by Grant Allen
“Oh! I’m going back to St. Nathaniel’s,” I continued. “If you’ll allow me, I’ll walk part way with you.”
“How very kind of you!”
We strode side by side a little distance in silence. Then a thought seemed to strike the lugubrious young man. “What a charming girl your cousin is!” he exclaimed, abruptly.
“You seem to think so,” I answered, smiling.
He flushed a little; the lantern jaw grew longer. “I admire her, of course,” he answered. “Who doesn’t? She is so extraordinarily handsome.”
“Well, not exactly handsome,” I replied, with more critical and kinsman-like deliberation. “Pretty, if you will; and decidedly pleasing and attractive in manner.”
He looked me up and down, as if he found me a person singularly deficient in taste and appreciation. “Ah, but then, you are her cousin,” he said at last, with a compassionate tone. “That makes a difference.”
“I quite see all Daphne’s strong points,” I answered, still smiling, for I could perceive he was very far gone. “She is good-looking, and she is clever.”
“Clever!” he echoed. “Profound! She has a most unusual intellect. She stands alone.”
“Like her mother’s silk dresses,” I murmured, half under my breath.
He took no notice of my flippant remark, but went on with his rhapsody. “Such depth; such penetration! And then, how sympathetic! Why, even to a mere casual acquaintance like myself, she is so kind, so discerning!”
“ARE you such a casual acquaintance?” I inquired, with a smile. (It might have shocked Aunt Fanny to hear me; but THAT is the way we ask a young man his intentions nowadays.)
He stopped short and hesitated. “Oh, quite casual,” he replied, almost stammering. “Most casual, I assure you.... I have never ventured to do myself the honour of supposing that... that Miss Tepping could possibly care for me.”
“There is such a thing as being TOO modest and unassuming,” I answered. “It sometimes leads to unintentional cruelty.”
“No, do you think so?” he cried, his face falling all at once. “I should blame myself bitterly if that were so. Dr. Cumberledge, you are her cousin. DO you gather that I have acted in such a way as to — to lead Miss Tepping to suppose I felt any affection for her?”
I laughed in his face. “My dear boy,” I answered, laying one hand on his shoulder, “may I say the plain truth? A blind bat could see you are madly in love with her.”
His mouth twitched. “That’s very serious!” he answered, gravely; “very serious.”
“It is,” I responded, with my best paternal manner, gazing blankly in front of me.
He stopped short again. “Look here,” he said, facing me. “Are you busy? No? Then come back with me to my rooms; and — I’ll make a clean breast of it.”
“By all means,” I assented. “When one is young — and foolish — I have often noticed, as a medical man, that a drachm of clean breast is a magnificent prescription.”
He walked back by my side, talking all the way of Daphne’s many adorable qualities. He exhausted the dictionary for laudatory adjectives. By the time I reached his door it was not HIS fault if I had not learned that the angelic hierarchy were not in the running with my pretty cousin for graces and virtues. I felt that Faith, Hope, and Charity ought to resign at once in favour of Miss Daphne Tepping, promoted.
He took me into his comfortably furnished rooms — the luxurious rooms of a rich young bachelor, with taste as well as money — and offered me a partaga. Now, I have long observed, in the course of my practice, that a choice cigar assists a man in taking a philosophic outlook on the question under discussion; so I accepted the partaga. He sat down opposite me and pointed to a photograph in the centre of his mantlepiece. “I am engaged to that lady,” he put in, shortly.
“So I anticipated,” I answered, lighting up.
He started and looked surprised. “Why, what made you guess it?” he inquired.
I smiled the calm smile of superior age — I was some eight years or so his senior. “My dear fellow,” I murmured, “what else could prevent you from proposing to Daphne — when you are so undeniably in love with her?”
“A great deal,” he answered. “For example, the sense of my own utter unworthiness.”
“One’s own unworthiness,” I replied, “though doubtless real — p’f, p’f — is a barrier that most of us can readily get over when our admiration for a particular lady waxes strong enough. So THIS is the prior attachment!” I took the portrait down and scanned it.
