Brodrick sent a messenger to Tanqueray's house for the manuscript. He
returned towards evening with a message that Mrs. Tanqueray was out, Mr.
Tanqueray was in the country and the servant did not know his address.

They telegraphed to Addy Ranger's rooms for his address. The reply came,
"Post Office, Okehampton, Devon."

Brodrick repeated it with satisfaction as he wrote it down: "Post
Office, Okehampton, Devon."

Gertrude was silent.

"He's got friends somewhere in Devonshire," Brodrick said.

"At the Post Office?" she murmured.

"Of course--if they're motoring."

Gertrude was again silent (she achieved her effects mainly by silences).

"We'd better send the wire there," said Brodrick.

They sent it there first thing in the morning.

Before noon a message came from Mrs. Tanqueray: "Address, 'The Manor,
Wilbury, Wilts.' Have sent your message there."

Admirable Mrs. Tanqueray!

"We've sent _our_ wire to the wrong address," said Brodrick.

"It's the right one, I fancy, if Miss Ranger has it."

"Mrs. Tanqueray's got the wrong one, then?"

They looked at each other. Gertrude's face was smooth and still, but her
eyes searched him, asking what his thoughts were.

They sent a wire to Wilbury.

Three days passed. No answer to their wires and no manuscript.

"He's left Okehampton, I suppose," said Brodrick.

"Or has he left Wilbury?"

"We'll send another wire there, to make sure."

She wrote out the form obediently. Then she spoke again.

"Of course he's at Okehampton." Her voice had an accent of joyous
certainty.

"Why 'of course'?"

"Because he went to Wilbury first. Mrs. Tanqueray said she sent our
message there--the one we sent three days ago. So he's left Wilbury and
he's staying in Okehampton."

"It looks like it."

"And yet--you'd have thought he'd have let his wife know if he was
staying."

"He probably isn't."

"He must be. The manuscript went there."

"Let's hope so, then we may get it to-morrow."

It was as if he desired to impress upon her that the manuscript was the
important thing.

It came as he had anticipated the next day. Miss Ranger sent it up by
special messenger.

"Good!" said Brodrick.

He undid the parcel hurriedly. The inner cover was addressed to Miss
Ranger in Tanqueray's handwriting. It bore the post-mark, Chagford.

"He's been at Chagford all the time!" said Gertrude.

(She had picked up the wrapper which Brodrick had thrown upon the
floor.)

Silence.

"T-t-t. It would have saved a day," she said, "if he'd sent this direct
to you instead of to Miss Ranger. Why couldn't he when he knew we were
so rushed?"

"Why, indeed?" he thought.

"There must have been more corrections," he said.

"She can't have typed them in the time," said Gertrude. She was
examining the inner cover. "Besides, she has sent it on unopened."

"Excellent Miss Ranger!"

He said it with a certain levity. But even as he said it his brain
accepted the inference she forced on it. If Tanqueray had not sent his
manuscript to Camden Town for corrections, he had sent it there for
another reason. The parcel was registered. There was no letter inside
it.

Brodrick's hand trembled as he turned over the pages of the manuscript.
Gertrude's eyes were fixed upon its trembling.

A few savage ink-scratches in Tanqueray's handwriting told where Miss
Ranger had blundered; otherwise the manuscript was clean. Tanqueray had
at last satisfied his passion for perfection.

All this Brodrick's brain took in while his eyes, feverish and intent,
searched the blank spaces of the manuscript. He knew what he was looking
for. It would be there, on the wide margin left for her, that he would
find the evidence that his wife and Tanqueray were together. He knew the
signs of her. Not a manuscript of Tanqueray's, not one of his last great
books, but bore them, the queer, delicate, nervous pencil-markings that
Tanqueray, with all his furious erasures, left untouched. Sometimes
(Brodrick had noticed) he would enclose them in a sort of holy circle of
red ink, to show that they were not for incorporation in the text. But
it was not in him to destroy a word that she had written.

But he could find no trace of her. He merely made out some humble
queryings of Miss Ranger, automatically erased.

The manuscript was in three Parts. As he laid down each, Gertrude put
forth a quiet hand and drew it to herself. He was too much preoccupied
to notice how minutely and with what intent and passionate anxiety she
examined it.

He was arranging the manuscript in order. Gertrude was absorbed in Part
Three. He had reached out for it when he remembered that the original
draft of Part Two had contained a passage as to which he had endeavoured
to exercise an ancient editorial right. He looked to see whether
Tanqueray had removed it.

He had not. The passage stood, naked and immense, tremendous as some
monument of primeval nature, alone in literature, simple, superb,
immortal; irremovable by any prayer. Brodrick looked at it now with a
clearer vision. He acknowledged its grandeur and bowed his head to the
power that was Tanqueray. Had he not been first to recognize it? It was
as if his suspicion of the man urged him to a larger justice towards the
writer.

He turned to Gertrude. "There are no alterations to be made, thank
heaven----"

"How about this?"

She slid the manuscript under his arm; her finger pointed to the margin.
He saw nothing.

"What?" He spoke with some irritation.

"This."

She turned up the lamp so that the light fell full upon the page. He
bent closer. On the margin, so blurred as to be almost indecipherable,
he saw his wife's sign, a square of delicate script. To a careless
reader it might have seemed to have been written with a light pencil and
to have been meant to stand. Examined closely it revealed the firm
strokes of a heavy lead obliterated with india-rubber. Gertrude's finger
slid away and left him free to turn the pages. There were several of
these marks in the same handwriting, each one deliberately erased. The
manuscript had been in his wife's hand within the last three days; for
three days certainly Tanqueray had been in Chagford, and for three weeks
for all Brodrick knew.

