《Captives》 - 免费有声读物

CHAPTER IX

THE INSIDE SAINTS

Maggie, when she was nearly home, halted suddenly. She stopped as when on the threshold of a room that should be empty one sees waiting a stranger. If at the end of all this she should lose Martin! ...

There was the stranger who had come to her now and would not again depart. She recognised the sharp pain, the almost unconscious pulling back on the sudden edge of a dim pit, as something that would always be with her now—always. One knows that in the second stage of a great intimacy one's essential loneliness is only redoubled by close companionship. One asks for so much more, and then more and more, but that final embrace is elusive and no physical contact can surrender it. But she was young and did not know that yet. All she knew was that she would have to face these immediate troubles alone, that she would not see him for perhaps a week, that she would not know what his people at home were doing, and that she must not let any of these thoughts come up into her brain. She must keep them all back: if she did not, she would tumble into some foolish precipitate action.

When she reached home she was obstinate and determined. At once she found that something was the matter. During luncheon the two aunts sat like statues (Aunt Elizabeth a dumpy and squat one). Aunt Anne's aloofness was coloured now with a very human anger. Maggie realised with surprise that she had never seen her angry before. She had been indignant, disapproving, superior, forbidding, but never angry. The eyes were hard now, not with religious reserve but simply with bad temper. The mist of anger dimmed the room, it was in the potatoes and the cold dry mutton, especially was it in the hard pallid knobs of cheese. And Aunt Elizabeth, although she was frightened by her sister's anger on this occasion, shared in it. She pursed her lips at Maggie and moved her fat, podgy hand as though she would like to smack Maggie's cheeks.

Maggie was frightened—really frightened. The line of bold independence was all very well, but now risks were attached to it. If she swiftly tossed her head and told her aunts that she would walk out of the house they might say "Walk!" and that would precipitate Martin's crisis. She knew from the way he had looked at her that morning that his thoughts were with his father, and it showed that she had travelled through the first stage of her intimacy with him, that she could not trust him to put her before his own family troubles. At all costs she must keep him safe through these next difficult weeks, and the best way to keep him safe was herself to remain quietly at home.

Of all this she thought as she swallowed the hostile knobs of cheese and drank the tepid, gritty coffee.

She followed her aunts upstairs, and was not at all surprised when Aunt Elizabeth, with an agitated murmur, vanished into higher regions. She followed Aunt Anne into the drawing-room.

Aunt Anne sat in the stiff-backed tapestry chair by the fire. Maggie stood in front of her. She was disarmed at that all-important moment by her desperate sensation of defenceless loneliness. It was as though half of herself—the man-half of herself—had left her. She tried to summon her pluck but there was no pluck there. She could only want Martin, over and over again inside herself. Had any one been, ever so hopelessly ALONE before?

"Maggie, I am angry," said Aunt Anne. She said it as though she meant it. Amazing how human this strange aloof creature had become. As though some coloured saint bright with painted wood and tinsel before whom one stood in reverence slipped down suddenly and with fingers of flesh and blood struck one's face. Her cheeks were flushed, her beautiful hands were no longer thin but were hard and active.

"What have I done, aunt?" asked Maggie.

"You have not treated us fairly. My sister and I have done everything for you. You have not made it especially easy for us in any way, but we have tried to give you what you wanted. You have repaid is with ingratitude."

She paused, but Maggie said nothing. She went on:

"Lately—these last three weeks—we have given you complete liberty. I advised that strongly against my sister's opinion because I thought you weren't happy. You didn't make friends amongst our friends, and I thought you should have the chance of finding some who were younger and gayer than we were. Then I thought we could trust you. You have many faults, but I believed that you were honest."

"I am honest!" Maggie broke in. Her aunt went on:

"You have used the liberty we gave you during these weeks to make yourself the talk of our friends. You have been meeting Mr. Martin Warlock secretly every day. You have been alone with him in the Park and at the theatre. I know that you are young and very ignorant. You could not have known that Martin Warlock is a man with whom no girl who respects herself would be seen alone—"

"That is untrue!" Maggie flamed out.

"—and," went on Aunt Anne, "we would have forgiven that. It is your deceit to ourselves that we cannot forget. Day after day you were meeting him and pretending that you went to your other friends. I am disappointed in you, bitterly disappointed. I saw from the first that you did not mean to care for us, now, as well, you have disgraced us—"

Maggie began: "Yes, I have been seeing Martin. I didn't think it wrong—I don't now. I didn't tell you because I was afraid that you would stop me—"

"Then that shows that you knew it was wrong."

"No, Aunt Anne—only that you would think it was wrong. I can only go by myself, by what I feel is wrong I mean. I've always had to, all my life. It would have been no good doing anything else at home, because father—"

She pulled herself up. She was not going to defend herself or ask for pity. She said, speaking finally:

"Yes, I have been out with Martin every day. I went to the theatre with him, too, and also had tea with him."

