How grave it was, Jane, who had gone into it so lightly, was only just
aware. This family had an immense capacity for disapproval; it was
awful, as Eddy had observed, for not liking people. It was bound, in its
formidable integrity, to disapprove of her. She had felt that she had
disarmed its criticism only by becoming ill and making it sorry for her.

She had not been a week in Dr. Brodrick's house before she discovered
that these kind people had been sorry for her all the time. They were
sorry for her because she had to work hard, because she had no home and
no family visible about her. They refused to regard Nina and Laura as a
family, or the flat in Kensington Square as in any reasonable sense a
home. Jane could see that they were trying to make up to her for the
things that she had missed.

And in being sorry for Jane Holland they had lost sight of her
celebrity. They had not referred to it since the day, three months ago,
when she had first come to them, a brilliant, distracting alien. They
were still a little perturbed by the brilliance and distraction, and it
was as an alien that she moved among them still.

It was as an alien (she could see it plainly) that they were really
sorry for her. They seemed to agree with her in regarding her genius as
a thing tacked on to her, a thing disastrous, undesirable. They were
anxious to show her that its presence did not destroy for any of them
her personal charm. They betrayed their opinion that her charm existed
in spite rather than because of it.

Thus, by this shedding of her celebrity, Jane in the houses of the
Brodricks had found peace. She was secure from all the destroyers, from
the clever little people, from everything that carried with it the
dreadful literary taint. Brodrick's family was divinely innocent of the
literary taint. The worst that could be said of Brodrick was that he
would have liked to have it; but, under his editorial surface, he was
clean.

It was in Hugh Brodrick's house, that the immunity, the peace was most
profound. Hugh was not gregarious. Tanqueray could not have more
abhorred the social round. He had come near it, he had told her, in his
anxiety to know _her_, but his object attained, he had instantly dropped
out of it.

She knew where she was with him. In their long, subdued confidences he
had given her the sense that she had become the dominant interest, the
most important fact in his social life. And that, again, not because of
her genius, but, he almost definitely intimated, because of some mystic
moral quality in her. He did not intimate that he found her charming.
Jane had still serious doubts as to her charm, and Brodrick's monstrous
sincerity would have left her to perish of her doubt. She would not have
had him different. It was because of _his_ moral quality, his sincerity,
that she had liked him from the first.

Most certainly she liked him. If she had not liked him she would not
have come out so often to Roehampton and Wimbledon and Putney. She could
not help but like him when he so liked her, and liked her, not for the
things that she had done for literature, not for the things she had done
for him, but for her own sake. That was what she had wanted, to be liked
for her own sake, to be allowed to be a woman.

Unlike Tanqueray, Brodrick not only allowed her, he positively
encouraged her to be a woman. Evidently, in Brodrick's opinion she was
just like any other woman. He could see no difference between her and,
well, Gertrude Collett. Gertrude, Jane was sure, stood to Brodrick for
all that was most essentially and admirably feminine. Why he required so
much of Jane's presence when he could have Gertrude Collett's was more
than Jane could understand. She was still inclined to her conjecture
that he was using her to draw Miss Collett, playing her off against Miss
Collett, stinging Miss Collett to the desired frenzy by hanging that
admirable woman upon tenter-hooks. That was why Jane felt so safe with
him; because, she argued, he couldn't do it if he had not felt safe with
her. He was not in love with her. He was not even, like Tanqueray, in
love with her genius.

If she had had the slightest doubt about his attitude, his behaviour on
the day of her arrival had made it stand out sharp and clear. She had
dined at Moor Grange, and Caro Bickersteth had been there. Caro had
insisted on dragging Jane's genius from its temporary oblivion, and
Brodrick had turned silent and sulky, positively sulky then.

And in that mood he had remained for the two weeks that she had stayed
at Roehampton. He had betrayed none of the concern so evidently felt for
her by Eddy and Winny and Gertrude Collett and Mrs. Heron and the
doctor. They had all contended with each other in taking care of her, in
waiting on her hand and foot. But Brodrick, after bringing her there;
after, as she said, dumping her down, suddenly and heavily, on his
family, Brodrick had refused to compete; he had hung back; he had
withdrawn himself from the scene, maintaining his singular sulkiness and
silence.

She forgave him, for of course he was disturbed about Gertrude Collett.
If he wanted to marry Gertrude, why on earth couldn't he marry her and
have done with it? Jane thought.

In order to think better she had closed her eyes. When she opened them
again she found Brodrick seated in an opposite chair, quietly regarding
her. She was alone with him. The others had all gone.

"I wasn't asleep," said Jane.

"I didn't suppose you were," said Brodrick; "if you were reading
Prothero."

Brodrick's conscience was beginning to hurt him rather badly. There were
moments when he connected Jane's illness with Prothero's departure. He,
therefore, by sending Prothero away, was responsible for her illness.

"If you want to read," he said, "I'll go."

"I don't want to read. I want to talk."

"About Prothero?"

"No, not about Mr. Prothero. About that serial----"

"What serial?"

"My serial. Your serial," said she.

Brodrick said he wasn't going to talk shop on Sunday. He wanted to
forget that there were such things as serials.

"I wish _I_ could forget," said she.

She checked the impulse that was urging her to say, "You really ought to
marry Gertrude."

"I wish you could," he retorted, with some bitterness.

"How can I?" she replied placably, "when it was the foundation of our
delightful friendship?"

