July brought in halcyon days for everybody. They were halcyon days for Clementina. There were neglected portraits to complete, new sitters for whom to squeeze in appointments, a host of stimulating things, not the least of which was the beloved atmosphere, half-turpentine, half-poetry, of the studio. Only the painter can know the delight of the mere feel of the long-forsaken brush, and the sight of the blobs of colour oozing out from the tubes on to the palette. Most of us, returning to toil after holiday, sigh over departed joys. To the painter the joy of getting back to his easel is worth all the joys that have departed. Clementina plunged into work as a long-stranded duck plunges into water. By rising at dawn, a practice contrary to her habit, she managed to keep pace with her work and to attend to the various affairs which her new responsibilities entailed. Her days were filled to overflowing, and filled with extraordinary happiness. A nurse was engaged for Sheila, a kind and buxom widow who also found herself living in halcyon days. She could do practically whatever she liked, as her charge was seldom in her company. The child had her being in the studio, playing happily and quietly in a corner, thus realising Clementina’s dream, or watching her paint, with great, wondering eyes. The process fascinated her. She would sit for an hour at a time, good as gold, absorbed in the magic of the brush-strokes, clasping the dingy Pinkie tight against her bosom. Tommy appeared one day with a box of paints, a miniature easel, and a great mass of uncoloured fashion-plates of beautiful ladies in gorgeous raiment. A lesson or two inspired Sheila with artistic zeal, so that often a sitter would come upon the two of them painting breathlessly, Clementina screwing up her eyes, darting backwards and forwards to her canvas, and the dainty child seated on a milking-stool and earnestly making animated rainbows of the beautiful ladies in the fashion-plates.
Then there was the tedious process of obtaining probate of Hammersley’s will. Luckily, he had wound up all his affairs in Shanghai, to the common satisfaction of himself and his London house, so that no complications arose from the latter quarter. Indeed, the firm gave the executors its cordial assistance. But the London house had to be interviewed, and lawyers had to be interviewed, and Quixtus and all kinds of other people, and papers had to be read and signed, and affidavits to be made, and head-splitting intricacies of business and investments to be mastered. All this ate up many of the sunny hours.
Tommy and Etta had halcyon days of their own, which, but by the free use of curmudgeonly roughness, would have merged into Clementina’s. Etta had cajoled an infuriated admiral, raving round the room after a horsewhip, into a stern parent who consented to receive Tommy, explicitly reserving to himself the right to throw him out of window should the young man not take his fancy. Tommy called and was allowed to depart peacefully by the front door. Then Quixtus; incited thereto by Tommy, called upon the Admiral with the awful solemnity of a father in a French play, with the result that Tommy was invited to dinner at the Admiral’s and given as much excellent old port as he could stand. After which the Admiral called on Clementina, whom he had not met before. During the throes of horsewhip hunting he had threatened to visit her there and then and give her a piece of his mind—which at that moment was more like a hunk of molten lava than anything else. But the arts and wiles of Etta had prevailed so that the above scheduled sequence of events had been observed. Clementina, caught in the middle of a hot afternoon’s painting, received him, bedaubed and bedraggled, in the studio, whose chaos happened to be that day more than usually confounded. The Admiral, accustomed to the point-device females of his world, and making the spick and span of the quarter-deck a matter of common morality in material surroundings, went from Romney Place an obfuscated man.
“I can’t make your friend out,” he said to Etta. “I don’t mind telling you that if I had seen her, I should never have allowed you to visit her. I found her looking more like a professional rabbit-skinner than a lady, and when I went to sit down I had to clear away a horrid plate of half-finished cold pie, by George, from the chair. She contradicted me flatly in everything I said about you—as if I didn’t know my own child—and filled me up with advice.”
“And wasn’t it good, dear?”
“No advice is ever good. Like Nebuchadnezzar’s food, it may be wholesome but it isn’t good. And then she turned round and talked the most downright common sense about women I’ve ever heard a woman utter. And then, by Jove, I don’t know how it happened—I never talk shop, you know——”
“Of course you don’t, dear, never,” said Etta.