There was no reason why he should not be there, no reason why they
should not be together. Then why these pitiable attempts at concealment,
at the covering of the tracks?

And yet, after all, they had not covered them. They had only betrayed
the fact that they had tried. Had they? And which of them? Tanqueray in
the matter of obliteration would at any rate have been aware of the
utter inadequacy of india-rubber. To dash at a thing like india-rubber
was more the sudden, futile inspiration of a woman made frantic by her
terror of detection.

It was clear that Jane had not wanted him to know that Tanqueray was at
Chagford. She had not told him. Why had she not told him? She knew of
the plight they were in at the office, of the hue and cry after the
unappearing manuscript.

So his brain worked, with a savage independence. He seemed to himself
two men, a man with a brain that worked, following a lucid argument to
an obscure conclusion, and a man who looked on and watched its working
without attaching the least importance to it. It was as if _this_ man
knew all the time what the other did not know. He had his own light, his
own secret. He had never thought about it before (his secret), still
less had he talked about it. Thinking about it was a kind of profanity;
talking would have been inconceivable sacrilege. It was self-evident as
the existence of God to the soul that loves him; a secret only in that
it was profounder than appearances, in that it stood by the denial of
appearances, so that, if appearances were against it, what of that?

He was thinking about it now, obscurely, without images, barely with
words, as if it had been indeed a thing occult and metaphysical.

Thinking about it--that meant, of course, that he had for a moment
doubted it? It was coming back to him now, clothed with the mortal
pathos of its imperfection. She was dearer to him--unspeakably dearer,
for his doubt.

The man with the brain approached slowly and unwillingly the conclusion
that now emerged, monstrous and abominable, from the obscurity. If that
be so, he said, she is deliberately deceiving me.

And he who watched, he with the illuminating, incommunicable secret,
smiled as he watched, in scorn and pity. Scorn of the slow and ugly
movements of the intellect, and pity for a creature so mean as to employ
them.

In the silence that he kept he had not heard the deep breathing of the
woman at his side. Now he was aware of it and her.

He was positively relieved when the servant announced Mrs. Levine.

There was a look on Sophy's face that Brodrick knew, a look of
importance and of competence, a look it always had when Sophy was about
to deal with a situation. Gertrude's silent disappearance marked her
sense of a situation to be dealt with.

Brodrick rose heavily to greet his sister. There was a certain
consolation in her presence, since it had relieved him of Gertrude's.
Sophy, by way of prelude, inquired about Brodrick and the children and
the house, then paused to attack her theme.

"When's Jane coming back?" said she.

"I don't know," said Brodrick.

"She's been away two months."

"Seven weeks," said Brodrick.

"Isn't it about time she _did_ come back?"

"She's the best judge of that," said Brodrick.

Sophy's face was extraordinarily clear-eyed and candid as it turned on
him.

"George Tanqueray's at Chagford."

"How do you know?" (He really wondered.)

"Miss Ranger let it out to Louis this morning."

"Let it out? Why on earth should she keep it in?"

"Oh well, I don't suppose _she_ sees anything in it."

"No more do I," said Brodrick.

"You never saw anything," said Sophy. "I don't say there's anything to
see--all the same----"

She paused.

"Well?" He was all attention and politeness.

"All the same I should insist on her coming back."

He was silent, as though he were considering it.

"Or better still, go down and fetch her."

"I shall do nothing of the sort."

"Well, if you think it's wise to give her her head to that extent--a
woman with Jane's temperament----"

"What do you know about her temperament?"

Sophy shifted her ground. "I know, and you know the effect he has on
her, and the influence; and if you leave her to him--if you leave them
to themselves, down there--for weeks like that--you'll have nobody but
yourself to thank if----"

He cut her short.

"I have nobody but myself to thank. She shall please herself about
coming back. It she didn't come--I couldn't blame her."

Sophy was speechless. Of all the attitudes that any Brodrick could take
she had not expected this.

"We have made things too hard for her----" he said.

"We?"

"You and I--all of us. We've not seen what was in her."

Sophy repressed her opinion that they very probably would see now. As
there was no use arguing with him in his present mood (she could see
_that_), she left him.

Brodrick heard her motor hooting down Roehampton Lane. She was going to
dine at Henry's. Presently all the family would be in possession of the
situation, of Jane's conduct and his attitude. And there was Gertrude
Collett. He understood now that she suspected.

Gertrude had come back into her place.

He picked up some papers and took them to the safe which stood in
another corner of the room behind his writing-table. He wanted to get
away from Gertrude, to be alone with his secret and concealed, without
betraying his desire for solitude, for concealment. He knelt down by the
safe and busied himself there quite a long time. He said to himself, "It
couldn't happen. She was always honest with me. But if it did I
couldn't wonder. The wonder is why she married me."

He rose to his feet, saying to himself again, "It couldn't happen."

With that slight readjusting movement the two men in him became one, so
that when the reasoning man reached slowly his conclusion he formulated
it thus: "It couldn't happen. If it did, it wouldn't happen this way.
He" (even to himself he could not say "they") "would have managed
better, or worse." At last his intellect, the lazy, powerful beast, was
roused and dealt masterfully with the situation.