Maggie could see Aunt Anne's anger rising higher and higher like water in a tube. Her voice was hard when she spoke again—she pronounced judgment:

"We see now that you were right when you said that you had better leave us. You are free to go as soon as you wish. You have, of course, your money, but if you care to stay with us until you have found some work you must now obey our rules. While you remain with us you must not go out unless my sister or I accompany you." Then her voice changed, softening a little. She suddenly raised her hands in a gesture of appeal: "Oh, Maggie, Maggie, turn to God. You have rebelled against Him. You have refused to listen to His voice. The end of that can be only misery. He loves, but He also judges. Even now, within a day, a week, He may come with judgment. Turn to Him, Maggie, not because I tell you but because of the Truth. Pray with me now that He may help you and give you strength."

Because she felt that she had indeed treated them badly and must do just now what they wished, she knelt down on the drawing-room carpet. Aunt Anne also knelt down, her figure stiff like iron, her raised hands once again delicate and ghost-like.

"O Lord God," she prayed, "this Thy servant comes to Thee and prays that Thou wilt give her strength in her struggle with the Evil One. She has been tempted and is weak, but Thou art strong to save and wilt not despise the least of these Thy children."

"Come, O Lord the Father, and take Thy daughter into Thy loving care, and when Thou comest, in all Thy splendour, to redeem the world, I pray that Thou wilt find her waiting for Thee in holiness and meekness of heart."

They rose. Maggie's knees were sore with the stiff carpet. The family group watched her from the wall ironically.

She saw that in spite of the prayer Aunt Anne had not forgiven her. She stood away from her, and although her voice now was not so hard, it had lost altogether the tender note that it used to have.

"Now, Maggie, you must promise us that you will not see Martin Warlock again."

Maggie flushed. "No, aunt, I can't promise that."

"Then we must treat you as a prisoner whilst you are with us."

"If he wants to see me I must see him."

They looked at one another. Aunt Anne was like a man just then.

"Very well. Until you give us your promise we must see ourselves that you do not disgrace us."

There was no more to be said. It was as though a heavy iron door had rolled to.

Aunt Anne passed Maggie and left the room.

Well, then, there was the situation. As she remained in the empty room she felt relief because now she knew where she was.

If only she could keep in touch with Martin then nothing else at all mattered. But that must be, otherwise she felt that she would rush at them all and tread them down and break doors and windows to get at him.

Meanwhile, how they must all have been talking! She felt no especial anger against Caroline Smith. It had been her own fault for trusting that note to her honour. Caroline had no honour, of course. Maggie might have guessed that from the way that she talked about other people. And then probably she herself was in love with Martin ... She sat down, staring in front of her, thinking. They all knew, Amy Warlock, Mr. Thurston, Miss Avies—knew about that wonderful, marvellous thing, her love for Martin, his for her. They were turning it over in their hands, soiling it, laughing at it, sneering at it. And what were they doing to Martin? At that thought she sprang up and began hurriedly to walk about. Oh, they must leave him alone! What were they saying to him? They were telling him how ridiculous it was to have anything to do with a plain, ugly girl! And he? Was he defending her? At the sudden suggestion of his disloyalty indignation fought in her with some strange, horrible suspicion. Yes, it would come back, that thought. He was weak. He had told her that he was. He was weak. She KNEW that he was. She would not lie to herself. And then at the thought of his weakness the maternal love in her that was the strongest instinct in her character flooded her body and soul, so that she did not mind if he were weak, but only wanted to defend him, to protect him ...

Strangely, she felt more sure of him at that moment when she was conscious of his weakness than she had been when she asserted his strength. Beneath that weakness he would be true to her because he needed her. No one else could give him what she did; he had said so again and again. And it would always be so. He would have to come back to her however often he denied her.

She felt happier then. She could face them all. She had been bad to her aunts, too. She had done them harm, and they had been nothing but goodness to her. Apart from leaving Martin she would do all, these next weeks, to please them.

She went up to her bedroom, and when she reached it she realised, with a little pang of fright, that she was a prisoner. No more meetings outside Hatchards, no more teas, no more walks ... She looked out of the window down into the street. It was a long way down and the figures walking were puppets, not human at all. But the thing to be thought of now was the question of letters. How was she to get them to the Strand Office and receive from them Martin's letters in return? After long, anxious thought there seemed to be only one way. There was a kitchen-maid, Jane, who came every morning to the house, did odd jobs in the kitchen, and went home again in the evening. Maggie had seen the girl about the house a number of times, had noticed her for her rebellious, independent look, and had felt some sympathy with her because she was under the harsh dominion of Martha.

Maggie had spoken to her once or twice and the girl had seemed grateful, smiling in a kind of dark, tearful way under her untidy hair. Maggie believed that she would help her; of course the girl would get into trouble were she discovered, and dismissal would certainly follow, but it was clear enough that she would not in any case be under Martha's government very long. Martha never kept kitchen-maids for more than a month at a time.

She sat down at once and wrote her first letter, sitting on her bed.

