THE TIGER-SKIN

I

“’Tis but a little piece of Childhood thrown away.”—John Ford.

She wandered about the wards at the Infants’ Hospital, a privileged person, ignored, tolerated, looked on askance by the properly caparisoned, properly certificated, properly trained nurses. She was not a nurse, she was not even a probationer, except by courtesy; she was the daughter of the founder of the Hospital, Dr. Emeric Favarger. She spent many hours there, lounging about, asking irrelevant questions of the nurses and the visiting doctors, getting into the way as only a privileged person can do. She was no good, she could not even amuse a baby, or keep it quiet for a moment until expert assistance arrived. She was there, it was understood, because she liked it; because the grey-green walls and absence of decoration were soothing to her, and the rows of white cots, to the number of thirty, each with its frontal brass denoting the name and style of its god-parent and pecuniary backer that lined both sides of the room. Her own name, Adelaide Favarger, figured over one little bed, and she was used to take up its puling occupant now and again. She would linger, casting her liquid glances at its chance, constantly varied, occupant lying there, with some at least of the creases of ill-nurture and previous ill-usage smoothed out and eased by the bands of merciful sleep.

She was twenty-five years of age, unmarried, motherless, the only daughter of Dr. Favarger. He was old, and had grown excessively rich, and had found himself able long since to retire from the activities of the profession. He still had his room in the Hospital, lectured there twice a week, and saw foreign doctors, departmental authorities, philanthropists and other persons who were interested in this particular new departure. This he had inaugurated himself, hoping to see it lead to Eugenical cultivation of the uncounted progeny of the struggling, uninstructed masses. At home, in the immense wool-gathering house he rented in Portland Place, he had a room the door of which was kept always closed. Behind this he was understood to be engaged in “experiments.” He entered it, never from the house, but by a door that gave on a mews at the back. As people said, anything—all sorts of things—might be going on in that house and never be heard of. It was known that Dr. Favarger bred and kept there countless cats; he wrote and commented learnedly on their habits in the monthlies. He was a man who might have been asked out to dinner every night in the year if he had chosen to let himself figure in the list of Society’s possible guests. But that he had always refused to do, and his daughter shared his self-imposed solitude. She was not the kind of girl whom hostesses asked out alone, or at a moment’s notice, to fill up a gap. She had no cordiality, no entrain, no “go.” She was attractive but not charming, the image of her father, whose hooked beaky nose she had inherited, together with passionate, regretful eyes that her dead mother had left her.

But no restraint was put upon her exercise of hospitality in Portland Place. She could ask any one she liked to dinner and she availed herself constantly of the privilege—but the proportion of male guests who put their knees under the old mahogany dining-table and drank her father’s old port, which was almost famous, was far in excess of the female. But Adelaide did not object to this proportion. Still, sly, silent with an air of biding her time, at eighteen; by the time she was twenty-five, the passion in her eyes was tremendous; she glowed in her dark setting, a meagre Circe who gathered the ready-made beasts about her, and shook no deterrent wand at them.

These were her evenings, smoke of cigars, fumes of liqueurs, conversations of veiled indecency under the guise of scientific discussion, which were led by her father; the cynical, heartless old man, holding forth indifferently, from sheer love of talking, to the audiences of queer, inferior, second-rate men that his daughter provided for him nightly. And for her days, they were mostly spent within the four walls of the abode of sanitation and physical purity that represented the outcome of both their theories of life. Adelaide had no sense of humour, but the cruel old man was apt to say that his daughter was the only microbe in the establishment—that miracle of asepticism. He gave her plenty of pocket-money, gibed at her to her friends before her face, but allowed her to do exactly as she liked, and with no consideration for her extreme youth and the life she had to live when he was gone, fared contemptuously towards the grave of known finality that awaited him. He had done his best for the world in the establishment of a higher ideal of infant feeding and early physical culture.

He had done well by his daughter, he had fulfilled his duty as he considered it towards her mind and body. He had given her the best of educations. She had been to school by the sea as a child, as a girl to college. She had insisted on being highly trained and educated up to the nadir of her powers, and had her views cut and dried at sixteen. Carefully concentrating herself, with feverish intentness on efficiency, she had managed to do well in the tripos at Oxford, but her friends said that she had been screwed up to the required pitch by her imperious vanity. The girls of her year who had come out below her in Honours used to laugh when they met her afterwards in the street; for them she was the crank who had outstripped them, peering as her habit was, under the hoods of perambulators, on her way to lectures on Eugenics and Baby-Culture. They had heard all about her desire, nay, her fixed determination, to marry and worthily contribute to the World-Force, in the usual manner. At Somerville Hall, she had made no secret of her intention to bear an Eugenical child, or two, having first selected its father carefully, from a physiological point of view. Oh, yes, she had talked of nothing else at tea parties and walks, and had bored them so that when she left she had made no harvest of life-friends. They had tossed their learned young heads, and quite expected, some day, to hear of Adelaide Favarger, in spite of her big talk, as the feeble hang-dog mother, if a mother at all, of one puny infant, begotten of nerves and hysteria, by the usual self-selecting father. That is, if any man chose her, and this, in spite of her wealth, they were inclined to doubt.

She wasn’t a girl who appealed to the men that marry. They felt that, and they were right.

For men, looking at Adelaide Favarger with the instinctive and unconscious cunning of the male, that makes in the long run so surely for what Adelaide herself would have called the World Purpose, were likely to pass her by, as sexually ineligible for motherhood. Socially, too, she did not appear apt to satisfy their own particular standards of comfort and pleasure. Though, indubitably, Adelaide would be rich, they feared to take a wife out of the dreary, ill-managed, ill-cleaned house in Portland Place, full of unprobed corners and flights of stairs that seemed to drop you into plumbless depths of scullerydom and basement. The hall and dining-room were full of valuable mahogany furniture whose dull unpolished surfaces reflected nothing, the drawing-room was spread with rich yellow damask, that draped the sofas and chairs, and hung as curtains to mask as much scanty light as was willing to filter in through the tall windows that no normal housemaid could reach up to clean. No one did clean them. The curtains soared out of sight into the dusty ceilings and the chance hand, essaying to draw them further apart, shook out a dusty flavour that nipped the nostrils and was forthwith obliged to desist.

Adelaide’s dinners, and she gave a great many of them, were ill cooked, scrambling and depressing. But the wine, Dr. Favarger’s own province, was excellent. He himself would have none of it. As soon as the sweets were put on, it was the old Doctor’s custom to rise, to stuff his creased napkin into the middle of his plate, and to leave the room without comment. It was always the same. He did not as a rule appear again: he disliked the kind of man that his daughter was apt to invite, and he had no desire to control her in the matter. The men were rather sorry to see him go, he was lazy, cynical and fascinating.

There was one of Adelaide’s men whom he perhaps did not dislike. Yet, although he would not sit out the dinner even for him, the only time that Wald Ensor dined with Adelaide he stayed until the coffee and cigarettes were put on. Perhaps it was because he had himself introduced his daughter to the amiable young man at the Children’s Hospital. Ensor came to inquire after a child, whom he had kindly been instrumental in bringing in. It was dying of malnutrition. Its slum mother, stupid, underfed and wretched, but not vile, could not nourish it properly even if she would.

The image of the tall, handsome young fellow with the perishing child in his arms had never left Adelaide; she had fallen in love with Wald Ensor, and with Adelaide, to fall in love was to ask to dinner.

Ensor came. He was excessively fascinating to Adelaide, because he was so different from her other young men and especially from the second-rate Chelsea artist whom she had asked to make a fourth, and whom she already considered a survival from her old days of bad taste. Ensor’s manner was perfection. He was shyish, grave, intent, and self-contained, talked prettily to her father about his hospital and his cats and respectfully to herself about the subjects in which a young lady should be interested. Adelaide was not interested, but she instinctively forebore to disabuse him.

She was too young, too reckless, too much unversed in strategy, to conceal the trend of her feelings and directing, as she did, all her conversation and her eyes towards Ensor, she seriously alienated the liking of her late friend, ally and limner, Mr. Wallace Marks, R.I.B.

He bided his time, however, and as long as Dr. Favarger presided over his own table, he listened in a frankly bored manner which contrasted with Wald Ensor’s polite attention to talk which he only half-approved, coming from the lips of this savage irresponsible old savant, the indifferent natural guardian of a young girl’s delicate morals.

“There is something,” the old hook-nosed man was saying, “something to be said for the woman who ill-treats her children.”

Adelaide protested conventionally. “Nothing!” she said.

“My daughter,” said her father spitefully, without looking in her direction, “wishes to impress you with the fact of her well-known love for babies. She does not, however, really care for them a bit. She has never considered these matters scientifically in her life, although she’s always hanging round the Hospital, and hindering my young assistants. If she had a child, she’d neglect it. Cruelty—masked by Philanthropy! Look for it deep—it’s there!” His nose appeared cold, sharp and ferreting. He did not smile. Ensor shuddered.

Adelaide made a wry face and Ensor was sorry for her, disproportionately so, for she did not really mind being teased by her parent. The old man continued—

“On the lines I have been mentioning to you, Ensor, even child-murder is excusable, obeying, as it may be said to do, an almost forgotten animal instinct. A cat, say, who by some circumstance or other has been disturbed before parturition and rendered hysterical——”

“Good Lord, a hysterical cat——” ejaculated the bounder.

