O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 10
'It is most kind of you, Mr. Ripley, to take me to this literary soirée and give me the entree in London, but who are these people? And why is this George Eliot criticized for living with a Mr. Lewes?'
'Very few know who 'George Eliot' is—they only know the rather stark and grim short stories that are published over this name in "Blackwood's." But I, Miss Bardeen, having your critical career well to heart, have ferreted out this dawning wonder and am now taking you to see her.'
'Her?'
'Her. The scandal—if any one could so call it—is now self-evident. Her name is Marian Evans, but we shall call her Mrs. Lewes, and the future may very possibly know something of her as George Eliot.'
'And Mr. Lewes? Does she—er—just for fun?'
'No, indeed, the highest principles. You see, his wife ran away once and he took her back. Then she ran away again, but he couldn't divorce her because he had once forgiven her. Such is English law. Then he met this slow-moving, solemn woman of genius, and they agreed to consider themselves married and let the world think of them as it pleases. They need each other. Her sombre cast of mind gives poise to his high-strung nature. She withstrains, ennobles, and purifies him. He wakes her up and gets her out of her dourness. I am afraid,' he added with a sigh, 'that you will like him the better of the two...And here we are in Blandford Square. Driver! the small brick house; there's a woman selling lavender in front of it.'
She felt a certain pride in arriving on Sears Ripley's arm. He was so poised, so intelligent, and in a very superior way so handsome. She sat upon a low divan at one end of the small, flat drawing-room, and, as she chatted about her journeys upon the Continent with two small Jewish brothers, she watched him engaging the clever and obviously versatile Mr. Lewes in philosophical dispute. Marian Evans, her heavy chin cupped in a white hand dotted with freckles, eagerly leaned her great leonine head towards the dispute. She offered no comment, but nodded wisely, and her deep and expressive eyes glowed with excitement when Lewes began to get the better of his opponent.
Ripley caught her eye, 'Come, Mrs. Lewes, won't you help me out? Your husband is giving me the worst of it.'
She pulled herself together and raised her huge chin, assuming for the moment the posture of a singer about to sing, then drooping with an almost childish artlessness began to talk rapidly in so low a voice even the two men close to her were obliged to bend their heads and Lanice could not hear the tone of her voice.
'And now,' said the littlest and most Hebraic of the flaxen brothers 'that you have raced pell-mell all over Italy, the Alps, seen Paris, and arrived in London, do you intend to amuse yourself with us for a while?'
'Yes, for a month at least. I have business to conduct.'
'Business? I thought you said you had bought all your dresses in Paris.'
'I did, although I shall not be able to wear them for at least two years—Paris is always that much ahead of us.'
She told them about the articles she had engaged to do for 'Fox's Journal,' and at the name of Fox an older man in a soiled yellow satin waistcoat hitched his chair nearer. He was blind. Lanice regretted that the prim, pretty young girl who accompanied him, and who she had been told was a country cousin who earned her livelihood leading him about, did not care enough for him to tell him that his waistcoat was dirty.
He said gravely, in a rift in the conversation, 'I have known and admired Mr. Fox for years—wittiest man on two continents—I am Mr. Clapyard—of Clapyard & Dunster, publishers, madam.' He was one of the men in England she had really wished to meet, and they began to gossip about certain books that her house and his had published together.
Then she stopped dead, for suddenly she remembered that Clapyard & Dunster would bring out the English edition of 'Sands of Araby.' Her confusion was so obvious and so inexplicable one of the young Jews asked her if she would not like a glass of wine. 'It is nothing. I suddenly forgot what I was saying. I do that sometimes'—and she laughed nervously.
'And this fall,' continued Mr. Clapyard when order had been restored to the conversation, 'we both of us will be publishing Captain Jones's big volumes on Araby. I have never brought out a book I felt more pride in than that.'
Lanice, completely at her ease once more, smiled and nodded and told one or two anecdotes about the traveller's great American tour. The tight, poor cousin was gazing at her perhaps with envy, perhaps with suspicion.
'This,' she said fingering a lump of amber tied too closely about her neck, with a red ribbon, 'He gave me this.'
'Yes,' elaborated Mr. Clapyard, 'Effie saw him daily in our office, and was able to help him a little. It was kind of him to remember her in parting—very courteous of him.' The two young women stared frankly at each other.
