with efficiency and attention, for that obviously was one of the services he rendered her. But the whole of his enthusiasm went into his attempts to foresee what in little things Pauline would be wanting. And, as he explained later to Robert Grimshaw, that day he had felt—he had felt it in his bones, in his soul—that Pauline was approaching a crisis, a breakdown of her personality. It wasn’t anything she had done; perhaps it was rather what she hadn’t, for she had sat that whole afternoon holding Leicester’s hand, rubbing it between her own, without speaking, looking straight in front of her. And suddenly he had a feeling—he couldn’t explain it. Perhaps, he said, Christian Science had had something to do with it—helped him to be telepathic.

But, sitting as she always did, perched on the arm of the chair where Leicester sprawled, Pauline simply turned her head to the door at Grimshaw’s entry.

“This doctor’s no good,” she said, “and the man he’s called in in consultation’s no good. What’s to be done?”

And then, like Mr. Held himself, Robert Grimshaw had a “feeling.” Perhaps it was the coldness of her voice. That day Sir William Wells had called in a confrère, a gentleman with red hair and an air of extreme deafness; and, wagging his glasses at his friend, Sir William had shouted:

“What d’you say to light baths? Heh? What d’you say to zymotic massage? Heh?” whilst his friend had looked at Dudley with a helpless gaze, dropping down once or twice to feel Leicester’s pulse, and once to press his eyeball. But he did not utter a word, and to Grimshaw, too, the spectacle of these two men standing over the third—Sir William well back on his heels, his friend slouched forward—had given him a sudden feeling of revulsion. They appeared like vultures. He understood now that Pauline, too, had had the same feeling.

“No, they don’t seem much good,” he said.

She uttered, with a sudden fierceness, the words:

“Then it’s up to you to do what’s to be done.”

Robert Grimshaw recoiled a minute step.

“Oh, I don’t mean,” she said, “because it’s your fault, but simply—I can’t think any more. It’s too lonely, yet I can’t talk about it. I can’t.”

Mr. Held, his mouth wide open with agony, glided out of the room, squeezing his ascetic hands together.

“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said.

“Oh, I know,” she answered. “I did talk to you about it. But it does not somehow seem to be right any more. Don’t you understand? Not only because it isn’t delicate or it doesn’t seem the right thing to talk about one’s relations with one’s husband, but simply ... I can’t. I can keep things going; I can run the house and keep it all dark.... But is he going to get well, or isn’t he? We know nothing. And I can’t face the question alone. I can do things. It drives me mad to have to think about them. And I’ve no one to talk to, not a relation, not a soul in the world.”

“You aren’t angry with me?” Grimshaw asked.

“Angry!” she answered, with almost a touch of contempt in her voice. “Good heavens! I’d dust your shoes for all you’ve done for us, and for all you’re doing. But you’ve got to do more. You’ve got to do much more. And you have to do it alone.”

“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said.

Pauline remained silent. She began again to chafe Dudley Leicester’s hands between her little palms. Suddenly she looked hard at Grimshaw.

“Don’t you understand?” she said. “I do, if you don’t, see where we’re coming to.” His face expressed a forced want of comprehension, as if he were afraid. She looked remorselessly into his eyes.

“It’s no use hiding our heads in the sand,” she said, and then she added in cold and precise words:

“You’re love with me and I’m in love with you. We’re drifting, drifting. But I’m not the woman to drift. I mean to do what’s right, and I mean to make you. There’s no more to be said.”

Robert Grimshaw walked to the farthest end of the tall room. He remained for a long time with his face to the corner. He attempted no denial. He could not deny, and once again he seemed older. His voice was even a little husky when, looking at her feet, he said:

“I can’t think what’s to be done,” and, in a very low voice, he added, “unless ...” She looked at him with her lips parted, and he uttered the one word: “Katya!” Her hand went up over her heart.

And he remembered how she had said that her mother always looked most characteristic when she sat, with her hand over her heart, erect, listening for the storms in the distance. And suddenly her voice appeared to be one issuing from a figure of stone:

“Yes, that is it! She was indicated from the first; we ought to have asked her from the first. That came into my head this afternoon.”

“We couldn’t have done better than we have,” he said. “We didn’t know how. We haven’t been letting time slip.”

She nodded her head slowly.

“We have been letting time slip. I knew it when I saw these two over Dudley this afternoon. I lost suddenly all faith in Sir William. It went out of me like water out of a glass, and I saw at once that we had been letting time slip.”

Grimshaw said: “Oh!”

But with her little air of sad obstinacy she continued:

“If we hadn’t, we should have seen from the first that that man was a cold fool. You see it the moment you look for it. Yes, get Miss Lascarides! That’s what you’ve got to do.”

And when Robert Grimshaw held out his hand to her she raised her own with a little gesture of abstention.

“Go to-night and ask Ellida if she will lend us her sister, to put us all straight.”

