Lord have mercy upon us!” cried Clementina. The pious ejaculation was in the nature of a reply to Miss Etta Concannon, the fragile slip of a girl whose portrait she had painted and in whose cornflower-blue eyes she had caught the haunting fear. There was no fear, however, in the eyes to-day. They were bright, direct, and abnormally serious. She had just announced her intention of becoming a hospital nurse. Whereupon Clementina had cried: “Lord have mercy upon us!”
Now it must be stated that Etta Concannon had bestowed on an embarrassed Clementina her young and ardent affection; secretly, during the sittings for the portrait which her father had commissioned Clementina to paint as a wedding present, and openly; when the sittings were ended and she called upon Clementina as a friend. In the first flush of this avowed adoration she would send shy little notes, asking whether she might come to the studio to tea. As she lived quite close by, the missives were despatched by hand. Clementina, disturbed in the midst of her painting, would tear a ragged corner from the first bit of paper her eyes fell upon—note-paper, brown-paper, cartridge-paper—once it was sand-paper—scribble “Yes” on it with a bit of charcoal and send it out to the waiting messenger. At last she was driven to desperation.
“My good child,” she said, “can’t you drop in to tea without putting me to this elaborate correspondence?”
Etta Concannon thought she could, and thence-forward came to tea unheralded, and, eventually such were her powers of seduction that she enticed Clementina to her own little den in her father’s house in Cheyne Walk—a fairy den all water-colour and gossamer very much like herself, in which Clementina gave the impression of an ogress who had blundered in by mistake. It was on the first visit that Clementina repudiated the name of Miss Wing. She hated and loathed it. On Etta’s lips it suggested a prim, starched governess—the conventional French caricature of the English Old Maid with long teeth and sharp elbows. She might be an old maid, but she wasn’t a prim governess. Everybody called her Clementina. Upon which, to her professed discomfort, Etta threw her arms round her neck and kissed her and called her a darling. Why Clementina wasted her time over this chit of a girl she was at a loss to conjecture. She was about as much use in the world as a rainbow. Yet for some fool reason (her own expression) Clementina encouraged her, and felt less grim in her company. The odd part of their intercourse was that the one thing under heaven they did not talk about was the bullet-headed, bull-necked young man to whom Etta was engaged—not until one day when, in response to the following epistle, Clementina brusquely dismissed her sitter, skewered on a battered hat, and rushed round to Cheyne Walk.
 
“My dearest, dearest Clementina,—Do come to me. I am in abject misery. The very worst has happened. I would come to you, but I’m not fit to be seen.
Your own unhappy
“Etta.”
“My poor child,” cried Clementina, as she entered the bower and beheld a very dim and watery fairy sobbing on a couch. “Who has been doing this to you?”
“It’s R-Raymond,” said Etta, chokingly.
To her astonishment Clementina found herself sitting on the couch with her arms round the girl. Now and then she did the most idiotic things without knowing in the least why she did them. In this position she listened to Etta’s heartrending story. It was much involved, here and there incoherent, told with singular disregard of chronological sequence. When properly pieced together and shorn of irrelevance, this is what it amounted to:
Certain doings of the bullet-headed young man, doings not at all creditable—mean and brutal doings indeed—had reached the ears of Etta’s father. Now Etta’s father was a retired admiral, and Etta the beloved child of his old age. The report of Captain Hilyard’s doings had wounded him in his weakest spot. In a fine fury he telephonically commanded the alleged wrongdoer to wait upon him without delay. Captain Hilyard obeyed. The scene of the interview was a private room in the service club to which Admiral Concannon belonged. Admiral Concannon went straight to the point—it is an uncomfortable characteristic of British admirals. The bullet-headed young man not being able to deny the charges brought against him, Admiral Concannon expressed himself in such terms as are only polished to their brightest perfection on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war. The young man showed resentment—amazing impudence, according to the Admiral—whereupon the Admiral consigned him to the devil and charged him never to let him (the Admiral) catch him (the bullet-headed young man) lifting his scoundrelly eyes again to an innocent young girl. Admiral Concannon came home and told his daughter as much of the tale of turpitude as was meet for her ears. Captain Hilyard repaired forthwith in unrighteous wrath to his quarters and packed off Etta’s letters, with a covering note in which he insinuated that he was not sorry to have seen the last of her amiable family. It had all happened that day.
