He did not know much more about himself than those around him. He did not remember his father or mother. His earliest recollection was of an elderly spinster who wore corkscrew curls, kept a day-school for young ladies, and took in a few boarders. He was one of these boarders, and now he always looked back on that part of his life with the deadliest hatred. Two facts connected with that establishment clung to his imagination with terrible tenacity. First, that he never got anything to eat there but bread steeped in boiled milk; secondly, that on frosty days his schoolmistress hit him on the knuckles with a lead-pencil because he did not hold his pen properly. Even now the smell of bread steeped in boiling milk made him ill.
From this school he was sent to another, a private one kept by a clergyman in Cumberland. No one ever visited him, and he never left school for holidays. He did not know who paid for him at those houses. He had a small allowance of pocket-money. At school he had displayed some taste for literature. He always took first place in essay-writing. He assumed from this that the clergyman must have suggested he should in some way be linked to literature: for when he left school, at sixteen years of age, the clergyman told him a situation had been secured for him in a publisher's office in London. The clergyman came up to town with him, introduced him to his new master, handed him a ten-pound note, saying it came from his guardian, and then took leave of him.
From the day he left that old maid's school he had never seen or heard anything of her. From the day that clergyman handed him the that ten-pound note and bade him good-bye he had never seen or heard anything of him. At the date he first found himself in the publisher's office he was too young to set any inquiries on foot about himself; and as time went on and he began to know something of the world and its ways, he came to the conclusion he had no right to his father's name, and that the one he bore was his mother's. When he had grown to be a man he felt deeply the humiliation of his position, and made up his mind to look no further into the matter, lest what was now only matter of inference might become matter of certainty. "Let sleeping dogs lie" was the motto he adopted, and he had never departed from it. To Marion Durrant he had told all he absolutely knew of himself. He had not told her anything he inferred or suspected. He had been told by the clergyman who had looked after his education that both his father and mother were dead. He had told Marion that he had never known either his father or mother, that they were both dead, that he had no memory of his childhood and youth apart from those two schools, and that as far as he knew he had no relative alive. But he had said nothing to her of his misgivings or doubts.
From all this it will be seen that Graham's allusion to the story connected with Anerly and his name would be anything but an inducement for Cheyne to leave London for that Devonshire village.
Every day he found his way out to Knightsbridge, and every day he had long sweet hours with his May.
It was afternoon on the day he got Graham's letter before he could leave home, and four o'clock had struck before he knocked at the hall-door of the little house in Knightsbridge.
When he came into the room where Marion Durrant sat hemming an apron, she said:
"What! come again to-day! In the name of wonder, what brought you here now?'
"You know, May, the pressure of race is ever from east to west,"
"The pressure of race! What on earth are you talking about? Don't! that hurts my hand."
"I was slapping your hand to prevent you from fainting at the unexpected sight of your slave and master. I meant the pressure of the human race-or more accurately, the attraction of the inhuman race-meaning yourself, sweetheart."
"Do you know, Charlie, you always begin a conversation as if you wanted me to think you clever; and if there is one thing I hate it is cleverness in a man."
"Do you know, Miss Durrant, you never by any means allow me to begin a conversation. Before I am fully in the room you always fly at me with some question or other."
"But you are so slow, Charlie. You take up half an hour getting ready to say 'Howd'y'do'; and if there is one thing more odious in a man than cleverness it is slowness."
"But you must admit. Miss Durrant, that if, when we meet, I am slow of speech, I am not slow in other matters proper to our meeting."
"Go away, sir! How dare you? I will not let you do that again. Sometimes I think you a bear, and sometimes I think you an elephant, but I think I hate you always."
"If you say any more I'll get a divorce on the grounds of cruelty and desertion. May, let us drop this sort of thing. Run and bring me a glass of beer. I've been trotting about the whole morning, and am dying for a glass of beer."
"You deserve to be starved, and you deserve to be thirsty, and you deserve to be-"
"I admit it all. I deserve it all, and every other thing that's awful, except to be married to you. Marion Durrant, spinster, what would you do if I cut my throat?"
"Charlie!"
"Or if I put my head under the wheel of an omnibus laden with exceedingly fat people?"
"Charlie! Charlie!"
"Or if I threw myself over Westminster Bridge with a couple of forty-pound shot tied round my heels?"
"I'll run for the beer, Charlie."
"Ah, I thought I'd get you to move at last. You see you can't bear to leave me even for a minute."
"Conceited fellow!" and she tripped out of the room.
She went herself with a jug into the little cellar under the front-door step, and drew the beer in a most elaborate and painstaking manner. She looked into three jugs before she was satisfied with one, although they were all as immaculate as human hands could make them. She looked at the glass as if it were a jewel she was thinking of buying, and the slightest flaw in it would render it valueless. She placed the jug and the tumbler and a plate of biscuits on an exceedingly slippery Japanese wooden tray, and declined to let the maid carry it up. She was proud of that polished jug, that polished glass, that polished tray. The jug and the glass and the tray were more to her that the condition of the beer. As a matter of fact, she never thought of the beer at all. It would be a pity if the beer was not in good condition; but it would be a disgrace if the jug, glass, and tray were not in perfect order.
When she came back to the room she was meek and penitential. We are always softened towards those to whom we have done ever so slight a service. When he had taken a draught of the ale and broken a biscuit, she said plaintively:
"Charlie!"
"Well, my fire-eating she-dragon, what bloodthirsty thing have you to say to your down-trodden slave now?"
"Only that you were right when you said-"
"When I spoke about cutting my throat?"
"No, no, no! When you said I did not like to go away from you even for a moment. Charlie, I hate going away from you, and I hate myself when you are away; for then I remember all the foolish things I have said to you, and-and I am always afraid-"
"Of my taking four pounds, apothecaries' weight, of solid opium?"
"No. Of your being angry with me some day, or of your not forgiving me."
She was pretty and very penitent, and he had had a long walk and a glass of beer, and he felt perfectly at rest and happy; so he put out his arms and took her into them for a moment, and when he let her go they both felt that, say what you like about love, it is the finest thing in all the world, and that there is nothing else which makes people so utterly unselfish.
"I had a letter from Graham this morning," said Charlie, after a pause.
"Where is he now?"
"In Devonshire still, sketching at some place called Anerly. He wrote me to send him some painting materials. He is going to begin a picture there, so I suppose we shall not see anything of him for some time. He has asked me to run down to him for a few days?"
"And will you go?"
"Not I. I am too busy just now."
"But you could do your work down there,