irrff ml ■%jainih\^ EUM% ^AOSANcaa* ^UIBRARYQ^ SlllBRARY6k ^0FCALIF0% ^0FCALIF(% CO CO ^UONYSOV^ %JUMNM$ S? 8^ <2. * ^^ »% h ^lOSANCFlfj- -n o s = O u. -^UIBRARYG^ ^tUBRARYQ^ § 1 \c & £ gjOF-CAllFOR^ ^OFCAIIFOM^ DC ^Aavaan^ ^ahvmhh^ CO £ =3 «$MIBRARY«f ^OKALIFORto y 0Aavaair# AWtUNIVER% ^ %HHVD-J0^ = o ^lOSANCfl^> ■^/hhainihv^ ^UIBRARYQ^ ^/OJITVDJO^ ^OKAllFOfy* ^OFCAUFO^ n> PAULA A Sketch from Life By Victoria Cross Author of " The Woman who Didn't tj. >j London Walter Scott Ltd Paternoster Square PR Goo5 t f&£ P "... cro<£o§ cror//uS or, TrXrjv a Set cr eiYcu crcxftov. A. . . . Xurcro/xevda a, rfiiKi'iKapiev. -i. o^ e/iauea ~>]p-as, ote eXP y ] l \ 0VK J/^ere. A. iyvwKa/iev ravr ' dXX eVe^epxei Xiav. A. kcu yap 7r/)os v/j-wv, deos yeyws, r/3pi(o/x?;j/." " . . . So wise ! so wise ! except in those things in which you should be wise. A. . . . Have pity ! I have erred. A. Too late you admit it; but when it was necessary then you did not know it. A. I have learned it : but your punishment is excessive. A. Yes : for I am a Deity, and you outraged me." PAULA i [ T was between twelve and one : the night was dark and wet, with some snow falling occasion- ally through the blackness. The rain-swept streets were deserted, cleared by the icy gusts of wind that came whirling down them and making the light flicker till it was blue in the lamp-posts. The Strand was almost quiet, the theatres closed. The rush of cabs, the hurry and confusion, the warfare of dripping umbrellas above the strug- gling crowd, the crush of wet, wind-blown, angry figures dispersing in different directions, all the noise and bustle attending the disgorgement of the different theatres was over, and the Strand relapsed into gloomy, sullen blackness and quietude. All who had any shelter of any sort, any place bearing the remotest resemblance to home, sought it hastily that night. Anywhere to be out of the 8 PAULA teeth of that gusty wind and the grip of the falling temperature ! * In one of the small, poor, black-looking houses of Lisle Street, Leicester Square, in the window over the door — that is to say, the drawing-room window — glowed a red blind. The light behind it must have been strong and the crimson blind new, for it made a warm patch of colour, a striking point in the damp, dismal, narrow street. It looked warm and cheery, that little red square, and it seemed to wink knowingly at you as you turned up Leicester Street towards it, or blink sleepily if you passed straight on along Coventry Street, giving it only a sidew r ay glance. Behind the red blind was a small square room with a low and rather grimy ceiling : the air was thick with tobacco smoke, and heavy with the scent of gin and water and coffee ; three gas-burners turned fully on and blazing merrily without globes and a good fire made the atmosphere oppressively warm. A short shabby horse-hair couch dragged up to the -fireplace accommodated two people. A man in an old fur-lined coat, used apparently as an im- provised dressing-gown, sat in the corner of it, his elbow resting on the head, and the cigarette he was absently regarding held in two fingers; a girl was seated at the end with her back half turned to him, and her feet on the fender. Another man sat on the table swinging his legs before the fire, and stirring the contents of his tumbler with a tin PAULA 9 dagger. Two girls were on the other side of the hearth making the same tumble-down chair do for them both, and taking alternate sips from the same glass. Their glaring yellow hair, obviously dyed, jarred painfully with their jet black eyebrows and " hair-pinned " eyes. "Charlie, how can you? I know I shall detest him ! " exclaimed the girl on the end of the sofa in answer to the remark of the man beside her. Her voice was singularly distinct and clear, and of beautiful timbre; it seemed capable of an infinity of subtle inflections. She turned a little more round as she spoke, with a half grimace at him : a red fez cap was on her head, and her mass of light undyed hair, caught together by a single hair-pin, fell from beneath it to the sofa where she was sitting. " A man," she continued, knocking off the ash of her cigarette against the mantelpiece, and then holding it idly between her white, smooth, and strangely flexible fingers, " who does nothing but lounge about the clubs, and drink and smoke ! Bah ! " There was such aversion in her tones that it produced a chorus of laughter : the young man on the sofa only murmured, " I never said he drank. Halham drinks very little, and I didn't know smoking was considered a crime in this establishment ! Wait till you see him !" he added, and watched his cigarette smoke absently. io PAULA " I don't want to see him," remarked the girl lightly, going on smoking. Then leaning back again towards the young fellow in the corner, and showing a lovely piece of white neck where the rather ragged collar of her dress fell open, " Where did you see this wonder first, Charlie?" " I met him at the Art Club," he answered slowly, " and we had something to drink " "Water?" interjected Paula, with a side glance over her shoulder. " No," he said as the others laughed ; " I had brandy and soda, and he had hock and seltzer, I believe." Paula laughed contemptuously, and took a fresh cigarette. "And what did you talk about?" she asked — " himself? and the women who have loved him and he has never cared about ? " "Oh no; art and literature, and music, and all sorts of things — he's an awfully clever fellow." "Art and literature! Can he paint a picture or write a book ? " " No, but " returned Charlie. " He criticises people who can," put in Paula ; "I see." " We went on to his rooms then," continued Charlie quietly, as if recalling some pleasant memory, " in St. James' Street. Such jolly rooms, and he has a glorious piano — a grand, an Erard — PAULA ii and he plays," he stopped and watched the smoke again. "Nice rooms, are they?" queried the man on the table. "What's the rent, I wonder? " " What sort of furniture has he got, eh, Charlie ? " asked the woman across the rug. " Has he got them long mirrors, and thick carpets, and hormolu cabinets? " "What did he play? " demanded Paula. " I don't know what rent he pays — he didn't inform me," returned Charlie, dryly; "and I didn't notice the furniture. 1 should think he could play anything. He is a wonderful reader at sight. Chopin and Wagner seem to be his favourites. He played a polonaise of Chopin beautifully." There was silence. Then Paula said, " Well, what is he like, Charlie ? go on with his catalogue of perfections." " I don't know how to describe him," returned Charlie. " He is considered very handsome ; blue eyes, and black hair, and a white complexion." " Very effeminate," remarked Paula, judicially. " But how has he got his money, that's what I should like to know?" said the man on the table, swinging his legs impatiently. " Well, I don't know very clearly,"' returned Charlie, vaguely. " His father was out in Australia a long time, director of a big banking concern there, I believe ; then he died, leaving his business and tons of money to his son, who has been 12 PAULA principally engaged seemingly in spending the latter." Paula made no remark — she was staring into the fire, its red glow fell upon her face, and showed a contemptuous smile cross it as she heard. " I do believe as I've seen him, Charlie," said one of the women with the discordant yellow hair, leaning forward and speaking excitedly in her hoarse voice, that contrasted so strangely with Paula's clear penetrating musical tones. " I was passin' Hatchard's, them booksellin' people I mean, and he came out. ' Lor ! ' I thinks, ' you are a good-lookin' man ; ' that waxy skin just as you say, and eyes like dark cornflowers with long eyebrows over them, just as if they'd been drawn with a streak of brown paint He looked about twenty-five." " Halham is twenty-nine," returned Charlie. " That was the man, I daresay ; he is constantly in Hatchard's." " I don't think I shall like him," murmured Paula, absorbed in puffing her cigarette, and following its rising blue clouds with half-closed eyes. "You? Very likely not. You don't care for anybody, I believe, except some of your own creations on paper," Charlie answered, laughing. "You are just a sort of mechanical arrangement of bones, etc., with a lamp swinging up inside you for intellect, and a solid piece of agate where your PAULA 13 heart should be. You don't count as ordinary flesh and blood." In the middle of their laughter the gas began to go down. Both the noisy flaring gas jets dwindled suddenly to blue points and went out, leaving them in darkness except for the dull glow of the fire and the red spots of their cigarette ends. The man heaved himself off the table with a regretful sigh. Charlie turned out of his sofa corner and felt in his pocket for lucifers. " Nonsense it is, turning off the gas ! " exclaimed Paula, as she groped along the mantelpiece. " Well, we must be going ; come on, Liz," and the two women got out of the big arm-chair. " Here are the matches," said Paula ; " but we've no candle, have we, Charlie ? " She struck a match as she spoke. In the candlesticks on the mantelpiece there was some charred paper which had once surrounded the candle, but nothing of the latter remained. " I must light you downstairs with these," said Paula, laughing, throwing the first match on the floor and lighting another. "You'll have the place on fire, if you're not careful," muttered Charlie, putting his foot on it. " Come and be extinguisher, then," laughed Paula to her brother, crossing the door and strik- ing a bunch of matches altogether and holding them above her head. They sent a bright yellow flame flickering down the stairs, and showed the figures moving down them. 14 PAULA " Good-night," she said. Several of the faces were turned back to her. Her own looked singularly youthful, gay, and un- troubled, as the match light struck on it beneath the red fez and the curling light hair. " Good-night," they answered. She followed them out to the head of the stairs as they disappeared down them. " Entertain you better when I have my own flat," she called laughingly over the stairs. " That the fellow I saw you with on Sunday is going to set you up in," returned one of the men. "All right; tell him to look sharp." Paula nodded. They had opened the street door ; the matches burned down and hurt her fingers. She flung them on the ground, and went back to the sitting-room. " And to think I am a parson's daughter," she murmured amusedly to herself in the dark. " Well, I suppose we may as well go to bed," she said to her brother, " as there are no candles, and I've pretty well used up the matches." Charlie was already raking out the ashes of the grate. " You are economical," she said derisively. " Naturally ; I have to do the economy for us both," he answered, turning round. " Good-night, dear." He kissed her, and she kissed him in return, and went upstairs to her own little room at the back of the house and under the roof. PAULA 15 As she entered she saw she had a more regal light to undress by than candles, matches, or the lodging-house gas itself. The room was flooded with moonlight. The blind was fully up, and the light poured through the panes, reproducing the window upon the floor. Great squares of white light lay on the boards, traversed by a huge black cross of shadow from the window-bars. Paula stood looking up at the sky, in delight at its white glory, and the black cross fell upon her face and on to her bosom as she stood there. Then she turned with a yawn, slipped off all her clothes together, and got into bed, leaving the blind up. In a few moments she was asleep : wrapped in a deep, soundless, dreamless sleep. As the night wore on, slowly the light crept round, and at last it blazed all across the face, neck, and bosom of the sleeper, the white patch spread till it covered all but the little feet, and these remained in thick blackness. The moonlight rested on her. It was palely divine ; she was deliciously human. It lay on her, and touched the mist of yellow hair upon the pillow, the warm red lips, the solid whiteness of the full throat, the plentiful white arm thrown above her head, the long form that lay so easily and peacefully beneath the thin coverlet : it tried to render all these ideal and ethereal, but it seemed a thing apart. Paula lay under the moonlight, warm flesh and blood pulsating under its ghostly touches, deliciously womanly, delightfully human : 16 PAULA a thing made for sorrow and suffering, pain and sin and death. Predestined to all of these, and con- scious it was so predestined, and yet looking out upon life joyously, innocently. None of them had approached her at present. Her life had been as clear as the moonlight lying across her face; it might be taken to symbolise her past path through life, as the black shadows enveloping her feet might stand for the thick mud of sorrows and passions in the track of her future. And on her brow and breast lay the cross, the great cross she would have to bear that is common to all flesh — the cross of human desires. The daughter of a parson, she had said ; and it was true. For twenty years Paula had lived a life of study and cloister-like quiet in a Suffolk rectory. Her father had taught both her and her brother, and brought them both up in an impracticable way: to think, to feel, to reason, to understand, which are all merely branches of the great art to suffer, to write and read in several languages, to love classics, art, and culture, and to be quite ignorant of what common-sense people call "anything useful." Put this education, which is so fatal to those same common-sense people, is exactly that most calculated to develop any of those gifts granted and held by Divine favour only. Paula's sensitive brain, excited by classical literature, trained and strengthened by Greek studies, and allowed long PAULA i; intervals in which to lie fallow, while she simply lay and dreamed and thought in Suffolk fields, or wandered through Suffolk lanes, turned slowly and steadily to creative work. The Rector would read his sermons to Paula — sermons far too ornate for the ignorant poor to gain much benefit from, and as full of classical quotations and allusions as scriptural texts ; and Paula would read little scenes from dramas and plays of her own writing in return, and each would appreciate the other — for the daughter's brain was but a strengthened, concentrated replica of her father's. And when the Rector died, leaving his two children absolutely unprovided for as it seemed, they each had really a great legacy from him — minds filled with the slow, rich, easy culture of years of thought and reflection and study, and the secluded companionship of a cultivated mind. Neither had been to school ; both had missed that disadvantage, and the degrading horror of examinations and cramming. At the Rectory there had been no " Society," and their life had mixed little with that of their fellow-creatures. Paula at twenty knew nothing of all those small jealousies and petty rivalries, flirtations, intrigues, little miseries, and trifling pleasures and triumphs, in which most girls are at that age so well versed. She had lived apart from her fellows, and her life had been broad and large and tranquil ; calm and 2 i8 PAULA grave, filled with study, and brightened with the warm affection of the two men who loved her. Fear, malice, vanity, envy, jealousy, and hate were all unknown emotions to her. Her mind had developed, buoyant, free, untrammelled, determined to live its own life and hold its own views, inde- pendent of others, interfering with none and suffering no interference. Generous, sympathetic and sensitive, filled with ardent impulses and a superabundance of vitality, with no actual experi- ence, and a brain excited by stores of theoretical knowledge, she stood on the edge of the world's battle-ground, admirably equipped to suffer — a most tempting prey for the prowling passions of life. " You must go out as a governess," had said Paula's maiden aunt on the Rector's death. "Really?" had laughed Paula; and six months later had seen her and her brother installed in Lisle Street. She was earning eighteen shillings a week at one of the big theatres, he about thirty shillings by giving lessons in music and an occa- sional orchestral engagement. Eighteen shillings a week is very little, and Paula longed to get on in her profession. But to get on seemed even more difficult than to make the start. Two years were now completed and she had not risen the least little bit Twenty-two years of age now, and still only a supernumerary, to stand on the boards towards the back of the scene, swing a basket PAULA 19 backwards and forwards, and join in a chorus about " Happy Springtide." Paula rebelled against her position every day of her life, but, in spite of outward discouragement, there rose continually within her, like the sap in the plant, a happy confident courage. She felt a certainty, a positive prescience of future greatness some day, just as Jeanne d'Arc foresaw the siege of Orleans while still tending her sheep on the hillside. She had written a complete play since she had been in London, and on looking at the finished work she saw that it was good. To get this play produced and herself given the principal part in it, was the desire that haunted her night and day ; but to attain this, in fact all between the desire itself and the fulfilment of it remained a blank. It seemed hugely possible and infinitely impossible at the same time. Whilst reading it in her own room, stung by a sense of its merits, it seemed as if such a work could not and would not in the nature of things remain always dead to the world. Out in the streets, on her way to the theatre, it seemed hopeless to suppose any one would accept the pro- duction of an inexperienced little super, who walked to the stage -door, and wore a black stuff dress. She had found an opportunity to beg the manager of the theatre where she was employed to look over it. He had promised to do so, and when he received it, kept it for three months. At the 20 PAULA end of that time, in answer to an urgent appeal from her, it had been returned. Paula opened the parcel and turned to the middle of the play. The two principal pages in it, containing the key to the whole, remained sewn together as she had sent them. After this check, Paula being merely an artist, and not having one respectable business instinct in her, let the play lie unused on a shelf, while she wondered vaguely if there was any way in which you could compel a manager to read a play. The days slipped by, and Paula lived on from one to the other, filled with a vague, restless dis- satisfaction whenever a chance word happened to stir those passions of vanity, ambition, and the appetite for life which lay deep down in her nature under her superficial indolence, like cobras curled under a blanket. After a time, the moon had travelled beyond the edge of her narrow little window ; the last beam of light retreated reluctantly, as if loath to leave the warm, lovely thing it had illumined, and the unconscious sleeper lay there swathed now from head to foot in a blackness like the black- ness of death. II It was between three and four the following afternoon, and a thick yellow curtain of fog was dropping heavily over Leicester Square and shut- ting out the light from the dingy houses in Lisle Street. A clock had just chimed the half-hour, when Charlie Heywood, with his collar turned up and his hands deep in his pockets, came briskly round the corner of Leicester Street, walked up to his door, let himself in, and rushed up the dark uneven stairs. " He's coming round ! " he said breathlessly, bursting into the little sitting-room, where Paula was lying on the couch at her ease, with her knees drawn up, reading a yellow-backed French novel by the light of the huge fire that flamed up the chimney and illumined the whole room. She was smoking, as these were her luxurious days when she was in an engagement, and as she earned so she spent. Paula would never save. "Saving," she would say, "makes all your life alike. When you have no money, you are hard- 21 22 PAULA up because you have none ; and when you have money, you are hard-up because you are saving," and she eschewed it as a bad habit. She looked round as Charlie entered. Her hair was down as last night, and the fez cap sat on her light curls ; a warm glow was on her pale skin ; she looked the personification of ease and comfort. " Who's coming ? " she asked in some surnrise. " Why, Vincent. I met him just now in Picca- dilly — he was going to his place. He asked me if you were in, and I said ' yes,' and he said he would come round to see you in about half-an-hour." "Very good of him, I'm sure," returned Paula with a yawn, closing the book. " All the same, I wish he hadn't. Why didn't you say I was engaged, or something?" "Why? You don't mind meeting him, surely?" " No," answered Paula slowly; "only it's rather a nuisance." This last was a favourite phrase of hers. Natur- ally idle and lazy, it was only when stung by her ambition or desires, both terribly keen and strong when aroused, that she cared to exert herself at all. All the ordinary small concerns of life, for the majority of people so full of interest, were to Paula "rather a nuisance." "Well, I should have thought that when we have to mix with so many vile common people, it would have been a relief to know some one in PAULA 2 j our own rank," replied Charlie, taking off his overcoat and hat. " Yes," answered Paula from her sofa ; " only probably he won't consider us his equals, and that's uncomfortable." " He knows a crood deal about us, because I told him," he returned, going over to one of the small cupboards by the fireplace. " And as to what we are doing now, and our having no money, he won't think anything of that — he is not the sort of fellow." Charlie had extracted a small metal teapot from the cupboard, and some cups, and was setting them on the table. He paused to take the matches from his pocket and light up the gas. When he had done so, he stood looking at the girl on the sofa. "Oughtn't you to do up your hair?" he said doubtfully. Paula's eyes opened wide, and she raised her eyebrows. " I ? No, I shan't bother ! He must take me as I am. I don't care a straw what he thinks ; besides," she added quickly, seeing her brother looked hurt, " he'll probably like this better. At the Duchess of So-and-so's, where he'll dine to-night, all the hairs will be done up. I at any rate shall make a change." Charlie laughed as he glanced over her. Perhaps she was right ; certainly she looked artistic and picturesque as she was, with her tiny feet in their 24 PAULA turncd-up Persian slippers, the straight simple skirt that showed every line of the wonderful figure, the short Zouave jacket, and the fez on her curling hair. He put the kettle on, and continued arranging the table. When that was done he turned his attention to the room in general, putting some books straight on a shelf in the wall, folding up loose newspapers, and altering the positions of the chairs. Paula watched him with her hands behind her head and derision in her eyes. "What is the use of tidying the room?" she asked. " Why not let him see it just as it usually is? One day he is sure to come unexpectedly, and then he'll get a shock." " No pretence " was Paula's motto in everything. " It gives you a great deal of trouble and only gets you despised," she thought, and she never practised it in anything. She was clever, gifted, and, like most clever people, supremely contemptuous of the opinions of others ; yet in spite of, perhaps because of, this she was popular. Charlie continued arranging the room to his satisfaction in silence. By the time he had finished the kettle boiled, and he lifted it to one side of the grate. " I'll go and wash my hands now," he said. " We must wait for tea till he comes." " Must we? " returned Paula. " I hope he won't be long then." Charlie went out of the room, and Paula opened PAULA 25 her book again and settled herself lower in the couch. It was only a few minutes later that a knock came at the door in the street below, and after an interval the sound of a light elastic step upon the stairs, a pause outside, and then a knock. " Come in," said Paula, and the subject of the previous night's conversation entered. A tall, smartly-cut figure buttoned into a slim, fashionable frock-coat, a rather long neck encircled by its high white collar, and a pale oval face above with a charming smile on it, were the things that struck her as she rose from the sofa and advanced to meet him. The most distinctive thing about Halham's general appearance was the air he had of belonging to the leisured, well-bred, moneyed class. Meeting him haphazard anywhere, in any dress, you would still think he belonged to the rank of idle, well-turned-out men, who lounge from one of their fashionable clubs to their rooms for exercise, and never walk farther than the length of Bond Street. He took her little soft hand in his, and said so gently and with such a soft voice, that it sounded almost affectionate, " I feel I know you already. I've seen you so many times, I should recognise you directly anywhere." " Would you ?" said Paula, raising her eyes to his face. They were very sweet eyes, and just now full of a soft admiration. "But mine's such a little part." 26 PAULA They walked slowly over to the hearth, the fire- light glinting on his half-patent boots, the Parma violets in his button-hole, and the gloss of his delicate shirt-cuff. " Will you have this chair?" she said, indicating the old leather one, and feeling sorry its springs would show in such lumps. He did not seem to notice it, and sat down. She took the end of the sofa herself, thinking how graceful his figure looked in the chair and how charming his face was. It was pale and closely shaven, with level, tranquil eyebrows. The dark blue eyes beneath had a peculiar calmness, and the whole expression of the face was one of gay, untroubled serenity. It was a striking, at- tractive countenance, and Paula's eyes drew a keen pleasure from it. All her preconceived antipathy melted away. She did instant justice to his singular good looks. All her artistic instincts seemed suddenly to quicken and have fresh life as she looked at him. And these were at present the only ones she was conscious of. A handsome face was to her as a fine painting, a beautiful statue, a line of poetry, or a strain of music, and she looked on a man's with the same cold admira- tion as she would have looked upon a woman's. In these moments, as Vincent drew his chair a little closer to hers and smilingly made commonplace remarks, no vague prescience, no prophetic shadow fell across the calm surface of Paula's brain. PAULA 27 There is a favourite tradition that when the human being stands before a crisis in his fate, some warning sense, some foreshadowing of it fills his mind. It may be so sometimes, generally it is the reverse. He faces all sorts of strange situa- tions, is thrown against striking personalities, and is filled with curious wonder and presentiments concerning their effect on his future ; they pass, leaving him untouched, and they and his warning voice are forgotten together. Then, in a careless calm, some little trivial incident drifts up to him on the sea of circumstance — he thinks and feels nothing about it, no sense of danger even faintly approaches him, and then suddenly he finds his life's tragedy upon him, it is all played out and over, past and gone by. It has happened. All that he expected, anticipated, thought possible, on other occasions, has crashed in upon him when he expected nothing, anticipated nothing, and thought nothing possible. If he survives the tragedy, it leaves him with his faith in omens sadly shattered. Paula, now side by side with the incarnate presentiment of all her future pleasure and misery, hardly a yard of space between them, let her eyes rest carelessly upon him and recog- nised nothing except that it was a graceful, pleasing presence. " I believe you smoke ? " she said interrogatively, with a half motion to offer him her cigarette case. It was a very pretty one, chased silver, and with 23 PAULA her name in looped letters engraved across it. It had the air of a gift, as had the gold bracelet on the white wrist that stretched up for it to the mantelpiece. " I do, although I find my nerves sufficiently bad without it," he answered, smiling. " I'll have a cigarette with you, if you like." "I'd better not lead you into temptation, per- haps," returned Paula, laughing. Vincent looked at the dazzling white teeth, the soft face with its blue eyes and buff-coloured hair beside him. " I hope you won't," he said, laughing too. " I am afraid I should follow rather easily." At that minute Charlie came into the room. " What are you two laughing at?" he said, in rather a surprised tone. " I heard you in my room upstairs." "We were on a very serious topic," remarked Paula. " Mr. Halham was lamenting the entire lack of moral strength in his character." " Halham ? " replied Charlie, coming over to the hearth and raising his eyebrows. " Why, you have immense strength, immense force of will, immense influence over others ! " " Dear me ! " murmured Vincent, leaning back in his chair and looking up at Charlie's enthusiastic face with a smile. " I didn't know I was so im- mense altogether." Paula watched him with interested eyes. His PAULA 29 face had a singularly sweet expression, and it was this that charmed her more than the regularity of the features. There was not a single conceited, sensual, nor cynical line in the whole countenance. " Yes, your influence over others makes you quite dangerous," continued Charlie jestingly, as he began making the tea. " You are the sort of person one would break all the ten command- ments for, if it were necessary." "Really?" laughed Vincent; "how very inter- esting ! I should be sorry to smash up the whole ten, though I think there are a few too many." " Too many ? " repeated Paula, raising her eye- brows and looking at him with reflected laughter in her eyes. " Why, I wish there were twenty ! Commandments were given us for the fun of breaking them ! " Vincent looked curiously at the soft youth of her face and the gay, passionate eyes. " Oh ! Well, I had not studied them from that point. Is that your view, Charlie?" he said, taking the cup of tea offered him and stirring it reflectively. " No," returned Charlie, with compressed lips ; " I think they make dangerous and uninteresting toys." " I think that has been rather mine hitherto, but I am sure your sister could convert me." " Oh, I haven't the spirit of a reformer in the least," asserted Paula, still jesting. " My creed 30 PAULA is, ' Do and say anything you please, only let your neighbour alone.' " " The only disadvantage of that plan," remarked Charlie, " is that it gives your neighbour a lot of spare time, which he generously uses up in inter- fering with you. I found this parcel downstairs, Paula, addressed to you," he added, handing her behind Vincent's head a square parcel in tissue. " Oh, yes ! " said Vincent, turning round, " I sent you in a box of sugared violets. I believe you like sweets." " How did you know that? " asked Paula, laugh- ing, as she took the box from her brother and drew off its tissue wrapping, disclosing a round Parisian bon-bon box of an exquisite violet tint, tied across with pale ribbons, and with a wreath of violets painted on the lid. " Oh, I divined the abstruse fact by some occult science," said Vincent, laughing, watching her with pleasure as she opened the lid and revealed the compartments of the box filled with the perfect natural flowers delicately crystallised and preserved in all their natural colour and beauty. " How lovely ! Thank you so much ! " she said, with a little pleased flush, looking at him over the open box, while the delicate perfume rose from it and filled the room. " Are they not a beautiful colour?" "Very," returned Vincent, smiling, and adding PAULA 31 mentally, "exactly like your eyes." "Have you ever tasted them ? " " Never." " Well, try now." " Will you have any ? " " No, thanks ; I prefer some of your more sub- stantial biscuits." Paula filled the little sugar-tongs sent in the box with the flowers, and ate them reflectively in silence. She was silent so long that Vincent and her brother both laughed, and asked her what she was thinking of. "Well, the extraordinary confusion of sense that they produce," she said; "they taste exactly as violets smell, but how can one sense be translated into another like that ? I don't see." " Oh, I think that is a fairly common thing," answered Vincent, "the interchange or confusion of two senses. Some of them are interchangeable, taste and smell noticeably so, and all are more or less. It very much enhances the pleasure of any sense when you can double it with another — focus, as it were, two senses on any particular point that is supposed to appeal only to one." Paula gazed at him with wide interested eyes. " But I don't understand at all what you mean practically," she said at last; "I can follow it in a way, but how does it act ? " " It is difficult to explain," said Vincent, quietly, with a slight flush, "but you have the proof of what 32 PAULA I say in the flowers you arc eating : you can only describe the taste of them by saying it is the scent of violets; but a scent has no taste — you cannot taste a scent except by the translation or the con- fusion of the two senses." " Are you familiar with what he means, Charlie?" asked Paula. " No, but I have a dim idea of it. I should think that there is not much in it, except for those people whose senses are peculiarly keen." " That's very crushing, Charlie," said Vincent, laughing, and holding out his cup to be refilled. " I never said there was ' much in it.' I started by saying it was a fairly common thing; and there is no doubt of the intense enjoyment of a double sense. Sight and touch will double with each other sometimes. For instance, I mean you can sometimes think you see the softness and smooth- ness of a thing, but you can't really see these — they are things that appeal only to the touch ; in point of fact, your sense of sight has doubled or confused itself with that of touch — you are practically feel- ing it as your eyes rest upon it, though you have no contact with it. You can back up four senses one behind the other sometimes in this way, in- tensifying your sight, say, with three others. Sound, again, translates itself into touch quite easily, witness Wagner's music, where some of the sounds appeal wholly to the sense of touch, rather than to the ear." PAULA 33 He was speaking to Charlie and slightly turned towards him, and Paula, listening, with her eyes resting on the thick waves of his black hair as he leaned his head on the chair just where the full stream of light from the gas jets fell on it, received suddenly a clue to his meaning. For the moment she felt the glossy softness of the hair under the sensitive nerve-centres of her finger- tips. A shiver of awakening sense seemed to pass through her. She closed the box of violets with a laugh. " I know more now than when I becan to eat," she said lightly. " That box has been quite like the apple of Eve. I feel just as she must have done with her newly-acquired knowledge." " Have a cigar, Vincent ? " said Charlie ; " let's try our doubled senses on that ! " "No," said Vincent, turning to Paula; "your sister promised me a cigarette." "Yes; try this — it's my own make," she said, offering him the case. " Really ? " asked Vincent, taking one. " How perfectly you've made it ! I couldn't believe it wasn't machine-made. So many gifts," he added softly, " and cigarette-making in addition. How I envy you ! " " I don't think one should ever be envied for one's gifts," returned Paula, gravely — " they arc a handicap on life." Vincent made no answer. Charlie gave him a 3 34 PAULA light and settled down to his own cigar in the chair opposite. " I should like to study physiology," she said after a minute; " all that you said about the senses interests me immensely." "Haven't you ever?" asked Vincent; "I think it is the most useful, the most important thing to know thoroughly. If we have been given nothing but our physical organism to rely upon, we ought to understand that, and all its laws and powers, perfectly. Don't you think so? " "Yes," returned Paula, mechanically. She had a curious feeling of not thinking for herself at that moment, but merely floating forward on his stream of opinion and judgment. " I know nothing of it." " You know so much of everything else," returned Vincent caressingly, " perhaps it doesn't matter in your case; but, as a general rule, ignorance of this one thing is the cause of endless mistakes in our own life, and endless wrong judgment of other people. Besides, unless you are a religionist, which I know you are not," he said, smiling, "and neither am I, it is the basis of everything. All the character, the gifts, all the vices and virtues and powers, are the toys of the blood and the brain." "Yes," said Paula softly again, without looking at him. "Well, isn't it best to know something of the material of the toys one is going to play with?" he PAULA 35 asked very gently, looking at the pretty fair head, from which she had taken the fez, and which was bent a little now as she gazed seriously into the fire. " See how a child is told that the penknife will cut him if he does not respect it, and the painted horse must not be sucked, as the paint is poisonous. It is just the same in the great game of life." " I say, Vincent," expostulated Charlie from his chair, " you'll make us think we are back at the Rectory." Vincent laughed. " I ought to be back at my rooms," he said, drawing out his watch, "so we must defer the remainder of the service ; but I do hope I shall see you again soon. We ought to see each other sometimes, we are living so close together." He got up. Paula handed him his cigarette case, which he had laid down beside her. He took it from her, his hand interlacing her soft warm fingers as he did so. " Good-bye," he said : enly that one word, but Paula flushed suddenly, with pleasure rather than confusion, under his eyes, and felt almost as if she had been kissed on the neck or cheek; the sound in itself was a caress, and translated itself, as he had said sound could, into a touch. She murmured her " Good-bye," and sat down again. " Charlie, I wish you wouldn't disturb yourself," Z6 PAULA Halham said as the former got up from his chair to accompany him to the door. When the two men had gone out of the room, Paula lay back on the couch — one arm round her box of sugared violets — staring up at the ceiling. Long after it was destined that, lying in this same attitude, this scene should return to her brain, and his jesting warning of the physiological side of life. Then she knew at last the truth of it; now the theory of the transmutation and doubling of sense interested her much more, and she lay thinking of it, and eating the mysterious violets at intervals. Vincent stepped into Lisle Street and com- menced to walk quickly in the direction of St. James' Street. He had one of the cigarettes the girl had given him in his lips, and he looked pleased, as if he had spent an agreeable hour, which he had. Quite a pleasant hour in that tiny, grimy room. Vincent always did manage to put in pleasant hours all over his day. He was really highly accomplished in the difficult art of enjoying himself without his pleasure being at anybody's expense. He always lived life to its full : absorb- ing all the pleasure it offered, freely, light-heartedly, and reining himself in with an iron will at the point where excess begins. He was so accustomed to pleasure that the sudden possession of it at any moment had no power to intoxicate him as with those unfortunate beings whom long self-restraint PAULA 2>7 has ruined. For the few years before his father's death he had known little but life's enjoyment : they had been brilliant and filled with gaiety, and in them had been founded the basis of the bright, hopeful, courageous temperament and the well- balanced mind that he possessed. Suppression and restraint always damages a character, in the same way as it damages the body. In many cases it may be inevitable and necessary, but it should only be regarded as a remedy, never as a treatment. Both mentally and physically restraint is generally the parent of excess at some future date, and suppression is usually the nurse of deformity. A limb or muscle of the body if re- strained from its natural exercise, atrophies; if totally bound up and debarred from use, it becomes deformed : and the human character too far re- pressed, from any cause, inevitably deteriorates, twisting itself into distorted lines, becoming mis- anthropic, hard, selfish, narrow-viewed, or immo- derate, as environment favours. The only son of a wealthy Australian banker, who after his wife's death had concentrated the whole of his affection in the handsome boy left him, Vincent had been sent to England and educated at Eton and Oxford : at both these, with the happy knack, which never after left him, of doing the best work or accepting the best pleasure life offered in the moment, he worked hard, loved and enjoyed the work while it lasted, and left the 33 PAULA 3 University with honours at twenty-one, to begin the real lessons of life. In the three years of pleasure that followed he learned much ; they taught him the' joy and the beauty of life, the worth of human effort, and engrained in his mind the healthy ardent love of existence. For the last four years, however, since his father's sudden death, he had been face to face with the work and difficulties that his father's large capital and extensive speculations carried with them. As he often said laughingly to his friends, he had enjoyed himself far more on his allowance than he had done since he had had the responsibility of his own fortune and income. He had none of his father's love for business and money-making. However, since a certain amount of attention to these matters was inevitable, he accepted his position with smiling philosophy and transacted his affairs as well as a man can whose heart is not in his work. Those last four years in Sydney had been spent in occupations which went hard against the grain of his nature, and in his anxiety to do justice to the responsible position he found himself in he worked harder and worried himself even more than was necessary. Each year the strain upon him seemed to increase, and at the end of the fourth his doctor ordered him peremptorily to England for change of occupation as much as change of air. And now he had been a year in PAULA 39 London, and actually a whole year, as he had laughingly told young Heyvvood, " without any objects of affection " — the friendship he had struck up with the boy at the. Art Club being the warmest feeling he possessed for anybody at the present minute. Vincent was fond of women, and liked their society, but they were not by any means indispens- able to him. In fact, he regarded them altogether very much as he did flowers, as sweet, delightful, orna- mental things, charming to have about one's rooms, to see and to enjoy, and to have gently and quietly removed when faded or withered. Not that he was brutal, or cruel, or heartless; he was the reverse of all these, and treated every woman with con- sideration and kindness, because that was the first way that occurred to him. Only he always looked quite practically at things; and when a woman ceased to be attractive or pleasure-giving, from any cause, her place was no longer beside men, that was all. On this account he hated the idea of marriage. Fancy marriage in youth ! Why, at forty he would not want a wife of forty — taste and discrimination does not decline with years — he would still prefer the beauty of twenty. Not that he always objected to other people's wives, though they were forty. But though without a touch of sentiment, Vincent's nature was essentially kind. He hated to see pain inflicted, hated inflicting it himself. 