For as much of the day as she could spare from the miserable formalities and arrangements attendant on the death of a human being, Clementina made a fool of herself over the child. It was a feminine scrap hungering for love, kitten-like in its demand for caresses. Contentedly nestling in Clementina’s arms, she related, piecemeal, her tiny history. Her name was Sheila, and she loved her father who was very ill. So ill that she had only been able to see him once since they had come off the ship. That was yesterday, and she had been frightened, for he said that he was going to mummy. Now mummy had gone to heaven, and when people go to heaven you never see them again. With a pang Clementina asked her if she remembered when her mummy went to heaven. Oh yes. It was ever so long ago—when she was quite little. Daddy cried, cried, cried. She, too, would cry if daddy were to go to heaven. . . . Clementina thought it best to wait and accustom the child both to the idea of the eternal parting and to herself, before breaking the disastrous news. But her heart was wrung. Sometimes Sheila revolted and clamoured to see him; but on the whole she showed herself to be reasonable and docile. She hugged to her side a shapeless and very dirty white plush cat, her inseparable companion. . . . They had lived in a big house in Shanghai, with lots of servants; but her father had sold it and sold all the furniture, and they were going to live in England for ever and ever. England was a place all full of green trees and grass and cows and flowers. Did Clementina know England? “Suppose daddy goes to heaven, would you like to come and live with me?” asked Clementina.
Sheila replied seriously that she would sooner live with her than with Na. Na was a new Na. Her old Na was in Shanghai. Her husband wouldn’t let her come to England. Only Clementina would have to cuddle her to sleep every night, like her daddy. Na didn’t cuddle her to sleep. She thought she didn’t know how. Daddy, she repeated like a young parrot, had said that was the worst of getting a nurse who had never had children of her own. They were so darned helpless. Clementina winced; but she put her arm round the child again.
“You’re not afraid of my not being able to cuddle you, Sheila?”
“Oh, you—you cuddle lovely,” murmured Sheila.
Who was her mother? Clementina had no notion. Hammersley had never announced the fact of his marriage. The last time she had seen him was six years ago. The child gave herself out to be five and a half. Hammersley must have married just before leaving England. He had breathed not a word to anybody. But so had Will Hammersley acted all his life. He was one who gave and never sought; a man who received the confidence of all who knew him, and kept the secrets both of joy and sorrow of his own life hidden behind his smiling eyes.
One of the secrets—the dainty secret that lay in her arms—was out now; a fact in flesh and blood. And for the guidance of this sensitive wisp of humanity to womanhood she, Clementina, and Ephraim Quixtus were jointly responsible. It was a Puckish destiny that had brought their lives to this point of convergence. With the dead man lying cold and stark upstairs, the humour of it appeared too grim for smiles. She wished that the quiet, capable man of wise understanding and unselfish heart, who had missed the express train at Brindisi that would have sped him swiftly to his longed-for Devonshire, and had come on to Marseilles with the sick stranger, had been appointed her coadjutor. Poynter could have helped her mightily with his kindly wisdom and his knowledge of the hearts and the ways of men, as he was helping her that day in the performance of the dreary duties to the dead. But Quixtus! He was as much of a child as the one confided to his care. Anxious, however, that Sheila should be prepossessed in his favour, she drew a flattering picture of the new uncle that would shortly come into her life.
“Is he your husband?” asked Sheila.
“Good Lord, no!” cried Clementina, aghast at the grotesque suggestion. “Whatever put that in your head, child?”
It appeared that Dora Smith, one of her little friends in Shanghai, had an uncle and aunt who were married. She thought all uncles and aunts were married.
“Do you think he’ll like my frock?” asked Sheila.
The vanity of the feminine thing! Clementina laughed for the first time that dismal day.
“Do you think he’ll like mine?”
Sheila looked critically at the soiled, ill-fitting blouse, and the rusty old brown skirt, and reddened. She paused for a moment.
