OF MUTUAL MISTRUST. HANDSOME JUDITH! BUT MARIANNE HAD NO WISH TO PRY INTO HER AFFAIRS. HOW MATTERS WERE COMFORTABLER. PLEASE BURN THAT POSTSCRIPT! CHALLIS'S EXPLANATION. HOW IT FAILED, AND HE WENT FOR A WALK

People go on making believe a thing is true which each knows to be false, or vice versa, a very long time. But when each believes the other thinks he knows nothing about the matter—or everything about it, as may suit his case best—reciprocal deception will have a still longer life. And longer still when each believes the other thinks that he believes ... and so on across and across ad infinitum, in shuttlecock flights! Our own belief is that if this topic were discussed by Senior Wranglers, one or more of them would say something intelligible, which we can't, about the term of mutual deception increasing as the square of the distance of the shuttlecock flights, or their number. The first sounds best.

At what stage of the labyrinth of reciprocities were Mr. and Mrs. Challis left when the gentleman laid down his pipe? Perhaps, considering that one has other uses for one's brain, it is safest to leave that question unanswered. But there was this difference between them—that Mrs. Steptoe's Ramsgate tale had made of Marianne's mind a fruitful soil for suspicion; while Titus's, apart from a tendency to detect the influence now and again of Charlotte Eldridge, was disposed to acquit his wife of any ingenuity in cultivating crops of the weed—indeed, of very few mental subtleties of any sort whatever. She was to him the incarnation of stupidity and abstract goodness, a solid substratum of which was an article of faith with him, reconcilable with any amount of little tempers, or big ones. And this faith went the length of supposing that Polly Anne credited him with it, and knew it would prevent him imagining that she could think him capable of believing that she could foster suspicions against him. Simple and intelligible!

But the nervous tremor that seized on Challis when he laid his pipe down just now was too palpable to leave reciprocal deceptions intact, unless accounted for as foreign to the subject. Therefore, when Marianne recognized the abnormal nature of the pipe-movement by saying, with the mien of an answer-seeker, "Are not you going to finish your pipe?" he felt that some intrepidity was called for, for both their sakes.

"Fancy I got a little chill in the damp ... oh no!—I changed everything. Besides...."

"Besides-what?"

"Well—it was such an awful business, you know! Why, when we were driving down to the station, how was I to know I shouldn't find you burned to a cinder? Just fancy!—Polly Anne!"

"You wouldn't have cared," says Marianne, softening. This was an improvement, and none the worse for the serious note in Challis's voice as he referred again to his relief when he knew the alarm had been for nothing. Nevertheless, in a sense, he was glad it was true that he had gone through strain enough to account for fifty nervous ague-fits. But he felt a dreadful hypocrite for all that! Just fancy!—availing himself of the incident to cover his embarrassment in answering a plain question about his young lady friend. But his duplicity was really for Marianne's sake as well as his own. Come now!

"I tell you what, Tite: you must have a regular good strong hot toddy to-night, with plenty of lemon. I'll make it for you." This was good—almost Coram Street again! Why spoil it? "I can't think what could possess you to go catching cold at the station. It didn't do any good." But she improved it: "You must have it after you're in bed, and you must have my duvet." Challis made no immediate protest against this policy, but the prospect of a June night under a duvet can never be tempting, even when one anticipates the sleep of a clear conscience. He was, however, really grateful, kissing a rather improved countenance his wife advanced on application: this phrase is taken from his mind, which had taken it, more suo, from the moneylender's column in the Times.

"It isn't anything; I've no objection to the toddy, though. Now, tell me some more about your mother ... about the dentist ... anything ... oh, by-the-bye! one of my letters was from Bob. It's upstairs.... I'll go and fetch it."

"Never mind it now! Or I can send Harmood. You didn't answer my question."

"Let me see—what was the question? No, don't ring! Harmood won't know where to find it. Besides, I don't want her fishing about among my papers." And the obstinate man went, and came back with the letter. If he hoped that the previous question was going to lapse, he was mistaken. "The question was about your friend Miss Arkroyd." She took Bob's letter, opened it, and made a pretence of looking at it. But she left her restatement, with all the force it had gathered by delay, for his consideration while she did so.

He stood behind her, looking over her shoulder at Bob's letter. The exact thing that crossed his mind as he did so was that he had now a new box of wax vestas in his pocket. But, then, he had had to quash the thought that suggested it. "That's a portrait of the new second master putting on his trousers," said he. "What about my friend Miss Arkroyd, Polly Anne dear?... No, that's not his real name. Pitt's his real name.... Rev. Iairus Pitt.... Oh, well!—boys will be boys, you know...."

But Marianne was not to be turned from her purpose by the Rev. Iairus Pitt, whose parents had not baptized him considerately. "Is it all settled about her going on the stage?... handsome Judith?"