'He has left England then? '(How lucky it was that her confusion had come upon her before the actual mention of Anthony's name—a name by which to conjure up women the world over.)
'Yes,' said the unfriendly country cousin.
'No—no,' corrected Mr. Clapyard mildly, 'hardly yet. He leaves England within the month, but he left London three days ago. They say, in recognition of some secret good he did in Araby, he is to be appointed Political Agent at Bagdad with an eye out for the whole of Persia and Arabia.'
Three days ago—and Lanice heard no more. Three days ago—and the rain pelting down through the soot and leaking through the arched roof of the dingy London station where, amid porters and boxes and luggage and tired travellers and patient guards, Sears Ripley had met her as she came up on the boat train. Perhaps if she had turned her head she might instead have seen Anthony. Perhaps he saw her—and chose to walk away. Perhaps their shoulders touched in the crowd and neither knew, and he would go his way to Bagdad and she hers back to Boston. Sears had taken her to a respectable and very female boarding-house which he had considered 'quite safe' for her, and after a dilatory conversation about the Continent had left her. But Anthony—if he had snapped his fingers she would have gone with him to the ends of the earth. She resented unreasonably the kind and friendly man who instead had met her. Clapyard was saying, 'I imagine that he is sailing within the month.' The little cousin was staring at her with stiff, uncompromising eyes. Lanice felt no jealousy towards the English girl. The lump of amber, clumsily shaped, was not the trifle Anthony Jones would select for any one who really amused and pleased him. It had been on the top of his trunk ('box,' he would say) and he was tired of it—and he felt he had to give the girl something, or he may have gone out and bought it; perhaps he had said, 'I'll take that—if it's not more than nine shillings.' And he knew she was just the girl to tie it on with a red ribbon, and to tie it too tight. She looked patronizingly at the relative, and the girl opened her little mouth to speak and changed her mind, and her throat swelled with the words she had not uttered so that the amber lump stood out.
Conscious as she was of the vibrating current that passed between her and this possible rival, Lanice was just as alive to Sears Ripley's eyes and mood. He had left Marian Evans and her group and had taken up his stand slightly behind her divan. He was watching her, out of little friendly triangular eyes, with burning interest. The thought flashed through her mind that this man understood her, as no one else ever had done. He knew everything, except that part of her nature that Anthony possessed. He understood everything, except the hours spent with Anthony Jones. Here he was baffled, and slightly fascinated. Here was her little private soul that he, who was so wise, never would see.
She tried to find the courage merely to say, 'Where is Mr. Jones?—I must see him—about the American edition of his book.' But she knew she might as well say, 'I love Anthony—if he is in this country I must see him; if he will have me I will go with him to Arabia.' Some day she would stop in at Clapyard & Dunster's and look over the English proofs and say casually to the old blind gentleman, 'By the way, I do wish I could get in touch with Mr. Jones—about some captions—'
She was relieved to find that the conversation had left Jones entirely and was concerned with the names of English inns. There was, it seemed, a famous hostelry known as 'Made in Heaven' and Professor Ripley was suggesting that it was originally 'mayde' and referred to the Virgin Mary—the name had some way escaped the Reformation. One had slept in the 'Gold Gallows Tree' and another in the 'Blue Cow's Mouth.'
Marian Evans, the philosophical conversation having ended, joined the group. 'The strangest name for an inn I ever heard,' she said in her gentle voice so at variance with her massive face, 'is the "God-Begot House," in Winchester.' Lanice had never heard this word used in any connection except the Bible and was slightly shocked that so refined a female as this Mrs. Lewes should now admit it to her lips. Then she remembered how much less fastidious she had found the English than her own countrymen and how Lady Maude on the ship coming over had told a long story in a loud voice which hinged entirely upon the presence of a bull at a cricket match.
'And it's a fine old house too,' added Mr. Clapyard. 'I've been there myself—the best beef and ale in England.'
His cousin stared even harder at Lanice.
'There is something this girl knows,' she thought, 'but will not tell me and I will not ask her.'
'Shall we not go into the dining-room? 'It was Mr. Lewes who spoke.
She glanced up and her eyes met Sears Ripley's and he looked brave and rather miserable and wise and tolerant. To both of them the glance they exchanged meant much.