Hence the tears.
“I thought you wrote me that the worst had happened,” said Clementina.
“Well, hasn’t it?”
“Good Lord!” cried Clementina. “It’s the very best thing that ever happened to you in all your born days.”
In the course of a week Clementina brought the sorrowing damsel round to her own way of thinking.
“Do you know,” said Etta, “I used to be rather afraid of him.”
“Any fool could see that,” said Clementina.
“Did you guess?” This with wide-open cornflower eyes.
“Look at your portrait and you’ll see,” said Clementina, mindful of the avalanche of memories which the portrait of Tommy Burgrave’s rough-and-ready criticism of the bullet-headed young man had started on its overwhelming career. “Have you ever looked at it?”
“Of course I have.”
“To look at a thing and to see it,” remarked Clementina, “are two entirely different propositions. For instance, you looked at that young man, but you didn’t see him. Yet your soul saw him and was afraid. Your father too—I can’t understand what he was about when he consented to the engagement.”
“Captain Hilyard’s father and he were old mess-mates,” said Etta.
“Old messmakers!” snapped Clementina. “And what made you accept him?”
Etta looked mournful. “I don’t know.”
“The next time you engage yourself to a young man, just be sure that you do know. I suppose this one said, ‘Dilly, dilly, come and be killed,’ and you went like the foolish little geese in the nursery rhyme.”
“They were ducks, dear,” laughed Etta, taking Clementina’s grim face between her dainty hands. “Ducks like you.”
Clementina suffered the caress with a wry mouth.
“I think you’re getting better,” she said. “And I’m jolly glad of it. To have one young idiot on my hands ill with congestion of the lungs and another ill with congestion of the heart—both at the same time—is more than I bargained for. I suppose you think I’m a sort of Sister of Charity. Why don’t you do as your father tells you and go down to your Aunt What’s-her-name in Somersetshire?”
Etta made a grimace. “Aunt Elmira would drive me crazy. You’re much more wholesome for me. And as for father”—she tossed her pretty head—“he has to do what he’s told.”
So Etta remained in town, her convalescence synchronising with that of Tommy Burgrave. Clementina began to find time to breathe and to make up arrears of work. As soon as Tommy was able to take his walks abroad, and Etta to seek distraction in the society of her acquaintance, Clementina shut herself up in her studio, forbidding the young people to come near her, and for a week painted the livelong day. At last, one morning two piteous letters were smuggled almost simultaneously into the studio.
“. . . I haven’t seen you for months and months. Do let me come to dinner to-night. . . . Tommy.”
“. . . Oh darling, DO come to tea this afternoon. . . . Etta.”
“I shall go and paint in the Sahara,” cried Clementina. But she seized two dirty scraps of paper and scrawled on them:
“Lord, yes, child, come to dinner.”
“Lord, yes, child, I’ll come to tea.” and having folded them crookedly despatched them to her young friends.
It was during this visit of Clementina to the fairy bower in Cheyne Walk that Etta informed her of her intention of becoming a hospital nurse.
“Lord have mercy upon us!” cried Clementina.
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” said Etta.
“The idea is preposterous,” replied Clementina. “What need have you to work for your living?”
“I want to do something useful in the world.”
“You’ll do much better by remaining ornamental,” said Clementina. “It’s only when a woman is as ugly as sin and as poor as charity that she need be useful; that’s to say while she’s unmarried. When she’s married she has got as much as she can do to keep her husband and children in order. A girl like you with plenty of money and the devil’s own prettiness has got to stay at home and fulfil her destiny.”