DARLING MARTIN—There has been an explosion here. The aunts have told me to give you up. I could not promise them that I would not see you and so I am a prisoner here until I leave them altogether. I won't leave them until after the New Year, partly because I gave a promise and partly because it would make more trouble for you if I were turned out just now. I can't leave the house at all unless I am with one of them, so I am going to try and send the letters by the kitchen-maid here who goes home every day, and she will fetch yours when she posts mine. I'll give her a note to tell the post people that she is to have them. Martin, dear, try and write every day, even if it's only the shortest line, because it is dreadful to be shut up all day, and I think of you all the time and wonder how you are. Don't be unhappy, Martin—that's the one thing I couldn't bear. If you're not, I'm not. There's no reason to be unhappy about me. I'm very cheerful indeed if I know that you are all right. You are all right, aren't you? I do want to know what happened when you got home. I quite understand that the one thing you must do now is to keep your father well and not let anything trouble him. If the thought of me troubles him, then tell him that you are thinking of nothing but him now and how to make him happy. But don't let them change your feeling for me. You know me better than any of them do and I am just as you know me, every bit. The aunts are very angry because they say I deceived them, but they haven't any right to tell me who I shall love, have they? No one has. I am myself and nobody's ever cared for me except you—and Uncle Mathew, so I don't see why I should think of anybody. The aunts never cared for me really—only to make me religious.

But, Martin, never forget I love you so much I can never change. I'm not one who changes, and although I'm young now I shall be just the same when I'm old. I have the ring and I look at it all the time. I like to think you have the locket. Please write, dear Martin, or I'll find it very difficult to stay quiet here, and I know I ought to stay quiet for your sake.

Your loving,

MAGGIE.

She put it in an envelope, wrote the address as he had told her, and then set out to find Jane. It was four o'clock in the afternoon now and the house, on this winter's day, was dark and dim.

The gas was always badly lit in the passages, spitting and muttering like an imprisoned animal. The house was so quiet when Maggie came out on to the stairs that there seemed to be no one in it. She found her way down into the hall and saw Thomas the cat there, moving like a black ghost along the floor. He came up to her and rubbed himself in his sinister, mysterious way against her dress. When she turned towards the green baize door that led towards the kitchen regions he stood back from her, stole on to the lower steps of the staircase and watched her with steady, unblinking eyes. She pushed the door and went through into the cold passage that smelt of cheese and bacon and damp earth. There seemed to be no one about, and then suddenly the pantry door opened and Jane came out. She stopped when she saw Maggie.

"Where's Martha?" asked Maggie in a low voice.

The whisper seemed to tell Jane at once that this was to be a confidential matter. She jerked with a dirty thumb in the direction of the kitchen.

"In there. Cooking the dinner," she whispered back. She was untidy, there were streaks of black on her face, but her eyes looked up at Maggie with a friendly, roguish glance, as though they had already something in common. Maggie saw that she had no time to lose. She came close to her.

"Jane," she said, "I'm in trouble. It's only you who can help me. Here's a letter that I want posted—just in the ordinary way. Can you do that for me?"

Jane, suddenly smiling, nodded her head.

"And there's something else," Maggie went on. "To-morrow morning, before you come here, I want you to go to the Strand post-office—you know the one opposite the station—and ask for a letter addressed to me. I've written on a piece of paper here that you're to be given any letters of mine. Give it to me somehow when no one's looking. Do you understand?"

Jane nodded her head. Maggie gave her the note and also half-a-crown, but Jane pushed back the money.

"I don't want no money," she said in a hoarse whisper. "You're the only one here decent to me."

At that moment the kitchen door opened and Martha appeared. When she saw Jane she came up to her and said: "Now then, idling again! What about the potatoes?"

She looked at Maggie with her usual surly suspicion.

"I came down for a candle," Maggie said, "for my room. Will you give me one, please?"

Jane had vanished.

Martin, meanwhile, after Maggie left him, had returned home in no happy state. There had leapt upon him again that mood of sullen impatient rebellion that he knew so well—a mood that really was like a possession, so that, struggle as he—might, he seemed always in the grip of some iron-fingered menacing figure.

It was possession in a sense that to many normal, happy people in this world is so utterly unknown that they can only scornfully name it weakness and so pass on their way. But those human beings who have suffered from it do in very truth feel as though they had been caught up into another world, a world of slavery, moral galley-driving with a master high above them, driving them with a lash that their chained limbs may not resist. Such men, if they try to explain that torment, can often point to the very day and even hour of their sudden slavery; at such a tick of the clock the clouds gather, the very houses and street are weighted with a cold malignity, thoughts, desires, impulses are all checked, perverted, driven and counter-driven by a mysterious force. Let no man who has not known such hours and the terror of such a dominion utter judgment upon his neighbour.

To Martin the threat of this conflict with his father over Maggie was the one crisis that he had wished to avoid. But his character, which was naturally easy and friendly and unsuspicious, had confused him. Those three weeks with Maggie had been so happy, so free from all morbidity and complication, that he had forgotten the world outside. For a moment when Maggie had told him that she had given her note to Caroline he had been afraid, but he had been lulled as the days passed and nothing interfered with their security. Now he was suddenly plunged into the middle of a confusion that was all the more complicated because he could not tell what his mother and his, sister were thinking. He knew that Amy had disliked him ever since his return, and that that dislike had been changed into something fiercer since his declared opposition to Thurston. His mother he simply did not understand at all. She spoke to him still with the same affection and tenderness, but behind the words he felt a hard purpose and a mysterious aloofness.