('It is just as well that it was he who met me—not Anthony.')
('I suppose if she asks me where he is, I'll tell her; after all she's not a child.')
'Some of the French inns have even odder names,' he said mildly, and taking her upon his arm he marched her into the dining-room.
She went far North to Westmoreland and there, in a doll's cottage garlanded with fading roses and laced with bird wings, she saw the figure of Harriet Martineau creep out in the sun to greet her, her ear-trumpet—great as the horn of Gabriel—thrust towards her interviewer.
She went to Yorkshire, and with sweating, panting horses climbed a black moor and came to a stone-cold village where even the roofs were of stones and no flowers brightened. At the head of the one street was a churchyard where the dead lay so close there was scarce room for grass. The dead seemed to push against the living and only a feeble lilac hedge held them back from the parsonage where the genius-stricken Brontes had lived and died. 'If I had come two years ago,' she thought, 'I should have seen them—at least I should have seen Charlotte, but she's gone now like the rest.' And she waited half the day to see a sick old man in clerical gaiters and stock, leaning upon his cane and shaking as he walked. What children he had—this sad old man! And they were gone and he was left. She thought of Emily striding upon the moor, with Heathcliffe and Cathy crying upon her with their inhuman voices, and Patrick drinking himself to death, and Charlotte and the gentle Anne. That house which now stood as one tomb among many had once been full of children—but they had never laughed and played like other children. They had been sad, wistful little creatures with the wings of death above their heads and the grave always open before their feet.
Professor Ripley suggested, on her next return to the spinsterish boarding-house in London, that she should go to the Duchy of Cornwall—quite in the opposite direction—and call upon the Reverend Job Paisley, an ancient, retired clergyman who wrote sketches of his own moors much in the manner of the earlier Gilbert White. Lanice knew that it was a long journey for a small author, but think! the Duchy of Cornwall!—and the name of his house was Paradise, Moors End, Liskeard. It was not until after she had assented to go and accepted Mrs. Paisley's invitation that she discovered that Sears Ripley himself, 'by the way,' would be a guest at the same time. 'You mean you yourself will be at Liskeard?' Her voice and the doubtful look she gave him did not presage great things for the future.
It was Ripley himself who met the coach as it distributed its passengers before the local inn, and drove her in the vicar's phaeton with not too well-concealed triumph to Paradise, Moors End, Liskeard, Duchy of Cornwall.
Something, she told herself that night, as she crawled in between the sheets deliciously heated by the brass warming-pan, was going to happen. She stayed awake long enough to decide that, if she had read aright the increasing tenderness of Sears Ripley's glances, it would now be a good time to 'have it over with.' He was much too self-contained to make a scene—the old dear. Oh, how she would miss him—when she had given him her 'no' and bade him 'leave her forever.' Since being in London she had come to have a very different feeling towards him than when he had merely been a friend of Anthony Jones, a dark background to the other's radiance. She found out rather to her surprise that he really was a distinguished scholar and one of the few Americans whose ease and distinction of manner could stand comparison with England's best.
The next day was unromantically chill. Fogs lay in counterpanes over the wild land and hid from view the village of Liskeard, and its tall trees and square church tower. The vicar's wife would not let Miss Bardeen walk, even as far as the Fountain of Saint Cleer, without forcing upon her her own stout walking-boots and excessively ugly tweed walking-gown. It was so short Lanice blushed to see that her ankles would have been displayed to public view were it not for the masculine boots. She wore over her head a light-weight black wool shawl in the manner of a country woman. It gave her a perverse pleasure to think how plain and unattractive she would look upon this walk which she believed Professor Ripley had planned for weeks.
They smiled at each other in the lower hall.
'Had I best take an umbrella?'
'Oh, no,' said Lanice, 'I want to get wet. Mrs. Paisley has assured me so many times that this cloth and these boots are impenetrable I want to put them to some test.—Oh, and you have on the vicar's raincoat?'
'Yes—and boots. The English certainly are most hospitable when they really get started. Actually these shoes are too small for me—but they have such a low opinion of American boots, I was really forced into them.'
'And his wife's are too large for me. Do we dare go back and get our own?'
'I dare, if you dare.'
'Agreed.'