Brodrick said it had nothing whatever to do with their friendship.

"Well," said Jane, "if it wasn't that it was Hambleby."

At that Brodrick frowned so formidably that Jane could have cried out,
"For goodness' sake go and marry her and leave off venting your bad
temper upon me."

"It had to be something," said she. "Why shouldn't it be Hambleby? By
the way, George Tanqueray was perfectly right. I was in love with him. I
mean, of course, with Hambleby."

"You seem," said Brodrick, "to be in love with him still, as far as I
can make out."

"That's why," said Jane, "I can't help feeling that there's something
wrong with him. George says you never really know the people you're in
love with."

There was a gleam of interest now in Brodrick's face. He was evidently,
Jane thought, applying Tanqueray's aphorism to Gertrude.

"It doesn't make any difference," he said.

"I should have thought," said she, "it would have made _some_."

"It doesn't. If anything, you know them rather better."

"Oh," said she, "it makes _that_ difference, does it?"

Again she thought of Gertrude. "I wonder," she said pensively, "if you
really know."

"At any rate I know as much as Tanqueray."

"Do I bore you with Tanqueray?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"You don't deny his genius?"

"I don't deny anybody's genius," said Brodrick furiously.

Jane looked at him.

"I don't think it's nice of you," said she, "to talk that way to me when
I've been so ill."

"You've no right to be ill," said Brodrick, with undiminished rancour.

"I have," said Jane. "A perfect right. I can be as ill as ever I
please."

She looked at him again and caught him smiling surreptitiously under his
heavy gloom.

"I mean," he said, "you needn't be. You wouldn't be if you didn't work
so hard."

She crumpled her eyelids like one who fails to see.

"If I didn't what?"

"Work so hard."

He really wanted to know whether it was that or Prothero. First it had
been Tanqueray, and she had got over Tanqueray. Now he could only
suppose that it was Prothero. He would have to wait until she had got
over Prothero.

"I like that," said she, "when it's your serial I'm working on."

"Do you mean to tell me," said Brodrick, "that it's that?"

"I was trying to tell you, but you wouldn't let me talk about it. Not
that I wanted to talk about it when the bare idea of it terrifies me.
It's awful to have it hanging over me like this."

"Forget it. Forget it," he said.

"I can't. I'm afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Of not being able to finish it--of letting you down."

He turned and looked at her intently.

"That's why you've been killing yourself, is it?"

She did not answer.

"I didn't know. I didn't think," he said. "You should have told me."

"It's my fault. I ought to have known. I ought never to have tried."

"Why did you?" His sulkiness, his ferocity, was gone now; he was
gentleness itself.

"Because I wanted to please you."

There was an inarticulate murmur from Brodrick, a happy sound.

"Well," he said, "you shan't go on."

"But what can we do?"

"We'll do something. There are plenty of things that can be done."

"But--there's the magazine."

"I don't care," said the editor, "if the abominable thing goes smash."

"What? You can contemplate it's going smash?"

"I can't contemplate your being worried like this."

"It's people that worry me," she said--"if I only could have peace!"

She sketched for him as she had sketched for Tanqueray the horrors
brought on her by her celebrity.

"That's London," he said, as Tanqueray had said. "You should live out of
it."

"Nothing comes to me in the country."

He pondered a long time upon that saying.

"You wouldn't call this country, would you?" he said at last.

"Oh dear me, no."

"Well--what would you think of Putney or Wimbledon as a compromise?"

"There can't be any compromise."

"Why not? It's what we all have to come to."

"Not I. I can only write if I'm boxed up in my funny little square, with
the ash-trees weeping away in the middle."

"I don't wonder," said Brodrick, "that they weep."

"You think it's so terrible?"

"Quite terrible."

She laughed. "Do you remember how you came to see me there?"

"Yes. And how you took me for the man come to tune the piano."

He smiled, remembering it. A bell rang, summoning them, and he took no
notice. He smiled again; and suddenly a great shyness and a terror
overcame her.

"Don't you really think," said he, "that this sort of thing is nicer?"

"Oh, incomparably nicer. But isn't it getting rather cold?"

His face darkened. "Do you want to go in?"

"Yes."

They rose and went together into the house.

In the hall, through the open door of the drawing-room, she could see
the table laid for tea, and Gertrude sitting at it by herself, waiting
for them. His sister and the children had gone. Somehow she knew that he
had made them go. They would come back, he explained, with the carriage
that was to take her to the station, and they would say good-bye to her
before she went.

He evaded the drawing-room door and led the way into his library; and
she knew that he meant to have the last hour with her alone.

She paused on the threshold. She knew that if she followed him she would
never get away.

"Aren't we going," said she, "to have tea with Miss Collett?"

"Would you rather?"

"Much rather," said she.

"Very well, just as you like," he said stiffly.

He was annoyed again. All through tea-time he sulked, while Jane
sustained a difficult conversation with Miss Collett.

Miss Collett had lost much of her beautiful serenity. She was still a
charming hostess, but there was a palpable effort about her charm. She
looked as if she were beginning to suffer from the strain of Brodrick in
his present mood.

What Brodrick's mood was, or was beginning to be, Jane could no longer
profess to be unaware. While she talked thin talk to Gertrude about the
superiority of Putney Heath to Wimbledon Park, and of Brodrick's house
to the houses of the other Brodricks, she was thinking, "This woman was
happy in his house before I came. He would have been happy with her if
I hadn't come. It would be kinder of me if I were to keep out of it, and
let her have her chance."

