Septimus Part 12

"He can come to Nunsmere and lodge with the local policeman," said Zora.

On the evening before they started from Paris she received a letter addressed in a curiously feminine hand. It ran:

"DEAR MRS. MIDDLEMIST:

"I don't let the gra.s.s grow under my feet. I have bought Penton Court. I have also started a campaign which will wipe the Jebusa Jones people off the face of the earth they blacken. I hope you are finding a vocation.

When I am settled at Nunsmere we must talk further of this. I take a greater interest in you than in any other woman I have ever known, and that I believe you take an interest in me is the proud privilege of

"Yours very faithfully, "CLEM SYPHER."

"Here are the three railway tickets, ma'am," said Turner, who had brought up the letter. "I think we had better take charge of them."

Zora laughed, and when Turner had left the room she laughed again. Clem Sypher's letter and Septimus's ticket lay side by side on her dressing-table, and they appealed to her sense of humor. They represented the net result of her misanthropic travels.

What would her mother say? What would Emmy say? What would be the superior remark of the Literary Man from London?

She, Zora Middlemist, who had announced in the market place, with such a flourish of trumpets, that she was starting on her glorious pilgrimage to the Heart of Life, abjuring all conversation with the execrated male s.e.x, to have this ironical adventure! It was deliciously funny. Not only had she found two men in the Heart of Life, but she was bringing them back with her to Nunsmere. She could not hide them from the world in the secrecy of her own memory: there they were in actual, bodily presence, the sole trophies of her quest.

Yet she put a postscript to a letter to her mother.

"I know, in your dear romantic way, you will declare that these two men have fallen in love with me. You'll be wrong. If they had, _I shouldn't have anything to do with them. It would have made them quite impossible_."

The energy with which she licked and closed the envelope was remarkable but unnecessary.

CHAPTER VI

Things happen slowly at Nunsmere--from the grasping of an idea to the pace of the church choir over the hymns. Life there is no vulgar, tearing two-step, as it is in G.o.dalming, London, and other vortices of human pa.s.sions, but the stately measure of a minuet. Delights are deliberate and have lingering ends. A hen would scorn to hatch a chicken with the indecent haste of her sister in the next parish.

Six months pa.s.sed, and Zora wondered what had become of them. Only a few visits to London, where she had consorted somewhat gaily with Emmy's acquaintances, had marked their flight, and the gentle fingers of Nunsmere had graduated the reawakening of her nostalgia for the great world. She spoke now and then of visiting j.a.pan and America and South Africa, somewhat to her mother's consternation; but no irresistible force drove her thither.

She found contentment in procrastination.

It had also been a mild amus.e.m.e.nt to settle Septimus Dix, after his recovery, in a little house facing the common. He had to inhabit some portion of this planet, and as he had no choice of spot save Hackney Downs, which Wiggleswick suggested, Zora waved her hand to the tenantless house and told him to take it. As there was an outhouse at the end of the garden which he could use as a workshop, his princ.i.p.al desideratum in a residence, he obeyed her readily. She then bought his furniture, plate, and linen, and a complicated kitchen battery over whose uses Wiggleswick scratched a bewildered head.

"A saucepan I know, and a frying-pan I know, but what you're to put in those things with holes in them fairly licks me."

"Perhaps we might grow geraniums in them," said Septimus brightly, alter a fit of musing.

"If you do," said Zora, "I'll put a female cook in charge of you both, and wash my hands of you."

Whereupon she explained the uses of a cullender, and gave Wiggleswick to understand that she was a woman of her word, and that an undrained cabbage would be the signal for the execution of her threat. From the first she had a.s.sumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master she had been absurdly jealous. But Wiggleswick, bent, h.o.a.ry, deaf, crabbed, evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed the word of command, and meekly accepted Zora as his taskmistress.

For Septimus began happy days wherein the clock was disregarded. The vague projects that had filled his head for the construction of a new type of quick-firing gun took definite shape. Some queer corner of his brain had a.s.similated a marvelous knowledge of field artillery, and Zora was amazed at the extent of his technical library, which Wiggleswick had overlooked in his statement of the salvage from the burned-down house at Shepherd's Bush.

