The Divine Fire Part 49

He drew back sharply.

"Miss Harden, won't you leave me a shred of self-respect?"

"And what about mine?" said she.

It was too much even for chivalry to bear.

"That's not exactly my affair, is it?"

He hardly realised the full significance of his answer, but he deemed it apt. If, as she had been so careful to point out to him, her honour and his moved on different planes, how could her self-respect be his affair?

"It ought to be," she murmured in a tone whose sweetness should have been a salve to any wound. But he did not perceive its meaning any more than he had perceived his own, being still blinded by what seemed to him the cruelty and degradation of the final blow.

She had stripped him; then she stabbed.

To hide his shame and his hurt, he turned his face from her and left her. So strangely and so drunkenly did he go, with such a mist in his eyes, and such anguish and fury in his heart and brain, that on the threshold of the Harden library he stumbled past Miss Palliser without seeing her.

She found Lucia standing where he had left her, looking at a little roll of pale green paper that her fingers curled and uncurled.

"Lucia," she said, "what have you done to him?"

Lucia let the little roll of paper fall from her fingers to the floor.

"I don't know, Kitty. Something horrible, I think."

BOOK III

THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

Mrs. Downey's boarding-house was the light of Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury. In the brown monotony of the street it stood out splendid, conspicuous. Its door and half its front were painted a beautiful, a remarkable pea-green, while its door k.n.o.b and door-knocker were of polished bra.s.s. Mrs. Downey's boarding-house knew nothing of concealment or disguise. Every evening, at the hour of seven, through its ground-floor window it offered to the world a scene of stupefying brilliance. The blinds were up, the curtains half-drawn, revealing the allurements of the interior.

From both sides of the street, the entire length of the dinner-table was visible. Above it, a handsome gilt gaselier spread out its branches, and on this gaselier as many as three gas-jets burned furiously at once. In the intense illumination the faces of the boarders could be distinctly seen. They sat, as it were, transfigured, in a nebulous whorl or glory of yellow light. It fell on the high collars, the quite remarkably high collars of the young gentlemen, and on those gay, those positively hilarious blouses which the young ladies at Mrs. Downey's wear. Beside the water-bottles and tumblers of red gla.s.s it lay like a rosy shadow on the cloth. It gave back their green again to the aspidistras that, rising from a ruche of pink paper, formed the central ornament of the table. It made a luminous body of Mrs. Downey's face. The graver values were not sacrificed to this joyous expenditure of gas-light, for the wall-paper (the design was in chocolate, on a ground of ochre) sustained the note of fundamental melancholy. At the back of the apartment, immediately behind Mrs. Downey, an immense mahogany sideboard shone wine-dark in a gorgeous gloom. On the sideboard stood a Family Bible, and on the Family Bible a tea-urn, a tea-urn that might have been silver. There was design in this arrangement; but for the Bible the tea-urn would have been obliterated by Mrs. Downey; thus elevated, it closed, it crowned the vista with a beauty that was final, monumental and supreme.

You had only to glance through those windows to see that Mrs. Downey's combined the splendid publicity of an hotel with the refinements of a well-appointed home. That it offered, together with a luxurious table, the society of youthful persons of both s.e.xes. And if everything around Mrs. Downey was on a liberal scale, so was Mrs. Downey herself.

She was expansive in her person, prodigal in sympathy, exuberant in dress. If she had one eye to the main chance, the other smiled at you in pure benignity. On her round face was a festal flush, flooding and effacing the little care-worn lines and wrinkles which appeared on it by day. It wore the colour of the hour which, evening after evening, renewed for her the great drama and spectacle of the Dinner.

Her table was disposed with a view to scenic effect. It was not by accident that Mrs. Downey herself was seated at the obscure or sideboard end, and that she gathered round her there the older and less attractive members of her circle. This arrangement was flattering to them, for it const.i.tuted an order of precedence and they were in the seats of honour. It had also the further advantage of giving prominence to the young people whose brilliant appearance of an evening was as good as an advertis.e.m.e.nt for Mrs. Downey's.

First then, at the top of the table, sat two elderly ladies, dishevelled birds of pa.s.sage, guests of a day and a night. Next, on Mrs. Downey's right, came old Miss Bramble, with old Mr. Partridge opposite on the left. The young gentleman at the extreme bottom or public end of the table was Mr. Spinks. He was almost blatantly visible from the street. At Mr. Spinks's side sat Miss Ada Bishop, the young lady in the fascinating pink blouse; and opposite him, Miss Flossie Walker, in the still more fascinating blue. To the left of Miss Bishop in the very centre of the table was a middle-aged commercial gentleman, Mr. Soper (not specially conspicuous); and facing him and on Miss Walker's right came Miss Roots, who might be any age you please between thirty and forty. Between them at the present moment, there was an empty chair.