“Unfortunately, yes. What do you think of her?”
I scrutinised the features. “Seems a nice enough little thing,” I answered. It was an innocent face, I admit; very frank and girlish.
He leaned forward eagerly. “That’s just it. A nice enough little thing! Nothing in the world to be said against her. While Daphne — Miss Tepping, I mean—” His silence was ecstatic.
I examined the photograph still more closely. It displayed a lady of twenty or thereabouts, with a weak face, small, vacant features, a feeble chin, a good-humoured, simple mouth, and a wealth of golden hair that seemed to strike a keynote.
“In the theatrical profession?” I inquired at last, looking up.
He hesitated. “Well, not exactly,” he answered.
I pursed my lips and blew a ring. “Music-hall stage?” I went on, dubiously.
He nodded. “But a girl is not necessarily any the less a lady because she sings at a music-hall,” he added, with warmth, displaying an evident desire to be just to his betrothed, however much he admired Daphne.
“Certainly not,” I admitted. “A lady is a lady; no occupation can in itself unladify her.... But on the music-hall stage, the odds, one must admit, are on the whole against her.”
“Now, THERE you show prejudice!”
“One may be quite unprejudiced,” I answered, “and yet allow that connection with the music-halls does not, as such, afford clear proof that a girl is a compound of all the virtues.”
“I think she’s a good girl,” he retorted, slowly.
“Then why do you want to throw her over?” I inquired.
“I don’t. That’s just it. On the contrary, I mean to keep my word and marry her.”
“IN ORDER to keep your word?” I suggested.
He nodded. “Precisely. It is a point of honour.”
“That’s a poor ground of marriage,” I went on. “Mind, I don’t want for a moment to influence you, as Daphne’s cousin. I want to get at the truth of the situation. I don’t even know what Daphne thinks of you. But you promised me a clean breast. Be a man and bare it.”
He bared it instantly. “I thought I was in love with this girl, you see,” he went on, “till I saw Miss Tepping.”
“That makes a difference,” I admitted.
“And I couldn’t bear to break her heart.”
“Heaven forbid!” I cried. “It is the one unpardonable sin. Better anything than that.” Then I grew practical. “Father’s consent?”
“MY father’s? IS it likely? He expects me to marry into some distinguished English family.”
I hummed a moment. “Well, out with it!” I exclaimed, pointing my cigar at him.
He leaned back in his chair and told me the whole story. A pretty girl; golden hair; introduced to her by a friend; nice, simple little thing; mind and heart above the irregular stage on to which she had been driven by poverty alone; father dead; mother in reduced circumstances. “To keep the home together, poor Sissie decided—”
“Precisely so,” I murmured, knocking off my ash. “The usual self-sacrifice! Case quite normal! Everything en regle!”
“You don’t mean to say you doubt it?” he cried, flushing up, and evidently regarding me as a hopeless cynic. “I do assure you, Dr. Cumberledge, the poor child — though miles, of course, below Miss Tepping’s level — is as innocent, and as good—”
“As a flower in May. Oh, yes; I don’t doubt it. How did you come to propos
e to her, though?”
He reddened a little. “Well, it was almost accidental,” he said, sheepishly. “I called there one evening, and her mother had a headache and went up to bed. And when we two were left alone, Sissie talked a great deal about her future and how hard her life was. And after a while she broke down and began to cry. And then—”
I cut him short with a wave of my hand. “You need say no more,” I put in, with a sympathetic face. “We have all been there.”
We paused a moment, while I puffed smoke at the photograph again. “Well,” I said at last, “her face looks to me really simple and nice. It is a good face. Do you see her often?”
“Oh, no; she’s on tour.”
“In the provinces?”
“M’yes; just at present, at Scarborough.”
“But she writes to you?”
“Every day.”
“Would you think it an unpardonable impertinence if I made bold to ask whether it would be possible for you to show me a specimen of her letters?”
