"What? I think I ought to know what Mr. Jeffries may have thought."
Kitty hesitated, and then, with a little burst, told her. It was curious. It appeared that Mr. Jeffries had been very hard up indeed, so hard up that, quite recently, he had actually had to take a position as a commissionaire. It was known, and possibly he had set any oddities of behaviour towards himself down to that.
A commissionaire! Louie was astounded.
"And aren"t you going to tell him?" she managed to get out.
"I must, the very next time I see him."
"You mean to-morrow?"
"I don"t know. You see"--Kitty hesitated again--"he"s left the School.
Practically been dismissed. He"s got some work at Bedford now."
"Dismissed on account of this?"
"I expect so."
"And now, of course, you"ve got to tell him that you believed this?"
Kitty dropped her head on the bed. She gave a little moan. "I don"t know how I shall ever do it!" she groaned in the bedclothes.
Louie considered herself ent.i.tled to agree that it wouldn"t be easy.
Presently Kitty rose. She crossed to Louie"s mirror and adjusted the boat-shaped hat. Then she came back to the bedside again and craned her head forward.
"May I see the baby?" she asked.
"Another time, I think," said Louie, her lips compressed.
Kitty left.
Louie"s mind was in a whirl. At her request, Kitty had turned out the gas before leaving, and only a nightlight glimmered on the little invalid"s table. She gazed at it. So she too had been haled into the drama!
On the young fancy stationer she wasted never a thought, either of indignation or of anything else; but Kitty--Evie Soames--Mr.
Jeffries--Roy--herself!--What a nightmare--what a pantomime! What an incredible genius this Mr. Jeffries seemed to have for getting himself into complications and dragging other people after him! It might well have puzzled anybody--anybody who had not the key of the puzzle--to know which among them all he really had honoured with his choice! Only Miss Levey seemed to be immune. Surely, for the sake of completeness, he could have found a way of dragging her in too!
Louie had to hold her key exceedingly firmly in order to retain even that lunatic theory that seemed to be the truth.
By dint of holding fast, however, the theory still stood the strain.
Evie Soames and Mr. Jeffries were still the central figures of the piece. Kitty was still the stalking-horse behind which, for whatever reasons, he machinated. She herself was still merely dragged in at the whim of a vicious little scoundrel over whose tongue whisky and calumnies ran indifferently, and this little beast was still engaged, or all but engaged, to Evie Soames. Yes, the triangle re-established itself. Kitty and herself were no more than imported complications.
The big man and the red-waistcoated youth were still the protagonists, and they faced one another over the stupid little head of Evie Soames.
And yet Louie, lying with her boy at her breast and blinking at the nightlight, refused to cla.s.s herself with the superfluous Kitty. She did not see herself in a "walking on" part. Though she made her entry late, something told her that she would have a word to say--or else it was a botched and mangled piece indeed. Of life itself as a botched and mangled piece she had no conception; though she kept her thoughts of Him locked within her own breast, it was still the bed of them that there _was_ an Artist over all. But for a false start she would have been on the stage now, and she would have given a voice to that pitiful part of poor Kitty"s. Say she had not left that Holborn School when she did--she remembered that breaking-up dance--had one more opportunity like that been given to her----
Then in the darkness she coloured violently. She had realised her own thoughts. This was as much as to say that she would have accepted Kitty"s role--would have consented to be an understudy--would, like other understudies, have ousted the princ.i.p.al in time--would have topped the bill with a man the latest of whose mysterious activities was that he had been a commissionaire----
She loved, or was on the point of loving, Mr. Jeffries----
"Nonsense!" she ridiculed herself.
But nonsense or not, it was stronger than all her efforts to think about something else. Perhaps it was her own false start that set her wondering, and ever returning to her wonder, whether he had not made one too. He seemed to have set up the figure of Evie Soames in his own imagination, and probably had not looked at Evie Soames as she actually was since. He seemed to have his full share of that masculine vanity which will have nothing to do with the compromise by which the world jogs on; his rapt, lion"s eyes might see visions afar off, and he would not as much as know that his shins were black and raw with the bruises of the hard facts among which he stumbled. Little as Louie knew of him, she thought she knew that. Lucky Evie Soames, who might be as stupid as the mud beneath her feet, yet in one man"s blind, far-seeing eyes could do no wrong!
But of course it was nonsense that Louie should have to recognise Evie Soames for her rival.
Yet, on one other point, as she lay with the babe at her breast and her eyes fixed on the little flame of the nightlight, she was already prepared to make a wager with herself. Her theory was still only a theory; she could not prove it; but it could prove itself. It would work out or it would not work out; if it worked out--well, Louie was a woman, and no woman hesitates for a single moment to put on the mantle of the prophet. Indeed, she had prophesied long before. "Circ.u.mstances are strong," this Mr. Jeffries who had since been a commissionaire had admitted when she had danced with him, "but is anybody ever beaten unless they deserve to be?" And he had taken his failure in the examination as a sign that he ought not to have gone in for it, and had refused to enter again. Yes, the earthenware vessel was on the point of collision with the one of bronze, and which would break the months or the weeks or the days would show. Kitty must not think that it availed a predestined spinster anything that she got engaged; Mr.
Jeffries would never marry Kitty.
And if Louie herself had returned to the Business School after Christmas----
Her dream of how she had danced with him, and he had said "_You_ understand," and she had replied, "_I_ should have found a way to keep you," returned vividly to her----
She would have found a way.
Then she remembered that which even then had stood between.
Excitedly she clutched her boy to her--he woke with the pressure, and gave a little croaking cry.
This, then, was the first of the two things that remained to be told about this part of Louie"s story.
For the second of them she had neither years nor months to wait, but a bare fortnight. A very few words will tell it.
One evening after the boy had been put to bed she went down into the nurses" parlour and helped Dot and Nurse Chalmers to overhaul the blouses in which the doctors operated. Besides themselves, only Miss Cora was present; she was reading an evening paper. Louie saw her purse her lips and then throw the paper away. Presently Louie, tossing a patched blouse aside, reached for the paper.
A few minutes later Miss Cora, with a "Why, what"s the matter?"
started forward and bent over her. Louie had gone deathly white.
"It"s nothing--I shall be all right presently," she muttered, her eyes closed.
Miss Cora took the paper. The page at which she herself had last looked was still uppermost. It contained an account of a suicide.
"What is it, dear?" Miss Cora asked again. "Not that?" She pointed to the paragraph. Indeed, there was little else of interest on the page.
"I shall be all right in a minute," Louie murmured again.
There was nothing remarkable about the suicide. A young man had hanged himself behind his bedroom door, and a verdict in accordance with the evidence (which, it was suggested, was largely medical) had been returned. He had left a letter for his mother, precisely like almost every other such letter, and parts of it were quoted. The young man"s name was Archie Merridew. He was to have been married on the morrow.
"Is that it?" Miss Cora asked again.
Louie nodded.
"Did you know him?"
Louie made no reply.
They are experienced women at nursing homes; especially about suppressed medical evidence they are able to draw conclusions. The next morning a few rapid guarded words pa.s.sed between Louie and Miss Cora. The effect of them was to give Louie a sudden feeling of nausea.
Miss Cora"s whispered explanation seemed only too probable. That also was all in his character.
"That"s it, you may be sure," said Miss Cora. "They ought to be lethal-chambered, nasty little sewer-rats; one of "em"s saved them the trouble at any rate. Did you know the girl he was going to marry too?"