LONDON LOVERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13727, 18 April 1908, Page 3 (Supplement)

LONDON LOVERS.

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL AKBANGEMY.NT.

BY MARGARET BAILLIE-SAUSDERS, Author of " Saint 3 in Society."

COPYRIGHT. I. H APT Ell XX.—(Continued.) Wjnnik had l>een contemplating hun in silence for a moment as he spoke. Now she came it tew steps forward and said, imperiously : " Listen, Mr. Lucason. Do you remember your own last wolds more than a. year ago when you went out of that door alter making me this 'gift' as you now call it'-' You turned round and said, ' You keep that for your honour' -1 ask you to remember. .1 took it then because it was the lesser of two evils. Now, now,'' she stamped her foot furiously, "1 have worked and worked and struggled for a year to pay it back and to buy back— honour. I have bought it back "at last. 'That money.'' she almost kicked one of the gold coins with the point, of her slipper, " gives, it hack to me. It is the price. If you ever respected me at all you will take "that money; it delivers me from your bitterest reproach!" Instantly he flung out both his hands ■with one of the suddenly un-English gestures that came to him in moments of strong emotion, palms outwards, like a salaam, and without a won! dropped on his knees and began gathering up the coins. He was so unexpectedly graceful that in the simple act of stooping'to do this he slipped naturally on to one knee with his head beaded and so gave the quaint impression that he knelt to her, rather than to the task. It was a sudden, half comical, turn to their positions, and any English stockbroker one could name would have needed the swift picturcsqueness born of that strain of Greek blood in him to save ib from being entirely laughable! Winnie, standing up in the middle of it all, even so angry and stately, may have been just faintly assailed by one of her sudden and dangerous desires to'laugh, as he knelt so and gathered up the scattered money ; anyhow she btfrst into speech to cover up some rush of feeling. " Every coin you must take! Every one. Then you must shake lianas. You must say that my honour that you shouted at— you did shout horribly—is restored. You must—''

"I win do all these things," he replied, "gladly, with penitence. But,'' throwing back his head, "this money I will give away on your doorstep "You will do nothing of the sort," said Winnie in a dangerous voice. " Mr. Lucason, do you hear me?" "I'm listening, yes/' he said, still scrambling after the coins with dignified gravity; happily half the amount was in notes, so that his labours began to come to a conclusion, and he was now back again on his feet, the linen bag with its dangling red tape in one hand, poking gravely about under the settees and cabinets for final coins that had strayed further than their brethren. But Winnie had no pity for the slight reddening of his face—he was not the thinnest of men to stoop like this, and some struggling -emotion still made her breast heave, though there was none of the old dancing in her eyes. •"You drive me," she said, "to the final humiliation by your obstinacy! Perhaps if I tell you how 1 got the money to buy back—thatyou will not talk of throwing it away at the door!'' He glanced up, flushed, from a far settee. " You've, said enough," he answered. "I. ask you for nothing. But I refuse, to keep the vile stuff! I shall a.l least give it to the unemployed workpeople! It burns my fingers." "It burnt mine, and wore them away to get it," she replied, holly. "But it is honestly worked for. Give it to workpeople," since it was earned by a workperson. You must listen. - ' He put the bag down now on a little table near him, and thrust his hands into his pockets and looked at her grimly. " I learnt how to write," said Winnie, hurriedly proceeding, "paragraphs at first about silly people's doings. 1 got a. little for that. Then Mr. Mo sen berg—l believe you know 'him?"—he noddedgave me an order to write him a weekly letter for his l'i'ther absurd paper. I did that, somehow. I wrote awfully badly and the things used to come back again and again, and often could not be used at all; partly because 1 "was so slaty," Lucason looked puzzled. "' I mean I threw so many what they call 'slates' at people; you know, called them things and so on. 1 had to learn to get out of that as best I could. It wasn't easy. I got a guinea a column for that rubbish when 1 got it in, which wasn't always by any means, especially at first. Then I sold one or two things of my own, furs and that" He started to interrupt imploringly. " No, you must listen, or you won't value the money. Oh, it was pretty easy in a way : 1 mean girl friends bought the things. Then out of my own. private dress-allowance I saved so much a quarter. but 'much' isn t a good word for it! Itwas awfully little, especially as all tin; time I was paying some bothering tradespeople's debts —Oh, you know the soil ; the kind one really needn't pay or'y that, in that sort of 'honour' that you yourself think so much of, I suppose one should; they were an extra, burden, but 1 did get rid of them. Of course I looked badly dressed and couldn't go anywhere much—No, no. hush! — only say this to- show you how I , cared for my honour, not in reproach. If isn't your fault. It never was your fault. Well, doing all that, selling, scraping, and scribbling 1 did at last make the ninety-two pounds, and yesterday I got the last guinea of it. Then I sent for yon." Again he, threw out- his hands, but this time despairingly. "And there's something more. You remember last February ye,, i". my brother Ronnie refused to tike a loan from you'.' Well, I made him. It was my doing. Why? Because I wouldn't have you burdened any more by any more Hardwinters. Of course I never told him of your loan to me. Not a soul ever- heard of it. So even Leger was paid back without knowing how it was done. Since then I haven't played a single game once; nor spent a penny on myself above what is necessary. ] haven't spoken again alone to the man who caused this bother. And I— haven't betted, over anything. I think, now. I've vindicated my honour as— a- respectable Hardwinter?"