He had to pass the fireplace to get back to his seat, which Gertrude
guarded. As he passed he caught sight of his own face in the glass over
the chimney-piece, a face with inflamed eyes and a forehead frowning and
overcast, and cheeks flushed with shame. Gertrude, looking up at him
from the manuscript she brooded over, instinctively made way for him to
pass.

It was she who spoke first. Her finger was on the pencil-marks again.

"Then that," said she, pointing, "that is not to stand?"

"Of course it isn't." He answered coldly. "It wasn't meant to. It's
rubbed out."

He looked at her for the first time with dislike. He did not suspect her
as the source of abominable suggestion. He was only thinking that if it
hadn't been for her he wouldn't have seen any of these things.

She shrank before his look. "Does he think I wanted him to see it?" she
said to herself.

Already she was clean in her own eyes. Already she had persuaded herself
that she had not wanted that. And in the same breath of thought she
asked herself, "What _did_ he see?"

She smiled as she answered his cold answer.

"I thought it was rubbed out, but I couldn't be quite sure."

They were so absorbed that they did not hear the door open.

[Illustration: Jane stood in the doorway, quietly regarding them]

Jane stood in the doorway quietly regarding them.




LXV


There were people who knew for a fact that Jane Holland (Mrs. Hugh
Brodrick) had run away with George Tanqueray. The rumour ran through the
literary circles shunned by Tanqueray and Jane. The theory of her guilt
was embraced with excitement by the dreadful, clever little people. Not
one of them would have confessed to a positive desire to catch her
tripping. But now that the thing had happened it satisfied the craving
for complete vision of the celebrated lady. It reduced considerably her
baffling eminence, and dispersed once for all the impenetrable,
irritating atmosphere of secrecy she had kept up.

There was George Tanqueray, too, who had kept it up even longer and more
successfully. At last they had been caught, the two so insolent in their
swift evasion of pursuit. Their fall, so to speak, enabled the hunter to
come up with them. People who had complained that they could never meet
them, who had wanted to meet them solely that they might talk about them
afterwards, who had never been able to talk about them at all, had now
abundant material for conversation.

The rumour, once it had fairly penetrated, spread over London in five
days. It started in Kensington, ran thence all the way to Chelsea,
skipped to Bloomsbury, and spread from these centres into Belgravia and
Mayfair. In three weeks the tale of George Tanqueray and Jane Holland
(Mrs. Hugh Brodrick) had invaded Hampstead and the Southwestern suburbs.
It was only confirmed by the contemptuous silence and curt denials of
their friends, Arnott Nicholson, Caro Bickersteth, Nina Lempriere and
the Protheros.

In Brodrick's family it sank down deep, below the level of permissible
discussion. But it revealed itself presently in an awful external
upheaval, utterly unforeseen, and in a still more unforeseen
subsidence.

There was first of all a split between Mrs. Heron and the Doctor. The
behaviour of Eddy and Winny, especially of Eddy, had got on the Doctor's
nerves (he had confessed, in a moment of intense provocation, to having
them). Eddy one evening had attacked violently the impermissible topic,
defending Jin-Jin (in the presence of his younger sister) from the
unspeakable charge current in their suburb, taxing his uncle with a
monstrous credence of the impossible, and trying to prove to him that it
_was_ impossible.

For the sake of the peace so beloved by Brodricks it was settled that
Frances and her children should live with poor dear John in the big
house in Augustus Road.

Brodrick then suggested that Gertrude Collett might with advantage keep
house for Henry.

This arrangement covered the dreadful rupture, the intolerable situation
at Moor Grange. Gertrude had contributed nothing to the support of the
rumour beyond an intimation that the rupture (between her and the
Brodricks) _was_ dreadful and the situation intolerable. The intimation,
as conveyed by Gertrude, was delicate and subtle to a degree. All that
she would admit in words was a certain lack of spiritual sympathy
between her and Mrs. Brodrick.

It was felt in Brodrick's family that, concerning Jane and Tanqueray,
Gertrude Collett knew considerably more than she cared to say.

And through it all Brodrick guarded his secret.

The rumour had not yet touched him whom it most affected. It never would
touch him, so securely the secret he guarded guarded him. And though it
had reached Hampstead the rumour had not reached Rose.

Rose had her hands full for once with the Protheros, helping Mrs.
Prothero to look after _him_. For Owen was ill, dreadfully and
definitely ill, with an illness you could put a name to. Dr. Brodrick
was attending him. Owen had consulted him casually the year before, and
the Doctor had then discovered a bell-sound in his left lung. Now he
came regularly once or twice a week all the way from Putney in his
motor-car.

Rose had positively envied Laura, who had a husband who could be ill,
who could be tucked up in bed and taken care of. It was Rose who helped
Laura to make Prothero's big room look for all the world like the ward
of a hospital.

Dr. Brodrick had wanted to take him away to a sanatorium, but Prothero
had refused flatly to be taken anywhere. The traveller was tired of
travelling. He loved with passion this place where he had found peace,
where his wandering genius had made its sanctuary and its home. His
repugnance was so violent and invincible that the Doctor had agreed with
Laura that it would do more harm than good to insist on his removal. She
must do as best she could, with (he suggested) the assistance of a
trained nurse.

Laura had very soon let him know what she could do. She had winced
visibly when she heard of the trained nurse. It would be anguish to her
to see another woman beside Owen's bed and her hands touching him; but
she said she supposed she could bear even that if it would save him, if
it were absolutely necessary. Was it? The Doctor had admitted that it
was not so, if she insisted--absolutely--for the present; but it was
advisable if she wished to save herself. Laura had smiled then, very
quietly.

