Septimus Part 19

"There will be no necessity," returned Sypher. "Mrs. Middlemist has ordered its immediate removal."

That was the end of the board episode. The next day he had it taken down and chopped into fire-wood, a cart-load of which he sent with his humble compliments to Mrs. Middlemist. Zora called it a burnt offering. She found more satisfaction in the blaze that roared up the chimney than she could explain to her mother; perhaps more than she could explain to herself.

Septimus had first taught her the pleasantness of power. But that was nothing to this. Anybody, even Emmy, curly-headed baby that she was, could turn poor Septimus into a slave. For a woman to impose her will upon Clem Sypher, Friend of Humanity, the Colossus of Curemongers, was no such trumpery achievement.

Emmy, when she referred to the matter, expressed the hope that Zora had rubbed it into Clem Sypher. Zora deprecated the personal bearing of the slang metaphor, but admitted, somewhat grandly, that she had pointed out the error in taste.

"I can't see, though, why you take all this trouble over Mr. Sypher," said Emmy.

"I value his friendship," replied Zora, looking up from a letter she was reading.

This was at breakfast. When the maid had entered with the post Emmy had gripped the table and watched with hungry eyes, but the only letter that had come for her had been on theatrical business. Not the one she longed for. Emmy's world was out of joint.

"You've changed your opinion, my dear, as to the value of men," she sneered. "There was a time when you didn't want to see them or speak to them or have anything to do with them. Now it seems you can't get on without them."

"My dear Emmy," said Zora calmly, "men as possible lovers and men as staunch friends are two entirely different conceptions."

Emmy broke a piece of toast viciously.

"I think they're beasts," she exclaimed.

"Good heavens! Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. They are."

Then, after the quick, frightened glance of the woman who fears she has said too much, she broke into a careless half-laugh.

"They are such liars. Fawcett promised me a part in his new production and writes to-day to say I can't have it."

As Emmy's professional disappointments had been many, and as Zora in her heart of hearts did not entirely approve of her sister's musical-comedy career, she tempered her sympathy with philosophic reflections. She had never taken Emmy seriously. All her life long Emmy had been the kitten sister, with a kitten's pretty but unimportant likes, dislikes, habits, occupations, and aspirations. To regard her as being under the shadow of a woman's tragedy had never entered her head. The kitten playing Antigone, Ophelia, or such like distressed heroines, in awful, grim earnest is not a conception that readily occurs even to the most affectionate and imaginative of kitten owners. Zora accepted Emmy's explanation of her petulance with a spirit entirely unperturbed, and resumed the perusal of her letter. It was from the Callenders, who wrote from California. Zora must visit them on her way round the world.

She laid down the letter and stirred her tea absently, her mind full of snow-capped sierras, and clear blue air, and peach forests, and all the wonders of that wonderland. And Emmy stirred her tea, too, in an absent manner, but her mind was filled with the most terrible thoughts wherewith a woman's mind can be haunted.

CHAPTER IX

Septimus had never seen a woman faint before. At first he thought Emmy was dead, and rubbed agonized hands together like a fly. When he realized what had happened, he produced a large jack-knife which he always carried in his trousers pocket--for the purpose, he explained, of sharpening pencils--and offered it to Zora with the vague idea that the first aid to fainting women consisted in cutting their stay-laces. Zora rebuked him for futility, and bade him ring the bell for the maid.

It was all very sudden. The scene had been one that of late had grown so familiar: Zora and Septimus poring over world itineraries, the latter full of ineffectual suggestion and irrelevant reminiscence, and Emmy reading by the fire. On this occasion it was the _Globe_ newspaper which Septimus, who had spent the day in London on an unexecuted errand to his publisher, had brought back with him. Evening papers being luxuries in Nunsmere, he had hidden it carefully from Wiggleswick, in order to present it to the ladies.

Suddenly there was a rustle and a slither by the fire-place, and Emmy, in a dead faint, hung over the arm of the chair. In her hand she grasped the outer sheet of the paper. The inner sheet, according to the untidy ways of women with newspapers, lay discarded on the floor.

With Septimus's help Zora and the maid carried her to the sofa; they opened the window and gave her smelling salts. Septimus anxiously desired to be a.s.sured that she was not dying, and Zora thanked heaven that her mother had gone to bed. Presently Emmy recovered consciousness.

"I must have fainted," she said in a whisper.

"Yes, dear," said Zora, kneeling by her side. "Are you better?"

Emmy stared past Zora at something unseen and terrifying.

"It was foolish. The heat, I suppose. Mr. Sypher's burning board." She turned an appealing glance to Septimus. "Did I say anything silly?"

When he told her that she had slipped over the arm of the chair without a word, she looked relieved and closed her eyes. As soon as she had revived sufficiently she allowed herself to be led up-stairs; but before going she pressed Septimus's hand with feverish significance.

Even to so inexperienced a mind as his the glance and the hand-shake conveyed a sense of trust, suggested dimly a reason for the fainting fit.

Once more he stood alone and perplexed in the little drawing-room. Once more he pa.s.sed his long fingers through his Struwel Peter hair and looked about the room for inspiration. Finding none, he mechanically gathered up the two parts of the newspaper, with a man's instinct for tidiness in printed matter, and smoothed out the crumples that Emmy's hand had made on the outer sheet. Whilst doing so, a paragraph met his eye, causing him to stare helplessly at the paper.

It was the announcement of the marriage of Mordaunt Prince at the British Consulate in Naples.