Dr. Favarger took no notice of him, but continued his sentence—

—“will tear or otherwise destroy the progeny that she foresees herself unable to feed or attend to. So do unhappy servant girls, faced, in their hour of trial, with the problem of the disposal of illegitimate offspring, reserve to themselves the right of destroying what their instinct tells them they will be unable in the future to protect and nourish——”

“Oh, Father,” protested Adelaide again and her tone was sincere. “Think of it! The tender young life, the helpless weakling, bone of one’s bone, flesh of one’s flesh.… Motherhood is so sacred—it should, I think, be subsidized by the State. A capitation fee for every child. Then the mother would have the wherewithal to nourish herself properly and maternal feeling would do the rest.”

Dr. Favarger smiled, a smile without kindness in it. It was his daughter’s smile. She had that too, as well as his nose.

“Even then, she or you would probably have none of these fine feelings at the moment. She has suffered physically; she is irresponsible: mere brutal selfish instinct dominates her. And if she desists, if she does make an attempt to salve it, she has to watch the hapless infant”—he sneered—“through her care, surviving, but as a hopeless idiot.… Of course,” he continued, “I except cases of mere cruelty, such as baby-farming. If a woman kills or ill-treats the child of another, no natural feeling except greed of gain can possibly come into play, not even vanity——”

“Vanity?” said Adelaide.

“Yes, Mother’s vanity, a huge non-negligible factor in these matters. But in most cases it is not necessary to plead it, for nature’s broad back may easily take the blame. And when a woman of our own class, maybe, is brought before the magistrate and fined or imprisoned because she has taken a rod to the ugly duckling, or systematically ill-treated a weakly, ungracious child to the point of extinction, she might plead that she is only doing what a cat or any other perfectly normal animal does when one of her young is not up to sample, and seems obviously degenerate to her keener sense. My cat Philippa, for instance——”

Adelaide sneered. The bounder fidgeted. Ensor preserved his attitude of somewhat strained attention.

—“Had a fine litter of four the other day. I found one of them, to my uninstructed eye, as healthy as the others, on the cold stone floor for three successive mornings before it died. She had thrown it out of the nest, she had refused to feed it, she had just weeded it out. Why? It was unfit to live. And if you study these trials that come up every now and then, and observe carefully the characteristics of the little victims as described by the officers of the S.P.C.C., you will see that in most cases these brutalized children are slow, unprepossessing, unpleasant and sometimes revolting in their habits. They work up through the first few years of infancy, unpetted, neglected, marked down to develop all the successive stages of degeneracy. They are obviously better dead. No pretty, healthy, fetching child—a child like the egregious infant in Bubbles, say,—ever appears in court on such a plea. There Mother’s vanity comes in.…”

He would have continued, but Adelaide, whom this conversation neither pleased nor interested, rose. The bounder heaved an audible sigh of relief. Ensor, though he had been interested, even a little charmed by the old man’s manner, could not help deploring that this extremely technical and advanced conversation had not postdated the young girl’s departure.

Old Dr. Favarger left the room with Adelaide. He said to her in the hall, before he hobbled away to his own study and sleeping apartment on the ground floor—

“You have picked up a gentleman for once.”

She walked on as if he had not spoken. She always made a point of not answering her father when he girded at her. His approval of Ensor, though not unpleasing, was absolutely immaterial to her. She loved him, she meant to have him, through the door of marriage or no. She went upstairs to the drawing-room to await the two men, and flung herself down on the great yellow sofa with the black cushions, too nervous even to smoke. She was convinced, albeit for the twentieth time, that she had found the Eugenical father at last.

* * * * * * *

Wald Ensor, the gentleman according to Dr. Favarger’s acceptance, left sitting after an atrocious dinner, with a man who could not possibly fulfil the Doctor’s conditions, felt extremely uncomfortable. His annoyance grew as his messmate tended to grow familiar in conversation. A wretched artist from Chelsea, self-styled modern, with white hair and a dyed moustache, to whom the host had not vouchsafed a word all dinner! The fine old man had been annoyed by his cockney accent, presumably. He had talked, although she did not listen, psychology with Adelaide, and his pert underbred voice had broken in all the while through Dr. Favarger’s cultivated tones. Now that the host and hostess were gone, this bounder ventured to turn the analytical method on to his hostess herself, and Ensor did not know how to stop him. He fidgeted about on his Spanish leather covered chair, and made various efforts to do so, but in vain.

“Nice girl, very,” the creature went on. “With a face like an old master—one of those Primitives, don’t you know? Lots of drawing about. Pity she’s so morbid.”

Wald Ensor made a gesture of negation.

“Oh, yes, she is. Talks of nothing but Eugenics and so on. Thinks of nothing but the other thing.… It’s only a mask, with these women you know, all that rot about child-bearing and being subsidized by the State and so on. She’s an erotomaniac, that’s what she is—sits about on yellow sofas and asks men to love her. They do that fast enough, she’s very good fun—but they don’t marry her.… Do you know Gertrude? Do you know why they put up with her—she’s the cook—why the dinners here are so confoundedly bad?”—

“No, I don’t, and——” Ensor expostulated. His blood boiled, he didn’t think he could stand it any longer, he wanted to throw his glass in the fellow’s face. He rose.…

The other man, nothing abashed, although their conversation had hardly lasted the canonical few minutes, rose too, saying amiably, “So! Let’s join our hostess.”

He continued amiably as they passed out—

“Cook’s bad, but can’t be parted with, don’t you know? She’s up to games of her own, is the fair Gertrude. They found a baby she’d just had in a dressing-table drawer, so Adelaide told me while she was sitting. Time for confidences, eh? Seen my portrait of her? In the New——”

They were half-way upstairs by this time. The artist opened the drawing-room door and disclosed Adelaide sitting, as he had predicted, on a yellow satin sofa, with her head resting on black satin cushions. There was room for one man beside her. The bounder slipped easily and voluptuously into that place, and Ensor with a spasm of jealous disgust, took an early opportunity of making his adieux, and left them.

He never dined in the house again. He could not bring himself to risk meeting men of that stamp.

Yet he pitied her. He admired her. Her great discontented eyes haunted him. He felt as if a white plaining woman’s hand was outstretched to him from out of a weltering sea of bounderism. Adelaide, a lady, could not really like that sort of man? No, for she liked him. She wrote continually begging him to accept her hospitality—hospitality of all kinds. She began to vary skilfully the form of her invitations, but he still refused all invitations to meals at her house.

At last she suggested that if he could not stand her cook he should take her out to dine at “some low pot house,” so she phrased it. He laughed. For he knew that if he should succumb to her blandishments, he would certainly take her to a decent fairly respectable restaurant: he would not pander to her taste for Bohemianism, but save her from herself and her friends.

As he thought it over after each fresh invitation, a taste for this form of social humanitarianism grew on him. He began to fancy the idea of rescuing this really nice girl and taking her to decent places and showing her how a decent man would behave. The girl was motherless, her father did not pretend to look after her. She had a fine generous character, was large in her ideas, she gave freely, she was kind to her own sex, and would never go back on any one. The disreputable cook, now,—he was sure that in keeping her on, poor Miss Favarger was really undertaking a work of charity. The woman had obviously had what is called a misfortune, she had possibly gone through what is also called a tragedy. Adelaide was obviously not the sort of person who would ever cast a human being out of doors, under any circumstances whatever, especially a woman in the condition in which the cook had presumably found herself. Lazy, preoccupied, indifferent, she made no excuse for her shameful tolerance, and even condescended to discuss the details of it with such worms as Ensor’s fellow guest of a few weeks ago. That was merely an error of taste, the result of her unmothered, unchaperoned state. She was at bottom a really well-bred woman. Ensor, a rover, a man who had knocked about the world and yet preserved his vast shyness and a modicum of innocence, thought he saw clearly that the time and place were out of joint with Adelaide. Her morals were mediæval, with no present parallel except perhaps one that should be found in the milieu of the South Sea Islands.

So he came to invite her to dine with him at Prince’s and even Kettner’s; she had tea with him on the slopes in Kensington Gardens; they walked together in Hyde Park on Sundays, Adelaide protesting vehemently that she hated dressing up and posing as one of the smart set. In vain Ensor assured her that to mingle casually with that select denomination at Church Parade, was not to be within a hundred miles of being “of” it: that to dine at Kettner’s with a man alone was sufficiently unconventional. Adelaide continued to protest, to beg him to take her to his flat, and to discuss sex questions in a loud voice over restaurant dinner tables. She called it Eugenics.

Ensor did not really enjoy these discussions, the young woman, sitting there, her elbows on the table, her hands propping her hard chin, her burning eyes fixed on him made it almost impossible for him to eat a solid British dinner, and keep his British countenance at the same time.

He could stand any amount of talk of this kind from platforms, or on the stage with the footlights between him and the exponents of the new Feeling, the New World Movement, the new Morality; here, under the shaded red lights, with discreet foreign waiters gliding about the chance commensals; the face to face discussion of such topics outraged his simple sensitiveness and ordinary sense of decency. The only thing that at all saved the situation was the girl’s astonishing absence of self-consciousness. She talked like a boy—a clever, morbid, self-conscious lad just home from college, her sedulous use of slang helped the impression. Yet all the while her eyes belied her and occasionally her voice. Now and then an outrageous note of sex bitterness pierced through her level lazy accents and brought their talk home with a rush from the plane of impersonality. With Adelaide it was when her eyes ceased to look passionate and eager but became sombre and heavy, instead: it was when her sharp grating voice grew soft and mellow and trailing that Ensor feared her most, and such moments were growing more and more frequent as their meetings went on. He stood to his guns, however, he was not one to throw even a graceless woman over.