In twenty-four hours she showed him the great room, bare and clean as
the ward of a hospital (Rose was on her knees on the floor, bees-waxing
it). The long rows of bookcases were gone, so were the pictures. He
couldn't put his finger on a single small unnecessary thing. Laura, cool
and clean in a linen gown, defied him to find a chink where a germ could
lodge. Prothero inquired gaily, if they couldn't make a good fight
there, where could they make it?

Henry, although used to these combats, was singularly affected as he
looked upon the scene, stripped as it was for the last struggle. What
moved him most was the sight of Laura's little bed, set under the north
window, and separated from her husband's by the long empty space
between, through which the winds of heaven rushed freely. It showed him
what the little thing was capable of, day and night, night and day, the
undying, indomitable devotion. That was the stuff a man wanted in his
wife. He thought of his brother Hugh. Why on earth, if he had to marry
one of them, hadn't he married _her_? He was moved too and troubled by
the presence there of Tanqueray's poor little wife. Whatever view truth
compelled you to take of Jane's and Tanqueray's relations, Tanqueray's
wife had, from first to last, been cruelly wronged by both of them.

Tanqueray's wife was so absorbed in the fight they were making as to be
apparently indifferent to her wrongs, and they judged that the legend of
Jane Holland and George Tanqueray had not reached her.

It had not. And yet she knew it, she had known it all the time--that
they had been together. She had known it ever since, in the innocent
days before the rumour, she had heard Dr. Brodrick telling Mrs. Prothero
that his sister-in-law had gone down to Chagford for three months.
Chagford was where he was always staying. And in the days of innocence
Addy Ranger had let out that it was Chagford where he was now. She had
given Rose his address, Post Office, Chagford. He had been there all the
time when Rose had supposed him to be in Wiltshire and was sending all
his letters there.

She did not hear of Mrs. Brodrick's return until a week or two after
that event; for, in the days no longer of innocence, his sister-in-law
was a sore subject with the Doctor. And when Rose did hear it finally
from Laura, by that time she had heard that Tanqueray was coming back
too. He had written to her to say so.

That was on a Saturday. He was not coming until Tuesday. Rose had two
days in which to consider what line she meant to take.

That she meant to take a line was already clear to Rose. Perfectly
clear, although her decision was arrived at through nights of misery so
profound that it made most things obscure. It was clear that they could
not go on as they had been doing. _He_ might (nothing seemed to matter
to him), but she couldn't; and she wouldn't, not (so she put it) if it
was ever so. They had been miserable.

Not that it mattered so very much whether she was miserable or no. But
that was it; she had ended by making him miserable too. It took some
making; for he wasn't one to feel things much; he had always gone his
own way as if nothing mattered. By his beginning to feel things (as she
called it) now, she measured the effect she must have had on him.

It was all because she wasn't educated proper, because she wasn't a
lady. He ought to have married a lady. He ought (she could see it now)
to have married some one like Mrs. Brodrick, who could understand his
talk, and enter into what he did.

There was Mr. and Mrs. Prothero now. They were happy. There wasn't a
thing he could say or do or think but what she understood it. Why, she'd
understand, time and again, without his saying anything. That came of
being educated. It came (poor Rose was driven back to it at every turn)
of being a lady.

She might have known how it would be. And in a way she had known it from
the first. That was why she'd been against it, and why Uncle and Aunt
and her master and mistress down at Fleet had been against it too. But
there--she loved him. Lady or no lady, she loved him.

As for his going away with Mrs. Brodrick, she "looked at it sensible."
She understood. She saw the excuses that could be made for him. She
couldn't understand _her_; she couldn't find one excuse for _her_
behaviour, a married woman, leaving her husband--such a good man, and
her children--her little helpless children, and going off for weeks
together with a married man, let him be who he might be. Still, if it
hadn't been her, it might have been somebody else, somebody much worse.
It might have been that Miss Lempriere. If _she_'d had a hold on him,
_she_'d not have let him go.

For deep-bedded in Rose's obscure misery was the conviction that Jane
Brodrick had let him go. Her theory of Jane's guilt had not gone much
farther than the charge of deserting her little helpless children. It
was as if Rose's imagination could not conceive of guilt beyond that
monstrous crime. And Jane had gone back to her husband and children,
after all.

If it had been Miss Lempriere she would have been bound to have stuck,
she having nothing, so to speak, to go back to.

The question was, what was George coming back to? If it was to her,
Rose, he must know pretty well what. He must know, she kept repeating to
herself; he must know. Her line, the sensible line that she had been so
long considering, was somehow to surprise and defeat his miserable
foreknowledge.

By Sunday morning she had decided on her line. Nothing would turn her.
She did not intend to ask anybody's advice, nor to take it were it
offered. The line itself required the co-operation and, in a measure,
the consent of Aunt and Uncle; and on the practical head they were
consulted. She managed that on Sunday afternoon. Then she remembered
that she would have to tell Mr. and Mrs. Prothero.

It was on Sunday evening that she told them.

She told them, very shortly and simply, that she had made up her mind to
separate from Tanqueray and live with her uncle.

"Uncle'll be glad to 'ave me," she said.

She explained. "_He_'ll think more of me if he's not with me."

Prothero admitted that it might be likely.

"It's not," she said, "as if I was afraid of 'is taking up with another
woman--serious."

(They wondered had she heard?)

"I can trust him with Mrs. Brodrick."

(They thought it strange that she should not consider Mrs. Brodrick
serious. They said nothing, and in a moment Rose explained.)