The unutterable perfidy of man! For the first time in his guileless life Septimus met it face to face. To read of human depravity in the police reports is one thing, to see it fall like a black shadow across one's life is another. It horrified him. Mordaunt Prince had committed the unforgivable sin. He had stolen a girl's love, and basely, meanly, he had slunk off, deceiving her to the last. To Septimus the lover who kissed and rode away had ever appeared a despicable figure of romance. The fellow who did it in real life proclaimed himself an unconscionable scoundrel. The memory of Emmy's forget-me-not blue eyes turning into sapphires as she sang the villain's praises smote him. He clenched his fists and put to incoherent use his limited vocabulary of anathema. Then fearing, in his excited state, to meet Zora, lest he should betray the miserable secret, he stuffed the newspaper into his pocket, and crept out of the house.

Before his own fire he puzzled over the problem. Something must be done.

But what? Hale Mordaunt Prince from his bride's arms and bring him penitent to Nunsmere? What would be the good of that, seeing that polygamy is not openly sanctioned by Western civilization? Proceed to Naples and chastise him? That were better. The monster deserved it. But how are men chastised?

Septimus had no experience. He reflected vaguely that people did this sort of thing with a horsewhip. He speculated on the kind of horsewhip that would be necessary. A hunting crop with no lash would not be more effective than an ordinary walking stick. With a lash it would be c.u.mbrous, unless he kept at an undignified distance and flicked at his victim as the ring-master in the circus flicks at the clown. Perhaps horsewhips for this particular purpose could be obtained from the Army and Navy Stores. It should be about three feet long, flexible and tapering to a point.

Unconsciously his inventive faculty began to work. When he had devised an adequate instrument, made of fine steel wires ingeniously plaited, he awoke, somewhat shame-facedly, to the commonplaces of the original problem.

What was to be done?

He pondered for some hours, then he sighed and sought consolation in his ba.s.soon; but after a few bars of "Annie Laurie" he put the unedifying instrument back in its corner and went out for a walk. It was a starry night of frost. Nunsmere lay silent as Bethlehem; and a star hung low in the east. Far away across the common gleamed one solitary light in the vicarage windows; the Vicar, good gentleman, finishing his unruffled sermon while his parish slept. Otherwise darkness spread over everything save the sky. Not a creature on the road, not a creature on the common, not even the lame donkey. Incredibly distant the faint sound of a railway whistle intensified the stillness. Septimus's own footsteps on the crisp gra.s.s rang loud in his ears. Yet both stillness and darkness felt companionable, in harmony with the starlit dimness of the man's mind. His soul was having its adventure while mystery filled the outer air. He walked on, wrapped in the nebulous fantasies which pa.s.sed with him for thought, heedless, as he always was, of the flight of time. Once he halted by the edge of the pond, and, sitting on a bench, lit and smoked his pipe until the cold forced him to rise. With an instinctive desire to hear some earthly sound, he picked up a stone and threw it into the water. He shivered at the ghostly splash and moved away, himself an ineffectual ghost wandering aimlessly in the night.

The Vicar's lamp had been extinguished long ago. A faint breeze sprang up.

The star sank lower in the sky. Suddenly, as he turned back from the road to cross the common for the hundredth time, he became aware that he was not alone. Footsteps rather felt than heard were in front of him. He pressed forward and peered through the darkness, and finally made out a dim form some thirty yards away. Idly he followed and soon recognized the figure as that of a woman hurrying fast. Why a woman should be crossing Nunsmere Common at four o'clock in the morning pa.s.sed his power of conjecture. She was going neither to nor from the doctor, whose house lay behind the vicarage on the right. All at once her objective became clear to him. He thought of the splash of the stone. She was making straight for the pond. He hastened his pace, came up within a few yards of her and then stopped dead. It was Emmy. He recognized the zibeline toque and coat edged with the same fur which she often wore. She carried something in her hand, he could not tell what.

She went on, unconscious of his nearness. He followed her, horror-stricken.

Emmy, a new Ophelia, was about to seek a watery grave for herself and her love sorrow. Again came the problem which in moments of emergency Septimus had never learned to solve. What should he do? Across the agony of his mind shot a feeling of horrible indelicacy in thrusting himself upon a woman at such a moment. He was half tempted to turn back and leave her to the sanct.i.ty of her grief. But again the splash echoed in his ears and again he shivered. The water was so black and cold. And what could he say to Zora?

The thought lashed his pace to sudden swiftness and Emmy turned with a little scream of fear.

"Who are you?"

"It's I, Septimus," he stammered, taking hold of his cap. "For G.o.d's sake, don't do it."

"I shall. Go away. How dare you spy on me?"

She stood and faced him, and her features were just discernible in the dim starlight. Anger rang in her voice. She stamped her foot.

"How dare you?"

"I haven't been spying on you," he explained. "I only recognized you a couple of minutes ago. I was walking about--taking a stroll before breakfast, you know."

"Oh!" she said, stonily.

"I'm dreadfully sorry to have intruded upon you," he continued, twirling his cap nervously in his fingers while the breeze played through his upstanding hair. "I didn't mean to--but I couldn't stand by and let you do it. I couldn't, really."

"Do what?" she asked, still angry. Septimus did not know that beneath the fur-lined jacket her heart was thumping madly.

"Drown yourself," said Septimus.

"In the pond?" she laughed hysterically. "In three feet of water? How do you think I was going to manage it?"