4 o TAULA Egotistic to a certain extent he undoubtedly was, but in thinking of himself first he always allowed his neighbour to come in a good second. He was not in the least cynical. He was as far removed from a cynic as he was from a senti- mentalist, being in the simplest sense of the term a materialist, and having the bright, philosophic, frank outlook of one upon life and his fellow human beings. He could not imagine any human powers apart from human matter, and the belief he denied to the soul he placed in the body. He loved that, respected its powers, and sympathised with and understood its failings. This was the root of his kindliness to women, perhaps, and of his general philosophy. The man who is a materialist and philosopher is rarely unkind. There is little that he comes across in others that can upset his equanimity. No being can be more cruel than the sentimentalist if wounded in his sentiment, and in this life there is so much to shock and wreck it. Equally the cynic is cruel in his way, with his wearisome and monotonous disbelief of the obviously good and beautiful. Halham's gay, light-hearted materialism led him for the most part to a generous belief in the good qualities of those about him. If these were dis- proved, he faced the discovery with philosophic indulgence. The absence of any great or certain expectations from humanity saved him from the PAULA 41 bitterness and harshness of the disappointed senti- mentalist. A skilled doctor, from a physical examination, can read accurately a man's mental or moral character. The disposition is far more a question of physique than ordinary people ever realise. No man is held morally accountable for the shape of his nose, yet, as a physician can distinctly prove, innate cowardice, or nearly any other so-called moral quality, is really as much a physiological matter as nasal symmetry. Vincent's physician was perhaps the man who really knew his character best. The energy of the heart-beats alone was enough to reveal to him the nervous, excitable temperament. Of his many friends and acquaint- ances there was not one who knew much of his disposition or his life. His extreme reticence and reserve, coupled with the refinement and intellectuality of his face, gained for him the reputation of greater virtue than he deserved. Not that he wished to establish any reputation. He was absolutely indifferent to what others thought or said of him, provided they were polite and amiable in his presence. If they chaffed him upon being moral he smiled pleasantly, if they taxed him with being immoral he smiled just as pleasantly, and no one felt any the wiser. But if his conventional virtue was perhaps over-estimated, his natural innate generosity and worth of character was probably underrated. 42 FAULA Turning into Piccadilly a short, elderly, red- faced man almost ran against him. Vincent raised his hat, recognising Lord Weston, one of his friends. " Oh, Vincent, there you are ! I'm delighted. Have you got time to come round to the Club for a game of billiards ? " asked the other as they shook hands. Vincent looked at his watch. " I am afraid I hardly have," he answered ; " I've only just time to get back to my rooms and dress before dinner at the Westcott's. I'm sorry." "Oh, well, another day then. I'll walk back with you just as far as your place. By the way, how is your business getting on ? " "Well," returned Vincent, " my affairs are getting horribly mixed up. Do you know, I shall have to go out again shortly." " No, don't say that. We don't want to part with you. Why don't you put in better managers ? " "Can't tell how it is," returned Vincent; "as soon as I am away, everything seems to go to the dogs. I low are your coals going ? " Lord Weston was the owner of an extensive coal property in Ashby-de-la-Zouche, and, unlike Vincent, a pronounced pessimist. " As bad as can be," he answered gloomily ; " I'm not getting over a thousand a month now : perpetual worry too, and work. At my age it's PAULA 43 too bad. I often feel inclined to blow my brains out ; I do indeed." They had reached Vincent's house by this time, and he paused, looking at his friend with a smile. " What an idea, Weston ! Life is always worth having, and work makes the worth of it ; I've found one can stand a good deal." " It's all very well," grumbled back the other, " but you look fairly fagged out at times. But it's no use advising you — you go on just the same." Vincent laughed. " That's not work, perhaps. Good-bye." " You dine with us the day after to-morrow, remember." And they parted. As Vincent went up to his flat he quite believed from his feelings that Weston might be right in saying he looked fagged out, and when he entered his drawing-room he did not pass through it and go at once to dress, but dropped into an arm-chair with a sense of fatigue. The cold had been sharp outside, and as he sat there, there seemed a faint, peculiar, barely perceptible bluish tinge on the clear pallor of his face, or perhaps it was only the reflection from the torquoisc-shaded lamps. Ill The following evening was dry and starlight: a strong wind swept the streets, but it had veered to the north-west, and was violent rather than cold. At five-and-twenty to twelve Paula was coming down the passage slowly to the stage-door, buttoning her gloves. Two or three of the actors and a girl belonging to the chorus stood at the door talking, and two men were just in front of her, settling themselves into their overcoats. Paula, looking up as she finished the last button, saw a tall figure in an overcoat, with a white silk handkerchief round the throat, suddenly appear amongst the others, and caught a glimpse of a crush hat over the bowlers and silks. It was Halham's. He came in at the door, slipped past the group, that was too much engrossed in itself to take much notice of him, and came up to her with a smile. She glanced up and smiled too. She felt so pleased to see him, and the pleasure lighted up all her face. She looked very charming and quite well-dressed, in spite of the old black skirt 41 PAULA 45 she was wearing. She had a smart velvet cape of the latest fashion, and a large, wide-brimmed hat, from beneath which the youthful face and sweet eyes looked up at him, sparkling with animation. "You were not at the theatre to-night," she said, as she put her hand in his; "I know, because I looked for you." " No," he answered, " that's why I've come to see you now. I thought you would let me escort you home, perhaps." "Oh, I'm so sorry," said Paula impulsively; " I should have liked it immensely, but I can't. I'm engaged to somebody else to-night." "Oh, that settles it then," returned Vincent, the least shade of disappointment crossing his face. " I am so sorry," repeated Paula anxiously, and looking up appealingly as if entreating him not to be angry with her for refusing. Vincent, who was accustomed to girls cutting their dances for him and always despised them for doing so, liked her for not offering to break her engagement, liked her too for the evident disappointment it was to her to keep it. "You can't help it," he answered quietly. " If you have made a promise you must keep it." Paula still looked distressed, and her eyes were fixed anxiously on his face. She knew the second violinist, who was £oinf to see her home, very well : they were great friends. 46 PAULA He liked her in an unselfish, devoted sort of way, and she knew if she asked him to excuse her for that night, he would do so directly. It was a great temptation : she felt a sudden impetuous desire to walk back with Vincent; his pale face looked very charming and the dark blue eyes very kind; when he had come specially for her too ! and she and Johnson could go home together every night. Should she speak to him ? But no, it would hurt his feelings, and simply because he was always friendly and faithful, was he to have no con- sideration ? It was a mean idea, and she rejected it. " I am so sorry ! You can't think," she said again. Vincent looked at her with some amusement. " I'll come to-morrow night, if I can," he said ; " I can't promise, I mayn't be able to, but I'll try. This is your friend, I think," he added, as a little man with a violin case approached them, peering hard at Vincent through his spectacles. " Good night, dear." He pressed her hand, lifted his hat, smiled down into her upraised disappointed face, and was gone without further hesitation. " Dear me, I'm very sorry to have kept you waiting," said Johnson fussily, coming up to her. " Oh, it doesn't matter," replied Paula gently, and they walked down the passage and squeezed past the chattering group that had swelled by this PAULA 47 time and filled up the doorway. She was just as nice as usual to the little violinist as they walked back through the wind-swept streets, but he thought her conversation a little abstracted ; and no wonder, since she kept asking herself over and over again, "Was he offended, I wonder?" It was only when she had said good-night to Johnson, and was finding her way up the narrow staircase, that it flashed upon her it was the first time she had cared a straw whether a man were offended or not. All the next day she thought about Vincent in a restless sort of way, and looked forward with keen pleasure to the evening. When it came, it brought disappointment. It was wet, and she waited in vain for Vincent ; he did not come. Paula would not wait long for anybody, and after ten minutes of acute longing to see him, vexation, and disappointment, she went home with an uninterest- ing super, Johnson having left the theatre early as soon as he learnt she was engaged. When she came in, her brother noticed her white disappointed face at once. " Will you take a note to the post for me, Charlie?" was the first thing she said, tearing off her gloves. " Yes, dear, of course," he returned in some surprise, looking up from a " Goss's Harmony" he was studying. Paula sat down in her hat and cloak and wrote to Vincent : — 48 PAULA "Dear Mr. Ilalham, — I waited for you this evening at the theatre, but you did not come. I was so disappointed. Were you offended with me last night ? Please let me hear from you or see you soon. — Yours sincerely, Paula Heywood." Charlie took the note without comment When he came back Paula seemed nearly in her usual spirits. She had swept his Harmony aside, and was busy making him a cup of coffee over the fire. The next day about three o'clock, when she was lying indolently on the couch, yawning as she watched two winter flies circling round the blackened gasalier, and feeling too sleepy either to read or smoke, a letter was flung in at her sitting- room door. Paula bounded off the sofa and across the room, divining whom the note was from. She picked it up and carried it back with her to the couch, as a tiger docs its pet bone. She scanned the outside critically, and looked long at the firm, distinguished writing which seemed to speak of the elastic wrist and hand that had executed it. Then she broke it open and read : — "Dear Miss Heywood, — I have just got your note. I was dining out last night, and could not reach the theatre in time. I am sorry for your disappointment. You were perfectly right to keep your engagement the previous evening. I should have been very sorry if you had done otherwise. PAULA 49 Will you come and have tea with me this after- noon, or would you prefer mc to come and see you? — Yours sincerely, Vincent Ilalham." Without a trace of fatigue or indolence now, in face or figure, Paula sprang from the sofa and ran upstairs. She went into Charlie's room, where he was dressing to go out to a pupil. "Shall I go?" she said, giving him the letter. " Of course, I suppose it's not quite correct to go to his rooms ; but it's more fun, and makes more change than his coming here. Does it matter ? " Charlie was in the agonies of fastening a very stiff collar with a very weak pin before the glass, and waited to get it right before replying. " No, it isn't correct, and you couldn't do it with heaps of men," he said at last, drawing on his coat. " But Halham is so extremely nice in every way to women, I think you can go to him if you want to. There's only one danger," he added, " in your intimacy with him." " What's that ? " asked Paula, with smiling eyes. " That you will get too fond of him. Vincent is a man most women find irresistible if he lays him- self out to please them, and he seems to have taken a fancy to you. He is a most charming fellow, and his society's delightful ; and if you can look upon him merely as a friend and interested companion, it's all right ; but I warn you — he isn't a marrying man." 50 PAULA " No," said Paula slowly, and with a cloud coming over her face, and a sadness into her eyes, " and of course he would never marry me in my present position." "Vincent will never marry at all," returned Charlie decisively. " He is much too fickle and impatient of restraint: he is just a seeker after his own pleasure, and takes nothing very seriously. Some people, I suppose, would slang him for his morals very much. I don't. I don't believe he's ever been brutal or cruel to a woman." Paula did not answer at all : she stood and watched him finishing his dressing with absent eyes, tossing the tassel of the window-blind to and fro in her hands. " Well, good-bye, dear," said Charlie, as he was preparing to leave the room ; " go and amuse your- self, only don't fall in love with him." He went out, and Paula walked into her own room. When, about an hour later, she walked up the stairs to Vincent's flat, she looked a very striking and attractive figure, all in black, with a narrow, high white satin collar round her neck, and her light hair twisted up into the fashionable nceud dc Diane, under the smart velvet hat Finding the outer door of his flat open, she passed through and knocked at the inner one. " Come in," said a voice, and she entered. Vincent was sitting at an escritoire in the window, PAULA 51 writing. He got up as she came in and advanced to meet her. Paula, looking up into his face, noted that he looked older than she had seen him do yet. The pallor of his face was more pronounced, and there were blue shades about the eyes. He looked tired and listless — almost painfully so. " I am very glad you could come," he said gently, in his quiet voice, as they walked over to the hearth together. Something in the grace of his figure, the ease of his walk, or possibly in the expression of his face, appealed to Paula's quick eyes, and filled her with pleasure. Her face lighted with radiant anima- tion, her lips parted in a sweet little smile as she thanked him for the chair he wheeled forward for her. To Paula to be in the society of any one she admired, and who, she knew, admired her, and whom she was anxious to please, was as it is to the plant to be in the sunlight. She seemed to glow and expand with new life as the plant does. Fresh colour was lent to the soft skin, an extra sweetness to the eyes, an added unconscious grace to each movement. Vincent's presence now drew out all the charm of her responsive nature. " I am afraid I have disturbed you," she said, glancing towards the table where he had been writing, and on which were tossed masses of loose letters and papers. " It is a delightful interruption," he said, throwing himself into the chair opposite her, his face already 52 PAULA beginning to recover its customary gaiety and colour in her presence. " I get so tired of per- petually worrying over business." "What beautiful rooms you have here!" said Paula, looking round with soft admiration from the depths of the deep purple velvet lounge he had given her. It did not sound a vulgar or bonrgeoise remark as she said it. It had nothing of the gaping awe of a school-girl in it, nor of the appraising instinct of the parvenu. It was just the unaffected expression of her sense of beauty, whether in upholstery, or features, or landscape. "Do you think so?" Vincent said, a smile of pleasure crossing his face. " I'm so glad. I fur- nished them entirely after my own ideas." It was a beautiful room they were in, and full of characteristics of the man who used it. It was very large and lofty, and the walls hung and draped after the modern fashion, not merely papered. The hangings were in a sort of yellow or dead-leaf coloured satin, that formed an exquisite harmony with the deep purple, grape-hued velvet of some of the chairs and lounges. The mantelpiece was of the snowiest marble, and the heavy, worked bronzed fender, resting on the Persian rug, was in itself a work of art. A grand Erard stood across one corner, not far from the long windows, also deeply draped in velvets blending the dead-leaf and purple tints of the rest of the hangings, and a great number of exquisite water-colours and sketches PAULA 53 stood on easels and tables in retired nooks through- out the room. The carpet seemed to have been specially designed to accord with the rest, leaves in varying shades of brown and bronze and gold drifted in loose wreaths over a snowy ground. Everywhere stood cases of books, and these rivalled in number the statuettes of bronze and marble. The red firelight leapt amongst them now, warming them almost to life, and threw long shadows from the palms that stood here and there, looking as if they had just come from the hothouse in their fresh and vivid green. Some white flowers also, though it was December, stood in a vase close to where he had been writing. At the far end of the room there were the doors into his bedroom, closed now, and with heavy curtains drawn across them. Entering first, and glancing round, one would have wondered whether the occupier were student or artist, or poet or musician, and, as a matter of fact, he was by profession and to the world none of these. Study, and painting, and music were merely his tastes as a dilettante, but they were nevertheless the loves and companions of his life; certainly not exclusive of human ones, but as cer- tainly supplementary to them. As Paula's eyes took in the wealth and comfort round her, she wondered with an amused smile what this man had felt in entering her little dingy room, with its tumbledown furniture and grimy ceiling. 54 PAULA " What are you smiling at ? " he said, smiling himself. " I was comparing this with our place," she said lightly. " I have often lived in a place as simple as yours is now," he answered quietly. Paula burst into a little gay laugh. "Simple" is such a convenient adjective to apply to other people's belongings, when dirty and squalid, and common and cheap is the description they deserve. "May I give you a cup of tea now?" Vincent asked, getting up. " I always make it myself." Paula, leaning taick in her chair, watched him as he moved a wicker tripod forward and lighted the spirit under the swinging copper kettle. " This is a very pretty figure," she said, leaning towards a tiny table where an ivory statuette, about a foot high, stood alone. It was the nude figure of a woman. " Yes, it's a lovely thing," Vincent said, pausing a moment with the cup in his hand. " There is nothing, I think, in all the world so absolutely beautiful as the beautiful form of a woman," he added, as he handed her her cup, and lifted his own from the table and sat down with it. r.iuki took the cup in silence, her eyebrows a trifle contracted. " Do you think so?" she said slowly, her eyes fixed on the delicate and charming image; "I don't. I think it is merely the asso- ciation of ideas. There are other things more PAULA 55 beautiful, but because this is so connected with the idea of pleasure, we put it first. From long habit, the ideas of beauty and pleasure have grown con- fused, and whatever an object may lack of the first if we can fill up the place with the second, we make no distinction, but just call the whole beautiful." Vincent raised his level eyebrows a little at this, and gazed at her in silence with his serious, re- flective eyes. Paula looking from the ivory figure met his meditative gaze regarding her. " What are you thinking of? " she asked quickly, with a brilliant smile. " Of what you have just said," he answered quietly; " I have never thought of it in that way. Perhaps you are right." "Well, if a woman had no connection with love and joy and life, but were only kept for food say, as sheep are, nobody would think her particularly beautiful," returned Paula lightly, balancing the spoon on the edge of her teacup. Vincent was silent. "The truth of things," she went on after a minute, " seems to me often to lie buried not at the bottom of a well, but beneath a mass of ideas that pass current for it. People make use of the ideas just as they are, tangled up with one another, without ever troubling to sort them out and see that each one keeps its own meaning. The ideas of beauty and happiness have got so hopelessly mixed now, nobody would ever differentiate them." 56 PAULA " Who taught you to sort out your ideas ? " said Vincent gently, looking at her with amusement. "Plato, I think, chiefly. As a child I had to read page upon page, and not only translate it, you know, but also wrestle out his meaning. Then he is so utterly a sophist that when I had thoroughly grasped his argument, I used to con- struct my own to combat his — I used as it were to feel for the truth, and keep to it in my own mind. If you don't do that in reading Plato, you must be misled, because he never sought to be true, only to be brilliant." Vincent felt a strange sensation as suddenly, after an utter absence of many years, there rushed back upon him the remembrance of his own studies, his own ardour and love in his Oxford days for the classics, their charm and their mystery. The long quiet nights given up to reading the language of the dead and the past in which every man can find his own present and his own future, for Life holds nothing in the emotions of man that the ancients have not recorded. " Have you read much ? " he asked, with a touch of envy wafted over his years of life and work from his student days. "Yes, a good deal. I used to read a whole author at a time, en bloc" she answered, laughing htly, with a sort of glee as a child recounts how many sweets it has eaten. " I read all Euripides in two months, and all Aristophanes in PAULA 57 three weeks, and so on. Sophocles in one week, one play every day: he is very easy and sweet. But I seldom read now. The charm has gone out of it. The desire has been stilled. It is funny," she added, looking away from him to the fire, " how the three epochs of our life are marked by three crazes. All people seem to have them more or less. In one's childhood one has a craze for toys, concrete little objects to play with ; then in one's youth that dies utterly, and one has the craze for knowledge, words and thoughts for the mind to play with ; and then that dies away too, com- pletely, and one gets the last, and generally fatal craze, for life itself, and other human beings to play with." Vincent gazed at her curiously, while his neglected tea grew cold in the cup. "You must know an immense deal about life already, since you have read so much," he remarked after a pause. " Yes," she said, glancing at him quickly, "so I do, theoretically. I have been studying the face of life in a mirror, but it is only that, don't you see? I know only the reflection. I have not met life yet face to face to know her. I have never clasped her hand, never laid my heart on her heart, never looked into her eyes." "That is all to come," he answered gently; "I only hope the eyes will smile when you look into them." 58 PAULA Paula laughed. " How frightfully seriously we have been talking! Plato is nothing to it. What are those I see up there? Cigarettes? I thought you said you ought not to smoke." Vincent laughed and got up. He took the unopened box of cigarettes from the mantelpiece, cut it open, and handed it to her. " Quite so ; but perhaps I do it all the more on that account. These I got specially for you ; but they are very strong. Dimitrino's. I don't know whether you will like them." She stretched out one of her hands, from which she had drawn the glove, and he watched with pleasure the smooth fingers listlessly extract a cigarette, as she looked at him smiling. " If they are excessively strong, I am sure to like them," she said jestingly. "Pleasure begins where moderation ends." Vincent laughed, and struck a match for her. " That might mean, excess only appears where pleasure is exhausted." "Very likely," she said lightly; "you probably know. My own acquaintance with pleasure is not extensive nor intimate." There was silence for a moment or two, and she smoked in a delicate pretty way, and he watched her. " Play me something, will you?" she said, with a longing glance at the Erard. "With pleasure," returned Vincent, smiling; PAULA 59 " but I am afraid you will consider it rather a poor performance." He got up and went to the piano, and drew a lounge up close beside it. " Come and sit here and inspire me," he said, and Paula rose. " What sort of thing shall I play ? " he asked, looking at her and not at the keys. " Choose for me," she answered. He turned over the loose music at his side, and then drew out the "Braut lied," from Lohengrin. " I will play this for you only," laughed Vincent ; " nobody else shall ever hear it from me," and he looked away from her, and began to play. As the liquid notes went through the shadowy silent room, the whole susceptible, nervous woman's nature sleeping in the frame of Paula, who as yet was but half girl and half artist, felt its dreams troubled and roused itself to listen. He played well, as Charlie had said, and under the mag- netism of the dreaming eyes watching him his talent asserted itself to the full, and the slow, subtle, incomparable melody moved in its har- monious procession divinely under his touch. The large room was filled with the exquisite sympathetic bridal song, and the girl lay back with suffused eyes, entranced and listening. It was the ex- position of a great natural power. Vincent system- atically neglected it because he never fully realised that he possessed it. He knew that it gave him pleasure to play, and his friends to listen. The 60 PAULA fust he ascribed to his folly, the second to their kindness. As in everything belonging to himself, he saw little worth in it, and merely laughed pleasantly at others' valuation. "Nonsense," he would say, " I have no gift whatever, except that of appreciating other people's." He smiled now as he saw how the girl was moved ; then laughed and abruptly let his hands fall from the keys. "You look quite pleased," he said jestingly, leaning his elbow on the wooden front of the key- board, and his chin on his hand ; " more so than you have yet Apparently I play better than I talk." " I don't know," murmured Paula, " which you do the better." In point of fact, she knew nothing just then but that she was content, infinitely satisfied in the moment, in a beatific state of being which is the first flavour the draught of pleasure brings to the mental palate. " A safe sort of compliment that commits one to nothing," laughed Vincent, looking down at her. " I must go ; it is getting dark," she said regretfully, but she did not stir. " What is the time ? " "Time?" returned Vincent, turning to the key- board and playing very softly. " One of the names of Pain. Don't talk of it," and the music grew a little louder, and seemed to lay clinging hands on her sensitive soul, and to hold her there motionless. The light fell more and more, till the three long PAULA 61 windows seemed far-off panels of white mist The room was full of soft shadow and low sound. " I must go," she said again. Vincent rose, walked towards the wall, and touched the electric light button, and a dozen lamps throughout the room instantly glowed into light under their different shades. The one above the girl's head on the piano flamed into a blood-red globe, and tinged her in its colour. He came back to the piano, but she sprang from her seat with a determination that expressed her reluctance. " No, really," she said ; " I have stayed too long already." She laid the end of her cigarette on the silver ash tray by her teacup, and replaced her glove. Vincent made no effort to detain her further. They walked together towards the door through the large shadowy room with the red fire and the red lamp left behind them. " Good-bye," he said, and she put her hand in his : it was held there, and she looked up. She was drawn a little nearer, and then somehow in some soft but irresistible way she found herself folded into his arms, close against his breast, and his lips against hers. Swayed by some power that seemed quite new to her and beyond herself, she linked her arms suddenly round his neck and kissed him back with her warm, smooth lips in a quick, responsive, passionate fervour. All the gratitude to him for the pleasure of that happy afternoon, all the appreciation of his charm and the sense of 62 PAULA violent attraction towards him, found relief in that impulsive kiss. It was not the kiss of passion nor even love. These had not been stirred as yet; it was rather of enthusiastic admiration, as she might have bent suddenly over the page of a book that stirred her and kissed it with vehement delight. As he had said " Good-bye," words had been leaping to her lips and striving in her brain — words to tell him how she admired him, how great her pleasure with him had been. Then suddenly in his arms, so near his heart, there had seemed no way to express it all but this — no way so simple, so natural, so utterly satisfying, so necessary as this, and in a pure spontaneous enthusiasm she let all the strength of her fervid soul rush out upon her lips as they met his. It ran like quick fire through the man's whole nervous, excitable being, but he gave no outward sign. "It was very charming of you to come," he said, very gently releasing her, withdrawing his arms from the warm, impulsive, living woman's form, and raising his head from the soft fair face, glowing now with all sorts of lights and tints and smile 3 — " Good-night." " Good-night," she murmured. And she passed out of the door, and he walked back into his rooms. He came up to the hearth, where the fire sent out its warm red glow on his feet, and the lamp shed its soft scarlet across his face. He PAULA O3 mechanically took out a cigarette from the box, and stood with it unlimited. The kiss was still throbbing through his whole system, and his mind rose in rather dismayed surprise to review the situation. It had been no part of his intention nor wish to kiss the girl when he had invited her to come to him ; but there, suddenly, at the door, at the touch of her warm hand, the attraction she possessed for all men had come over him irre- sistibly. Almost before he knew he wished it, he had drawn her within his arms and her soft lips had been under his, and what a fresh ardent delight there had been in that embrace and kiss between them. For years past nothing had thrilled him as that moment had done. " She can kiss," he thought, recalling the sweet, natural, spontaneous abandon on the thrown-back face and the fire of the lips. It had been inevitable, irresistible, unavoidable, that moment at the door, and very sweet ; but still he regretted it. It was not what he wanted with this girl. Passion be- tween them would probably spoil everything. And he had meant it should not be. He was annoyed with himself for yielding to the influence she had upon his senses, but he realised suddenly what a powerful, overwhelming influence that was. He had planned a quiet friendship, protective on his side, grateful on hers, an interested affection, an intellectual camaraderie, such as already existed with her brother, which would have been delightful 64 PAULA with her clever, brilliant mind, and he dreaded the idea of passion, which he felt would burn up all these. He did not understand that all these things he thought he wanted were but disguises of the natural yearning towards a woman who attracted him, and without this for their bases they would not have sprung up at all. " I will keep it to a mere companionship," he was saying to himself now, as he walked to and fro, calmly leaving out of the matter his nature and hers, and the great inscrutable law that impelled them to each other. The more educated and cul- tivated the human mind may be, the farther it generally drifts from the great truth, that the will and the laws of Nature are inviolable, immutable ; that they work secretly, insidiously, but unceasingly, and in the end all laws must dissolve before them. The great invisible latent force of our own nature within us during life is as relentless, as unalterable, as illimitable as the power of death. The mind and the brain that asserts itself in defiance is as surely, as remorselessly crushed by it sooner or later as the grain beneath the slow mill-stone. "Yes, I'll keep it to companionship," he thought again, with a desperate resolve for the future, and an angry reproach to himself that he had been for a moment overpowered. It was for Paula's sake he reasoned as he did. It was passion already on his side, though he refused to believe it, but at least it was an unselfish one. It was not her youth PAULA 65 nor her innocence that appealed to him so deeply, and stirred all the tenderness of his nature towards her. It was the promise of her life, the brilliant gifts that he believed lay in her hands. To darken an opening life like this ! To spoil, or waste, or cripple those splendid powers ! The very shadow of the thought sent a shudder of horror through him. " Mere companionship," he repeated again to himself as the heat of the kiss died down within him, and the calm of his resolve came over him, and then he went to dress for dinner. Paula went down the stairs with a buoyant step, a glow of light-hearted happiness diffused through her, a light in her eyes, and a smile on her parted lips. This lasted until she reached the door and found herself in St. James' Street, and then the mood, the rush of simple natural feeling was gone by: she found herself back in the conventional world in which we live, and in which we are judged. She had for one moment been wholly natural, wholly herself. For one moment there had been no laws, no rules, no fashions, only just the leapings up of sweet, joyous, natural impulses ; but here in the street, as a sudden tide, came back upon her the remembrance of the modern conven- tionalities of our civilised life. The colour burned suddenly in her face, and her soft parted lips folded together in an angry line. " Fool I was ! " she thought to herself. " We arc 66 PAULA no longer in the Garden of Eden. I wonder if he would misunderstand." And somehow she did not think that he would ; but still from her own standard, set up for ordinary daily life, she had erred greatly, and a hot anger against herself filled her. It was so unlike herself, too. In all associa- tion with men she generally placed so great a distance between herself and them that they felt and respected it. Why, here, had she so suddenly failed? Never before had she given a kiss to any one beyond her father and brother. She had been often asked, and it had never occurred to her as even possible to comply. Now, here, it had not seemed possible, it had not occurred to her to resist ! It was incomprehensible. The anger and annoyance within her lent an unconscious quick- ness to her steps. She was already at the top of St. James' Street, when she became aware suddenly of some one trying to overtake her, and stopped. As she turned she confronted a short, well-dressed girl with a sharp, fox-like face and foxy-coloured hair. "Oh, Maggie, is that you? : ' Paula said, recog- nising the girl, who stood always on her left in the garden scene in which they both appeared nightly. " Yes, it's me," responded the other. " Lor ! you do walk at a pace ! " she said, thrusting her arm through Paula's, and then added, in a con- fidential tone, as they turned into Piccadilly, " Got any money? " PAULA 67 " Got any money ? " repeated Paula innocently. " No, I haven't." The other darted a side glance at her. " I have just seen you come out, you know." "Yes? Just now, you mean? from Mr. Halham's —well?" They were walking down towards the Circus, on the quiet side of Piccadilly. The shops were all lighted now, and the pavements brilliant with streams of light from the windows. Paula looked down at the face of the girl beside her, and fixed her eyes there with a cold, questioning gaze. " Oh, you do act ! " said the girl sulkily. There was silence. Paula looked at her with the blood receding from her face, leaving it stone white, and her heart beating violently. The girl felt the gaze of her companion, and kept her own eyes stolidly on the pavement. Suddenly she felt a wrench at her arm. Paula had withdrawn hers, but she still walked on in silence. She was keeping a check upon herself with difficulty. When at last she spoke she merely said, quietly: "Mr. Halham is my brother's friend, and I went round to have tea with him, that's all." "Tea!" muttered the girl; "I'd call it milk and water, if I was you. But there, Polly," she said, suddenly changing her tone, " I didn't mean to offend you, really I didn't, and I want you to lend me half-a-sov.; do, I'm that hard up I don't know where to turn — will you now ? I know you've got 63 PAULA it," she added coaxingly, trying to take her arm again, but Paula resented it. " No, I haven't got it," she said coldly. " I have absolutely nothing at this minute. I have lent to you when I've had anything, but we are hard up ourselves now. I haven't the least idea where our rent is coming from to-morrow." "Oh!" returned Maggie, and relapsed into sullen silence. A few steps more brought them to the Circus. Paula was going to cross to get into Coventry Street, and Maggie's direction lay down Regent Street towards Waterloo Place. Paula parted from her with a careless nod. " So-long," she said, and crossed the road. Maggie stood a minute looking after her. "Nasty, mean thing!" she muttered beneath her sharp-pointed little teeth. " And all that affectation and side too ! I'll pay her out ! " and she turned down Regent Street. Paula went on homewards filled with charing irritation and bitterness, which after all is a very general state of feeling for us all in the press of our civilised life, very different from our emotions in our exalte moments, such as she had just passed through, when we take wing from it. " I must get out of this vile position," she thought desperately as she walked on. "All my gifts, and yet as I am, classed with that creature ; and before the world, in his eyes too, we should be about on a level, I suppose ! Great heavens ! what have I done these PAULA 69 last two years since I came up here ? I have been trying and trying, and I have achieved nothing." That same night by the last post came a few lines from Vincent. They told her he had had an invitation from a friend to spend a few weeks in Belgium, and that he had accepted it. All letters sent to his club would be forwarded, and he hoped to hear from her now and then. Paula grew paler with a curious pain for the first few seconds as she read. Then she shrugged her shoulders with a smile of self-contempt. " What is it to me ? I have got my work to see to," she thought. They were sitting at supper, and when she had finished the note, she tossed it over to her brother with a laugh. " Cheerful place, Belgium, at this time of the year," she remarked. " I hope he will enjoy himself." IV A COUPLE of weeks had passed, and the little household behind the red blind in Lisle Street was plunged into pressing poverty. For some unassigned reason Paula had lost her place at the theatre, and the eighteen shillings a week thus cut off from their small total income was a frightful loss. The reason for her sudden dismissal Paula had no clue to, except that which lay in two malevolent brown eyes looking out of a foxy face at her on the Saturday afternoon when she was abruptly cashiered. Thinking over the matter a thousand times, with crimsoning face, she re- membered the girl's meeting with her outside Vincent's house ; she remembered her words ; she remembered the manager's particular fad that those girls in the minor parts and lower ranks should be of unquestioned moral character. He had to tolerate constantly all sorts of peculiarities amongst the " stars " ; but this, so far from inuring him to an atmosphere of moral elasticity, made him all the more virulent against any shortcomings of the 70 PAULA 71 mere supers. Try as she would to shake herself free from the idea, Paula could not help feeling that the innocent afternoon at Vincent's rooms had been the root of the evil. It jarred upon her, and she could not explain her suspicions to her brother ; she would not even admit it to herself. She only reiterated to him, with a burst of angry tears, that they had given her no reason, and she knew of none; and they both bore their misfortunes with the pagan resignation their father's teaching had instilled into them. Charlie's lessons fell off too, as several of his pupils were laid up with coughs and colds, and too ill to take them. One week they had only nineteen shillings to meet their expenses, out of which their rent absorbed thirteen shillings. When he had paid this, Charlie brought up the remaining six shillings and laid them on the faded cloth. The girl was sitting at the table, with a sheet of foolscap before her, and a long quill pen in her hand. She looked at the money absently for a minute, and then raised her eyes to his, and laughed. " Is that all we have for this week ? " she asked. "Yes." She shrugged her shoulders. " We must cut off our cigarettes," she murmured, and went back to polish an epigram. Charlie sat down to the table with an air of desperation, and began to write a letter. When he had finished it, the girl looked up. /- PAULA " Whom have you written to?" " Vincent." " Why ? " " To ask him to lend us ten pounds." Paula paled suddenly. " Give me the letter." " What are you going to do with it ? " " Burn it." "What nonsense!" exclaimed Charlie; "ten pounds is no more to Vincent than ten pence ! He would lend it gladly ! " " That's nothing to do with it. The idea's horrible. Do let's keep our friendship with him intact, and not drag our wretched money affairs into it." " As you please," returned Charlie, flinging the letter into the fire, " only I don't see what we're to do." Paula returned to her work in silence, and her brother left the room. That same afternoon she went out and pawned her bracelet and cigarette case. They gave her five pounds for the one and ten shillings for the other. Then she went on into Regent Street and bought ten yards of coarse red silk at Liberty's. She turned over every silk they possessed before the right tint was discovered, but at last she selected one. It was a deep blood colour with the lights and reflections of wine shimmering on its surface. She gave one pound fifteen shillings for it, and took the rest of the money back to her brother. PAULA 73 "This will last a little while," she said, caress- ingly ; "as to what is to happen next, tit nc qucBsicris scire nefas" she quoted laughingly. The silk was taken up to her room and pushed in a wrapper carelessly under the bed. Some days later than this she had a long letter from Vincent, in answer to one of hers that had told him in a general way of her difficulties in getting her work considered even. He said he should be back, he thought, in a few days, and added in a postscript : " Try Reeves, the manager of the Halibury Theatre. He is a friend of mine, and will help you, I think; only I should apply j:>er- sonally." She read the letter to her brother, and every afternoon subsequent to its receipt Charlie asked petulantly, " Why didn't she go to see Reeves ? " But for a whole week Paula did not go, spending the afternoon and sometimes evening in her bedroom, locked in. One day, however, just after their nominal lunch, as he sat moodily over the fire, mentally considering his list of pupils, she came into the room behind him, and said quietly in her flute-like voice, " I'm going to see Reeves." Charlie turned and saw her standing, a mar- vellous figure, in the dingy room, clothed from head to foot in blood-coloured silk. Over her arm hung her old black dress. " Do you like my costume ? " she said. " This is for the dance at the end of the play. I made it, all myself this last week." 74 PAULA " You're not going down the Strand like that, I hope ? " Paula laughed. " No ; look here," and she slipped her black skirt on, and then drew on the jacket bodice of her dress. In two seconds the crimson silk' had disappeared from view. "Yes ; it's a fetching sort of dress. You copied it from that old picture, ' A Persian