MRS

MRS. KEITH’S CRIME

CHAPTER I

IT cannot be true; it must be fancy. The child is growing, has grown too fast, is delicate, and he did not know what to say, and yet he looked so grave when he heard that my mother and sister had both long ago died of consumption. ‘It often skips a generation, and then shows itself again,’ he said, and he seemed sorry for us when he said good-bye.

If anything happened to Molly, the little one who came six months after her father died; Molly, with the strange longing that half frightens me written in her eyes, a longing that perhaps only years hence I shall learn to understand; —to Molly, who is more than half, I say, for there is Jack; and a bonnie boy is Jack, going on for eight years old. He has sturdy legs, and wide-open blue eyes, and a crop of golden hair. But my heart has never ached for him as it has for Molly, and love has no bands that bind so fast and close as those that fear and sorrow weave. If Molly dies— But I dare not think of it, for I can face nothing, can go on no longer, if that is to be. After all, we have only a certain amount of courage in us, and mine was all used up in past days; there is none left for this.

How cruel it seems. I sit down and try to think over the years since Molly’s father died. They are only a few, after all and yet how long a time they seem. You know how it all came about, how happy we were, how in an hour the whole world changed. It is maddening to remember it—the summer morning and the sunshine; and the laughter of the children on the beach; and his last words, ‘I shall not be long, my darling. Go home and wait for me. You are tired.’ I got up and went home, turning, as I stood on the steps, to take another look at the sea—the sea that was killing him even while I looked, and laughed, and felt so happy; and then I waited for him just as he had told me. They carried him back. I can hear the slow tramp, tramp of their feet now, and see the water dropping from his hair and the cloth with which they had covered him. There he lay, he who but an hour before had been a strong man, dead—dead for evermore....

There was no money when Arthur died. His pictures were only just beginning to sell. We had made this little home in St. John’s Wood, and lived on hope and credit and the few commissions that came in, and on anything that turned up; a pleasant, happy-go-lucky life enough, but one in which there was no margin left for accident or sorrow. I wrote to Uncle Clement, the one relation we had in the world, or rather, the only one at all likely to help us. He was very good in a rather cold, hold-aloof manner. He and my father had never been very cordial brothers; the one was rich, and the other had had nothing but his pay, and many a deep gulf is dug with gold, especially between relations. But he was very good to the children and me, and let us stay in this little house, and kept us going to a certain extent.

When I got better I wanted to do something for myself, and, after much consideration, decided to give lessons in painting; but it was very difficult to get pupils, and at last I tried doing portraits of children, and met with a great deal of success. I don’t do them very well, perhaps, but the mothers say that I have a knack of catching a likeness, and of catching it just when a child is looking its prettiest; so they are always pleased, and gradually I have become almost a fashion, and, though my work is certainly not well paid for, I can get as many portraits to do as I please.

Uncle Clement died three years since, and left me a hundred a year; it is to go to Jack at my death. Poor little Molly was ignored altogether, for Uncle Clement did not like girls; h thought them mere frivolities, that sensible women only bore sons, and to daughters he would give no encouragement.

On the whole we have managed pretty well, I think bitterly, as I look round the little drawing-room, with the palms, and the Japanese fans, and the little bits of china, and the darling gold-and-chocolate covers, that give the room an individuality of its own. I have been so proud of our little home and of all the folk, working-folk mostly, artists like myself, who came to see me. It have been something to feel that they recognised me and numbered me among themselves, as if they knew all the longings that were in my work, all the hard-trying and goodness of its execution. Sometimes I have been really successful, and have seen my name in the catalogue of the minor exhibitions. Once it was in the Grosvenor list, and it made me so happy, I felt as if I was swimming through the crowd at the private view, and all the world was making way for me, conscious of my triumph and sharing it. It seems so foolish now, but I have even tried to learn the names of safe investments for small sums, feeling that the time would come soon when a little could be put by for Jack’s education; and now suddenly all this dreaming has vanished.