And when she had said good-bye to Mrs. Heron and the children, and found
herself in the doctor's brougham, shut up all alone with Brodrick, she
said to herself that it was for the last time. When she let him take her
back to Kensington Square, when she let him sit with her there for ten
minutes in the half-darkness, she said to herself that it was for the
last time. And when he rose suddenly, almost violently, for departure,
she knew it was for the last time.

"It was good of you," she said, "to bring me home."

"Do you call _this_ a home?" said Brodrick.

"Why not? It's all I want."

"Is it?" he said savagely, and left her.

He was intensely disagreeable; but that also, she told herself, was for
the last time.

As long as Brodrick was there she could listen to the voice inside her,
murmuring incessantly of last times, and ordering her to keep out of it
and let the poor woman have her chance.

But when he was gone another voice, that was there too, told her that
she could not keep out of it. She was being drawn in again, into the
toils of life. When it had seemed to her that she drew, she was being
drawn. She was drawn by all the things that she had cut herself off
from, by holding hands, and searching eyes, and unforgotten
tendernesses. In the half-darkness of her room the faces she had been
living with were all about her. She felt again the brushing of Winny's
hair over her cheek. She heard Winny's mother saying that she liked her.
She saw Brodrick sitting opposite her, and the look with which he had
watched her when he thought she was asleep.

And when the inward admonitory voice reiterated, "Don't be drawn," the
other answered, "Whether I'm out of it or in it the poor woman hasn't
got a chance."




XXX


It had not occurred to Gertrude that she had a chance. To have
calculated chances would have seemed to her the last profanity, so
consecrated was her attitude to Brodrick and to all that was Brodrick's.
Her chance was, and it always had been, the chance of serving him. She
had it. What more, she said to herself, could a woman want?

The peace she had folded round Brodrick wrapped her too. In the quiet
hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock, nothing had happened to
disturb her beautiful serenity. It was by the cultivation of a beautiful
serenity that she had hoped to strengthen her appeal to Brodrick and her
position in his house. In the beginning that position had been so
fragile and infirm that she had had then no trust in its continuance.
Three years ago she had come to him, understanding that she was not to
stay. She was a far removed, impoverished cousin of Mrs. John
Brodrick's. Hence her claim. They had stretched the point of cousinship
to shelter the proprieties so sacred to every Brodrick. He had not
wanted her. He preferred a housekeeper who was not a lady, who would not
have to be, as he expressed it, all over the place. But he was sorry for
the impoverished lady and he had let her come. Then his sister Sophy had
urged him to keep her on until he married. Sophy meant until he married
the lady she intended him to marry. He had not married that lady nor any
other; he was not going to marry at all, he told them. But he had kept
Gertrude on.

He had said at the time that he didn't think she would do, but he would
try her. He regarded Gertrude with the suspicion a Brodrick invariably
entertained for any idea that was not conspicuously his own. But
Gertrude had managed, with considerable adroitness, to convince him that
she was, after all, his own idea. And when Sophy Levine triumphed, as a
Brodrick invariably did triumph, in the proved perfection of her scheme,
he said, Yes, Miss Collett was all right, now that he had trained her.
If he approved of Miss Collett it was because she was no longer
recognizable as the Miss Collett they had so preposterously thrust on
him. He could not have stood her if she had been.

Brodrick was right. Gertrude was not the same woman. She did not even
look the same. She had come to Moor Grange lean, scared, utterly
pathetic, with a mouth that drooped. So starved of all delight and of
all possession was Gertrude that she flushed with pleasure when she
heard that she was to have for her very own the little north room where
the telephone was now. There was such pathos in her meek withdrawal into
that little north room, that Brodrick hadn't the heart to keep her in
it. The drawing-room, he had intimated, also might be hers, when (it was
understood rather than stated) he wasn't there himself.

By that time he no longer objected to Gertrude's being all over the
place. Brodrick, though he did not know it and his sisters did, was the
sort of man who could not be happy without a woman to look after him.
Silently, almost furtively, Gertrude made herself indispensable to him.
She knew what he wanted before he knew it himself, and was on the spot
to supply it. Thus, watching the awful increase of Brodrick's
correspondence, as the editor grew great, she was prepared for the
coming of a secretary and had forestalled it.

She had kept herself prepared for the coming of a wife, a mistress of
Brodrick's house, and by making Brodrick supremely comfortable she had
managed to forestall that too. His secretary had become the companion
that his housekeeper could not hope to be. Hitherto he had kept Gertrude
Collett out of his library as far as possible. Now her intrusion had the
consecration of business, and it was even permissible for Gertrude to
spend long hours with him in the sanctuary. Brodrick invariably
breakfasted alone. This habit and his deadly and perpetual dining out,
had been a barrier to all intimacy. But now a large part of his work on
the "Monthly Review" could be done at home in the evenings, so that the
editor had less time for dining out. And latterly he had taken to
coming home early in the afternoons, when he rather liked to have
Gertrude in the drawing-room pouring out tea for him. She filled the
place of something that he missed, that he was as yet hardly aware of
missing. It seemed to him that he had got used to Gertrude.

He could not think what life would be like without Gertrude, any more
than he could think what it would be like with her in a closer and more
intimate relation. For none of them had ever suggested that he should
marry Gertrude. No Brodrick would have dreamed of marrying his
housekeeper. Gertrude would not have dreamed of it herself.