Now and then he would creep from the shyness which enveloped the inventive side of his nature, and would talk with her with unintelligible earnestness of these dreadful engines; of radial and initial hoop pressures, of drift angles, of ballistics, of longitudinal tensions, and would jot down trigonometrical formulae ill.u.s.trated by diagrams until her brain reeled; or of his treatise on guns of large caliber just written and now in the printers' hands, and of the revolution in warfare these astounding machines would effect. His eyes would lose their dreamy haze and would become luminous, his nervous fingers would become effectual, the man would become transfigured; but as soon as the fervid fit pa.s.sed off he would turn with amiable aimlessness to his usual irrelevance. Sometimes he would work all night, either in his room or his workshop, at his inventions. Sometimes he would dream for days together. There was an old-fas.h.i.+oned pond in the middle of the common, with rough benches placed here and there at the brink. Septimus loved to sit on one of them and look at the ducks. He said he was fascinated by the way they wagged their tails. It suggested an invention: of what nature he could not yet determine. He also formed a brotherly intimacy with a lame donkey belonging to the s.e.xton, and used to feed him with _pate de foie gras_ sandwiches, specially prepared by Wiggleswick, until he was authoritatively informed that raw carrots would be more acceptable. To see the two of them side by side watching the ducks in the pond wag their tails was a touching spectacle.

Another amenity in Septimus's peaceful existence was Emmy.

Being at this time out of an engagement, she paid various flying visits to Nunsmere, bringing with her an echo of comic opera and an odor of _Peau d'Espagne_. She dawned on Septimus's horizon like a mischievous and impertinent planet, so different from Zora, the great fixed star of his heaven, yet so pretty, so twinkling, so artlessly and so obviously revolving round some twopenny-halfpenny sun of her own, that he took her, with Wiggleswick, the ducks and the donkey, into his close comrades.h.i.+p. It was she who had ordained the carrots. She had hair like golden thistledown, and the dainty, blonde skin that betrays every motion of the blood. She could blush like the pink tea-rose of an old-fas.h.i.+oned English garden. She could blanch to the whiteness of alabaster. Her eyes were forget-me-nots after rain. Her mouth was made for pretty slang and kisses. Neither her features nor her most often photographed expression showed the tiniest sc.r.a.p of what the austere of her s.e.x used to call character. When the world smiled on her she laughed: when it frowned, she cried. When she met Septimus Dix, she flew to him as a child does to a new toy, and spent gorgeous hours in pulling him to pieces to see how he worked.

"Why aren't you married?" she asked him one day.

He looked up at the sky--they were on the common--an autumn stretch of pearls and purples, with here and there a streak of wistful blue, as if seeking the inspiration of a reason.

"Because no one has married me," he replied.

Emmy laughed. "That's just like you. You expect a woman to drag you out of your house by the scruff of your neck and haul you to church without your so much as asking her."

"I've heard that lots of women do," said Septimus.

Emmy looked at him sharply. Every woman resents a universal criticism of her s.e.x, but cannot help feeling a twinge of respect for the critic. She took refuge in scorn.

"A real man goes out and looks for a wife."

"But suppose he doesn't want one?"

"He must want a woman to love. What can his life be without a woman in it?

What can anybody's life be without some one to care for? I really believe you're made of sawdust. Why don't you fall in love?"

Septimus took off his hat, ran his fingers through his upstanding hair, re-covered his head, and looked at her helplessly.

"Oh, no! I'm booked. It's no use your falling in love with me."

"I wouldn't--presume to do such a thing," he stammered, somewhat scared. "I think love is serious. It's like an invention: sometimes it lies deep down inside you, great and quiet--and at other times it racks you and keeps you from sleeping."

"Oho!" cried Emmy. "So you know all about it. You _are_ in love. Now, tell me, who is she?"

"It was many years ago," said Septimus. "She wore pigtails and I burned a hole in her pinafore with a toy cannon and she slapped my face. Afterwards she married a butcher."

He looked at her with his wan smile, and again raised his hat and ran his hand through his hair. Emmy was not convinced.

"I believe," she said, "you have fallen in love with Zora."

He did not reply for a moment or two; then he touched her arm.

"Please don't say that," he said, in an altered tone.

Emmy edged up close to him, as they walked. It was her nature, even while she teased, to be kind and caressing.

"Not even if it's true? Why not?"

"Things like that are not spoken of," he said soberly. "They're only felt."

This time it was she who put a hand on his arm, with a charming, sisterly air.

"I hope you won't make yourself miserable over it. You see, Zora is impossible. She'll never marry again. I do hope it's not serious. Is it?"

As he did not answer, she continued: "It would be such--such rot wasting your life over a thing you haven't a chance of getting."