"It is useless. He would not believe us. We cannot be at his elbow to hold back his hand when the bad moment comes. n.o.body will be there, as a matter of fact; for women of this temperament--born naggers, in short, since that's what it comes to--when they are also ladies, graceful and gracious as she is; never nag at all before outsiders. To the world, they are bland; everybody says, 'What charming talkers!' They are 'angels abroad, devils at home,' as the proverb puts it. Some night she will provoke him when they are alone, till she has reached his utmost limit of endurance--and then," she drew one hand across her dove-like throat, "it will be all finished."

"You think so?"

"I am sure of it. We human beings go straight like sheep to our natural destiny."

"But--that is fatalism."

"No, not fatalism: insight into temperament. Fatalists believe that your life is arranged for you beforehand from without; w.i.l.l.y-nilly, you MUST act so. I only believe that in this jostling world your life is mostly determined by your own character, in its interaction with the characters of those who surround you. Temperament works itself out. It is your own acts and deeds that make up Fate for you."

For some months after this meeting neither Hilda Wade nor I saw anything more of the Le Geyts. They left town for Scotland at the end of the season; and when all the grouse had been duly slaughtered and all the salmon duly hooked, they went on to Leicestershire for the opening of fox-hunting; so it was not till after Christmas that they returned to Campden Hill. Meanwhile, I had spoken to Dr. Sebastian about Miss Wade, and on my recommendation he had found her a vacancy at our hospital. "A most intelligent girl, c.u.mberledge," he remarked to me with a rare burst of approval--for the Professor was always critical--after she had been at work for some weeks at St. Nathaniel's. "I am glad you introduced her here. A nurse with brains is such a valuable accessory--unless, of course, she takes to THINKING. But Nurse Wade never THINKS; she is a useful instrument--does what she's told, and carries out one's orders implicitly."

"She knows enough to know when she doesn't know," I answered, "which is really the rarest kind of knowledge."

"Unrecorded among young doctors!" the Professor retorted, with his sardonic smile. "They think they understand the human body from top to toe, when, in reality--well, they might do the measles!"

Early in January, I was invited again to lunch with the Le Geyts. Hilda Wade was invited, too. The moment we entered the house, we were both of us aware that some grim change had come over it. Le Geyt met us in the hall, in his old genial style, it is true; but still with a certain reserve, a curious veiled timidity which we had not known in him.

Big and good-humoured as he was, with kindly eyes beneath the s.h.a.ggy eyebrows, he seemed strangely subdued now; the boyish buoyancy had gone out of him. He spoke rather lower than was his natural key, and welcomed us warmly, though less effusively than of old. An irreproachable housemaid, in a spotless cap, ushered us into the transfigured drawing-room. Mrs. Le Geyt, in a pretty cloth dress, neatly tailor-made, rose to meet us, beaming the vapid smile of the perfect hostess--that impartial smile which falls, like the rain from Heaven, on good and bad indifferently. "SO charmed to see you again, Dr. c.u.mberledge!" she bubbled out, with a cheerful air--she was always cheerful, mechanically cheerful, from a sense of duty. "It IS such a pleasure to meet dear Hugo's old friends! AND Miss Wade, too; how delightful! You look so well, Miss Wade! Oh, you're both at St. Nathaniel's now, aren't you?

So you can come together. What a privilege for you, Dr. c.u.mberledge, to have such a clever a.s.sistant--or, rather, fellow-worker. It must be a great life, yours, Miss Wade; such a sphere of usefulness! If we can only feel we are DOING GOOD--that is the main matter. For my own part, I like to be mixed up with every good work that's going on in my neighbourhood. I'm the soup-kitchen, you know, and I'm visitor at the workhouse; and I'm the Dorcas Society, and the Mutual Improvement Cla.s.s; and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and to Children, and I'm sure I don't know how much else; so that, what with all that, and what with dear Hugo and the darling children"--she glanced affectionately at Maisie and Ettie, who sat bolt upright, very mute and still, in their best and stiffest frocks, on two stools in the corner--"I can hardly find time for my social duties."

"Oh, dear Mrs. Le Geyt," one of her visitors said with effusion, from beneath a nodding bonnet--she was the wife of a rural dean from Staffordshire--"EVERYBODY is agreed that YOUR social duties are performed to a marvel. They are the envy of Kensington. We all of us wonder, indeed, how one woman can find time for all of it!"

Our hostess looked pleased. "Well, yes," she answered, gazing down at her fawn-coloured dress with a half-suppressed smile of self-satisfaction, "I flatter myself I CAN get through about as much work in a day as anybody!" Her eye wandered round her rooms with a modest air of placid self-approval which was almost comic. Everything in them was as well-kept and as well-polished as good servants, thoroughly drilled, could make it. Not a stain or a speck anywhere. A miracle of neatness. Indeed, when I carelessly drew the Norwegian dagger from its scabbard, as we waited for lunch, and found that it stuck in the sheath, I almost started to discover that rust could intrude into that orderly household.