And yet she dreamed. But her dream was of continuance in the silent,
veiled adventure, the mystery and religion of her service. Service to
Brodrick, perpetual, unwearying service, constituted to her mind the
perfect tie. It was the purity of it that she counted as perfection. She
desired nothing further than her present surrender to the incorruptible,
inassailable passion of service. Whenever, in her dream, she touched the
perilous edges of devotion, Gertrude had pulled herself back. She had
told herself that she was there for nothing in the world but to save
Brodrick, to save him trouble, to save him worry, to save him expense;
to save and save and save. That was really what it came to when she
saved him from having to keep a secretary.

For Gertrude lived and moved and had her sentimental being in Brodrick.
Thus she had laboured at her own destruction. So preoccupied was she
with the thought of Brodrick that her trouble, travelling along secret
paths of the nerves and brain, had subtly, insensibly communicated
itself to him. He grew restless in that atmosphere of unrest. If
Gertrude could have kept, inwardly, her visible beautiful serenity,
Brodrick, beguiled by the peace she wrapped him in, might have remained
indefinitely quiescent. But he had become the centre of a hundred
influences, wandering spirits of Gertrude's brain. Irresistibly urging,
intangibly irritating, perpetually suggesting, they had prepared him for
the dominion of Jane Holland. But Gertrude was not aware of this. Her
state, which had begun within a few months of her arrival, remained for
three years a secret to herself. She was before all things a
sentimentalist, and she had the sentimentalist's monstrous innocence and
boundless capacity for illusion. She shuddered in the grip of mortal
renunciation, and called her state holy, when adoration and desire were
fused in a burning beatitude at the approach of Brodrick. In her three
years' innocence she continued unaware that her emotions had any root in
flesh and blood; and Brodrick was not the man to enlighten her. His
attitude was such as to nourish and perpetuate her beautiful serenity.

It was with the coming of Jane Holland that disturbance had begun; a
trouble so mysterious and profound that, if her conscience probed it,
the seat of it remained hidden from the probe. She thought, in her
innocence, that she was going to have an illness; but it had not struck
her that her symptoms were aggravated by Miss Holland's presence and
became intense to excruciation in those hours when she knew that
Brodrick and Miss Holland were off together somewhere, and alone. She
sickened at the thought, and was unaware that she was sick. This
unconsciousness of hers was fostered by all the conventions of her
world, a world that veils itself decorously in the presence of the
unveiled; and she was further helped by her own anxiety to preserve the
perfect attitude, to do the perfect thing.

She was not even aware that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was
rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly
on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a
perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned Miss Holland.
Thus she found herself positively looking forward to Miss Holland's
coming, actually absorbed in thinking of her, wondering where she was,
and what she was doing when she was not there.

It ended in wonder; for Brodrick was the only person who could have
informed her, and he had grown curiously reticent on the subject of Jane
Holland. He would say that she was coming, or that she was not coming,
on such or such a day. That was all. Her coming on some day or the other
was a thing that Gertrude had now to take for granted. She tried to
discuss it eagerly with Brodrick; she dwelt on it with almost
affectionate solicitude; you would have said that Brodrick could not
have desired it more than she did.

In the last two weeks Gertrude found something ominous in Brodrick's
silence and sulkiness. And on this Sunday, the day of Jane's departure,
she was no longer able to ignore their significance. Very soon he would
come to her and tell her that he did not want her; that she must go;
that she must make room for Miss Holland.

That night, after Brodrick had returned from taking Jane Holland home,
his secretary came to him in the library. She found him standing by the
writing-table, looking intently at something which he held in his hand,
something which, as Gertrude appeared to him, he thrust hastily into a
drawer.

"May I speak to you a moment?" she said.

"Certainly."

He turned, patient and polite, prepared to deal, as he had dealt before,
with some illusory embarrassment of Gertrude's.

"You are not pleased with me," she said, forcing the naked statement
through hard lips straight drawn.

"What makes you think so?"

"Your manner has been different."

"Then what you mean is that you are not pleased with my manner. My
manner is unfortunate."

He was almost oppressively patient and polite.

"Would it not be better," she said, "for me to go?"

"Certainly not. Unless you want to."

"I don't say that I want to. I say it might be better."

Still, with laborious, weary patience, he protested. He was entirely,
absolutely satisfied. He had never dreamed of her going. The idea was
preposterous, and it was her own idea, not his.

She looked at him steadily, with eyes prepared to draw truth from him by
torture.

"And there is no reason?" she said. "You can think of no reason why it
would be better for me to go?"

He hesitated a perceptible instant before he answered her.

"There is no reason," he said; and having said it, he left the room.

He had paused to gather patience in exasperation. Gertrude interpreted
the pause as the impressive stop before the final, irrevocable decision;
a decision favourable to her continuance.

She was not appeased by it. Her anxiety rather had taken shape,
resolving itself into a dreadful suspicion as to the relations between
Brodrick and Miss Holland.

He was not thinking of marrying Miss Holland. But there was something
between them, something which by no means necessitated her own
departure, which indeed rendered superfluous any change in the
arrangements she had made so perfect. It was not likely that Brodrick,
at his age, should desire to change them. He might be in love with Jane
Holland. He was wedded to order and tranquillity and peace. And she
never would be. There was wild, queer blood in her. Her writings proved
her lawless, defiant, contemptuous of propriety. She had, no doubt,
claimed the right of genius to make its own rules.