He unlocked a drawer and took out three or four. Then he read one through, carefully. “I don’t think,” he said, in a deliberative voice, “it would be a serious breach of confidence in me to let you look through this one. There’s really nothing in it, you know — just the ordinary average every-day love-letter.”
I glanced through the little note. He was right. The conventional hearts and darts epistle. It sounded nice enough: “Longing to see you again; so lonely in this place; your dear sweet letter; looking forward to the time; your ever-devoted Sissie.”
“That seems straight,” I answered. “However, I am not quite sure. Will you allow me to take it away, with the photograph? I know I am asking much. I want to show it to a lady in whose tact and discrimination I have the greatest confidence.”
“What, Daphne?”
I smiled. “No, not Daphne,” I answered. “Our friend, Miss Wade. She has extraordinary insight.”
“I could trust anything to Miss Wade. She is true as steel.”
“You are right,” I answered. “That shows that you, too, are a judge of character.”
He hesitated. “I feel a brute,” he cried, “to go on writing every day to Sissie Montague — and yet calling every day to see Miss Tepping. But still — I do it.”
I grasped his hand. “My dear fellow,” I said, “nearly ninety per cent. of men, after all — are human!”
I took both letter and photograph back with me to Nathaniel’s. When I had gone my rounds that night, I carried them into Hilda Wade’s room and told her the story. Her face grew grave. “We must be just,” she said at last. “Daphne is deeply in love with him; but even for Daphne’s sake, we must not take anything for granted against the other lady.”
I produced the photograph. “What do you make of that?” I asked. “I think it an honest face, myself, I may tell you.”
She scrutinised it long and closely with a magnifier. Then she put her head on one side and mused very deliberately. “Madeline Shaw gave me her photograph the other day, and said to me, as she gave it, ‘I do so like these modern portraits; they show one WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.’”
“You mean they are so much touched up!”
“Exactly. That, as it stands, is a sweet, innocent face — an honest girl’s face — almost babyish in its transparency but... the innocence has all been put into it by the photographer.”
“You think so?”
“I know it. Look here at those lines just visible on the cheek. They disappear, nowhere, at impossible angles. AND the corners of that mouth. They couldn’t go so, with that nose and those puckers. The thing is not real. It has been atrociously edited. Part is nature’s; part, the photographer’s; part, even possibly paint and powder.”
“But the underlying face?”
“Is a minx’s.”
I handed her the letter. “This next?” I asked, fixing my eyes on her as she looked.
She read it through. For a minute or two she examined it. “The letter is right enough,” she answered, after a second reading, “though its guileless simplicity is, perhaps, under the circumstances, just a leetle overdone; but the handwriting — the handwriting is duplicity itself: a cunning, serpentine hand, no openness or honesty in it. Depend upon it, that girl is playing a double game.”
“You believe, then, there is character in handwriting?”
“Undoubtedly; when we know the character, we can see it in the writing. The difficulty is, to see it and read it BEFORE we know it; and I have practised a little at that. There is character in all we do, of course — our walk, our cough, the very wave of our hands; the only secret is, not all of us have always skill to see it. Here, however, I feel pretty sure. The curls of the g’s and the tails of the y’s — how full they are of wile, of low, underhand trickery!”
I looked at them as she pointed. “That is true!” I exclaimed. “I see it when you show it. Lines meant for effect. No straightness or directness in them!”
Hilda reflected a moment. “Poor Daphne!” she murmured. “I would do anything to help her.... I’ll tell what might be a good plan.” Her face brightened. “My holiday comes next week. I’ll run down to Scarborough — it’s as nice a place for a holiday as any — and I’ll observe this young lady. It can do no harm — and good may come of it.”
“How kind of you!” I cried. “But you are always all kindness.”
Hilda went to Scarborough, and came back again for a week before going on to Bruges, where she proposed to spend the greater part of her holidays. She stopped a night or two in town to report progress, and, finding another nurse ill, promised to fill her place till a substitute was forthcoming.
“Well, Dr. Cumberledge,” she said, when she saw me alone, “I was right! I have found out a fact or two about Daphne’s rival!”