"She's like all these writin' people. _I_ know 'em."

"Yes," said Prothero. "We're a poor lot, aren't we?"

(It was a mercy that she didn't take it seriously.)

"Oh you--you're different."

She had always had a very clear perception of his freedom from the
literary taint.

"But Mrs. Brodrick now--she doesn't care for 'im. She's not likely to.
She'll never care for anybody but herself."

"What makes you think so?"

"Well--a woman who could walk off like that and leave 'er little
children--to say nothing of 'er husband----"

"Isn't it," said Prothero, "what you're proposing to do yourself?"

"I 'aven't got any little children. She's leavin' 'er 'usband to get
away from' im, to please 'erself. I'm leavin' mine to bring 'im to me."

She paused, pensive.

"Oh, no, I'm not afraid of Mrs. Brodrick. She 'asn't got a 'eart."

"No?"

"Not wot _I_ should call a 'eart."

"Perhaps not," said Laura.

"I used to hate her when she came about the place. Leastways I tried to
hate her, and I couldn't."

She meditated in their silence.

"If it's got to be anybody it'd best be 'er. She's given 'im all she's
got to give, and he sees 'ow much it is. 'E goes to 'er, I know, and
'e'll keep on going; and she--she'll 'old 'im orf and on--I can see 'er
doin' of it, and I don't care. As long as she 'olds' im she keeps other
women orf of 'im."

Their silence marvelled at her.

"Time and again I've cried my eyes out, and _that_'s no good. I've got,"
said Rose, "to look at it sensible. She's really keepin' 'im for me."

Down-stairs, alone with Laura, she revealed herself more fully.

"I dare say 'e won't ever ask me to come back," she said. "But once I've
gone out of the house for good and all, 'e'll come to me now and again.
He's bound to. You see, _she_'s no good to him. And maybe, if I was to
'ave a child--I might----"

She sighed, but in her eyes there kindled a dim hope, shining through
tears.

"Wot I shall miss is--workin' for 'im."

Her mouth trembled. Her tears fell.




LXVI


Between seven and eight o'clock on Tuesday evening, Tanqueray, in an
execrable temper, returned to his home.

The little house had an air of bright expectancy, not to say of
festival; it was so intensely, so unusually illuminated. Each window,
with its drawn blind, was a golden square in the ivy-darkened wall.

Tanqueray let himself in noiselessly with his latchkey. He took up the
pile of letters that waited for him on the hat-stand in the hall, and
turned into the dining-room.

It smiled at him brilliantly with all its lights. So did the table, laid
for dinner; the very forks and spoons smiled, twinkling and limping in
irrepressible welcome. A fire burned ostentatiously in the hearth-place.
It sent out at him eager, loquacious tongues of flame, to draw him to
the insufferable endearments of the hearth.

He was aware now that what he was most afraid of in this horrible coming
back was his wife's insupportable affection.

He turned the lights down a little lower. All his movements were
noiseless. He was afraid that Rose would hear him and would come running
down.

He went up-stairs, treading quietly. He meant to take his letters to his
study and read them there. He might even answer some of them. Anything
to stave off the moment when he must meet Rose.

The door of her bedroom was wide open. The light flared so high that he
judged that Rose was in there and about to appear. He swung himself
swiftly and dexterously round the angle of the stair-rail, and so
reached his own door.

She must have heard him go in, but there was no answering movement from
her room.

With a closed door behind him he sat down and looked over his letters.
Bills, proofs from the "Monthly Review," a letter from Laura that
saddened him (he had not realized that Prothero was so ill). Last of
all, at the bottom of the pile, a little note from Rose.

She had got it all into five lines. Five lines, rather straggling,
rather shapeless lines that told him with a surprising brevity that his
wife had decided on an informal separation, for his good.

No resentment, no reproach, no passion and no postscript.

He went down-stairs by no means noiselessly.

In the hall, as he was putting on his hat, Susan came to him. She gave
him a queer look. Dinner was ready, she said. The mistress had ordered
the dinner that he liked. (Irrepressibly, insistently, thick with
intolerable reminiscence, the savour of it streamed through the kitchen
door.) The mistress had cooked it herself, Susan said. The mistress had
told Susan that she was to be sure and make him very comfortable, and to
remember what he liked for dinner. Susan's manner was a little shy and a
little important, it suggested the inauguration of a new rule, a new
order, a life in which Rose was not and never would be.

Tanqueray took no notice whatever of Susan as he strode out of the
house.

The lights were dim in the corner house by the Heath, opposite the
willows. Still, standing on the upper ground of the Heath, he could see
across the road through the window of his old sitting-room, and there,
in his old chair by the fireside he made out a solitary seated figure
that looked like Rose.

He came out from under the willows and made for the front door. He
pushed past the little maid who opened it and strode into the room. Rose
turned.

There was a slight stir and hesitation, then a greeting, very formal and
polite on both sides, and with Joey all the time leaping and panting and
licking Tanqueray's hands. Joey's demonstration was ignored as much too
emotional for the occasion.

A remark from Rose about the weather. Inquiries from Tanqueray as to the
health of Mr. and Mrs. Eldred. Further inquiries as to the health of
Rose.

Silence.

"May I turn the light up?" (From Tanqueray.)

"I'd rather you let it be?" (From Rose.)

He let it be.

"Rose" (very suddenly from Tanqueray), "do you remember Mr. Robinson?"

(No response.)

"Rose, why are you sitting in this room?"

"Because I like it."