“Of course I don’t—but somehow we got on to the subject, and she showed a more intelligent appreciation of the state of naval affairs than any man I’ve met for a long time! As for those superficial, theoretical donkeys at the Club——”
“And what else, darling?” said Etta, who had often heard about the donkeys, but now was dying to hear about Clementina. “Do tell me what she talked about. She must have talked about me. Didn’t she?”
“About you! I’ve told you.” He took her chin in his hand—she was sitting on a footstool, her arms about his knee.
“You can’t have told me everything, dear.”
“I think she informed me that her selection of a husband for you was a damned sight better than mine—I beg your pardon, my dear, she didn’t say ‘damned’—and then the little girl you’re always talking of came in, and the rabbit-skinner seemed to turn into an ordinary sort of woman and took me up, and, in a way, threw me down on the floor to play with the child.”
“What did you play at, dad? When I was little you used to pretend to swallow a fork. Did you swallow a fork?”
The iron features relaxed into a smile.
“I did, my dear, and it was the cold pie fork, wiped on a bit of newspaper. And last of all, what do you think she said?”
“No one on earth could guess, dear, what Clementina might have said.”
“She actually asked me to sit for a crayon sketch. Said my face was interesting to her as an artist, and she would like to make a study of it for her own pleasure. Now what pleasure could anybody on earth find in looking at my ugly old mug?”
“But, dear, you have a most beautiful mug,” cried Etta. “I don’t mean beautiful like the photographs of popular actors—but full of strength and character—just the fine face that appeals to the artist.”
“Do you think so?” asked the Admiral.
“I’m sure.” She ran to a little table and brought a Florentine mirror. “Look.”
He looked. Instinctively the man of sixty-five touched the finely-curving grizzled hair about his temples.
“You’re a silly child,” said he.
She kissed him. “Now confess. You had the goodest of good times with Clementina this afternoon.”
“I don’t mind owning,” said the Admiral, “that I found her a most intelligent woman.”
And that is the way that all of us sons of Adam, even Admirals of the British Fleet, can be beguiled by the daughters of Eve.
Halcyon days were they for Quixtus, for whom London wore an entirely different aspect from the Aceldama he had left. Instead of its streets and squares stretching out before him as the scene of potential devilry, it smiled upon him as the centre of manifold pleasant interests. He had the great work to attack, the final picture that mortal knowledge could draw of that far off, haunting phase of human life before the startling use of iron was known to mankind. It was not to be a dull catalogue of dead things. The dead things, a million facts, were to be the skeleton on which he would build his great vivid flesh-and-blood story—the dream of his life, which only now did he feel the vital impulse to realise. He had his club and his cronies, harmless folk, beneath whose mild exterior he no longer divined horrible corruption. From them all he received congratulations on his altered mien. The change had done him good. He was looking ten years younger. Some chaffed him, after the way of men. Wonderful place, Paris. He found a stimulating interest in his new responsibilities. Vestiges of his perfunctory legal training remained and enabled him to unravel simple complications in the Hammersley affairs, much to Clementina’s admiration and his own satisfaction. He discovered a pleasure once more in the occasional society of Tommy, and concerned himself seriously with his love-making and his painting. He spoke of him to Dawkins, the rich donor of the Anthropological Society portrait, to whom Tommy had alluded with such disrespect to Clementina. Dawkins visited Tommy’s studio and walked away with a couple of pictures, after having paid such a price as to make the young man regard him as a fairy godfather in vast white waistcoat and baggy trousers. Quixtus also entertained Tommy and Etta at lunch at the Carlton, Mrs. Fontaine completing the quartette. “I should have liked it better,” said Clementina, when she heard of the incident (as she heard all that happened to the lovers), “I should have liked it better if he hadn’t brought Mrs. Fontaine into it.” Whereat Tommy winked at Etta, unbeknown to Clementina.