Molly has been looking ill for a long time. We went for a fortnight to Broadstairs and spent the days together, we three never separating, but staying all day upon the beach, or dawdling along the little pier, or wandering through the fields to Ramsgate, and drinking milk, and driving back in an extravagant fly. But still she did not get better. She was only growing, I thought, and waited; but she did not get better. Then at last I took her to Dr. Finch. He is a great man; there is no disputing his opinion; and when he had examined Molly he looked grave enough, and said that the best thing of all would be to get her out of England for the winter. ‘It may be the saving of her,’ he said gently. It may! I looked up at him half dazed. I am half dazed still.

Mrs. Marshall was waiting to see me when we returned about her little godchild’s portrait. I told her what Dr. Finch had said, and told her so calmly that she looked at me curiously as she answered, ‘It is very sad for you.’ She said the words in an odd, polite voice, as if she wondered whether I cared. Perhaps, it bored her to be told about the child, for she is an odd, formal person with an even passionless voice and a strange unsympathetic manner. Once I caught myself wondering whether her husband had made love to her before he married her, and if he did now, and whether she ever did anything kind, save as a matter of principle. With her all things seem to have a foundation of principle or convictions, and love and pity and hate to have no power over her. Perhaps it is an excellent thing; principles and convictions give one cold comfort, but they are responsible for few crimes.

‘I am not sure that I can undertake the portrait,’ I told her. ‘There are some things to finish, and we are going abroad for the winter.’

‘You can arrange to leave your work and go?’ she asked in surprise. She knew me a little in old days when Arthur was here, and knew what a struggle we had, and how necessary Uncle Clement’s help had been afterwards. I half resented the question.

‘I must,’ I answered. ‘One does not consider whether one can arrange a thing that may save one’s child’s life.’

‘Going abroad is very expensive,’ she said. Her words were considerate, but her voice was still only polite; there was not the ghost of any sympathy in it. It was just as well, in the state of mind I was in.

‘It may be expensive,’ I answered; ‘but at the worst we’ll walk, and I’ll carry the babes on my back’

‘You’ll have to swim across the Channel,’ she said, with an odd, grim smile.

A flood of memories rushed into my heart at her words, and I checked a little cry that all but escaped my lips. In a moment I had seen Arthur going down to the sea, and had heard him tell me once again to wait for him. Perhaps the message he sent me the moment that he died is written in Molly’s eyes; for the first time it went through me like a flash that this was the strange meaning in them that I was for ever yearning to understand. Mrs. Marshall turned almost pale as she realised all that her words had made me remember.

‘I am very sorry,’ she said humbly; ‘it was very stupid of me. I am always saying the wrong things. How old is Molly?’ she asked, in an abrupt voice, as if anxious to do the best she could towards separating my thoughts form my memories.

‘She is nearly six; she is the baby,’ I answered.

She was silent for a moment, and then she said, more to herself than to me, ‘Yes, I understand; I dare say you will always call her the baby, even when she is grown up.’

And then she went away, and I have come in here to rest and to try and realise what it all means.

It is odd how different this room looks to-day; there is something cruel and mocking about it. There, on the easel, is the picture Clarence Grove gave me at Christmas. The foreground is coarsely painted, but I never noticed that before. I turn from it, and look at the palms standing in large pots on the floor of the little conservatory; the black-and-white pavement makes me shiver. The flowers about the room are fresh and bright; the chintz covers have a happy dainty air. There is something satisfying about the whole place, and yet Molly is upstairs, and the doctor says that if she goes abroad it may—only that it may, and not that it will—be the saving of her. It is odd how difficult it is to feel or realise all that is in the words, though Molly is just life to me. It seems as if I had changed into some other person, and, keeping my own set of memories, look on half curiously at the old self which had shut a door of some kind on me, so that I can no longer enter it. Or else something has failed, some of the wheels in me have ceased to go, as in a machine a little bit out of order. It seems impossible that in a month’s time we shall all be in another land, and the studio closed, and the commissions going elsewhere, and this pretty room will be all covered up, and the palms and the flowers will be dying, and the big picture taken down from the easel and turned with its face to the wall. I wonder what made Clarence Grove give that picture to me? for he is not rich and he has a wife and many children. It is called ‘The Forsaken Garden,’ after Swinburne’s poem, and there is a quotation under it—‘Bright with a summer to be.’ In fancy I have often wandered down the half-hidden pathways and among the brake and briar. It makes me shudder to think of the people who once made the garden trim and neat and full of sweet-smelling flowers; they are all sleeping in the churchyard—you can see their graves over the hill in the corner there—and the sea is breaking on the shingly beach below, and the sun is shining, and strangers are coming to make the garden trim again and to laugh through ‘the summer to be.’ I am never tired of wondering who these are that are coming.