Gertrude's brain, which had been passive to the situation, now worked
with uncontrolled activity. She found herself arguing it out. If it were
so, whatever was, or had been, or would be between them, it was
transitory. It would run its course and period, and she would remain,
and he would return to her. She had only to wait and serve; to serve and
wait. It seemed to her then that her passion rose above theirs, white
with renunciation, a winged prayer, a bloodless, bodiless longing,
subtler than desire, sounding a poignant spiritual cry.

And all the time she knew that her suspicion was not justified. Jane
Holland was honest; and as for him, she was not even sure that he cared
for her.

Every instinct in her was now subdued to the craving to be sure, to know
how far the two were going or had gone. Whatever was between them, it
was something that Brodrick desired to conceal, to thrust out of her
sight, as he had thrust the thing he had held in his hand.

Up-stairs overhead, she heard the door of his room opening and
shutting. She saw the light from his windows lengthening on the gravel
path outside. He was not coming back.

She opened the drawer where she divined that it lurked hidden, the thing
that was the sign and symbol of their secret. She found lying there,
face downwards, a portrait of Jane Holland, a photograph of the painting
by Gisborne. She took it in her hand and looked at the queer,
half-plain, half-beautiful, wholly fascinating face; and it was as if
she looked for the first time on the face of her own passion, dully,
stupidly, not knowing it for the thing it was. She had a sudden vision
of their passion, Jane's and Brodrick's, as it would be; she saw the
transitory, incarnate thing, flushed in the splendour of its moment,
triumphant, exultant and alive.

She laid the portrait in its drawer again, face downwards, and turned
from it. And for a moment she stood there, clutching her breasts with
her hands, so that she hurt them, giving pain for intolerable pain.




XXXI


Now that the thing she was afraid of had become a fact, she told herself
that she might have known, that she had known it all the time. As she
faced it she realized how terribly afraid she had been. She had had
foreknowledge of it from the moment when Jane Holland came first into
Brodrick's house.

She maintained her policy of silence. It helped her, as if she felt
that, by ignoring this thing, by refusing to talk about it, by not
admitting that anything so preposterous could be, it did somehow cease
to be.

She would have been glad if Brodrick's family could have remained
unaware of the situation. But Brodrick's family, by the sheer instinct
of self-preservation, was awake to everything that concerned it.

Every Brodrick, once he had passed the privileged years of his minority,
knew that grave things were expected of him. It was expected of him,
first of all, that he should marry; and that, not with the levity of
infatuation, but soberly and seriously, for the good and for the
preservation of the race of Brodricks in its perfection. As it happened,
in the present generation of Brodricks, not one of them had done what
was expected of them, except Sophy. John had fallen in love with a
fragile, distinguished lady, and had incontinently married her; and she
had borne him no children. Henry, who should have known better, had
fallen in love with a lady so excessively fragile that she had died
before he could marry her at all. And because of his love for her he had
remained unmarried. Frances had set her heart on a rascal who had left
her for the governess. And now Hugh, with his Jane Holland, bid fair to
be similarly perverse.

For every Brodrick took, not delight, so much as a serious and sober
satisfaction, in the thought that he disappointed expectation. Each one
believed himself the creature of a solitary and majestic law. His
actions defied prediction. He felt it as an impertinence that anybody,
even a Brodrick, should presume to conjecture how a Brodrick would, in
any given circumstances, behave. He held it a special prerogative of
Brodricks, this capacity for accomplishing the unforeseen. Nobody was
surprised when the unforeseen happened; for this family made it a point
of honour never to be surprised. The performances of other people,
however astounding, however eccentric, appeared to a Brodrick as the
facilely calculable working of a law from which a Brodrick was exempt.
Whatever another person did, it was always what some Brodrick had
expected him to do. Even when Frances's husband ran away with the
governess and broke the heart Frances had set on him, it was only what
John and Henry and Sophy and Hugh had known would happen if she married
him. If it hadn't happened to a Brodrick, they would hardly have blamed
Heron for his iniquity; it was so inherent in him and predestined.

So, when it seemed likely that Hugh would marry Jane Holland, the
Brodricks were careful to conceal from each other that they were
unprepared for this event. They discussed it casually, and with less
emotion than they had given to the wild project of the magazine.

It was on a Sunday evening at the John Brodricks', shortly after Jane
had left Putney.

"It strikes me," said John who began it, "that one way or another Hugh
is seeing a great deal of Miss Holland."

"My dear John, why shouldn't he?" said Frances Heron.

"I'm not saying that he shouldn't. I'm saying that one way or another,
he does."

"He has to see her on business," said Frances.

"_Does_ he see her on business?" inquired John.

"He says he does," said Frances.

"Of course," said the Doctor, "he'd _say_ he did."

"Why," said Sophy, "does he say anything at all? That's the suspicious
circumstance, to my mind."

"He's evidently aware," said the Doctor, "that something wants
explaining."

"So it does," said Sophy; "when Hugh takes to seeing any woman more than
once in five months."

"But she's the last woman he'd think of," said Frances.

"It's the last woman a man thinks of that he generally ends by
marrying," said John.

"If he'd only think of her," said the Doctor, "he'd be safe enough."

"I know. It's his not thinking," said John; "it's his dashing into it
with his eyes shut."

"Do you think," said Frances, "we'd better open his eyes?"

