The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Part 13

Her head drooped on her breast. "He--beats--me."

"What!" John forgot to whisper. It was the greatest shock his recluse life had known, compact as it was of horror at the revelation, shamed confusion at her candour, and delicious pleasure in her confidence.

This fragile, exquisite creature under the rod of a brutal bully!

Once he had gone to a wedding reception, and among the serious presents some grinning Philistine drew his attention to an uncouth club--"a wife-beater" he called it. The flippancy had jarred upon John terribly: this intrusive reminder of the customs of the slums. It grated like Billingsgate in a boudoir. Now that savage weapon recurred to him--for a lurid instant he saw Winifred's husband wielding it.

Oh, abomination of his s.e.x! And did he stand there, in his immaculate evening dress, posing as an English gentleman? Even so might some gentleman burglar bear through a salon his imperturbable swallow-tail.

Beat a woman! Beat that essence of charm and purity, G.o.d's best gift to man, redeeming him from his own grossness! Could such things be? John Lefolle would as soon have credited the French legend that English wives are sold in Smithfield. No! it could not be real that this flower-like figure was thrashed.

"Do you mean to say--?" he cried. The rapidity of her confidence alone made him feel it all of a dreamlike unreality.

"Hush! Cecilia's singing!" she admonished him with an unexpected smile, as her fingers fell from her face.

"Oh, you have been making fun of me." He was vastly relieved. "He beats you--at chess--or at lawn-tennis?"

"Does one wear a high-necked dress to conceal the traces of chess, or lawn-tennis?"

He had not noticed her dress before, save for its spiritual whiteness.

Susceptible though he was to beautiful shoulders, Winifred's enchanting face had been sufficiently distracting. Now the thought of physical bruises gave him a second spasm of righteous horror. That delicate rose-leaf flesh abraded and lacerated!

"The ruffian! Does he use a stick or a fist?"

"Both! But as a rule he just takes me by the arms and shakes me like a terrier. I'm all black and blue now."

"Poor b.u.t.terfly!" he murmured poetically.

"Why did I tell you?" she murmured back with subtler poetry.

The poet thrilled in every vein. "Love at first sight," of which he had often read and often written, was then a reality! It could be as mutual, too, as Romeo's and Juliet's. But how awkward that Juliet should be married and her husband a Bill Sykes in broadcloth!

II

Mrs. Glamorys herself gave "At Homes," every Sunday afternoon, and so, on the morrow, after a sleepless night mitigated by perpended sonnets, the love-sick young tutor presented himself by invitation at the beautiful old house in Hampstead. He was enchanted to find his heart's mistress set in an eighteenth-century frame of small-paned windows and of high oak-panelling, and at once began to image her dancing minuets and playing on virginals. Her husband was absent, but a broad band of velvet round Winifred's neck was a painful reminder of his possibilities. Winifred, however, said it was only a touch of sore throat caught in the garden. Her eyes added that there was nothing in the pathological dictionary which she would not willingly have caught for the sake of those divine, if draughty moments; but that, alas! it was more than a mere bodily ailment she had caught there.

There were a great many visitors in the two delightfully quaint rooms, among whom he wandered disconsolate and admired, jealous of her scattered smiles, but presently he found himself seated by her side on a "cosy corner" near the open folding-doors, with all the other guests huddled round a violinist in the inner room. How Winifred had managed it he did not know, but she sat plausibly in the outer room, awaiting new-comers, and this particular niche was invisible, save to a determined eye. He took her unresisting hand--that dear, warm hand, with its begemmed artistic fingers, and held it in uneasy beat.i.tude.

How wonderful! She--the beautiful and adored hostess, of whose sweetness and charm he heard even her own guests murmur to one another--it was her actual flesh-and-blood hand that lay in his--thrillingly tangible. Oh, adventure beyond all merit, beyond all hoping!

But every now and then, the outer door facing them would open on some new-comer, and John had hastily to release her soft magnetic fingers and sit demure, and jealously overhear her effusive welcome to those innocent intruders, nor did his brow clear till she had shepherded them within the inner fold. Fortunately, the refreshments were in this section, so that once therein, few of the sheep strayed back, and the jiggling wail of the violin was succeeded by a shrill babble of tongues and the clatter of cups and spoons. "Get me an ice, please--strawberry," she ordered John during one of these forced intervals in manual flirtation; and when he had steered laboriously to and fro, he found a young actor beside her _their_ hands dispart. He stood over them with a sickly smile, while Winifred ate her ice. When he returned from depositing the empty saucer, the player-fellow was gone, and in remorse for his mad suspicion he stooped and reverently lifted her fragrant finger-tips to his lips. The door behind his back opened abruptly.

"Good-by," she said, rising in a flash. The words had the calm conventional cadence, and instantly extorted from him--amid all his dazedness--the corresponding "Good-by." When he turned and saw it was Mr. Glamorys who had come in, his heart leapt wildly at the nearness of his escape. As he pa.s.sed this masked ruffian, he nodded perfunctorily and received a cordial smile. Yes, he was handsome and fascinating enough externally, this blonde savage.

"A man may smile and smile and be a villain," John thought. "I wonder how he'd feel, if he knew I knew he beats women."