Had he not been the most retiring, most modest of men he would have realized that Adelaide Favarger was in love with him. He would have disliked—he would have refused to realize it, for it would have forced him to formulate his own feeling for her, and that was a queer mixture of sensual pity, and revolted fascination. There were times when he thought he fully grasped what she wanted of him and was glad of her assumption that his refusal to dine with her in Portland Place represented merely a protest against the inefficiency of her cook. This theory, which at all times and all seasons she put before him, and which she had freely proffered as an explanation of his “snubbing” of her, was a convenience to him, since it effectually masked his reluctance to be the father of her eugenical child.

* * * * * * *

Like her other men friends, Ensor always saw Adelaide Favarger home after their evenings together. Unlike the others, however, he always left her punctiliously on the doorstep, as soon as her front door answered to her key and the cavernous gulf of the hall swallowed her up. No Bianca Capello business for him! She used to tease him about this, she used the romantic illustration, with a point of bitterness. She had now accepted the situation and no longer even asked him to come in. Her “Good-nights” were a miracle of sour brevity and conciseness.

One night in July they had been to the Exhibition together and had sat late listening to the band playing “Tristan.” The out-door performance represented a pale vapid reflection of the original orchestral heat and passion merely, but out there in the murky shadow-thridden radiance, in the dust-fumed air, it was effective. Adelaide had talked less than usual. The summer nights that year were long and clear. When rather late, they returned to it, satiate of romance, great, wide Portland Place seemed to sleep lonely under a Norwegian midnight. Nothing so cold even as a moonbeam shone on its raddled stones and stern house fronts, except where a tree in the garden next to Adelaide’s house hung over her steps on one side and lent it some mystery. There was a big party higher up the street and some stationary taxicabs stood waiting in the middle of the roadway, black, vague, a file of indistinguishable shapes, whence the figure of a man now and then disengaged himself, did something to his vehicle and was absorbed into the mass again. Adelaide had insisted on Ensor’s dismissing their own cab at Oxford Circus, and together they walked across the broad stone-paved expanse. The girl held her exiguous skirts tightly round her thin, airily poised legs. She knew they were fine, she knew she had a beautiful figure.

She gained the broad flat step in front of her door and turned a little sideways to the man who stood waiting for her to effect her entry and bid her a hasty good-bye as usual. He was a little bemused by “Tristan” he was looking dreamily back across the street they had just traversed, his head full of carefully conceived, adroitly moving harmonies.…

“Come in and have a drink?” Adelaide said carelessly, but her voice was rough and throaty.

The demand appeared to startle him. He thought he had cured her of all that. Her request was out of all order and he did not reply at once.…

She faced him but did not meet his eyes.…

“Why won’t you?” she asked peevishly. “Even if you won’t dine? What have I done? Why am I doomed? Cursed.…”

“My dear Miss Favarger! …”

“Miss Favarger be blowed!” She spoke like a school-girl. She caught, as a monkey does, at the lapel of his coat—fumbled at it.…

“For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t insult me so! Come in for a moment!”

II

Wald Ensor came back to his flat in Ebury Street some time in the early piping dawn and found a cablegram lying in his letter-box. It told him of the sudden death of a distant but beloved relation, out in California, a man in whose business he had a concern. A day or two later he had arranged his affairs and sailed for the other side. He had found time before he left to forward a bulky package to Miss Adelaide Favarger, containing the skin of a leopard which he had shot himself, and of which he had spoken to Adelaide. It went with her, somehow, and she had looked flattered when he said so. He had now a very friendly feeling towards her, she seemed to him, on the whole, since their mutual experience, to be a saner, worthier member of the community than before.

He did not fancy, when he stepped off this hemisphere, that he was leaving Europe for a very long time. But it was so. He married out in California. He conceived it to be out of pity in some sort, an idea of giving a girl, much buffeted by fortune, a home. But as a matter of fact Adelaide had awakened the zest of the eternal feminine in a man who had imagined himself to be a confirmed bachelor. The girl was saved, domesticated, but Wald Ensor’s attempts at civism and paternity were not blessed in the usual way. After they had been married five years his wife died in giving birth to a child, which died too. Then he drifted, bereft of his casual impetus towards a settled life. His cousin died, leaving him fairly well off. He started several adventures in the world of business, nearly all of which failed, for he had not what is called la main heureuse.

With an orange grove that did not pay, left on his hands, and nothing else to speak of, he came back to Europe. Temporarily crippled in his resources, he decided to lie low till matters should have righted themselves. He was too proud to take his place in society, and go out while his only dress suit was shiny at the knees. He avoided London. He did, however, call in Portland Place and found new inmates established there, and was told that old Dr. Favarger was dead and Miss Favarger gone, no one knew where, and that she had taken the cook with her.

It was in Yorkshire on a market-day, in Beverley, that he met Adelaide again.

At first sight she seemed very little altered, only he realized that he had always imagined that she was taller. She was walking with her old staccato step that suggested some congenital weakness, such as a slightly stiffened spine, on the rough cobbled stones of the market, about and among the pens and improvised folds that prisoned lowing cows and calves and indifferent, sullen bulls. She was not alone. Her companion was a beautiful girl of about fifteen, a whole head taller than herself. Perhaps that was why he thought her shrunken? There was about her a slight countrified air, which differed greatly from the exaggerated, rather meretricious style in which the old Adelaide had been used to make her points, and strive to enhance her own peculiar charm.

The two women were absorbed. They were leaning on the well-worn wooden rail, which served to pen in the unruly cattle, and watched with interest and attention the movements of a magnificent young bull, which had as nearly as possible succeeded in wrenching his neck free from the clumsy headstall that fixed him to the post. His discontented, inflamed eyes, his stubby, determined shoulder, the dull, passionate intentness on freedom manifested by his attitude seemed to fascinate the elder woman, who was expatiating on his beauties to the seemingly less interested spectator beside her.…

“Nice beast, isn’t he, Phillis?” she murmured.

“Yes, but he’ll get his head out in about a minute!” the child said nervously.

“Then it will be Hell let loose,” replied the elder woman, evidencing a sort of savage enjoyment in the spectacle of the younger one’s timidity. She continued, gloating, “He’d have the whole place cleared in no time. Shall we stay and see the racket?”

Her hand stole towards the frayed rope.…

“No, don’t undo it, Addie. Oh, I do believe you’re going to! Do let’s go home,” the child pleaded pettishly. “And Mary must be tired and cold, waiting in the car all this time.”

“Oh, damn Mary!” said Adelaide. “Who cares for Mary?”

“But I’m tired and cold too.”

“You are? Come along then, my precious—at once.”

She turned and faced Wald Ensor. The long last look with which she had enveloped the splendid, sullen, restless animal had not left her humid eyes.

Quickly she recognized him, and righted herself. She put up to her eyes, with a reminiscence of her town manner, a pince-nez that hung round her neck by a chain of antique workmanship, and said in a hard voice—

“Is that you?”

Then a marked hesitation seemed to overcome her. She raised her arm that hung languidly down at her side, as if to ward off a blow. A little collection of parcels she was holding together by a string fell to the ground. The child very properly bent to pick them up. Ensor properly, too, was about to forestall her, but a gesture from Adelaide seemed to him to be intended to prevent and forbid him doing so. There was an awkward pause.…

Then Adelaide, indicating with her pince-nez the stooping figure of the beautiful young girl, and looking carefully away, pronounced quickly—

“Wald, my daughter, Phillis.”

“How do you do?” said Wald Ensor, formally, when, her cheeks reddened with stooping, the child resumed her upright position. She was concerned because one of the parcels was missing. Perhaps it had rolled under the feet of the bull? …

“Never mind,” said her mother fondly. There was a loving pride in her voice. None of the lowing cows, untethered, but morally fast anchored to the posts where their calves were firmly bounden, their mother-love taken into strict consideration by the cunning drover, who relied on it more surely than on any rope that was ever spun of hemp, could boast a tenderer, more maternal solicitude. Ensor was touched. So the restless, theoretic Adelaide was happy and settled at last, her hopes fulfilled, her theories carried out.

Phillis, in her bucolic completeness and obvious sterling health, was a maternal production to be proud of. She had golden hair, blue eyes and a complexion of roses and again roses. There were hardly any lilies, and although she was lovely at fifteen, the chances were that she would be raddled at fifty. Ensor noticed that the bare hand that clutched the wooden rail was, unlike her mother’s, large and heavy. She probably had feet to correspond. The dark, bushy eyebrows, which struck a note of savagery in the simple, placidly sensuous countenance, suggested one coarse progenitor; Adelaide’s was an excessively refined type. He surmised that she had in effect succeeded in capturing something in the nature of a prize-fighter for a mate. Such, she had declared, was her ambition to do in the old days at any rate, something rustic, fair and Saxon.…

Adelaide released her underlip, which she had drawn in and had bitten till it bled, and spoke quickly, with a graceless, oppressive cordiality that reminded Ensor, at that moment, of the first time she had invited him to dinner in Portland Place. In her access of nervous excitement, as of one constantly expecting to be refused, she was exactly the same, uncertain, deprecating, but peremptory.

