Secret Bread Part 17

Panic peeped in Phoebe's brown eyes, giving her a flas.h.i.+ng look of something woodland, despite her would-be smart attire. She dropped her lids to hide it.

"London...." she murmured. Then, sitting upright, and staring at her twisting fingers:

"Ishmael!..."

A pause which Ishmael broke by asking, "Well?"

"Nothing. Only--I was wondering. Whether you ... how you'd like London, and whether you wouldn't find down here, and all of us, very dull when you come back?"

"What rot! Of course not! Why should I?" asked Ishmael, already so in London in antic.i.p.ation that he could not even take an interest in his return to this older world.

"Oh, I don't know. I only wondered. You never wonder about things, do you, Ishmael?"

"I don't think I ever do anything else."

"Not in the way I mean. You wonder about life and all sorts of things like that that I don't bother about, but not about people, about what you feel for them. That's what I mean by wondering."

"Oh, feeling!..." said Ishmael in a gruff embarra.s.sment; "I dunno. Yes I do, though. I don't think what one feels is so very important--not the personal part of it, anyway. There's such a lot of things in the world, and somehow it seems waste of energy to be always tearing oneself to tatters over one's personal relations.h.i.+p towards any one other person."

Phoebe tried to s.n.a.t.c.h at the words that blew past over her head as far as her comprehension of them was concerned.

"But how can you say it's not important?" she exclaimed reproachfully.

"Even being married wouldn't seem important if you looked at it that way."

"Even being married...." repeated Ishmael. Inwardly came the swift thought: "Well, why is there all this fuss about it, anyway?" All he said was:

"Why, have you been thinking of getting married, Phoebe?"

"A lady can't be the first to think of it...." said Phoebe.

"I suppose not," he agreed, true to his own age and that in which he lived. Conversation lay quiescent between them; he was aware of a sensation of weariness and wished she would go, pretty as she looked sitting there in her circle of swelling skirt and trim little jacket that fitted over her round breast and left bare her soft throat.

"Have you ever ...?" asked Phoebe suddenly.

"Have I ever what?"

"Thought of it ... of getting married?"

"Good Lord! not yet. There's been such a lot of other things...."

"Well, when you do I'll hope you'll be very happy," said Phoebe.

"Thanks! I hope so too."

"I don't suppose you'll know me then."

"Why ever not?"

"Oh, well, of course you'll marry a real lady, and she wouldn't want to know me. She'd think me common."

"What utter nonsense, Phoebe! Do all girls talk such silly nonsense?

Why, of course I'll always be far too fond of you to lose sight of you, and I expect you and my wife--how idiotic that sounds--will be no end of friends." He did not think so; but there struck him that there was something rather plaintive and wistful about Phoebe that afternoon.

Suddenly she rose and settled the basque of her jacket with quick, nervous fingers.

"I must go," she said hurriedly. "I don't know what Va.s.sie'll say at me staying up here like this."

"It was awfully nice of you to come," said Ishmael, taking the little hand that lay idle against a flounce. She made no motion to withdraw it or to move away, and glancing up at her he saw there were tears in her eyes. As he looked they slipped over her lashes and rolled down her cheeks. She made no effort to stay them, nor did she sob--she cried with the effortless sorrow of a tired child.

"Phoebe! why, what's the matter? Are you unhappy about anything?

Phoebe, do tell me what it is?"

She shook her head but stammered out:

"It's nothing, but I'm sort of frightened.... I can't tell you about what. And I thought you might be able to help me and put it all right, but you can't."

"How do you know I can't? You haven't tried me."

"Yes, I have," she said, half-laughing now through her tears that were already dry upon her cheeks. Whatever thought, whatever fear, whatever glimpsing of dread possibilities in herself or in some other person had brought her to his side that afternoon was already weighing less unbearably upon her, though she had failed in her attempt to find an easing. Her mind simply could not sustain for long one idea, and in the pa.s.sing moment she was always able to find distraction. She found it now in Va.s.sie, who came sweeping in, slightly flushed and with a lighter manner than that with which she had ushered in Phoebe. She bore her off with promise of tea and a look at new gowns with none the less determination, but the sight of tearstains on Phoebe's cheek at once softened and relieved her.

Ishmael was left with a vague feeling that he had failed Phoebe in something she had expected of him. Yet for himself he was cheered by her visit, for it had served to bring him out of that dead, still peace where he had been for so many days, that had not lightened even with returning strength, but that had been swept away by the breath of the commonplace Phoebe brought with her.

As to Va.s.sie, she was occupied with wondering whether the pa.s.sionate yet careless caresses that Killigrew had lavished on her that afternoon "meant anything" or not. He had told her that in France they always said that "love was an affair of the skin...." And she knew she had a perfect skin. Killigrew had told her it was perfect to stroke as well as gaze upon; none of her English swains had ever told her that. She always looked on Killigrew as a foreigner because he was so alien to herself.