So strangely had last night's image of Judith—or, rather, her identity—cancelled her previous one of the stage aspirant, that Challis all but exclaimed, "Oh, of course!—she was going on the stage. Actually I had forgotten that!" For he had forgotten it—Estrild and all!—in the outbreak of fever in which he had so completely forgotten himself and his position and his duties. But he kept to himself what would have been unintelligible to Marianne; not without a feeling of relief that her question had reminded him of an aspect in which Judith could be easily discussed by both, without any arriÈre pensÉe.

"Handsome Judith," said he seriously and equably as he resumed his seat, "has given up all idea of going on the stage. That's at an end."

"Oh!" A short and thick exclamation, very conclusive.

"I shall have to find someone else to play Estrild if I finish the play...."

Mrs. Challis was considering. "She's going to be married, of course," she said.

"H'm!—I've no reason to suppose she is."

"You said her sister was?"

"I said something about Sibyl and Lord F. Yes!—but they're not twins, you know, she and Judith!"

"I know that. Really, Tite, I'm not the goose you always try to make me out! Besides, twins don't, invariably: sometimes one dies of a broken heart."

"Judith won't die of a broken heart when her sister marries," says Challis dryly. "I understand. But, Tite dear, do consider! A married sister younger than herself!"

"Miss Arkroyd isn't the sort of party to contract matrimony in order to walk in front of her sister at Court. Besides, there might not be another coronet handy, to walk in front with."

"What sort of party is she, then?" Challis thought to himself that a certain class of stupidity makes as formidable a cross-examiner, sometimes, as cleverness itself. Getting no immediate reply, his wife repeated, "Well!—what sort?"

"She's a problem; that's the expression nowadays. I'm not sure it isn't as good as another."

"Never mind the expression! You know you admire her very much."

"I do. But, you see, Polly Anne?—she won't act Estrild. So where are we?" What a boon Estrild, recollected just in time, had been in this conversation!

"What excuse does she give for backing out?" The speaker's grim attitude towards suggested breach of faith grated on her husband. But that was all in the day's work—the bad day's work!

"I think I'll have another pipe.... Oh yes!—I'm feeling all right again now; it was nervous, after that horrible affair at the station.... I'll fill it up new, and then I'll tell the whole story."

"I have no wish to pry into Miss Arkroyd's affairs. However, tell me if you like."

"Not if you don't like!" Challis is again puffing in comfort at this point, and, to our thinking, matters are going easier. No particular reply comes from Marianne, and he assumes a disclaimer, saying, "All right, Polly Anne! I'll go on. It seems that the Great Idea had something to do with it...."

"Let's see!—that's the Fine Art turn-out...."

"Yes; the new Art and Craft affair—Sibyl's. There was a family row when she proposed to put up her name, with 'Limited' after it, over a shop in Bond Street." He went on, and narrated briefly how Sibyl had met her parents' remonstrances by saying that if Judith went on the stage, she didn't see for her part why she shouldn't conduct a business. Especially as it was distinctly understood that mechanics would not be employed; only craftsmen. Also that the articles sold would not be things, but art-products. Also that they would be curiously wrought. How the Bart. had interrupted her, to ask what on earth she meant by Judith going on the stage! For the most palpable and visible things would go on in the family under the worthy gentleman's nose, and he be never a penny the wiser. "Then," said the narrator, "Judith was summoned, and there was a scene. The upshot was that both the young ladies being of age, and having a right to go their own way, it seemed at first that each would certainly carry out her intention, in spite of their parents' remonstrances. But maturer reflection showed Sibyl, whose sisterly feelings run high...."

"They don't hit it off?"

"Exactly!... showed Sibyl that if she made her own compliance with her parents' wishes contingent on Judith throwing up the play-acting...."

"I see," said Marianne very perceptively; adding, as an under-word, "There was the lord, too."

"It was what John Eldridge would have called a wipe for Judith. And, as you say, Lord Felixthorpe might have flinched at a stage sister-in-law."

"I didn't say so, but it was what I meant." An uncomfortable look comes on Marianne's face, as though something had crossed her mind. She says disconnectedly, "Tite dear!"—with a new intonation out of place at this juncture, but immediately after cancels it. "Never mind!—at least, never mind now! Go on about Judith."

Challis glanced sharply at her, puzzled by her words and their manner. But he let them pass, and continued: "Anyhow, Judith has given up the stage, and there is to be no shop with 'Sibyl Limited' over it."

"What do you suppose you will do about the play?"

"I must leave it alone for a little, and see how matters shape themselves. You see, the play was written for Judith Arkroyd, and you can't think what a job it will be to think another identity—Silvia Berens, for instance—into the part. Or Thyrza Shreckenbaum."

"I really am sorry for you, Titus. After writing things all over again and making alterations! Oh dear!" Marianne thought to herself, should she get up and go across the rug to her husband and kiss him? But then a memory must needs cross her mind—that story of the Ramsgate wedding—never cleared up! Till that was done, her rÔle of domestic affection stopped short of gratuitous kissing. Some day she would get at that story, and know all about it.