They met again in the lower hall some five minutes later and again they smiled widely at each other. Lanice did not bother to draw the shawl over her head and the fog soon formed dewdrops on her bright hair. They found the rude stone canopy over the Fountain of Saint Cleer almost too easily.
'Let's try something harder,' suggested Sears Ripley.
'The Hurlers, for instance.'
'What are they?'
'Druid circles, far out on the moor. Dr. Paisley has often written about them in his sketches.'
'But is it safe to go so far out on the moor alone in a fog?'
'Not very,' he admitted, 'but we cannot possibly lose our way for long. Bodmin Moor is not so vast or treacherous as Dartmoor, and then, I have a map Dr. Paisley drew for me a few days ago. I saved it until you should come along and enjoy it too. I understand we shall find paths to follow, and if not, why, we can turn back.'
Soon they left the confines of the village and found themselves floating off over the coarsely carpeted moors in the spreading softness of the fog. The thick banks undulated about them, sometimes lifting and showing wild and fantastic glimpses of a desolate land. Almost everything seemed to be horizontal, but such things as stood perpendicular in this flat world gained a gigantic height. The two human beings looked at each other in amazement that such a tall man and woman existed. It was hard to talk naturally—to avoid whispering.
'I feel,' said Lanice at last, 'that when we get there the druids will climb up out of their tumuli and sacrifice us.'
Professor Ripley was dubiously studying tiny footpaths, trying to orient himself by a non-existent sun.
'If we are now on the right path,' he said, 'we shall come to an ancient cross'—and as he spoke and stared, the fog lifted and a broken, wordless cross, looking forty feet high, seemed to walk towards them like a holy vision.
'I do not think it was here,' said Lanice helplessly, 'before you spoke. Do you believe in magic?'
'Yes—when in Cornwall. I believe in the giant Tregeagle and in Hell Hounds, but most of all in the pixies, perhaps we are pixie-led at this very moment. If so, the cross will disappear. Why, Heaven help us! it's gone already. Well, the fog was considerate to lift when it did. At least we know our direction.'
They pushed their way cautiously through heather and gorse and roundabout innumerable ancient mine diggings. But where were the Hurlers? In the fog the rabbits looked as large as ponies, and the ponies they continually mistook for prehistoric stones. Most of the little mares had foals with them and were as wild as deer.
'We must be near to the place,' said Ripley. 'You keep to the footpath and I'll walk beside it through the heather. The stones are said to be at least twenty feet from the path. 'Or,' he added generously, 'would you rather be the explorer?'
He saw by her brightening eye that this would please her, and humbly took up his journey alone upon the footpath and let the young female, inappropriately (as most men would have thought) struggle through the heather and make the actual discovery. They called back and forth through the fog so that Lanice would not be lost. The thick atmosphere absorbed most of their voices. 'Professor Ripley,' she would call, and he would answer 'Miss Bardeen.' A little sparrow voice—'Professor Ripley,' a far-away rumble, 'Miss Bardeen.'
Once she cried, 'I've found them!'—but the objects she mistook for druid stones swished their tails, snorted and fled upon the moor. Then at last a vague black mass loomed before her and instantly behind it, rank upon rank and shoulder to shoulder, stood the Hurlers. She called to Sears Ripley and groping like a blind man he came to join her. They sat on one overturned giant and still in whispers speculated upon the vanished races. They felt like hunters who have stalked their prey and only after the most prodigious cunning out-manœuvred their victims. Both were glad of the fog. How comparatively prosaic it would have been if they had seen the stone circles for miles and walked straight into them! Lanice tried to describe to him how that first great stone had cut through the fog like the bow of a ship.