Dancer,' we had down at home, I know. Will the British matron approve of it, though ? " " She'll have to," replied Paula, putting on her hat and coat. " Will you get back from Ealing to-night?" " No ; I think not. They've got a big concert on. I'll be back to-morrow some time before luncheon." At hour later Paula was at the Halibury. Mr. Reeves had sent word he would sec her if she could wait. He was busy with his manager just then. Paula assented gladly, and half-an-hour went by. The fog descended, together with the temperature, and penetrated the corridors and passages of the theatre. At four a common- looking young man brought her a cup of coffee, and mumbled something about Mr. Reeves being sorry to detain her, and improvised a seat for her where she stood in the passage, and left her again to her own reflections. Paula sat and waited patiently on the upturned box, one knee crossed over the other, and the flexible, boneless-looking PAULA 75 little foot, in its muddy shoe, swinging slowly, as she gazed absently down between the pasteboard walls to the dim shadowy expanse of the stage. She held the coffee-cup in her hand untouched, until the coffee grew cold in the chilly little draught that played round her shoulders. Paula was indifferent to the coffee, unconscious of the cold ; all her thoughts and senses were absorbed, focussed, on those boards, that looked so smooth and clean in their present obscurity. She sat and stared at them until the sight seemed to hypnotise her ; it seemed as if the shaded level fascinated her, as they say quicksands will fascinate a man who gazes long at them. At last, with a mechanical, noiseless movement, she set the cup down on the floor beside her, rose to her feet, with her eyes still on the stage, and glided silently along towards it. She went to the centre, and then paused and looked round. She was quite alone. The de- serted theatre, looking vast in its emptiness, and filled by shifting yellow vapour as the fog came oozing in from the outside, loomed before her vague and uncertain, the dim stage stretched round her. Paula looked, and the light of anima- tion and excitement leapt all over her face, her eyes widened and gleamed as they swept over the gloomy obscurity of the house. To her, it was full, full from ceiling to floor, of eager faces, dazzling with light, overflowing with a surging sea 76 PAULA of humanity, of life, enchained, held silent by her, and she the sole mistress of this stage, the holder of the magic that held the house. She stretched out her arms to the vacant building in a sudden momentary intoxication, the intoxication that comes from the knowledge of power. "Sooner or later I'll hold you all in the hollow of my foot ! " she murmured, her lips quivering in an exultant smile. " One more rehearsal can't do any harm before I show to the old bird," and she slipped off her shoes. Two seconds sufficed for her quick supple fingers to unfasten and throw off the old black merino dress, another two to drag the battered hat from her head and subtract the two crossway pins from her hair, and then she stood upright, a vivid figure in the scarlet Persian dress, with stockinged feet, and loose hair, and falling sleeves. For a moment she stood just softly humming the measure, and beating her feet in time. Then when the bar assigned to it was reached, suddenly she gave the wonderful back- ward leap that makes the dancing of the Levantine Arabs a thing of wonder and intoxication for the eye. With her two little feet kept well together, she sprang upwards and backwards, her whole supple body convex for an instant in one single simple perfect curve, her head almost to her heels with its weight of hair sweeping the boards. It was a dance that she had practised over and over again, for sheer love of it, in her room, and PAULA 77 sometimes before her brother. The first idea had been given her from an old book of plates they had had as children, illustrating the dances of all lands. The mere jigging of European countries, in which the feet carry the stiff motionless figure from one spot to another, appealed to her as little as the mere posturing and contorting of the Farther East, in which the feet remain motionless. It was the poetry of motion that lies between these two extremes, in which the feet are not chained to the ground, and where every limb has to respond to the rhythm of the ankles, that Paula had made her own. Pay a young Arab to dance to you in the Levant, or, better still, come upon him unobserved when he is dancing before his friends, and never again will any other dance satisfy you. Paula danced now as they dance, herself drunk with the physical delight of it. Her eyes were half closed, and her sense of hearing turned inwards, following silently the rhythm beating in her brain. She neither heard nor saw two men — Reeves and his manager — coming down the wings, and was unconscious that they stopped short upon the stage, open mouthed and eyed. They waited there and watched, silent, almost breathless, until the dance came to its close. Then Reeves coughed loudly. Paula turned, and stood for a second looking them full in the face, then she advanced easily. A brilliant flush from the physical exercise burned 78 PAULA on her cheeks, her widely-expanded eyes showed the nervous tension passed through, and there was a smile, almost insolent in its assured triumph, on her lips. As she came up there was an unconscious arrogance in her step; in her whole walk the inevitable, subtle, physical ex- pression of her mental attitude. It was a mistress approaching her two dependents. She had the sovereignty with which genius impartially invests the poorest and the humblest — a divine sovereignty before which earthly sovereignty shrinks abashed. For that moment she was clothed in it, and she knew it, and felt it, and realised it ; and the two men before her realised it too, more clearly than was quite comfortable. One thought was present, however, to both of them — that which had held them so breathlessly would hold the house. When she was within a yard of them she stopped. "I didn't know I had an audience, and such a critical one," she said, resting both hands on her hips. " What do you think of my pas seul a FArabique?" The tone was jesting and familiar, her eyes flashed mockingly over them. It was im- possible to restrain herself: the cells in her brain were glowing, the blood racing in her veins; she felt an irresistible sense of her triumph, the triumph of a thing perfectly accomplished, an art perfectly expounded. She could not recall the artificial humility of her tones when she had sought ad- mission. The two pompons magnates standing PAULA 79 there, round-eyed and limp, small potentates in the possession of a few roods of earth and a few feet of bricks and mortar, struck her as ludicrous in her intangible, impalpable, yet incomparable wealth of the potentialities in her own brain and limbs. "Ah a very wonderful performance," said Austin Davies, Reeves's manager. " Where under the sun could you have learnt such a thing?" " Learn," echoed Paula, her lips parting and her eyebrows rising in derisive laughter. " I don't learn ! Who should teach me ? The thing's mine. I evolved it !" and she laughed again, throwing back her head, till they saw nothing but the white swell- ing throat and full under-chin. " It comes in my play, you know — the play I've come to you about. I've got the MS. here. I hoped perhaps you'd consider it," and she looked at Reeves. He had stood silent, holding his chin in his hand and staring at her. As she turned and caught his gaze, there was a passing contraction of the expres- sive eyebrows. In these moments she had been all artist, and the woman in her forgotten, but Reeves seemed looking more at the woman than the artist. "Certainly," he said; "I shall be very pleased to consider it. But where does the dance come in?" " The leading part has it, and it comes at the close of the third act." "Ah — hum," said Reeves, "then — I suppose it So PAULA might be difficult to find another I suppose you would be the best exponent yourself? " "Well, it does seem likely, doesn't it?" returned Paula, with a laugh, going over towards where her clothes lay, and picking up the roll of manuscript. " Here you are," she said, carelessly opening the paper and handing it to Reeves ; " there — third act," and she indicated with her finger where he was to look. Reeves did look, but his eyes followed the finger also with interest. Davies took the upper edge of the paper in his hand, and peered over his companion's shoulder. Paula stood and watched them both, as they stood silent, reading. She knew the general effect of giving her writings in this way. It was almost as certain as turning on the spectator Medusa's shield. The paper was taken with indifference, the first lines carelessly scanned, and then came the absorption of the reader, and his gradual assumption of similarity to a stone figure. Paula waited perhaps fifty seconds till the solidi- fication was tolerably complete, and then, as care- lessly as she had given it, put her whole hand over the middle of the page to draw it away. " That's the play," she said, " and I thought you might like to see me rehearse the dance, so I dressed ready for it ; but now you have seen it, haven't you ? So I think I'll be going home." Davies and Reeves both raised their eyes simultaneously, and tightened their clutch on the PAULA Si paper as she tried to withdraw it. " This seems extremely interesting, Miss — er — Heywood," said Reeves. " We must consider this. Suppose you come to my house now and read it through to me ? We might get through some business this evening." Paula was silent. She hesitated, and her hesi- tation was visible in the uncertain swaying of the scarlet -clothed figure and the raising of her eye- brows. Both men watched her keenly. " I should think you might read it yourself," she said at last in an injured tone. " I might, but I shan't," said Reeves curtly, letting the roll of MS. in his hands fly to again. " You're not so busy, Miss Paula, surely ? " added Davies, with a grin. " Very good," said Paula ; " I'll come and read it to you." " Get your clothes on, then, and wait here," said Reeves ; " I'll come back and fetch you in a minute. Come, Davies ; " and he turned away with the MS. still in his hand. When both men had disappeared down the wing, Paula went to her heap of old black clothing and her muddy shoes, and put them on. The brilliant Oriental figure vanished into its black shroud, the shining hair was bunched relentlessly into the crown of the shapeless hat, and, re-transformed into the common nondescript form of the poor London girl, Paula sat down on the boards from sheer fatigue, to wait for Reeves. " How funny it all was, not a bit like 6 32 PAULA the interview I thought, and their finding me like that," she muttered ; " however, it all seems smooth so far." As the heat and glow kindled by the dance died out of her poorly-nourished body, and the delightful animation of her triumph faded from her brain, she began to feel chilly, cold, mentally and physically. The stage was draughty, and she shivered in the damp fog, and pressed her hands in her lap to keep them warm. In a few minutes, Reeves, looking twice his natural siae in a fur overcoat and silk hat, with both hands plunged into his capacious pockets, came hurrying back. His face was large and pallid, and, together with his pale greenish eyes and light hair, brought before one's eyes the irre- sistible suggestion of a large white cat. He perceptibly started as his eye fell on the little shabby black heap sitting on the boards just where he had left the brilliant Eastern dancer. " Come, my dear child, come," he exclaimed. " You'll catch cold," and he extended one hand to help her on to her feet. " Follow me," he said, and led the way round through the wings to the stage-door. It was beginning to snow outside. Reeves's little brougham was waiting for them. An icy wind howled down the black street, whirling a cloud of snowflakes in its path. As Reeve, opened the door, it swirled over the threshold like eddying water, and the snow stung their faces and fell white upon the door-mat. Two men were PAULA 83 standing gossiping just inside the doorway; they nudged each other as Reeves and his companion came up, and both followed with interested eyes the pair across the pavement in the snowy wind — Reeves, huge and solid in his heavy coat, the girl slight, with uncertain footsteps, and thin black clothes blown about her by the angry gusts. Reeves held the door open, and she got in and sat down in the soft corner of the carriage. Reeves followed, and took up between himself and his coat all the remaining two-thirds of the seat — a not unwelcome presence to her then in her cold, starved misery, by reason of his very air of warmth and wealth and comfort. He turned to her as the door snapped, and they started. "Well, little girl, that's better, eh?" he said kindly. " Beastly night to be out in on foot." He patted the small soft hand that lay ungloved on her knee — a hand that no fire-lighting nor any other work could roughen, nor redden, nor leave other than smooth and white and supple, as its nature was to be. Paula glanced up at him quickly, and read his face ; it was gracious, patron- ising, benign, and kind and smiling — all that a man's is, in fact, when he is with a woman who is pleasing to him, and by whom he feels certain he will not be repulsed. Paula felt a quick mental recoil, a sort of nervous apprehension as she looked up, and the image of that other graceful and fascinating per- 84 PAULA sonality sprang up in her brain. But where her art was concerned, Paula was blind and deaf to all else ; her instincts fought savagely, unreason- ingly for that, trampling on everything that rose in its path. She saw that she was expected to make herself amiable, and she yielded at once to the necessity. " For my play," she thought half unconsciously, as another woman might have said, " For my child." She smiled back at Reeves a lovely smile, that seemed almost to light up the brougham like a flash of electric light. Want of food, fatigue and cold, nervous excitement, and the influence of the opium and nicotine of her incessant cigarette smoking, had all contributed to intensify the pallor of her face, and lend it a peculiar brilliance ; false and delusive, and not lasting, but effective, fas- cinating, for the time, like the dying light on the consumptive's features. She let her hand rest passive under Reeves's, and said gently, in her softest tone, " Yes, it's very good of you to take all this interest in my work. I have had so many disappointments, and had such a dreadfully hard time lately." Reeves felt a delightful consciousness of his own generosity and magnanimity grow within him. " Well, perhaps that's all coming to an end now," he answered; "we must sec what can be clone with you. Next year you may be driving home in your own brougham, who knows? " PAULA 85 Paula merely laughed, leaning back in her corner, and yielding her figure to the easy, spring- ing motion of the carriage. They were bowling smartly up Piccadilly now, and her eyes, looking through the window beyond Reeves, caught the flash of light from the window of the Piccadilly Club. She sat forward suddenly, and looked through the snow-whitened darkness at the bright panes, with the figures of the men moving behind them. " Was he there? " she wondered ; one, per- haps, of those very forms she caught sight of indistinctly as the carriage flashed by? Then Reeves's words came back to her : Her own brougham — next year. Next year ! might she not then be on a level with him ; with name, money, influence at her command, would she not be his equal? Equal? She would be more, for half her gifts were divine, and his, at most, of this world. He would be a man of wealth, a distinguished figure amongst his own set; but she, if she could but develop and display her gift, would have the fame of half the world, — she who now, night after night, walked by on the wet pavements outside his club in all but rags. And he loved her now, she knew it, and what then when he saw her famous, brilliant, sought after ? Her thoughts moved on, gay symphonies of colour, melting and changing one into the other, a wild but beautiful phantasmagoria of the future; S6 PAULA and she sat lost, absorbed in its contemplation, pale and with her lips parted, and her eyes fixed, and one hand clutched unconsciously at her beating heart. Reeves sat beside her, wondering whether he had really come across a good thing in this casual way, and roughly casting up the cost of mounting a play where the scene was laid in Persia. A jerk, as the coachman pulled up before the mansion where Reeves owned the first floor fiat and the one above, recalled them both. Reeves helped her out attentively. Paula's head swam as she entered the heated atmosphere and glare of light within the glass doors, where the small page- boys stood gazing through at the whirling snow beyond the portico, and the broad white steps of the general staircase, with their red carpet, seemed to heave and sway like billows rising in the ocean. Mechanically she took the arm that Reeves ex- tended to her, and walked up, the stairs feeling like vague, yielding vapour to her feet. When they reached the drawing-room, Reeves ensconced her in the most comfortable chair, put one of the electric lamps behind her, so that it shed a flood of shaded light over her shoulder, and, pulling his own chair within a reasonable distance, prepared to listen with critical attention. He might be extremely susceptible where a woman was concerned ; but he was a sharp, cute, hard- headed judge when his work came into the matter. He made it his boast that he had never produced PAULA 8; an unsuccessful play. Now he did not even glance at the girl, but sat staring fixedly into the fire, with all his soul in his ears, listening, rapt, with his brain at full stretch. Paula had a quite remark- able talent for reading aloud. Her voice was singularly flexible, with tones in it as soft as the touch of velvet. And it fitted round each indi- vidual word and sentence like an exquisite setting to jewels. She read for two hours and three- quarters without a sign of fatigue, and then, at the last word in the play, let the MS. drop, and looked smilingly at Reeves. He jumped to his feet, and took a turn round the room. " First rate ! " he said, as he came back and sat down opposite her again ; " first rate ! " He looked keenly at her. " Well, well ! " he thought ; " how unexpectedly one chances sometimes on a prize !" Aloud he only said, " I can't promise anything, you know, until I've consulted my manager ; but I'm pleased myself, and if he agrees, we'll bring it out. Then your dancing is quite remarkable ; where could you have got it from ? Have you ever been in the East ? " " Never," replied Paula, stretching her feet a little nearer to the hot blaze of the fire. She felt weak now, and dreamy, and faint, and it was nice to sit there in the depths of that luxurious chair and listen to compliments. " Marvellous ! I have seen an Arab youth dance just like that, with that inward curving of the spine, SS PAULA but never any European. You must have practised a great deal." " Comparatively little," murmured Paula ; "only just when I felt inclined." Reeves noticed how pale she was looking. " You look worn out," he said kindly. " Have some coffee or brandy and soda to pull you round." " Oh no, thanks," replied Paula, hastily getting up, with a glance at the clock ; " I must go — I've been here an age." As she went to the door, Reeves followed her. All through the interview his attraction towards her had been growing stronger : her presence, her attitude in his large arm-chair, those soft, well-made feet on his fender-rail, her smile, her voice — all these had been as small draughts of stimulants to him, which a man takes without noticing or counting, but which work their effect all the same upon him. Paula was conscious of it, as she was conscious that she habitually attracted men. She had made no more effort to-night than she ever did, but she had been with him for three hours, and therefore, at the end, the caress in his voice, the warm pressure of his hand, the light in his eyes, all seemed natural to her. She was so accustomed to them all, she received them all from every nine men out of ten she came in contact with. But Reeves had heard the play. He had sat and listened to a piece such as comes once or twice perhaps into the hands of a manager in his whole managerial life — if he is PAULA 89 lucky. The wit and the brilliance of it was in his ears, it seemed to fill the atmosphere of the room, and gather like a glittering aureole round the girl's pale excited face, and the quick thrill of excite- ment in his veins was nearly outweighed by the deference for her genius. "You will consider it then," she said, turning at the door, " and let me know soon ? " She smiled faintly; her eyes were full of light under their sweetly arched lids, her tone was appealing, her face, turned to him, seemed to say, " My life depends on you." The excitement rushed up through the deference. Reeves took her hand again. " Yes, very soon — to-morrow perhaps," he answered. " Good-night, dear; mayn't I? just one." He had slipped his arm round her waist, his face was close to hers. Paula had drawn back, very gently, but decidedly. "Just to seal our agreement about the play," mur- mured Reeves, with his lips very close. Paula flushed, and the tears started to her eyes. The play was very dear, and she might be en- dangering it. " Please don't ask me, not to-night," she murmured appealingly. Reeves drew back at once and dropped his arm. " Oh, certainly not, if you don't wish it ! " he said, with chill formality, and elaborately opened the door, standing at arm's length. Paula hesitated an instant, then passed through the door. Reeves accompanied her in silence across the hall of the 90 1'AULA flat to the outer door, opened this for her, and stood back chillily for her to pass on to the stair- case. They could see straight down it and through the double glass doors into the street. The storm had increased : a perfect blizzard howled and raged past the well-fitting panels of those baize-edged doors. Nothing was visible but a whirling white sheet beyond the panes. The air, even here on the house staircase, had an icy grip. The wind was audible throuch the solid walls. Reeves had meant to send the girl home in a hansom, with one of his rugs to help her miserable clothing in keeping her warm, but that little incident at the door had changed the tenor of his thoughts. He looked now at the raging snowstorm with grim satisfac- tion. " Let her walk," he thought, — " it will do her good." "Good evening, Miss Heywood," he said aloud, and turned back into his flat, closing the door quietly behind him and leaving her on the stair- case. Paula, who had known his thoughts perfectly, and was also accustomed to these sudden falls of temperature in men's manners, smiled slightly, and went down and out. As she opened the doors, the gust of icy wind in her face almost hurled her back- wards. She merely smiled as the snow beat into her face, set her teeth, and let the door swing to behind her on the warmth and ease and comfort they guarded, and turned into the street She PAULA 91 went a few steps, staggering under the violence of the wind, blown from one side of the pavement to the other, blinded by the cutting snow driving against her eyes. The wind caught her hat and wrenched at it, dragging it to one side; then it attacked her hair, not very securely done at the theatre, and pulled it out in loose strands across her eyes ; then it came under her thin cape, piercing her through to the heart with a deadly chill of cold, and sent her reeling against the ice-bound railings. She clung to them, panting, gasping for breath. Her weak- ness came suddenly home to her. How her heart seemed to flutter and her limbs to be like paper! Would she ever reach Lisle Street? "Nonsense, I must," she thought, checking the spasm of fear that rose in her. She left the railings and struggled on again. A slight lull came in the wind, and she reached Piccadilly in safety. The snow was now thick on the pavements, and her feet, chilled through and through in the old shoes, ached with the cold. Very few people seemed out, here at the top of Piccadilly. A man passed at intervals with his collar turned up, hat pressed on his eyes, and hands deep in his pockets, that was all. Feeling an intolerable faintness grow upon her with each step, Paula stumbled on painfully, and gradually got down towards the bottom of the incline. There were more people here and more light, and as she 92 PAULA approached the Piccadilly Club a warm pulse beat through her cold sick misery. " Dear Vincent," she murmured involuntarily, as she saw the warm light from the Club windows pour out into the snow-laden air. The wind seemed suddenly to gain a fresh access of fury as she came up to the Club, the snow beat and whirled and surged wildly in it. Paula felt with terror her strength was ebbing, a strange breathless dizziness was coming over her. How cold, oh how bitterly cold it was ! a darkness greater than the darkness of the night was closing in, her heart seemed leaping in her throat, her limbs had no feeling, she tottered, stretched her hand blindly to the railing, missed it, staggered, and fell senseless in the snow. About the same time that Paula left Reeves, Vincent had entered his Club to inquire for letters, and, finding one or two of importance, stayed there to read them. He stopped there reading and then considering them, till the clock struck the half-hour past seven, then he remembered he was going out to dinner. He had his coat brought, and prepared to leave. As, with his collar well turned up, and his gloved hands in his pockets, he signed from the Club steps to a passing hansom, his eye caught sight of a small crowd of people standing in the driving snow round some object on the ground. " Pore thing, she's dead most like," he heard one old woman mutter to herself as she turned from PAULA 93 the group, shivering herself, and hurried away into the darkness. Vincent, who always allowed himself to be in- fluenced easily where a woman was in question, sauntered down the steps to the crowd, while the hansom waited at the kerb. Two men were just lifting a limp black figure from the ground ; the head dragged heavily back- ward, the hat had fallen off, and a mass of tumbled yellow hair and a stone-white face caught the light from the Club window. " God in heaven ! " ejaculated Vincent, as his eyes fell upon it, " Paula ! " The men who had lifted her looked up, every face in the little knot of figures turned to him. They were all poor, common people, and they stared at Vincent's tall well-dressed figure sprung suddenly amongst them, and the white horror of his face. "Do you know the young woman, sir?" said the man who was supporting Paula's shoulder; her arm dropped nerveless to the ground, the lovely hand lay upturned, livid in the snow. " Yes," returned Vincent, briefly, forcing his way to her side. " Here, my men, lift her up on to those steps while I get some brandy." " Too much of that on board already, I should say," remarked a loafer at his side with a grin. Vincent's eyes met his. He walked at him as the man stood in his way, and rolled him backward into the gutter. Vincent sprang up the steps and into 94 PAULA the Club as the men carried Paula with difficulty, in the teeth of the raging blizzard, after him. His heart seemed breaking with pity. " Poor little girl," he muttered, " poor dear little girl." He got the brandy in a glass from one of the stewards, and hurried back to her. One of the roughs was supporting her head on his arm, kneeling on the upper step. The other stood by holding her shapeless hat and turning it nervously in his hands ; the remaining people, whose curiosity was sufficient to dull their sense of cold, stood round the bottom of the steps, staring open-mouthed. Vincent went down on his knees, raised her head on his own arm, and put the brandy to her lips. A little ran over them and fell down the pale cheeks ; her teeth were clenched, hard and im- movable. Vincent saw nothing would pass them. He looked up, half inclined to summon a doctor, then his eye fell on the increasing knot of figures at the foot of the steps. A policeman had strolled up by this time, and was standing looking over their heads at all the proceedings with judicial gravity, while the snow piled itself on his helmet. On the other side of him he was conscious of the grinning waiters staring through the glass, and he thought he caught the voice of a man he knew demanding his coat preparatory to coming out. " Shall I fetch a doctor, sir?" volunteered one of the men, in an awed voice he thought suited to the blue tint of the upturned face. PAULA 95 " No," said Vincent sharply, anxious to get away from this theatrical publicity ; " I'll take her to her own home," and he stooped over the pulseless figure and lifted it, and went down the steps to the cab. " He knows 'er pretty well, don't 'ee ? " grinned one man to the other as he followed with the hat. Vincent pushed decisively through the loafers and past the policeman, who only stood and stared stolidly in the driving wind. The cabman had jumped from his scat, and offered to hold her if Vincent got in first. He sprang in, and then between the two men the girl's nerveless body was put inside ; the little feet dragged upon the step, and ca'bby had to press them up with his hands. Vincent took the head on his breast, and put both arms round her. " Lisle Street," he called to the cabman, and gave the number. Cabby clambered to his box, and the cab whirled away rapidly through the sheets of blinding snow. " Darling ! darling ! " murmured Vincent, beside himself with distress, lifting her head higher on to his breast, and pressing his lips down on hers. Just as they turned the corner of Leicester Street, she stirred a little in his arms, and he saw her eyes open and felt her shiver. " What has happened ? " she murmured vaguely. "You fainted, darling; but you are safe now, safe in my arms, and close at home." Paula drew 96 PAULA a long, gasping breath, her head fell back, and she drifted away into unconsciousness again. When the landlady appeared at the door, in answer to the cabman's knock, Vincent beckoned to her. The woman, impressed by the sight of Vincent's silk hat and high white collar, which she caught a glimpse of through the glass, lumbered across the pavement in the snow. " Sakes alive !" she exclaimed, on seeing the limp form and death-like face within. " Whatever's happened to her ? " Vincent flung open both doors, and with great difficulty managed to put the girl into the cabman's arms, while the woman supported her feet, that had banged against the step before, to Vincent's distress. When the trio had reached the hall, Vincent took her again himself, and sent the cab- man to fetch the nearest doctor. " Which is her room ? " he asked the landlady as he went up the stairs, with the woman following him. " Over the drawing-room, sir, at the back," she answered, and they mounted the stairs in silence. Through all his anxiety and distress a faint feeling of pleasure passed into Vincent's mind at the thought of seeing her room, and being privi- leged to enter it. At the head of the stairs he paused : they were in pitch blackness, and he did not know where the door was. The landlady fumbled in her pocket for the matches, and then hastily PAULA 97 pushed past him, opened a door, and struck a light. She lighted a candle on the mantelpiece, and as it flared up Vincent followed her into the room. It struck him as painfully small and poor, with its sloping roof; but the bed in the corner was a pretty spot in it. He walked to it and laid her on it. " Is Mr. Ileywood in ? " he asked. " No, sir." " Have you any brandy in the house? " " Yes, sir ; they 'as some in their own cupboard," the woman answered glibly. She knew exactly where that brandy was situated. " I'll go downstairs for it. I would undress her at once and put her into bed, and cover her up well," Vincent said. " Do that at once, will you ? " he added sharply, as the woman stood looking rather helpless, and he disappeared. It only took him a few minutes to run down the stairs and find the cupboard in the unlighted room below. He got out the bottle and bounded up the stairs again. The landlady had succeeded in loosening Paula's clothing, and drawing off her wet skirt. Underneath this she had unexpectedly come upon the beautiful Liberty silk, and stripped it off with impatient fingers. " Makin' out they're so poor and dressin' up like this," she muttered con- temptuously, flinging the dress, now a good deal crushed and tumbled, on the foot of the bed. Then she dragged the blankets and quilt over her, 7 98 PAULA and as Vincent re-entered, stood panting from her exertions. He came over to the bed — the white face and tumbled hair lay motionless on the pillow. Her teeth were not so tightly clenched as in the former faint. Vincent bent over her and poured some of the brandy between her lips. She stirred a little, and the lips parted easily now and her eyelashes quivered. "That is better," he murmured, in a relieved tone. "Can't you light a fire?" he said, looking up at the woman, who stood beside him staring solemnly; "this room's freezing," and he shivered in his overcoat. " I don't know as this grate'll burn," returned the woman, going sullenly over to it; "I don't know as it doesn't smoke." "Light it and see," said Vincent shortly from the bed. The helpless disbelief of this class of person in their own and everybody else's capacity to do anything needful, always annoyed his willing, in- dependent spirit. "Well, sir," rejoined a complaining voice from the hearth, "I've no one to help me; my servant's out, and I'm not accustomed to be asked ter do such things at this time of night, when I'm dress :d and all, with the coals and the sticks in the cella right away downstairs." Vincent straightened himself and stood up by the bedside, setting the brandy on the table beside him, and looked clown upon the woman PAULA 99 with, as she said afterwards, "quite a nasty flash in his eyes." " The fire must be lighted," he said, " so there is an end to it. If you won't do it, I will." The landlady gazed at him in blank astonishment. The tall, slim figure in the long coat looked very commanding standing there. His silk hat almost touched the sloping beam against the ceiling. He gave her one second in which to answer, then seeing her still hesitate, and feeling a shiver run through the form on the bed, he snatched up the second candlestick from the mantelpiece and lighted it. " Kindly stay here, then," he said sharply, as he went out. The landlady, feeling half resentful, half overawed, stood a few minutes where he had left her, and then began thuddincr round the room with her heavy tread, unneces- sarily putting things straight, and making a vulgar neatness speaking of herself, out of the beautiful confusion that spoke of Paula. The form on the bed shivered, and, for want of more brandy, lapsed again into insensibility. Vincent found his way, with light feet, to the very bottom of the house, and groped along a stone passage, which he judged might lead to the cellar beneath the steps. He came across an old basket on his way there, and this, when he reached the cellar, he balanced on the coals and proceeded to fill it. There seemed no shovel, so he gathered together the most promising lumps with his fingers. Then he found his way carefully back to ioo PAULA the kitchen, and looked about for the wood. A pile of bundles happened to be standing behind the kitchen door. He took a whole one, and a newspaper that was screwed in the corner of the fender. All went into the basket on his arm, and he turned to go upstairs. Only perhaps five minutes altogether had elapsed before he re-entered Paula's room. The landlady, who had taken a chair at the foot of the bed, gasped when she saw him come in with her vegetable basket full of coals. He took no notice of her, but set the coals by the grate, and then approached the bed. It was close to the window, and an icy draught from without blew upon him and it. He looked at the covering for a minute and then felt it. It consisted of two very thin blankets and a worn cotton quilt. Vincent unfastened his overcoat and then drew it off. It was warm through with his own warmth. He laid it over the girl, pressing it close round her shoulders. The woman watched him stolidly, more impressed than ever now by his evening dress and expanse of shirt front. "Have you taken off her shoes?" he asked suddenly, turning on her. She mumbled apologetically that she had for- gotten it. Vincent volunteered nothing; he merely told her to get up and let him come to the foot of the bed. J'aula's two little feet, in their soddened, muddy PAULA 10 1 shoes, lay together, limp and ice-cold, between the blankets. He drew both shoes and stockings off, and held the frozen feet for a minute in his warm hands. Work and love and anger sent the blood quickly and hotly along his veins. He laid the little feet back in the blanket, somewhat warmed by the contact of his hand, and covered them over. Then he crossed to the hearth and knelt down on it to light up the fire. He had just stuffed in the paper and laid the wood when there was a per- emptory tap at the door, and immediately after the doctor came in. He was a short man with a pompous dignity in every line of his face and form. He stopped short just inside the door, at the sight of Vincent's elegant figure in his evening dress kneeling before the grate. " Come in," said Vincent, with the least trace of impatience in his voice, and going on rapidly with his work. " Your patient is on the bed. She fainted and fell on the pavement about an hour ago. She came to as I brought her home and fainted again, but not so deeply. It has seemed more a stupor than a faint since." By this time Vincent had put a match to the paper, and the fire was so scientifically laid, and with such an abundant supply of wood that it caught, and a broad sheet of flame went crackling up the chimney. " Enough to set it afire," remarked the landlady, 102 PAULA coming over to the rug; "and not swept this nine years." Vincent had risen to his feet and gone over to where the doctor stood looking down on the bed. He had one of Paula's hands in his, his fingers on the wrist, and glanced at the watch in his other hand. He looked up as Vincent approached. " The cabman desires to be paid," he said merely, in solemn tones. " The cabman," echoed Vincent, for a minute not knowing what he meant. Then he glanced at the unwieldy form of the landlady. Should he send her down — no, quicker to go himself. In the hall he found the cabman. Their colloquy was short, and Vincent was soon back in the top room. "Well, how is she?" he asked as he came into it. The fire was blazing away merrily, and the little place many degrees warmer now than when he had entered it at first. " There's nothing at all the matter that I can discover," said the doctor, speaking gravely with pursed-up lips. " It is simply a case of inanition. I should say she has had no food for several hours, and that combined with the cold has produced collapse. She wants food now, food and wine, and watching." " What sort of food," demanded Vincent — " beef- tea?" "Yes," said the doctor, " beef- tea would be excellent, and wine or brandy at intervals. She PAULA 103 shouldn't be left alone without stimulants through the night. The fire should be kept up, and some one should watch her and be ready with nourish- ment at the least sign of faintness. She seems to me to have been overstrained — she's low, and the action of the heart very weak. Coma in a low temperature in her state might be, well " — with a shrug of his shoulders — "fatal; she should be watched." " I understand," said Vincent thoughtfully. He stood silent for a second or two thinking. He had had no time till now to remember his own engage- ments. They flashed upon him now; he must send a note to the people he had disappointed at dinner, and for the other — should he be wanted here through the night? " May I ask," said the doctor, looking round superciliously at the silk-lined overcoat on the bed, at the hat on the chair, at Vincent's own figure, and the mark the grate bars had left on his other- wise immaculate shirt-cuff, "if you — er — intend to stay yourself?" What was this whole little busi- ness ? he wondered. " Well," Vincent said simply, " the fact is I was just going out to dinner when all this happened. She fainted just outside my club, and I'm due now elsewhere," he added, pulling out his watch and looking at it. " But nothing is of any consequence except securing her getting round. If ) r ou say she can't be left I must stay till When's Mr. Hey- 104 PAULA wood coming back?" he said suddenly, turning towards the woman at the hearth. "Not till to-morrow mornin'; 'ee's gorn into the country," returned the woman rather spitefully. Vincent hesitated. He raised his eyebrows significantly at the doctor and went to the door; the doctor followed him, and when the two men were outside, Vincent said : " That woman is a perfect fool, and will do nothing, and the girl's brother's away. I can stay myself with her till to-morrow morning and watch her, if you could kindly send in the things you think necessary." The doctor came down a little from his throne of pomposity and promised to see the things were sent ; and in a few minutes Vincent came back to deal with the landlady. Her fat, loud-breathing presence in the room annoyed him, and, as she had evidently no intention of being more than orna- mental, he thought he could dispense with her altogether. The landlady had some scruples as to the respectability of the whole proceedings, but Vincent was so dictatorial, so " barefaced," as she put it, that her moral courage ebbed before him, and at last she lumbered out of the room and down the stairs, muttering " she'd never known such goin's on in all her born days." Vincent, left in possession upstairs, looked round the little room and over the sweet unconscious figure on the bed, with a thrill of keen feeling. Ilalf-an-hour later Eli/a, the servant, came up, PAULA 105 round-eyed with astonishment, bringing a tray of parcels from the chemist's and grocer's. Vincent had his kettle boiling, and in three minutes was carrying a cup of beef-tea to the bed. Paula lay in a conscious stupor ; but he roused her enough to drink the contents of the cup. She opened her eyes dreamily upon him. " How delightful it is to be with you ! " she murmured. Then she closed them again with a sigh. Vincent flushed with pleasure, took the cup from her, and went back to the hearth. The doctor had said she was to sleep if she could, and only be roused if her lips seemed growing white. Vincent sat and watched her, while the little clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the seconds. At intervals he went to look at her. Twice she was too white to please him, and he got her to swallow some brandy, and brought the colour back. At two o'clock the cold seemed to intensify, and he went to her again. No ; she was not white now. The face glowed like delicate, rose-tinted porcelain. She seemed to feel his presence and his gaze, for her eyes opened. She looked up at him. She was not very clear ; the returning warmth and sleepiness made everything confused, in a pleasant confusion. Vincent looked down on her. " Are you warm now ? " he asked. " Yes ; deliciously warm," she murmured. Vincent put his hand in under the blankets round 106 PAULA her neck. " Yes, you are," he said, withdrawing it, and covering her close to the chin. " Keep so, and go to sleep." He was turning away, but she murmured his name. It was just a soft whisper. Her cheeks were flushed now, her lips warm and red, her eyes bright, though suffused with drowsy, semi-unconsciousness. She realised nothing except that he was there. " What is it ? " asked Vincent. " Kiss me," she murmured, and Vincent bent down and kissed her, with his heart beating. " Good-night, dear," he said gently, and the extreme softness and gentleness of his voice acted like a soothing spell upon her tired brain, and lulled it into sleep again. Vincent went over to the hearth, took the one