Ho gave a sort of miserable groan. He remembered the year he had spent, half judging, half condemning her. And here she had been struggling, toiling to regain her pride. If was awful. ■ He was rushing

into speech, but she would not hear him.

"Give me your hand on it," she said almost with gaiety. " Now that's all right and settled. lam restored.''

Yes. yes." lie began. "And now that it is, and that I've lost nearly a year and a-hati vindicating myself in this way to convince you." she went on in a different torn, drawing away from him and raising her chin with sudden excitement, "there is something more that I must say; something I must assert, something that I will tell you if I die for it. I want to tell you that I am Me!" Her ungrammatical enthusiasm raised her voice to a wild declamatory crescendo that was startling in its contrast., to her former halthumorous, half-rueful relation of her year's efforts: "Listen, Mr. Lucason, and do credit me with this. I'm not an angel, and I never was! I'm not an ancestor without a nose on a grave! I never said I was good because you saw me feeding chickens at winter 1 ]s'o. I never pretended

to make flannel clothes: They were all in jour own head; I never pretended to be anything. I was Me then and I want to tell you I'm still Me. I shall never be anything else, and what is more I don't want to he. J do not care what you expect of me, what the world expects of me! People have this idea and that idea as to what a woman ought to be ; -they want either a machine or an angel, or a "bit of both, and expect us to grind ourselves down to their dreary little sets of rules and petty local notions. Lovers are the most exacting of all, and some of us are silly enough to pretend anything to please "them I I could have pretended to you that day when you came here, that I was an injured innocent, and you would have believed me, but at least, horrid as I am, I treated you honestly —I told you all. I needn't have told toil about that bet. But I did it because I would rather be hated for what I really am than loved for what I am not. This has been a year of slavery, ghastly slavery and humiliation, to prove myself honourable. But one should be honourable—in that I will meet you. And I've tried to be better, more serious, and kinder and repair things that I've done wrong even though I go about, in rags. And "look at that—" she pushed out her small slippered foot with ouch, passionate suddenness that the shoe j< rked on' and flew into the middle of the room and Fell at Lucason's feet. He picked it up. "Yes. look at it!" said Winnie.

"That is one of the things I've had to put up with to get myself righted—with myself!"

The slipper was black satin, of the kind worked with a close pattern in the little beads; it was certainly shabby, and the satin was brownish and the beads gone in many places with sad thread end.- where they should have been. '"That's to show you what it cost. I'd do that again tomorrow. But I tell you thai a woman, like me at any rate, who will stand that, go about in shoes like those, and look the fright that I have done, for a year and five months, has a right to her own individuality, and from this time forward I refuse—l utterly refuse—to be expected to be an angel, when 1 am. and always was, Mo. Now, you know." Lucason was kissing the slipper with rapture. He now put it into his pocket and came towards her, and before she could ward or wave him off took her hands and thing himself into such a passionate- avowal of admiration and love that for a few seconds she was unable- to stop him. His words fairly tumbled over one another, and again and again he kissed the hands he held. " You are you, and it's you I love," he kept repeating. "I don't want the angel, Winnie -only you. only you." But she snatched her hands away, and drew herself from him so quickly and so coldly that a strange light broke upon his rapture and opened his eyes to something of her true attitude; he must not love her afte. all, he must keep back, his wild words. It was not to listen to this that/""sho had sent for him.

"Thanks, but this it utterly the end of our nonsense, Mr. Lucason," she. said. " I have talked nonsense. But this 1 cannot allow. Please go away now, and accept my thanks for all your patience and kindness. I refuse —1 refuse, I say, to listen to you."

