“My dear,” she said, “let us be great friends for the sake of the bond between us.”
He started at her touch, and plucking both hands from his pockets, imprisoned hers in them.
“Friends! You’re a dear. The dearest thing in the world. You’re going to be the only woman I’ve ever loved. Why, you’re crying!”
Her wet eyes glistened. “We’re all hopelessly perplexing, aren’t we?”
“You’re not. Not a little bit.” He kissed her hand and let it go. “You’re straight and adorable. But what can I call you?”
“Call me?” The question was a little shock. “You can call me by my name, if you like—when we are alone—Marcelle.”
“Splendid!” he cried. “The long-felt want. I’ve had as many Sisters as my young life can stand.”
She rose, helped him to rise.
“I hope,” she said, “you will remain the boy that you are for a very long time.”
CHAPTER II
AFTER this they had the many talks which they had promised themselves, and she told him the little things about John Baltazar which he had craved to learn. And the young man told her of his ambitions and his hopes and his young despairs. The last mainly concerned one Dorothy Mackworth, a Warwickshire divinity in a silk tennis sweater and tam-o’-shanter, whose only imperfection, if the word could be applied to tragic misfortune, was her domination by some diabolic sorcery which made her look more kindly on the black Leopold, his brother, than on himself. Her age? Seventeen. “You poor babies,” thought Marcelle. Once she said:
“Why worry? You can find a thousand little Dorothys in a week if you look for them—all a-growing and a-blowing, with never a wicked spell on them at all.”
“You are wrong,” he replied. “One can find thousands of Susans and Janes and Gertrudes—all very charming girls, I admit; but there’s only one Dorothy. She’s very remarkable. She has an intellect. She has a distracting quality, something uncanny, you know, in her perceptions and intuitions. I’m dead serious, Marcelle, believe me——”
She let him talk his heart out. Her soul, dry and athirst, drank in his boy’s freshness—how greedily she scarcely realized. In her character of nurse she had acted as Mother Confessor to many a poor lonely wretch; but in every case she had felt it was to the nun-descended uniform she wore, to its subconsciously recognized sanctity, and not to the mere kindly woman beneath, that she owed the appeal or the revelation. But now to young Godfrey Baltazar she was intensely, materially woman. Foolishly woman in her unconfessed craving to learn the details of his life and character and outlook on the world.
Once he checked an egotistic exposition.
“Look here,” he said, struck by a sudden qualm, “I’m always holding forth about myself—what about you?”
“There’s nothing about me. I’m just a nurse. A nurse is far too busy and remote from outside things to be anything else than a nurse.”
“But you started out as a mathematical swell at Newnham. Oh yes, you did! Men like my father don’t coach rotters—least of all women. What happened? You went in for the Tripos, of course?”
She shook her head. “No, my dear. The magic had gone out of my life. I tried Newnham for half the next term—facing the music—but it was too much for me. I broke down. I had to earn my livelihood. My original idea was teaching. I gave it up. Took to nursing instead. And now you know the whole story of my life.”
“I can’t understand anybody really bitten with mathematics giving it up.”
She smiled. “I don’t think I was really bitten. Not like you.”
Then she led him from herself to his own ambitions, on this as on other occasions. Gradually she established between them a relationship very precious. It was the aftermath of her own romance.
One day, business calling her to London, she changed into mufti, and hurried down the front steps to the car that was to take her to the station. She found Godfrey waiting by the car door.
“My word! You look topping!” he cried in blatant admiration, and she blushed with pleasure like a girl.
He begged for a jaunt to the station and back. The air would do him good. She assented, and they drove off.
“You look younger than ever,” he went on. “It’s a sin to hide your beautiful hair under that wretched Sister’s concern. Now I see really the kind of woman you are——”
“What have clothes got to do with it?”
“Lots. The way you select them, the way you put them on, the way you express yourself in them. No one can express themselves in a beastly uniform. Now, all kinds of instincts, motives, feelings, went into that hat. There’s a bit of defiance in it. As who should say: ‘Now that I’m an ordinary woman again, demureness be damned!’ ”
She said: “I’m glad I meet with your lordship’s approval,” and she felt absurdly happy for the rest of the day. In her heart she thanked God that he regarded her not merely as a kind old thing to whom, as a link between himself and his father, he was benevolently disposed. Out of sight, she would then be out of his mind. But she held her own as a woman; unconsciously had held it all the time. Now the little accident of the meeting in mufti secured her triumph. When he left the home he would not drift away from her.
He had said on the platform, waiting for her train:
“As soon as we can fix it up, I’ll get hold of Dorothy, and you and I and she’ll have a little beano at the Carlton. I do so want her to meet you.”
The wish, she reflected afterwards, signified much: Dorothy to meet her, not she to meet Dorothy. The kind old thing, as a matter of boyish courtesy, would be asked to meet Dorothy. But Dorothy was to meet somebody in whom he took a certain pride.
She remembered a story told her by a friend who had gone to see her boy at a famous public school on the occasion of the Great Cricket Match. At the expansive moment of parting he said: “Mother, I suppose you know that the men feel it awfully awkward being seen with their people, but as you were out and away the most beautiful woman in the crowd, I went about not caring a hang.”
She would have to get herself up very smart for Dorothy. In the train coming back she fell a-dreaming. If John Baltazar and she had stuck it out in all honour for a few years, Death, which was in God’s hands and not theirs, would have solved all difficulties. They would have been married. The five-year-old child would have called her “mother.” She would be “mother” still to this gallant lad whose youth and charm had suddenly swept through the barren chambers of her heart. And in the night she asked again the question which in the agonized moments of past years she had cried to the darkness: “Why?”
Why had he left her? If he had been strong enough to keep love within the bounds of perfect friendship, she, the unawakened girl, living in passionate commune with intellectual and spiritual ideals, would have found for some years, at least, all her cravings satisfied in such a tender and innocent intercourse. And if he had claimed her body and her soul, God knows they were his for the taking.
So