When Winifred had reached the street door Clytie leaned over the banisters and called after her.
“Winnie! I must have been in a sweet temper this afternoon.”
“Of course, dear. Why do you say so?”
“Because you have left your basket of anemones for me to take care of!”
CHAPTER IV.
When Winifred had gone Clytie took an omnibus to Cheyne Walk, where some friends of hers lived, and after her visit returned to her solitary dinner. It argued some strength of mind in Clytie that she did not give way, as many lonely women do, to a distaste for ordinary food, and a corresponding craving for the miscellaneous and not over wholesome meal denominated high tea. She had not reached the stage of feminine depression and sense of helplessness when inchoate banqueting on bread and butter and penny buns seems to bring cheerless solace. Her temperament seemed almost virile in its vigour, and although she had her sex's antipathy to gastronomy, she nevertheless found it reasonable that she should be provided with a decently served dinner. Besides, Mrs. Gurkins, who was professionally interested in food stuffs, held solid views on the subject. She herself had a good appetite, and her little girl children ate everything they could lay their little white teeth to; she did not believe in not being hungry. It was one of her grievances that her other lodger, Mr. Kent upstairs, cooked his own victuals scramblingly, and would not allow her to see that his wants were duly satisfied. Accordingly she bestowed extra care upon Clytie.
After the cloth was removed Clytie continued the book she had been reading during the meal, and at last flung it aside. She rose and walked about the room, somewhat restless. She felt lonely—vaguely desirous of action, and yet idle. Was it a dumb premonition of fate, this restlessness? At any rate it led her to perform a trivial action which set in motion the currents of her future life.
She sat down at her writing table that stood in the recess between the fireplace and the light-curtained window and lit a couple of candles, whose pretty red paper shades threw a rosy glow around the corner of the room. It was only a simple note that she scribbled, hastily, boldly, as was her wont. Then she left the candles burning, and returned to her armchair by the fire and gave herself up to meditation.
The boy model she had engaged that morning interested' her powerfully. She shrank from an insistence upon the solution of the little problem she had offered to Winifred during the afternoon, hovering over and away from it. Her sense of type and personality was too acute not to be profoundly struck by the difference between his mother and himself. On the one hand was dulness, commonness, a coarse-fibred nature responsive to the stirrings of neither hope nor despair, a dull, uncomplaining drudge; on the other hand a quick, fiery temperament, showing itself in flashing black eyes, delicate nostrils, wiry, curly brown hair—all made picturesque by unqualified dirt. And yet, despite this refinement of feature, there was cruelty, brutality even, written on the childish face. That might be the fault of his upbringing, thought Clytie. But his beauty—where did it come from? She smiled as she thought of King Cophetua. It was the beggar maiden's grace that had won the king's heart, and grace was a quality that Jack's mother most distinctly lacked. Clytie felt dimly conscious of being on the verge of an appalling discovery. Her reading had been catholic enough, and her independent acquaintance with life sufficiently broad, to render the fact familiar to her that kings and beggar maidens if they fall in love with each other usually dispense with the ceremony of marriage. But then love pardons all—a formula in Clytie's new theory of social statics, perhaps wisely not accepted in Durdleham—and all the sorrow in lawlessness that had come within Clytie's small experience had been in her eyes sanctified by love. Yet who could have loved this woman? She was not more than three-and-thirty now—young enough to show that she had never possessed the mere attraction of comeliness. The boy remained, however, a living proof.
She thought of Winifred, and sighed a little. Why should she be forever craving after this strange hidden knowledge, after the taste of things bitter, when there was so much sweetness in life? The thought of Winifred's pure, gentle touch in flowers and delicate bloom of fruit and calm, transparent glass came over her like a rebuke. And then she smiled again, remembering how Winifred had coaxed her once to try and paint a bunch of roses, and how dismayed she had been at the egregious failure. No; the cobbler must not go beyond his last.
“I don't suppose I am very wicked after all,” she said to herself.
She rested her chin upon her hand and let her thoughts wander idly, building up a romance for Jack. He was a foundling, of noble parents, and Mrs. Burmester was only his foster mother. Then she roused herself with a little exclamation of disgust:
“What a perfectly Durdleham solution!”
The next moment, with an instinct common to folks whether at Durdleham or London, she sprang from her chair and cried:
“There's something burning!”
The room in fact was full of thin smoke, and, as Clytie rose, a snake of red flame ran up the curtains by the writing-desk. She rushed to them, but as soon as she had touched them, the folds being shaken out, the whole burst into a blaze. She fled to the door about to scream “Fire!” at the top of her voice.
What happened next neither she nor John Kent could afterwards exactly explain. He was on his way downstairs when the door was suddenly thrown open and a stream of light burst on to the gloomy landing. Clytie ran almost into his arms crying, “My room is on fire!” and then he was tearing down blazing, fiery curtains, smothering them with rugs, and stamping out glowing masses of drapery amid much smoke and confusion. It did not take very long to extinguish the flames, but the struggle while it lasted was fierce and exciting. Clytie stood by watching him, her hand at her throat. It was a new sensation to her to have a man acting for her in an emergency. She had failed. She saw by the man's energy, his fearless dealing with the blazing mass, his strength, his violence, that she never could have succeeded. She admired him, was angry at it; felt herself a helpless woman, was angry at that too; wished that the danger had been a little greater, at which she was more angry than ever.
However, when the last traces of the fire were extinguished, and the man stood before her, somewhat out of breath, wiping his forehead, this little train of emotions came to an end. She gazed piteously at her curtainless windows and scorched wainscoting. He turned and opened the window, whence the damp, gusty wind whirled the smoke in billowing drifts about the room.
“There!” he said, with a breath of relief.
“Oh, how can I thank you?” said Clytie. + “Don't,” he replied with cheerful laconism. “I am glad I was handy—for your sake as well as my own. I live upstairs.”
“I know; I have seen you come in and out. In fact, you passed us to-day. But still you have saved the whole house, and I thank you very, very much!”
“How did it all happen?” he asked, removing for the first time his white slouch hat and disclosing a shock of brown curly hair.
“The candle-shade on the desk; do you see? It must have caught fire and toppled over on to the curtains. I was sitting here and forgot I had left the candles alight; and then I smelled something burning and saw the curtains in a blaze. Then I ran out to call somebody.”
“That was very stupid,” said Kent, pushing back the desk from the middle of the room, where he had wheeled it; “by opening the door you made the things burn quicker. All you had to do was to drag down the curtains and cover them with the hearthrug. And then it is very silly to use paper candle-shades. They are no good, and they are always causing accidents. I hope you are not going to get any more.”
The assured paternal air with which Kent delivered himself of this little speech did away with its apparent rudeness. Clytie, who at first looked