"If you do that," said Levine, "he'll marry her to-morrow."

"Yes," said the Doctor; "much better encourage him, give him his head."

"And fling her at it?" suggested Sophy.

"Well, certainly, if we don't want it to happen, we'd better assume that
it will happen."

"Supposing," said Frances presently, "it did happen--what then?"

"My dear Frances, it would be most undesirable," said John.

"By all means," said Levine, "let us take the worst for granted. Then
possibly he'll think better of it."

The family, therefore, adopted its characteristic policy of assuming
Hugh's intentions to be obvious, of refusing to be surprised or even
greatly interested.

Only the Doctor, watching quietly, waited for his moment. It came the
next evening when he dropped in to dine with Hugh. He turned the
conversation upon Jane Holland, upon her illness, upon its cause and her
recovery.

"I shouldn't be surprised," said he, "if some time or other she was to
have a bad nervous break-down."

Hugh laughed. "My dear Henry, you wouldn't be surprised if everybody had
a bad nervous break-down. It's what you're always expecting them to
have."

Henry said he _did_ expect it in women of Miss Holland's physique, who
habitually over-drive their brains beyond the power of their body. He
became excessively professional as he delivered himself on this head.

It was his subject. He was permitted to enlarge upon it from time to
time, and Hugh was not in the least surprised at his entering on it now.
It was what he had expected of Henry, and he said so.

Henry looked steadily at his brother.

"I have had her," said he, "under very close observation."

"So have I," said Hugh. "You forget that she is an exceptional woman."

"On the contrary, I think her so very exceptional as to be quite
abnormal. Geniuses generally are."

"I don't know. For a woman to live absolutely alone, as she does, and
thrive on it, and turn out the work she does--It's a pretty fair test of
sanity."

"That she should have chosen to do so is itself abnormal."

"It's not a joyous or a desirable life for her, if that's what you
mean," said Hugh.

But that was not what the Doctor meant, and he judged it discreet to
drop the discussion at that point.

And, as for several weeks he saw and heard no more of Miss Holland, he
judged that Hugh had begun to think, and that he had thought better of
it.

For the Doctor knew what he was talking about. When a Brodrick meant to
marry, he did not lose his head about a woman, he married sanely,
soberly and decorously, for the sake of children. It was so that their
father had married. It was so that John--well, John had been a little
unfortunate. It was so that he, the Doctor----

He stopped short in his reflections, remembering how it was that he had
remained unmarried. Like every other Brodrick he had reserved for
himself the privilege of the unexpected line.




XXXII


Every year, about the middle of August, Brodrick's family dispersed for
the summer holidays. Every year, about the middle of September, its
return was celebrated at a garden-party given by the Levines.

Brodrick's brother-in-law lived with an extreme simplicity in one of
those square white houses in St. John's Wood, houses secluded behind
high, mysterious walls, where you entered, as by secret, through a
narrow door.

The party had streamed through this door, over the flagged path and
through the house, into the small, dark, green garden at the back, a
garden that seemed to guard, like the house, its secret and its mystery.
There, on this yearly festival, you were certain to find all the
Brodricks, packed rather tight among a crowd of Levines and their
collaterals from Fitzjohn's Avenue, a crowd of very dark, very
large-eyed, very curly-haired persons, persons attired with sobriety,
almost with austerity, by way of protest against the notorious excesses
of their race.

And with them there was always, on this occasion, a troop of little boys
and girls, dark, solemn-eyed little boys and girls, with incredibly
curly hair, and strange, unchildlike noses.

Moving restlessly among them, or grouped apart, you came upon friends of
the Brodricks and Levines, and here and there a few journalists,
conspicuously tired young men who toiled nocturnally on the "Morning
Telegraph."

This year it was understood that the party would be brilliant. The young
men turned up in large numbers and endeavoured to look for the occasion
a little less tired than they were. All the great writers on the
"Monthly Review" had been invited and many of them came.

Caro Bickersteth was there; she came early, and Sophy Levine, in a
discreet aside, implored her to give her a hand with the authors.
Authors, Sophy intimated, were too much for her, and there would be a
lot of them. There was Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning, and Jane
Holland, of course----

"Of course," said Caro, twinkling.

"And Mr. Tanqueray."

At that name Caro raised her eyebrows and remarked that Sophy was a
lucky lady to get Him, for He never went anywhere. Then Caro became
abstracted, wondering why George Tanqueray was coming, and to this
particular show.

"Will his wife be here?" she inquired.

"Dear me," said Sophy, "I never asked her. You don't somehow think of
him as married."

"I doubt," said Caro; "if he thinks so of himself. There never was a man
who looked it less."

Most singularly unattached he looked, as he stood there, beside Nina
Lempriere and Laura Gunning, drawn to them, but taking hardly more
notice of them than of any Brodrick or Levine. He was watching Jinny as
she moved about in the party. She had arrived somewhat conspicuously,
attended by Brodrick, by Winny Heron and by Eddy, with the two elder
little Levines clinging to her gown.

Jane was aware that Nina and Laura were observing her; she was aware of
a shade of anxiety in their concentration. Then she knew that Tanqueray
was there, too, that he was watching her, that his eyes never left her.

He did not seek her out after their first greeting. He preferred to
stand aside and watch her. He had arrived later and he was staying late.
Jane felt that it would become her not to stay. But Brodrick would not
let her go. He took possession of her. He paraded her as his possession
under Tanqueray's eyes; eyes that were fixed always upon Jane,
vigilantly, anxiously, as if he saw her caught in the toils.