She was not like his mother at all; it was as though some spy had been introduced into the house in his mother's clothing.

But for them he did not care; it was his father of whom he must think. Here, too, there was a mystery from which he was deliberately kept. He knew, of course, that they were all expecting some crisis; as the days advanced he could feel that the excitement increased. He knew that his father had declared that he had visions and that there was to be a revelation very shortly; but of these visions and this revelation he heard only indirectly from others. His father said nothing to him of these things, and at the ordinary Chapel services on Sunday there was no allusion to them. He knew that the Inside Saints had a society and rules of their own inside the larger body, and from that inner society he was quite definitely excluded. Of that exclusion he would have been only too glad had it not been for his father, but now when he saw him growing from day to day more haggard and worn, more aloof from all human society, when lie saw him wrapped further and further into some strange and as it seemed to him insane absorption, he was determined to fight his way into the heart of it. His growing intimacy with Maggie had relieved him, for a moment, of the intensity of this other anxiety. Now suddenly he was flung back into the very thick of it. His earlier plan of forcing his father out of all this network of chicanery and charlatanism now returned. He felt that if he could only seize his father and forcibly abduct him and take him away from Amy and Thurston and the rest, and all the associations of the Chapel, he might cure him and lead him back to health and happiness again.

And yet he did not know. He had not himself escaped from it all by leaving it, and then that undermining bewildering suspicion that perhaps after all there was something in all of this, that it was not only charlatanism, confused and disconcerted him. He was like a man who hears sounds and faint cries behind a thick wall, and there are no doors and windows, and the bricks are too stout to be torn apart.

He had been behind that wall all his life ...

Amy's allusion to Maggie in the morning had been very slight, but had shown quite clearly that she had heard all, and probably more, than the truth. When he returned that morning he found his mother alone, knitting a pink woollen comforter, her gold spectacles on the end of her nose, her fresh lace cap crisp and dainty on her white hair—the very picture of the dearest old lady in the world.

"Mother," he began at once, "what did Amy mean this morning about myself and Maggie Cardinal?"

"Maggie who, dear?" his mother asked.

"Maggie Cardinal—the Cardinal niece, you know," he said impatiently.

"Did she say anything? I don't remember."

"Yes, mother. You remember perfectly well. She said that they were all talking about me and Maggie."

"Did she?" The old lady slowly counted her stitches. "Well, dear, I shouldn't worry about what they all say—whoever 'they' may be."

"Oh, I don't care for that," he answered contemptuously, "although all the same I'm not going to have Amy running that girl down. She's been against her from the first. What I want to know is has Amy been to father with this? Because if she has I'm going to stop it. I'm not going to have her bothering father with bits of gossip that she's picked up by listening behind other peoples' key-holes."

Amy, meanwhile, had come in and heard this last sentence.

"Thank you, Martin," she said quietly.

He turned to her with fury. "What did you mean at breakfast," he asked, "by what you said about myself and Maggie Cardinal?"

She looked at him with contempt but no very active hostility.

"I was simply telling you something that I thought you ought to know," she said. "It is what everybody is saying—that you and she have been meeting every day for weeks, sitting in the Park after dark together, going to the theatre. People draw their own conclusions, I suppose."

"How much have you told father of this?" he demanded.

"I don't know at all what father has heard," she answered.

"You've been that girl's enemy since the first moment that she came here," he continued, growing angrier and angrier at her quiet indifference. "Now you're trying to damage her character."

"On the contrary," she answered, "I told you because I thought you ought to know what people were saying. The girl doesn't matter to me one way or another—but I'm sorry for her if she thinks she cares for you. That won't bring her much happiness."

Then suddenly her impassivity had a strange effect upon him. He could not answer her. He left them both, and went up to his room.

As soon as he had closed the door of his bedroom he knew that his bad time was come upon him. It was a physical as well as a spiritual dominion. The room visibly darkened before his eyes, his brain worked as it would in dreams suggesting its own thoughts and wishes and intentions. A dark shadow hung over him, hands were placed upon his eyes, only one thought came before him again and again and again. "You know, you have long known, that you are doomed to make miserable everything that you touch, to ruin every one with whom you come in contact. That is your fate, and you can no more escape from it than you can escape from your body!"

How many hours of this kind he had known in Spain, in France, in South America. Often at the very moment when he had thought that he was at last settling down to some decent steady plan of life he would be jerked from his purpose, some delay or failure would frustrate him, and there would follow the voice in his ear and the hands on his eyes.

It was indeed as though he had been pledged to something in his early life, and because he had broken from that pledge had been pursued ever since ...