Eating the end of his meal—which he had begun at the Langhams’—with young Held alone in the dining-room, Robert Grimshaw said:

“We’re going to call Miss Lascarides to the rescue.”

The lean boy’s dark eyes lit up with a huge delight.

“How exactly the right thing!” he exclaimed. “I’ve heard of her. She’s a great professional reputation. You wouldn’t think there was a whole world of us talking about each other, but there is, and you couldn’t do better. How did you come to hear of her?” And then his face fell. “Of course it means my going out of it,” he said.

Robert Grimshaw let his commiserating glance rest on the young man’s open countenance, over which every emotion passed as openly and as visibly as gusts of wind pass over still waters. Suddenly an expression of timid appeal came into the swarthy face.

“I should like you to let me say,” the boy brought out, “how much I appreciate the way you’ve all treated me. I mean, you know, exactly as an equal. For instance, you talked to me just as if I were anybody else. And Mrs. Leicester!”

“Well, you are like anybody else, aren’t you?” Robert Grimshaw said.

“Of course, too,” Held said, “it’ll be such a tremendous thing for her to have a woman to confide in. She does need it. I can feel that she needs it. Oh, as for me, of course I took a first in classics, but what’s the good of that when you aren’t any mortal use in the world? I might be somebody’s secretary, but I don’t know how those jobs are got. I never had any influence. My father was only Vicar of Melkham. The only thing I could do would be to be a Healer. I’ve so much faith that I am sure I could do it with good conscience, whereas I don’t think I’ve been doing this quite conscientiously. I mean I don’t think that I ever believed I could be much good.”

Robert Grimshaw said: “Ah!”

“If there’d been anything to report to Sir William, I could have reported it, for I am very observant, but there was nothing. There’s been absolutely nothing. Or if there’d been any fear of violence—Sir William always selects me for cases of intermittent violence.”

Again Robert Grimshaw said: “Ah!” and his eyes went over Mr. Held’s form.

“You see,” Held continued, “I’m so immensely strong. I held the amateur belt for wrestling for three years, Græco-Roman style. I expect I could hold it still if I kept in training. But wasn’t I right when I said that Mrs. Leicester had some sort of psychological revulsion this afternoon?” He spoke the words pleadingly, and added in an almost inaudible voice: “You don’t mind my asking? It isn’t an impertinence? It means such an immense amount to me.”

“Yes, I think perhaps you’re right,” Grimshaw said. “Something of the sort must have occurred.”

“I felt it,” Held continued, speaking very quickly; “I felt it inwardly. Isn’t it wonderful, these waves that come out from people one’s keenly sympathetic to? Quite suddenly it came; about an hour after Sir William had gone. She was sitting on the arm of Mr. Leicester’s chair and I felt it.”

“But wasn’t it because her face fell—something like that?” Robert Grimshaw asked.

“Oh no, oh no,” Held said; “I had my back to her. I was looking out of the window. To tell the truth, I can’t bear to look at her when she sits like that beside him; it’s so ...”

A spasm of agony passed over Mr. Held’s face and he swallowed painfully. And then he continued, his face lighting up:

“Why it’s such a tremendous thing to me is that it means I can go forward; I can go on to be a Healer without any conscientious doubts as to my capacities. If I felt this mentality so much, I can feel it in other cases, so that really it means life and death to me; because this sort of thing, if it’s very good study, doesn’t mean any more than being a male nurse, so that I’ve gained immensely, even if I do go out of the house. You don’t know what it’s meant to me to be in contact with your two natures. My mentality has drawn its strength, light; I’m a different person from what I was six weeks ago.”

“Oh, come!” Robert Grimshaw said.

“Oh, it’s true,” Mr. Held answered. “In the last place I was in I had to have meals with the butler, and here you’ve been good, and I’ve made this discovery, that my mentality will synchronize with another person’s if I’m much in sympathy with them.” And then he asked anxiously: “Mrs. Leicester wasn’t very bad?”

“Oh no,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “it was only that she had come to the resolution of calling in Miss Lascarides.”

“Now, I should have thought it was more than that,” Held said. “I was almost certain that it was something very bitter and unpleasant. One of those thoughts that seem suddenly to wreck one’s whole life.”

“Oh, I don’t think it was more than that,” Robert Grimshaw said; and Mr. Held went on to declare at ecstatic lengths how splendid it would be for Pauline to have Katya in the house, to have someone to confide in, to unbosom herself to, to strengthen her mentality with, and from whom to receive—he was sure she would receive it, since Miss Lascarides was Mrs. Langham’s sister—to receive a deep and clinging affection. Besides, Miss Lascarides having worked in the United States, was certain to have imbibed some of Mrs. Eddy’s doctrine, so that, except for Mr. Leicester’s state, it was, Mr. Held thought, going to be an atmosphere of pure joy in the house. Mrs. Leicester so needed a sister.

Robert Grimshaw sipped his coffee in a rather grim silence. “I wish you’d get me the ‘ABC,’ or look up the trains for Brighton,” he said.