"Why do you like it?"

(No response; only a furtive movement of Rose's hand towards her
pocket-handkerchief. A sudden movement of Tanqueray's, restrained, so
that he appeared to have knelt on the hearthrug to caress the little
dog. A long and silent stroking of Joey's back. Demonstration of
ineffable affection from Joey.)

"His hair never _has_ come on, has it? Do you know" (very gravely), "I'm
afraid it never will."

(A faint quiver of Rose's mouth which might or might not have been a
smile.)

"Rose, why did you marry me? Wouldn't any other hairless little dog have
done as well?"

(A deep sigh from Rose.)

Tanqueray was now standing up and looking down at her in his way.

"Rose, do you remember how I came to you at Fleet, and brought you the
moon in a band-box?"

She answered him with a sudden and convulsive sob.

He knelt beside her. He hesitated for a moment.

"Rose--I've brought you the band-box without the moon. Will you have
it?"

She got up with a wild movement of escape. Something rolled from her lap
and fell between them. She made a dash towards the object. But Tanqueray
had picked it up. It was a pair of Tanqueray's gloves, neatly folded.

"What were you doing with those gloves?" he said.

"I was mendin' them," said she.

Half-an-hour later Rose and Tanqueray were walking up the East Heath
Road towards their little house. Rose carried Tanqueray's gloves, and
Tanqueray carried Minny, the cat, in a basket.

As they went they talked about Owen Prothero. And Tanqueray thanked God
that, after all, there was something they _could_ talk about.




LXVII


Dr. Brodrick had declared for the seventh time that Prothero was
impossible.

His disease was advancing. Both lungs were attacked now. There was, as
he perfectly well knew, consolidation at the apex of the left lung; the
upper lobe had retracted, leaving his heart partially uncovered, and he
knew it; you could detect also a distinct systolic murmur; and nobody
could be more aware than Prothero of the gravity of these signs. Up till
now, he, Brodrick, had been making a record case of him. The man had a
fine constitution (he gave him credit for that); he had pluck; there was
resistance, pugnacity in every nerve. He had one chance, a fighting
chance. His life might be prolonged for years, if he would only rest.

And there he was, with all that terrible knowledge in him, sitting up in
bed, driving that infernal pen of his as if his life depended on _that_.
Scribbling verses, he was, working himself into such a state of
excitement that his temperature had risen. He displayed, Brodrick said,
an increasing nervous instability. When Brodrick told him that (if he
wanted to know) his inspiration was hollow, had been hollow for months,
and that he would recognize that as one of the worst symptoms in his
case, Prothero said that his critics had always told him that. The worst
symptom in his case, _he_ declared, was that he couldn't laugh without
coughing. When Brodrick said that it wasn't a laughing matter, he
laughed till he spat blood and frightened himself. For he had (Brodrick
had noticed it) a morbid horror of the sight of blood. You had to inject
morphia after every hæmorrhage, to subdue that awful agitation.

All this the Doctor recounted to Laura, alone with her in her forlorn
little drawing-room down-stairs. He unveiled for her intelligence the
whole pathology of the case. It brought him back to what he had started
with, Prothero's impossibility.

"What does he do for it?" he repeated. "He knows the consequences as
well as I do."

Laura said she didn't think that Owen ever had considered consequences.

"But he _must_ consider them. What's a set of verses compared with his
health?"

Laura answered quietly, "Owen would say what was his health compared
with a set of verses? If he knew they'd be the greatest poem of his
life."

"His life? My dear child----"

The pause was terrible.

"I wish," he said, "we could get him out of this."

"He doesn't want to go. You said yourself it wasn't the great thing."

He admitted it. The great thing, he reiterated, was rest. It was his one
chance. He explained carefully again how good a chance it was. He dwelt
on the things Prothero might yet do if he gave himself a chance. And
when he had done talking Laura remarked that it was all very well, but
he was reckoning without Owen's genius.

"Genius?" He shrugged his shoulders. He smiled (as if they weren't
always reckoning with it at Putney!). "What is it? For medicine it's
simply and solely an abnormal activity of the brain. And it must stop."

He stood over her impressively, marking his words with clenched fist on
open palm.

"He must choose between his genius and his life."

She winced. "I don't believe he _can_ choose," she murmured. "It _is_
his life."

He straightened himself to his enormous height, in dignified recoil from
her contradiction.

"I have known many men of genius," he said.

"His genius is different," said she.

He hadn't the heart to say what he had always said, that Prothero's
genius was and always had been most peculiarly a disease; but he did
not shrink from telling her that at the present crisis it was death.

For he was angry now. He could not help being moved by professional
animus, the fury of a man who has brought his difficult, dangerous work
to the pitch of unexpected triumph, and sees it taken from his hands and
destroyed for a perversity, an incomprehensible caprice.

He was still more deeply stirred by his compassion, his affection for
the Protheros. Secretly, he was very fond of Owen, though the poet _was_
impossible; he was even more fond of little Laura. He did not want to
see her made a widow because Prothero refused to control his vice. For
the literary habit, indulged in to that extent, amounted to a vice. The
Doctor had no patience with it. A man was not, after all, a slave to his
unwholesome inspiration (it had dawned on him by this time that Prothero
had made a joke about it). Prothero could stop it if he liked.

"I've told him plainly," he said, "that what it means to him is death.
If you want to keep him, you must stop it."

"How can I?" she moaned.

"Don't encourage him. Don't let him talk about it. Don't let his mind
dwell on it. Turn the conversation. Take his pens and paper from him and
don't let him see them again till he is well."

