She sat up in bed with a sudden wild motion as if to jump out and flee away from the sound of the words which had just pa.s.sed her own lips.

Mrs Fyne restrained her, soothed her, induced her at last to lay her head on her pillow again, a.s.suring her all the time that nothing this woman had had the cruelty to say deserved to be taken to heart. The girl, exhausted, cried quietly for a time. It may be she had noticed something evasive in Mrs Fyne's a.s.surances. After a while, without stirring, she whispered brokenly:

"That awful woman told me that all the world would call papa these awful names. Is it possible? Is it possible?"

Mrs Fyne kept silent.

"Do say something to me, Mrs Fyne," the daughter of de Barral insisted in the same feeble whisper.

Again Mrs Fyne a.s.sured me that it had been very trying. Terribly trying. "Yes, thanks, I will." She leaned back in the chair with folded arms while I poured another cup of tea for her, and Fyne went out to pacify the dog which, tied up under the porch, had become suddenly very indignant at somebody having the audacity to walk along the lane.

Mrs Fyne stirred her tea for a long time, drank a little, put the cup down and said with that air of accepting all the consequences:

"Silence would have been unfair. I don't think it would have been kind either. I told her that she must be prepared for the world pa.s.sing a very severe judgment on her father..."

"Wasn't it admirable," cried Marlow interrupting his narrative.

"Admirable!" And as I looked dubiously at this unexpected enthusiasm he started justifying it after his own manner.

"I say admirable because it was so characteristic. It was perfect.

Nothing short of genius could have found better. And this was nature!

As they say of an artist's work: this was a perfect Fyne. Compa.s.sion-- judiciousness--something correctly measured. None of your dishevelled sentiment. And right! You must confess that nothing could have been more right. I had a mind to shout 'Brava! Brava!' but I did not do that. I took a piece of cake and went out to bribe the Fyne dog into some sort of self-control. His sharp comical yapping was unbearable, like stabs through one's brain, and Fyne's deeply modulated remonstrances abashed the vivacious animal no more than the deep, patient murmur of the sea abashes a n.i.g.g.e.r minstrel on a popular beach.

Fyne was beginning to swear at him in low, sepulchral tones when I appeared. The dog became at once wildly demonstrative, half strangling himself in his collar, his eyes and tongue hanging out in the excess of his incomprehensible affection for me. This was before he caught sight of the cake in my hand. A series of vertical springs high up in the air followed, and then, when he got the cake, he instantly lost his interest in everything else."

Fyne was slightly vexed with me. As kind a master as any dog could wish to have, he yet did not approve of cake being given to dogs. The Fyne dog was supposed to lead a Spartan existence on a diet of repulsive biscuits with an occasional dry, hygienic, bone thrown in. Fyne looked down gloomily at the appeased animal, I too looked at that fool-dog; and (you know how one's memory gets suddenly stimulated) I was reminded visually, with an almost painful distinctness, of the ghostly white face of the girl I saw last accompanied by that dog--deserted by that dog. I almost heard her distressed voice as if on the verge of resentful tears calling to the dog, the unsympathetic dog. Perhaps she had not the power of evoking sympathy, that personal gift of direct appeal to the feelings. I said to Fyne, mistrusting the supine att.i.tude of the dog:

"Why don't you let him come inside?"

Oh dear no! He couldn't think of it! I might indeed have saved my breath, I knew it was one of the Fynes' rules of life, part of their solemnity and responsibility, one of those things that were part of their una.s.sertive but ever present superiority, that their dog must not be allowed in. It was most improper to intrude the dog into the houses of the people they were calling on--if it were only a careless bachelor in farmhouse lodgings and a personal friend of the dog. It was out of the question. But they would let him bark one's sanity away outside one's window. They were strangely consistent in their lack of imaginative sympathy. I didn't insist but simply led the way back to the parlour, hoping that no wayfarer would happen along the lane for the next hour or so to disturb the dog's composure.

Mrs Fyne seated immovable before the table charged with plates, cups, jugs, a cold teapot, crumbs, and the general litter of the entertainment turned her head towards us.

"You see, Mr Marlow," she said in an unexpectedly confidential tone: "they are so utterly unsuited for each other."