An hour passed. The party dwindled and dissolved around them. The
strangers were gone. The hordes of Levines had scattered to their houses
in Fitzjohn's Avenue. The little Levines had been gathered away by their
nurses from the scene. Only Brodrick and his family remained, and Jane
with them, and Tanqueray who kept on looking at the two while he talked
vaguely to Levine.

Brodrick's family was not less interested or less observant. It had
accepted without surprise what it now recognized as inevitable. It could
no longer hope that Hugh would cease from his insane pursuit of Jane
Holland, after making the thing thus public, flourishing his intentions
in the face of his family. With a dexterity in man[oe]uvre, an audacity,
an obstinacy that was all his own, Hugh had resisted every attempt to
separate him from Miss Holland. He only let go his hold when Sophy
Levine, approaching with an admirable air of innocence in guile,
announced that Baby was being put to bed. She suggested that Jane might
like to see him in his--well, in his perfection. It was impossible,
Sophy maintained, for anybody not to desire above all things to see him.

Up-stairs in the nursery, Winny and Mrs. Heron were worshipping Baby as
he lay on the nurse's lap, in his perfection, naked from his bath. Sophy
could not wait till he was given up to her. She seized him, in the
impatience of maternal passion. She bent over him, hiding her face with
his soft body.

Presently her eyes, Sophy's beautiful, loving eyes, looked up at Jane
over the child's shoulder, and their gaze had guile as well as love in
it. Jane stood before it motionless, impassive, impenetrable.

Winny fell on her knees in a rapture.

"Oh, Miss Holland!" she cried. "Don't you love him?"

Jane admitted that she rather liked him.

"She's a wretch," said Sophy. "Baby duckums, she says she rather likes
you."

Baby chuckled as if he appreciated the absurdity of Jane's moderation.

"Oh, don't you want," said Winny, "don't you want to kiss his little
feet? Wouldn't you love to have him for your very own?"

"No, Winny, I shouldn't know what to do with him."

"Wouldn't you?" said Mrs. Heron.

"Feel," said Winny, "how soft he is. He's got teeny, teeny hairs, like
down, golden down, just there, on his little back."

Jane stooped and stroked the golden down. And at the touch of the
child's body, a fine pain ran from her finger-tips to her heart, and she
drew back, as one who feels, for the first time, the touch of life,
terrible and tender.

"Oh, Jane," said Sophy, "what are you made of?"

"I wonder----" said Mrs. Heron.

Jane knew that the eyes of the two women were on her, searching her, and
that Sophy's eyes were not altogether kind. She continued in her
impassivity, smiling a provoking and inscrutable smile.

"She looks," said Sophy, "as if she knew a great deal. And she doesn't
know, Baby dear, she doesn't know anything at all."

"Wait," said Mrs. Heron, "till she's got babies of her own. Then she'll
know."

"I know now," said Jane calmly.

"Not you," said Sophy almost fiercely, as she carried the little thing
away to his bed beside her own. Winny and the nurse followed her. Jane
was alone with Frances Heron.

"No woman," said Frances, "knows anything till she's had a child."

"Oh, you married women!"

"Even a married woman. She doesn't know what her love for her husband is
until she's held his child at her breast. And she may be as stupid as
you please; but she knows more than you."

"I know what she knows--I was born knowing. But if I were married, if I
had children, I should know nothing, nothing any more."

Frances was silent.

"They--they'd press up so close to me that I should see nothing--not
even them."

"Don't you want them to press?"

"It doesn't matter what I want. It's what I see. And they wouldn't let
me see."

"They'd make you feel," said Frances.

"Feel? I should think they would. I should feel _them_, I should feel
for them, I should feel nothing else besides."

"But," persisted Frances, "you would feel."

"Do you think I don't?" said Jane.

"Well, there are some things--I don't see how you can--without
experience."

"Experience? Experience is no good--the experience you mean--if you're
an artist. It spoils you. It ties you hand and foot. It perverts you,
twists you, blinds you to everything but yourself and it. I know
women--artists--who have never got over their experience, women who'll
never do anything again because of it."

"Then, my dear," said Frances, "you would say that geniuses would do
very much better not to marry?" Her voice was sweet, but there was a
light of sword-play in her eyes.

"I do say it--if they're thinking of their genius."

"Would you say it to Hugh?"

The thrust flashed sharp and straight.

"Why not?" said Jane, lightly parrying the thrust.

Sophy appeared again at that moment and said good-bye. They held her at
parting with a gaze that still searched her and found her impenetrable.
Their very embrace dismissed her and disapproved.

Tanqueray was waiting for her at the gate. He was going to see her home,
he said. He wanted to talk to her. They could walk through Regent's Park
towards Baker Street.

They had left the Levines' some way behind them when he turned to her.

"Jinny," he said, "what are you doing in that galley?"

"What are you doing in it yourself, George?"

"I? I came to see you. I was told you would be there. You know, you _do_
let yourself in for people."

"Do I?"

"You do. And these Brodricks aren't your sort. No good can come of your
being mixed up with them. Why do you do these things?" he persisted.

"They're kind to me," she pleaded.

"Kind? Queer sort of kindness, when you're working yourself to death for
that fellow and his magazine."

"I'm not. He'll let me off any day. He said he'd rather his magazine
smashed than I did."