high cane chair there was, and stretched out his legs wearily to the fender. He felt very tired himself now, cold without his coat in the draughty room, and faint for want of food. He had had nothing to cat since his luncheon that day at one. He glanced at the becf-tea jar on the mantelpiece, but somehow felt too worn out to be at the trouble of making it for himself. He folded his arms on his chest to keep his hands warm, and let his head sink for- ward, and his eyelids over his eyes. It got colder momentarily, and the temperature in the room sank, though the fire burned well. Vincent coughed several times and turned uneasily, as he dozed on the hard chair. PAULA 107 Towards eight o'clock in the morning the light began to struggle into the room. The snow that lay on all outside lent its reflection, and the room grew light rapidly. Paula stirred in her sleep, then opened her eyes and looked round. Invigorated by the food and the brandy, and the long unbroken rest, she felt well — quite well ; and with her brain clear now, and only her memory of last night at fault, she gazed about her. The table beside her of bottles and glasses and cups, the coat over her, Vincent's motionless figure in the chair by the hearth, told her this much at once : she had been ill ; he had stayed with her and been nursing her. A warm glow ran through her ; she almost trembled with the quick thrill of loving, affectionate gratitude that penetrated her. "Vincent," she said softly, raising herself on one elbow. The motionless figure did not stir. Paula slipped out of bed, and with her bare feet crossed to him. The piled-up fire was still burning steadily, but Paula felt how cold the air was in spite of it. She stood for a second or so rubbing one little foot over the other, and looking down upon him. Then she dropped on one knee beside him, and put her arms round without touching him, and let her hands rest at the back of his chair, that she might lean forward and look into his face. She was always a little, just a very little — well, not afraid of him, but timid with him when they were together ordinarily, and now it was so delightful to have him like this 10S PAULA so completely in her possession, so unconsciously, so helplessly for those few minutes her own. She noticed his evening dress, and her eye pass- ing over him rested on the white cards that stuck out of his breast pocket. By his attitude, as he had fallen more into sleep and sunk more forward, the cards had been forced half out of his pocket, and Paula could recognise them as invitation cards : on the foremost of one she could read "Lady Sandhurst" and "pleasure" and "company" and "dinner." The other was a similar card with a different writing, doubtless a second invitation. Paula's sensitive eyes glowed and lighted as she looked, then she glanced round. No sign of any dinner for him here : then her eyes came back to him ; she noticed the coal-dust on his cuffs and hands. Paula leaned yet a little more forward and gazed into the unconscious face. Its bloodlessness and the fine carving of its lines reminded her of a statue. The cold morning light striking across it made it very grey ; the checks were pale ; the whole face looked tired and haggard. He was sleeping quite silently with his mouth tightly closed and lips compressed. That moment, in- significant and commonplace as it seemed, was the greatest, psychologically, of her life. In that moment when she knelt there with her bare feet on the bare floor of the attic, looking into his face, the great admiration within her was joined suddenly PAULA 109 by a great gratitude, and from the union of these two her love, a devoted passionate love, sprang into being. The grey light came in and embraced them both. The unconscious, wearied, sleeping figure of the man, and the ardent, intensely living form and just-awakened face of the girl kneeling there with her bare white arms locked round him, her hair falling on her shoulders, the linen loose and open at her neck, and her eyes upraised, full of the brightest of all dawns. " My life, if ever you need it," she murmured. There was only a grey, light quietness round them. No eye and no ear witnessed the vow. Vincent stirred slightly. Did there come to him any touch of dim consciousness that his future was balanced and decided in that moment? Paula, remembering suddenly her half-dressed condition, rose hastily as he moved and retreated to the bed. She had got in and drawn up the clothes just as he lifted his head and uncrossed his stiffened arms. His first glance was towards the bed. " Well, how do you feel now ? " he said, smiling. " Quite well : how good you were to me last night ! " " I could hardly do less, dear," returned Vincent. " I should think you're ready for some breakfast, aren't you ? " He stirred the fire into a blaze, and set the kettle on. " The coffee's downstairs in the cupboard where no PAULA you found the brandy," volunteered Paula, feeling a delight in this humble domesticity shared with him. What would poverty or any exterior circum- stance matter if one possessed this fund of pleasure in a companion's presence? The young fellow's face and figure furnished this poor little room better than all the upholsterers in London could have done. " I'll go and fetch it," he answered, and went out and down the narrow dark stairs that he felt quite familiar with since last night. About nine o'clock Charlie reached Lisle Street, and went straight up to his sister's room, just glancing into the sitting-room on his way up. As he pushed the door open, the sound of laughter reached him, the blazing light o( the fire, and the scent of toast and coffee. He came in, and then stopped in blank amazement on the threshold. Paula was a little raised in the bed, leaning on one doubled white arm, her light hair flowing in ruffled waves over the pillow propped up behind her. Beyond Vincent's pallid, tired looks there was nothing to suggest illness of cither. Vincent was sitting on the foot of the bed, leaning against the rail and sipping his coffee. Charlie stood, growing pale, and his heart beating painfully. Nothing seemed able to explain this situation. Vincent's evening dress proclaimed that he must have been there all night, and his overcoat flung upon the bed, and his gloves and FAULA in hat on the girl's toilet table, lent an indefinable air of appropriation to the place. "This looks a terrible scene of dissipation, I'm afraid," Vincent said, quietly smiling ; " but come in, it's all right when explained." Charlie came in, reassured, in spite of the evidence of his own senses. "You are two extraordinary people," he said, shutting the door and going over to the fire. " But I must say you have made your- selves comfortable in here. It's the most beastly cold day you can imagine outside." "Have you had your breakfast, Charlie?" asked Paula. "Nothing; I've come straight up from Ealing," he answered. " I hurried back, thinking you might feel dull, but " he raised his eyebrows and looked round significantly. Paula laughed, and in a few extravagant phrases, modified by Vincent's deprecations, she gave him a vivid account of the previous evening and night. Charlie listened in silence, pouring himself out a cup of coffee and helping himself to some buttered toast. " I always told you Vincent was immense," he said as she finished ; "everybody adores him." "My dear Charlie," murmured Vincent, "you'll ruin my character with all this flattery. Well, I think the patient's fairly restored now," he added, getting up, " and I have got to see my agent in the City at eleven, so I must go. Can you spare this now?" he asked, putting his hand on his ii2 PAULA overcoat lying on the bed. Paula said she could, and he drew it on. " Good-bye, dear ; take care of yourself, and let me hear what Reeves said about the play, after all." lie walked over to the dressing-table for his hat, and Paula watched him, full of delightful emotions. To watch him look in her glass, pick up his gloves from her toilet-table ! It was playing at being married to him ! " So-long, Charlie," he said, as he opened the door. " Oh, don't trouble to come down with me. My dear fellow, where's the occasion ? " As Vincent walked away from Lisle Street, he thought with a smile how curiously relentless some- times a man's individual fate seemed to be. How it mocked at and overrode the precautions reared by feeble humanity as outworks before the enemy. He had left London, even England, to avoid her, and then on the second evening of his coming back she was thrown unexpectedly, unnecessarily, unavoidably, across his path. He felt his outworks had been mercilessly destroyed in the just past night. Were the Greeks right when they painted a man but a mere will-less, powerless shade, hurried on to destruction or borne aloft in safety, impelled to virtue or dragged into vice and misery and shame, just as his own ever-accompanying black- winged Destiny decided ? "So that's your decision? You will only produce it on those terms? " It was Paula's voice speaking. She was leaning against the wall of Reeves's drawing-room, looking up at him as he stood facing her. The electric light shone down on her; she was very pale, and her eyes had a tired, disappointed look in them. Reeves looked down upon her in silence, fumbling with the roll of her manuscript. There was a little garnet brooch at her neck. His eye rested on it mechanically, and saw how her heart-beats made it rise and fall. It crossed his mind then that he was doing an unwise action. That which has been accursed since the world began — bargaining for a human life. " Let her go," said a voice within him; " take the work, and let her go." "Is it such a very hard condition?" he mur- mured, after a minute. "Not in itself," returned Paula; "not to many women — perhaps not to me under other circum- stances, but I'm given over to another. Surely you in 8 H4 PAULA would not want to marry me, would you, knowing that ? " " What can the other fellow do for you ? " said Reeves, evasively. " Can he give you what I can ? — wealth, fame, everything?" "No," answered Paula, quietly; "not anything; but love isn't bought by gifts." There was silence, in which Reeves looked at her. It was a pity that in those moments her face could show no lines, only its youthful whiteness, to the searching light. It was a pity that the figure had such grace, as she leant wearily against the wall. In those moments her youth and attractive- ness took up arms with Reeves against her, and she was helpless before them. Gifts, as she had said, are the handicap on the race of life. " No," he said, suddenly turning away from her, " there is no other condition. As my wife, I'll bring out the play for you — give you a public and a future. If you won't accept these terms, I have no others to offer," and he flung the roll of paper on the table. " You won't get any other manager to take it," he said, after a minute, as she did not speak, only leant there watching with absent eyes the stiff paper on the table slowly uncurl itself like a living thing. " You have gifts, but that play's very peculiar and rather risky. I see it, only I'm willing to take the risk, and I believe you'll be very great; but I don't know who else in all London except myself would chance it." PAULA 115 Paula still stood silent. A sense of helplessness, a weariness of everything, came over her. Here was her desire given into her hand. She would be very great. All her dreams, her vague hopes, her longings of years past, were here crystallised into tangible form and pressed upon her, but now weighted with a condition that rendered them worthless. Reeves walked about the room nervously, then came up to her. " Why, my dear little girl, how can you hesitate?" he said kindly, taking one nerveless hand in his and holding it. " Don't you understand how much I can do for you ? I tell you, you'll have all London at your feet, and by this time next year your name will be known pretty well all over the world." He saw he had touched one right note at any rate. Her eyes gleamed as he spoke, and her lips quivered. No more obscurity and nonentity, no more to walk in the streets a mere insignificant little unit of the crowd, with all her powers locked within her own brain, where they fought and struggled vainly, destroying themselves and her. Here would be life at last, life for herself, and immortality perhaps for her work. " Oh, Reeves," she said, suddenly clasping his hand with both of hers, " do take it. I don't want any of the money that may come from it. Take all the profits from it for yourself, only produce it and let me act in it. Don't ask mc to u6 PAULA tie myself. Don't tempt me to marry you. I can't ever love you, I feel I ought not to marry you. It would be a crime. I am as good as married to somebody else." Reeves's face grew cold as he listened, and he withdrew his hand. He felt the intense love for her work which underlay the words. He heard the accent of fear with which she begged him not to tempt her. He felt sure with a little diplomacy he could twist her to his own wishes. She was weak, helpless, blind in the intoxication of her great desire, and he saw it. " I can't alter what I have already said, if we argue over it for a week. Perhaps, if you feel so strongly about the matter, you had better take back your play and see what you can do with it yourself." Paula was unnerved, as a mother who sees her child in danger. She drew herself up from her leaning attitude and looked Reeves full in the face with her steady brilliant eyes. His shifted and fell, and moved uneasily under them. " Then you want to marry me, knowing I con- sent only for the play, that I can't ever care for you, and that my whole soul is given to another?" " Yes," said Reeves, sullenly. There was a long silence, in which Reeves fid- geted about the room, wondering what she was thinking of. Then he came up and stood in front of her. PAULA 117 " Wouldn't you like to have your own victoria and drive out in it shopping every afternoon ? Have nothing to do all day but amuse yourself? Drive in the Park, and have everybody turn their heads to look after you ? Wouldn't that be nice, eh ? " Paula raised her eyes to him. To her, Vincent's figure seemed standing between them. " Very," she answered coldly, and Reeves saw she was unmoved. " Then you need only work so little," he re- sumed ; " all the summer we would take for our- selves. You have only to say what you would like, to have it — a villa on one of the Italian lakes, or a yacht to go cruising in the South seas. Surely it's not a very terrible prospect? " Her eyes were still on his — an absent look came into them. All the pictures that his words un- folded before her seemed barren and dark, devoid of sunlight, as if he had conjured up for her a trip to the Arctic Ocean ; and then, so strangely does the brain work sometimes, she seemed to see a prison rise before her in imagination, a convict yard with rows of chained, blistered human beings bending to their labour under the brazen beams of a pitiless sun. Somehow she felt to herself that she was there, chained and bowed, thirsty and suffering, with blistered bleeding limbs, and yet happy, divinely, satisfyingly happy, for beside her, working also in the glare, its shadow falling on nS PAULA her, was the figure that stood between herself and Reeves. Her whole nature cried out in the vision. The Italian lake, the Southern seas, Reeves's villa and his yacht, were to her blank and cheerless; while a prison, desert, or grave shared with this other seemed homes of passionate pleasure. " No," she said suddenly, " I can't do it. I am not free to marry you." She made a movement as if to leave altogether ; her face was determined. Reeves turned pale, and looked helplessly about the room, as if seeking some inspiration. His eye fell suddenly on the play itself lying on the table. He picked it up. " Well, wait one moment," he said. " Come and sit down just for a few minutes, and let me read you something here, and see then if you have the heart to bury it in some back cupboard at home." " What's the good ? I must know my own play, surely ? " said Paula, amused and light-hearted again, as she felt her decision was made. " Well, never mind ; just to please me. Come." Pie wheeled forward the deep, comfortable arm- chair she had sat in that first night at his rooms. Paula, always willing to oblige every one where possible, cast herself into it, clasping each arm of it lightly in her smooth, soft hands, and looking over at Reeves with unconcealed derision. Reeves, unmoved, seated himself in his chair and opened the MS. in the middle, and began to read. He had a large, supple, sympathetic voice, admirably PAULA 119 adapted to reading aloud, and here he exerted his skill to the utmost. It was his last chance, and he meant to win. He read on. There was complete silence in the room, and the clever sentences went through it like the passes of polished rapiers. After a time he stopped suddenly and looked up. The girl had sunk back in the chair, her eyelids were closed, she was deathly pale, and breathing heavily. Her heart gave great bounds at irregular intervals, one hand had slipped from the chair arm and hung quivering to the floor ; her whole body was tense and trembling. It was the physical expression of the agony of the inward struggle. " Paula ! " She opened her eyes. " Yes." " Is it to live ? Shall I produce it ? " The girl sprang to her feet ; her eyes flamed out of the sick, exhausted pallor of her face. " Yes," she said, "produce it." " Then you will marry mc ? " " I suppose so." " Darling ! " exclaimed Reeves. He got up, seized both her hands, drew her into his arms, and kissed her. Paula shivered, and submitted pas- sively. It seemed to herself she had stepped forward in the darkness, and slipped and fallen suddenly on the miry ground of prostitution. At close upon eleven o'clock a knock came to the door of Vincent's flat. Vincent himself was 120 PAULA on the point of going to bed. He had returned not more than half-an-hour before from a big dinner, where he had been greatly bored. The stillness of his rooms seemed to oppress him, and he determined to turn in and sleep. He was in his bedroom when he heard that knock fall on his door. He paused in the centre of the room with a slight smile. He recognised it directly. It was Paula's knock ; imperious, impetuous, like none other that ever came there. He smiled, thinking how almost any other woman coming at that com- promising hour would have tried to modify their knock and veil their coming, if ever so slightly; but that was not Paula. He rather liked her for her want of care for herself and her reputation. It gave him more to take care of. Thinking of this now, he laid down his watch he was just pre- paring to wind, and crossed himself to the outer door and opened it to her. She came past him quickly, and went by like a flash into his sitting- room. He rclockcd the door quietly; then he followed her back into his room and shut the door. Paula came up and seized both his hands. " Tell me you're not angry with me for coming ! You don't mind my coining, do you?" she said imploringly, eagerly, in excited entreaty. "No, of course I am not; why should I be?" returned Vincent in his softest voice, drawing the pliable figure, that was trembling all over, into his PAULA 121 arms, and kissing her on the mouth, waves of delight coursing through his blood as he felt this living joy at his breast. He waited for her to speak; but Paula lay silent in his arms, in that soft, seducing, caressing, tender embrace. Then suddenly she tore herself out of his arms. "Vincent, don't, don't; I have promised to marry him ! " Vincent drew away from her a few steps and looked at her in silence. The slight, elegant figure, the unmoved face, with its dark eyebrows and grave eyes she was accustomed to see soften for her, swam before her sight, and seemed to gather into them all that was of account to her in this life. Her eyelids quivered with a rush of fresh tears, and the next moment she had thrown herself down along the ground, and her soft cheek and lips were pressed upon his feet. Nobody but Paula could have done it, but to her the action was easy, natural ; her flexible body had been trained to express emotions, as a voice or face, and the action, which with almost any other woman would have been theatrical, affected, awkward, or absurd, was with her simple and beautiful, because so absolutely natural. Vincent thought he had never seen anything so inimitably graceful as the fall and the figure that lay upon the ground. .And was another man ? The thought went into him like a dagger. "Oh, do forgive me," she sobbed; "don't look at me like that. Tell me what to do, and I'll do 122 PAULA it." He felt her hot lips and the pressure of her cheek on his instep. He bent down and lifted her under her arms, and drew her up to him. Then he sat down in one of the huge purple chairs, and gathered her into his arms and pressed her head upon his shoulder. " You are angry with me ? " " No, not angry, only surprised." "Do you care whether I marry or not?" A feverish tightening of his arms about her was the only response. " Who is the man ? " he asked, after a minute. " Reeves." " I should feel I ought not to stand in the way of any one who would marry you," he said constrainedly. "Oh, Vincent, it isn't that at all. It's for the play!" " What play ? " " Why, mine; he will produce it, make me, give me to the world, if — if I marry him." " I see, it's a trade," rejoined Vincent, with a slight bitter smile. " Yes ; tell me what I am to do." Her soft lips were in his neck, one hand, burn- ing and trembling, pressed his cheek and tried to turn his averted face to hers. " I can't, not at once in this way. I must have time to think." " I thought it was all settled," she said, lying PAULA 123 with a sort of despairing passivity in his arms, and pushing the hair back from her forehead. " When I had his note saying he had accepted it, and I was to go and see him, I was so happy. I thought I was free, that it would be a great success, and after its run here you would take me touring with it in the provinces. You would have done that, wouldn't you ? " She turned a little in his clasp, easily as a child turns in its bed, and raised her face upwards to him. " Yes," murmured Vincent from between his compressed lips. " I wanted my liberty so much. There's no liberty where there's poverty, but this will be only exchanging the tie of poverty for the tie of marriage," There was silence in the room, then, following her last word, Vincent held her to him, sitting silent and motionless, while a tide of feelings he hardly recognised, and to which he could not give a name, seemed to sweep across him. It always needs a rival to teach a man how much he loves a woman. Her own virtue, her own charm, her own sweetness, has not one-tenth the power to rouse his passions as the approach of another man. Paula, living close to him, loving him, devoted solely to him, with all her powers of attraction could not move Vincent as these words of Reeves and marriage on her lips. Women value men according to their own desire for them. Men 124 PAULA value women according to the desire of others for them. " Let me get up," said Paula, after a minute in a stifled voice. " In your arms I can think of nothing but you; and I must, I must try to think what I'm to do. Let me go." Vincent released her, and she got up and took her place in the chair opposite him and leant towards the fire. She shivered and looked white and ill. " You see," she said, " it's a great chance for me, a great opening, and perhaps the only one. I have tried to get my plays accepted in the ordinary way, but no one will look at them and consider them. Here, in this case, Reeves will simply make me ; he will produce the play in the best possible way, under the best conditions, and I have the principal part in it. He says I have exceptional talent, that I shall be a great success, the success perhaps of the century. Is it worth marrying him for? " She put both elbows on the table by her and leant her chin on them, gazing across at him. She looked terribly white and haggard, worried and unhappy, and half the colour and beauty of her face at other times was taken from it, but to Vincent it appeared now in the light of the other man's passion, holding, as it had never done yet. "If you don't care for the man, it's a simple sale of yourself, that's all," he returned. His own PAULA 125 face had grown as white as hers, and she saw the lines hardening round his mouth. " You know I don't care for him," said Paula, passionately. Vincent's face grew paler yet, and set till it looked rigid and white as the marble mantel- piece beside him. Pie started up and walked up and down a length of the room in silence. " I can't let you do it," he said at last, suddenly. " It is a sheer simple prostitution, loathsome, un- natural. Nothing would reconcile you to it. No success would be worth it. It would be a life of wretchedness for you. Give up the idea." " Then what can I do ? " she said, wearily leaning back in her chair. " There seems no way of getting my work taken otherwise, and you see what I am, a hundredth-rate actress, not even that now, and with no money and no position ; and you I may lose at any minute — you don't care for me much. You would not marry me." Her voice quivered violently. Vincent looked at her and saw the blue eyes swimming ; two great heavy tears rolled from the lids and fell down the bloodless checks. She got up and tried to turn from him. Vincent came towards her. "What is it? Come to me," and he stretched out his arms. All his tenderness and love excited by herself, all his passion roused by the thought of the other man. As she still shrank from him, trying to check her tears, he came closer and drew 126 PAULA her to him. " I will marry you, Paula, rather than give you up to that fellow Reeves — so let us settle it. I can't bear to see those great big tears." Paula, looking up, saw that the pallor had passed from his face ; it was flushed and smiling and human-looking now as it bent over her. " Won't that make you happy ? " Paula put both arms round him and burst into a passion of sobs. "Oh yes, yes, as long as you cared for me, but you may not. Charlie says " "Well, what?" asked Vincent, a slight hardness coming into his voice. " That you have loved lots of women, that you don't care for any of them long, that you go from one to the other. Will you continue to love me ? If not — even if we were married " "We can't say anything for the future," returned Vincent; "I know nothing about that. Why trouble about it ? We love each other very much now. Hadn't we better take what the present offers, and leave the future to look after itself?" "Oh, I don't know; it's all so complicated, and I can't think now. My head seems spinning round, and I must go, Vincent," she added, freeing herself from him, and looking at the clock. " I can't decide anything. You think it all over, and decide for us both." "Nature has decided it already, dear, I think," said Vincent, smiling. " I'm coming back with PAULA 127 you," he added, as she picked up the little velvet hat she had thrown in one of the chairs. The walk back to her house was very silent. She felt dazed, incapable of thought. She put her arm through Vincent's, and let it lean there with a sense of exquisite pleasure. Could the success of any play, the triumph of any art, give her more than this ? Art, success, triumph, may have their own rewards, their own pleasure ; but the subtlest, keenest, sweetest, most satisfying joys remain for ever locked in Nature's hands. The following afternoon, early, Vincent walked round to Lisle Street. The air was crisp and bright, full of the winter sunlight. Piccadilly was crowded with well-dressed men and women, and bright faces stung into colour by the sharp, small wind. Everything looked bright and cheery, and British and common-place, at three o'clock this February afternoon. Vincent walked on with a light heart and a pleasing animation within him. It was characteristic of him that he never ques- tioned the wisdom of a course once decided on, and seldom turned back from it for any considera- tion. As he walked now, it never occurred to him to think over the wisdom or unwisdom of the step he had taken. Any hesitation was over and done with before he had let the decisive words pass his lips to Paula last night. Now he was only engaged in pleasant visions of the future, and thoughts of the woman who would share it. Under 123 PAULA the influence of his passion for her, she seemed to him the condition of his life " both necessary and sufficient," as they say in mathematics ; and as she was attained, he did not trouble to think of anything else just then. To marry her quietly, and take her away to Cairo within the following week, and then on to Australia, was the plan he was building up in his brain as he went along. As he entered the small dark room from the outside air, he was vaguely conscious of stepping into another atmosphere, metaphorically as well as actually. It was very dark inside, and the air so laden with tobacco smoke that he could hardly see across it. There was a faint scent of opium, too, that weighed upon the senses. The fire burned in a cavernous red hollow, sheets of loose paper lay upon the table, and after the first second his eyes descried the form of the girl herself lying on the couch beneath the window. She had a white dressing-gown on with open sleeves falling back from her arms, which were clasped above her head, and her hair fell over the edge of the low couch and touched the floor. The whole formed a sharp contrast to the bustling, practical British outside, and would have struck disagreeably on many men, but Vincent was in himself peculiar, and the scene amused him rather than anything else, while the air of supine decadence about the picture was rather a relief to the perpetual Philistinism with which he was always surrounded PAULA 129 and never in sympathy. He came up to the sofa with a smile, and would have lifted her in his arms but that she started up as he approached, and something in her face made him retreat a little and stand motionless. It was pale, and her eyes looked unnaturally bright, with the pupils widely dilated in them as if by fear or pain, or both. "Are you ill, dear?" he said in his softest voice, that voice that when Paula heard it always seemed to rouse in her the thirst to hear it again. " No ; at least not physically." She crossed to the mantelpiece as she spoke, and then stood leaning there with her back to it. She took a paper and some tobacco, and began to roll herself a cigarette in her quick, dexterous fingers ; the action seemed quite mechanical and unconscious, the result of extreme mental nervousness and tension and suppressed excitement. Vincent watched her in silence. Her hands were not the least of her attractions. They were very white and singularly smooth, slim, but yet with every bone beautifully encased and concealed, and a faint rose flush at each finger tip. " It's no use our seeing each other any more," she said in rather a strained voice, looking down at the cigarette as she rolled it. " I have quite made up my mind, quite decided to marry Reeves, and get the play out" The words fell upon Vincent like so many 9 130 PAULA distinct cuts with a sword, but he gave not the slightest indication of pain, nor even of surprise. " After all we said last night," he merely answered. "What did we say?" returned Paula, running the cigarette along her crimson lips to damp the gummed edge, and looking at him over it with blazing eyes as she did so. "Nothing very definite, I think; but anyway if we did, it's just the same: it's all rescinded, anything I said, cancelled by a stronger power than myself." Vincent did not answer. At all times he was greater at acts than words, and just now the great pain he was passing through deprived him of what- ever power he did possess over language. " I am forced to do what I am going to do," said Paula, after a second's silence; " I can't help myself." A sudden pallor came over Vincent's face, together with a look of clearer comprehension. Who's forcing you?" he asked quickly. "Reeves? Has he? — have you " " Oh no," returned Paula hastily, divining his thought, and smiling at his literal interpretation of her words — "Oh no, I belong to you wholly, all that part of me that's human, much more than I shall ever belong to Reeves. I meant a greater power altogether. Necessity, the to xpv v of the Greeks — they arc horrible words." She sat down on the end of the sofa. She was trembling and looking wretchedly ill. Vincent stood motion- PAULA 131 less, half paralysed by the shock of her first words. Instinctively he felt they were true, and the matter irrevocably fixed. Explanations, whys and where- fores, would be given him, but what did they matter? His consciousness had run forward, as it were, and gripped the great effect out of the saw- dust and chaff of its causes. It was everything to him, they nothing. " Do you understand ? " the girl said feverishly. " Not altogether," replied Vincent coldly, sitting down too, in the old leather chair, and leaning one elbow on the table beside him. " What necessity is there for you to marry the man you don't like, instead of the one you do ? " " The necessity that it is the quickest way of working out my own powers ; the necessity for working them out lies in the powers themselves. Don't you remember how I told you the first day I saw you how gifts are a handicap on the race of life? They are, if the goal is happiness ; certainly they are. They are just so many obligations, so many ties, and claims, and chains. You are born into the world already apprenticed, as it were ; your own will and desires go for nothing. You are simply dominated by the great despot that is enthroned within you. Your talent, whatever it is, makes you work for it. I don't suppose I can explain further to you, Vincent, if we talk for ages," she said, getting up and walking excitedly about the room. " I can only say this, that when 132 PAULA any gift is bestowed upon you, the irresistible impulse to use it is given too ; that when by any divine power the brain is fertilised, it must produce, just as when a woman has once conceived she must bring forth." Vincent gazed at her fixedly as she paced up and down the tiny space free in the little cramped room, while the burning, excited words in the musical voice seemed to fall upon him as sparks upon his flesh. All the attraction this wildly excitable temperament, this intensely vital organ- isation possessed for him, crept over him, invaded him, gripped him in an intolerable vice. "Do you understand any better?" she said, suddenly stopping before him. He took one of the smooth hands, so soft and weak, yet that pos- sessed such an immense power over him. It burnt like flame, and sent its quick fire through him. "A little; but what happiness will there be for either if we are separated ? " he murmured, looking up at her. " I see you don't understand," she said, with- drawing her hand and continuing her excited walk. " There is no happiness for me, there can't be. You will find yours elsewhere. I shall never find any. People like me never do. The gods give them gifts which raise them to their own level ; then they get jealous of them : they grudge what they have given, but they cannot take back their gifts, so they strike at the individual and his PAULA 133 individual happiness : that they can do, and they do it. The old Greek metaphor has been proved through thousands of years ; it is not a metaphor, but a fact and a truth — the envy of the gods. To be happy one must be insignificant, plain, and stupid. Then one is free, one has no obligations, no responsibilities ; one can enjoy one's own life ; one is not sold into bondage at one's birth. One must have nothing that can excite the jealousy of Heaven. If one has, one's life is a mere slavery; a working, a ceaseless labour to please those gods that smite us down in the moment of our triumph, because we have attained to divine things, — be- cause we are one of them, and they envy us." Vincent involuntarily glanced round, there seemed little enough in her present surroundings to excite the envy of the most egoistic god. Paula noted, and read his glance instantly. Nothing could have been so fatal to his hopes of moving her. "Yes, I know," she said vehemently, facing him, her whole form trembling with the intensity of the emotions vibrating through her. " I know it seems ridiculous to talk as I am talking, here in this little den, an ordinary commonplace individual as I am. I seem absurd, conceited, mad or intoxicated, I daresay. Well, that is why I • mean to prove myself to you, to the world, to every one. Why should you believe, why should any one believe anything till it is proved? You would be fools if 134 PAULA you did. I don't expect you to. I don't care. I don't want belief. I shouldn't care if you did believe. I want you to know. I know what I can do. You shall know too. That's why I am sell- ing myself, because it is the necessary price. Come on the night the play is produced. Come, and I defy you then to deny I am what I claim to be." As she stood in the dim light, her expanded eyes torn wide open, and seeming to burn with inward fire, her nostrils dilated, her bosom rising and falling as the breath came and went through her parted lips, it was not difficult to believe her anything she might claim to be. The Greeks unscrupulously confused together excitement, enthusiasm, and divinity. When their priestess at Delphi became excited and enthu- siastic, they called her inspired and divine, and they were right. There is a touch of divinity in all human enthusiasm. It alone can command and make possible the impossible. Vincent started up, completely carried away on the stream of her emotion, dominated by her influence, thrilled through by her electricity. " I don't deny anything. Haven't I always sympathised with your talents and your powers ? My sweet, these are what I love you for ; but why not make me the instrument for producing them ? Can't I do for you all that Reeves can ? Come and talk to me practically, Paula." Pie approached her, took her two hands and drew her towards PAULA 135 him. His face was alight with the tenclcrcst love and admiration. She yielded, and came and stood :lose to him, and looked up. " Can you bring out the play at once ? " she asked merely. She seemed singularly hard and unapproachable ; wrapped round in that peculiar coldness, almost brutality, that seems inseparable from the artistic nature, and always co-existent with its passionate ardour, its impulsive sympathy. With divine powers seems lent also at times the utter impersonality and impartiality of a deity. " I would try, but I am afraid I could not immediately. I must go out again and see after my own affairs — they are dreadfully embarrassed at the present minute; but in a year or eighteen months' time I could do it." Paula twisted away her hands and stood clear from him. " Delay means uncertainty, and I can't risk it. The great Now is the only moment in life worth counting on. I have promised Reeves to marry him on the same day as the play is brought out. That is only about two months from now." "It is utterly horrible; I can't believe you will do it." " I am going to." " I warn you not to. It's madness. You can't set aside your own nature." He was standing facing her. He made no further attempt to take her hand, but his face was white and drawn with 136 PAULA pain and anxiety. " If I saw you about to cut your throat with a razor I could not feel more acutely. You may not see the future, but I do if you marry that man, or any man, without love." " I can't help it, I must do it." " Very well, you will regret it." There was no answer. Vincent took his hat and walked to the door without another word. Paula did not seek to detain him. What was the good ? She had already set aside her nature, resolved to trample on its impulses and disobey its laws. Vincent walked out of Lisle Street, and went slowly in the direction of his own place. When he reached his room, he flung himself on the sofa and lay there with closed eyes. He felt strangely exhausted. His nerves seemed collapsing, running down like the strings of an instrument that has been tuned beyond the pitch at which it will stand. It was one of the most charming traits in Vincent's character his utter lack of appreciation of self. It had been one of the qualities Paula most had loved in him. It seemed marvellous to her self- confident, arrogant nature that any one could possess so much and seem to recognise their possessions so little; could have so great a charm for others and be so unconscious of it himself; could habitually so undervalue his own powers, his own good looks. Certainly Vincent did so; as he lay there now, he was conscious of suffering acutely, but his suffering did not seem unjust nor PAULA 137 unreasonable. It seemed natural that the girl should refuse to sacrifice her work to himself. What had he to offer for a young life and an intellect like this? To him, with his innate generous appreciation of others and diffidence of self, he seemed to have so little. When at six his servant came in with a tray on which were his tea things, he did not stir, and when an hour later the man came to fetch them, they were still untouched, and his master was still lying motionless on the couch with his hand over his eyes. VI The following two months were perhaps the best Paula ever knew. They were full of animation, each day of them beat hard with the pulse of life. She felt herself, realised herself, then fully for the first time ; as it were, knew that she was living, and saw that her life was an important thing for herself and others. It was the period, too, of expectation and anticipation, full of happy, eager, tremulous longing and looking forward, which kept all her feelings excited and her life-stream flowing at high pressure. They were now at the end of February, the piece was to be produced in May, and they were busy with rehearsals, and with finding suitable people for the parts. Reeves humoured Paula in every way, and she was an implacable tyrant in everything where the play was concerned. She was careless, indifferent, yielding on every point, in every way, in all her character, except where her art was in question, and here she was immovable, obdurate even to cruelty. There was but one way in which everything was to be done, every detail 138 PAULA 139 managed, and that was the right way. So Paula would have it done, and not otherwise. And her artistic instinct was unerring. She never failed here nor made a mistake. Eye and ear were equally correct, and her judgment fault- less and absolutely unswerving. A single gesture would have to be repeated a thousand times, if she were not satisfied with it. Placed sometimes in her stall in front with Reeves beside, and her brother and Austin Davies on the other side of her, she would sit, frowning and implacable, and insist that a certain line was spoken wrongly, and have it repeated and repeated till every one but herself was weary and impatient, and urged her to be, or at least to seem, satisfied. But Paula would not give way. "I don't care," she would say coldly; "it isn't right, and you must go on till you get it so." Reeves, tired though he might be, hypercritical as he might think her, was too proud and too fond of her to do less than back her up, so she sat on frowning and attentive, and the others waited yawning, and the actor or actress went through the faulty fragment again and again till his or her throat ached. Generally under Paula's directions the right thing was obtained at last, and then Paula would rise at once. " That's it, you've got it. You've arrived," she would say; and then turning to the others, " Now don't you see that that's a different thing altogether. Wasn't 1 4 o PAULA I right?" And they had to admit that she was. Paula enjoyed those afternoons of rehearsal, whether she was on the stage or guiding the others from the house. Her whole daring, clever, active spirit rose to the work. She embraced it passionately, ardently. She was full of that en- thusiasm that clears away all difficulties before it, and can make success out of the poorest materials. And here everything favoured her. She saw her advantages were exceptional, and meant to use them to the full. Reeves