He stripped to the waist and bathed in cold water; even then it seemed to him that his flesh was heavy and dull and yellow, that he was growing obese and out of all condition. He put on a clean shirt and collar, sat down on his bed and tried to think the thing out. To whomsoever he had done harm in the past he would now spare Maggie and his father. He was surprised at the rush of tenderness that came over him at the thought of Maggie; he sat there for some time thinking over every incident of the last three weeks; that, at least, had been a good decent time, and no one could ever take it away from them again. He looked at her picture in the locket and realised, as he looked at it, a link with her that he had never felt with any woman before. "All the same," he thought, "I should go away. She'd mind it at first, but not half as much as she'd mind me later on when she saw what kind of a chap I really was. She'd be unhappy for a bit, but she'd soon meet some one else. She's never seen a man yet except me. She'd soon forget me. She's such a kid."

Nevertheless when he thought of beginning that old wandering life again he shrank back. He had hated it—Oh! how he'd hated it! And he didn't want to leave Maggie. He was in reality beginning to believe that with her he might pull himself right out of this morass of weakness and indecision in which he had been wallowing for years. And yet what sort of a life could he offer her? He did not believe that he would ever now be able to find this other woman whom he had married, and until he had found her and divorced her Maggie's position would be impossible. She, knowing nothing of the world, could disregard it, but HE knew, knew that daily, hourly recurrence of alights and insults and disappointments, knew what that life could make after a time of women in such a position; even though she did not mind he would mind for her and would reproach himself continually.

No, it was impossible. He must go away secretly, without telling her ... Then, at that, he was pulled up again by the thought of his father. He could not leave him until this crisis, whatever it might be, was over. A very little thing now might kill him, and at the thought of that possibility he jumped up from his bed and swore that THAT catastrophe at least must be prevented. His father must live and be happy and strong again, and he, Martin, must see to it.

That was his charge and his sacred duty above all else.

Strong in this thought he went down to his father's room. He knocked on the door. There was no answer, and he went in. The room was in a mess of untidiness. His father was walking up and down, staring in front of him, talking to himself.

At the sound of the door he turned, saw Martin and smiled, the old trusting smile of a child, that had been, during his time abroad, Martin's clearest memory of him.

"Oh, is that you? Come in."

Martin came forward and his father put his arm round his neck as though for support.

"I'm tired—horribly tired." Martin took him to the shabby broken arm-chair and made him sit down. Himself sat in his old place on the arm of the chair, his hand against his father's neck.

"Father, come away—just for a week—with me. We'll go right off into the country to Glebeshire or somewhere, quite alone. We won't see a soul. We'll just walk and eat and sleep. And then you'll come back to your work here another man."

"No, Martin. I can't yet. Not just now."

"Why not, father?"

"I have work, work that can't be left."

"But if you go on like this you'll be so that you can't go on any longer. You'll break down. You know what the doctor said about your heart. You aren't taking any care at all."

"Perhaps ... perhaps ... but for a week or two I must just go on, preparing ... many things ... Martin."

He suddenly looked up at his son, putting his hand on his knee.

"Yes, father."

"You're being good now, aren't you?"

"Good, father?"

"Yes ... Not doing anything you or I'd be ashamed of. I know in the past ... but that's been forgotten, that's over. Only now, just now, it's terribly important for us both that you should be good ... like you used to be ... when you were a boy."

"Father, what have people been saying to you about me?"

"Nothing—nothing. Only I think about you so much. I pray about you all the time. Soon, as you say, we'll go away together ... only now, just now, I want you with me here, strong by my side. I want your help."

Martin took his father's hand, felt how dry and hot and feverish it was.

"I'll be with you," he said. "I promise that. Don't you listen to what any one says. I won't leave you." He would like to have gone on and asked other questions, but the old man seemed so worn out and exhausted that he was afraid of distressing him, so he just sat there, his hands on his shoulders, and suddenly the white head nodded, the beard sank over the breast and huddled up in the chair as though life itself had left him; the old man slept.

During the next four days Martin and Maggie corresponded through the fair hands of Jane. He wrote only short letters, and over them he struggled. He seemed to see Maggie through a tangled mist of persons and motives and intentions. He could not get at the real Maggie at all, he could not even get at his real feelings about her. He knew that these letters were not enough for her, he could feel behind her own a longing for something from him more definite, something that would bring her closer to him. He was haunted by his picture of her sitting in that dismal house, a prisoner, waiting for him, and at last, at the end of the four days, he felt that he must, in some way or other see her. Then she herself proposed a way.

"To-morrow night (Friday)," she wrote, "the aunts are going to a meeting. They won't return until after eight o'clock. During most of that time Martha will be in the kitchen cooking, and Jane (who is staying late that night) has promised to give me a signal. I could run out for quarter of an hour and meet you somewhere close by and risk getting back. Jane will be ready to let me in. Of course, it may fail, but things can't be worse than they are ... I absolutely forbid you to come if you think that this can make anything worse for you at home. But I MUST see you, Martin ... I feel to-night as though I couldn't stand it any longer (although I've only had five days of it!), but I think that if I met you, really you, for only five minutes, I could bear it then for weeks. Let me know if you agree to this, and if so where we could meet about 7.30."

