The Lowest Rung Part 13

"And so you are back," he said. "I was just wishing that you were at the moment I caught sight of you. If you think it possible that a word or two could be dragged out of such a silent enigmatical person as yourself, I should like to have a little talk with you."

I could not help liking him. His keen eyes were kindly, though his face was grave.

"What do you want to talk about?" I said bluntly.

"What an unnecessary question. What can I want to talk about except Emmy?"

I was silent. I felt more uncomfortable about the whole affair than I had done yet, and that was saying a good deal.

Mr. Kingston led the way down a little track to a place where the trees grew so close together that the murderous scythes had not been able to get in among them. Here the bracken had been unmolested, and was going unhara.s.sed through all its most gorgeous pageant. Great fronds of ivory white, of palest gold, of brownest gold, of reddest gold upreared themselves among the purple waves of the heather, wearing the stray flecks of the sunshine like jewels on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. We sat down on a fallen tree round which the bracken had wrapped its splendour.

"How extraordinarily beautiful it is!" he said, more to himself than to me, putting out his long, artistic hand, gnarled and hardened with work, and touching a pale frond with a reverent finger. "I am glad to have seen it once more. It is twenty-five years since I have seen an English autumn."

There was a moment's silence, and then he went on without any change of tone:

"And you are thinking, you sad-faced, downright little woman who are so afraid that I am going to make your dear Aunt Emmy unhappy, you are thinking that you did not take a precarious seat on this trunk in order to hear a possible enemy descant on the beauties of nature."

I was astonished at his penetration. My own experience, gleaned entirely from the genial little egotist whose wife I was, had taught me that men never noticed anything. I had had no idea that I had shown the fear of him which I felt.

"And yet you are my only possible ally," he went on, "my only helper, if you are willing to help me, in the somewhat difficult task which I have in hand."

"You mean, marrying my aunt?" I said.

"No," he said, looking at me with a kindness which made me ready to sink into the ground with shame. "I can do _that_ without a.s.sistance. Emmy, G.o.d bless her! has been ready to marry me any time these twenty-five years, and, poor soul, she is ready now. She has not the faintest idea what she would be in for if she did, but she is ready to risk it."

I was silent. I was bewildered for one thing, and I did not want "to put my foot in it" again immediately for another. And there was really no need for me to speak, for he went on slowly, looking full at me:

"What I have to do, if I can, is to save Emmy's romance for her."

I could only stare at him.

"For twenty-five years," he went on, "that dear woman has lived on her love for me. It has coloured her whole life. I know what I know. It has been her support in all the endless years she nursed that cruel old egoist her father, who would not let her marry me, when we _could_ have married, seventeen years ago. But it is not _me_ that she wants now, though she did want me for many years; it is the thought of me--if you can't understand without my saying it, I can't make you--it's her romance which is important to her, and which I want her to keep, at all costs."

"My darling Emmy," he said, and there were tears in his hawk eyes, "the most unselfish and devoted, the sweetest, the humblest, and the most beautiful creature I have ever known. And she has given up everything out of constancy to me, home, children, everything; no, not for me exactly, but for a dream, for an ideal, for something of which I was to her the symbol, but which I no more resemble than I resemble that frond of bracken."

He turned his face away.

"It would have been all right if they would have let us marry when we were both still young, and I had got a home together," he went on; "but now it would be inhuman to root her out of her little home and drag her across the world, and try to transplant her into my rough place. How rough it is I see, now that I have been back in England. I did not know it was so uncouth when I lived in it. It's the only life I'm accustomed to, the only life I'm fit for now, though it was sorely against the grain at first. I don't think I could have stuck to it, except for the hope of marrying her some day. But I see now the only life I'm fit for is not fit for her. And I can't give it up. I can't desert my poor old uncle, who is growing infirm and depends on me entirely."

"Why did you come back?" I groaned.