being entirely devoted to her, her word was law inside the theatre: no one dared to contradict nor to withstand her. It became her world, and she ruled in it despotically. It was the kingdom for which she had sold herself, and she meant that it should repay her. Not that she was disliked within it. Real power, real abilities, always grind out a certain admiration and respect from surrounding lower minds. In all these weeks she was wholly artist. The woman seemed to have died in her when she parted with Halham. She rarely thought of him, and never alluded to him. She thought she had risen superior to her nature, certainly it did not trouble her. She was gloriously happy in the abstract pleasure of her work and her art, delighted with all the mental emotions she went through daily, the glow of flattered vanity, of satisfied pride and gratified ambition. She was PAULA 141 under the influence of a mental intoxication, which is a state as clearly defined, and one as fatal to the true perception of things, as physical intoxication. Reeves wisely did not attempt to interrupt the current of affairs that seemed flowing so much in the direction of his wishes. He was Paula's devoted slave in the theatre, the sharp, powerful tool with which she carved everything there to her own ideas, and at all other times he encompassed her with a fine indulgent fatherly affection which was so subdued and unobtrusive that Paula really hardly noticed it in the stress of all her other feelings. She grew very fond of him too, in an affectionate, careless sort of way that left all the deeper springs of her nature quite untouched. The strange waves of emotions that had upheaved in her at the approach of the other man had sunk again to a flat level, passed over and gone by. She had almost forgotten them. The idea that one day they might rise again and sweep every- thing before them, would have seemed ludicrous, had it been suggested to her. However, there was nothing to suggest it. Halham had gone, and remained away, and Reeves was careful not to alarm nor even rouse her numbed susceptibilities. He never approached the subject of love with her, and their lips never met. A kiss dropped on her soft hair, sometimes at parting with her, was the greatest licence he allowed himself, and she ceased to feel dislike, or fear, or repulsion, as she found 142 PAULA there was no coercion and no restraint put upon her. At the theatre, where her enviable position might have made her the object of jealous hatred, she became after the first few weeks extremely popular. She was one of those natures that love being- loved by their fellows, and outside the questions of her art she took some trouble to be amiable, and to conciliate every one she came in contact with. Her sympathies were naturally very quick, and the least suffering she became cognisant of called them forth. A sprained ankle or a chapped arm amongst any of the girls belonging to the staff excited her pity and drew some compensation from her. And so the two months slipped by, and in a waking dream, in a blind mental drunkenness, Paula walked onward to the edge of the precipice. VII The morning of the fifth of May broke clear and brilliant, the dawning was like a divine smile upon the earth. Paula opened her eyes in the twilight of her white-curtained bed, as the first rose of dawn gleamed on the windows : and then let her lids close languidly again with a sigh. The burden of this day and its responsibilities — its great issues of success or failure, its great possibilities, its great uncertainties — seemed in that moment of first awakening too heavy to be borne. She lay idle, motionless, in the bed with her eyes closed, and her hair loose and disordered on the pillow, her face as pale as the linen. She had had little sleep the nisfht before, and that little overshadowed with a sense of oppression that had weighed on the tired brain all night, and forced it to awake now at the first dawn. It was her wedding-day — a day by some women looked upon as the most eventful of their lives, but to Paula, if the fact was even present to her remembrance just then, it seemed as nothing ; it was microscopic in importance, reduced 143 144 PAULA to infinitesimal proportions by the side of its huge neighbour. It was her wedding-day, but it was the day of the first representation. Would it succeed or would it fail ? On her rested all the effort, all the work, and the result — after all — on chance ! She moved wearily, opened her eyes, and glanced longingly at the bottle of chloroform standing on the corner of the dressing-table. A little of that on a handkerchief to her nostrils, and she could drift quietly back into oblivion and rest — for ever, slip off the burden and escape the ordeal. She almost stretched her hand to the bottle, so great was the sense of nervous shrinking, of reaction, almost of terror, now on the threshold of her accomplished wishes. Then came the thought born of her genius and her pride. " You must succeed." She seemed to hear it in the room like a divine whisper. The lovely breast swelled under its laces ; she pushed the hair from her eyes with both hands, and murmured half aloud, " I will." Still she did not stir. Such a deadly weakness weighed upon her. She glanced round the room, watching the light grow stronger. Then all at once a finger of sun darted through the crack of the blind and fell on Vincent's portrait, glinting across the glass. Her eye caught it, and for the first time a dim realisation of what the day was, for her, flashed upon her. " Oh, darling, darling," she thought, with a rush of hot tears in her eyes as she PAULA 145 stretched out her arms to the portrait, " I shouldn't feel like this if it were you ! " So she lay for a few seconds staring at the picture, with the tears falling down her pale cheeks; but the great central idea that pressed upon her mind crushed down all others. Her thoughts, that had clung to Vincent for a moment or two, and dwelt with horror upon Reeves, reverted violently to the play, and the images of both men faded like the shadows in a mist. She sat up at last, pushed down the bed- clothes, and put her feet over the bedside. She sat looking down at them thoughtfully for a few minutes. They had a great deal before them, a great deal to do, and a great deal depended on them, these small feet. A great deal; the bril- liance of the play went for much, her own acting went for much, but her dancing for perhaps more than all. They looked smooth, firm, and rosy, fit for anything, and she swung them joyously to- gether. What other feet in all London could dance like these? That dance, incomparable, unique as it was, would make any play go down. London would come to see it alone, if nothing else. She got up at last and walked over to the glass. She drew back the curtains from the window, and stood looking out, her eyes fixed distantly at a house across the street. She was a beautiful, charming figure with the linen falling a little open at the solid throat, only half concealing one smooth breast, and her hair with the morning light on it IO 146 PAULA curling on her shoulders. But she looked and felt ill, her hand shook nervously on the curtain ; there was a frightful pallor upon her face, the pallor of late hours and over-fatigue and overstrain, and the effects of these ached through her system. That dreadful indefinable weight upon her heart, that is the cost of all great desire, the sense of responsibility, seemed suffocating her. She looked across the street, and in the opposite house she saw a little dull-haired shop-girl washing her face and neck close by the open window. It came to her the thought, that girl on her wedding morning, what would her feelings be ? A simple, unfettered, irresponsible happiness, the unreason- ing light-heartedness of unspoiled health, and a joy, genuine if coarse and primitive, at the thought of her oily-haired young shop assistant — the man of her choice. How different from herself this morning, sick and overstrained, torn with her keen desires and sharp hopes, and even her own body demanded as the price of success, and self so obliterated within her that she had no room for repulsion in her brain! A smile passed over her face as she caught its reflection in the glass and let the curtain slide from her tremulous hand. " Happy are they that have no gifts." She did up her hair as well as she could with her uncertain fingers, and then dressed rather slowly but calmly. She was too absorbed in the thought of the evening to be anything but calm, PAULA 147 calm and collected in doing the little things required of her. When she had packed up the few things still remaining from last night, and fastened the last button in the bodice of her white cloth dress, she went into the little sitting-room, her gloves and large white hat in her hand. The marriage was to be before the registrar, by Paula's wish. "What is the use of going to church?" she had asked. " It seems so ridiculous when you know what a Pagan, and Hedonist, and all the rest of it, you are marrying. Besides, it makes more unnecessary bother. If you will crowd the ceremony into the same day as the first show, it must be done quietly, or I shan't be fit for any- thing in the evening," and as Paula wished so it was arranged. There was to be a quiet wedding at the registry, and in place of a wedding breakfast, a big supper at the Savoy after the play. " Our last breakfast together, Charlie," she said, when they were both seated at it, looking across the little round table which had served them for so long, looking with a sweet smile in her soft eyes. The young man opposite seemed to gulp some- thing down his throat which was harder to swallow than his coffee as he met it. " Yes, dear, I shall miss you dreadfully," he said, after a moment. That was all, but there were eloquent pauses be- tween each word. " I hope you will be snug in the new rooms," she said softly. " I am glad you're going there. I 148 PAULA couldn't bear to leave you here. In St. James' Street you will be close to Vincent," — her lips grew white at his name, — " and see him a good deal, I expect . . . oftener than ... I shall." She stopped, unable to say more ; and Charlie was silent too, and looked away. He would not say a word to cloud her feelings further : he thought of the Greek commonplace, "Speak no ill-omened words;" but in his heart he thought, " I wish to Heaven she were marrying the right man ; I'm sure this will be a bad busi- ness." They finished their breakfast, or rather the pretence they made of it, in silence. Then as Paula got up and passed his chair, she laid her hand on his shoulder. " It's well worth it, Charlie dear," she said, reading his thoughts and answering them. "Think of me on the boards to-night." A little past noon, in the full blaze of the fresh May sunlight, in the little brougham that threaded its way briskly through the thick of the traffic in Piccadilly, Reeves turned to Paula and drew his pale, nervous-eyed bride into his arms. Paula made no resistance. She even lifted her face to his with a smile, but her lips remained unre- sponsive to the touch of his : she hardly noticed the passion in his arms as they interlaced her and pressed her to him. She was abstracted, absorbed in all that lay before her. The step she had just taken had not roused nor moved her ; it seemed PAULA 149 such a little thing beside the issues hanging over her ! But she had an intensely kind and sym- pathetic nature. It would have been impossible to stir passion in her then, or any personal emotion, but even her mental absorption could not do away with her unselfish instincts. She saw vaguely that Reeves sank back in his place with a look of disappointment, and she laid her hand on his im- pulsively. "Dear Dick," she said, "you mustn't mind my being distraite just now. I am quite dead, as it were, to every emotion but anticipation of this evening. Afterwards, when I know it's a success — after twelve, after we've left the theatre — I'll wake up, for you." The accent and the softness with which she spoke the last two words were ineffable as she laid her head against his shoulder, and the sweetness of them thrilled through and through the man who heard them. Paula was unconscious of their effect, almost of the words themselves. She used them and the accompanying tones almost mechanically. She had meant to say something to comfort Reeves, and she had said it, and her thoughts slipped back to the stage again. When they reached Reeves's house, she found quite a large reception to meet and welcome her. The stone staircase had its balustrade decorated with lilies up to the first floor, and was lined on each side with tiers of white and crimson flowers. Several friends of his met her at the door and 150 PAULA pressed round her with congratulations. Austin Davies came up amongst the first, and it was noticed Paula thanked him more warmly than any one else. She did so unconsciously, merely because he was more intimately connected with her play than any of the rest. When she reached the rooms upstairs, she saw without heeding that Reeves had had them decorated like the staircase. Masses of white flowers met the eye from every side, and near the window rose a bank completely formed of white hyacinths, with her name, Paula, in scarlet geraniums written across it. The rooms were filled, though not crowded, by the people she had got to know within the last two months, and every one agreed that she had seldom looked better than when she appeared and hesitated an instant with delightful want of confidence on the threshold. The clear pallor of the face above its white dress, with the faint flush of excitement in the cheeks, and the widely dilated eyes, filled with light and looking out from beneath its dark eyebrows, made you forget the irregularity of its features. The abnormal cleverness and power in the face struck you and held you, just as its delicacy, almost ill-health, fascinated you. Con- gratulations poured over her, and Paula with her sweet smile moved amongst the group of figures exchanging her thanks with little tender remarks and compliments to the women, such as had made her so popular at the theatre. PAULA 151 At last, when much champagne had been con- sumed, and Paula's health drunk several times, and that of the play, the dance, the theatre, the drama in general, and every other toast that could possibly be thought of, a move for departure was made among the guests, and they retreated gradually, each without exception assuring her that they were coming to witness her triumph in the evening. When the last had gone, Paula's strength seemed to collapse. " Oh, Dick," she said, laying her hand on Reeves's, " I feel so ill." He looked at her and saw an abject, terror in her eyes. Usually she did not care a hang, as she would have expressed it, whether she felt ill or well, but to-night ! If she were ill to-night, at the theatre ! Reeves half supported her to the sofa. " Lie down, darling, and rest," he said very gently, as she sank down on it. He brought her a glass of champagne from the inner room, but she motioned it away with a friendly smile. It made her feel sick. He stood beside her with his watch in his hand, looking from her to it with a worried expression. " I ought to be down at the theatre, there's so much to see to ; but I don't like to leave you." A gleam of fresh animation leant into Paula's eyes, she opened them wide and looked up eagerly. " Oh, yes ; go if it's necessary," she said. " Am I wanted ? Shall I come too ? " " No ; you'd much better keep quiet," he said, 152 PAULA looking at her anxiously, " and reserve your strength." She caught his hand between her two, that burnt with fever. " You'll do everything — exert yourself to the utmost to make it a success, won't you ? " she said, fixing her strangely dilated eyes on his face. " It's the road to my love, Dick ; I'll do anything for you if it succeeds — I'll adore you." She spoke without weighing or calculating her words, without even thinking of them. Words, with all their necessary tones and accents and subtle intonations of voice, were such ready familiar servants to her, and did their work generally so well. Reeves felt stirred to the innermost depths of his being as he heard them, and he bent over her with a hot flush in his face, and kissed her enthusiastically on her lips. "Darling!" was all he said; but Paula knew the very utmost would be done, and, as the door shut quietly behind him, her head sank back on the cushion content. She lay there with eyes closed and arms outstretched, one hand trailed upon the floor beside the low couch. She was not thinking of her husband, she did not feel the warmth that his excited kisses still left upon her face, nor was she thinking of Vincent — only of the evening's work. By seven o'clock the theatre was filling rapidly, by half-past it was nearly full. The lights were still turned down and twinkled like blinking eyes PAULA 153 all over the house. The centre of it was filled with a faint dusty mistiness that always seems clinging about a theatre when the drop-scene is not up. The curtains in most of the boxes had been drawn aside, and faces looked down from between them on the gathering crowd below : people were stand- ing up in the stalls with their backs to the stage scanning the upper galleries. There were plenty of celebrities present and known beauties, but there was little remark or discussion about anything except the play, and this new dramatist, actress, and dancer that was about to be sprung suddenly upon the world. The critics were there in force, and the faces of the reporters wore a more haggard and eager look than usual. The orchestra filed in and began to tune softly, its scrapings and twitterings seemed an accompaniment to the excited talk in whispering and undertones that was going on in all parts of the house; numberless bouquets of all sorts and dimensions lay along the velvet ledges of the boxes and dress circle, ready to be thrown. A sense of suppressed eager anticipation hung over the whole house. A little earlier than this, Paula was driving down in Reeves's carriage to the theatre where the public were waiting for her so eagerly, ready to welcome her and acclaim her if she succeeded to the full, eager to fall upon her and rend her in pieces — metaphorically — if she failed or slipped in the minutest detail from physical weakness or any 154 PAULA other cause, and to fall upon her with all the more merciless condemnation for having dared so much. They drove in silence, sitting side by side, one of her hands, a small cold hand, damp with excite- ment, closed tight in his, her head upon his shoulder, and her eyes closed with the tears of nervous weakness falling down her pale cheeks. "Our friend Halham has come back," remarked Reeves after a minute or two of silence; " I found him at the box office this afternoon. I have taken him into my box, of course." " Yes," assented Paula. She hardly heard or understood, and Reeves lapsed into silence again. At the last minute before the curtain went up, Vincent came round to the green-room to see her. It was full of figures, and he found himself pressed back in an angle between the door and the wall. Paula was standing in the centre of the room, a tall white figure, pressed round by a crowd of sympathisers, each with some suggestion, some last remark to make. Vincent watched her keenly in silence from his place against the wall. She was quivering all over, her nostrils beat nervously. Each time she turned or moved, he saw the sort of tremor agitating her. Reeves laid his hand on her shoulder, and said kindly, " How nervous you are, dear ! " but he was wrong. She had passed the nervous stage ; and so Vincent felt, watching her. Her trembling now was the mere effect of intense mental concentration on the coming effort, PAULA 155 and keen physical excitement. To Vincent she seemed quivering, vibrating with her reined-in powers, as he had seen racers quiver when reined-in at the start. At last Reeves said, " Now, dear!" and Paula, with her hand on his arm, walked to the door, fol- lowed by the others ; they pressed past Vincent. Her eyes did not glance in his direction, and they went down towards the stage. Vincent left the green-room and hurried back to regain the box ; when he was half-way there, the dull, thundering noise of applause, like a heavy sea breaking on the beach, came to his ears, and he knew she was on the boards. From the first few moments of her appearance, every one, from wall to wall of the theatre, felt that she had the makings of a great actress in her. Physical gifts go for so much in this art, of which, perhaps, the least powerful is mere beauty. An exquisite suppleness of voice, an unusual plasticity of form, a power of perfect expression by the face alone, these are the gifts that are necessary and sufficient. And with all these Paula was endowed ; but there was yet more given into her hand. Underlying the powers of expression there was the intensity of emotion to express. As she came down the boards towards the foot- lights, looking absurdly young, and gazed across at the waiting house, there was a curious fire in the widely dilated eyes ; the divine afflatus seemed 156 PAULA to be upon the proudly smiling lips. Great and pro- longed was the applause, and Paula smiled a sweet, tender, confident smile, that seemed to embrace the whole audience. She felt she loved it. There was hardly a trace of nervousness. In the first few words she had to speak she lost memory of the listening, watching house. There was much scribbling in the critics' note- books. Reviews already written out received points and touches. Already prepared eulogies on her voice were tuned up a screw of the peg higher. It had never at any of the rehearsals been so purely soft and beautiful, so full of tears, so running over with laughter as to-night. As the first act drew to its close, every one felt a leaping impulse to begin to applaud not only the acting, but the piece. " It is good," was the one verdict in every brain, accented with envy, surprise, reluctance, or satisfaction, according to the critic's view and preconceived ideas. At the end of the first act, as she stood bowing by Reeves's side in response to the furore of applause, she happened to glance for the first time towards the box where now Vincent sat alone, and straight across the glare of the footlights, above the rows of applauding stalls, she met the tranquil blue eyes with their steady gaze fixed upon her, that she had last seen in her little dim room at Lisle Street when she had boasted of her powers. For a minute the whole house seemed rocking PAULA 157 before her gaze, ceiling and gilded gallery and the huge globe of light above seemed to swirl round together, and through a mist, a chaos of faces and light, shone steadily upon her those calm fixed eyes. The next instant her vision and brain were clear again. A fiercer flame of animation than before leapt through her. People said afterwards there was more passion in her acting after the first act, that she surpassed herself in the second and third, and they attributed it to her having gained more confidence, to the greater scope given by the acts themselves, and various other wrong causes. Reading these reports afterwards, the only two people who knew the right cause smiled painfully. For the last scene in the third act every one settled down in their seats, more firmly, as it were; a rustle went through the whole house, as the women arranged their dresses and their programmes just as they wanted them to be through the whole scene, not wishing to have to disturb them again. Everybody whispered to his neighbour that now the famous dance was coming, though everybody knew it ; then gradually a silence grew and spread, and in an excited hush of expectation the curtain went up. The last scene was laid in the Persian Court, and a beautiful scene of brilliance, life, animation, colour, and movement it was. A thou- sand lights hung from the fretted roof and sparkled through ruby and violet glass, and glinted through bronze open-work, throwing a shimmering, 158 PAULA swimming glow over the marble floors and the vivid Mohammedan costumes. Paula had no trade jealousy. Her engrained arrogance and belief in herself saved her from a hundred other petty failings. She had thought first of the play, last of herself, and had worked sedulously through Reeves and his manager to collect together, not a cast of inferior talent, to form a foil to her own powers, but one that should be a brilliant setting to them. She would have laughed at the idea of being eclipsed. "You take care of the play; I'll take care of myself," she had said mockingly to Austin Davies, when he had suggested a lovely face in Fidelia's rival, or a peculiarly well-acted minor part, would detract from the effect that Paula's Fidelia created. And she was justified. Now, when she was surrounded by the art and the talent she had welcomed, there was still no voice quite like hers, no figure that drew the watching eyes from hers. A miraculous surplus of life seemed lent her, and the passionate fervour with which she spoke and moved and loved, as the Persian girl, carried away even the stoniest, most blast of "first-nighters." It was so perfectly easy and natural to her ; an effect obtained without the slightest straining. The whole part was but a revelation, and that not a full one, of her ardent, joyous, living self. All her powers were exer- cised as easily, as spontaneously as the song PAULA 159 comes trilling, bubbling, and gushing from the thrush's throat. The dance was to be the finale, and as the heavy- blue carpet was unrolled in the centre of the crowded stage, before Fidelia's feet, the stillness amongst the audience was a stillness that might be felt. Then as the orchestra started a faint slow music with a peculiar rhythm, she commenced her dance. Every one in the crowd on the stage had his allotted part to play as onlooker, but had he forgotten it, no one would have noticed it, so completely was attention riveted to ' the dancer, so irresistibly was every eye kept held, powerless to transfer its gaze, on the exquisite figure bending and curving itself to form ten thousand perfect lines, the formation and breaking up of which followed exactly the faint risings and fallings of the weird music. So wonderfully did the symmetries of her movement seem to fall in with the symphony of the music that the senses seemed doubled and confused; one seemed suddenly to lose distinction as to which was sound and which motion. There had been whispers of Mrs. Grundy and remarks anent the British public with reference to this dance, which Paula had as usual smiled away in unlimited scorn, but which had been the subject of anxious private discussions between Reeves and his stage manager in her absence ; but Reeves, spurred on by his love and fortified by his artistic sense, had determined to risk it, and for once Mrs. 160 PAULA Grundy was silenced, and the great British public sat enthralled without cavilling, without straining after their blushes, simply pinned to their seats with their eyes pinned open, as the loveliness of true art, untrammelled by fear, unfettered by restrictions, was revealed to them. Hardly a breath was drawn, the quiet throughout the house was intense. In a cathedral the silence could not have been deeper, more reverent, the motionless figures that watched that one figure that moved might have been assisting at some great religious rite — and after all, were they not? What is religion but a sense of the divine, and these were divine gifts that were being poured out before them in a glad, generous spontaneity. When the dance and the scene terminated and the curtain fell, there was still a second of silence. Then the lights were turned up, and the storm of acclamation broke. Seldom has an audience been so enthusiastic, because seldom has it been so genuinely excited. A sort of nervous physical excitement moved the onlookers, communicated by the sight of the physical effort and tension, and physical triumph, they had watched. Some of the women were hysterical, the men in the stalls clapped violently, the men in the gallery stood up and shouted. Reeves, who had been watching the effect from the front, in his box, rushed round to receive her behind the scene. Charlie followed, pale, and with PAULA 161 the tears standing in his eyes. Vincent sat on, alone, without stirring, his chin resting on his hand, his face set and drawn, grimly surveying the crowded, excited house. Paula, flying off the stage as soon as the curtain touched it, ran straight into Reeves's arms outstretched towards her as she came up the wings. He clasped her to him, but she struggled herself free from him impatiently. Her hands, and neck, and face were damp with sweat, the dust of the boards lay on her hair and the scarlet folds of her dress, her eyes blazed feverishly. "Well, how did I do it?" she asked, eagerly looking round the animated circle that closed about her. " Was it at my best ? " There was a chorus of enthusiastic voices. Paula looked im- ploringly at Austin Davies. He was the man whose opinion she wanted most. " Was it — was it ? " she asked breathlessly. " Superb — a triumph," he answered back with the water standing in his keen grey eyes, and a glow of admiration on his usually wooden face. Meanwhile the audience were becoming furious. Paula's rush from the stage and those few hurried exclamations had only taken some seconds, but as the curtain remained motionless under their warm continued applause, they felt themselves injured, and the gallery stood up and stamped and shouted "Fidelia," and "Author," till the theatre echoed. This had the effect of bringing Reeves forward slowly before the curtain leading the sweet 1 1 1 62 PAULA figure their eyes hungered after. There was not the faintest trace of nervousness, nor fatigue, nor pallor now. Her whole body seemed elastic as she walked, her eyes swept the entire house, and all saw the flash in them. Her face was flushed and brilliant with dazzling smiles. Her whole genius was alight, on fire within her, her self- confidence supreme, her pride and elation bound- less. She bowed, and some of the bouquets were thrown to her feet, others handed up over the foot- lights. She bowed again, and such was the grace and symmetry and poetry in that one single figure before them, the fascinating seduction of those bows, that they would have kept her there for ever. As she retreated backwards, gliding, and soft, and supple, with her eyes smiling over the bouquet at the great audience applauding her, the gods screamed louder, and kicked the woodwork before them in a madness of appreciation. Paula, as she had gone back, had lifted her eyes to Reeves's box, empty now but for that one solitary figure sitting motionless as if hewn in stone. She saw the grey-hued face with its set eyes fixed upon her. The hopeless melancholy upon it, and the cold but intensely savage jealousy in the eyes pierced to her heart, and sent a greater intoxication to her brain than all the thunder of the house. She felt wild, maddened, out of herself, beyond control almost with elation, with triumph, with a mental drunkenness of sheer delight. PAULA 163 Upstairs in her dressing-room, she tore off the Mohammedan dress with wild, impatient fingers. What would he say to her? how would he greet her? What had he been thinking of her ? He had come back ! He had responded to her challenge ! He had come to see her triumph! Well, he had seen it. The thoughts raced and bounded through her excited brain in random disorder as she shook out the dust from her hair and slipped a white petticoat over her head. Her supper dress of white satin was lying ready over a chair. The dresser stood by holding the bodice, wonderful in its tourbillons of tulle and lace. To her remarks and her flatteries Paula paid no attention, and the woman's voice went on like a badly-played accom- paniment to the dancing music of her thoughts. The door opened and Reeves entered. His wife was before the glass, just leaning forward to it. In one hand she had a wet sponge, and the other leant on the toilet table. She saw Reeves enter, and laughed at him as she dabbed the sponge to her over-blackened eyelashes. The glass gave back an enchanting picture of soft neck and shoulder and arm as she balanced forward towards it. Reeves came up and planted himself just behind her, and watched her over her shoulder. " Well, how much longer are you going to be ? " he said, smiling. " They are all waiting for you, and quite rabid downstairs ! " Paula laughed gaily. ' 1 64 TAULA " Let them wait ! I must get this blacking off. My eyes look like a pair of boots." " I wanted Ilalham to stay and come on with us to supper, but he wouldn't. Said he'd been ill abroad, and wasn't properly put together yet, and went off in spite of all I could say. I felt we should have been more complete with him. He introduced you to me, Polly, do you remember?" Watching his wife's sweet brilliant face in the glass, Reeves saw a sudden pallor and blank come over it. He thought she was going to faint. The narrow dressing-room was hot, the air laden with dust and the scent of cosmetics, and a huge unprotected flare of gas blazed in its jet just above her head. " Pull open that skylight," he said sharply to the dresser as he started forward to support his wife, but Paula waved him away. " Oh, I am all right," she said, with a hard laugh. She was so bitterly disappointed. And was this only disappointment, she half wondered to herself. This craze of longing to speak with Halham now she had seen him, this sickening blank and loss because she heard he was not coming — what did it mean? Her triumphal joy, where had it all vanished ? Her impatience to get dressed, to see herself look lovely, her wild hurry to be downstairs, it was all gone. She could have sunk upon the ground and cried. " You are overdone, dear child," said Reeves, anxiously. "Come, make haste and get dressed. PAULA 165 Here, Mrs. Stokes, that skirt, please." Paula, angry and maddened, with feelings she had no time and no wish to put a name to, rubbed her eyes free of the paint and then turned to the dresser. " Yes, put it on," she said impatiently. What did anything matter? She did not care now how she looked or how she dressed. She almost tore the delicate lace of the bodice as she dragged it on carelessly with her burning hands. Meanwhile Vincent had left the box, passed downstairs, and got away from the theatre. His head was throbbing hard, his thoughts confused. He only knew one thing clearly — he must get away. Get out of the intolerable presence of this man Reeves, out of hearing of his satisfied self- congratulation, his repeated expressions of grati- tude to his friend for having, as he expressed it, "put a diamond into his hand." Away from that seducing, melting loveliness of form, from those sweet speaking limbs and muscles, that, as her eyes met his languidly in the slow movement of the dance, seemed to say, " I am yours, now and ever." How was it ? How had it grown up, this mon- strous situation ? He could not think. He only felt an intolerable longing to seize Reeves as he sat there, huge, pleased, and smiling, and hurl him over the box edge. " My wife," and " my Paula," and " my creation." Good God ! and still the swimming eyes seemed calling to him from the 1 66 PAULA stage. Then in the tumults of applause, as he looked over the swaying sea of moving heads and faces, all this mass of cultured and uncultured humanity swayed and ruled by that one slender girlish form, he remembered her words to him in Lisle Street, the whole scene came back to him. Every word was recalled. And she had sold herself into servitude, in obedience to the divine powers moving her. He left the theatre with his head reeling ; then, as he walked, the sudden impulse came to see her again, to know how she was looking, feeling. He paused, then walked back and round towards the stage entrance of the theatre. To join them, to be in the company of Reeves and herself, to play the quiet interested friend in this mad turmoil of jealous rage,, was impossible. He looked about him. There, close by the stage door, was another doorway. The recess was not deep, but it lay completely in shadow. Vincent stepped into it and waited. The night was moonlit, but the moon- beams shot by him. The time passed, and to Vincent it seemed neither short nor long. He was in a hell of feeling, in which there is no time nor measure of it. It was in reality ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps, that he waited there. Suddenly there was the sound of laughter, and a crowd of figures, men and women, poured out over the narrow pathway into the road. The men, mostly laughing and talking and smoking, hailed up PAULA 167 hansoms; there were a number of women, making brilliant patches of colour in the grey and black and silver of the moonlit street. Vincent saw nothing, there seemed a rushing darkness all round his straining vision. Then she came out leaning on Reeves's arm, a pale blue opera-cloak was half tossed back from the exquisite bosom rising from the billows of tulle, looking soft as foam in the moonlight. They paused for a moment while the brougham came to the kerb, paused not two yards from where Vincent stood sheltered by the jutting stone of the doorway. He saw her distinctly, standing with the light shining brightly on her gleaming satin dress and fair head and white throat. Tight round the base was a necklet of rubies. Vincent's eyes swam, and it seemed to him a horrible line of blood. She was laughing, jesting; the moonlight flashed across her white teeth, he heard the soft musical voice and lost its words. There was a thundering in his ears, the sweat ran cold in his palms. Then she had dis- appeared ; a click of the carriage door and the coachman drove off, giving place to the crowding hansoms. Vincent, careless of observation, left the shadow and turned in the opposite direction, walking madly, unconscious of where he was going. At one o'clock a crawling cabby came along the kerb beside him, with an insinuating " Keb, sir? " Vincent paused, and signed to the man to stop. 1 68 PAULA " Drive," he said merely. His face was a deadly white, and great lines of sweat ran along his fore- head. Cabby looked down at him and had his ideas, but the distinguished face and figure impressed him, and he answered politely, "Yes, my lord; where to ? " Vincent hesitated. There are moments when the tension in our brain is so excessive that it cannot yield the least, even the very least, attention in any other direction than that in which it is being wholly drawn. At such times the simplest, most trivial question looms before us meaningless, as impossible to grasp as a mathematical problem to the unlearned. Vincent gazed at the man now with contracted brows. Then he said with an effort, " To the Docks," and prepared to get in. The cabby spoke to him through the trap. " It's a bit too far, my lord," he said. Vincent sat back silent in the cab, then he answered mechanically, " Well, go as far as you can, and then set me down." " Very good, my lord," returned cabby, interested in this fare of the exceedingly pleasing face, stamped with such a pallid look of intolerable suffering. Vincent cared nothing where he was driven. Movement somehow, somewhere, was all that was necessary, and he had already walked himself faint in the hot May night. He lay back against the cushions, sick and exhausted, with PAULA 169 closed eyes. Still on the blank darkness painted themselves two figures — Reeves, unctuous, self- satisfied, triumphant, and that other sinuous, vivid form dominating the multitude. That she loved him, that she belonged to him, that she was his, in will, in all those unerring impulses that Nature has implanted to make clear her laws, he was convinced, and this hideous anomaly of surrender to another seemed a thought not to be borne. On the night that she was wedded to her art she was also wedded to a life-long prostitution. As she com- menced the pure, narrow, upward path of the one, spiritually she began the broad decline of the other. Well, so she had decided it to be. It was too late, too late now. Maddened by his own pain, he asked himself, " Why had he come back to see it ? " And he remembered clearly he had never anticipated the despair, the regret, the sick, disordered agony he felt now. lie had fancied in his two months' absence he had grown resigned, and he had thought it was merely curiosity that had brought him back. His life held so much beyond and out- side this girl, and his habit never to recall the past, and never to regret the absent, was so fixed that her influence over him had sunk rapidly in that time. The high road to all love must be the senses, and there are few bye-ways. The artist, with his exquisitely keen imagination, can love in absence ; for to him, unless he wishes, there is no 170 PAULA absence : he can reproduce at will the colour, form, and voice of his mistress ; he can have the touch and sight of her through his imagination as keenly as through his senses. But the average man cannot. There is no way in which he can realise the touch and the sight, and without the touch and the sight his passion, even his love dies. Vincent had none of the artistic imagination, only the artist's extreme susceptibility of the senses. Away from Paula he had been unconscious almost of his love ; here, brought again under the sensory in- fluence, his realisation of it became terrible. Here too there was more than the mere sensory in- fluence — there was the tremendous stimulus to his vanity. Paula had been right in her judgment of him when she felt that this man would never love her poor, humble, obscure, as he did now in the blaze of her realised talents and powers. There was such a subtle flattery in the thought that hovered in his brain, that she who stood there mistress of the house, acclaimed, applauded, petted, envied, spoiled, admired, would be sub- missive to his slightest command, tremulous with pleasure at his touch, obedient to his will. It w r as so in fact. It might have been apparent to all ; and now he was for ever an outsider — a mere railcd-off spectator like the rest. The sweetness of the flattery seduced his brain, and the pain of the following realisation goaded it, in turns. PAULA 171 Cabby drove leisurely onward, and the sky grew pale and stretched its tender green above the glimmering waste of streets, the blue of the night sky softened, and at last the rose of dawn flushed round it above the dark, sharp outlines of the roofs, and the light, chill morning breeze blew in upon the pale, damp face and the unseeing eyes beneath the hansom's lamp. After a time the trap was raised. " I can't go no farther than this 'ere, my lord," came through it. " Where do you put up ? " came back in his fare's monotonous tones. " Near the Circus, Piccadilly?" " Yes, my lord, just by there — Eden Mews." " Drive back then." They turned. Vincent looked at his watch. A quarter to three. Had they gone home yet ? he wondered, with a bitter contraction of his mouth. The cabman set him down at the Circus. Vincent, stiff and chilly, though there was sun now in the air, drew his overcoat across his evening dress, and started to walk up Piccadilly. Half-way he turned aside, and in a few seconds more stood in the fresh young daylight before Reeves's house and looked up. There was a light still visible in the drawing- room ; all the windows had their blinds still down. Vincent looked up. His teeth were set, and in the haggard yellow-tinted cheek, deep violet hollows shot down far below the eyes. i/2 PAULA Upstairs, within, Reeves and Paula had not long returned. She was walking up and down the room with a springing step as if she could never tire; her eyes seemed to burn and flame in her pale face. She talked and laughed incessantly, holding her cigarette between her teeth, the strong light from above falling on her hair as she passed and repassed beneath the lamps, and making it glitter in all its marked waves. Reeves subsided into an arm-chair and sipped a glass of milk and soda at intervals : he was beginning to feel a sort of oppressed fatigue, and his eyes followed her rest- less figure dubiously. It was almost maniacal, dangerous, her excess of excitement. Outside the light grew stronger ; he could see the slits between the Venetians get brighter, and hear the sounds of traffic increasing in the pauses