When the Doctor left her she went up-stairs to Owen.

He was still sitting up writing, dashing down lines with a speed that
told her what race he ran.

"Owen," she said, "you know. He told you----"

He waved her away with a gesture that would have been violent if it
could.

She tried to take his pen and paper from him, and he laid his thin hands
out over the sheets. The sweat stood in big drops between the veins of
his hands; it streamed from his forehead.

"Wait just a little longer, till you're well," she pleaded.

"For God's sake, darling," he whispered hoarsely, "leave me, go away."

She went. In her own room her work stood unfinished on the table where
she had left it, months ago. She pushed it away in anger. She hated the
sight of it. She sat watching the clock for the moments when she would
have to go to him with his medicine.

She thought how right they had been after all. Nina and Jane and
Tanqueray, when they spoke of the cruelty of genius. It had no mercy and
no pity. It had taken its toll from all of them. It was taking its toll
from Owen now, to the last drop of his blood, to the last torturing
breath. His life was nothing to it.

She went to him silently every hour to give him food or medicine or to
take his temperature. She recorded on her chart heat mounting to fever,
and a pulse staggering in its awful haste. He was submissive as long as
she was silent, but at a word his thin hand waved in its agonized
gesture.

Once he kissed her hands that gave him his drink.

"Poor little thing," he said, "it's so frightened--always was. Never
mind--It'll soon be over--only--don't come again" (he had to whisper
it), "if you don't mind--till I ring."

She sat listening then for his bell.

Rose came and stayed with her a little while. She wanted to know what
the Doctor had said to-day.

"He says he must choose between his genius and his life. And it's I who
have to choose. If he goes on he'll kill himself. If I stop him I shall
kill him. What am I to do?"

Rose had her own opinion of the dilemma, and no great opinion of the
Doctor.

"Do nothin'," she said, and pondered on it. "Look at it sensible. You
may depend upon it 'e's found somethin' 'e's got to do. 'E's set 'is
'eart on finishin' it. Don't you cross 'im. I don't believe in crossin'
them when they're set."

"And if he dies, Rose? If he dies?"

"'E dies 'is way--not yours."

It was the wisdom of renunciation and repression; but Laura felt that it
was right.

Her hour struck and she went up to Owen. He was lying back now with his
eyes closed and his lips parted. Because of its peace his face was like
the face of the dead. But his lips were hot under hers and his cheek was
fire to her touch. She put her finger on his pulse and he opened his
eyes and smiled at her.

"It's finished," he said. "You can take it away now."

She gathered up the loose sheets and laid them in a drawer in his desk.
The poem once finished he was indifferent to its disposal. His eyes
followed her, they rested on her without noting her movements. They drew
her as she came towards him again.

"Forgive me," he said. "It was too strong for me."

"Never again," she murmured. "Promise me, never again till you're well."

"Never again." He smiled as he answered.

Dr. Brodrick, calling late that night, was informed by Laura of the
extent to which he had been disobeyed. He thundered at her and
threatened, a Brodrick beside himself with fury.

"Do you suppose," she said, "it isn't awful for me to have to stand by
and see it, and do nothing? What can I do?"

He looked down at her. The little thing had a will of her own; she was
indeed, for her size, preposterously over-charged with will. Never had
he seen a small creature so indomitably determined. He put it to her.
She had a will; why couldn't she use it?

"His will is stronger than mine," she said. "And his genius is stronger
than his will."

"You overrate the importance of it. What does it matter if he never
writes another line?"

It seemed to her that he charged him with futility, that he echoed--and
in this hour!--the voice of the world that tried to make futile
everything he did.

"It doesn't matter to you," she said. "You never understood his genius;
you never cared about it."

"Do you mean to tell me that you--_you_ care about it more than you care
about him? Upon my word, I don't know what you women are made of."

"What could I do?" she said. "I had to use my own judgment."

"You had not. You had to use mine."

He paused impressively.

"It's no use, my child, fighting against the facts."

To Henry Laura was a little angry child, crying over the bitter dose of
life. He had got to make her take it.

He towered over her, a Brodrick, the incarnate spirit of fact.

It was a spirit that revolted her. She stood her ground and defied it in
its insufferable tyranny. She thought of how these men, these Brodricks,
behaved to genius wherever they met it; how, among them, they had driven
poor Jinny all but mad, martyrizing her in the name of fact. As for
Owen, she knew what they had thought and said of him, how they judged
him by the facts. If it came to that she could fight the Doctor with his
own weapons. If he wanted facts he should have them; he should have all
the facts.

"_This_ isn't what's killing him," she said. "It's all the other things,
the things he was made to do. Going out to Manchuria--that began it. He
ought never to have been sent there. Then--five years on that abominable
paper. Think how he slaved on it. You don't know what it was to him. To
have to sit in stuffy theatres and offices; to turn out at night in vile
weather; to have to work whether he was fit to work or not."

He looked down at her very quietly and kindly. It was when people were
really outrageous that a Brodrick came out in his inexhaustible patience
and forbearance.

"You say he had to do all these things. Is that the fact?"

"No," said Laura, passionately, "it's the truth."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean it's what it amounted to. They--they drove him to it with their
everlasting criticism and fault-finding and complaining."

"I should not have thought he was a man to be much affected by adverse
criticism."

"You don't know," she retorted, "how he was affected. You can't judge.
Anyhow, he stuck to it up to the very last--the very last," she cried.