The mere thought of seeing her was wonderful. He would not have believed a month ago that it could have come to mean so much to him.

He wrote back:

"Yes. At the corner of Dundas Street, by the Pillar Box, 7.30."

He knew that she had been to that dark little street with her aunts to see Miss Pyncheon.

The night, when it came, was misty, and when he reached the place she was at once in his arms. She had been there more than five minutes, she had thought that he was not coming. Martha had nearly caught her ...

He kissed her hair and her eyes and her mouth, holding her to him, forgetting everything but her. She stayed, quiet, clinging to him as though she would never let him go, then she drew away.

"Now we must walk about or some one will see us," she said.

"We've only got five minutes. Martin, what I want to know is, are you happy?"

"Yes," he said.

They walked like ghosts, in the misty street.

"Well, then I am," she said. "Only your letters didn't sound very happy."

"Can you hold on till after the New Year?" They were walking hand in hand, her fingers curled in his palm.

"Yes," she said. "If you're happy."

"There are troubles of course," he said. "But I don't care for Amy and the rest. It's only father that matters. I can't discover how much he knows. If I knew that I'd be much happier. We'll be all right, Maggie, if nothing happens to him."

With a little frightened catch in her throat she asked him:

"How do you mean, if anything happens to him?"

"If anything happened to him—" she could feel his hand stiffen round hers; "through me—then—why then—I'd leave you—everything—I'd have to."

"Leave me! ... Oh Martin! No!"

"I'd go. I'd go—I don't know where to. I don't know what I'd do. I'd know then that I must leave every one alone, always, for ever—especially you."

"No. You'd need me more than ever."

"You don't understand, Maggie. I'd be impossible after that. If father suffered through me that would be the end of it—the end of everything."

"Martin, listen." She caught his arm, looking up, trying to see his face. "If anything like that did happen that would be where you'd want me. Don't you see that you COULDN'T harm me EXCEPT by leaving me?"

"You can reason it as you like, Maggie, but I know myself. I know the impulse would be too strong—to go away and hide myself from everybody. I've felt it before—when I've done something especially bad. It's something in me that I've known all my life." Then he turned to her: "But it's all right. Nothing shall happen to the old man. I'll see that it doesn't. We've only got to wait a fortnight, then I'll get him away for a holiday. And once he's better I can leave him. It WILL be all right. It SHALL."

Then he bent down to her. "You know, Maggie, I love you more, far more than I ever thought. Even if I went away you'd be the only one I'd love. I never dreamt that I'd care for any one so much."

He felt her tremble under his hand when he said that.

She sighed. "Now I can go back," she said. "I'll say that over to myself again and again."

They stayed a little longer, he put his arms round her again and held her so close to him that she could feel his heart throbbing. Then when they had kissed once more she went away.

She returned safely. Jane opened the door for her, mysteriously, as though she enjoyed her share in the conspiracy. Maggie sped upstairs, and now with Martin's words in her ears, had enough to stiffen her back for the battle.

The next move in the affair was on the following afternoon when Maggie, alone in the drawing-room, beheld Caroline Smith in the doorway.

"She's got cheek enough for anything," was Maggie's first thought, but she was not aware of the true magnificence of that young woman's audacity until she found her hand seized and her cheek kissed.

Caroline, in fact, had greeted her with precisely her old spontaneous enthusiasm.

"Maggie, darling, where have you been all these days—but WEEKS it is indeed! You might at least have sent me just a word. Life simply hasn't been the same without you! You pet! ... and you look tired! Yes, you do. You've been overworking or something, all because you haven't had me to look after you!"

Maggie gravely withdrew, and standing away from the shining elegance of her friend said:

"Caroline—I want to know something before we go any further. What I want to know is—why did you read that note that I asked you to give to Martin Warlock?"

Caroline stared in amazement. "My dear, what IS the matter? Are you ill or something? Oh, you are. I can see you are! You poor darling! Read your note? What note, dear?"

"The note I gave you a month ago—one evening when you were here."

"A note! A month ago. My dear! As though I could ever remember what I did a MONTH ago! Why, it's always all I can manage to remember what I did yesterday. Did you give me a note, dear?"

Maggie began to be angry. "Of course I did. You remember perfectly well. I gave it to you for Martin Warlock. You let him have it, but meanwhile you read it, and not only that but told everybody else about it."

Caroline's expression changed. She was suddenly sulky. Her face was like that of a spoilt child.

"Well, Maggie Cardinal, if you call that being a friend! To say that I would ever do such a thing!"

"You know you did!" said Maggie quietly.

"Read your letters? As though I'd want to! Why should I? As though I hadn't something more interesting to do! No thank you! Of course you have been getting yourself into a mess. Every one knows that. That's why I came here to-day—to show you that I was a REAL friend and didn't mind WHAT people said about you! When they were all talking about you last night, and saying the most DREADFUL things, I defended you and said it wasn't really your fault, you couldn't have told what a rotten sort of a man Martin Warlock was—"

"That's enough," said Maggie. "I don't want your defence, thank you. You're mean and deceitful and untrue. You never have been a friend of mine, and I don't want ever to see you again!"