They planned the article which Lanice—with Ripley's help—should write for the 'Journal.' 'I shall begin,' she cried, 'with a quotation from Dr. Paisley—in fact the whole article will, in a way, be about him, only he will be much in the background, and the druids in the foreground.' He was enthusiastic, and, as he told her exactly where she could get the information about druids, Lanice lapsed into silence and had time to recall the strange, impossible fact, that only last night she had made up her mind to 'let him have it over with' to-day. Obviously she should have felt relieved to find that the Professor had no amorous secrets of which he needs must be delivered. It should have been pleasant for her to think that their beautiful friendship would not be overshadowed by any 'lusts of the body' (as Miss Bigley would have said). Obviously it was destined to remain 'on the higher plane.' She moved restlessly. She wished she knew of what he was really thinking—this large bearded man, sitting almost too close, in a subtly episcopal raincoat and wet American shoes. Was he too true to the memory of his dead wife Prunella, or had perchance Anthony Jones dropped some light remark to his friend that would make a good man hesitate before offering marriage? He had strode into the house of her being. He had found doors and opened them. He had wandered down corridors and upstairs and he had found one secret door locked against him. One holy of holies which his wise eyes and kind heart could never penetrate. A little locked room to which he had no key. What thoughts were behind that strong brow?
'Miss Bardeen,' he said rather solemnly, 'the vicar is evidently accustomed to nibbling hard candy during his rainy weather calls. In fact this inner pocket—well in out of the wet—is full of them. Allow me.'
They both rolled the durable sweets about their tongues. Lanice laughed slightly.
'Why do you laugh, Miss Bardeen?'
'I was thinking that you looked rather like Zeus and was expecting you to launch a thunderbolt, and instead of that you were fishing about in your pockets, trying to make up your mind whether or not you dared steal the candy.'
He looked at her with a sweet smile. Schooled as she was to Anthony's furious desires, she could not see anything more than affectionate consideration in his glance. When preparing for an unwanted proposal she had taken an obstinate pleasure in the ugliness of her borrowed clothes. Now, with what the Professor would have considered a feminine change of heart, she began to encourage the black shawl to fall about her with grace and held it poetically to her breast with a long white hand. When he turned away his head to point out to her a herd of fog-wrapped ponies feeding close to the circle, she quickly seized the opportunity to sleek down her black hair over her ears with her characteristic gesture. She wished she knew whether or not her color had risen with the cool damp of the walk. Without color she never had a high opinion of her appearance. As Ripley turned his eyes to the lady beside him, he indirectly answered her thought.
'The fog, these old grey stones—this vast moor that we cannot see—only feel—certainly becomes you, Miss Bardeen. I can fancy myself pixie-led, you the pixie, and this the rendezvous of your kind.'
She rewarded this sop to her egoism with a sidewise goblin glance.
'Oh,' he said enthusiastically, 'look at me again like that. I could see then just the little girl you were at ten or eleven. Weren't you mischievous and secretive, and, pardon me, quite a provoking child? You see, I have children of my own.'
'If I was, no one bothered to slap me much. Papa was too interested in his classics, and Mamma—well, she never grew up enough to take a really adult interest in a child. She shook me if I got in her way, and how my long ringlets and my long legs all dangled—just like a little wooden doll!'
The man loved children and Lanice's picture attracted him. 'Tell me more about your childhood.'
'Nothing, except I was always punished for the wrong things. I think,' she said rather piteously, 'that this started me all wrong. You see I've never believed in justice or right and wrong—the way other people seem to.'
'What were you punished for?'
'For silly childish mistakes—not for the things that really were wrong. It made me slightly—lawless.'
The statement sounded strange coming from such an obviously genteel lady. But the Professor did not laugh at her as another man might have done; he nodded and agreed very seriously.
'Shouldn't a child be punished for what she tried to do?' The man slipped quickly into the fascinating subject of the discipline of childhood. He told her at some length his theories in regard to Mary and Ridgewood, and, having finished with their moral and spiritual welfare, he laid down as well some drastic physiological laws for the young. It seemed that he had much care of his two children in their infancy. His wife had been delicate, so delicate she had rarely left her chamber after the birth of Ridgewood. 'She was far from well when I married her,' he explained sadly. 'I think now I would have hesitated—health means so much in marriage. And I will always feel that I really killed her—giving her my children to bear. But then, of course, I was young and less practical. If I should ever marry again I would not permit myself to love an incurable invalid.' He gave an approving glance to his companion, and Lanice knew that, in spite of her thinness and her fits of pallor, he had seen through her and knew her to be beautifully healthy and sound. He edged towards her slightly and she delicately edged away.
'I suppose,' she said demurely, 'marriage can be a very happy state.'
'Oh, my dear Miss Bardeen. It is the only one for most of us. There are a few exotic, perverse, and often unhappy creatures who can live best without it. I am sure Anthony Jones never either put anything into his marriage or got anything out.'