of Paula's wild rackety talk. Her beautiful voice, full of its own music, was the only sound within the rooms. Reeves sat silent : at last he said piteously, and almost as a child might, with a glance at the clock, "Aren't you coming to bed, dear?" Paula stopped short in her frenzied walk and looked at him : both soft little hands were balanced on her hips, her mouth was rippling over with laughter. Ilcr eyes met his from under her arched lids. "Poor Dick!" she said, half mockingly. "You're thinking, 'Where do I come in?' Four o'clock ; it is hard upon you. Well, I'm going PAULA 173 now," she turned to the door as she spoke. Reeves had sprung to his feet. " When may I come ? " he said, and his voice trembled. Paula looked across at the great marble clock opposite her. " In fifteen minutes, if you like," she said simply, and went out. She went up the broad staircase ; it was perfectly silent : the electric light burnt steadily amongst the palms and statues. Paula passed up, her footfall making no sound on the thick carpets. Then she stood in her bridal room and looked round, realising for the first time fully the step she had taken. She stood in the centre of the floor motionless. Outside she could see the May sunshine was strong upon the window, the birds were chirruping gaily to one another ; it was already fresh, glad, innocent morning over the earth. And she stood and shivered in the quiet rose-hued room, so still, so quiet, with its steady lights burning on, and the rumble of the traffic only coming dimly like a murmur from the distance. It seemed like the inner recess of some secret temple. At the far end she caught a glimpse of her full-length reflection in a glass. She was in white, this was her marriage dress. She was married. She was about to break the greatest law of Nature — the law that a woman shall mate only with the man she loves. The sweat broke out and grew cold upon her skin. The more she realised her position the more the i/4 PAULA horror grew. Thoughts of marriage inevitably brought the image of Vincent with them, and her womanhood, stung and revolted, overthrew the artist's instincts within her and leapt up dismayed and horror-stricken. The artist in her loved Reeves as an accessory, an indispensable to the work ; and thought of her art induced thought of him naturally and painlessly, but the woman in her loved Vincent, and the idea of love brought him only to her mind. It was Vincent's face now that looked down upon her everywhere from the walls. Vincent's voice seemed calling to her out of space. Vincent's arms were stretched out to her. His image filled the room. Every instinct of her nature, every law of her being, demanded him, called for him, longed for him. His eyes, his lips, his breath, where were they ? She extended her arms feebly, and gave a little involuntary cry ; her swimming eyes were hot and blind. A vast, angry presence seemed with her in the room, threatening her. " How dare you, how dare you surrender yourself to another, when you are his — his by my will and my laws? My curse upon you for ever and ever." And the girl heard it and her limbs tottered under her in terror. It was the voice of Nature. A great horror, a nameless, indefinable, un- reasoning fear came over her; the room seemed stifling her, the walls falling in upon her, the great wrathful presence seemed descending from over- PAULA i / :> head, crushing and blinding her. To escape! she rushed with the swirling darkness round her to the door. There were a hundred doors as the room reeled before her failing vision. She went forward, and her head, face, and bosom dashed violently against the wall. She staggered backwards, stunned and trembling, swayed for an instant, and then fell senseless on the ground. The joyous sunlight burst through the cracks of the blind and filled the room with soft light ; the birds sang loudly out- side. Inside there was no sound. When Reeves, after many gentle knocks and weary waits outside, at length pushed the door open and entered softly, he found her there, the brilliant figure of last night's triumph, the success of the season, the envied of half London, motion- less, unconscious, her hands clenched in an agony of despair, a ray of sun striking across her blanched, bruised face. VIII Twelve o'clock the next morning found the break- fast table still littered over with the breakfast things. Paula, very pale, with a purplish bruise spreading over her left temple, sat on the sofa drawn up to the table, languidly turning over the morning newspapers that lay beside her. The jubilant, exuberant sunlight rushed through the lowered blinds and lightly-drawn curtains of tinted lace behind her, and stray shafts of it reached the light hair and made it glow and glisten. "What have you got there?" said Reeves at last, as Paula, sunk in a reverie, remained behind the open TelegrapJi. " A review of last night — will you read it to me?" she answered wearily ; " it's so long, and my eyes feel so tired." She handed him the paper and sat back in the corner of the couch, listlessly stroking her hand backwards and forwards over its velvet pile while Reeves read. The critic had done his best for her. No praise seemed too great for the play, the actress, the dance. At the allusions to 170 PAULA 177 the beauty of her figure, a little red flush crept into her cheeks as she listened. Had those been his thoughts too, all that time he had sat so motionless in the box, looking down upon her? She quite started when Reeves came to the end of the column and his voice ceased ; she had missed the con- cluding paragraphs, which was a pity, for they were even more rapturous than the rest She looked up, and met Reeves's eyes beaming upon her as he lowered the paper. "Unparalleled success," — "her marvellous gifts." " Well, Paula, are you happy now? " Paula fixed her eyes upon him, the blood ebbing away from her face : the sudden question startled her, clashing in upon her thoughts. "Happy?" she echoed, and then added, with a strained smile, "What is being happy? Who shall say? The Telegraph critic apparently thinks I ought to be. Here, what do they say in the Times?" Reeves laid aside the Telegraph and took the Times she offered him. She listened as before, silent, with bent head and eyes fixed on the couch while he read aloud her praises. She was one exceptionally favoured by nature and fortune, a dramatist born, a genius fully revealed. Paula listened, and underneath she seemed to hear a voice continually repeating, "You are a prostitute: what better ? " Was that what he was thinking of her ? "It makes very pleasant reading, eh?" said 12 173 PAULA Reeves, with a laugh, from across the table, when he had exhausted the Times' correspondent's opinions. "Yes, it's very nice," she answered; "but I don't think I'll hear any more, it seems to make my head ache. You read to yourself." Then she lay back with closed eyes. Reeves looked nervously at the pale face for a minute, then turned back to reading the review, and there was silence in the room except for the occasional rustling of the paper. Paula felt as if an iron band were cutting into her forehead, just above the eyes ; the first full, awful realisation of having made some great error, which she was helpless to undo, and of which all the consequences loomed indefinably vague and horrible before her, beat in persistently on her brain. She wanted not to think, to make her mind a blank, but she could not. Each time she raised her lids she saw her husband's figure sitting opposite, and a sudden sense of suffocation, a loathing of his presence, filled her. And this was the man she was to live with day after day for years ! Why had she not understood better ? Why had she not listened to Vincent's warnings? She had been absolutely blind and deaf till now. During her engagement to Reeves, while still untied to him, she had felt none of this desperate revolt. The irrevocable has always a terror for vacillating humanity. How carelessly one walks in and out of PAULA 179 a prison cell when merely on a visit of inspection; it does not strike one as particularly appalling; but if suddenly the door shut upon us, shutting us inside, with what an agony of despair should we see it close. Paula had been with Reeves daily, going in and out of her cell, so to speak ; but now the door was shut, and the key turned. After a minute or two she started to her feet ; she felt literally she was going mad. She crossed towards the door. Reeves looked up. " Where are you going?" he asked. The question came like fire to a wound. It seemed to madden further the girl's overstrung nerves. Was she never to move now without sanction ? She stood still half- way to the door, and looked back to him. A physiognomist could have read the terrible, stifled agony within her, on her face. To Reeves she only looked horribly pale, almost livid, in the warm sunlight, and haggard beyond description. She controlled herself with a great effort. " I am going upstairs to finish dressing," she answered coldly. " Oh well, look here ! I must go down to the theatre this afternoon ; you'll come too, won't you ? " A sense of relief passed through her. " Must you ? No ; I am too tired to come." "Very well. I shan't be away long, dear." Paula said nothing, and went upstairs. Late that afternoon Vincent stood in his dressing-room, just redressed and shaved after 180 PAULA his sleepless night. The face that the glass gave back to him was white and aged, seamed deeply by that most terrible of all our passions, jealousy. " She has succeeded in making me suffer as she has succeeded in everything else," he thought, with a resentful bitterness quite alien to his usual frame of thought. " It would be a pity not to go and congratulate her," and he went out, going first to his club, and then on slowly with an aching heart towards Paula's new residence. Half-way up Piccadilly a friend met him, and though Vincent would have passed with a careless smiling salutation, the other arrested him with a chaffing remonstrance : " My dear Halham, what is the matter? You don't look yourself at all! What is it, eh, liver?" " No," replied Vincent, smiling, and looking, as his friend thought, " d d handsome," as he stared at the pallid face in the sunlight. "Just a touch of cardiac neuralgia, that's all." He tapped his chest lightly as he spoke, and after some commiseration from his friend, passed on with a bitter smile. He found Paula sitting in the drawing-room, of which the blinds were lowered almost to the ground. She was on the sofa, leaning forward, her arms resting on her knees, her hands clasped loosely together. She looked up as he entered the darkened room. Such a white face, such pained, excited eyes met his. He paused involuntarily as PAULA 181 his gaze took in the disconsolate figure, the crushed, drooping attitude. This was so different from what he had expected. He had come from his club, where the talk had been principally of Paula, her charm, her powers, her success, and thence along Piccadilly, where her photograph in every con- ceivable attitude and costume filled the shop windows ; and here he had expected to find her herself, radiant, elated, proud, the centre of a crowd of flatterers, laughing, delighted, overjoyed by the universal adulation and homage, and instead she sat like this alone, one solitary drooping figure in the shaded room, pallid, and her eyes darkened by tears, like a mourner in a fresh bereavement She touched him more like this than as she had been the night before — more perhaps than she had ever done. The resentment and the anger against her he had been feeling died away completely, and a great pity for her took their place. Her face, her form, the very position in which she sat, expressed a hopeless dejection. As he approached she rose, lifted her heavy eyes to his face for a moment, and then sat down as be- fore. He took his seat beside her on the couch and covered one little hand with his. She did not move away, nor alter her attitude, nor feign a smile. He glanced over her. She was very simply dressed, her hair merely twisted round her head; there was nothing either assumed or con- cealed in her grief, he saw. She neither displayed 1S2 PAULA it nor hid it. Whatever she might be to the public and others, to him she was the same simple, natural, child-like Paula as of old. A tide of sympathy welled up in his heart for her, poor little girl ! If she had made a mistake after all ! Neither spoke for a long time, then he said, "Are you unhappy, Paula ? I came to congratulate you. Every one is talking of you and your success." "Yes; oh yes, I know," she said in a suffocated voice. " But is it worth it ? Oh, you don't know what I have suffered," she added, drawing away her hand and burying her face in the sofa cushions with a sudden outburst of sobbing, "last night and this morning." Vincent sat silent, looking down at the rugs at their feet His face had grown very pale. The low anguished sobs beat through the room. His keen eyes had noted at once the great violet bruise that was spreading now all over one side of the girl's face, and the sight of it half paralysed his voice. " I have suffered too," he said at last, in a low tone. " I had no sleep last night I have not closed my eyes, as you can imagine, since I saw you last ; but I thought at least you were content and satisfied with the arrangement." " Oh, yes, yes," sobbed Paula, sitting up and clasping his nerveless hand between her two burn- ing palms. "You have been most dear and good to me : you have done all you could. Your love PAULA 183 is something quite different from other men's, and now I have lost you . . . irrevocably cut myself off from you for ever and ever . . . don't you understand what I feel ? " and she bowed her head forward on his hand, and pressed her fore- head on it in an agony of weeping. Vincent sat quite silent and motionless : watch- ing him one might have thought he was unmoved, untouched, except for the increasing pallor of his face and the deepening of the lines of pain about his set mouth. He had never anticipated this. It had crossed his mind as a fitful fear several times, that if, after irrevocably tying herself, the play should not succeed ? Then he felt Paula's deso- lation would be intense; but after the singular, the unequivocal triumph of last night, all doubts had been allayed. It is the best for her, he had thought in the midst of his own pain, as the multitude had applauded, with the shouting and the clapping in his ears, and the sweet figure with its face alight with happiness before his eyes. It is the best for her ! This must be the extreme of pleasure, the best that life can give, for her. And after seeing this and thinking thus, it had never faintly occurred to him that he could find her other than supremely content. She had voluntarily sacrificed everything else for this one object which she had most un- doubtedly obtained to the full, and now this despairing agony was incomprehensible as well as terrible. 1 84 PAULA Vincent could not quite fathom nor gauge — perhaps no one but an artist can — that fierce, intolerable craving of the artist for recognition ; it is as blind, as unreasoning, as implacable as hunger until satisfied, and then when the craving is assuaged the blinded eyes are clear to see again. That desire, like every other, has a ferocity, a mad intensity before gratification, that in no way is equalled nor even faintly approached by the joy its fulfilment can confer. In the frenzy of his ambition, when carried away by the exaltation and enthusiasm, the artist will accept everything, con- sent to anything, for the sake of his art. His life itself seems of no consequence beside it; but this almost superhuman, this transitory fervour past, his art ceases to console him for the ashes of his ruined life. But Vincent, though he could not exactly trace her sorrow to its source, saw the reality of it and the intensity, and he felt acutely there had been a false step somewhere, that in some way she had missed the path to her happi- ness. And the room in its warm afternoon light seemed to grow grey around him as he realised it, listening to those convulsive sobs. " Paula, listen to me," he said at last, moving his hand, still clasped in hers, and drenched by her hot tears. " I want to speak to you." Paula raised her head and looked at him. " What is it ? tell me all. You chose this course yourself," he said very gently. " What is the PAULA 185 meaning of this great bruise? What is the matter ? Is Reeves " " No, oh no ; I have no fault to find. Reeves is very good and kind to me. But it is you I want, you I love. I want to be with you," she said passionately, slipping to her knees from the couch and kneeling so at his feet before him while she raised her face to his. " And now I have lost you utterly. I feel it, I know it. It was for you principally I wanted to succeed. I wanted to show you all I could do, to let you see my powers. It was you all the way through; I longed so to shine in your eyes, I wanted to prove to you that you had the love not only of an ordinary little girl like any other, but of one who could be great if she chose : it was a love worthy of you — worthy of your acceptance — I got blinded. I did not feel as if I were losing you — and now — and now, nothing is anything to me without you." The words poured in one unbroken stream from her lips, her pallid face looked grey, the tears flowed unchecked from beneath her swelled eyelids as she gazed up longingly, despairingly, into his grave face above her. Vincent looked down upon her and put his arms round her, folding her a little closer to him, very gently, as one might a sobbing child. To many men, perhaps to most, to see this figure that last night had been the magnet for hundreds of admiring eyes, kneeling thus at his feet, broken 1 86 PAULA and weeping, desolated in the midst of her triumph, because he was lost to her, would have brought, if not arrogant pleasure, at least a glow of satisfied self-love and pride. To Vincent it only brought the keenest pain. To his refined, sensitive mind it seemed horrible, an unnatural anomaly, as it seemed sometimes when the pheasants fell before his gun. It was satisfactory to know one's skill, but all pleasure was lost in the vague sense that it was misdirected against a thing both beautiful and harmless, a perversion of power. So here he saw how great his influence was, to possess so much over another human life, and for it but to mean the wrecking and the breaking and the ruin of it, filled him with revolt against himself. " There is only one thing to be done now, Paula," he said at last, "to accept your life as it is. You have a brilliant success ; live in the thought of that as far as you can. Throw me out of your recollection entirely. I am leaving England to-day, and shall not come back for years ; perhaps I may never come back. Cease to think of me, darling, as living ; that is the only thing to be done now." He felt her tremble violently in his arms : it reminded him of the death-quiver of a shot bird. " I am so sorry 1 came back now," he murmured, in desperate self-reproach, "but you told me to come to see you and witness your triumph, and I did not think you cared for me still in this way." lie might have added with justice, " I never could PAULA 187 have supposed you would have married another if you had ; " but it was not his way to reproach any- body but himself. " Paula, do you understand me ? " he went on after a second, as she made no answer. His own agony, his own jealousy, his own sickness of desire, were swept away utterly in his sudden terror for her and her future. " You must do this ; it's the only way to make your life livable ; it's no use to think of the past, not even to glance at it. Live for your art now." " I have killed myself for it." " No ; you have only just begun to live. In a year's time, or less, you will have succeeded in for- getting me if you try." " Will you come back in a year, and see if I have forgotten ? " Vincent shook his head, looking down into the bloodshot, swimming eyes. "You have to face your life without me. It is useless to look for my return ; as useless as the return itself would be." Paula said nothing. She only grew very cold and trembled excessively. Vincent felt he ought to leave her, and had no strength to unlock his arms and rise. Minutes of agony passed, and each second that the clock ticked out seemed to physically wound the girl's sick brain. At last Vincent bent over her and kissed her, and she knew the moment of their farewell had come. He lifted her on to the couch. She slipped from his arms down 1 83 PAULA on to it, and lay there as a corpse. Vincent hesi- tated beside her. It zvas the corpse of the woman he had known. As he went down and through the hall, his eye caught the marble plate on the side-table. As he had passed it before he had noticed it was empty, now a number of cards, small narrow ones predominating, filled it. " She was at home to no one but you, sir," said the servant, with a badly concealed grin, as he noticed Vincent's glance at the plate. Vincent recognised her reckless indifference to appearances. He said nothing, and passed out. In the bright sunlight of Piccadilly he paused to look once more in at the photographs that hung in a line along the middle of the glass panes of the shop windows, and attracted a little crowd of young men in irre- proachable frock-coats and hats, and with high white collars round their craning necks. He stood amongst them, listening with sad dulled perception to their remarks, and looking into the brilliant eyes that laughed at him across the glass. Was there really any truth in the legend of the Envy of the Gods ? he wondered sadly as he heard the admiring comments and the openly expressed cnviousness of the women standing just in front of him, and recalled the smitten figure he had left. A portrait of Reeves was stuck up beside hers, and there were many comments anent him and the marriage. Opinions that he was "a lucky devil" were freely volunteered. Hypotheses of changing PAULA 189 places with him were mockingly exchanged, and Vincent hearing, suddenly pushed his way violently out of the little ring, feeling the wild brute jealousy surge up again in hot angry waves from the darkest recesses of his soul. Not his, but mine ! shouted all the instincts within him, and they clamoured the fiercer because he knew that every one of those men he left behind to stare at her portrait would envy him, if they knew, even his pain. IX Nearly ten months had gone by since Paula's marriage, and her life had flowed evenly along in its channel of success. Her name was well known now all over England, and familiarly gossiped about in the dramatic world in America. Her own play, " Fidelia," was still running, and every night the house was crowded as it had been from the first. Her talents were undisputed, her right to the enviable and much envied position she had obtained, unquestioned. For ten months her life had been a buoyant floating on a rising tide of ease, prosperity, success, fame and admiration; and to herself these ten months had been empty, barren of pleasure. For ten months her art and her genius had been fed and satisfied, and had given her all they could in return ; and for ten months her nature had been slowly grinding her small between its mill-stones. The admiration had ceased to stimulate, the fame had ceased to charm, the success become a thing to be taken for granted. The very exercise 190 PAULA 191 of her powers, the nightly attendance at the theatre had become a drag, a wearisome necessity, a duty and a work in which her spirit was broken. The companionship of her husband was irksome, tedious without being repulsive : he was not un- kind, he was not cruel, he was simply a bore. The troubles and pains of her life now were not acute ones ; there was one large, wide, overspreading, heavy trouble — the deadly monotony of it, the dreary emptiness, the sense of waste, the sense of the absence of pleasure. This life that to others seemed so brilliant, was to the one who lived it a grey, colourless desolation. And to a volcanic nature like Paula's, any form of life was better suited than a painless and pleasureless inertia. Her passions did not die in it ; they simply slept uneasily, tossing and stirring low down in the depths of her nature, and sending a sickness all through it. She had been working hard. She worked incessantly, so none of her trouble could be traced to the morbidness of an idle woman. She had written and completed a new play that was ready for production now, had had her own part to rehearse, and new dances to invent and then practise, besides superintending all the other parts and the staging of the whole. She practised her dancing untiringly, and perhaps in those hours spent before the glasses, arranged so that she could see every pose and attitude — hours when the 192 PAULA reflections gave back to her her flushed cheeks and leaping bosom, some of the old joy in her art came to her again; but mere work without some great aim to accomplish, some great obstacles to conquer, was not enough to fill up her life, though it might use up her time. Now her aim was accomplished and she had no obstacles to vanquish, since no one now denied her the recognition she had once thirsted for so savagely. She worked merely to maintain the place she had won, and there grew into the work something mechanical which was different from the enthusiasm of the winning. Besides, a disposition like hers, with its immense capacity of loving, needed, and always would need, something sweeter and nearer in life than the applause of the multitude. As distraction from the work, she had unlimited society, and of the intellectual and artistic kind she liked ; she had also that which would have been, certainly for most women, an alleviation of life — flirtations without number; but Paula, though she flirted in a half-hearted, passionless sort of way, did so rather because it gave the men who admired her pleasure, and because it was more or less ex- pected of her in her character of popular actress, by her husband as well as everybody else, than it gave her personal amusement She was filled with a slow consuming dislike of her husband — a dislike that she felt was unjust and partly cruel, and that she fought with daily and PAULA 193 hourly, but in vain : it grew in spite of herself, it spread throughout her whole moral system, and she was conscious of it spreading without the power to stay it. Sometimes this dislike, this dis- taste, rose almost to hatred within her, and in such moments she would passionately try to subdue it, to wrench it out of her heart. It was a plant that was foreign to that soil, and its unnatural growth hurt her. Like the Greek Antigone, hers was a nature that was born for loving not hating, and the presence of this feeling, that she tried hard to con- trol and could not, troubled her almost as much as the presence of the man who excited it Reeves had been the means by which she had blighted her life as well as made it, but any injury he had caused in the past, had it ended in the past, she would have forgiven easily: that was not the root of resentment against him now. It was the fact that he, and he alone, stood between her now, at the present time, hourly, momentarily, and her happiness; that he was the barrier between her and her desires, the chain bound round her cramped soul, thirsting after its liberty. She could not for- give this, could not forget it; because it was an ever- recurring injury, she could perpetually fight against her resentment of it, and that was all she could do. He was the block in the path to everything she most wished and longed for. And at times she hated him with an intensity proportionate to the intensity of the desires he frustrated. 194 PAULA She could not help nor destroy nor lessen this violence of all her feelings, any more than she could alter the rapid circulation of the blood in her veins, make the warm current lethargic and the quick pulses beat slowly. She could keep reins upon her actions and words, a perpetual repression upon herself, and that was all. This she did, and the constant warfare within told upon her and took away her strength, little by little. Nature was slowly, inexorably, resistlessly destroying the one who had dared to defy her commands. It was Sunday afternoon, and she was crouching over the fire. It was dusk already, for the rain poured steadily outside from the black, fog-laden sky. Behind her stretched the long drawing-room, with the shadows gambolling and frisking through and about the furniture as the flames leapt amongst the coals in the grate. She sat with her hands out- stretched to the fire, and eyes staring down into its red heart. She had sat there over an hour, when a sudden ring, followed by a knock, went through the perfect stillness of the flat. She started violently, recognising Vincent's knock directly. In a few seconds he came in, and she rose and stood by the hearth, with the light of the fire behind her. He saw that her figure had rounded, grown fuller, and seemed even more supple than formerly ; the fire-glow burned on her soft light hair as she stood waiting. He came forward and shook hands, remembering vaguely that she at one PAULA 195 time used to advance to him ; now she waited merely, and when they had shaken hands, dropped back into the chair and her old position. " I have only just come back ; my first visit is to you. I could not stay away any longer," he said, as she did not speak. " I wish I could see you looking a little happier." " I can never be happy," returned Paula in a low voice. " Where have you been ?" " In Australia, at work," he said. There was a long silence. " Have you ever thought of me ? " she asked. The tone was low. There was a desperate accent in it, and a peculiar meaning. It seemed to go through the room. " Yes. Far too often for my own peace." " Have you been alone all this time ? " The voice came hard, as if it was difficult for her to form the question. " Quite alone," he answered. There was a deep, long silence. It seemed a great gulf between them. Neither met the other's eyes. A fierce delight and a horrible sense of approaching danger seemed fighting together in the air above their heads. Paula looked at him at last, with dry, white lips. "Take me to live with you now," she said in a low tone. Vincent did not answer : his heart gave one great leap at her words, but the thought, " You 196 PAULA must not," came immediately after and held him silent. He sat back motionless in the arm-chair, his chin resting upon one hand, his eyes fixed upon her. Paula's gaze met them through a dim hot mist of tears. "Are you so unhappy?" he said quietly, at length. "Unhappy!" echoed Paula, lying back also in her chair and letting both arms overhang the sides despairingly. " I am dying ; morally and physically — can't you see it ? " Then she added : " But you haven't seen me yet " and she bent down with one of her impulsive movements, seized the brass poker from the fender, and stirred the fire into one brilliant gaseous blaze. "Now look at me," and she leant forward so that the light illuminated all her face and looked at him through it. Some of its own natural sweetness came back to it as she looked into his eyes, but he saw the hollows beneath the eyebrow bone, the hungry fierceness in the wide pupils, the hard "dragged look about the mouth ; on it all was the impress, the seal of her thwarted, starved and driven, but unconquered nature. Vincent looked at her in- tently and could not read nor name the strange, and to a practised eye, fearful expression of her face. His life was given to practical pleasures and pains, not to the psychological analyses of them, and the simple impression produced upon him PAULA 197 found expression in the simple phrase, " You don't look well, dear." But a tremendous pity was ' stirred in him and a vague alarm by her look, though he could not classify it and docket it with its full meaning. " Let me come to you," she said again, plead- ingly, and the music of the tones was incompar- able; it came into them unconsciously when she was with him just as the sweetness to her face. It was a voice now that Reeves and others never heard. " Take me to live with you," she mur- mured, and the tears welled up in her eyes and fell slowly, like drops of blood in the firelight, as she still sat forward with her arms leaning on her knees and her hands clasped. " I have tried to live with him, have tried to follow my art, have tried to do all you told me, but it is killing me; and this man kills me, he draws out and develops all that is bad in mc, so that I don't recognise myself. I hate him and loathe him, though 1 fight against it day and night, and this existence debases and degrades me. It can't be right, it can't be well, to go on with it. It is destroying every good quality within me. I would give up everything, sacrifice the world, lay down my art, to respect myself again. Living with you even as your servant would be a better state than living as I do now." There was silence except for the light crackling of the fire, which threw its glow over their faces 198 PAULA and showed them to each other — the man's grave and drawn, the woman's pallid and desperate. Their mutual passion seemed like a huge, breath- ing, living beast crouched between them in the firelight, oppressing them both with the conscious- ness of its presence. And this monster now was but that same innocent, joyous affection they had felt a few months back transformed by circum- stances. It is one of the commonest revenges of Nature for her slighted goods. Constantly in youth she proffers to the heedless human being her richest gift without payment, in innocent freedom, and constantly it is then passed by, and sooner or later in after years he is forced to buy it in blood and tears, and at the price of his soul. Something of all this forced itself painfully on the man as he sat there. " Why have you put yourself in such a painful position ?" he said slowly, at last. " You would not come to me before; now to leave him might only be another mistake." "But you would like me to, wouldn't you?" she said in a barely audible whisper, stifled by a sense of shame. " I should like nothing that would end in your un- happincss," returned Vincent quietly. Then there was a long silence, in which the sound of their own hearts seemed throbbing loudly through the room. " I should be so sorry to overthrow all that your work has produced," he said after a minute; "can't PAULA 199 you see that? I see that there's a new play an- nounced ; that's your own, of course ? " Paula nodded. "You have so much now — you've achieved so much in your art." " Yes ; but one's art cannot console one for break- ing the first law of one's nature." " Did I not tell you that before you married ? " " I know you did, but I was blind then. I can see the truth now, and I want to undo the error." " I am afraid it's too late." " That means, I suppose, you don't care for me any more ?" Vincent got up, feeling his judgment leaving him. "No; I am accustomed to mean what I say. I am afraid it is too late to secure your own happiness now, whatever we do." " I will do anything you tell me," she said im- pulsively, and pressed her soft lips on his hand. He smiled a little sadly. " If you would have done what I told you all along, you would have saved us both a good deal of suffering," he said gently. " Good-bye, dear ; I shall be at the theatre to-morrow evening, and all this week. Let me see you doing your very best." " You shall," murmured Paula, and he went out. When he was gone she got up and went upstairs, turned the key in the lock of the bedroom door, and threw herself face downwards on the bed, praying, in the wild passionate way in which she 200 PAULA had prayed from her childhood upwards, to some vague God only half believed in, praying for some help and guidance in the dark night that had over- taken her in the morning of her life. Vincent walked into Piccadilly and down it with a pale and abstracted face. He was accustomed to do that which he considered the right without either praying or weeping over it, but here his path was not well defined, and he felt how easily the worse might appear the better reason. Had Paula been a different woman, with a more tractable, docile nature, with less self-will, and of a lower-strung temperament, he would have tried to maintain his present position for her sake, thinking that in time she might settle down in the life she had chosen. But in a nature like this, so fierce, almost savage, in its instincts and desires, he dreaded the result of this continued repression. He might urge her to accept her life, but he had a sad experience of her obedience to others, even to himself. It was a somewhat mythical quality. Vincent was at the theatre the following evenincr, and all the subsequent ones of that week, as he had promised her, but he did not come to her house, nor did he hear from her. Her eyes met his over the flare of the footlights, and two rows of well- filled stalls, with a mute supplication — that was all. Night after night, as he lay sleepless and wretched, her face rose before him, with its terrible look of revolt and appeal. That must find its expression PAULA 201 at last, if not in the sweeter, more human fault of coming to his arms, then possibly in some horrible, unnatural way — and here thought stopped short He could not contemplate further. He hesitated to take her out of her life now, but he could not help feeling it was more fashion, custom and prejudice, that was influencing him than the ethical right of the question. "Before her marriage," he thought, " I called it prostitution ; yet if by chance she had fallen to that, I should have no doubt but that I ought to take her from it now." Had she made any other mistake, been misguided in any other matter but marriage, no one would have blamed her for trying to undo the error. In the question of marriage alone, it is not allowed to the human being to come forward frankly and say, " I have made a mistake : let me undo it as far as I can : give me a fresh start, let me try to do better." In all other phases of life the man who starts on a wrong road and turns resolutely back from it is applauded for his courage. In marriage alone the world says, "If you find yourself on the wrong road, tread it to the grave." He thought and rethought these things, his brain working in an agonising circle, and the days slipped by without bringing him anv nearer a decision. X Sunday had come round again, and the afternoon found Paula walking round and round her drawing- room just as the lion paces round and round its cage. Reeves had gone out to luncheon and would not be back till their dinner-hour : he had pressed Paula to come, but she had excused herself on the ground of feeling ill. Her drawn, haggard face and feverish eyes fully bore out her statement, and Reeves had left protesting he would not be long, he would come back early, and so on. " Oh, be away as long as you can," was Paula's inward impatient comment, and she watched him go with a feeling of relief. Luncheon was served for her alone, and after attempting to eat and failing, she went back to the drawing-room to resume her aimless walk. She tried to think, but in some curious way she seemed losing control over her thoughts. Clear, consecutive thought seemed im- possible to her now. If she took the simplest subject she could not think it out to the end. " What is the matter with me ? " she asked herself, 2'J2 PAULA 203 and a sort of sick horror crept over her. She went up to the cases of books that stood facing her against the wall and read their titles over to herself. They seemed to convey no meaning to her. She took out one, a copy of Martial, and turned over its leaves, but she could not fix her attention on any line in it. It seemed like an unknown, un- familiar thing. " And Latin used to be so easy and so interesting. What can be the matter ? " She turned from the books, the tears welling up to her eyes, and looked round the room. There was nothing to answer her; the fire crackled softly through the silence, the handsome furniture stood unmoved in its place. She crossed back again to the table, and took up one of the papers lying on it ; but that she could not read for more than a few seconds together. An indescribable feeling of illness took possession of her if she tried to force her attention further. She laid the paper down and passed on to the window, and stood there leaning her head against the pane. " I suppose it will snow," she thought, and thought this several times over without realising it. She moved away after a few minutes, and walked round the room again, only conscious of an intense feeling of illness. " Now so idiotic and once so clever," she thought, "and only ten months ago." At the end of the room stood a small cabinet. She went up to it suddenly, turned the key in it, and opened it. It was full of her own MSS., 204 PAULA whole plays and scenes and parts of scenes. She drew out some loose paper and read at random, kneeling on the floor. A sense of the merit of the work forced itself upon her. "Yes, it's good," she thought to herself. "It is good, and I shall never write like that again — never." She thrust all the papers back, and relocked the door. " Yes, I was clever," she thought, rising from her knees, " but it's past now. My cleverness is gone, like everything else." She recommenced her weary walk. The palms of her hands were burning, a dull pain rose from the back of her neck and reached to the top of her forehead, holding all the back of her head in an iron grip. She went round the room, leaning at intervals against the wall. "Vincent? Will he come this afternoon or not?" she asked herself. It seemed the only thing she cared for, the only thing that she could understand. Her limbs trembled, the grasp of her hand on the chairs she passed was uncertain, yet move she must. She knew what her illness was. It was the revenge of her outraged being. Her nature, that she had dared to trample on, had risen and faced her now, and she knew it was stronger than she. She sat down after a time from sheer fatigue and leaned her head in her hands. She recognised that her suffering was just, that she had merited it all. She had attempted the impossible. She had tried to subdue the great natural impulses, to crush them PAULA 205 down and make them subservient to one artificial engrafted desire. " I ought to have known I could not do it — could not keep it up," she thought. It was sustaining the long-drawn-out conflict she felt unequal to, and it is in this that our ever-present Nature has the advantage over us. An individual can conquer his Nature once, as Paula in her enthusiasm could have cut off her hand for the sake of her mental desires ; but in the slow hourly conflict that goes on day by day, it is impossible for the human being to be triumphant, because the very force with which he is fighting is taken from him minute by minute. All the splendid energies divinely implanted in this girl's body and brain were given now, squandered in the pitiful hourly struggle against overpowering forces. The greater the energy, the stronger the individual's will, the more deplorable, the more extravagant the waste ; in this useless conflict against eternal powers, it is as a child's hand striking a brick wall. At five her own maid brought her a cup of tea. Paula took it in silence. The girl offered to light the gas. No, her mistress preferred to sit in the dusk. Then the maid lingered at the door. " Well, what is it ?" asked Paula. " Please, mum, could I go to church this evening ? I know it's not my Sunday out, but " " Go to church," repeated Paula. " No, you can't this evening ; I may want my hair done. 2o6 PAULA Why have you become so religious all of a sudden? " The girl made no answer, and withdrew. Paula sat on by the fire absorbed in her own pain, and then after a few minutes the sound of sobbing reached her in the silence of the room. Always sympathetic to the sorrows of others, she got up mechanically and went to the door, opened it, and stood for a second in the dusk of the threshold. The sound of sobbing was quite distinct now and came from the kitchen, which lay at the end of the passage facing her. She walked along it, and as she approached the kitchen door she heard a suffocated voice repeating, " And him going to Cape Town to-morrow too; it's