I recollected then how Hilda Wade had pointed out to me during those six months at St. Nathaniel's that the women whose husbands a.s.saulted them were almost always "notable housewives," as they say in America--good souls who prided themselves not a little on their skill in management.

They were capable, practical mothers of families, with a boundless belief in themselves, a sincere desire to do their duty, as far as they understood it, and a habit of impressing their virtues upon others which was quite beyond all human endurance. Placidity was their note; provoking placidity. I felt sure it must have been of a woman of this type that the famous phrase was coined--"Elle a toutes les vertus--et elle est insupportable."

"Clara, dear," the husband said, "shall we go in to lunch?"

"You dear, stupid boy! Are we not all waiting for YOU to give your arm to Lady Maitland?"

The lunch was perfect, and it was perfectly served. The silver glowed; the linen was marked with H. C. Le G. in a most artistic monogram.

I noticed that the table decorations were extremely pretty. Somebody complimented our hostess upon them. Mrs. Le Geyt nodded and smiled--"_I_ arranged them. Dear Hugo, in his blundering way--the big darling--forgot to get me the orchids I had ordered. So I had to make shift with what few things our own wee conservatory afforded. Still, with a little taste and a little ingenuity--" She surveyed her handiwork with just pride, and left the rest to our imaginations.

"Only you ought to explain, Clara--" Le Geyt began, in a deprecatory tone.

"Now, you darling old bear, we won't harp on that twice-told tale again," Clara interrupted, with a knowing smile. "Point da rechauffes!

Let us leave one another's misdeeds and one another's explanations for their proper sphere--the family circle. The orchids did NOT turn up, that is the point; and I managed to make shift with the plumbago and the geraniums. Maisie, my sweet, NOT that pudding, IF you please; too rich for you, darling. I know your digestive capacities better than you do.

I have told you fifty times it doesn't agree with you. A small slice of the other one!"

"Yes, mamma," Maisie answered, with a cowed and cowering air. I felt sure she would have murmured, "Yes, mamma," in the selfsame tone if the second Mrs. Le Geyt had ordered her to hang herself.

"I saw you out in the park, yesterday, on your bicycle, Ettie," Le Geyt's sister, Mrs. Mallet, put in. "But do you know, dear, I didn't think your jacket was half warm enough."

"Mamma doesn't like me to wear a warmer one," the child answered, with a visible shudder of recollection, "though I should love to, Aunt Lina."

"My precious Ettie, what nonsense--for a violent exercise like bicycling! Where one gets so hot! So unbecomingly hot! You'd be simply stifled, darling." I caught a darted glance which accompanied the words and which made Ettie recoil into the recesses of her pudding.

"But yesterday was so cold, Clara," Mrs. Mallet went on, actually venturing to oppose the infallible authority. "A nipping morning. And such a flimsy coat! Might not the dear child be allowed to judge for herself in a matter purely of her own feelings?"

Mrs. Le Geyt, with just the shadow of a shrug, was all sweet reasonableness. She smiled more suavely than ever. "Surely, Lina," she remonstrated, in her frankest and most convincing tone, "_I_ must know best what is good for dear Ettie, when I have been watching her daily for more than six months past, and taking the greatest pains to understand both her const.i.tution and her disposition. She needs hardening, Ettie does. Hardening. Don't you agree with me, Hugo?"

Le Geyt shuffled uneasily in his chair. Big man as he was, with his great black beard and manly bearing, I could see he was afraid to differ from her overtly. "Well,--m--perhaps, Clara," he began, peering from under the s.h.a.ggy eyebrows, "it would be best for a delicate child like Ettie--"

Mrs. Le Geyt smiled a compa.s.sionate smile. "Ah, I forgot," she cooed, sweetly. "Dear Hugo never CAN understand the upbringing of children. It is a sense denied him. We women know"--with a sage nod. "They were wild little savages when I took them in hand first--weren't you, Maisie? Do you remember, dear, how you broke the looking-gla.s.s in the boudoir, like an untamed young monkey? Talking of monkeys, Mr. Cotswould, HAVE you seen those delightful, clever, amusing French pictures at that place in Suffolk Street? There's a man there--a Parisian--I forget his honoured name--Leblanc, or Lenoir, or Lebrun, or something--but he's a most humorous artist, and he paints monkeys and storks and all sorts of queer beasties ALMOST as quaintly and expressively as you do. Mind, I say ALMOST, for I never will allow that any Frenchman could do anything QUITE so good, quite so funnily mock-human, as your marabouts and professors."

"What a charming hostess Mrs. Le Geyt makes," the painter observed to me, after lunch. "Such tact! Such discrimination!... AND, what a devoted stepmother!"