“You have seen her?” I asked.
“Seen her? I have stopped for a week in the same house. A very nice lodging-house on the Spa front, too. The girl’s well enough off. The poverty plea fails. She goes about in good rooms and carries a mother with her.”
“That’s well,” I answered. “That looks all right.”
“Oh, yes, she’s quite presentable: has the manners of a lady whenever she chooses. But the chief point is this: she laid her letters every day on the table in the passage outside her door for post — laid them all in a row, so that when one claimed one’s own one couldn’t help seeing them.”
“Well, that was open and aboveboard,” I continued, beginning to fear we had hastily misjudged Miss Sissie Montague.
“Very open — too much so, in fact; for I was obliged to note the fact that she wrote two letters regularly every day of her life— ‘to my two mashes,’ she explained one afternoon to a young man who was with her as she laid them on the table. One of them was always addressed to Cecil Holsworthy, Esq.”
“And the other?”
“Wasn’t.”
“Did you note the name?” I asked, interested.
“Yes; here it is.” She handed me a slip of paper.
I read it: “Reginald Nettlecraft, Esq., 427, Staples Inn, London.”
“What, Reggie Nettlecraft!” I cried, amused. “Why, he was a very little boy at Charterhouse when I was a big one; he afterwards went to Oxford, and got sent down from Christ Church for the part he took in burning a Greek bust in Tom Quad — an antique Greek bust — after a bump supper.”
“Just the sort of man I should have expected,” Hilda answered, with a suppressed smile. “I have a sort of inkling that Miss Montague likes HIM best; he is nearer her type; but she thinks Cecil Holsworthy the better match. Has Mr. Nettlecraft money?”
“Not a penny, I should say. An allowance from his father, perhaps, who is a Lincolnshire parson; but otherwise, nothing.”
“Then, in my opinion, the young lady is playing for Mr. Holsworthy’s money; failing which, she will decline upon Mr. Nettlecraft’s heart.”
We talked it all over. In the end I said abruptly: “Nurse Wade, you
have seen Miss Montague, or whatever she calls herself. I have not. I won’t condemn her unheard. I have half a mind to run down one day next week to Scarborough and have a look at her.”
“Do. That will suffice. You can judge then for yourself whether or not I am mistaken.”
I went; and what is more, I heard Miss Sissie sing at her hall — a pretty domestic song, most childish and charming. She impressed me not unfavourably, in spite of what Hilda said. Her peach-blossom cheek might have been art, but looked like nature. She had an open face, a baby smile and there was a frank girlishness about her dress and manner that took my fancy. “After all,” I thought to myself, “even Hilda Wade is fallible.”
So that evening, when her “turn” was over, I made up my mind to go round and call upon her. I had told Cecil Holsworthy my intentions beforehand, and it rather shocked him. He was too much of a gentleman to wish to spy upon the girl he had promised to marry. However, in my case, there need be no such scruples. I found the house and asked for Miss Montague. As I mounted the stairs to the drawing-room floor, I heard a sound of voices — the murmur of laughter; idiotic guffaws, suppressed giggles, the masculine and feminine varieties of tomfoolery.
“YOU’D make a splendid woman of business, YOU would!” a young man was saying. I gathered from his drawl that he belonged to that sub-species of the human race which is known as the Chappie.
“Wouldn’t I just?” a girl’s voice answered, tittering. I recognised it as Sissie’s. “You ought to see me at it! Why, my brother set up a place once for mending bicycles; and I used to stand about at the door, as if I had just returned from a ride; and when fellows came in, with a nut loose or something, I’d begin talking with them while Bertie tightened it. Then, when THEY weren’t looking, I’d dab the business end of a darning-needle, so, just plump into their tires; and of course, as soon as they went off, they were back again in a minute to get a puncture mended! I call THAT business.”
A roar of laughter greeted the recital of this brilliant incident in a commercial career. As it subsided, I entered. There were two men in the room, besides Miss Montague and her mother, and a second young lady.