I wonder how we shall get the money to take us abroad? This question is beginning to present itself. There are some commissions, but no time to execute them. There is very little money in the house. At Christmas there will be fifty pounds due, but rent and taxes to pay out of it. The money must be found; but how? We have nothing to sell, and no one of whom to borrow. It seems impossible to get it, and yet it must be got somehow. If it only saves her; if only some day I sit here again, knowing that she is upstairs, bright and strong and sturdy as Jack is, what trifles all the difficulties will seem looking back at them across the good thing that will have been accomplished. How would it do, I wonder, if we went to some warm spot in the south—we could just manage to get there, perhaps—and then I tried to earn some money by painting portraits? Long ago, in Switzerland—it was in the first years of our marriage—we were staying at a mountain place, shivering with cold, and calling the man who built the rooms without fireplaces an idiot, when one day a travelling artist turned up. Never dreaming that Arthur was of his own trade, he painted our portraits of four or five other people in the hotel, for ten francs each, and then packed up his canvas, rolled it round with black American cloth, and went on his way as blithe as a swallow journeying south. Why should not I do that kind of thing? It would be very gipsy-like and independent. Perhaps I might take clothes enough in my pocket to give a hand to each of the children, or carry them on my back as I had suggested to Mrs. Marshall; or at any rate I might put them, and our luggage too, into a wheelbarrow and push it on in front. Arthur and I often used to sit and speculate on various ways of living, wondering out of which most happiness could be got.

‘I should like a caravan,’ I remember saying to him once, ‘which brooms and brushes and baskets hanging outside, and a chimney-pot and smoke coming out of it; and inside there should be a little bed to sleep in, and a little stove to cook at, and two seats, and a few pots and pans, packed so as neither to rattle nor to break; and you should lead the horse and crack a whip now and then, and I would sell our wares as we went along, to the folk who lived in out-of-the-way cottages and seldom went to town. And for dinner we would buy some meat, and when we had cooked it we would eat it in our little house, looking out at the sweet country-side the while; and at night we would draw up under a tree, and sleep soundly till the birds called us in the morning. It would be a glorious life, with no bills and no best clothes, and few amenities.’

‘Pleasant enough,’ said Arthur, thoughtfully; ‘but I think it would be a better thing to be a bargee—to sit all day long at the end of a barge, smoking a short pipe and swearing at the boy on the towing-path.’

‘But where should I be?’

‘You should crouch down beside me, my darling,’ he answered. ‘You would like that?’

‘Oh, yes. I should hear so many wicked words; it would be delightful.’

‘The worst of it is,’ he went on, with a sigh, ‘that the spread of science and education together will, I fear, do away with the barge and the boy, perhaps even with the swearing.’

I think of this merry talk now sadly enough, sitting alone with the vagabond longings rising up with me. But I must go upstairs and see my little one. It is never possible to stay away from her long.

She is in the nursery, sitting quite still, with an open picture-book in her lap, watching Jack, who is on the rocking-horse, singing as he rocks to and fro, and sharpening a pencil at the same time; the rein is twisted round his left hand.

‘Molly doesn’t care a bit about anything, mother,’ he says, ‘so I am singing to her.’

So sweet a little voice has Jack; we always like to listen to him, and to look at his pretty round face while he sings.

‘I am tired, mammy,’ Molly says; and, getting up, she clings to me and put her head on my shoulder.

‘My poor little darling,’ I say, and she nestles down close in my arms. ‘Do you know, my children,’ I tell them suddenly, ‘that you are going into a strange country soon?’ My heart fails me listening eagerly, so I go on without flinching. ‘Into a strange country, where it will be beautifully sunny and warm all through the winter.’

‘Perhaps we shall be able to pick flowers?’ Molly said dreamily.

‘Will there be any robbers or wild beasts?’ Jack asks in the tone of one prepared to fight a legion.

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