Already John had generalised the charge. "I hope Cecilia will keep him at arm's length," he had said to Winifred, "if only that she may not smart for it some day."

He lingered purposely in the hall to get an impression of the brute, who had begun talking loudly to a friend with irritating bursts of laughter, speciously frank-ringing. Golf, fishing, comic operas--ah, the Boeotian! These were the men who monopolised the ethereal divinities.

But this brusque separation from his particular divinity was disconcerting. How to see her again? He must go up to Oxford in the morning, he wrote her that night, but if she could possibly let him call during the week he would manage to run down again.

"Oh, my dear, dreaming poet," she wrote to Oxford, "how could you possibly send me a letter to be laid on the breakfast-table beside _The Times_! With a poem in it, too. Fortunately my husband was in a hurry to get down to the City, and he neglected to read my correspondence. ('The unchivalrous blackguard,' John commented. 'But what can be expected of a woman beater?') Never, never write to me again at the house. A letter, care of Mrs. Best, 8A Foley Street, W.C., will always find me. She is my maid's mother. And you must not come here either, my dear handsome head-in-the-clouds, except to my 'At Homes,' and then only at judicious intervals. I shall be walking round the pond in Kensington Gardens at four next Wednesday, unless Mrs. Best brings me a letter to the contrary. And now thank you for your delicious poem; I do not recognise my humble self in the dainty lines, but I shall always be proud to think I inspired them. Will it be in the new volume? I have never been in print before; it will be a novel sensation. I cannot pay you song for song, only feeling for feeling. Oh, John Lefolle, why did we not meet when I had still my girlish dreams? Now, I have grown to distrust all men--to fear the brute beneath the cavalier...."

Mrs. Best did bring her a letter, but it was not to cancel the appointment, only to say he was not surprised at her horror of the male s.e.x, but that she must beware of false generalisations. Life was still a wonderful and beautiful thing--_vide_ poem enclosed. He was counting the minutes till Wednesday afternoon. It was surely a popular mistake that only sixty went to the hour.

This chronometrical reflection recurred to him even more poignantly in the hour that he circ.u.mambulated the pond in Kensington Gardens.

Had she forgotten--had her husband locked her up? What could have happened? It seemed six hundred minutes, ere, at ten past five she came tripping daintily towards him. His brain had been reduced to insanely devising problems for his pupils--if a man walks two strides of one and a half feet a second round a lake fifty acres in area, in how many turns will he overtake a lady who walks half as fast and isn't there?--but the moment her pink parasol loomed on the horizon, all his long misery vanished in an ineffable peace and uplifting.

He hurried, bare-headed, to clasp her little gloved hand. He had forgotten her unpunctuality, nor did she remind him of it.

"How sweet of you to come all that way," was all she said, and it was a sufficient reward for the hours in the train and the six hundred minutes among the nursemaids and perambulators. The elms were in their glory, the birds were singing briskly, the water sparkled, the sunlit sward stretched fresh and green--it was the loveliest, coolest moment of the afternoon. John instinctively turned down a leafy avenue.

Nature and Love! What more could poet ask?

"No, we can't have tea by the Kiosk," Mrs. Glamorys protested. "Of course I love anything that savours of Paris, but it's become so fashionable. There will be heaps of people who know me. I suppose you've forgotten it's the height of the season. I know a quiet little place in the High Street." She led him, unresisting but bemused, towards the gate, and into a confectioner's. Conversation languished on the way.

"Tea," he was about to instruct the pretty attendant.

"Strawberry ices," Mrs. Glamorys remarked gently. "And some of those nice French cakes."

The ice restored his spirits, it was really delicious, and he had got so hot and tired, pacing round the pond. Decidedly Winifred was a practical person and he was a dreamer. The pastry he dared not touch--being a genius--but he was charmed at the gaiety with which Winifred crammed cake after cake into her rosebud of a mouth. What an enchanting creature! How bravely she covered up her life's tragedy!

The thought made him glance at her velvet band--it was broader than ever.

"He has beaten you again!" he murmured furiously. Her joyous eyes saddened, she hung her head, and her fingers crumbled the cake. "What is his pretext?" he asked, his blood burning.

"Jealousy," she whispered.

His blood lost its glow, ran cold. He felt the bully's blows on his own skin, his romance turning suddenly sordid. But he recovered his courage. He, too, had muscles. "But I thought he just missed seeing me kiss your hand."

She opened her eyes wide. "It wasn't you, you darling old dreamer."

He was relieved and disturbed in one.

"Somebody else?" he murmured. Somehow the vision of the player-fellow came up.

She nodded. "Isn't it lucky he has himself drawn a red-herring across the track? I didn't mind his blows--you were safe!" Then, with one of her adorable transitions, "I am dreaming of another ice," she cried with roguish wistfulness.

"I was afraid to confess my own greediness," he said, laughing. He beckoned the waitress. "Two more."

"We haven't got any more strawberries," was her unexpected reply.

"There's been such a run on them to-day."

Winifred's face grew overcast. "Oh, nonsense!" she pouted. To John the moment seemed tragic.

"Won't you have another kind?" he queried. He himself liked any kind, but he could scarcely eat a second ice without her.

Winifred meditated. "Coffee?" she queried.