“Where are you staying, Wald? At the Antelope? Here on business? Well, you can do it from High Walls. We’ll motor you in every day. Let us go and get your things out of the Antelope. The car’s there—waiting for us——”

“Thank you— I hardly think I——” so Ensor was saying at intervals, and continued to say. He felt annoyed, hustled, overborne by all the methods of an aggressive, overweening personality. Adelaide’s love of domineering had once been modified by youthful languor; now her masterfulness was reinforced by physical fitness. She had grown out of the delicacy of the young girl, and was well, a woman to count with.

He thought of this as he walked behind her and Phillis through the thronging market-place. She talked to him over her shoulder, hardly listening to his objections. They threaded the crowd. Fusty interested groups were collected round this or that shrewd cheap Jack. He extolled, in the clearings they willingly made for him, now yards of tawdry lace, now pieces of coarse netting warranted never to tear, now rough crockery warranted never to break. And Ensor could hardly hear Adelaide’s unmodulated voice, through the clatter of hoofs on the stone causeways as the clumsy, puzzled animals were run along them at a gallop by sweating, panting stable-boys, anxious to exhibit their paces to intending purchasers. Adelaide would stop dead every now and then and become absorbed in the contemplation of melancholy stallions with straw-plaited tails, which stood, their shiny black hocks turned outward, all adown the smooth bits of stone flagging intersecting the rough cobbles.

Ensor, to call her attention to his protests, punctuated his remarks at intervals with, “My dear Mrs.——” She took no notice, and if she heard, did not care to supply the name. Now and again Phillis would turn and smile, a sweet irresponsible smile, at him and sketch an inviting gesture. Ensor liked all children, and especially girls of that age, and after one of these little demonstrations followed with less travail of the spirit and fewer protests. He rather wanted, too, to see the Mary “be-damned” who was said to be waiting, cold, tired, and neglected in the car.

They had reached the outer fringe of booths, the raucous voices of cheap Jacks and the heartrending moos of the cows faded out of hearing, and the broad street in front of the Antelope Inn, before whose open yard door many conveyances stood, lay before him. He crossed the road and was now faced with the immediate problem of acceptance or refusal of Adelaide’s invitation.

There was another child in the motor, hunched up and cowering among the rolling swathes of the leather motor hood pushed back. She was obviously cold and tired of waiting. She seemed about ten years old. Her dull eyes fixed themselves on him stupidly, wearily, with a kind of painful animal interest.… She did not take them off him. Her white, wide, flat face did not light up in the least when Adelaide approached, and in reply to Ensor’s tacit inquiry, said briefly—

“No, not mine. The cook’s. You remember Gertrude—the cook that couldn’t cook? Ha! ha! Didn’t you worry me about it? I have Mary here for her health, and I leave her in the car because she’s afraid of cows. Now, Phillis, be quick, go and get the things at Storr’s, and come back. It’s a fairly long run home, Wald.…” She busied herself with some rugs.…

Phillis departed, saying in a child’s flirtatious way as she obeyed her mother’s request, “Now mind you come,” while Ensor slavishly entered the hotel, sought his room and gathered up his belongings. The other child seemed to him to have seconded the invitation too, in her own dreamy, spiritless way. It touched him. He fancied he might cheer her up a bit if he could once get her to take to him and gain her confidence. Children liked him.

When he came out of the hotel again Phillis and the other child were safely stowed away in the back of the car under one rug, pressed up against each other to keep warm. They seemed to get on very well together, Ensor was glad to see.

Adelaide invited her guest to take his seat in front beside her, and they started.

* * * * * * *

Adelaide drove in a careless, slapdash way which suggested the hand of little practice. She took risks, she showed ignorance of some fundamental rules of safety. This, however, did not disconcert Ensor at all, he had plenty of physical courage. Full tilt they ran along dull lanes and roads, blackish under foot, hedge-bordered in a sullen craven green. The Plain of York in all its mediocre dreariness unrolled itself before them. Adelaide, from between her pursed lips, made no attempt to point out landmarks or objects of interest. There were no interesting features to point out. Dull bryony shoots and clematis tendrils were spread over the hedges, like a dusty net coverlet on a lodging-house bed, neutral-tinted nettles carpeted them at the foot, and at due intervals in their extent, clean, neatly-made gates shut off the entry into fields each one like the other. The same kind of stupid, spiritless bird rose up now and again, and lighted on the tedious brown furrow that hid the one behind it. Mean clumps of trees that veiled no possible trysting-place, bordered the road or looked over it here and there. Ensor heard the little girls behind him whispering and chuckling in the well of the carriage where they had declined in laughing avoidance of the cold wind that blew steadily over the plain. At least he heard Phillis’s voice and took Mary’s for granted. The two seemed to be very good friends.

And then Adelaide began to talk to him in her wiredrawn inartistic tones which suggested to Ensor something like a rope, lashing, being trailed along a gravel walk, for he longed to bid her lift it, to try to get taut now and then. The crude passion that smouldered in her eyes, only lent an edge to her voice. It always did. When his mind dwelt on the changes in her, he could think of no feature that had altered much in twelve years, except her mouth which, from having been as nearly as possible straight, had now lost all suggestion of curve, and opening generally in raspishness, closed always in a helpless peevishness. Her face reminded him of the matronly yet at the same time old-maidish faces of those mentally starved, materially satisfied women of the Renaissance he had seen in pictures and reproductions. It was the same drawing over the cheeks, the same anxious slope of the flesh away from the consumptive peaks and hollows of the bones. Her nervous little hands, clawlike, handled the wheel with ill-regulated vigour and obstinate determination to excel. Her vanity amused Ensor, and since it made so decidedly for efficiency, commended itself to him. He liked women to show grit, and did not on the whole object to be managed by any person exhibiting marked competency.

As he reckoned, she had to give most of her real attention to the driving of the car. Her vanity stimulated her to attempt to pay off her guest with a conversation composed of ideas long since formulated by herself or others.

“Isn’t it a grim country?” she said cheerfully. “They say that there are more heirs and heiresses of solitary habit and tottering reason to the square inch here than in any other county in England. You see,” she knitted her brows, “these old feudal people have all along paid no attention to physiological rules; they have chosen to intermarry so fearfully.”

“Your old preoccupation, eh!” said Ensor, smiling.

“Don’t sneer, Wald. We met and took to each other on that ground, you remember, and I am keener on it than ever. I hate anything of a misbegotten or deformed nature like death or sin, which indeed it is.” She looked at him keenly. “Do you know if I was not a Christian woman I should find myself beating Mary here within an inch of her life?”

Ensor made a sound indicating his wish and his conviction that it were proper that she should lower her voice. Adelaide accepted the criticism and to some extent heeded its remonstrance, in the next few words she said.

“But as she’s poor faithful old Gertrude’s unique scion I stay my hand, and give her instead Parrish’s Food.”

“It’s very good of you,” Ensor murmured, oppressed. He remembered the baby in the chest of drawers, and, besides, he felt those big helpless opaque-seeming eyes of the child in the car behind, plumb in the middle of his back.…

“Dead against my own theories too,” Adelaide went on. “That sort of distinct evidence of a parent’s physiological failure ought to be stamped out at birth.”

“Perhaps,” said Ensor slowly and strainedly. “Perhaps she is going to be a poet? I fancy Keats had those beautiful suffering eyes.”

“Eyes of a sick monkey, pah!” ejaculated Adelaide, brutally, and as loudly as she had ever spoken before. “Let us not think of her. Tell me all about yourself.”

Wald Ensor obeyed and gave her an account of his doings during the last twelve years. As he talked in the even, rather tame manner which in him was accentuated, not diminished, by deep feeling, he was conscious all the time of a duel waged within him by two opposing but strong moods.

One side of him longed to lay his hand on Adelaide’s and get her to stop the car, and allow him to step out of the range of her puissant personality, which alarmed while it interested him. The other side, the explorer-adventurer side, divorced from her image, wanted to stay and see it through, and have another look at the two youthful beings for whom Adelaide was making herself responsible, more especially the cook’s ailing child. One long, attenuated, but distinct thread of passionate feeling linked him to her.… He had felt like that towards a monkey from a tropical island on the ship that the captain was bringing home to colder climes, and which resented it in sadness and melancholy.

With regard to adventure, he could not help wondering if when they reached a place called High Walls, where Adelaide said she lived, a fond husband would come to the portal, and welcome his wife and the stranger she had chosen to bring home. For Adelaide had volunteered no information about herself on that head, and he was too shy, or too apprehensive of difficulties to ask for any. He only gathered that she was well off and had bought High Walls herself, for Dr. Favarger had left his only daughter everything.

Ensor expected, he knew not why, that the car would turn in at some majestic drive, bordered by fine old trees. He was the more surprised when after going for half-a-mile or so along a bit of road bordered by hedges on one side, and a high brick wall on the other, overhung by heavy elm-trees, Adelaide stopped the car opposite a small sunk door in this very wall.

“I live here,” she said. “Wald, will you ring?”

Rooks cawed from their nests in the clumps of high trees that seemed to fill all the enclosure, and a dog barked, evidently hearing the noise of the car and anxious to welcome its mistress. Ensor, as he stood in the roadway after having pulled the long iron handle of the bell, had the sense of being at the postern gate of some embattled fortress standing tall and grimly self-contained in the gloomy plateau of the Wolds.