Yet that evening he spent with Ishmael and the Parson, and the next day a grey uncertain morning of blown clouds found Ishmael and Killigrew both seated in the train while she waved her handkerchief at them from a receding platform. And if that handkerchief were to be wet with tears that were not for her brother nor yet for Killigrew except in so far as he had, with his gay tongue and sudden secret kisses, awakened hopes in her that she was beginning to see, by his very nature, could have no foundation, at least she let no one even guess at it. They were tears of rage, almost as much with herself as him, and if Killigrew were never to have had more upon his conscience than a light flirtation with this ambitious and far from ignorant girl, there would have been little to disturb his healthy slumbers. Va.s.sie was not one to waste time over the regrets that eat at the heart, and, though she could not altogether stifle pain at the outset, her strong-set will made the inevitable period of recurrent pangs shorter for her than for most. Killigrew had played the game quite fairly according to his code; it was Va.s.sie's ignorance of any form of philandering beyond the crude interchange of repartee and kisses of the young clerks she had hitherto met that had made the playing of it unequal. She and Phoebe were both enacting the oldest woman's part in the world--that of being left behind to wait; and it was two very unwitting youths who left them. As the train gathered speed on its long journey both Ishmael and Killigrew had their minds on what lay before them, not on anything left behind.

CHAPTER VIII

NEW HORIZONS

When Ishmael laid his aching head upon the pillow one night a week later in the Tavistock Square house of Mr. Alderman Killigrew it carried within a whirl of impressions so confused that days would have been needed in which to sort them out. London--the London of the 'sixties--noisy with hoofs and iron-bound wheels upon its cobbles and macadam, dark with slums that encroached upon its gayest ways, glittering with night-houses and pleasure gardens that focussed light till dawn, brightened as with cl.u.s.tered bubbles by the swelling skirts of ladies of the whole world and the half, was, though smaller, ignorant of electric light, and without half the broad s.p.a.ces and great buildings of the London of to-day, still more sparkling and gayer in its effect because life was less hidden. The 'sixties were not squeamish, though they were prudish; a man's own womenfolk were less noticeable than to-day, not only in such minor detail as the exclusion of them from the tops of omnibuses; but they, after all, were but a fraction of what went to make up spectacular life. Those were the days of bloods--when an officer and a gentleman went as a matter of course to all the c.o.c.kpits and gaming houses, the night clubs and rings sacred to the "fancy"; when it was still the thing for a gentleman to spend his nights in drinking champagne and playing practical jokes that were forgiven him as a high-spirited young man who must sow his wild oats and garnish each word of conversation with an oath. From the comparative respectability of Cremorne and Motts, and the frankly shady precincts of the "Pie" and the "Blue Posts" down to places considerably worse, London was an enormous gamut of opportunities for "seeing life."

Killigrew, as a merchant's son, however well off, could not penetrate to the most sacred precincts--Motts was more or less barred to him; but on the other hand he was in the midst of what was always called the "Bohemian" set--in which were many artists, both the big and the little fry. One could "see life" there too, though, as usual, most of the artists were very respectable people. It was a respectable art then in vogue in England. Frith was the giant of the day, and from the wax figures at Madame Tussaud's to pictures such as the "Rake's Progress"

the plastic arts had a moral tendency. Even the animals of Sir Edwin Landseer were the most decorous of all four-footed creatures; Killigrew blasphemed by calling the admired paintings still-life studies of animals. But then Killigrew was from Paris and chanted the newer creed; he was always comparing London unfavourably with Paris even when he was showing it off most.

The house in Tavistock Square was grand beyond anything Ishmael had ever imagined, if a little dismal too. It was furnished with a plethora of red plush, polished mahogany, and alabaster vases; while terrible though genuine curios from Mr. Killigrew's foreign agents decorated the least likely places. You were quite likely to be greeted, on opening your wardrobe, by a bland ostrich egg, which Mrs. Killigrew, the vaguest of dear women, would have thrust there and forgotten. She had a deeply-rooted conviction that there was something indecent about an ostrich egg--probably its size, emphasising that nakedness which nothing exhibits so triumphantly as an egg, had something to do with it.

Mrs. Killigrew was nothing if not "nice," but she was something much better than that too. Ishmael, though he could no more help laughing at her than could anyone else, soon felt a genuine affection for her that he never lost. She was a little wide-eyed, wistful-looking woman, really supremely contented with life, and, though kindness itself, quite incapable of realising that anyone could ever really be unhappy or wicked. "I'm sure the dear Lord knows what's best for us all," was her comfortable creed, that in one less sweet-natured would have made for selfishness.

"I'm sure that'll be very nice, my dears," was her invariable comment on any programme suggested by the young men; and there was a legend in the family that Killigrew--or Joseph, as his mother always called him in full--had once said to her: "How would it be, mother, if I were to murder the Guv'nor and then take you round the world with me on the money? We could settle in the South Sea Islands, and I'd marry a darky and you could look after the picaninny grandchildren?" To which Mrs.

Killigrew had responded: "Yes, dear, that will be very nice; and on your way, if you're pa.s.sing the fishmongers', will you tell him to alter the salmon for this evening to cod, as your father won't be in to dinner?"

Mr. Killigrew was a thin, pale man, not at all the typical prosperous merchant, with a skin like the s.h.i.+ny outside of a cold suet pudding, a high wall of forehead, and the thin-lipped mouth of a lawyer. Perhaps it was because of that mouth he was such a successful trader, while the brow provided him with enough philosophy to bear gladly with a child so different from himself--always a hard blow to egoism.

Mr. Killigrew approved of Ishmael; he liked his keenness on whatever appertained to his trade as an agriculturist, and he himself being concerned in the import of several tropical fruits and products, went with the young man to the great Horticultural Show at South Kensington, while the scornful Joe betook himself to the races; and Mrs. Killigrew, though she declined both outings, was sure that they would be very nice.