"And you believed him?"

"I believed him."

"Then," said Tanqueray, "it's more serious than I thought."

His eyes rested on her, their terrible lucidity softened by some veil.
"Do you like him, Jinny?" he said.

"Do I like him? Yes."

"Why do you like him?"

"I think, perhaps, because he's good."

"That's how he has you, is it?"

He paused.

"Brodrick doesn't know you, Jinny, as I know you."

"That's it," she said. "I wonder if you do."

"I think I do. Better, perhaps, in some ways, than you know yourself."

He was silent for a little time. The sound of his slow feet on the
gravel measured the moments of his thought.

"Jinny," he said at last, "I'm going to talk truth to you." Again he
paused. "Because I don't think anybody else will."

"There are things," he said, "that are necessary to women like Mrs.
Levine and Mrs. Heron, that are not necessary to you. You have moments
when your need of these things is such that you think life isn't worth
living unless you get them. Those moments are bound to come, because
you're human. But they pass. They pass. Especially if you don't attend
to them. The real, permanent, indestructible thing in you is the need,
the craving, the impulse to create Hamblebys. It can't pass. You know
that. What you won't admit is that you're mistaking the temporary,
passing impulse for a permanent one. No woman will tell you that it's
temporary. They'll all take the sentimental view of it, as you do.
Because, Jinny, the devilish thing about it is that, when this folly
falls upon a woman, she thinks it's a divine folly."

He looked at her again with the penetrating eyes that saw everything.

"It may be," he said. "It may be. But the chances are it isn't."

"Tanks," she said, "you're very hard on me."

"That's just what I'm not. I'm tenderer to you than you are yourself."

It was hard to take in, the idea of his tenderness to her.

"Think--think, before you're drawn in."

"I am thinking," she said.

Tanqueray's voice insisted. "It's easy to get in; but it isn't so jolly
easy to get out."

"And if I don't want," she murmured, "to get out----?"

He looked at her and smiled, reluctantly, as if compelled by what he saw
in her.

"It's your confounded Jinniness!"

At last he had acknowledged it, her quality. He revolted against it, as
a thing more provoking, more incorrigible than mere womanhood.

"It'll always tug you one way and your genius another. I'm only asking
you which is likely to be stronger?"

"Do I know, George? Do _you_ know?"

"I've told you," he said. "I think I do."




XXXIII


Three weeks later, one afternoon in October, Jane found herself going at
a terrific pace through Kensington Gardens. Brodrick had sent word that
he would see her at five o'clock, and it wanted but a few minutes of
that hour.

When Tanqueray sounded his warning, he did not measure the effect of the
illumination that it wrought. The passion he divined in her had had a
chance to sleep as long as it was kept in the dark. Now it was wide
awake, and superbly aware of itself and of its hour.

After she had parted from him Jane saw clearly how she had been drawn,
and why. There was no doubt that the folly had come upon her; the folly
that Tanqueray told her she would think divine. She not only thought it
divine, she felt it to be divine with a certainty that Tanqueray himself
could not take away from her.

Very swiftly the divine folly had come upon her. She could not say
precisely at what moment, unless it were three weeks ago, when she had
stood dumb before the wise women, smitten by a mortal pang, invaded by
an inexplicable helplessness and tenderness. It was then that she had
been caught in the toils of life, the snares of the folly.

For all its swiftness, she must have had a premonition of it. That was
why she had tried so desperately to build the house of life for Brodrick
and Miss Collett. She had laboured at the fantastic, monstrous
fabrication, as if in that way only she could save herself.

She had been afraid of it. She had fought it desperately. In the teeth
of it she had sat down to write, to perfect a phrase, to finish a
paragraph abandoned the night before; and she had found herself
meditating on Brodrick's moral beauty.

She knew it for the divine folly by the way it dealt with her. It made
her the victim of preposterous illusions. The entire district round
about Putney became for her a land of magic and of splendour. She could
not see the word Putney posted on a hoarding without a stirring of the
spirit and a beating of the heart. When she closed her eyes she saw in a
vision the green grass plots and sinuous gravel walks of Brodrick's
garden, she heard as in a vision the silver chiming of the clock, an
unearthly clock, measuring immortal hours.

The great wonder of this folly was that it took the place of the
creative impulse. Not only did it possess her to the exclusion of all
other interests, but the rapture of it was marvellously akin to the
creative ecstasy.

It drove her now at a furious pace through the Gardens and along the
High Street. It caused her to exult in the face of the great golden
October sunset piled high in the west. It made her see Brodrick
everywhere. The Gardens were a green paradise with the spirit of
Brodrick moving in them like a god. The High Street was a golden road
with Brodrick at the end of it. The whole world built itself into a
golden shrine for Brodrick. He was coming to see her at five o'clock.

He was not there, in her room, when she arrived. But he had been there
so often that he pervaded and dominated the place, as Tanqueray had once
dominated and pervaded it. He had created such a habit, such a
superstition of himself that his bodily presence was no longer necessary
to its support. There was a chair by the fireplace, next the window. She
could not see it now without seeing Brodrick, without seeing a look he
had, when, as he sat there silent, his eyes had held her, covered her,
caressed her. There were times when he had the gestures and the manner
of a man sitting by his own fireside, taking her and all that she
signified for granted, establishing between them a communion in which
the poignant, ultimate things were not said because they were so
profoundly felt.