Time passed. No one came to the door, the dog inside barked fitfully. Adelaide’s voice sounded unreal in the great spaces.… Yet she was talking as people talk in cities.

“Nice old place!” she was saying jauntily. “I bought it, it went so well with my own peculiar mentality. It belonged to one of the crocky-minded noblemen I told you of; he came to need only one room—somewhere else and padded—so I got it cheap, freehold and all. It takes delightfully few servants to keep it up, and that’s what I like. I hate servants spying. What are mine about.… Hollo!”

She stood up in the car and called out. Her voice was not good. At last, a shuffling old manservant appeared, and stood holding the door, not attempting to make himself useful in any way. It was Ensor who helped Adelaide out. Then he turned to the two children.… Phillis had already leaped out. Ensor looked keenly at the other child, sitting or rather crouching in the wide seat. Their eyes met for a moment. Then Adelaide seemed to intercept them.

“Mary, stop in the car! … No, she may as well come round with us,” she said fussily.

The man got in and took the vehicle off somewhere, and piled with motor-rugs, Ensor stumbled after Adelaide and the two children. A narrow path, flagged with stones, not a carriage drive, led up the very short way to the house. On the steps an ugly puppy rushed at them, and covered Phillis with damp paw-marks. The child tried to abash and quieten it, in vain. Adelaide in her unnatural, would-be forcible tones, called it off, and bade it come to her. The dog obeyed, but in Ensor’s opinion, without enthusiasm.

Adelaide seemed to think differently. “You see,” she said. “He loves the hand that chastens him. I do the chastening. I have to, all these people are so tender-hearted, except Gertrude—she has good strong hands.”

“I do hate to hear it howling, Addie,” remarked Phillis.

“All young things,” said her mother, gravely, “need to go through a period of misery and due correction before they are fitted for social purposes. And this is a good dog, or you bet I shouldn’t keep him or trouble about him at all. I hate mongrels, human or otherwise, don’t you, Wald?” …

Her eyes hardened, embittered in expression, fell on the puny child, who held an immense rug that trailed on the ground beside her. She was evidently too shy or helpless to put it down or act at all until an order was expressly given her. Ensor took the rug from her. She did not look up. He began to think this instance of Adelaide’s philanthropic kindness was half-witted.…

“Go in, Mary,” said Adelaide sharply. “Don’t stand fiddling there!”

* * * * * * *

Some one did thrash the puppy next day, for Ensor heard it howling loudly beneath his bedroom window. Its cry was for all the world like that of a child that was being beaten. He could not rest in bed through the noise, though he knew well enough that dogs must be trained. He rose and employed the hour or so thus gained on the day to examine carefully the position of the room he was in, its means of exit, etc., in the style of all well-seasoned travellers. He then put on his hat and went out by a back entrance, half stumbling over and apologizing to a small child in a cotton frock who was scrubbing the steps of it. He examined the shape of the house, the extent of the garden, and counted the number of tall elm-trees that surrounded it, and were in their turn circumscribed by the high, dull brick wall that gave Adelaide’s house its name.

High Walls was a composite building, finished in late Georgian period, but including portions dating from almost every period after Elizabeth. The Elizabethan part was more or less built up in the interior. A Georgian architect of the worst years had carefully enclosed and hidden it away, and faced all with a frontage that offended every canon of art and taste and depressed every eye as well. The high brick wall, Ensor fancied, represented a still more recent addition, for the hideous expensive portal and colonnade of the façade which had been evidently designed to dazzle the countryside, was dwarfed and crushed out of all proportion by the encroaching circumference which ate up both air and space, and gave the house the air of an asylum or a prison.

His voyage of discovery ended, he went quietly in by the front door in the middle of the colonnade, and found himself in a shiny-floored hall, carpeted here and there with wild beast skins, among which he recognized his own handsome present to Miss Adelaide Favarger. One corner of the hall, rendered rather dark in daylight by the pillars of the colonnade, was palisaded off with old German screens, or arm-chairs that successfully fended off draughts from the front door, and permitted it to be used as a lounge and smoking-room.

It was panelled with oak and furnished in the old-fashioned regulation country-house style in dark browns and yellows. Several heavy antlered heads of deer hung on the walls. Their sad, glassy eyes leered down pensively. He noticed, as he went round, pince-nez in hand, that there were some very good engravings. But they all embodied the usual gloating cruelties of the sportsman. There was a print of the fighting deer of Landseer with antlers interlocked till death, another of the rabbit in the trap, and one of the stag pulled down by its yelping enemies. All these famous works of art were repugnant to Ensor. He was, if he thought about it, inclined to be anti-vivisectionist.

On the broad hearth, although it was July, charred logs rested on the iron dogs and fell slowly away into a bed of soft grey ash, the reduced ghosts of themselves. There was a growing heap of detritus that was never buried or cleared away. The gnawing flame lurked there somewhere at its heart, but gave no warmth, and the man, used to Californian summers, felt chilly and longed to stir the logs, though it was summer, into some semblance of wintry activity.

He knew how to behave, however, and taking up an out-of-date local paper that was lying about, he sat down with a patient eye on the main staircase which he expected his hostess to presently descend. The paper was dull to the uninitiated in local gossip, and he dropped it and began to go over again in his mind the last words that Adelaide had said to him as she ascended that very staircase last night. One small, finely-shaped foot was on the stair. With her small housekeeping letter-bag in one hand—the bag he had never seen her without since they came to High Walls—she had held out to him the other hand, saying gravely, without suspicion of vulgar archness—

“Good-night. Sleep well. I shan’t.”

He had said nothing, disconcerted, but had let her go. He was outraged, not so much by her words, as by the look with which she had punctuated them. It made him remember, with an intense, shy, conscious memory, the last time he had seen her eyes as she had turned to him on the gas-lit doorstep—the eyes of a sick monkey—she had given him the phrase herself—the yellow sofa in its corner at Portland Place—the wide gleaming doorstep again, when placated, reproachless, seeking not to bind him, she had let him out into the dawn.

He had begun by admiring her for her fine non-deprecatory attitude, her bold reliance on the social and moral efficacy of her own standards and principles. She denied nothing, deprecated nothing, dropped nothing. The yellow sofa was there, in the hall, he had recognized it overnight, a handsome piece of furniture. He had not supposed that she cared to invest it with sentimental recollections of her old home and her maiden days. Or did she?

He brooded over the ways of women, of which he proudly supposed himself to know nothing, when a female servant came through the outer hall, bearing to-day’s paper, which she laid down on the yellow cushions beside him. He had no time to ask her a question as to Adelaide’s morning plans, for she quickly passed back again through the red baize door that led, so Ensor imagined, to the kitchen region. She left the door open. A waft of sounds came to him, voices, one of which he fancied was the voice of the famous and omnipotent Gertrude, on whom so far he had never set eyes, while the other he knew to be Adelaide’s. She was already down and afoot, then; she was a good housekeeper, and gave her orders early?

She was evidently holding the handle of the door preparatory to coming through, finishing a sentence which he did not hear. The tone in which Gertrude permitted herself to answer her mistress set him against her; it was raucous, coarsely good-humoured, and her speech, of which he caught fragments here and there, grossly familiar.

“With me? You’ve told Phillis? Well, that’s quick work, I must say!”

“It’s got to be done,” Adelaide replied sturdily, he heard her. “And the sooner the better.”

“The other’ll miss her!”

“That can’t be helped. You needn’t mind—Phillis’ll profit. This very day, mind!”

There was a pause. The cook had gone back into the kitchen some little way before she replied, and the vicious emphasis with which she spoke was accentuated by the clang of a dish, roughly set down on some pantry shelf or other.

“I don’t mind, but it seems a queer sort of way to go and treat your own flesh and blood!”

Adelaide let the door go sharply and, bag in hand, came forward to greet her guest. She had not expected to see him already down, and said so. She looked excessively handsome, if a trifle pale, as she pushed her hand through the cloudy swathes of hair that lay across her forehead. With characteristic crankiness, she arranged her hair across, not over or back from her forehead. It became her.

She stood chatting to her guest, telling him that breakfast was not ready yet, for that lazy little Phillis, whose business it was to make the tea, had had a fit of temper this morning early, and was not dressed yet. While she was speaking, Phillis looked over the banisters, and addressed her mother, calling her by her Christian name, a fashion that Ensor disliked. He fancied that perhaps the child was allowed, nay enjoined to do so, in order to minimize the effect of her size and the precocious development on the age-estimation of her mother, a natural weakness to which Adelaide, like other ladies, was probably prone.

“Oh, Addie!” the child said appealingly. “Mayn’t I really have Mary to sleep with me any more?”

“No,” replied Adelaide. “It is high time Gertrude began to train her.… Now, don’t worry, it would be poor kindness to keep her any longer with you, spoiling a good servant and unfitting her for her station. Go in and make tea.”

Phillis obeyed sulkily. Ensor was glad to see her put up a good fight for her companion.

Adelaide perched with a childish movement on the arm of the sofa, showing a pretty ankle in its openwork stocking. She looked like a handsome, capable gipsy, as she sat there, dangling her everlasting bag.…

* * * * * * *

“I’ve been asking Gertrude,” she said carelessly, “if she remembers you, and she says she does. You must look her up after breakfast.”

“But I never saw her!” he said, unwillingly, remembering her voice so lately heard. “You mean your cook in Portland Place?”