She was not shamming. Again her changeable face was set in perfectly genuine coolness and pride, and she" looked like an angry goddess. And a moment ago she hud kicked her shoe across the room! He had gone through maddening alternations of surprise and hope- since he had entered her presence, but this bitterly disappointing end to it all was more than he could bear. He made a bitter answer that contained in it some hint of reproach, some dim allusion to Leger's having originally turned away her heart from him. It. was an unwise venture, but a man so shaken is reckless.

"You think so?" she said coldly. "I shall not attempt to contradict you. I cannot go into any discussions of the past or the future. For all those months I have worked and waited for the right to assert my own individuality without reproach. I've done so. There is only one more thing to be done, one more matter to be put right, and then I shall start life entirely afresh, and be rid of everything." •' What is to be put right?" he staid. "It is something that —not my fault," she sat" " I won't say whose fault it is, or why the rumour was started. But it is there. Have you- -1 am ashamed to mention it—ever heard our names, yours and mine, connected together?"

" Yes, of course." '* I don't sec any of course,"' she replied stiffly. " People are very ridiculous. Well, 1 can speak freely as you have heard it yourself. What 1 have to say is this. 1 was tackled with it myself once or twice, especially recently. One day my cousin Joan Leger— know?"—he nodded,

" asked me outright whether it was true. I did not deny it. Hushfor my own ends utterly. I will tell you whybecause I did not want to be bothered by anybody until I had finished this task ] have just completed." "Bothered? But who vonld bother you?" "Mr. Lucason, one cannot tell you everything. It should be enough to .say that. I simply let the whole subject slide. I did nothing to contradict it. I begin tomorrow—Yes," she said, stamping again. "And the first, persons to be informed of your titter and entire freedom and mine too will be the Legers!" " Do youare you wanting to send me mad?" said Lucason. "Are you mad? What have I done to deserve such a deliberately concocted string of humiliations as those yon have prepared for me in this interview? You fling my willing present in my face, you refuse my.love, and now you conclude by threatening to tell that that—beast that there is nothing between us! For heaven's sake leave the, rumour alone, but don't stoop to speak to him about such a thing." "1 must. It is due to you," said Winnie. "To me? As if 1 cared ! You care nothing that 1 am the most miserable man in l/ondon to-day! -And through you. All you care for is that ridiculous notion of honour that you have gone mad about. You will break a man's heart willingly and talk about your honour! Do you think I haven't spent i year, more than a year of misery for vou and. through you? Oh, Winnie, this is too much!" She stood, white and grave and set bei fore hi in. "Go now," .she said. "'J'huL is all I have to say." "' Absolutely and entirely ail?" lie stared at her a. moment almost unbelievingly. Then he threw up one hand with a gesture of despair and went almost headlong out of the room and down the stairs. When he got to the hall door he i remembered that he had left his letterbook on the table, in the muddle of rearranging his pockets with the money. Ho went, up the stairs again and into the room, dimly hoping to find her still there. Hut the room was empty. In the middle of the floor lay the little "shabby shoe. He was going to pick it up when he heard a sound fro:: the inner drawing-room, a small apartment divided oil' from the other. He paused and listened. It was stormy, passionate sobbing. _ In a panic of horror at his own intrusion he turned, and, gathering up the little shoe, went out into the rain. Rejected, insulted and himself seething with wild rebellion and rage, he went out into the wet world, tarrying her shoe and a burden of wild anger. CHAPTER XXI. The temper of man is so constituted that l possibly he who would not grudge years and years of unrequited devotion would fall into violent language at having to chase a flying lady Jill over London for one day. It is quite natural. Few men will forgive humiliation when publicly displayed, though the Recording Angel alone knows the countless million times the same men l>ar ii in silence in the privacy of their own homes. It is not so much "Thou shalt not make me a fool'' as "Thou sirfft not make me a public fool," which is the theme of the decalogue—a perfectly reasonable qualification. It begins in the public schoolboy who refuses" to be called " Ducky," and kissed by female relations in bonnets on Speech Day, and is continued in the surly and laconic behaviour of bridegrooms at large weddings; it is further expressed by young fathers who usually declare that the first baby is ugly; and can be noted in an Englishman angrily bestowing sixpence on a beggar, or a statesman who is not a charlatan lumberingly and curtly expressing his best ideal*. That -ought Mord had -no {deep, AJi^