At the moment I did not know how to apply this remark. I thought at first of Fyne and the dog. Then I adjusted it to the matter in hand which was neither more nor less than an elopement. Yes, by Jove! It was something very much like an elopement--with certain unusual characteristics of its own which made it in a sense equivocal. With amused wonder I remembered that my sagacity was requisitioned in such a connection. How unexpected! But we never know what tests our gifts may be put to. Sagacity dictated caution first of all. I believe caution to be the first duty of sagacity. Fyne sat down as if preparing himself to witness a joust, I thought.

"Do you think so, Mrs Fyne?" I said sagaciously. "Of course you are in a position..." I was continuing with caution when she struck out vivaciously for immediate a.s.sent.

"Obviously! dearly! You yourself must admit..."

"But, Mrs Fyne," I remonstrated, "you forget that I don't know your brother."

This argument which was not only sagacious but true, overwhelmingly true, unanswerably true, seemed to surprise her.

I wondered why. I did not know enough of her brother for the remotest guess at what he might be like. I had never set eyes on the man. I didn't know him so completely that by contrast I seemed to have known Miss de Barral--whom I had seen twice (altogether about sixty minutes) and with whom I had exchanged about sixty words--from the cradle so to speak. And perhaps, I thought, looking down at Mrs Fyne (I had remained standing) perhaps she thinks that this ought to be enough for a sagacious a.s.sent.

She kept silent; and I looking at her with polite expectation, went on addressing her mentally in a mood of familiar approval which would have astonished her had it been audible: "You my dear at any rate are a sincere woman..."

"I call a woman sincere," Marlow began again after giving me a cigar and lighting one himself, "I call a woman sincere when she volunteers a statement resembling remotely in form what she really would like to say, what she really thinks ought to be said if it were not for the necessity to spare the stupid sensitiveness of men. The women's rougher, simpler, more upright judgment, embraces the whole truth, which their tact, their mistrust of masculine idealism, ever prevents them from speaking in its entirety. And their tact is unerring. We could not stand women speaking the truth. We could not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life--the unit in the great sum of existence. And they know it.

They are merciful. This generalisation does not apply exactly to Mrs Fyne's outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither my affections nor my vanity were engaged. That's why, may be, she ventured so far.

For a woman she chose to be as open as the day with me. There was not only the form but almost the whole substance of her thought in what she said. She believed she could risk it. She had reasoned somewhat in this way; there's a man, possessing a certain amount of sagacity..."

Marlow paused with a whimsical look at me. The last few words he had spoken with the cigar in his teeth. He took it out now by an ample movement of his arm and blew a thin cloud.

"You smile? It would have been more kind to spare my blushes. But as a matter of fact I need not blush. This is not vanity; it is a.n.a.lysis.

We'll let sagacity stand. But we must also note what sagacity in this connection stands for. When you see this you shall see also that there was nothing in it to alarm my modesty. I don't think Mrs Fyne credited me with the possession of wisdom tempered by common sense. And had I had the wisdom of the Seven Sages of Antiquity, she would not have been moved to confidence or admiration. The secret scorn of women for the capacity to consider judiciously and to express profoundly a meditated conclusion is unbounded. They have no use for these lofty exercises which they look upon as a sort of purely masculine game--game meaning a respectable occupation devised to kill time in this man-arranged life which must be got through somehow. What women's acuteness really respects are the inept 'ideas' and the sheep-like impulses by which our actions and opinions are determined in matters of real importance. For if women are not rational they are indeed acute. Even Mrs Fyne was acute. The good woman was making up to her husband's chess-player simply because she had scented in him that small portion of 'femininity,' that drop of superior essence of which I am myself aware; which, I gratefully acknowledge, has saved me from one or two misadventures in my life either ridiculous or lamentable, I am not very certain which. It matters very little. Anyhow misadventures. Observe that I say 'femininity,' a privilege--not 'feminism,' an att.i.tude. I am not a feminist. It was Fyne who on certain solemn grounds had adopted that mental att.i.tude; but it was enough to glance at him sitting on one side, to see that he was purely masculine to his finger-tips, masculine solidly, densely, amusingly,--hopelessly."

I did glance at him. You don't get your sagacity recognised by a man's wife without feeling the propriety and even the need to glance at the man now and again. So I glanced at him. Very masculine. So much so that "hopelessly" was not the last word of it. He was helpless. He was bound and delivered by it. And if by the obscure promptings of my composite temperament I beheld him with malicious amus.e.m.e.nt, yet being in fact, by definition and especially from profound conviction, a man, I could not help sympathising with him largely. Seeing him thus disarmed, _so_ completely captive by the very nature of things I was moved to speak to him kindly.