“Not much of a cook, was she? But so faithful. And I needed it. She needed me. She had a lover who was a prize-fighter, and he deserted her and left her with that wretched child you’ve seen, to keep.… It is a case of atavism, I expect, for he was a fine fellow.”

“Was that she beating the dog this morning?”

“Yes. She’s got good strong hands.”

An exultant gleam, an instantaneous flicker, as though by some new unexpected mode of invention, he had been afforded a kodak view of the suddenly protruded forked tongue of a viper, crossed Ensor’s excited vision. He shuddered. And Adelaide suddenly, but with an air of intense premeditation, slipped off the arm of the sofa and kissed him.

III

Impelled by the sudden fruition of all that was morbid in his nature, Wald Ensor, towards the end of the year, married Mary Adelaide Frances, the widow of J. Dibben, Esq. It is a fact that until he bestirred himself to apply for the licence, he had not known the name of the father of Phillis. Adelaide never refused but seemed to prefer not to speak of him. Ensor supposed that Dibben, a healthy, ordinary man of no preponderating degree of intellect, had quickly managed to alienate and embitter a capricious, easily-bored woman like Adelaide. He was too modest to imagine that he himself amused her or interested her to any great extent, but at all events, he thought she considered him adequate. In his company, she appeared to find the nearest approach, for her, to a state of repose. She took possession of him, body and soul. He realized it faintly. She even seemed to have made some slight sacrifice of her individuality with a view to enslaving him completely. Though to every one else her manner was curt, unpleasant and at times unbearably arrogant, she stayed her savage tongue and curbed her domineering temper whenever it came in direct contact with her husband. And even had she allowed her natural acerbity full play, the fact that she was now about to become a mother for the second time, called forth all Ensor’s chivalry and tenderness.

He rejoiced greatly at his approaching paternity. The want that had been created deep in his heart by the premature death of his child out in California was about to be completely satisfied; the void that for lack of a better he had filled with Adelaide’s child, Phillis Dibben, he had adopted openly; while, secretly, Mary, her foster sister, as he in his heart called her, was far dearer to him. Phillis Dibben was unsympathetic, he did not think hers was altogether a nice nature, but still she was a child, and Ensor’s love of children was a real and true sentiment.

Though Adelaide and he had met first on the common ground of their philoprogenitive instinct, Ensor had come to suspect that his own was the truer development of it. Adelaide admired healthy, presentable specimens of the class only, and the beauty of Phillis as an undeniable guarantee of her own Eugenical perfection afforded the amount of toll to her vanity, the satisfaction of her pride that was needed to evoke the motherly in her. It was the only motive that swayed her, Ensor thought. Or else why did she so neglect the cook’s unhappy progeny, the child she had begun by petting, and more or less treating as her own? He could not forget that he had seen Mary, now degraded to a servant, on the day he had come across her in Beverley, sitting in the car with Adelaide’s own child. The turn was too sudden. It outraged his sense of decency.

Ensor, whose large heart was capable, where children were concerned, of embracing the halt and the maimed and the eugenically incorrect, could hardly endure to let the question stand over till Adelaide was more fit to deal with it. He constrained himself to do so, however, and contented himself with speaking kindly to the little girl whenever he met her on the stairs or in the corridors. She did not walk, she crawled; he had an idea she was slightly deformed? He realized that it was Mary he had stumbled over that first morning as she knelt by a side door into the garden, feebly scouring some stone steps. Her translation from the padded seat of the car to the hard stones she was washing had been so sudden that he could not easily conceive it to be she.

After a while he did speak to Adelaide. She made no mystery of it. She was a woman of her word, and Mary’s play days were over. Yes, it was true, she had until then been more or less brought up with Phillis, had shared her room and her meals and walks and games. It had pleased Phillis, but she could not sacrifice a child’s whole future even to please Phillis, so now that was over. With a sort of fiendish rationalism and want of consistency, she condemned a child brought up, through her caprice, in comparative ease and idleness, to do the rough work of the house, eat inferior food, worst of all, she subtracted her from all the softening educative influences to which she had been accustomed.

He listened, tapping his boot with his riding-whip. He said nothing. He thought it over. If only the child could hold on, it would of course be as well not to worry Adelaide just now, but wait till she had got safely over her forthcoming experience, always a severe mental trial to women of her temperament. Then, surely, milder counsels might prevail; he might get Mary reinstated, a kind of foster sister to Phillis, and that was what he would like best. Oh, very much best, for he had the greatest, the most absurd, tenderness for the ugly, sad unchildish child! But if that were impossible, if her mistress still refused to allow it, Mary might at least be taken out of this and sent away to some bright, well-managed school, or home of her own class, to be properly trained and educated. He did not like the notion of her being brought up to be a servant, she did not look as if she would ever be strong enough. But there were other professions. He would see——?

Meantime he did what he could for the child, and that was very little. She never appeared in the better part of the house that the red baize door shut off, and he sometimes fancied that Adelaide disliked to see him cross the threshold of it into the other. Yet the oldest and most interesting part of High Walls lay beyond, and Ensor was something of an antiquary, where architecture was concerned. He did not want to annoy his wife, however, and he was careful to conduct his architectural investigations from the back, where the historical portions of the house were situated. There Mary’s work lay, and he often spied her at her task of ablution on steps and hearth stones, armed with a pail and a piece of bath-brick, feebly scouring, swirling a wet rag about, ineffectually spreading long spiderlike arms in a radius of their length all round her and producing a dull wet surface, to be succeeded by a bright brown sanded one, where before all was dull, unvisited dust or dirt. She had terribly long arms for a child of her size and age, and she was moreover, he noticed, left-handed like himself. He would stand there for quite a long time looking down on her rusty red ribbon top-knot, knowing that the child was aware of him, but was far too well drilled to look up and crave his notice. How had they managed to transmogrify her so quickly, from a sort of foster sister to Phillis, sleeping with Phillis, driving about in the motor with Phillis and her mother, into the submissive drudge who never looked up till he spoke to her, and then with a sad cowed expression that went to his heart?

If she were actually carrying a heavy pail, too heavy for her or trailing a broom long enough for a person twice her height, he considered he was justified in taking the pail or the broom away from her at once and trying to learn from her the place where she wished it to be deposited. It was difficult to get her to speak at all, and she got shyer as the days went on. He felt, manlike, that he could scarcely offer to go down on his knees and scrub the stone floor in her stead, but he would have liked to do so, for he realized that it was not a child’s work. He fancied that the School Board, if they were aware that one of their prey was thus day by day removed from every form of school training, might have something to say about it, and dreaded some sort of exposure for Adelaide. Mary was given no tuition of any kind; he was sure of it. High Walls was five miles away from Market Weighton, and though in the nearest hamlet, consisting of a few cottages, there was a school that was half-a-mile distant, Mary never went beyond the garden, if indeed she got any fresh air at all.

The place was curiously self-contained, in its girdling walls. Adelaide did her own marketing in the motor, tradesmen never penetrated within their circumference. As it used to be said of the house in Portland Place that anything might go on there, so it might be said of High Walls. Adelaide had perhaps chosen to live here, perhaps through some affectionate analogy with the home of her birth and the house in which her mother had died. She had bought High Walls outright, so he learned, she made her own gas, she kept her own fowls and her own cows, and she ordered her clothes from Paris, fetching large wooden boxes that had crossed the seas, from the station herself, in the ever useful motor. In everything she did there was a brusquerie, a jerkiness, a suggestion of eccentricity.

There was no doubt that for one reason or another, from austerity, shyness and love of solitude, or simply from lack of social instinct, Adelaide had succeeded in creating a human vacuum all round her, an area sterilized of gossip. Since their marriage, before the registrar, three months ago, Mrs. Ensor, her husband felt pretty sure, had had no visitors. As a matter of fact, Ensor knew of three people who said they had driven or motored out to High Walls to pay their respects to the lady he had married, but even if they had done so, admittance was probably refused them. These were the wives of men that Ensor had met about in Market Weighton or Beverley, and who had enjoined their women folk to call on the queer, uncivilized woman whom this gentle, civilized man that they rather liked, had married. It was easy for Ensor to see that she was not popular. If people even realized her previous existence, they forbore to talk of her, and the call was only a tribute to his own charm and obvious pleasant gentlemanliness. For he was a man’s man, a man whom women are apt to find dull. But as Adelaide never went out, never returned a call, never expected to be asked to anything, it was easy enough to be civil to the husband, and make him free of what there was of Society in these sleepy little market towns. Before very long Wald Ensor belonged to the Conservative Club of Beverley, and was put on the Library Committee of that active little place, while in Weighton he played golf, and adjudged prizes. The wives’ drawing-rooms knew him not or hardly at all, he could not very well go about among the women without Adelaide, and he did not choose to do so.

He constrained himself to be more or less active in whatever was going, to fulfil his trivial duties as a citizen when they came his way, partly from a sense of duty, partly, he fancied, because the monotony of his existence at High Walls was slowly sapping his vitality, dulling his good temper and sense of good fellowship. The desire to travel again sometimes came over him in a great wave. If it had not been for Phillis and Adelaide, he said to himself: if it had not been for Mary, he did not say or even think to himself—he would, in certain irrepressible moods, have proposed it to his wife, to leave her for a time.