Caroline Smith was horrified. "Well, upon my word. Isn't that gratitude? Here am I, the only person in this whole place would take any trouble with you! When the others all said that you were plain and stupid and hadn't anything to say for yourself I stuck to you. I did all I could, wasting all my time going to the dressmaker with you and trying to make you look like something human, and this is the way you repay me! Well, there's a lesson for me! Many's the time mother's said to me, 'Carry, you'll just ruin yourself with that kind heart of yours, laying yourself out for others when you ought to be seeing after yourself. You've got too big a heart for this world.' Doesn't it just show one? And to end it all with accusing me of reading your letters! If you choose to sit in the park after dark with a man who everybody knows—"

"Either you're going to leave this room or I am," said Maggie.

"Thank you!" said Caroline, tossing her head. "I haven't the slightest desire to stay, I assure you! Only you'll be sorry for this, Maggie Cardinal, you will indeed!"

With a swish of the skirts and a violent banging of the door she was gone.

"The only friend I had," thought Maggie.

The next development was an announcement from Aunt Anne that she would like Maggie to accompany her to a meeting at Miss Avies'. Aunt Anne did not explain what kind of a meeting it would be, and Maggie asked no questions. She simply replied that she would go. She had indeed by this time a very considerable curiosity of her own as to what every one thought was going to happen in ten days' time. Perhaps this meeting would enlighten her. It did.

On arriving at Miss Avies' gaunt and menacing apartment she found herself in the very stronghold of the Inside Saints. It was a strange affair, and Maggie was never to see anything quite like it again. In the first place, Miss Avies' room was not exactly the place in which you would have expected to discover a meeting of this kind.

She lived over a house-agent's in John Street, Adelphi. Her sitting-room was low-ceilinged with little diamond-paned windows. The place was let furnished, and the green and red vases on the mantelpiece, the brass clock and the bright yellow wallpaper were properties of the landlord. To the atmosphere of the place Miss Avies, although she lived there for a number of years, had contributed nothing.

It had all the desolate forlornness of a habitation in which no human being has dwelt for a very long time; there was dust on the mantelpiece, a melancholy sputtering of coal choked with cinders and gasping for breath in the fireplace, stuffy hot clamminess beating about the unopened windows. Along the breadth of the faded brown carpet some fifty cane-bottomed chairs were pressed tightly in rows together, and in front of the window, facing the chairs, was a little wooden table with a chair beside it, on the table a glass of water and a Bible.

When Maggie and her aunts entered the chairs were almost all occupied and they were forced to sit at the end of the last row but one. The meeting had apparently not yet begun, and many heads were turned towards them as they took their places. Maggie fancied that the glances directed at herself were angry and severe, but that was very possibly her imagination. She soon recognised people known to her—Miss Pyncheon, calm and placid; Mrs. Smith, Caroline's mother, very stout, hot, and self-important; Amy Warlock, proud and severe; and Miss Avies herself standing, like a general surveying his forces, behind the table.

The room was draughty and close and had a confused smell of oil-cloth and geraniums, and Maggie knew that soon she would have a headache. She fancied that already the atmosphere was influencing the meeting. From where she sat she could see a succession of side faces, and it was strange what a hungry, appealing look these pale cheeks and staring eyes had. Hungry! Yes, that's what they all were. She thought, fantastically, for a moment, of poor Mr. Magnus's Treasure Hunters, and she seemed to see the whole of this company in a raft drifting in mid-ocean, not a sail in sight and the last ship's biscuit gone.

They were not, taken altogether, a very fine collection, old maids and young girls, many of them apparently of the servant class, one or two sitting with open mouths and a vacancy of expression that seemed to demand a conjurer with a rabbit and a hat. Some faces were of the true fanatic cast, lit with the glow of an expectancy and a hope that no rational experience had ever actually justified. One girl, whom Maggie had seen with Aunt Anne on some occasion, had especially this prophetic anticipation in the whole pose of her body as she bent forward a little, her elbows on her knees her chin on her hands, gazing with wide burning eyes at Miss Avies. This girl, whom Maggie was never to see again hung as a picture in the rooms of her mind for the rest of her life—the youth, the desperate anxiety as of one who throws her last piece upon the gaming-table, the poverty of the shabby black dress, the real physical austerity and asceticism of the white cheeks and the thin arms and pale hands—this figure remained a symbol for Maggie. She used to wonder in after years, when fortune had carried her far enough away from all this world, what had happened to that girl. But she was never to know.

There were faces, too, like Miss Pyncheon's, calm, contented, confident, old women who had found in their religion the panacea of all their troubles. There were faces like Mrs. Smith's, coarse and vulgar, out for any sensation that might come along, and ready instantly to express their contempt if the particular "trick" that they were expecting failed to come off; other faces, again, like Amy Warlock's, grimly set upon secret thoughts and purposes of their own, faces trained to withstand any sudden attack on the emotions, but eager, too, like the rest for some revelation that was to answer all questions and satisfy all expectations.