“I’m sure he’ll say that he does,” she replied sedately.
Clementina caught a whimsical gleam in Poynter’s eye.
“Oriental diplomacy!” she remarked.
He shook his head. “You’re wrong. Go deeper.”
Clementina flushed and stroked the child’s fair hair.
“I’m afraid I’ve got to learn a lot of things.”
“In the most exquisite school in the world,” said Poynter.
Quixtus came downstairs about four o’clock, pale and shaky, and found Clementina in the dark and stuffy writing-room of the hotel. She had petted the child to her afternoon sleep, about half an hour before, and had left her in the joint care of the Chinese nurse and the dirty white plush cat tightly clasped to her breast. She had just finished a letter to Tommy. Either through the fault of the deeply encrusted hotel pen, or by force of painting habit, a smear of violet ink ran a comet’s course across her cheek. She had written to Tommy:
“If you don’t want to know what has happened, you ought to. I find my poor friend dead on my arrival. Elysian fields for him, which I’m sure are not as beautiful as the English lanes his soul longed for. To my amazement he has left a fairy child to the joint guardianship of your uncle and myself. Your uncle’s a sick man, and needs looking after. What I’m going to do with all you helpless chickens, when I ought to be painting trousers, God alone knows. I once was an artist. Now I’m a hen. Yours, Clementina.”
She had also written to Etta in similar strain, and at the same inordinate length, and was addressing the envelope when Quixtus entered the room.
She wheeled round.
“Better?”
“Thank you,” said he. “Though I’m ashamed of myself for sleeping all this time.”
“Jolly good thing you did go to sleep,” replied Clementina. “It has probably saved you from a breakdown. You were on the verge of one.”
“Can I help you with any of the unhappy arrangements that have to be made in these circumstances?”
“Made ’em,” said Clementina. “Sit down.”
Quixtus obeyed, meekly. He wore an air of great lassitude, like a man who has just risen from a bed of sickness. He passed his hands over his eyes:
“There was a sealed packet, if I remember rightly, and a child. I think we might see now what the packet contains.”
“Are you fit to read it?” she asked. He smiled vaguely, for her tone softened the abruptness of the question.
“I am anxious to do so,” he replied.
Clementina opened the envelope and drew out the two documents, the letter and the will, and read them aloud. Neither added greatly to the information given by Poynter. Hammersley charged them as his two oldest, most loved and trusted friends, to regard themselves as the parents and guardians of his orphaned child, to whom he bequeathed a small but comfortable fortune, to be administered by them jointly in trust, until she should marry or reach the age of twenty-five years. No mention being made of the dead wife, her identity still remained a mystery. Like Clementina, Quixtus had not heard of his marriage, could think of no woman whom, six years ago, while he was in England, he could have married.
But six years ago. . .! Quixtus buried his face in his hands and shuddered. Had the man been false to every one—even to the wife of the friend he had betrayed?
Suddenly he rose with a great cry and a passionate gesture of both arms.
“I am lost! I am lost! I am floundering in quicksands. The meaning of the earth has gone from me. I’m in a land of grotesques—shapes that mop and mow at me and have no reality. The things they do the human brain can’t conceive. They have been driving me mad, mad!” he cried, beating his head with his knuckles, “and yet I am sane now. Did you ever know what it was to be so sane that your soul was tortured with sanity? Oh, my God!”
He walked about the room quivering from the outburst. Clementina regarded him with amazed interest. This was a new, undreamed of Quixtus, a human creature that had passed through torment.
“Tell me what is on your mind,” she said quietly. “It might ease it.”
“No,” said he, halting before her. “Not to my dying day. There are things one must keep within oneself till they eat away one’s vitals. I wish I had never come here.”
“You came here on an errand of mercy, and as far as you were concerned you performed it.”
“I came here with hate in my heart, I tell you. I came here on an errand of evil. And outside the door of his room my purpose failed me—and I sent him my love. And then I went in and saw him—dead.”