through the- watches of the long hours he heard the clock of the Marylebone Parish Church chime the hours across the misty reaches of the Park, and in the distance a faint " kop, kop," from a complaining seal at the Zoological Gardens, which had been brought there in captivity and would never rest again. All that he 'had gone through in that interview: even.' word she had said, every look and action of hers recurred to him again and again, even as had been the case all day; and gradually as the hours of the darkness crept on, and h's surprise and anger abated, he saw further into the meaning of her strange doings. Why had she spent a year trying to pay him* back the debt? Why had she humiliated herself, robbed herself, abased, herself to do that, when not a soul knew of the mutter but themselves? To buy back her honour, she had melodramatically said. Yes, but in whose- eyes, since none but he and she knew of its iossl For the abstract satisfaction of doing so in her own eyes? liven he, little conceited as he was in his lover's capacity, saw that lie took some part in the matter; his opinion counted. She could have got the money from her *-other and returned it to him; there were. er way.-. But she had chosen to work

. it with her own ringers and her own wit, and give it back to him herself, am" to utter that gallant defence ot her own inJ.viduality: and for whom, if not for him? Good heavens, did she tare for his opinion after all? Then if so why was she going now to openly contradict their supposed engagement, at this time of all others? Why, when she had re-won his regard and respect, when she had accomplished her purpose, was she now going to east him oft' for ever? A dear, large, logical nice man gets so puzzled over the jugglings of feminine motives. He did. He struggled with those elusive guessings for hours ; but at last he did see some dim meaning, and it was a meaning that made him fly up and utter a volcanic ejaculation. The beast Leger was dangling about her, half afraid so long as he believed Lucason to be secretly her fiance! she had let the matter stand so until she had finished her hard self-set task: but now she was going to release him from even that dear supposition—release him ! As "If he wanted to be released? Good heavens, could it be that she did not mean to humiliate him, but just to treat him honourably and fairly? Did she suppose that he wanted to be freed from the story on behalf of Zilla Cohen? Could it be that she wis not, from the very first, insulting him but trying— would hardly bear thinking of!—trying to deserve his regard, his respect? If so then—he would marry her, the adorable, darling, silly Quixotic thing, with her consent or without it ! With him ideas meant action. He would see her the minute the morning dawned; he would fo.co her to listen to him ; no, she shouldn't listen, she should just give

Was that why she tried when he ran back into the drawing-room and he had heard her sobbing'' Was it becausethe thought was too unspeakably intoxicating—she eared for him a little bit after all? Then, if so, he would go out and proclaim to all London that she was engaged to him, let her contradict it as she might! If that were so she was his. If she loved him ever so little, she was his; not another man should look at her. The darling! To work like that, to try to to raise her beautiful self in his eyes, and then to send him away for his own wretched Kike! Was that what she meant when she had returned him the first hundred?— regret ;or the past and an attempt to right herself again? Great Scott! what an idiot, what a self-centred, priggish, solemn idiot he had been never to have understood her before, never to have seen her real nobility, her grit, her courage; never to have understood how bitterly she had felt his reproach, how strangely it had worked in iierl Was there ever "such a blind ass of a lover, he said!

The sweet thing, he had invented a character for her, had tacked it on to her. and then insulted her because she came short of it; and all the time she was this brave, eager, merry creature whoso struggling year of work, to regain his good opinion had just been revealed to him. She was right when she said, "1 am me"—si e was Winnie, faulty and merry and fair, and he was a dull dog with a few conventional notions of femininity who had dared to judge her! This was"what had come of idealising a living woman iuto a marble effigy of her ancestress, this calamity, this year's estrangement, this long suffering. The cad l.ei'er. wretched as he was, heal had more chance with her, since he had never, certainlv, put her on a pedestal; rather had lie trampled her in the mud. And then it began to slowly dawn on Moid the old, old truth that woman would rather be trampled on (by the right man) than put on a pedestal by any man, right or wrong; and his first emotion was one of contempt for a creature so poor in spirit, as would be the earliest verdict of any unthinking mortal; his second, when he 'had thought out the .latter, was hot, enthusiastic admiration. The conviction brought a light to his anxious eyes, set as they were in the sheer puzzle of man over woman's vagaries; it braced his muscles, it gave spring to his movements, as he now rose up in the May dawning and prepared to set about the first day, worthy of the. name, that he had ever lived ; the" day id' the triumphant lover. The morning had dawned, in perfect beauty and purity, gold and tender over the Park tree*, tinging their billowing outline with faintest glory, and spreading out on to the short cropped grass beneath them like a pearly mantle. The far " kop, kop" of the lonely beast in the Zoo was growing fainter on the breeze; sleep, or his breakfast, or philosophy, had come to his sorrowful spirit, and with the sadness of the long still night his. yearning voice ceased, to give place first to 'the rattle of the milk-carts, and then to the songs of birds, twittering a morning pasm in the rapidly growing sunshine, Lucason, his soul on fire with theirs, told his man to have the motor ready at an early hour; he must breakfast quickly and be "gone in an hour's tim«. His voice, bis manner, wore all impatience. The man obeyed, wondering at bis master's change of mood, his flushed cheek, his bright, almost angry eye, sparkling with some sudden project. As for the master, he tried to calm himself; he went out on the balcony, and tried to smoke, but could not rest or settle anywhere. He remembered j then, that it was exactly two years since the May day he had. first seen her. 'The motor was ready early, but when he had breakfasted and got into it he remembered that, he could not go rushing to the Port-grave Square household at that unearthly hour on Sunday morning. For it was there that he was going. He had no clear plan of action, beyond, just going there and demanding an audience, and being heard fully and finally. However, he had to content himself by a run round the westerly regions until it was, or lie judged it was, time to go to her house.