He could not, somehow, talk to Adelaide now; he thought it was because of her condition. He had come to think that everything, including questioning, plans and so on, must be deferred until Adelaide, in her own phrase, was “through.” She thought and talked of nothing else. It was an event of more than ordinary importance to her. Well, it would be over in a few months. Then he would ask her about her social ostracism. He would find out if it was self-incurred, a voluntary effort on her part? Or was it a case of sour grapes, and had she been clever enough to make a virtue out of necessity? She was clever enough for anything, of that he was convinced. Or had she from pique, temper or caprice, so obstinately refused herself at the beginning, when first she had come to settle in Yorkshire, that people had grown tired at last of making overtures of friendship; overtures that were continually repulsed by the sour chatelaine of the lonely house, in its belt of sombre trees and solid deterrent masonry.

He could not ask her this now, he could not ask her anything. He literally knew nothing about the woman he had married and taken to his breast, together with her child and her cook and her cook’s bastard, with the name that a man unknown had given her and which he had superseded so easily.

He did not know how long she had lived in Yorkshire, why she lived in Yorkshire, and why she had taken a mansion that was little better than a prison in which they two lived immured.

To do her justice, she did not seek to prison him there with her, she made no objection to his leaving her for hours. She would not seemingly have minded his leaving her for days, only he never did. He was held by her lazy, picturesque indifference, by the remembrance of the attraction of her bursts of passion in the days when she was not, as now, concentrating every force of her being on one single point, the bearing of a healthy child, a wonderful child, a child that should be even more eugenical than Phillis. He did not know that he was weak, but he knew that she was strong and that when he was not loving her, he was afraid of her. Yes, he, Wald Ensor, the man who had shot tigers and braved artillery and dug for gold under circumstances of almost impossible fortitude and endurance, was afraid of this hawk-nosed, straight-lipped woman, with the thin wrists, the small feet and the vanishing waist.

She was ruining him, she was breaking his spirit, making him a craven, as in another department Gertrude the cook, with her “good strong hands” that he shuddered to look at, was making of Mary. Mary, her child, the human being over whom she had power, even as Adelaide his wife, had power over him. He was sure of it. With her cruel, if necessary, training, Gertrude was killing her child by inches. In obedience to her mistress’s strange wild theory of economics, the warped little body of the cook’s child was being maimed and stunted, her mind dwarfed and annulled, her moral and physical growth contravened beyond recall. For Adelaide, with her strong will and sense of duty, was behind Gertrude, driving her to do what she thought was right and correct for the child of humble birth domiciled under her roof. She was right, economically right; it were indeed useless and extravagantly unpractical to bring up the cook’s child in luxury, beyond her station; the wrench of unfitness for her inevitable degradation and fall to her true station in life would be all the more severe later on. Only Adelaide’s want of imagination, however, could inure her to the thought of such a situation created by her own behest. Adelaide! fond of children! Never! Ensor smiled bitterly under his drooping moustache, and forced himself to remember that Adelaide had the defects of her qualities, and that philoprogenitiveness was not one of them. He had gauged her aright in the old days at Portland Place, or was it that that sly, all-seeing old father of hers had sown the doubt in his mind?

“Adelaide, fond of children! She only thinks she is. Cruelty masked by philanthropy.”

And what was that about Mother’s vanity, and its non-negligibility as a factor? He remembered the old man’s pawky sneer as he said it.

“Cases of baby-farming,” he had argued. “There’s sheer cruelty. If a woman ill-treats or even kills the child of another, no natural feeling except cruelty can possibly come into play, not even vanity.…”

Vanity! Yes. There it was, a clear issue. The beautiful Phillis, her own… petted, cherished! … And on the other hand Mary, deformed, disgraced by Nature’s hand.… He used to hide his head in his hands as he contemplated the terrible antithesis.

Get her away! … He must… as soon as Adelaide had given birth to the wonderful child that was to be hers and his! That was settled. Meanwhile, he suffered, strange, unreasonable torments. Sometimes hanging about in the back of the house he would see the hem of Mary’s frock or the reach of her arm, as she scrubbed and lathered and polished. Then, with a groan, he would prevent himself from turning the corner of yard or out-house, lest he actually caught sight of the child at some one of her debilitating tasks. He would clench his hands, stuff a great cigar into his mouth, anything to keep him from rushing upon the poor waif, lifting her up, and boldly facing Gertrude, carry her off to America or the Antipodes.

One day, feeling he could bear it no longer, he got on to his bicycle and rode out to Weighton, on purpose to buy something; toys, sweatmeats, he did not know what, for Mary. Too handsome a present might bring down a beating, he sadly suspected; he had better get her something to eat, something nourishing, something that would disappear. He was about to invest in chocolate fondants, the best, when he suddenly realized that the cook’s child had been back in her proper station full three months, and would no longer appreciate the kind of eatables that would appeal to Phillis, who was a gourmet. He asked for and procured the wholesome candy, and rode home, tired and depressed. The impulse which had sent him out was a little spent. Poor Mary was the cook’s child after all, bred to servitude, doing only what her mother had done before her. He was a meddling busybody and would probably only succeed in getting the poor little creature a beating.…

He was thinking of Adelaide and Phillis now—of the rich sensuous beauty of Adelaide’s child, and the uncanny handsomeness of his wife. The devilish attraction of it swayed him, always more especially when he was tired and overwrought. It was her eyes.…

However, he had got the candy, a fat packet that ought to rejoice any normal child’s heart, and on arriving home he went boldly into the rear premises through the red baize door, and asked where Mary was?

Gertrude, coarse, homely, but on the whole well favoured, suspended her chopping operations at a board, and raising her chin, regarded him quizzically. With a kind of good-humoured malice, so it appeared to him, she slightly deferred her reply.… Then she said calmly—

“Mary is in the scullery.”

Raising her voice she called—

“Mary! You’re wanted.”

Quickly, obediently, a drooping, crestfallen figure of infancy appeared and stood in the sunlight that poured through the doorway, flung from a wide open window far back in the room she came from. It irradiated the ground she stood on and the filmy mass of cobwebs over her head; it could not light her up, any more than the bogey in the fields which flaps lank and dull in the full glare of noontide. And this was a living child, rendered by what means he knew not, unsusceptible, like any scarecrow, of light and joy. The depressed red bow on the top of her head looked as if it had not been untied for weeks. The hem of her skirt was partially torn off, it was far too long for her, and she had fastened, or some one had fastened it up for her, clumsily with a piece—two pieces of string. It showed a dirty pair of knickerbockers.

She stood, waiting patiently, blinking a little, hideous, shapeless, piteous. Gertrude said nothing but looked from one to the other, comparing them as it were, enjoying herself quietly, like a rough in the front row of the pit.

After a while, as if the play had lasted long enough, she said—

“Come here! I’ll put a pin in for you.”

Mary came shuffling up, not unwillingly. She did not seem to dislike her mother, that is all that could be said, and Ensor was glad to be able to think it possible that Gertrude was not always unkind to her. But such shocking neglect, even if there had been no excessive corporal punishment, was culpable. He stood, handling the packet of sweets dubiously, while the mother proceeded, with many a shake and pull, to modify her child’s disorder, which she had the sense to see injured her in the opinion of her master, if master he could be called who had no authority. At last summoning his courage, Ensor pulled out the packet and put it into Mary’s hand as she stood there, pending the adjustment of clothes that could hardly be called such, so ragged and insufficient were they.

The sweets fell to the ground, dropped with strange unchildish negligence from a nerveless hand. The child did not even look up. A spasm of agony transfixed the heart of Ensor.

Gertrude noticed the violent contraction of his features. She picked up the packet of bull’s eyes, and actually inserted one into Mary’s mouth. Ensor did not see if the child retained it, for he was groping on the ground for some of the sweets that had fallen out of the burst packet.

“Say thank you, you silly!” Gertrude adjured the child who stood astonished, bewildered, by such ordinary attentions as are the usual award of the protected and cherished young of any class. She was passive through fright, but if she had had the spirit, it was easy to see that her one idea was to hide, and that her eyes were looking for a corner to run into. But her mother had hold of her, ordering her attire, shaking her as if she had been a small frail apple-tree.

“That’s a very unsuitable length for a child’s dress, surely?” Ensor remarked, when Mary stood, hardly erect, sheepish but disengaged at last. The peccant undergarments were shoved into their proper place, more or less, and concealed, and her long loose frock was draped into paniers all round her.

“She’s skinny, that’s what it is!” conceded Gertrude. “Nothing won’t stay up round her! The dress too long, eh? No wonder! It’s one of Phillis’s that Miss Adelaide threw away because it was too bad for her beauty to wear. It had to do for my Mary, hadn’t it? We can’t afford to have clothes made on purpose for us, can we? Now run away, run away and play!”

She grinned. Mary stood stock still.

“You’re to grow into your clothes, I see,” said Ensor helplessly. “Well, make haste and grow, there’s a good girl!”

Mary smiled. Even if the gentleman’s words were absurd and irrelevant, she could not be deceived in the kindness of the speaker’s intention.

The smile, begun without spirit or brilliance, faded out like sunlight on a wall on a rainy day. Gertrude took up his speech, and answered it.

“Grow! Her! Never fear! Mary’s one of those stunted-from-birth ones Miss Adelaide’s always talking about. Just look at these thundering long arms!”

She extended to its full length the gnome-like, skinny limb to which she alluded. The owner suffered this liberty wearily. Her stupid glazed eyes were fixed on Ensor. They seemed to say, “Save me! Save me!”

He stammered out—

“Couldn’t she be sent to the sea for a month or so? … I would arrange it.… That is, if you could spare her?”