The sacred name had been spoken. Lanice tightened invisibly and wondered if she could trust her voice to question further.
'Do steal me another of Dr. Paisley's peppermints.' With this ball to click against her teeth she dared continue.
'The idea of Captain Jones as a family man is indeed a droll one—did it occur before or after he left India for Arabia?'
'Two or three years before. She was his colonel's daughter—charming, of course, or she never would have attracted Jones in the first place, but I fear of a very nun-like and cold temperament. I'm afraid Jones really scandalized Henry Longfellow the night we all dined together at the Red Horse Tavern by the frankness with which he protested that our civilization to-day makes women so pure it unfits them for matrimony—and then rather—ah, caddishly, referred to his own wife. There is a streak of almost incredible coarseness in the man, amazingly mixed with his fundamental innocence. But of course you never saw anything of the coarse side of his nature?'
Did the slight upward inflection of his voice leave a statement or a question? Lanice preferred to take it as a statement.
'Indeed,' she murmured, 'and where now is—where now is she?'
'Back here in England again, poor soul.'
She thought to herself cleverly, 'In a minute I will ask him where Anthony himself is.'
'Professor Ripley,' she began abruptly, 'may there not be something—oh, just a little truth in Captain Jones's indelicate remarks? I mean, isn't there such a thing as too great a purity even for women? After all, we are not merely souls.'
He laughed approvingly. 'You are, as always, almost incredibly right. But of course I knew you'd think that. It is splendid that you dare say it.'
'Why—why did you know—I'd think that?'
'Last night—the delicious absorption you felt while eating your roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and then the almost seraphic look in your eyes when you see tarts and clotted cream.'
'Oh, Professor Ripley, you are calling me a glutton!'
'Far from it—your appetite is never so broad as it is deep—if you understand what I mean, and then, do you realize, that when I asked you if you had liked Italy, you first told me about the pastelletti and then about the Uffizi!'
They both laughed together and Lanice felt kindly towards him.
'I believe,' he said rather seriously, 'that the truth of the matter lies somewhere between Captain Jones and his boasted sensuality and the heroes of "Hearth and Home" romances, who so mawkishly extol the spirit to the entire neglect of the body.'
There was a pause and Lanice, although by no means bored, feared that perhaps her companion was, and quickly suggested that they return to the house called Paradise.
'No, no—I beg of you. We will never be in so strange a place again—never so far removed from all the world. And I may never again have a live pixie for a companion.'
He settled himself rather obstinately on his stone. The conversation drifted to the tin mines of Cornwall and the Phoenicians and how they taught the Cornishmen the exquisite arts of clotted cream and saffron cake. He was impersonal enough to be slightly provoking to the young lady, who before she had left London had carelessly checked off this week-end as the one in which he should propose—and be declined. She gave him a tentative goblin look, and he, a mere man after all, edged nearer. The conversation swung back over the centuries and across the Atlantic. Quite without prodding from Lanice they began discussing her own fitness for matrimony. She eagerly denied any such fitness, but was piqued when he all too readily assented. Perhaps the Home was not her métier. This unexpected stand on his part threw her conversationally out of her stride. She had often indulged in such discussion with the stronger sex—always vowing that she was destined to the arts, the gentleman protesting that such charms as hers would never be permitted to fade in spinsterhood. Professor Ripley merely sighed: 'It will all depend on what you want of life, Miss Bardeen; if a career, I doubt if it can be very well combined with matrimony. Although Mrs. Stowe and George Eliot and certain others seem to make a success of it.'
Some instinct stirred within her. She drew in her breath suddenly, caught her lower lip between her teeth, shut her eyes.
'Oh, Mr. Ripley, it is suffocating—this fog. I feel dizzy—faint.'
But before the gentleman could offer the appropriate support of his muscular right arm, she had leaped up, swathed herself in her black shawl with an inimitable Spanish gesture, and floated off towards the pathway. Her better nature had reasserted itself before her lower had really landed her in those manly, and seemingly uneager, arms.