“And you forgave him,” said Clementina.
“No; I prayed that God would.”
He turned away. Clementina rose from her chair by the writing-table and followed him.
“What was between you and Will Hammersley?”
For an instant he had an impulse to tell her, she looked so strong, so honest. But he checked it. Confidence was impossible. The shame of the dead must be buried with the dead. He pointed to the documents lying on the table.
“He thought I never knew. I never knew,” said he.
“I give it up,” said Clementina.
A memory smote him. He bent his brows upon her. His eyes were sad and clear.
“You have no inkling of the matter?”
“None in the least. Good Lord!” she broke out impatiently, “if I had, do you suppose I’d be cross-questioning you? I’d be trying to help you, as I want to do.”
He threw himself wearily into a chair and leant his head on his hand.
“I’ve had queer experiences of late,” he said. “I’ve learned to trust nobody. How can I tell that you’re sincere in saying you want to help me?”
Clementina puckered up her face.
“What’s that? Here am I, who have been abusing you all your life, now doing violence to my traditions and saying let us kiss and be friends—just at the very moment when you want friends more than you ever did in your born days—and you ask me if I’m sincere! Lord in heaven! Did you ever know me to be even decently polite to creatures I didn’t care about?”
Clementina was indignant. The faint shadow of a smile passed across Quixtus’s face.
“You’ve not always been polite to me, Clementina. This change to solicitude is surprising. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. Which means——”
“Do you suppose you’re the only person who knows tags out of the Latin grammar?” she snapped. Then she laughed in her dry way. “Don’t let us begin to quarrel. We’ve got a child, you and I. I hope you realise that. If we were its real father and mother we might quarrel with impunity. As we’re not, we can’t. What are we going to do?”
Quixtus thought deeply for a long time. His sensitive nature shrank from the duty imposed. If he accepted it he would be the dead man’s dupe to the end of the chapter.
“You have seen the little girl?” he inquired at last.
“Yes. Been with her most of the day.”
“Do you like her?”
She regarded him with whimsical pity.
“Oh yes, I like her,” she said.
“Then why not keep her to yourself? I am not bound by Hammersley’s wishes. All I have to do is to decline to act either as executor or trustee.”
Clementina’s heart leaped in the most unregenerate manner. To have Sheila all to herself, without let or hindrance from her impossible co-trustee! She was staggered by the sudden, swift temptation which struck at the roots of her unfulfilled womanhood. For a while she dallied with it deliciously.
“If it’s agreeable to you, I’ll decline to act,” said Quixtus, after the spell of silence.
Clementina strangled the serpent in a flash and cast it from her. To purchase happiness at the price of human infirmity? No. She would play squarely with life. Feminine instinct told her that the care of the child was needful for this weary man’s salvation. She attacked him with more roughness than she intended—the eddy of her own struggle.
“What right have you to shirk your responsibilities? That’s what you’ve always done—and see where it has landed you. I’m not going to be a party to it. It’s pure and simple cowardice, and I have no patience with it.”
“Perhaps I deserve your reproaches,” said Quixtus mildly. “But the present circumstances are so painful——”
“Painful!” she interrupted. “Lord above, man, what does it matter whether they’re painful or not? Do you suppose I’ve gone through six and thirty years without pain? I’ve had awful pain, hellish pain, as much pain as a woman and an artist and a scarecrow can suffer. That’s new to you, isn’t it? But you’ve never seen me making a hullabaloo about it. We’ve got to bear pain in the world, and the more we grin, the better we bear it, and—what is a precious sight more useful—the more we help others to bear it. Who are you, Ephraim Quixtus, that you should be exempt from pain?”
She turned to the yellow packet of “Maryland” on the marble mantlepiece and rolled a cigarette. Quixtus said nothing, but sat tugging at his scrubby moustache.
“That child,” she said—and she paused to lick the cigarett............