Where Love Is. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ little girls,” he laughed, pinching her chin.

      On the evening of the 31st of December Jimmie, in his well-worn evening suit, came down to the dining-room, and for the first time in his life waited for Aline. He sat down by the fire with a book. The cab that had been ordered drew up outside. It was a remarkable thing for Aline to be late. After a while the door opened, and a voice said, “I am ready.” Jimmie rose, turned round, and for a moment stared stupidly at the sight that met his eyes. It was Aline certainly, but a new Aline, quite a different Aline from the little girl he had known hitherto. Her brown hair was done up in a mysterious manner on the top of her head, and the tip of a silver-mounted tortoise-shell comb (a present, she afterwards confessed, from Constance Deering, who was in her secret) peeped coquettishly from the coils. The fashionably-cut white evening dress showed her neck and shoulders and pretty round arms, and displayed in a manner that was a revelation the delicate curves of her young figure. A little gold locket that Jimmie had given her rose and fell on her bosom. She met his stare in laughing, blushing defiance, and whisked round so as to present a side view of the costume. The astonishing thing had a train.

      “God bless my soul!” cried Jimmie. “It never entered my head!”

      “What?”

      “That you're a young woman, that you're grown up, that we'll have all the young men in the place falling in love with you, that you'll be getting married, and that I'm becoming a decrepit old fogey. Well, God bless my soul!”

      She came up and put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.

      “You think it becoming, don't you, Jimmie?”

      “Becoming! Why, it's ravishing! It's irresistible! Do you mean to say that you got all that, gloves and shoes and everything, out of a five-pound note?”

      She nodded.

      “Good Lord!” said Jimmie in astonishment.

      In this manner came realisation of the fact that the tiny child he had undressed and put to sleep in his own bed ten years before had grown into a woman. The shock brought back some of the old perplexities, and created for a short while an odd shyness in his dealings with her. He treated her deferentially, regarded apologetically the mean viands on which he forced this fresh-winged goddess to dine, went out and wasted his money on adornments befitting her rank, and behaved with such pathetic foolishness that Aline, crying and laughing, threatened to run away and earn her living as a nursery-maid if he did not amend his conduct. Whereupon there was a very touching scene, and Jimmie's undertaking to revert to his previous brutality put their relations once more on a sound basis; but all the same there stole into Jimmie's environment a subtle grace which the sensitive in him was quick to perceive. Its fragrance revived the tender grace of a departed day, before he had taken Aline—a day that had ended in a woeful flight to Paris, where he had arrived just in time to follow through the streets a poor little funeral procession to a poor little grave-side in the cemetery of Bagneux. Her name was Sidonie Bourdain, and she was a good girl and had loved Jimmie with all her heart.

      The tender grace was that of March violets. The essence of a maid's springtide diffused itself through the house, and springtide began to bud again in the man's breast. It was a strange hyperphysical transfusion of quickening sap. His jesting pictured himself as of a sudden grown hoary, the potential father of a full-blown woman, two or three years short of grandfatherdom. But these were words thrown off from the very lightness of a mood, and vanishing like bubbles in the air. Deep down worked the craving of the man still young for love and romance and the sweet message in a woman's eyes. It was a gentle madness—utterly unsuspected by its victim—but a madness such as the god first inflicts upon him whom he desires to drive to love's destruction. In the middle of it all, while Aline and himself were finding a tentative footing on the newly established basis of their relationship, the ironical deity took him by the hand and led him into the cold and queenly presence of Norma Hardacre. .

      After that Jimmie fell back into his old ways with Aline, and the Great Frock Episode was closed.

Chapter V—A BROKEN BUTTERFLY

       Table of Contents

      ALINE sat in the studio, the picture of housewifely concern, mending Jimmie's socks. It was not the unoffending garments that brought the expression into her face, but her glance at the old Dutch clock—so old and crotchety that unless it were tilted to one side it would not consent to go—whose hands had come with an asthmatic whir to the hour of eleven. And Jimmie had not yet come down to breakfast. She had called him an hour ago. His cheery response had been her sanction for putting the meal into preparation, and now the bacon would be uneatable. She sighed. Taking care of Jimmie was no light responsibility. Not that he would complain; far from it. He would eat the bacon raw or calcined if she set it before him. But that would not be for his good, and hence the responsibility. In slipping from her grasp and doing the things he ought not to do, he was an eel or a twelve-year-old schoolboy. Last night, for instance, instead of finishing off some urgent work for an art periodical, he had assured her in his superlative manner that it was of no consequence, and had wasted his evening with her at the Earl's Court Exhibition. It had been warm and lovely, and the band and the bright crowd had set her young pulses throbbing, and they had sat at a little table, and Jimmie had given her some celestial liquid which she had sucked through a straw, and altogether, to use her own unsophisticated dialect, it had been perfectly heavenly. But it was wrong of Jimmie to have sacrificed himself for her pleasure, and to have deceived her into accepting it. For at three or four o'clock she had heard him tiptoeing softly past her door on his way to bed, and the finished work she had found on his table this morning betrayed his occupation. Even the consolation of scolding him for oversleep and a spoiled breakfast was thus denied. She spread out her hand in the sock so as to gauge the extent of a hole, and, contemplating it, sighed again.

      The studio was a vast room distempered in bluish grey, and Aline, sitting solitary at the far end, in the line of a broad quivering beam of light that streamed through a lofty window running the whole width of the north-east side, looked like a little brown saint in a bare conventual hall. For an ascetic simplicity was the studio's key-note. No curtains, draperies, screens, Japaneseries, no artistic scheme of decoration, no rare toys of furniture filled the place with luxurious inspiration. Here and there about the walls hung a sketch by a brother artist; of his own unsold pictures and studies some were hung, others stacked together on the floor. An old, rusty, leather drawing-room suite distributed about the studio afforded sitting accommodation. There was the big easel bearing the subject-picture on which he now was at work, with a smaller easel carrying the study by its side. On the model-stand a draped lay figure sprawled grotesquely. A long deal table was the untidy home of piles of papers, books, colours, brushes, artistic properties. A smaller table at the end where Aline sat was laid for breakfast. It was one of Jimmie's eccentricities to breakfast in the studio. The dining-room for dinner—he yielded to the convention; for lunch, perhaps; for breakfast, no. All his intimate life had been passed in the studio; the prim little drawing-room he scarcely entered half-a-dozen times in the year.

      Aline was contemplating the hole in the sock when the door opened. She sprang to her feet, advanced a step, and then halted with a little exclamation.

      “Oh, it's you!”

      “Yes. Are you disappointed?” asked the smiling youth who had appeared instead of the expected Jimmie.

      “I can get over it. How are you, Tony?”

      Mr. Anthony Merewether gave her the superfluous assurance that he was in good health. He had the pleasant boyish face and clean-limbed figure СКАЧАТЬ