cruel." She pushed open the door, and saw her maid sitting in the empty kitchen by the fire with her head bowed on her hands, as her mistress had sat in her drawing- room. " Louie, what are you crying for ? Who's going to Cape Town ? " " My young man, mum," murmured the girl. " Is it he you want to see then this evening? " "Yes, mum," sobbed the girl. "Why didn't you tell me?" said Paula, open- eyed. " Of course you can go for that." " And what about your hair, mum? " said the girl gratefully, looking up and drying her eyes. "Oh, I will manage somehow without you; but what on earth made you say you wanted to go to church?" PAULA 207 "Well, mum, ninety-nine mistresses out of a hundred would let you go to church, and they wouldn't let you go anigh your young man fer anything, if they could help it." "Oh, I see. Well, go at once if you like; but if you're so fond of your young man, take my advice and keep him with you." "Oh, I would if I could, no fear, but I can't, mum," said the girl sorrowfully ; " he will go, he's like mad on it. He'd never go if I had my way." " I am sorry," said Paula softly ; " well, run off now and spend a long evening with him anyway." And while the girl was thanking her she with- drew gently, and went back to her own room. It was very dark, but some light from the now falling snow entered at the long windows, and the fire burned cheerily. Between these half lights, Paula's eyes rested on the stone cast of Vincent that she had begged him before her marriage to give her instead of a photograph. It was a life-sized bust, and stood on a moderately high pedestal against a velvet curtain, facing you as you entered the door. As the lights flickered across the face it almost seemed to smile, and Paula crossed towards it and flung her arms round the shoulders and drew the bust close till the cold stone rested on the warm human bosom. Then she bent over it and kissed the lips in a passion of blinding tears. " Sorrow and suffering and parting everywhere," she murmured, thinking of the girl she had just left. 2oS PAULA " But you would have spared it all to me. I have brought it all upon myself. You would have saved me." She stood there with her hot tears falling on the stone and laid her head at last down upon the shoulder, and twisted her arms tightly about its neck. She was unconscious of how the time passed. Her brain, exhausted and weakened now by the pressure of one ever-present desire, sank easily into stupor. She welcomed it : it meant peace. The fire died down, but still she did not move, and she was still standing there when the door opened and Reeves entered. The room was almost dark, but a dim light falling through the curtains was enough to show her attitude and catch the whiteness of the stone. He had come in with his key, and Paula, absorbed in herself, had not heard him. As the handle of the sitting-room door squeaked in his hand she started and moved from the pedestal, but not before he had seen her clearly standing there. "What on earth are you doing, Paula?" he said, coming up to her. Paula did not answer. The fear of involving Vincent against his will in her affairs fell upon her and held her silent. Inwardly she cursed herself for having been found and taken by surprise. "Oh, I saw it all," returned Reeves; "you were kissing that bust of Vincent, and I suppose that's how you go on with the flesh-and-blood original PAULA 209 when he's at hand." I lis face was white with surprised and jealous anger, Paula could divine the expression of it in the tones of his voice, though she could not see it. She stepped to the mantelpiece and turned the handle belonging to the electric light. It illumined the lamp and burners all over the room on the instant, and flooded both their countenances. She preferred to face him fully in it. "Your supposition is quite wrong then," she said coldly, flinging herself into one of the easy-chairs by the hearth. Her face was pale, the signs of tears were plain upon it, the traces of the long afternoon's conflict with her passions were visible in a look of pain and illness. " H'm," said Reeves satirically. Paula was silent, for very fear of making matters worse by anything she might say. Her heart beat to suffocation. For herself she cared nothing, but to drag Vincent into an unsought, unmerited conflict with her husband was the very last thing she desired. Reeves walked about the room in silence, bitine nervously the cigar he had been smoking. " Well, will you kindly tell the servants," he said at last, "to say you're not at home whenever Vincent calls in future? You sec, I can't quite think those re- hearsals go for nothing. Do you understand ? " he added, as she did not answer. " I hear what you say, if that's what you mean," 210 PAULA returned Paula. She was sitting back in her chair now, swinging one foot idly backwards and forwards. Almost any man would have seen that it was a dangerous moment to try to use coercion. All the impetuous, passionate nature was already aflame. There was an angry light beneath her lids, and her nostrils beat nervously, but Reeves saw nothing, blinded by his own jealous rage. "Well, do you mean to do it?" he said, stopping in front of her. " No, most certainly not," returned Paula, look- ing up, an arrogant defiance in every line of the pale face; "I shall receive Vincent, ot anybody else, whenever and as often as I choose. I've told you there's nothing between us. If you think there is, that's your fault." " I don't say what I think. I shan't allow you to see him, that's all." " Allow! " repeated Paula, contemptuously. Her eyes rested on him, alight with scorn and resent- ment ; her bosom heaved and her lips quivered. Lying back there in the chair, she seemed like a young, supple, newly-caged panther, enraged and waiting to spring. "Yes, allow," repeated Reeves, angrily; "this is my house, and my servants shall have orders about him from me, that's all." Paula got up suddenly from her chair. She was as pale as the stone cast itself In that moment the resolve that had been drifting about in her PAULA 211 mind, half formed through ten long months of suffering, crystallised itself. " My dear fellow," she said to Reeves, with a mocking smile, "you may give whatever orders you like to your servants ; " and she crossed the room and went out without another word, and before Reeves had the thought to stop her. She went upstairs, every limb and muscle quiver- ing with rage. In her room she turned on the light and went straight to the armoire and got out a black velvet hat and jacket. She put on the jacket, fastening it with rapid trembling fingers, and crossed to the glass to put on her hat. She had conscious instincts enough left to make her dress well and carefully; the face that looked back from the glass was whiter than ash dust and ablaze with excitement ; never had it looked better ; the pallor and the brilliance of it struck her even through her rage, and filled her with a sense of pleasure and triumph. She set the hat on her light curls and pushed them into place under the wide velvet brim. Then she opened a drawer and took out gloves and a dark veil and a jewel box. She unlocked it, and counted twenty sovereigns from a bag into her ordinary leather purse, added a ten- pound note, and then relocked the box. As she did so her eyes fell on the rings that sparkled and flashed all over the smooth white fingers. The plain gold band of her wedding-ring shone amongst them. She clenched her teeth hard and com- 212 TAULA menced to tear them off. When she had slipped off her wedding-ring, she took it over to the grate, and, kneeling down on the hearth-rug, held the ring firmly in her left hand, finger and thumb on its edge, and lifted the heavy brass poker with the other. One blow upon it and the circle was split, the ring lay burst into its flattened halves on the rug. The accumulated rage and hatred of many months, the long-controlled misery and revolt of all her married life, was in that blow : it only took a second or so. She picked up the pieces and rose, took up a small handbag that contained things for her toilet, slipped the veil, purse, and gloves into it, snapped it, and turned to go. Her face now was cold and composed as a stone mask, through which were looking two living blazing eyes. She walked downstairs and saw their room door open, and its light poured into the hall. Reeves came up to it as she was passing by. "Where are you going?" he asked, with a sudden deadly sinking of the heart, an apprehen- sion, a fear of — he could not tell what. The light from the open room fell full upon her. Her figure was dilated with the tumult of the feelings within her. Reeves stepped back involuntarily before the blinding hate in her face and eyes. " I am going out — never to come back again," she said, and the voice lost none of its music in its accent of merciless loathing. " Paula, listen, darling- PAULA 213 "You fool," she said, half mockingly; and the marvellously expressive face, that made her power on the stage, showed now all the subtle changes of scorn and hate and derision as she looked back into his. A sense of the immense value she was to this man was borne in upon her. She read printed on his face even now the wild longing to bridge the gulf torn open between them. " Search all London for my equal, and you will not find it." " Paula, wait ; I'll do anything— — " " I don't care what you do," returned Paula, and she flung the whole handful of rings she had brought downstairs at his feet. They rolled, glittering and sparkling, flashing with a thou- sand rays, in every direction, into all sorts of corners, over the white Wilton pile carpet, all except the smashed wedding-ring ; that could not roll, but lay in its two shattered fragments where she had flung it, just at his feet. Paula went on downstairs without another word, and out. Reeves, rushing after her, got down to the hall just in time to see the graceful figure in its dark clothes getting into a hansom. The next instant she was gone. He could have jumped into another cab and followed her, but he made sure she was going to Vincent. No other idea flashed upon him; that she was going straight to him was the one thought that possessed him, and he would go there straight too. Almost as white as she had been, Reeves 214 rAULA reascendcd the stairs, cursing Vincent as he had never cursed any one in his life. " Great Northern Hotel," Paula said to the cabman, and sat back behind the glass against which the snow beat furiously. She had not the faintest thought of going to Vincent's rooms openly in this way, to throw the onus of the responsibility upon him without first hearing if he were prepared for it. Reeves, she anticipated, would follow her, and then to take him to the man she would give up her life itself to shield from pain or danger was a plan which never sug- gested itself to her, just as no plan but this could force itself on Reeves's mind. Paula meant to hide herself at the other end of London and summon Vincent to her there. There he could come without danger and without under- taking responsibility, and she could learn his wishes without compromising him. " Free," she murmured to herself as she drove on, and she lay back against the cab cushions with a delighted quiver of the mouth and a sudden lighting of the eyes. When the lights of the Great Northern came in view she could hardly see them for the blur of half- frozen snow on the windows of the cab. As it stopped, she hastily fastened the black veil round her hat and let the glass down. She paid the cabman, and taking her handbag herself passed through the driving snow into the vestibule of the hotel. It was very crowded : the eight o'clock PAULA 215 express from Burnley had just come in, and passengers, wrapped up to the eyes and laden with more or less snow-covered packages, were bustling to the manager's desk or giving directions about their luggage to the porters. It helped her to escape notice, which was her object just then. Even as it was she attracted a good many glances, and as she stood in the glaring light by the bureau, waiting her turn, she dreaded at each minute to be recognised and addressed by name. When at length she could get up to the wire cage behind which the manageress was sitting, she gave the name of Mrs. Johnson, made no remark as to the absence of luggage, and followed the waiter upstairs, drawing her veil a little more closely down about her chin, and devoutly hoping none of the servants would recognise the figure they had perhaps only the night before yelled and. kicked their approval of from the gallery or pit. She had asked for a bedroom and private sitting-room, and they gave her two rooms opening one into the other on the first floor. Hotel rooms are generally the picture of discomfort, but these two made a favourable exception, they were well furnished and well lighted. Paula ordered a fire to be lit and a cup of coffee brought her, and flung herself into an easy-chair, while the waiter pulled down the blinds and drew the heavy curtains to shut out the snow that whirled savagely in the darkness beyond. As soon as the fire was well alight and the 216 PAULA servants gone, she took up a telegraph-form from a side-table and addressed it to Vincent. Beneath she wrote : — " Come to me, if you possibly can, at once. I have broken with R. finally. — Paula, Room 21, Mrs. Johnson." She drank the coffee they had brought, as she felt chilled with the drive, glanced in the glass, re-settled her veil, and took up the telegram. All the evil passions had passed from her face, all the hardness and mockery had disappeared, and the sweetness had come back to it at the thought of Vincent. " He will tell me what to do," she murmured ; and whatever that might be she felt she would do it to please him. She took the telegram herself into the station, and sent it off; then she stood hesitating for a second or two on the platform, thinking of her now ringlcss third finger, and finally walked into the street instead of back to the hotel. It was snowing heavily, but she put up her umbrella, raised her skirts determinedly, and walked on fast against the wind. Then suddenly she remembered it was Sunday, and with a shrug of her shoulders at her own foolishness, she turned back to the hotel. As soon as Reeves had got into his fur coat and hat, he hurried down the stairs and hailed the first crawling hansom that passed his steps. He let down the glass mechanically, as the snow blew in stinging his face, and sat glaring through it with unseeing eyes. Deep down in one of his capacious PAULA 217 fur pockets, where he had thrust his hand, he grasped a small, cold object, and his fingers met round its steel muzzle. He did not know himself what his intentions were. Had his life depended on it, he could not have given a coherent answer just then. His brain seemed twirling round, as one twirls a kaleidoscope ; and now one picture, one set of thoughts, fitted themselves together, only to break and reform into another, just as the glass fragments in the toy. The principal feeling, perhaps, within him was a hatred, a jealous hatred, of Vincent ; the picture that formed itself most constantly was a portrait of him, of the calm, cold face and the graceful figure. This, this, then, was the man she had always loved ; this the chosen one out of the crowd that always hung about her. Why should he be the favoured one ? this man who was — was — and — and — he stammered in his thoughts even. What he would have liked to say would have been a worthless, ignorant, hideous blockhead, and instead Vincent's image forced itself between his thoughts, and he found himself repeating, — good-looking, good-looking, and gifted, very gifted. This, then, was the man of whom she had murmured that one little word when he had first brought her to con- sciousness on their wedding night. Her lips had been locked thereafter, and he had never heard it since, and he had tried to forget it, that one little endearing pet name. Just a short word, but it 2iS PAULA had bitten deeply into his mind, as steel into flesh. He had cast it out of his brain, but it had always crept back and nestled there again, like an adder with its tiny barbed tongue. And at night he had lain often with that tongue darting into him — " Whom do I belong to, eh ? into whose ear and against whose neck have I been murmured ? Not yours, eh? not yours?" And now he knew to whom those sweet lips had said it. He muttered it again and again, and each time his fingers closed nervously on the revolver. In this frame of mind, unreasoning as a mad- dened animal, he jumped out almost before the cab had stopped at Vincent's door, pulled violently at the bell for his flat, and then rushed up the stairs. Vincent's man-servant let him in at the flat door, and Reeves strode past him to the drawing- room and walked in. In a large arm-chair before the fire Vincent sat motionless, reading. A large shaded lamp stood just behind him, and at his side a low leather table covered with great ponderous books of reference. The light from the reading lamp struck across his pale abstracted face and his slight white hand that held the volume. An egg- shell china cup and saucer that he had used for his coffee stood on the mantelpiece. A small silent fire burnt at his feet. At the far end of the room his bedroom doors stood wide open. Both rooms were well lighted, and a dead silence reigned, only broken by the steady muffled ticking of the large PAULA 219 clock on the mantelpiece. Into this quiet atmo- sphere of study Reeves came impetuously, blazing with the tumult of passions fighting within him, and paused suddenly on the threshold. Instinctively he felt she was not here. Had she even passed through these rooms, that faint delicate scent, a subtle, barely perceptible perfume like the breath of roses, that always hovered over her, would have betrayed her : there had been no warring of emotions in this room, the very air seemed cold and quiet as in a cloister. The young fellow looked round as his visitor entered. " Oh, Reeves," he said quietly, " is that you ? Come and sit down." He closed the book and laid it with the others on the table, and then let his hands rest idly on his chair arms, as he looked up and watched the other stride heavily up to the hearth. Reeves stood looking savagely about the rooms for a few seconds, utterly confused by the difference of this scene from what he had pictured; then feeling he must speak, and unable to say any- thing but that which was seething in his mind, he stammered out — " Isn't Paula here ? I ... I thought she was." " Paula?" repeated Vincent in unfeigned surprise, but immediately getting on his guard. " No. Did you ask her to come for anything ? " Reeves laughed, a short, cynical laugh, and looked down ironically at the figure in the chair. Vincent met his gaze with one of cold, steady inquiry. 220 PAULA " I should be likely to do that, now, knowing what I know. So you're the man she loves ! " he added, the rage with which he had come bursting out again after its momentary check. " Well, I've often wanted to see the man Paula could love, and I'm much gratified." Vincent, inwardly confused and dismayed, alarmed too for the girl, and much distressed, did not let a trace of any emotion show in his face beyond an extreme surprise. " Isn't this all rather wild ? " he said quietly. " What do you mean ? " Reeves stood on the rug, his face changing colour momentarily, his right hand pulling con- vulsively at something in his pocket, which he dragged up and thrust back unconsciously in his excitement. Vincent had not altered his position; he leaned back, almost lying rather than sitting in his chair, his legs crossed, one arm outstretched along the chair arm, and the other hand raised now towards his forehead, while his elbow leaned upon the table. He watched Reeves and the action, the meaning of which he knew so well, with faint amusement. Reeves looked at him, too ; and, even blind as he was with jealous rage, he did justice at that moment to the charm that there w r as in the easy attitude, the quiet voice, the extreme composure. " It's the same thing," he muttered, half to himself, half aloud, "whether she's here or not : you're the cause of it all." " I wish you'd speak out," said Vincent, with a PAULA 221 touch of irritation. " It's childish to go on like this. What's the matter ? " " The matter !" said Reeves. "The matter is that Paula has gone from me: smashed up her wedding ring, and said she's never coming back, because I objected to her standing with her arms round your marble head, kissing it." Vincent paled slightly. Why would she be so reckless and so rash? he asked himself in dismay. How could he best protect her from herself? And what did it all mean ? Had she done it in open defiance of Reeves, or had he found her acci- dentally ? " But probably this is only some freak of hers," he said aloud, with a quiet smile ; "you know how extraordinary she is. As for me, you can see for yourself she's not come here." " What does all this damned foolery of kissing mean, then ? " muttered Reeves. " Are you her lover?" he demanded furiously, turning on Vincent suddenly. Vincent felt strongly inclined to kick him out of the place, but thinking still of Paula's interests, he restrained himself. " No," he said, emphatically and savagely. Then he added with his former calm, " That sort of thing, with her, means nothing. She admires that cast for its workmanship, and might just as probably have kissed it had it been any one else's." Reeves hesitated. It was true that you could 222 PAULA not judge of Paula quite as an ordinary woman. The artist in her gave her a double life and character ; he knew that but too well, and he really had no proof against this man. Had that little word that stung his memory been Vincent, then he should have been sure; but it was not, it was just a pet name, of which the original might be Dick for that matter, or anything else. Well, he would make a guess, and he pronounced it suddenly out loud. The word rang through Vincent's ears and stirred echoes in his startled brain. It was like a drop of molten lead dropped upon him, but under Reeves's eyes his face remained as iron. There was not a quiver, not a movement, not one faintest indication of the shock that went through him. He saw the other's device, and defeated it absolutely. " Is that what she calls you ? " he said sym- pathetically ; and Reeves, nearly but not quite thrown off the track of his suspicions, mumbled something unintelligible. He half turned towards the door; then he came back and drew the pistol out of his pocket, and held it close to Vincent's face. " Do you see that ? " he said grimly. "Yes, and it's not the first I've seen," returned Vincent, dryly, without moving. " Well, if I find she's with you at any time, I'll put a bullet into your head, though I have to follow you all over the world to do it." PAULA 223 At the last word Vincent leapt to his feet, knock- ing the pistol contemptuously aside with his hand. His anger, which had been growing and accumu- lating throughout the whole interview under his quiet manner, was thoroughly alight now. " How dare you come disturbing me and threatening me in my own rooms ? " he said, as he faced the other man with his eyes blazing and his voice vibrating with anger. " Go out of them this instant, or I'll have you turned out." Vincent's anger, like that of most people who are ordinarily extremely amiable and conciliatory, was particularly unpleasant to face. Reeves shrank before him now involuntarily just as his clerks had done formerly in similar moments, and feeling suddenly he had made an ass of himself, accused the wrong man, and insulted his best friend for nothing, he mumbled some half apology, and hastily shuffled to the door. Vincent heard his steps pass across the hall and the flat door shut, and paced excitedly up and down his own rooms for a few minutes, his muscles quivering still with anger, and the pulses in his temples beating. He was not particularly strong at that time, and the highly-strung, nervous tempera- ment he possessed he tried still further by constant worry, hard work, study, and late hours. His heart beat violently as he walked backwards and forwards. He felt a sense of illness and annoyance that he could not get back his calm immediately. 224 PAULA What was all this about Paula ? he asked him- self. And — with sudden fear — where had she gone if not come to him? Had she — had she ? and he paused in his walk as the awful thought struck him. Had she, in a moment of despair, fled to death? and to death rather than him? because he had repulsed her, urged her to continue to do her duty ? and if it had been too hard ! poor little girl ! The threats to himself he never gave one passing thought to. The visit of Reeves had had just the reverse of a deterrent effect. Before that he might still have hesitated, now he should hesitate no longer. If Paula begged him to come to her he would go. In Vincent's whole organisation there was not a single strand of cowardice ; but there were many strands of obstinacy, and the thought that another stood with threats between him and any object would simply make him doubly determined to gain it. He was still pacing up and down, when the double knock of a telegraph boy came sharply upon his door. It echoed through the Sunday stillness that reigned over the flat. Vincent stood still with his heart beating. From her or of her ? he asked himself wildly, and years seemed to elapse as he stood listening to the measured step of his servant go to the door and then return. He took the telegram from the man in silence, and glanced through it. " There's no answer," he said quietly, looking up, and the man withdrew. Vincent gave PAULA 225 a deep sigh of relief as he folded up the telegram and thrust it into his breast pocket. After the visions of death and horror that had been passing through his mind, these few words telling him she was close to him, alive, waiting for him, stirred a joyous revulsion of feeling. A rush of new love and tenderness ran through him, and he gave it rein for the first time through months of systematic repression. She was free now ; then so was he. The current ran quick in his veins, the warm colour tinged his cheeks. " Fortunate it did not come half-an-hour earlier," he thought grimly, with a smile, as he went into the adjoining room. " She is so reckless, her not coming straight here to me was a marvellous piece of prudence for her." He drew on his overcoat and folded the white silk handkerchief round his neck. His movements were quiet, unhurried. It was just his dinner-hour, and a casual observer would have thought he was going round to his club for it, as usual ; but the eyes in the glass had a warm glow in them as he settled his hat on his forehead, and there was a smile upon his lips as he pulled out his gloves from a drawer and put them on. His heart beat hard with pleasure at the thought of the woman he was going to. The insult of Reeves's visit, and his threat, gave an added zest to the position, and the image of the man who owned her standing between himself and Paula with his loaded pistol, filled him with cool amusement. 15 226 PAULA Very rarely indeed did anybody prevent Vincent from obtaining any object he had set his heart upon ; and now, after some experience of this, it amused him to watch the attempt. His control over himself, and the quiet tenacity of his desire, generally brought its fulfilment in the end, in the face of all obstacles. The fact that however strong his desire might be, his command over it was stronger, and the power he possessed of hiding it deep down beneath an unmoved exterior, were the chief sources of his success. And here not the least pang of conscience troubled him with reference to the other man. Reeves would reap the just result of his own disgraceful, dishonourable bargain. To Vincent the contract had always been repellent, abhorrent, vile beyond words. For a man to trade with a woman for herself, to use her natural love for her gifts and all her joy in them as a lever to force her to his own desires, to act the meanness of Jacob and Esau over again with a girl in the first morning of life, and deprive her for ever afterwards of her birthright to give herself where she would, seemed to him inex- pressibly revolting. All this time he had held himself in check for her: if she could accept her life, good; he would try to make easier for her the path she wished to walk. But now there was no consideration to hold him, and he felt he was robbing no one. Reeves had robbed him, and now he was taking back his own. PAULA 227 He was quite ready, and just leaving the room, when a thought struck him, and he turned back to his dressing-table. " Since he's so fond of them," he thought, with a smile, and took a small revolver from the drawer — one which had been his constant companion in Australia. He glanced over it now, saw it was fully loaded, and slipped it into his pocket. Five minutes later he was stepping from the snowy pavement into a hansom. " Great Northern," he said, through the trap. He supposed from her wire that Paula was Mrs. Johnson at the hotel, and he meant if he were asked for his name to give Mr. Johnson, but, according to his general rule, he should not volunteer any information. He meant to walk into the hotel and straight on to her room, not stopping en route, unless he were stopped. His principle was, " Take everything you want for granted in this life," and those around you generally take it for granted too. At the hotel when he arrived there was still a large number of passengers round the bureau and in the passages. He passed through them as if with a definite purpose to the stairs. At the head of the first flight a room- waiter met him and asked him what number he could direct him to. " Twenty-one," replied Vincent promptly, and the man, recognising it was the number of a private sitting-room, bowed and passed on with a respect- ful " Straight on, sir, on the right." Vincent went down the corridor, his heart beat- 228 PAULA ing, his whole frame thrilled through with longing, love, and pleasure. The door of 21 stood just ajar. Vincent tapped slightly and then pushed it open. Paula was not visible. The room might have been occupied some weeks from its appearance. A carefully made-up fire blazed in the grate, and flung its light all over the room — a red light that danced over the table, ready laid for dinner, spark- ling on the white damask and silver, and amongst the red and white wine-glasses. His own portrait faced him from the mantelpiece, where it stood in the centre in its frame, very much en evidence, and her own little clock was beside it. The couch was drawn close to the fire, and her velvet jacket lay tossed among the cushions. On this couch, which faced the folding doors into the next room, Vincent sat down, and his hand fell upon her cloak beside him ; the velvet felt warm to his hand, half frozen by the outer air. He watched the door, and in a few seconds it opened. Paula came through the door from the darkness behind her, and with one little, glad, in- articulate cry ran towards him. It thrilled through the man who heard it, just as their first kiss had thrilled him. That had been nature awakened ; this was nature satisfied. Relief, infinite confi- dence, and pleasure spoke in it. He felt the influence he possessed over her as he had never done yet, realised the absolute completeness of her love for him. There was no questioning now as PAULA 229 she met him, no hesitation, no asking for forgive- ness. She had found herself, felt sure of herself at last. " Vincent," she said, pressing his hand and drawing him down beside her, as she took her seat on the sofa, " I am free. I shall never go back to him — never. I can't stand it. 1 feel mad with the happiness of being free again." She crossed her hands behind her head, and leant back in the corner of the couch. Her lips and cheeks were brilliant, her eyes overflowing with light and sparkling with smiles. To Vincent her unquestioned freedom was not so obvious. To him the path before them seemed set with infinite difficulties for them both. But to Paula, when under the influence of any of her keen desires, all obstacles in the road to them seemed to dwindle into nothing. Almost as a somnambulist she walked straight towards them and amongst them, her eyes fixed on the given point before her, and blind to all else, and deaf to all warnings. It was not exactly her fault. It was the outcome of the innate recklessness of her character. She was simply incapable of giving to anything that stood between her and her wishes its due import- ance. It seemed as if the magnitude of the desire itself dwarfed everything temporarily to her eyes. As she had heedlessly, almost unthinkingly, sold herself for her art, without fully realising the importance of the act, so now it seemed genuinely, 230 PAULA perfectly simple to her to cast aside her obligations when she had once actually determined that she would. Unfortunately, an agreement signed with Fate is generally pigeon-holed against us for life. "Well, why are you so silent?" she asked, rais- ing her eyebrows. " See, dearest, I've done nothing to involve you in the matter at all. I've made up my mind to leave Reeves, that's all ; but if — if Well, I shall go down into the country, to live quietly by myself, quite alone. My leaving him need not affect you at all, unless you wish." " Yes, I think you will do that," said Vincent, suddenly turning to her; and then he added with an extreme gravity, " I hope you won't attempt any more impossible things. Haven't we suffered enough? " Paula's eyes filled. " I will do exactly what you tell me," she murmured submissively; and Vincent felt it was impossible to moralise with her. " What do you suppose Reeves will do ? " he said, after a minute. " Get a divorce, I suppose," returned Paula lightly ; " I don't care a hang what he does." Vincent was silent. He saw that no suspicion of her husband following and attacking himself occurred to her. Instinctively he felt the slightest hint of this would terrify Paula and make her deny him possession of herself " Let's hope he will," he said merely, enjoying her proximity now, and feeling the pleasure made keener by the sense that PAULA 231 he might pay for these moments with his life. " Then in six months you will be my wife ; will you like that?" he asked. "Yes," she murmured. " And your work ! Are you content to leave it all? Remember how much you wanted a name once ! " Yes, I know," returned Paula. " I was great, in a way, with Reeves. With you I shall be happy, which I have found out to be much better." A discreet cough and tap came outside, and Paula sprang up, with a smile, and crossed to the chair by the fire opposite him. " Yes, you can serve dinner," she said, in answer to the waiter ; and he brought in the soup. " Our first dinner together," Vincent murmured, with a smile, as they drew up their chairs. She was so light-hearted, so untroubled, that she seemed to him more like his innocent bride than a woman whom the world would hold guilty, and the law declare bound to another. Paula was absolutely without a sense of guilt, and therefore felt no self-reproach and no fear. She had never regarded herself as the wife of Reeves, never looked upon the marriage with him as anything but a harsh contract, entered into for the sake of her art, and of which she had not under- stood the terms. To her view, that recognised only the moral and never the conventional aspect of things, there could be no infidelity where there had 232 PAULA never been love. If she chose to resign her art and the contract made for it alone, she seemed to her- self free to do so. When the waiter had been dismissed, Paula filled Vincent's glass as well as her own. " I haven't been drinking wine this last week," he said, with smiling disapproval, " and I am certainly in no need of any this evening." " Oh, you must," laughed Paula ; " I wish it. I can't understand any one not drinking wine, except for economy," she added, lifting her own glass and looking at him over it with the amber light of the sparkling liquid reflected in her smiling eyes. " The only motive that doesn't move me," answered Vincent, laughing, and watching her drink with pleased eyes. "If I couldn't afford it, I suppose I should do it." He kissed the sweet little hand that carried the empty glass back to the table, and took it from her and put his own un- touched one by her plate. " Oh, do drink it, Vincent." " I'd rather not." "You make it like a temperance meeting," com- plained Paula, and Vincent yielded, as usual with her, to her caprice, and drank the wine with a smile, knowing it would bring its customary pain across his eyebrows. " Now are you satisfied ? " he said, laughing. • "Quite," returned Paula, looking at him with a passion of appreciation that startled him. This PAULA 233 delightful weakness of his made his strength to her. The yielding up of his will, to the outside world so unbending, into her hands, appealed to her vain and imperious nature ; appealed, too, to its generous, tender instincts. By it he subdued her, chained her to himself, and endeared himself to her, to an extent he himself never realised. " I am sorry I asked you," she said, penitently and impulsively. " Will it hurt you ? " " I don't think the consequences will be very serious or desperate," he answered, laughing. " In any case, the fatal act is accomplished," he added, jestingly. " Don't let your dinner get cold ; let me give you the other wing." Paula still looked at him anxiously, but the immediate effect was only for good ; a light colour came into his face and suffused the pale, well- carved, handsome lips that were so much — too much — like a statue's. As the dinner went on and they talked and laughed together, it seemed to her nothing had intervened between them since they had sat in her little room at Lisle Street on the first evening they had met and jested as to the ten commandments across their teacups. After dinner, when the waiter had left them, after setting their coffee on the table, Vincent drew her to him. She came over to the hearth and sat down on the rug before the fire at his feet, and leant her head back on his knees. " Give mc your signet ring to wear, will you ? " 234 PAULA she said, holding up her ringless hands ; " I can turn its crest into the palm and make it look like a wedding-ring." " I will bring you one to-morrow," Vincent answered, slipping off his ring from his little finger and putting it on to her hand, so that its carved amethyst faced the palm. They began to talk of their plans. Vincent leant strongly to their starting on the following day for Plymouth, and taking the first boat to Australia. Paula combated the idea. " Oh no, Vincent ; you say you are a bad sailor, and you will be ill and wretched all the time : it is such a pity to begin our life together like that. Let's go overland to Marseilles, and cross into Egypt from there. Think what weather this is to start from Plymouth in." Vincent was silent, gazing at the white upturned throat. " Vincent ! " " Yes, dear." " Well, what do you think ? " " I have said what I think, darling." " But I'd much rather go via Marseilles." " Then we will go that way," he said, smiling. " It won't make much difference, will it?" " Possibly none. I could not say. Anyway we will chance it." The officious clock on the mantelpiece struck ten. They both listened to the ten strokes that seemed PAULA 235 to jar on the warm stillness and soft red light of the room. Vincent looked at her. " I must go, darling," he said, rising ; " look at the time." Paula rose too, and stood for a second, and then, as at their first kiss, their very first, long before, she found herself almost unconsciously drawn within his arms, in that soft, irresistible embrace. " Shall I stay ? " he murmured. XI The next morning, very early for him — between seven and eight — Vincent left the Great Northern and took a hansom back, through an icy, yellow fog, to his rooms. The dark, heavy atmosphere lay like a wet blanket round him, and seemed to correspond to the weight of responsibility he felt he had taken up since last night. He pushed the silk muffler higher round his throat, and fastened the overcoat across his breast. Even then he coughed a little, and his face looked grey, tired, and worn in the cheerless light. Not that he regretted a single moment in the past twelve hours ; on the contrary, he felt a deep content and quiet satisfaction. Reeves was scored off, and his own property his again ; but there was much to be thought out, much to arrange, and a deep anxiety to shield the girl from all danger and from all painful consequences weighed upon him. When he reached his rooms, he rang to have his fire lighted, and while this was being done, he changed from his dress clothes into his dressing- 236 PAULA 237 gown and slippers. When he reappeared, the room was empty and the fire burning brilliantly. Vincent drew the couch towards the grate and threw himself upon it with a sense of extreme exhaustion. In a few seconds he was asleep, too tired to think things out further. When he next opened his eyes his breakfast stood waiting for him on the table, and a letter in the plate. Vincent roused himself, sat up, and took the letter. It was from Reeves — an apology for the previous night's interview, a retraction of all sus- picion, and a hope their lengthy friendship would not be broken. An ironical smile passed over the face of the man reading it. There was something amusing in being apologised to at that moment by Paula's husband. He sat for a long time gazing down absently on the paper in his hand, thinking over his own course of action. Would it be more convenient to himself, he was thinking, to refuse to accept Reeves's apologies, and make last night's scene, as he well could do now, the excuse for a break with him ; or to maintain a nominal friendship with him for the present? In the first case, if he broke with him, he would be spared all observa- tion and all comment upon his own actions, but at the same time he should then lose sight of Reeves's movements and intentions; whereas in the second case, under cover of their acquaintanceship, he could make Reeves supply him with detailed 238 PAULA information. In the one case he would see the enemy's maps, and have to make pretence of dis- playing his own ; in the other he would see none, and show none. He thought he preferred the former. It was the method where more diplomacy and skill were required ; but, on the whole, he thought it safer, if well worked. He crossed to his writing-table and wrote a few rapid lines, asking if Reeves had heard anything of Paula, and offering his assistance if Reeves required it. He despatched this, and then sat down to his breakfast. He did not know now if it were the best thing to have done ; it would be a great nuisance to have Reeves coming in and out and hanging about just then, when he was making his preparations for his and Paula's leaving : at the same time it would be simply invaluable to them to know where Reeves might be, and in what occupation, at any given time. He had hardly finished his breakfast and flung himself upon the couch, when he heard a knock on the outside door ; it was familiar, and he wondered for a second whose it was, then his sitting-room door opened and Paula's brother came in. Vincent started a little at his unexpected entry, and he only had a few seconds to decide how to meet the questions he had doubtless come to ask. Should he take him into their confidence? He hesitated ; his life-long habit was reserve. The less people, even among your friends, know your plans, the PAULA 239 smoother they work. But with Paula's brother it was different. There was little danger of his be- traying them through stupidity. One glance at his face decided Vincent. How like he was to her ; he seemed more like her than ever this morning, and the same alert intelligence looked out of his eyes. " Oh, Vincent," he exclaimed, crossing the room to the couch and sitting down by it, " what is all this about Paula? What does it mean? Reeves came to me last night, and told me she'd gone. Of course I thought it was to you, and said nothing; but then he assured me he'd been to you, and you knew nothing about it. But surely you do know something of it, don't you?" he said, fixing his eyes on Vincent's face. Vincent did not answer immediately. There was silence, and in the grey morning light between them the two men looked at each other. " If you don't," he broke out passionately after a minute, " she is dead — she has done it. She has often threatened to — often," and Vincent saw him grow white to his quivering lips. " No," he said, very gently, in the tone which he generally used only to her ; " no, she is alive." " Then you do know ! Where is she ? Where was she last night ? " " With me," Vincent replied, quietly meeting the other's eyes fully; then, with the faintest shadow 240 PAULA of a smile, he extended his hand from the couch towards him. " Do you condemn us, Charlie ? " A hot, red flush went in a sudden wave over the other's face, and he seized the outstretched hand in both his own. " No, no, no; you know I don't," he said impulsively. " It was all a wretched, miser- able mistake; she ought never to have married Reeves. She has suffered dreadfully. You have been away; you don't know what it has been to see her, to watch her as I have clone, struggling against herself and wasting to death in the struggle. She used to come and spend the Sunday with me sometimes, and cry, until she fainted from exhaus- tion. It was terrible," and the boy shuddered. Vincent's eyes filled painfully as he listened. " She is not really weak," Charlie went on, in passionate defence. " She always made the mistake of trying to force herself beyond endurance, to drive against the grain of her nature, to do things a really weak woman would never attempt. It must have ended in suicide at last — that was what I dreaded — she wanted her liberty so much. She had always had it from a child, and she couldn't forgive Reeves for taking her from you. She " At this moment there was a ring at the outer bell, and before either had time to alter their position, Reeves had entered the room. As Vin- cent had expected, he had come flaring round the instant he had received his note. He looked more like a huge white cat than ever this morning : his PAULA 241 pale skin seemed to have an additional pallor, and his greenish-coloured eyes blinked nervously at the sunlight under their swollen lids. " Any news ? " asked Vincent, from the sofa. " None," muttered Reeves, walking over to them, his eyes travelling all over the room, as if he almost expected to see Paula now crouching behind some piece of furniture. " What am I to do, I say ? " and he looked from one to the other with a ludicrous helplessness. " Can I offer you some breakfast ?" asked Vincent, sitting up. " I can have some fresh coffee made for you in a few minutes." " No, no," answered Reeves distractedly ; " I couldn't touch anything." " Well, but haven't you any clue as to where she would be likely to go ? " said Vincent. " None, none," returned Reeves ; " I'm utterly, totally, at a loss." " It seems to me," remarked Vincent, " you had better wait quietly ; it's quite possible she will return in a few days. I am going over to Paris this evening ; can I make any inquiries, or help you in any way when I'm there ? " " Paris ! " ejaculated Reeves, stopping short in his fiery walk. " But why should she go there ? " " No reason ; but fugitives sometimes do," rejoined Vincent. His voice and manner were perfectly calm. Charlie listened with acute attention. 