Etta, sitting on the window seat, looked at the Thames, seen in patches of silver through the fresh greenery of the Embankment trees.
“I know what you’re thinking of, dear,” she said, with the indulgent solemnity of the Reverend Mother of a Convent, “but I shall never marry.”
“Rubbish,” said Clementina.
“I’ve made up my mind, quite made up my mind.”
Clementina sighed. Youth is so solemn, so futile, so like the youth of all the generations that have passed away. The child was suffering from one of the natural sequel? of a ruptured engagement. Once maidens in her predicament gat them into nunneries and became nuns and that was the end of them. Whether they regretted their rash act or not, who can say? Nowadays they rush into philanthropic or political activity, contriving happy evenings for costermongers or unhappy afternoons for Cabinet Ministers. The impulse driving them to nunnery, Whitechapel, or Caxton Hall has always been merely a reaction of sex; and the duration of the period of reaction is proportionate to the degree of brokenness of the heart. As soon as the heart is mended, sex has her triumphant way again and leaps in response to the eternal foolishness that the maiden blushes to read in the eyes of a comely creature in trousers. This Clementina knew, as all those—and only those—whose youth is behind them know it; and so, when Etta with an air of cold finality said that she had made up her mind, Clementina sighed. It was so ludicrously pathetic. Etta’s heart had not even been broken; it had not sustained the wee-est, tiniest fracture; it had been roughly handled; that was all. In a month’s time she would no more yearn to become a hospital nurse than to follow the profession of a chimney-sweep. In a month’s time she would be flirting with merry, whole-hearted outrageousness. In a month’s time, if the True Prince came along, she might be in love. Really in love. What a wonderful gift to a man would be the love of this fragrant wisp of womanhood!
“I’ve quite made up my mind, dear,” she repeated.
“Then there’s nothing more to be said,” replied Clementina.
A shade of disappointment spread over the girl’s face, like a little cloud over a May morning. She jumped from the window-seat and slid to a stool by Clementina’s chair.
“But there’s lots to be said. Lots. It’s a tremendously important decision in life.”
“Tremendous,” said Clementina.
“It means that I’ll die an old maid.”
“Like me,” said Clementina.
“If I’m like you I won’t care a bit!”
“Lord save us,” said Clementina.
The girl actually took it for granted that she enjoyed being an old maid.
“I’ll have a little house in the country all covered with honeysuckle, and a pony-trap and a dog and a cat and you’ll come and stay with me.”
“I thought you were going to be a hospital nurse,” said Clementina.
“So I am; but I’ll live in the house when I’m off duty.”
Clementina rolled a cigarette. Etta knelt bolt upright and offered a lighted match. Now when a lissom-figured girl kneels bolt upright, with a shapely head thrown ever so little back, and stretches out her arm, there are few things more adorable in this world of beauty. Clementina looked at her for full ten seconds with the eyes of a Moses on Mount Nebo—supposing (a bewildering hypothesis) that Moses had been an artist and a woman—and then, disregarding cigarette and lighted match, she laid her hands on the girl’s shoulders and shook her gently so that she sank back on her heels, and the match went out.
“Oh, you dear, delightful, silly, silly child.”
She rose abruptly and went to the mantelpiece and lit the cigarette for herself. Etta laughed in blushing confusion.
“But darling, nurses do have times off now and then.”
“I wasn’t thinking about nurses at all,” said Clementina.
“Then what were you thinking of?” asked Etta; still sitting on her heels and craning her head round.
“Never mind,” said Clementina. “But what will you want an old frump like me in your house for?”
“To listen to my troubles,” said the girl.
Clementina walked home through the soft May sunshine, a smile twinkling in her little beady eyes and the corners of her lips twisted into an expression of deep melancholy. If she had been ten years younger there would have been no smile in her eyes. If she had been ten years older a corroborative smile would have played about her lips. But at thirty-five a woman in Clementina’s plight often does not know whether to laugh or to cry, and if she is a woman with a sense of humour she does both at once. The eternal promise, the et............