"I came back," he said, "because I have cared for her and worked for her all my life. And because I heard that her beast of a father had left her almost penniless, and that fat Tom had married and turned her out. And until I saw her again from day to day I did not realise the nature of her feeling for me. I came back to offer her what I had, not that it was much, hoping to marry her and take her back with me.... But that is not what would make my Emmy happy _now_. What she needs is to go on in this perfect little doll's house, this little haven, thinking of me, and praying for me, and tending her flowers, and mourning like a dove in its tree because we are parted."

It was exactly what Aunt Emmy needed. I could not have put it into words, but this strange man had done so.

"You will not speak," he said, "but you agree with me for all that. I had to make sure you agreed. Your confirmation is all I wanted, and now I have it."

It was not that I would not speak. I could not speak. I was thinking of the room in that horrid wooden house which he had built for her.

After a few minutes he went on quietly:

"I think the thing for me to do is to be ruined, only partially, of course, not enough to make her miserable, and to hurry back to Australia without her at once for the time being, and from there to write regularly by every mail, nice letters (they cannot be forbidden now); but never to come back any more. A bank has just failed in Australia in which I had money. The situation can be arranged."

I looked away from him.

"I owe it to her," he said.

THE UNDERSTUDY

The only form of human love that atrophies the heart is the love of self.

Marion Wright sat in the centre seat of the third row of the stalls, shivering in spite of her sables. It was the dress rehearsal of her first play, that play on which she had spent herself to the verge of mental bankruptcy.

The nauseating presentiment of failure, the distaste and scorn of her own work, were upon her, which the artist never escapes, which return as acutely after twenty successes as in the hours of suspense before the first essay. Marion's surroundings were not of a nature to rea.s.sure her.

To her unaccustomed eyes the empty, dimly lit theatre, swathed and bandaged in dust-sheets, looked ominously dreary. Had any one ever laughed in this shrouded desert? The long lines of stalls huddled under their wrinkled coverings stretched before and behind her. The boxes were shapeless holes of pallid grime. It was as if a London fog had trailed its dingy veil over everything. There was a fog outside as well, and the few electric lights which had been turned up peered blurred and yellow.

An immense ladder, three ladders tied together, reared itself from the stalls to the roof. Something was being done to the lights on the ceiling. Tired-looking men in overcoats were creeping into the orchestra, thrusting white faces under screened lights, and rustling papers on stands.

Marion had the theatre to herself except for a few whisperers in the back row of the stalls--her maid, an attendant, one or two actors of minor parts who did not appear in the first act, and a few costumiers.

It was fiercely cold, and she had not slept for several nights. She wished she had never been born.

A magnificent-looking woman, wearing her chin tilted slightly upwards, was squeezing herself and an immense fur coat towards her along the stalls, and sat down beside her. This was Lenore, the leading lady.

She turned a colourless, beautifully shaped face and heavy eyes with bistred lashes towards Marion.

"I suppose we shall have to wait about two hours for Mr. Montgomery,"

she said apathetically.

"Does he always keep people waiting?"

"Always, since he made his great hit in _The Deodars_."

There was a moment's silence.

"Mr. Montgomery does not like his part," said the leading lady tentatively, hanging a hand in an interminable white glove over the back of the stall in front of her.

Marion's face hardened.

"It's not a sympathetic part," she said, "but an artist ought not to think of that."

"No, it's not sympathetic," acquiesced Lenore, turning up her fur collar. "It seems as if the princ.i.p.al man's part never _is_ sympathetic in a woman's play. If the central figure is a woman, the men grouped round her are generally prize specimens of worms. I wonder why. In your play, now, Maggie's everything! George does not count for much, as far as I can see. Even Maggie had not much use for him."

"She loved him," said the author, with asperity.

"Did she? Sometimes when I'm playing Maggie to Montgomery's George I wonder if she did. And I just wonder now and then if I would have thrown him over as she did. I mean for good and all. It seems to me--if she'd cared for him, cared _really_, you know----"