Maggie wondered, as she looked about her, how she could have raised in her own imagination, around the Chapel and its affairs, so formidable an atmosphere of terror and tyrannic discipline. Here gathered together were a few women, tired, pale, many of them uneducated, awaiting like children the opening of a box, the springing into flower of a dry husk of a seed, the raising of the curtain on some wonderful scene. Maggie, as she looked at them, knew that they must be disappointed, and her heart ached for them all, yes, even for Amy Warlock, her declared enemy. She lost, as she sat there, for the moment all sense of her own personal history. She only saw them all tired and hungry and expectant; perhaps, after all, there WAS something behind it all—something for which they had a right to be searching; even of that she had not sure knowledge—but the pathos and also the bravery of their search touched and moved her. She was beginning to understand something of the beauty that hovered like a bird always just out of sight about the ugly walls of the Chapel.

"Whatever they want, poor dears," she thought, "I do hope they get it."

Miss Avies opened the meeting with an extempore prayer: then they all stood up and sang a hymn, and their quavering voices were thin and sharp and strained in the stuffy close-ceilinged room. The hymn, like all the other Chapel hymns that Maggie had heard, had to do with "the Blood of the Lamb," "the sacrifice of Blood," "the Blood that heals." There was also a refrain:

And, when Thou comest, Lord, we pray That Thou wilt spare Thy
sword, Or on that grim and ghastly day Who will escape the Lord? WHO will escape the Lord?

There were many verses to this hymn, and it had a long and lugubrious tune, so that Maggie thought that it would never end, but as it proceeded the words worked their effect on the congregation, and at the last there was much emotion and several women were crying.

Then they all sat down again and the meeting developed a very business-like side. There was a great deal of discussion as to dates, places, appointments, and Maggie was amused to discover that in this part of the proceedings Mrs. Smith had a great deal to say, and took a very leading place.

The gathering became like any other assemblage of ladies for some charitable or social purpose, and there were the usual disputes and signs of temper and wounded pride; in all those matters Miss Avies was a most admirable and unflinching chairman.

Then at last the real moment came. Miss Avies got up to speak. She stood there, scornful, superior, and yet with some almost cynical appeal in her eyes as though she said to them: "You poor fools! No one knows better than I the folly of your being here, no one knows better than I how far you will, all of you, be from realising any of your dreams. Tricked, the lot of you!—and yet—and yet—go on believing, expecting, hoping. Pray, pray that I may be wrong and you may be right."

What she actually said was as follows: "This will be our last meeting before the end of the year. What will come to all of us before we all meet again no one can say, but this we all know, that we have, most of us, been living now for many years in expectation. We have been taught, by the goodness of God, to believe that we must be ready at any moment to obey His call, and that call may come, in the middle of our work, of our prayers, of our love for others, of our pursuit of our own ambitions, and that whenever it does come we must be ready to obey it. We have been told by our great and good Master, who has been set over us for our guidance by God Himself, that that call may now be very near. Whatever form it may take we must accept it, give up all we have and follow Him. That is understood by all of us. I will not say more now. This is not the time for any more directions from me. We must address ourselves, each one of us, to God Himself, and ask Him to prepare us so that we may be as He would have us on the day of His coming. I suggest now before we part that we share together in a few minutes of private prayer." They all rose, and Maggie, before she knelt down, caught a sudden glimpse of the pale girl whom she had noticed earlier standing for a moment as though she were about to make some desperate appeal to them all. Some words did indeed seem to come from her lips, but the scraping of chairs drowned every other sound. Nevertheless that figure was there, the hands stretched out, the very soul struggling through the eyes for expression, the body tense, sacred, eloquent, like the body of some young prophetess. Then all were on their knees, and Maggie, too, her face in her hands, was praying. It was, perhaps, the first time in her life that she had actively, consciously, of her own volition prayed. The appeal formed itself as it were without her own agency.

"God—if there is a God—give me Martin. I care for nothing else but that. If You will give me Martin for my own always, ever, I will believe in You. I will worship You and say prayers to You, and do anything You tell me if You give me Martin. Oh God! I ought to have him. He is mine. I can do more for him than any one else can—I can make him happy and good. I know I can. God give him to me and I will be your slave. God, give me Martin—God, give me Martin."

She rose, as it were, from the depths of the sea, from great darkness and breathlessness and exhaustion. For a moment she could not see the room nor any detail, but only one pale face after another, like a pattern on a wall, hiding something from her.

She stood bewildered beside her aunts, not hearing the strains of the last hymn nor the quaver of Aunt Anne's trembling voice beside her.

"God, give me Martin," was her last challenge in the strange pale silence that floated around her. Then suddenly, as though she had pushed open a door and gone through, she was back in the world again, a flood of sound was about her ears, and in front of her the red face of Mrs. Smith, her mouth wide open, like the mouth of an eager fish, singing about "the Blood of the Lamb" with unctuous satisfaction ...