Miss Roots was the link between the melancholy decadence above the aspidistras and the glorious and triumphant youth below. As far as could be inferred with any certainty she had leanings to the side of youth. Her presence was no restraint upon its glad and frolicsome humour. It felt that it could trust her. She had never been known to betray any of the secrets that pa.s.sed at the risk of their lives from Miss Bishop's side of the table to Miss Walker's. There was reason to suppose that Miss Roots was aware of the surrept.i.tious manufacture of bread pellets by Mr. Spinks (Mr. Spinks being the spirit of youth incarnate); but when one of these missiles struck Miss Roots full in the throat, when it should have just delicately grazed the top of Miss Flossie's frizzled hair, Miss Roots not only ignored the incident at the time, but never made the faintest allusion to it afterwards.

Therefore Mr. Spinks voted Miss Roots to be a brick, and a trump, and what he called a real lady.

Very curious and interesting was the behaviour of these people among themselves. It was an eternal game of chivy or hide-and-seek, each person being by turn the hunter and the hunted. Mrs. Downey tried to talk to the birds of pa.s.sage; but the birds of pa.s.sage would talk to n.o.body but each other. Miss Bramble took not the slightest notice of Mr. Partridge. Mr. Partridge did everything he could to make himself agreeable to Miss Bramble; but she was always looking away over the aspidistras, towards the young end of the table, with a little air of strained attention, at once alien and alert. Mr. Spinks spent himself in perpetual endeavours to stimulate a sense of humour in Miss Walker, who hadn't quite enough of it, with very violent effects on Miss Bishop, who had it in excess; while Mr. Soper was incessantly trying to catch the eye of Miss Roots around the aspidistras, an enterprise in which he was but rarely successful; Miss Walker finally making no attempt to bridge over the s.p.a.ce between her chair and Miss Roots.

That empty seat was reserved for Mr. Rickman, who was generally late.

On his arrival the blinds would be pulled down in deference to his wish for a more perfect privacy. Meanwhile they remained up, so that wandering persons in hansoms, lonely persons having furnished apartments, persons living expensively in hotels or miserably in other boarding-houses, might look in, and long to be received into Mrs.

Downey's, to enjoy the luxury, the comfort, the society.

The society--Yes; as Mrs. Downey surveyed her table and its guests, her imagination ignored the base commercial tie; she felt herself to be a social power, having called into existence an a.s.sembly so various, so brilliant, and so gay. One thing only interfered with Mrs.

Downey's happiness, Mr. Rickman's habit of being late. Such a habit would not have mattered so much in any of the other boarders, because, remarkable as they were collectively, individually, Mrs. Downey seldom thought of them unless they happened to be there, whereas with Mr.

Rickman, now, whether he was there or not, she could think of nothing else.

And to-night Mr. Rickman was later than ever.

"I'm really beginning to be afraid," said Mrs. Downey, "that he can't be coming."

The middle-aged gentleman, Mr. Soper, was heard muttering something to the effect that he thought they could bear up if he didn't come.

Whereupon Mrs. Downey begged Mr. Soper's pardon in a manner which was a challenge to him to repeat his last remark. Therefore he repeated it.

"I say, I 'ope we can manage to bear up."

"Speak for yourself, Mr. Soper." (This from Mr. Spinks who adored Rickman.)

"Well, really, I can't think how it is you and he don't seem to hit it off together. A young fellow that can make himself so pleasant when he likes."

"Ah-h! When he likes. And when he doesn't like? When he comes into the room like a young lord with his head in the air, and plumps himself down straight in front of you, and looks at you as if you were a sorter ea'wig or a centerpede? Call that pleasant?"

Mr. Spinks chuckled behind his table napkin. "He means a centre piece.

Wouldn't he make a handsome one!"

Mr. Soper combined a certain stateliness of carriage with a restless insignificance of feature.

"We all know," said Mrs. Downey, "that Mr. Rickman is a very reserved gentleman. He has his own thoughts."

"Thoughts? I've got my thoughts. But they don't make me disagreeable to everybody."

Mr. Spinks craned forward as far as the height of his collar permitted him. "I wouldn't be too c.o.c.k-sure if I were you, Mr. Soper."

The young end of the table heaved and quivered with primeval mirth.

Even Flossie Walker was moved to a faint smile. For Mr. Soper, though outwardly taciturn and morose, was possessed inwardly by a perfect fury of sociability, an immortal and insatiable craving to converse.

It was an instinct which, if gratified, would have undermined the whole fabric of the Dinner, being essentially egoistic, destructive and malign. Mr. Soper resented the rapidity with which Rickman had been accepted by the boarding-house; he himself, after two years'

residence, only maintaining a precarious popularity by little offerings of bon-bons to the ladies. Hence the bitterness of his present mood.

"There are thoughts _and_ thoughts," said Mrs. Downey severely, for the commercial gentleman had touched her in a very sensitive place.

"And when Mr. Rickman is in wot I call 'is vein, there's n.o.body like him for making a dinner go off."

Here Mr. Soper achieved a sardonic, a really sardonic smile. "Oh, of course, if you're eludin' to the young gentleman's appet.i.te--"