The Master Mummer Part 8

Unconsciously my att.i.tude towards him changed. It is hard to mock a man who believes in himself.

"Go ahead, then, Allan," I said quietly. "Remember that you have told me nothing yet."

Mabane turned towards me. He spoke slowly. His face was serious--almost solemn.

"The man Delahaye will never claim the child," he said. "I think that he will die. The man who shot him has gone--we shall not hear of him again, not for many years, if at all. He has gone like a stone dropped into a bottomless tarn. We shall not send the child back to the convent. She will remain here."

He paused, as though expecting me to speak. I shrugged my shoulders.

"Come," I said, "I shall not quarrel with your prophecy so far, Allan.

The introduction of a feminine element here seems a little incongruous, but after all she is very young."

Mabane unclasped his arms, and looked thoughtfully around the room.

Already there was a change since a few days ago. The ornaments and furniture were free from dust. There were two great bowls of flowers upon the table, some studies which had hung upon the wall were replaced with others of a more sedate character. The atmosphere of the place was different. Wild untidiness had given place to some semblance of order.

There was an attempt everywhere at repression. Mabane knocked the ashes from his pipe.

"For five years," he said abstractedly, "you and I and Arthur have lived here together. Are you satisfied with those five years? Think!"

I looked from my desk out of the window, over the housetops up into the sunshine, and I too was grave. Satisfied! Is anyone short of a fool ever satisfied?

"No! I am not," I admitted, a little bitterly.

"Tell me what you think of these five years, Arnold. Tell me the truth,"

Mabane persisted. "Let me know if your thoughts are the same as mine."

"Drift," I answered. "We have worked a little, and thought a little--but our feet have been on the earth a great deal oftener than our heads have touched the clouds."

"Drift," Mabane repeated. "It is a true word. We have gained a little experience of the wrong sort: we have learnt how to adapt our poor little gifts to the whim of the moment. Such as our talent has been, we have made a servant of it to minister to our physical necessities. We have lived little lives, Arnold--very little lives."

"Go on," I murmured. "This at least is truth!"

Mabane paused. He looked at his pipe, but he did not relight it.

"There is a change coming," he said, slowly. "We are going to drift no longer. We are going to be drawn into the maelstrom of life. What it may mean for you and for me and for the boy, I do not know. It will change us--it must change our work. I shall paint no more guesses at realism--after someone else; and you will write no more of princesses, or pull the strings of tinsel-decked puppets, so that they may dance their way through the pages of your gaily-dressed novels. And an end has come to these things, Arnold. No, I am not raving, nor is this a jest.

Wait!"

"You speak," I told him, "like a seer. Since when was it given to you to read the future so glibly, my friend?"

Mabane looked at me with grave eyes. There was no shadow of levity in his manner.

"I am not a superst.i.tious man, Arnold," he said, "but I come, after all, of hill-folk, and I believe that there are times when one can feel and see the shadow of coming things. My grandfather knew the day of his death, and spoke of it; my father made his will before he set foot on the steamer which went to the bottom on a calm day between Dover and Ostend. Nothing of this sort has ever come to me before. You yourself have called me too hard-headed, too material for an artist. So I have always thought myself--until to-day. To-day I feel differently."

"Is it this child, then, who is to open the gates of the world to us?" I asked.

"Remember," Mabane answered, "that before many months have pa.s.sed she will be a woman."

I moved in my chair a little uneasily.

"I wonder," I said, half to myself, "whether I did well to bring her here!"

Mabane laughed shortly.

"It was not you who brought her," he declared. "She was sent."

"Sent?"

"Aye, these things are not of our choosing, Arnold. There is something behind which drives the great wheels. You can call it Fate or G.o.d, according to your philosophy. It is there all the time, the one eternal force."

I looked at Mabane steadfastly. He did not flinch.

"Psychologically, my dear Allan," I said, "you appear to be in a very interesting state just now."

Mabane shrugged his shoulders. He crossed the room for some tobacco, and began to refill his pipe.

"Well," he said, "I have finished. To-morrow, I suppose, I shall want to kick myself for having said as much as I have. Listen! Here they come."

Isobel came into the room, followed by Arthur in a leather jacket and breeches. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes danced with excitement. She threw off her tam-o'-shanter, and stood deftly re-arranging for a moment her wind-tossed hair.

"Glorious!" she exclaimed. "Oh, it has been glorious! Mr. Arthur, how can I thank you? I have never enjoyed myself so much in my life. If the Sister Superior could only have seen me--and the girls!"

"Motoring, I presume," Mabane remarked, "is amongst the pleasures denied to the young ladies of the convent?"

She laughed gaily.

"Pleasures! Why, there are no pleasures for those poor girls. One may not even smile, and as for games, even they are not permitted. I think that it is shameful to make such a purgatory of a place. One may not, one could not, be happy there. It is not allowed."

She caught the look which flashed from Mabane to me, and turned instantly around.

"Oh, Monsieur Arnold," she cried breathlessly, "you do not think--I shall not have to return there?"

"Not likely!" Arthur interposed with vigour. "By Jove! if anyone shut you up there again I'd come and fetch you out."

She threw a quick glance of grat.i.tude towards him, but her eyes returned almost immediately to mine. She waited anxiously for me to speak.

"If we can possibly prevent it," I said slowly, "you shall never return there. I do not think that it is at all the proper place for you. But you must remember that we are, after all, people of no authority.

Someone might come forward to-morrow with a legal right to claim you, and we should be helpless."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "If we can possibly prevent it," I said slowly, "you shall never return there."]

Slowly the colour died away from her cheeks. Her eyes became preternaturally bright and anxious.

"There is no one," she faltered, "except that man. He called himself my guardian."

"Had you seen him before he came to the convent and fetched you away?" I asked.

"Only once," she answered. "He came to St. Argueil about a year ago. I hated him then. I have hated him ever since. I think that if all men were like that I would be content to stay in the convent all my life."

"You don't remember the circ.u.mstances under which he took you there, I suppose?" Mabane asked thoughtfully.