16 242 PAULA "And why are you going?" resumed Reeves abruptly, staring fixedly at him ; " this is some- thing new." Vincent laughed. " I told Charlie days ago I was going. Didn't I ? " he said, carelessly turning to his companion, who assented at once. " It's business, as usual, with our firm's agent. He's over there now. We might run over together, if you thought it any good." Charlie's breath seemed to himself to halt in his lungs as he heard. Vincent lay pale, unmoved, indifferent, on the couch; his. voice was gentle, calm, and cold as usual. "No," grumbled Reeves; "how can I go? I can't get away to-night ; besides, she's not likely to have gone so far." Vincent remained silent with the air of a man who has exhausted his stock of suggestions and can think of no more. Charlie played nervously with a tortoise-shell paper-knife he had taken from the table, and Reeves stamped gloomily about with his eyes on the carpet. " Well," he said at last, " I'll go and see Austin : he and Polly were always chums ; he may have heard something of it all. Anyway, he is a clever fellow, and could advise me, perhaps." With this speech, which was not exactly complimentary to his present advisers, he took up his hat and went to the door. "Sec you again, Charlie," with a nod in his PAULA 243 direction. " I suppose I shan't see you again, Halham, till you come back. By the way, how long do you stay ? " " Oh, two days, I expect ; not more," answered Vincent. " Well, good-bye," said Reeves, and went. " I think you were splendid," murmured Charlie, when they heard the door bang ; but a wave of light scarlet blood swept across the clear-outlined face on the sofa cushion. " I hate telling lies," he said passionately, springing to his feet. " I hate having to delude and trick another, even for her sake. This is where a woman always leads one. Why, in Heaven's name, didn't your sister accept me when I could have married her, given her all I had, and when there was no third person's damned inter- ference ? " He was excited now, and his eyes shone on the astonished Charlie, who watched him in a sort of fascination. So long as Reeves had been in the room, Vincent had been statuesque in composure and indifference, and the sharp transi- tion was arresting. " Yes," he said slowly, after a second ; " I admit it's all Paula's fault." The words touched the generous nature of the other to the quick. " What a beast I am to have spoken like that ! " he exclaimed. " Dear little girl ! No, it was not her fault, Charlie. It was mine, somehow or other ; it must have been. Well, it's no use 244 PAULA lamenting the past now. Are you coming to cheer me whilst I pack ? I must get some things together." Charlie got up, and the two men went into Vincent's room. Vincent gave him a comfort- able arm-chair, and proceeded to drag out his portmanteaus, answering Charlie's questions about his sister as he did so. When at five o'clock Vincent drove up to the Great Northern with a couple of his portmanteaus, he looked white and haggard, and as he entered Paula's sitting-room upstairs, she had, in the ill- ness of her lover's face, a first faint taste of all the bitterness that lies in the core of the fruit of evil- doing. She sprang from the chair by the fire where she sat waiting for him, all her love tremu- lous in her face and shining in her eyes. Vincent's tone was just as tender and his smile just as sweet for her as he caressed her. " Well, darling, you must have had a dull day, Pm afraid," he said gently, as she took his cold, half-frozen hand in her two soft palms, deliciously warm and rosy. His, though drawn from his fur- lined glove, chilled as the touch of snow itself. "What makes you look so ill, Vincent?" she asked, with tears in her voice. "Do I look ill?" he said, smiling. "Oh, no- thing; I am a little tired, I suppose. I had a good deal to do and arrange at my place to make things quite straight. You see, we may not want to come back for some time, and leaving so suddenly when PAULA 245 you are not sure about your return always means work." He threw himself into the arm-chair, pulled up to the hearth waiting for him, and drew Paula on to his knees. " We shall come back as soon as Reeves has got his divorce, shan't we?" she said softly. " Possibly," he returned, languidly. Contin- gencies, even probable ones, never interested him. His mind was of the clear-cut order that faces facts willingly, but objects to grappling with in- tangible hypotheses. Paula's mind, the imaginative, speculative mind, on the contrary, had the true artistic habit of leaping over the actual into the theoretical, of looking at things in their widest, most general sense, of scanning their far-reaching issues — of passing over the Is into the Might Be. In this case Vincent knew perfectly the divorce Paula assumed so lightly was not even a possible contingency, and the mention of it brought back for an instant the heart sickness of the morning. He realised all his love was unable to free her now from the fetters she had so carelessly forged, and he felt, too, that same carelessness which had been with her when she so lightly slipped them on, was with her now when she fancied she had so lightly laid them aside. Her gay, reckless nature, trained and fed on the Greek ideals instead of the English Bible, recognised only two really serious and important things in life — art and love. To feel deeply for, or be deeply impressed by, anything 246 PAULA else was impossible to her. Vincent felt this as he looked at her and saw her vivid, radiant face glowing with happiness, where another woman's would have been pale with anxiety and stained with tears. "You are quite happy?" he said involuntarily, looking up at her with a laugh. All the anxiety he felt, all the difficulties he foresaw when away from her, faded utterly here, now, under the irresistible power of her physical presence. " Perfectly," she answered, her hand on his that held her waist. " As happy as if you had married me instead of Reeves ? " "Quite. Does anything matter if we have each other? " It was the simple expression of her view of things. He drew the lovely head down suddenly beside his own. " No, nothing ! Nothing ! " XII Eleven days had passed, and on the evening of the eleventh, Paula lay on a couch half-way between the fire and the window of a room on the first floor of the " Hotel de l'Univers et de Pro- vence," at Marseilles. The window overlooked the quay and the noble harbour, one of the great harbours of the world. From this sitting-room one could see, through the delicate spires of a hundred masts, the flat, white-faced houses on the opposite side of the quay, and the black figures of people and carts moving over the great rough flagstones. Here and there in a gap amongst the huge dark hulls one caught the ripple and the shimmer of smooth water, and over all poured floods of white electric light that shone on the intricate meshes and webs of the rigging, making a silvery network between mast and mast. What is there in this harbour so almost painfully moving? As one watches its ceaseless, sleepless stir, its regulated turmoil — as one sees the vessels entering and departing with their freights of ardent, eager, living 247 243 PAULA beings, notes ship after ship changing and giving place to another in the eternal coming and going, and looks on all the restless, heaving, ordered disorder, one seems to lay one's hand on the great throbbing heart of humanity and hear it beat, to hold its pulse and feel it rise and fall. Paula lay looking with dreaming eyes through the panes. There was a faint flush under the soft skin, an unfinished smile trembled on the parted lips. Her arms were doubled above her head. She was waiting for Vincent to come back. He had gone to see about their berths in the next vessel starting for Australia, and she had stayed in on the nominal plea of feeling tired, but really more that she might have a few minutes of absolute solitude in which to enjoy, to realise, her own happiness ; — to take it up, as it were, in both hands, and look at it as a child does a new plaything. "I am happy," she thought, exultantly; "and for eleven days I have been happy. What a wonder- ful thing to have possessed and had ! and when it dies, as it must die, it will leave the wonderful legacy of its memory behind." She glanced back mentally through her life. The years stood up before her in grey blocks of time, like a line of diminishing cliffs, the farthest away being small and lost in mist. And on the face of them, blazing in white light, stood out eleven days. - Happiness, what is it like? Like the gorgeous painted butterfly fluttering high over our head, PAULA 249 with the sunlight shining on its burnished wings. Our hands are thrust up for it, and the hand that clutches it finds it has killed it — sometimes. But here and there a delicate hand and a magic touch can secure it alive, and then the butterfly lives — for a little while. Paula laughed, a little gay laugh, and sprang up from the sofa. " Anyway, I have my butterfly at present, and in splendid condition." She walked over to the hearth, stirred the fire, and looked in the glass, leaning her elbows on the mantelpiece. She was dressed in his gifts. He had insisted on her keeping the money she had and giving her everything she needed ; and she delighted in the look and the touch of them, because they were his. As she leant there, her roseate face supported on the white dimpled hands, she saw the door open behind her and Vincent enter. The colour in her face deepened and the blue eyes smiled caressingly across the glass. Vincent came up and kissed her, drawing her head, backwards on to his shoulder. " Where have you been such an age ? " she mur- mured, under his kiss. " Yes, it's years, as you say," he returned ; " the ?eon of half-an-hour. I have secured our cabin, and the boat leaves on Monday — I wish it were to-night." " Do no boats leave to-night ? " " Yes, one ; but I couldn't get a cabin to our- selves on that one." 250 PAULA " I am glad you didn't take it. I feel it would kill me to be separated from you a whole twelve hours." Vincent laughed, and pressed her closer. "That is what I feel, too, and why I refused the berths this morning when they were offered me; but I know it was unwise. I am so unwise where you are concerned, always." Paula laughed and released herself, and walked away to the window and stood looking out at the brilliant quay. The Monarch, for Alexandria, had just sailed out of the harbour, leaving behind it its empty berth, a glistening breadth of smooth black water. It had gone, and they were left behind. Vincent followed her to the window. " But it doesn't matter, does it? " "We must hope it will not," he returned gravely. " In any case, the boat's gone now ; it's no use thinking of it." "To-day's Friday; we haven't long to wait," remarked Paula, gazing out at the maze of light beneath them ; and Vincent gazed at her and stroked her hair gently where it flowed in crink- ling golden waves above her little white ear. Nine o'clock chimed, and the waiter entered the room bringing their coffee on a tray. Paula strolled back into the room and over to the fire to make and light a cigarette, humming as she did so, "Ha! ha! ha! Madame dc Thomas! Ellc est maigre commc ci, clle est maigre comme ca. Elle est PAULA 251 maigre comme tout, est Madame de Thomas" — the last song they had heard at the cafe chantant last night. She sugared the coffee, and Vincent joined her from the window and took the easy-chair by the hearth; she threw herself into the other and crossed one knee, so that her foot could swing to the refrain of "Madame de Thomas." It was a cosy little room in which they sat, one part bedroom and five parts sitting-room, after the manner of French apartments. The bed stood almost hidden in an alcove draped with red ; mir- rors, round and oval, on the walls gave back the sparkling light of the fire. A soft steady glow shed from the lamp swinging from the ceiling showed a new portmanteau open upon the floor, and all sorts of delicate chiffons and articles of feminine attire lying on the chairs. Paula herself, sitting in the midst of the gay, bright confusion, showed no trace of the terrible stress of feelings that had lifted her, as a great wave in life's ocean, and flung her on to this stretch of sparkling white sand, this reef of coral, where there was only sunlight and clear water. It was only Vincent who looked a little grave, and stirred his coffee with preoccupied deliberation. " You look quite sad," said Paula in her caressing voice, after a minute, looking across at him. The light from above fell on her head and through the gilt waves of her hair, her eyes were luminous with the excitement of his presence. 252 PAULA The man threw a look over her that was in itself almost an embrace. "Yes; because I feel I ought to tell you something, and haven't the courage," he murmured. Paula put her cup down, and her red lips parted faintly in a smile. "What an alarming preface! What can it be ? Do tell me ! " " Come and give me a kiss ; then I will." In almost one perfect, single movement Paula slid from her chair to her knees beside him. She put her arms round him and lifted her face to his. " You needn't bribe me to do that," she mur- mured. " Now tell me, what is it ? " " Supposing it makes you very unhappy? " Paula laughed. " Nothing can harm me very much now. I am out of reach of the gods. Vixir " They have still the future." " And I the present. I don't care for anything the future may bring, unless it's our separation." " This might even mean separation — it did once before," said Vincent, bitterly. " I can't bear telling you, only I feel I ought. I went to the Poste Restantc to-day for letters, and found one there from Reeves. Somehow or other he has learnt that we are here, and he threatens that he will remove your play instantly from the boards if you don't return." Paula lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him. He had grown pale with the effort PAULA 253 it had cost him to tell her. " Is that all ? " she asked. " Yes. Isn't it enough ? " Paula laughed joyously. " Let him," she said merely. " Let him put the whole thing on the fire, if it amuses him. It is his and the public's loss." " But this is the same play," said Vincent, slowly, " that some months back you sacrificed both of us for deliberately." " Yes, because I was a child ; I hadn't learnt life's alphabet. A child will give away his in- heritance for a box of bonbons. I gave away mine for the bonbons of fame. Afterwards the child sees what a fool he's been, as I do now." Vincent gazed at her in silence. He hardly understood her and her rapid, violent changes of feeling. And this very fact lent her an additional attraction for him. That which we thoroughly understand we soon tire of. What a charm lies in a new tongue, and once learnt how little we read in it ! "A woman's best inheritance is herself," went on Paula, in her light, derisive tones. " If she invests that, it pays her back in dividends of pleasure. If she invests her talents, they pay her back in work." "And you don't care ?" he said, looking into the brilliant, mocking face. " I don't care — now." "Then we may burn this, it needs no further 254 PAULA consideration," returned Vincent ; and he drew Reeves's letter from his pocket, and holding aside her hand that tried to intercept it, flung it on the fire. She watched it curl in the light wood flame. " Why didn't you let me see it ? I wanted to," she said petulantly. "Why, if you say you don't care ? " he said, laugh- ing, and raising his eyebrows. There was a flush of triumph on his face. The half of all passion is vanity, either excited or gratified, and in this complete abandonment of gifts and favours really divine for the human pleasure he could offer, was an exquisite flattery. " That idiotic letter has depressed you all day ! " she said, after a minute ; " come out and let's go to the • Basserie des Chouxfleurs ' and hear Jean Jaques sing Les Tourterelles." Vincent drew out his watch. " It's late now, but we will go if you like." "Yes — I should like. W T here did I put my dress ? I say ! what a state of confusion my things are in ! " She got up and found her dress and jacket, and was equipped in them in five minutes. As she put on her hat in front of the glass, Vincent came up. " Do I really outweigh everything with you ? " he asked in her ear. " Why don't you study your looking-glass more, if you think it so funny?" she said mischievously, engaged in pinning on her hat. PAULA 3 Vincent laughed. " How we shall have to pay for all this happiness ! " he murmured, half un- consciously, looking at the laughing face in the glass. " Nonsense," returned Paula. " The only thing you have to pay for in this world is doing your duty. Virtue is its own punishment ! " XIII At the same hour the following evening, Paula sat in her room nursing her happiness, as she had done the preceding one. The room was in an even greater confusion : she had just gone to the bottom of her trunk and turned everything on to the floor to pack it another way ; then her mood changing, she had flung herself into a chair to have a "think," and she hummed absently as she sat, " Ha ! ha ! ha ! Madame de Thomas." The door opened. She looked up, expecting Vincent. It was the waiter, however, who advanced smiling. " A letter for Madame," he murmured. She took it from the tray, and he withdrew. Paula tore it open contemptuously. She recognised the handwriting, and the mere sight was hateful to her. "25 Ouai de Robinet, Marseilles. "My dear Paula, — With some little difficulty I have traced you and followed you, and I am now staying, as you see, next door to you. My window overlooks your hotel entrance. 258 PAULA 257 " I shall be glad if you will rejoin me here within two hours of receiving this note, so that we can return together by the midnight train to Paris. " Should you not see fit to do this, I intend shooting Halham at sight. I may, or may not, be able to do so at once, but as I shall make hunting him down my sole occupation henceforward, it is unlikely he will escape me long. " I am quite indifferent as to what penalty I have to pay myself. I am determined to have one of two things — either my wife back or Halham's life. Personally, I should much prefer the former, but I leave the choice entirely in your hands. " Your affectionate husband, "Dick Reeves." There was a little flutter of paper as the letter fell to the ground. Paula rose to her feet, and her eyes looked about the room as the eyes of a wild beast when first caught in the trap. It was terrible, awful, never to be forgotten if once seen, the look in the girl's face of hatred coupled to despair. The full realisation came home to her at once of all they meant, those few words traced on the silent paper. They were Vincent's death-warrant await- ing her signature. Then for the first time she felt how she loved this man — more than life or eternity, more than her own body and soul, more than the world or heaven, was this other slight perishable frame animated with its day of human life. 1; 258 PAULA "Vincent! Vincent!" she said aloud. It was the cry of a dying human soul. She saw there was but one way before her — to go back. There was no haze in her brain, no dazed and merciful obscurity. All in her brain stood out sharp, distinct, and clear. She made a step forward, then stopped, as if paralysed. " My God ! my God ! why are you so fearfully cruel ? It was a crime to marry him, I know, but I was blinded. Who sent that blindness upon me ? Then I suffered for ten months — how I suffered! and now this agony. All this punishment for all my life long for one error, one folly. Is it just? Is it just?" A mocking voice repeated in her ears, " Have you forgotten, ' the way of trangrcssors ' ? " But the voice died again in waves of memory from her childhood's training. She was not a Christian with the humble Christian's ideas of a merciful Father, with merciful chastisements and a merciful recall to the fold. It seemed to her a strange, inexplicable fate that had blinded her in her girl- hood and thrown her into marriage with Reeves, that same inexorable fate that had hounded her on to rebellion, and now again that fate that pursued her in its fury to hurl her back into the abyss. She was the helpless shade drifting before the whirlwind. She paced up and down the room as a Roman slave might pace whilst waiting for the torture. PAULA 259 There was nothing to be done and no escape, and she knew it. She walked with her teeth sunk in her lip till the blood from it ran in a tiny thread to her chin, and she did not notice it; her nails were sunk into the flesh of her palms in her clenched hands. Only one thing possessed her mind now. The man she loved should not suffer. As she came up to the window, the brilliance of the harbour with its swaying load of vessels and their silvery rigging caught the mechanical vision, and she looked out. " Had we gone yesterday night," she thought, with a bitter smile, " we might have escaped." Well, it was not to be. The door opened as she stood there, and she turned and saw Vincent enter. Was it only her malignant fate that dazzled and deluded her vision ? Or did he really look better, more pleasing, more attractive than usual that night ? His face was slightly flushed with the cold air outside, his eyes animated with the thought that he was coming back to her ; a smile broke over his lips as she came to him. The next moment her arms were twisted tightly round his throat ; her warm lips on his seemed seeking to draw out his life. "Why, what is it, darling?" he asked, con- cernedly. " Oh, Vincent ! I must give you up — go back." " Go back !" he repeated, almost sharply. "What are you talking about ? " 260 PAULA " He will kill you otherwise." Vincent gave a relieved laugh. " Oh, is that all ? " he said, merely taking off his hat and laying it down. Then drawing her over to the fire, he stood opposite her on the rug and put his arms round her again. " Well, Sweetness, that amiable intention of his is not new to me." " Read it," she said, with dry lips and throat ; and she gave him the letter. Vincent took the sheet from her ice-cold hand and read it, keeping her trembling frame against his side. When he came to the end he flung the letter on the table and laughed, and bent over her and kissed her bleeding lips. " I admit it's very neatly put : succinct and to the point — worthy of one of your own plays, darling. But as to shooting — two can shoot, if it comes to that. Since we left I have never been without this as my hospes comesque corporis," and he drew out his own little revolver, and the steel glistened in the firelight. Paula clung to him in silence. " He put a charming postscript to his last letter about the play, but I didn't want you to be bothered. I didn't think he would write again and fuss you about it." He spoke as lightly as if a troublesome tradesman had sent in his bill. Xor was it affectation. Danger is an exhilaration to some temperaments. It was to him. His eyes sparkle 1 as he glanced over his own steel toy. PAULA 261 "But don't you understand . . . that ... I . . . can't . . . stay ? " said Paula. Her lips and throat were so dry she could hardly articulate. She trembled so violently that the bracelets on her arm clinked together. Vincent laid down the revolver on the table and looked at her with sudden gravity. " What do you mean ? " he said briefly. " I want you to understand once for all that there's nothing else for you to do." Paula looked back at him in silence. The agony that held her brain seemed almost to deprive her of her reasoning powers and of her speech. It was more instinct that worked in her than reason — the defensive instinct acting for him. If a mother, Paula would have fought to the death for her young, and the wealth of unused maternal instinct within Nature used now for her lover. Paula stood with her arms hanging at her sides motion- less for a second, then her strained eyes wandered from his face to the clock. She started violently. " Look at the time ! He said two hours ! " Her voice was thin with fear, her lips white except where the blood had stained them. She turned mechani- cally from him to the table, seized the linen and the dainty pairs of new shoes laid upon it, and dropped them into the open trunk. An unconscious instinct for a commonplace matter worked while her mind was reeling in a blind horror of pain. She had been going to Egypt, and she was packing for 262 FAULA that : now she was going somewhere else, but she must pack for that too. The movement convinced Vincent of her intentions which he would not believe from her words. She meant, then, to return, to go back to the other man, and suddenly, through all the nineteenth-century culture, through his self-command, and the delicate refinement of habitual thought and feeling, rushed up the simple, savage, primal impulse — the blind jealousy of male against male. He seized her arm and tore her backwards from the trunk. She looked up and saw his face close above hers, and as she had never seen it yet. It was transfigured by anger, and that anger against her ! but she had no fear in her ; if he would only kill her she would be glad ! The grip on her arm forced the tears into her eyes, through them she looked at him. The usually pale skin burned with a dull crimson, his eyes were blazing, the mouth and chin were set in an iron cruelty. "What folly is this, Paula? Do you suppose you can go backwards and forwards, and trifle with me like this? You chose to come; now I choose you to stay, and there's an end of it." Paula gazed at him with her filling eyes, and, as in her own case far back, his face took up arms against his words — it appealed so vividly to Paula. At this crisis of her life, and of her own happiness, the impersonal instinct leapt up in her and con- quered. Marred as it was with rage, every line in PAULA 263 the countenance was noble and perfectly drawn. It was handsome; to the woman who loved him, it was beautiful ; to the artist it was sacred. A plainer man Paula would have loved, and perhaps, now, stayed with. " He might not even kill you," she said, and her voice was almost calm. She was thinking aloud rather than speaking. " He might maim you, dis- figure you, blind you. How can I stay? " He looked down at the raised face with its wide, tear-filled eyes. In spite of all she had passed through Paula's face still retained a wonderfully innocent child-like look that aarae back to it and lingered on it at moments now and then. The look was there now, and it melted Vincent's passion of anger. He drew her up close into his arms and felt the heart beating in a wild tumult on his own. " Even if he did all these imaginary things," he murmured in his old tone and with his old smile, " none of them would be so bad as giving you up. And why think of what may never be the case at all? I never do. You are always fighting pos- sible battles, solving hypothetical problems. You shouldn't do it. Wait till the things come. It's quite improbable that we shall meet at all ; if we do, I should imagine I'm the straighter shot of the two." "No! I can't stay, I can't," replied Paula, her voice stifled with weeping; "don't ask me — oh, don't," and she freed herself from his clasp and 264 PAULA went on gathering her things together mechani- cally, and throwing them into her trunk with the tears streaming down her blanched cheeks. Vincent sat down in the centre of the disordered room and followed her with his eyes. She went through every detail of her packing, sobbing all the while, and her hands quivering violently as she folded the things together. She seemed half un- conscious of all she did; even her crying seemed unconscious; the tears streamed down and she never once paused to dry them. At last the trunk was full, and she knelt and locked it ; then standing up, she surveyed the room: all was finished; she slipped the keys into her pocket and came up to him to say good-bye. She put one arm round his shoulders, but Vincent did not stir. "Say good-bye to me, Vincent, won't you?" she said, in her sobbing voice; "you may never see me again." " I have told you, you are to stay: you are dis- obeying me." " But I can't stay to murder you. I am only going for you." " I must know what I wish most, and I tell you to stay." " I can't." " Very good; then you have dune with me." The coldness and hardness of the words and tones — the result of his own intense feeling — seemed to crush the trembling girl as a physical PAULA 265 blow. She threw, herself passionately on her knees before him and clasped his hand. " Oh, Vincent, say you forgive me, and let me go in peace." " I can't do that," returned Vincent, with un- changed face and voice. " You have had your own way all along against my wishes and judgment, and in consequence have spoilt both our lives. I warned you not to marry Reeves, and you would. I urged you then not to leave him, and you would. Now I tell you to stay, and you insist upon going: well, go then, and, as I say, have done with me, that's all." His face was pale with the stress of suppressed passions. Paula, kneeling there, wrung her hands despairingly. " But he will follow us — you — wherever we go." " You knew that when you left him." "Not that he might kill you. No, no, no; I swear I never dreamed of it." " I have told you I would rather risk it ten thousand times than have the pain of losing you, and the humiliation of giving you up to Reeves." Paula looked up at him through her blinding tears. For a moment she wavered, it was so easy, so delightful to stay: the temptation was very great, life with him until found — if found — by Reeves, and then simple death by her own hand if he were taken from her ; but to go back, to enter again that dark, narrow path of degradation that 266 PAULA she must tread downwards to the end : it was almost beyond her strength, but then — she looked hard at the face she loved, and it swam suddenly before her in a mist of blood. " Let me go," she said, in a faint, breathless voice, with dilated eyes. " I have said, go." " But with your consent ? " " No." " Say you forgive me ; condemn me, think me in the wrong, but forgive me." " No." " Then I must go unforgiven," she said suddenly, starting to her feet. "Oh, Vincent, nobody can ever love you in this world as I have done, and do, and always shall. I would give up my life this minute for yours if it would benefit you, but that wouldn't. Going back to him does protect you, and I must do it." Vincent did not seek to restrain her by force : he looked up, and the last he saw of her was her pale face and passionate eyes gazing back at him from the darkness beyond the threshold of the door. Then she was gone. Vincent sat on motionless. By-and-by some men belonging to the hotel came up to take her portmanteau and handbag. He took no notice. The men took the things out in silence and closed the door. Mechanically, like a sleep-walker, she had gone straight from him to her husband's room. Reeves PAULA 267 looked up and saw her enter: her face was livid and lin°d and seamed, the eyes looked out at him with an undying hatred and reproach. His own, flinching yet compelled to remain fixed on hers, grew wide with a nervous terror. She staggered forward a few steps almost as one drunk, and he shrank back in his chair before her. " You have come back ? " he muttered vaguely, mechanically, with his mouth hanging open. " For his sake," returned Paula. She had no voice, but the dry lips moved and he saw them form those words. She swayed for a second, then dropped speechless where she stood. Reeves started up and bent over the little huddled, broken heap on the hearth, nerveless, limp, almost lifeless, with little beauty in it now, and on the ashen lips the stamp of an eternal hate. He had got his wife back. Was this his wife? Who can constrain the human soul ? XIV The journey back to Paris was terrible. Paula was perfectly silent and passive, like a re-captured fugitive from an asylum, whose frenzy has spent itself. She moved and acted as was required mechanically, but with such a will-less indifference that Reeves looked at her from time to time with a paralysing fear gripping his heart Suppose this brain, so strangely excitable at all times, should lose its balance — the perfect, delicate balance — and the powers it had been divinely gifted with ? He was oppressed, and before leaving the semi- apartment, semi-hotel, he made his way to the bar and drank largely to dull his thoughts a little. Only once did Paula give evidence that she was still a rational, sentient being, and that was before they descended the stairs, when Reeves slipped his revolver into his handbag. Her eyes flashed as they followed it in silence. When they came down he was a little behind her, and she stood on the pavement looking up to the window above her in the next-door hotel. It was still lighted. The 263 PAULA 269 night was icy, with a north wind sweeping down the snow-laden streets. Her velvet jacket lay back unfastened from her throat and chest. She felt the cold pierce through and through her. Where was he? Was he still sitting there motionless? She thought so, and the wall and window and blind became transparent for her. "Come! get into the carriage, you'll catch cold," said Reeves's voice behind her. She walked for- ward quietly and took her seat. The train left Marseilles punctually at midnight. In the first- class carriage besides themselves were two other passengers, Frenchmen. Reeves took one corner, and his wife lay a crushed, seemingly inanimate figure in the opposite one. Reeves put his railway rug over her and lifted her feet on to the foot-warmer. She took no notice, her face was whiter than the snow lying on the window ledges, and her eyes were closed. Reeves took the large velvet hat next from her head and put it up on the rack. The Frenchman opposite looked round the Gil Bias he was reading, and fixed his eyes on the blonde cJievelure thus revealed with undisguised admira- tion. The Frenchman beside her looked sym- pathetic and observed that Madame appeared souffrante. At the one break that occurs, when the train stops for twenty minutes, their carriage emptied itself, and Reeves asked Paula if he could get her anything, or if she would come to the refreshment room. She simply shook her head, 2;o PAULA and he got out, leaving her alone, and the carriage door open. In the next carriage, also on their way to Eng- land, travelled a British paterfamilias and his two daughters. They descended also and passed Paula's carriage on their way to the refreshment room. . He happened to glance in and saw her face and figure and light head under the lamp- light. " By Jove," he said to his two girls, " we have a celebrity travelling with us. That's Paula Heywood in the next carriage, the great dancer; I recognised her directly. That's her husband, that big man on in front, in the fur coat — see him?" Both girls were deeply interested. In the refresh- ment room he regretted his remark, for they could hardly let him finish his coffee, so eager were they to see what Paula " was like off the stage." They hurried him breathlessly up to the platform again that they might have a glimpse at her before the train started. "There's a person I envy," said the younger girl. " Fancy having all that ! Youth and beauty and fame, and being able to do all those things ! Write, and act, and dance ! and lots of money, and a husband who adores you ! She must be perfectly happy. Why should everything be given to one person ? " she added vehemently. " Unto him that hath, etc.," answered her father as they approached the open door. " Now, my chick, don't stare too much." PAULA 271 The three comfortable English figures drew close to the carriage, the two girls' hearts beating with curiosity and interest. "Is she in this one?" the elder girl whispered audibly, and her father nodded. They looked round the door. Paula, who had caught the whisper, had started up nervously and flung her rugs aside. She sat up, yet half crouch- ing as a sick lion does when suddenly roused. Pier face was white, her lips blue and swollen from the wounds her teeth had made. Her eyes blazed out with a restless, nervous glitter upon the three rosy, kindly British faces looking in. Out of the pupils looked such a horrible, hopeless agony of unreason- ing despair that the kind-hearted father drew on his girls hastily. " By Jove ! it's a cold night," he said, shivering ; " get in, dears, get in," and he helped them into their own carriage. The girls said nothing. " En voiture, en voiture" came along down the platform; "montez, messieurs, montez, s'il votes plait." Reeves came tearing down the train, his long fur coat flying out, showing its inside pockets. His face was flushed with the many brandies he had been consuming. He had just time to scramble up the high steps of the carriage with the aid of the porter. The door was banged to. The train slid forward into the darkness. On the trio in the next carriage was a great silence. At last the youngest said, " She didn't look very happy." " She ought to be then, if she is not," answered 272 PAULA the other daughter, with asperity. She was a tall, lean girl, pleasant, plain, and good-tempered, except when a rush of rebellion came over her against the fate that had spared her the agony of its gifts. " Those people seldom are," returned their father, oracularly. The lean girl looked out into the darkness, in- scrutable as the mystery of life itself. "All the same, she must have had her moments," she said with bitter envy. She was ashamed to add her inner thought that followed, " I have never had one." " Oh, yes," answered the Briton grimly, " I don't doubt it, and she's paying for some of them now, if I'm not mistaken." His daughter said nothing. She stared out into the darkness, thinking of the other woman on the other side of the thin wooden partition. She felt dimly such pain as had looked out of that face must have been the child of some exquisite pleasure her mind could hardly conceive. And the vague- ness, the mystery that hung like a tantalising veil round both the pleasure and pain, fascinated her. It was not all commiseration that stirred in her, her pity was strangely like envy. She looked out with attentive eyes. Every time the train passed into a tunnel or through a cutting, the light from the next carriage flared upon the opposite brick- work, and the outlines of the four figures within, PAULA 273 clearly silhouetted in sharp shadow, flitted along the wall. On the other side of the partition Reeves sat back in his corner, his mind clouded and soothed by the station brandy, and after a time sank into a semi-doze. Paula, opposite him, sat white and rigid, looking away from the broad face with its drunken flush into the flying darkness at her side. Death was there, almost certain death; if she turned the handle and sprang forward, death and oblivion awaited her, but she looked out calmly. It neither tempted nor invited her. It is not those who suffer most that recruit the suicidal ranks. The capacity to feel intense pain means also the capacity to feel intense joy, and in natures like Paula's, in their moments of cruellest, inexpressible agony, the memory or the anticipation of pleasure welds round them a chain to life that even their pain cannot break. It is rather those of lower strung temperaments, not remembering that life has ever offered them much worth having, and not believing that it ever will, who go from it so easily when a deeper tint of grey suffering comes over it. On flew the train through the snowy night. All the three men fell asleep by degrees, only the girl sat with wide eyes the whole night long and saw the blackness beyond the windows change and lighten in the chill blue dawn. In the wild fury of rebellion against her fate, there remained 18 274 PAULA one clear thought in her brain — " It is my duty." The duty of convention that would have compelled her to remain with a husband she had grown to hate simply because he was her husband, Paula did not understand, but the moral obligation to save, at any cost to herself, the man she loved, appealed to her forcibly, irresistibly. As she would have flung herself upon the rack and kissed it, had it been to save him suffering, so now she set her face towards the old life she loathed, and would endure it to the end for his sake. All through the journey she was excessively silent, and this silence oppressed and awed Reeves. He longed at last for her to cry, to complain, to argue, to defend herself, but she did none of these. Hour after hour of their travelling passed, and she remained quite speechless. Then he began to understand how much he missed the brilliant, versatile talk, the clear laughter that he had always heard about him when with her ; if not with himself, with friends, acquaintances, strangers — any chance companions. He felt sud- denly like a child who has re-captured a pet bird and thrust it back into its cage with delight, and then waits and waits in vain for his songster to sin£ a. Crown Svo, Cloth, 3s. 6d. Third Volume now ready. DRAMATIC ESSAYS. Edited by William Archer and Robert W. Lowe. 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