Quixtus’s friendship with the spotless flower of womanhood continued. He had tea with her in her prettily-furnished little house in Pont Street, where he met several of her acquaintances, people of unquestionable position in the London world, and attended one or two receptions and even a dance at which she was present. Very skilfully she drew him into her circle and adroitly played him in public as a serious aspirant to her spotless hand. There were many who called him the variegated synonyms of a fool, for to hard-bitten worldlings few illusions are left concerning a woman like Lena Fontaine; but they shrugged their shoulders cynically, and viewed the capture with amused interest. Only the most jaded complained. If she wanted to give them a sensation, why did she not go a step further and lead about a bishop on her string? But these uncharitable remarks did not reach Quixtus’s ears. The word went round that he was a man of distinguished scientific position—whether he was a metallurgist or a brain specialist no one at the tired end of the London season either knew or cared to know—and, his courtly and scholarly demeanour confirming the rumour, the corner of Vanity Fair in which Lena Fontaine fought to hold her position paid him considerable deference. The flattery of the frivolous pleased him, as it has pleased many a good, simple man before him. He thought Mrs. Fontaine’s friends very charming, though perhaps not over-intellectual people. He went among them, however, scarce knowing why. A card of invitation would come by post from Lady Anything, whom he had once met. Before he had time to obey his first impulse and decline, Lena Fontaine’s voice would be heard over the telephone.
“Are you going to Lady Anything’s on Friday?”
“I don’t think so.”
“She has asked you, I know. I’m going.”
“Oh?”
“Do come. Lady Anything tells me she has got some interesting people to meet you; and I shall be so miserable if you’re not there.”
Who was he to cause misery to the spotless lady? The victim yielded, and blandly unconscious of feminine guile was paraded before the interesting people as the latest and most lasting conquest of Lena Fontaine’s bow and spear.
August plans were discussed. She was thinking of Dinard. What was Quixtus proposing to do? He had not considered the question. Had contemplated work in London. She held up her hands. London in August! How could he exist in the stuffy place? He needed a real holiday.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know where to go,” said he.
Very delicately she suggested Dinard. He objected in his shy way. Dinard was the haunt of fashion and frivolity.
“I should walk about the place like a daw among peacocks,” said he.
“But why should you be a daw? Why not do a little peacocking? Colour in life would be good for you. And I would undertake to keep your feathers trim.”
He smiled, half-allured, half-repelled by the idea of strutting among such gay birds. To refuse the spotless lady’s request downright was an act of discourtesy of which he was incapable. He gave a vague and qualified assent to the proposal, which she did not then tempt him to make more definite. Content with her progress, she bided her time.
Quixtus had little leisure to reflect on the sceptical attitude towards humanity which, theoretically, he still maintained. In addition to all these hour-absorbing interests, Sheila began to occupy a considerable place in his life. Sometimes he would call at Romney Place; sometimes Clementina would bring the child to Russell Square; sometimes, when Clementina was too busy, Sheila came in the nurse’s charge. He cleared out a large room at the top of the house, which was to be Sheila’s nursery when she took up her quarters there. It needed re-papering, re-carpeting, re-furnishing, he decided. Nothing like cheerful surroundings for impressionable childhood. With this in view, he carried off Sheila one day to a firm of wall-paper dealers, so that she could choose a pattern for herself. Sheila sat solemnly on the sofa by his side while the polite assistant turned over great strips of paper. At last she decided. A bewildering number of parrots to the square yard, all with red bodies and blue tails, darting about among green foliage on which pink roses grew miraculously, was the chosen design. Quixtus hesitated; but Sheila was firm. They proudly took home a strip to try against the wall. Clementina, hearing from Sheila of her exploit, rushed up the next afternoon to Russell Square, and blinked her eyes before the dazzling thing.
“It’s only you, Ephraim, that could have taken a child of five to select wall-papers.”
“I will own that the result is disastrous,” he said, ruefully. “But she set her heart upon it.”
She sighed. “You’re two babies together. I see I’ve got to fix up that nursery myself.” She looked at him with a woman’s delicious pity. What could a lone man know of the fitting up of nurseries?
“You hear what your auntie says?” he asked—the child was sitting on his knee. “We’re in disgrace.”
“If you’re in disgrace you go in the corner,” said Sheila.
“Let us go in the corner, then.”
“If you hold me very tight,” said Sheila.
But Clementina came up and forgave them, and kissed the little face peeping over Quixtus’s shoulder.
“It does my heart good to see you with her,” she cried, with rare demonstrativeness.
It was true. Sheila’s sweet ways with Tommy and Etta caused her ever so little a pang of jealousy. Her increasing fondness for Quixtus made Clementina thrill with pleasure. You may say that Clementina, essentially just, was scrupulous not to encroach upon Quixtus&r............