"My dear Mrs. Prothero, nobody wanted him to----"

"He did it, though. He did it because he was not what you all thought
him."

"We thought him splendid. My brother was saying only the other day he
had never seen such pluck."

"Well, then, it's his pluck--his splendour that he's dying of."

"And you hold us, his friends, responsible for that?"

"I don't hold you responsible for anything."

She was trembling on the edge of tears.

"Come, come," he said gently, "you misunderstand. You've been doing too
much. You're overstrained."

She smiled. That was so like them. They were sane when they got hold of
one stupid fact and flung it at your head. But you were overstrained
when you retaliated. When you had made a sober selection from the facts,
such a selection as constituted a truth, and presented it to them, you
were more overstrained than ever. They couldn't stand the truth.

"I don't hold _you_ responsible for his perversity," said the poor
Doctor.

"You talked as if you did."

"You misunderstood me," he said sadly. "I only asked you to do what you
could."

"I have done what I could."

He ordered her some bromide then, for her nerves.

That evening Prothero was so much better that he declared himself well.
The wind had changed to the south. She had prayed for a warm wind; and,
as it swept through the great room, she flung off her fur-lined coat and
tried to persuade herself that the weather was in Owen's favour.

At midnight the warm wind swelled to a gale. Down at the end of the
garden the iron gate cried under the menace and torture of its grip. The
sound and the rush of it filled Prothero with exultation. Neither he nor
Laura slept.

She had moved her bed close up against his, and they lay side by side.
The room was a passage for the wind; it whirled down it like a mad
thing, precipitating itself towards the mouth of the night, where the
wide north window sucked it. On the floor and the long walls the very
darkness moved. The pale yellow disc that the guarded nightlight threw
upon the ceiling swayed incessantly at the driving of the wind. The
twilight of the white beds trembled.

Outside the gust staggered and drew back; it plunged forward again, with
its charge of impetus, and hurled itself against the gate. There was a
shriek of torn iron, a crash, and the long sweeping, rending cry of live
branches wrenched from their hold, lacerated and crushed, trailing and
clinging in their fall.

Owen dragged himself up on his pillows. Laura's arm was round him.

"It's nothing," she said, "only the gate. It was bound to go."

"The gate?"

It seemed to her touch that he drew himself together.

"I said I'd come back--through it----" he whispered. "I shall--come
back"--his voice gathered a sudden, terrible, hoarse vibration--"over
it--treading it down."

At that he coughed and turned from her, hiding his face. The
handkerchief she took from him was soaked in blood. He shuddered and
shrank back, overcome by the inveterate, ungovernable horror.

He lay very still, with closed eyes, afraid lest a movement or a word
should bring back the thing he loathed. Laura sat up and watched him.

Towards morning the wind dropped a little and there was some rain. The
air was warm with the wet south, and the garden sent up a smell, vivid
and sweet, the smell of a young spring day. Once the wind was so quiet
that she heard the clock strike in the hall of the hospital. She counted
seven strokes.

It grew warmer and warmer out there. Owen was very cold.

Laura ran down-stairs to telephone to the Doctor. She was gone about
five minutes.

And Prothero lay in his bed under the window with a pool of blood in the
hollow of the sheet where it had jetted, and the warm wind blowing over
his dead body.




LXVIII


Laura Prothero was sitting with Jane in the garden at Wendover one day
in that spring. It was a day of sudden warmth and stillness that brought
back vividly to both of them the hour of Owen's death.

They were touched by the beauty and the peace of this place where Nicky
lived his perfect little life. They had just agreed that it was Nicky's
life, Nicky's character, that had given to his garden its lucent,
exquisite tranquillity. You associated that quality so indivisibly with
Nicky that it was as if he flowered there, he came up every spring,
flaming purely, in the crocuses on the lawn. Every spring Nicky and a
book of poems appeared with the crocuses; the poems as Nicky made them,
but Nicky heaven-born, in an immortal innocence and charm.

It was incredible, they said, how heaven sheltered and protected Nicky.

He, with his infallible instinct for the perfect thing, had left them
together, alone in the little green chamber on the lawn, shut in by its
walls of yew. He was glad that he had this heavenly peace to give them
for a moment.

He passed before them now and then, pacing the green paths of the lawn
with Nina.

"No, Jinny, I am _not_ going on any more," Laura said, returning to the
subject of that intimate communion to which they had been left. "You
see, it ended as a sort of joke, his and mine--nobody else saw the point
of it. Why should I keep it up?"

"Wouldn't he have liked you to keep it up?"

"He would have liked me to please myself--to be happy. How can I be
happy going on--giving myself to the people who rejected _him_? I'm not
going to keep _that_ up."

"What will you do?"

Laura said that she would have enough to do, editing his poems and his
memoirs. Jane had not realized the memoirs. They were, Laura told her,
mainly a record of his life as a physician and a surgeon, a record so
simple that it only unconsciously revealed the man he was. George
Tanqueray had insisted on her publishing this first.

"I hated doing it for some things," she said. "It looks too like a
concession to this detestable British public. But I can't rest, Jinny,
till we've made him known. They'll see that he didn't shirk, that he
could beat the practical men--the men they worship--at their own game,
that he did something for the Empire. Then they'll accept the rest.
There's an awful irony in it, but I'm convinced that's the way his
immortality will come."

"It'll come anyway," said Jane.

"It'll come soonest this way. They'll believe in him to-morrow, because
of the things he did with his hands. His hands were wonderful. Ah,
Jinny, how could I ever want to write again?"