"Well. And what do you think of it?"

"I don't know. How's one to tell. But I say that the thing is done now and there's an end of it," said the masculine creature as bluntly as his innate solemnity permitted.

Mrs Fyne moved a little in her chair. I turned to her and remarked gently that this was a charge, a criticism, which was often made. Some people always ask: What could he see in her? Others wonder what she could have seen in him? Expressions of unsuitability.

She said with all the emphasis of her quietly folded arms:

"I know perfectly well what Flora has seen in my brother."

I bowed my head to the gust but pursued my point.

"And then the marriage in most cases turns out no worse than the average, to say the least of it."

Mrs Fyne was disappointed by the optimistic turn of my sagacity. She rested her eyes on my face as though in doubt whether I had enough femininity in my composition to understand the case.

I waited for her to speak. She seemed to be asking herself; Is it after all, worth while to talk to that man? You understand how provoking this was. I looked in my mind for something appallingly stupid to say, with the object of distressing and teasing Mrs Fyne. It is humiliating to confess a failure. One would think that a man of average intelligence could command stupidity at will. But it isn't so. I suppose it's a special gift or else the difficulty consists in being relevant.

Discovering that I could find no really telling stupidity, I turned to the next best thing; a plat.i.tude. I advanced, in a common sense tone, that, surely, in the matter of marriage a man had only himself to please.

Mrs Fyne received this without the flutter of an eyelid. Fyne's masculine breast, as might have been expected, was pierced by that old, regulation shaft. He grunted most feelingly. I turned to him with false simplicity. "Don't you agree with me?"

"The very thing I've been telling my wife," he exclaimed in his extra-manly ba.s.s. "We have been discussing--"

A discussion in the Fyne menage! How portentous! Perhaps the very A discussion in the Fyne menage! How portentous! Perhaps the very first difference they had ever had: Mrs Fyne unflinching and ready for any responsibility, Fyne solemn and shrinking--the children in bed upstairs; and outside the dark fields, the shadowy contours of the land on the starry background of the universe, with the crude light of the open window like a beacon for the truant who would never come back now; a truant no longer but a downright fugitive. Yet a fugitive carrying off spoils. It was the flight of a raider--or a tractor? This affair of the purloined brother, as I had named it to myself, had a very puzzling physiognomy. The girl must have been desperate, I thought, hearing the grave voice of Fyne well enough but catching the sense of his words not at all, except the very last words which were:

"Of course, it's extremely distressing."

I looked at him inquisitively. What was distressing him? The purloining of the son of the poet-tyrant by the daughter of the financier-convict. Or only, if I may say so, the wind of their flight disturbing the solemn placidity of the Fynes' domestic atmosphere. My incert.i.tude did not last long, for he added:

"Mrs Fyne urges me to go to London at once."

One could guess at, almost see, his profound distaste for the journey, his distress at a difference of feeling with his wife. With his serious view of the sublunary comedy Fyne suffered from not being able to agree solemnly with her sentiment as he was accustomed to do, in recognition of having had his way in one supreme instance; when he made her elope with him--the most momentous step imaginable in a young lady's life. He had been really trying to acknowledge it by taking the rightness of her feeling for granted on every other occasion. It had become a sort of habit at last. And it is never pleasant to break a habit. The man was deeply troubled. I said: "Really! To go to London!"

He looked dumbly into my eyes. It was pathetic and funny. "And you of course feel it would be useless," I pursued.

He evidently felt that, though he said nothing. He only went on blinking at me with a solemn and comical slowness. "Unless it be to carry there the family's blessing," I went on, indulging my chaffing humour steadily, in a rather sneaking fashion, for I dared not look at Mrs Fyne, to my right. No sound or movement came from, that direction.

"You think very naturally that to match mere good, sound reasons, against the pa.s.sionate conclusions of love is a waste of intellect bordering on the absurd."

He looked surprised as if I had discovered something very clever. He, dear man, had thought of nothing at all. He simply knew that he did not want to go to London on that mission. Mere masculine delicacy. In a moment he became enthusiastic.

"Yes! Yes! Exactly. A man in love ... You hear, my dear? Here you have an independent opinion--"