"She is one of the local secretaries of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children," I said, drily.

"And charity begins at home," Hilda Wade added, in a significant aside.

We walked home together as far as Stanhope Gate. Our sense of doom oppressed us. "And yet," I said, turning to her, as we left the doorstep, "I don't doubt Mrs. Le Geyt really believes she IS a model stepmother!"

"Of course she believes it," my witch answered. "She has no more doubt about that than about anything else. Doubts are not in her line. She does everything exactly as it ought to be done--who should know, if not she?--and therefore she is never afraid of criticism. Hardening, indeed!

that poor slender, tender, shrinking little Ettie! A frail exotic. She would harden her into a skeleton if she had her way. Nothing's much harder than a skeleton, I suppose, except Mrs. Le Geyt's manner of training one."

"I should be sorry to think," I broke in, "that that sweet little floating thistle-down of a child I once knew was to be done to death by her."

"Oh, as for that, she will NOT be done to death," Hilda answered, in her confident way. "Mrs. Le Geyt won't live long enough."

I started. "You think not?"

"I don't think, I am sure of it. We are at the fifth act now. I watched Mr. Le Geyt closely all through lunch, and I'm more confident than ever that the end is coming. He is temporarily crushed; but he is like steam in a boiler, seething, seething, seething. One day she will sit on the safety-valve, and the explosion will come. When it comes"--she raised aloft one quick hand in the air as if striking a dagger home--"good-bye to her!"

For the next few months I saw much of Le Geyt; and the more I saw of him, the more I saw that my witch's prognosis was essentially correct.

They never quarrelled; but Mrs. Le Geyt, in her un.o.btrusive way, held a quiet hand over her husband which became increasingly apparent. In the midst of her fancy-work (those busy fingers were never idle) she kept her eyes well fixed on him. Now and again I saw him glance at his motherless girls with what looked like a tender, protecting regret; especially when "Clara" had been most openly drilling them; but he dared not interfere. She was crushing their spirit, as she was crushing their father's--and all, bear in mind, for the best of motives! She had their interest at heart; she wanted to do what was right for them. Her manner to him and to them was always honey-sweet--in all externals; yet one could somehow feel it was the velvet glove that masked the iron hand; not cruel, not harsh even, but severely, irresistibly, unflinchingly crushing. "Ettie, my dear, get your brown hat at once. What's that?

Going to rain? I did not ask you, my child, for YOUR opinion on the weather. My own suffices. A headache? Oh, nonsense! Headaches are caused by want of exercise. Nothing so good for a touch of headache as a nice brisk walk in Kensington Gardens. Maisie, don't hold your sister's hand like that; it is imitation sympathy! You are aiding and abetting her in setting my wishes at naught. Now, no long faces! What _I_ require is CHEERFUL obedience."

A bland, autocratic martinet: smiling, inexorable! Poor, pale Ettie grew thinner and wanner under her law daily, while Maisie's temper, naturally docile, was being spoiled before one's eyes by persistent, needless thwarting.

As spring came on, however, I began to hope that things were really mending. Le Geyt looked brighter; some of his own careless, happy-go-lucky self came back again at intervals. He told me once, with a wistful sigh, that he thought of sending the children to school in the country--it would be better for them, he said, and would take a little work off dear Clara's shoulders; for never even to me was he disloyal to Clara. I encouraged him in the idea. He went on to say that the great difficulty in the way was... Clara. She was SO conscientious; she thought it her duty to look after the children herself, and couldn't bear to delegate any part of that duty to others. Besides, she had such an excellent opinion of the Kensington High School!

When I told Hilda Wade of this, she set her teeth together and answered at once: "That settles it! The end is very near. HE will insist upon their going, to save them from that woman's ruthless kindness; and SHE will refuse to give up any part of what she calls her duty. HE will reason with her; he will plead for his children; SHE will be adamant.

Not angry--it is never the way of that temperament to get angry--just calmly, sedately, and insupportably provoking. When she goes too far, he will flare up at last; some taunt will rouse him; the explosion will come; and... the children will go to their Aunt Lina, whom they dote upon. When all is said and done, it is the poor man I pity!"

"You said within twelve months."

"That was a bow drawn at a venture. It may be a little sooner; it may be a little later. But--next week or next month--it is coming: it is coming!"

June smiled upon us once more; and on the afternoon of the 13th, the anniversary of our first lunch together at the Le Geyts, I was up at my work in the accident ward at St. Nathaniel's. "Well, the ides of June have come, Sister Wade!" I said, when I met her, parodying Caesar.

"But not yet gone," she answered; and a profound sense of foreboding spread over her speaking face as she uttered the words.

Her oracle disquieted me. "Why, I dined there last night," I cried; "and all seemed exceptionally well."