When at last ho got there, and went clattering noisily into the quiet square with its air of Sunday decorum, its closed blinds, lie glanced up at No. 16 to where Winnie's pots of yellow cistus glittered in the sunshine, but the house looked quiet by reason of the drawn white blinds, and a stray eat crossing the street was the only indication of life in sight. He got out and went up to the door with a beating heart, only to be informed by the man that Miss Waring was out —had gone to church and was to lunch out with Sir Harry and Lady Leger at a restaurant; the man could not say what church. Lucason nodded, however, in as offhand a way as he could, and came away, calling himself severe and manythings for not having thought of church. He had forgotten Winnie's orthodox habit« in the confusion brought about by her exciting actions; perhaps he is to lie excused, since, in a sense, he had also forgotten what day of the week it was. He directed his man to a church he had heard Winnie say she liked—-it was some distance away in the regions of Earl's Court—and there he waited in his snorting car patiently till the people came out—but she was not amongst them after aH. His next move would be" to find the restaurant at which she lunched. It is characteristic of him that he liad no idea of going home and waiting till her return, as anyone in a saner mood woulu certainly liave done. He cannot be called quite sane at this moment, and he immediately decided to call at a well-known restaurant much frequented by Leger (not Rakers, by the bye). He went there at once, and climbed out and inquired about Sir Harry and Leger of the various officials, and even looked eagerly into tie luncheon room, but all to no purpose. From there he went on to several other well-knowa and fashionable restaurants, .a . pilgrim, of loye^

standing at doors in a motor-coat and surveying fiercely the cheery parties of lanchers within. He roust nave- given sri odd impression. People asked if be was a private detective, and someone facetious* !y suggested that he must be the brokers man, since nobody of bis acquaintance had ever been known to pay a bill in that particular hostelry, ft cannon; be said thathe cared for these ribald comments, but went on from place to place, impatiently hunting for the lost lady, till as the hours went, by be began to feel hungry himself, and succumbed to the inviting odour of hot luncheons so far as to go down to ids own club and order one. While waiting for it be "oeountered it man lie hud been trying to get hold of for some time, namely Westaway, the celebrated architect, who had some time ago been given the commission of several important structural alterations in tiie country house he had bought. This man came up to him and began a line of conversational "shop" intended to bo a great favour on his part. Tie was celebrated for being hard to screw to a point, and a difficult man to get hold of, and h«> knew this perfectly well—no one better.' and thought himself all the kinder for now actually opening a business conversation himself with Mt. Lucason. It was a sad precedent for such a wayward genius to commence a reformation of his former morose habits by attacking about the staircase of his house a man who had not only lost his lady but was in the very act «'t running after her, and gobbling his, lunch in order to facilitate, the quest ! Vale plays us some hard tricks. Of all Wcstaway's clients) Lucason was perhaps the only one <>n ft wild-goose chase niter the mistress for whom the house had originally been intended ; yet he managed to put his foot into the matter unspeakably by tackling this particular grass-lover onthia particular day. It was hard on Westaway. He got most unkindly snapped- at, and actually driven away, and he ran his fingers through. his ghostly moustache, cut off since he became professedly artistic, with the forlornest air, and decided henceforth to be haughty and on a pedestal with the moneyed British public. (To be concluded on Wednesday next.)