He waited on the cook’s answer agonizedly. She was in effect the child’s mother, with absolute power over it for life and death.…

“Spare her, Lord, yes!” answered the cook calmly. “The work she does isn’t worth speaking about. You’re nobbut a poor worker, aren’t you, Mary?” She turned to Ensor, away from the child, but she did not trouble to drop her voice at all—

“ ’Twould be no good, Sir. I’m thinking Miss Adelaide’s begun her grand training too late.”

“What d’you mean?” he asked.

“She’ll be training her into her grave, that’s what she’s doing.”

“Sh—h! for God’s sake, woman!” he muttered, and sought his wife. Something must be done.

* * * * * * *

He had no authority, except, strange to say, as far as Phillis was concerned. And though Phillis’s physical upbringing left nothing to be desired, he considered her mental education in some ways to be defective. Adelaide placed no obstacle whatever to his realization of certain views he had formulated and insisted on to the verge of tediousness with regard to the moral standards to be inculcated in a young growing girl.

She listened patiently, while he exposed these theories, and her thin lips wore something more nearly approaching to a smile at these times than any other, while her husband thus took a practical interest in the future of her daughter. He reasoned broadly, and generally; he could not lay his whole mind before the wife of Phillis’s father. For that father counted, and not, in Ensor’s idea, favourably. Phillis had certain strongly marked tendencies which he deplored, and which he conceived her to derive from the parent he did not know. She had undoubtedly a strain of the coarse and the callous; her father had probably had these characteristics more strongly developed. She had also some disagreeable qualities that he distinguished in and traced from Adelaide, and that careful training might cross and deny and finally eradicate. She was sly, she was morbid, she was headstrong and reckless of the claims of others.

So, acting with Adelaide’s authority, delegated to him, unquestioningly, he kept a strict watch and supervision on the books she read, and the conversations she heard or took part in. He did not countenance her frequent visits to the kitchen and her odd indecent familiarity with Gertrude the cook. He had asked his wife if he might not prohibit the child from entering the servants’ quarters altogether, and seal the red baize door that led to them against her use. He would like to forbid all entrance and egress by it, and force her to give her word of honour that she would observe the prohibition.

“She may give it, but she won’t keep it,” said Adelaide lazily. “You can’t wonder. She’s fond of Gertrude, because she gives her tit-bits, and Phillis is greedy, poor darling! And then”—she looked up in his face—“there’s your beloved Mary! She’s about, and you must remember the two were brought up together. They were like foster sisters before you came. You altered everything. And now I am going to have your child!”

He stooped and kissed her, full of premature paternal emotion. Adelaide was supposed to be not quite so well to-day. She was lying on the famous tiger-skin that he had given her, and which she had spread over a low wide couch in the hall. She chose to lie on it always, so that the brute’s savage head was close to her own. Loving and akin, the live Adelaide and the dead beast he had given her, both reeked of each other. There was all the hot suggestion of the jungle, of careless natural savagery in the juxtaposition of the tiger’s snarling teeth, Adelaide’s dusky eyes, and the spots and splashes of black that showed on each side of her spare form, like caked, dried blood upon the gold. It was his wife’s boast that her beautiful figure was hardly altered by her present condition, and the shocking cruelty to the unborn implied in this attainment of an unnatural shapeliness was lost on the simple fellow who was so soon to be a father.

“Our child,” he said, kissing her again passionately, “is the thing that matters.”

Then the recollection of that other child went through, pierced his heart like an arrow. He rose from his knees. All the blood in his body came into his face. He stood looking down on the woman, who had returned the passion of his caress with all the force of which she was at present capable. A large patch on the tiger-skin, a zebra mark bitten in, zig-zagging across the yellow fur, focussed his eyes.…

“Adelaide,” he prayed softly, “could we not take Mary back into the house again?”

“No,” Adelaide said. She spoke quite quietly too, but Ensor knew her; a storm was coming.

“Then,” he said pleadingly. “Could she not be sent away for a bit—or”—his immense struggle betrayed itself in his voice—“for good?”

“You cannot interfere with Gertrude’s business,” came plumb and sharp from Adelaide. “If Gertrude likes to leave me, she can of course take her child away with her. But I cannot do without Gertrude, and Gertrude will never leave me. Ask her.”

She turned away, and laid her cheek against the flat head of the tiger.

“And I was so happy!” she wailed, in bitter accents.

He knelt down again. Her breath came quick. He feared for her.

“It is no use,” she said. “You have spoilt it all. And all for the sake of a dirty misbegotten little wretch whose own mother can’t stand her and beats and neglects her. I don’t blame Gertrude. Don’t you understand, Wald, Mary is one of the wrecklings, one of Nature’s faults that ought to have been smothered at birth? I wish I had. I wish somebody had. My father would have put her away fast enough if I had asked him, only like a fool, I was kind to Gertrude, and saw her through with it. But I have come to hate the very sight of the child! And you—you to come snivelling to me about her.… You!”

She laughed. Her passion was spent. She looked him, her husband, up and down, contemptuously.

He murmured: “Don’t, don’t excite yourself!”

“I won’t,” she said squarely, turning her face round to the wall. “I’m better now. I won’t let you hurt me. I’ll even discuss the unwholesome brat, if you like, that’ll show you I don’t care. Get on. Talk quietly and tell me what’s wrong about Mary’s upbringing.”

“You are very good,” Ensor murmured, “are you sure it won’t upset you?”

“No, I tell you.” She sat up and faced him. She pulled a basket of needle-work towards her and busied herself with it. Her hands did not shake. Ensor admired her. After all, she had no nerves, and he might as well say his say about the child, get better terms of existence for her, and be done with the subject. He made up his mind he would not say much; he would not descend to particulars of her ill treatment unless Adelaide asked for them. He began gently—

“I do think, don’t you? that when all’s said and done, Mary’s young, and even a servant’s child ought to have some joy of its life. Mary oughtn’t to be made to slave like a grown-up. Hang it all, a simple child should lightly draw its breath, not to the tune of housework and floorscrubbing. The sight of that poor kid carrying those heavy pails about makes me quite sick. I should like to tell you what I saw yesterday. Gertrude must be an unnatural mother——”

“Well, speak out, what did you see?” Adelaide asked sharply.

“You were out driving. Mary was standing by one of the high windows in the hall——”

“She’d no business to be there. Suppose a caller came?”

“No callers come. Why don’t they, by the way?”

“I hate people. I’ve snubbed them all, they daren’t show their noses here. Go on. What was your paragon doing in the hall?”

“She was eating something out of an enamel tin platter such as you feed dogs in, laid on the sill. The platter was not over clean, and I don’t know what the mess was, but it looked most unappetizing and she seemed to be—yes, actually picking something—something disgusting—something alive out of it.… !”

“Pah, you sicken me!” Adelaide screamed. Ensor went on relentlessly, now that he was wound up.…

“I put my hand on to her little scrubby head with that faded knot of red ribbon on the crown——”

“I wonder you can touch it. Don’t touch me.”

“And I told her not to eat the nasty stuff, and what was it? She said it was bits Gertrude cut off the toast before it went in the dining-room, the same as the dog had. It looked days old—quite mouldy. I shouldn’t like to give such a mess to my dog. I can only account for it as a morbid taste of the young growing child, and I bade her throw it away, and not eat between meals. It shows the shocking state of health she’s in, and she’s morbidly inventive, for then she said——”

“What did she say?”

“That it was her breakfast. Nonsense, I said. But she stuck to it. She seemed cowed, brutalized, but she stuck to it. I say, Adelaide—I know you aren’t very fit just now, but oughtn’t you to make some inquiries? Does Gertrude beat her or ill treat her? I hear sounds, of a morning sometimes—not so much lately since you’ve been seedy—but they freeze my blood, until I realize that it’s the dog getting a licking.… Oh, Adelaide, reassure me, don’t you see a man can’t stand the suspicion of such a thing in his house? A helpless child.…”

The drops of sweat stood on his forehead. Adelaide spoke, as it were a prepared speech, which it was now time to make.

“Your house!” she said. It was hers and the man winced.…

She continued, raising herself a little. “Look here! Mary’s a liar as well as a pig. You’ve owned it. Morbid—is that all? I say a filthy, beastly liar! … And, Wald, I’m going to bear your child, and if you want to have a healthy one, born alive—you haven’t had much luck with children, so you say—you had better not worry me.… Let me have this chance. I’ll never try again. I shall kill myself if this one does not come off. Suppose you be wise in time, and leave off meddling in my domestic concerns, and go and attend to your own. You’ve a meeting of the Library Committee in Beverley at three. It’s full time.” She glanced composedly at the watch that lay on her breast, and lay down again as if it were a duty.…

He went about his business, trying to calm down in the quiet operation of the natural round, and the mild form of civic functions that filled his days. Adelaide was right, an important meeting of the Library Committee was on for to-day, at which he had announced his intention of speaking, for the subject interested him personally. It was a question of morals as applied to the feast of contemporary literature spread before the youth of Beverley and Weighton. Ensor’s contention was that as young girls formed the main contingent of the readers of books in all provincial towns it behoved far-seeing and right-minded city councillors to see that no works pernicious in quality or deleterious in tone should be delivered over to their private consumption. Their elders, with a taste for life, spiced and otherwise, should purchase outright the literature their souls loved, and leave the shelves of chance to works of limpid purity and unimpeachable if dreary moral tone.