Sears Ripley, slightly astonished, strode after. Lanice, casting a backward glance over him, had a sudden flattering conviction that if she had followed her first instinct she would then and there have had the painful duty of giving him her 'no.' Now her pride made her even refuse the assistance of her escort's arm. He was very solicitous. 'But I am quite all right. I think the fog was especially heavy over the Hurlers. Now I feel infinitely well...See!' And the rash young lady whirled her heavy skirts about her and danced fantastically upon the path. In comparison to her wraith-like grace the man seemed to be shambling like a bear.
So the two moved like strange figures from a fairy story, through the fog and over the moor, following the intricacies of the footpath back to the house called 'Paradise.' Sears Ripley did not, and perhaps never would, 'declare himself.'
It was when she was in London that she felt most bitterly the insistence of Anthony Jones. It would be so easy to stop in at Clapyard & Dunster's and so unembarrassing to ask her question of a blind man who never had seen her face. But she had strength to resist until, opening her American mail, her eye caught the final paragraph of Mr. Fox's weekly letter.
'And, by the way, do drop in sometime and ask Mr. Clapyard what arrangements we could make with his printers for the frontispiece of "Sands of Araby." That type of engraving is done so much better over there than here, I have decided to import if I can get reasonable terms....'
The seven elderly spinsters with whom she ate her breakfast, and who instinctively disapproved of this exotic presence among them, sipped their tea and raised their eyebrows. Such absorption could only mean a love letter, and the creature was already seeing far too much of the tall, distinguished gentleman with the beard.
She looked up from her letter and, although she knew, asked her breakfast companions where the offices of Clapyard & Dunster might be.
'Really, an English lady would hardly try to find it on foot, but then we are not accustomed to mixing in the business world...'
She got her cab and went, found Mr. Clapyard still in his pathetically soiled waistcoat, his cousin reading manuscripts out loud to him in her cutting voice. 'She cried to her natural protector "Help help" but there was no help. She leaped upon the rock and gazed upon the abyss yawning below her...'
'Ah,' said Mr. Clapyard, smiling indulgently, 'I'm beginning to yawn, too. Try another one, Effie.'
The girl clutched the amber at her throat. 'Would you like a long poem on the death of Wellington?' Then she looked up and saw Lanice looking in. 'Here is an American,' she said with rude emphasis. 'I suppose she has business with you.'
'If I may interrupt,' said Lanice gently, 'I'm Miss Bardeen, with a small matter of business from Mr. Fox.'
She took the chair offered her and discussed her errand and answered the publisher's questions about her adventures among the littérateurs. The cousin went to the window and stared out at the rain which had begun to course upon the dingy pane.
'And one more thing,' said Lanice, without glancing at the hostile back. 'I wish I had Captain Jones's address. I want to ask him about some captions.' She had taken the first great step with complete ease.
'Effie.'
'Yes.'
'Look out Captain Jones's English address for this young lady.'
'Yes, Mr. Clapyard.'
When the interview with Mr. Clapyard was over, the two young women went below to the little bookshop which in spare moments Effie helped to serve. From a drawer in a cluttered desk she drew out a stack of letters holding them so her guest might not see the writing. Jealousy suddenly flamed up in Lanice. Could it be that Anthony Jones, who had never written a line to her, had carried on a voluminous correspondence with this horrid little girl? Slowly and with a rude secrecy she read letter after letter, looked up and stared into Lanice's face.
'By now he must have sailed.'
'I am sure that he has not.'
'Why do you say that?'
'I feel that it is true.'
'Oh—of course—woman's intuitions. You are very much interested in Captain Jones?' The American girl's eyes flashed and her light jaw settled like steel. There was something reptilian and dangerous in the slight swinging poise of her sleek head, on its long neck.
'Yes,' she said.
'Not a matter of captions?'
'No.'
'What if I refuse to give it to you?'
'I'll go back to Mr. Clapyard.'
The two young women gazed at each other in a white heat of hatred, jealousy, and suspicion. For a moment Lanice thought of snatching the stack of letters from the girl's hand. A young clerk with a pen over his ear came through the swinging door that led to the publisher's.
'If, ma'am, you'd like it,' he said, 'and intend to call upon the Laureate, Mr. Clapyard will give you a letter to introduce you.'
Lanice turned to go upstairs.
'You will tell Mr. Clapyard?' asked Effie.
'No.'
'Do not dare.'
'No—' and she smiled a very little. So defeated, she turned and again went upstairs.