Meanwhile matters were comfortabler; no doubt of it! That odious play-acting business was at an end—at least, so far as Judith, who was the vicious quitch in it, was concerned. Titus might have as much Silvia Berens as he liked; she knew that would be all safe. Also, Marianne misinterpreted her husband's visible reluctance to talk of Judith, at first, as an excusable disgust with the young lady herself for the trick she had played him. He had got to speak of her freely enough at last. This was because, as a matter of fact, his sense of his surrounding relations was growing on him, and each moment was feeling comfortabler than its predecessor.

Challis finished his pipe, and they chatted of other matters. Then followed a good deal about the railway accident, and Challis talked learnedly about the flashpoints of petroleums. They seemed quite agreed that if it could only be established beyond a doubt that neither of them had ever seen or spoken to any one of the sufferers, or their relations or belongings, the calamity would come within the category of common accidents in newspapers, that happen every day somewhere, and can't be helped. But Marianne was terribly afraid that the guard, who was burned nearly to a cinder, must be the red-nosed guard who looked in at her carriage in the morning and asked if she had dropped a pair of double eyeglasses. That would bring it painfully near home.

Mr. Eldridge's impulsiveness and some of his individualities were reviewed. It was impossible to acquit him of having given his friend a perfectly unnecessary fright; but we would not dwell on it, for look at the excellence of his heart! This quality was always saving John from censure, which would have been dealt out unsparingly to the possessor of a bad one. It is extraordinary what an affliction you can be to your friends, with impunity, when once your intrinsic goodness is an established fact.

Even grandmamma was pacifically talked over—a thing that happened rarely enough. Marianne had not been very long with her, as, while they were at lunch, the tooth-stopping came out, and she knew that if it was not replaced the tooth would come on aching. These interesting particulars came gradually, as Marianne brewed the promised toddy. Challis had declined to have it in bed, as quite uncalled for by his malady, which he maintained, truly enough, no doubt, was purely a nervous affection.

But he never drank that toddy!

For when it was ready, Marianne said: "It's so hot I can't touch it. You'll have to wait."

"All right," he said. "I shall be a few minutes yet. I dare say I'll have another half-pipe to make up three. Don't you stop, old girl!"

Marianne yawned. "Well, perhaps I may as well go. I've had a good deal of running about, and I'm sleepy. Good-night, dear; don't burn your mouth!" She was more her old self than she had been for a long time. For, you see, she had seen—but slowly—that her cloud had cleared away. Challis's own feeling that—for him—Judith must cease, had worked itself into speech that his wife had merely supposed to relate to the chute of the projected drama. It was a good wind that blew Judith away, whatever quarter it blew from.

She went close to her husband, giving him the right piece of her face to kiss. "Which tooth was it?" said he. She showed him, tapping it. "It's a very little hole," he said, "and a good tooth!" She replied: "That's why Mr. Leaver says it should be stopped with gold. Now, good-night, dear! Drink the toddy, and don't be very late!"

Now, if only this woman had just gone straight away to bed and slept! And if that man, who had fully sworn to himself—mind you!—that the thing he had to do was to thrust his past delirium behind him, had but smoked his pipe, drunk his toddy, slept and waked next day a wiser man, might not the whole of the silly story have passed into oblivion, and left this prosy tale of ours without a raison-d'Être? Quite possible! But, then, no such thing happened.

For Marianne seemed to hang fire and hesitate over her departure. She paused as she passed the open window; the sweet air, now that the rain had stopped, was pleasant after so much smoke. "What a beautiful moonlight night it's come out!" she said. But the moonlight grated on her husband. That moon was only a day older and a shade smaller than the full orb shining on the little Tophet garden and that Calypso of last night, robed in a stellar universe of moonsparks. Why need the rain-rack, flying northward after doing the garden so much good, leave conscious guilt exposed to the sight of Artemis—or Hecate—who knew all about it yesterday? Why not have gone on raining a little longer?

Marianne took another view. She said again, "How lovely the moon is, Tite!" in an unusual way for her. For she was not given to romantic sentiments. Her husband read in her manner a recognition of their rapprochement; for such it was, though no official recognition had been bestowed on distance, its condition precedent. He went and stood beside her; and, for her sake as well as his own—so he thought—gazed on the moon with all the effrontery of those experienced reprobates, Mr. Brown and Lord Smith. He forsook the toddy to do so, having just tried it with his fingers, and decided it could be touched with safety.

They stood side by side at the window; a minute or more, maybe. Then she said, almost as though conscious of some unscheduled ratification: "That'll do, dear! Now suppose I go to bed. The toddy will be cold." He followed her to the foot of the stairs, to endorse the cordiality of his send-off. There she kissed him again, but said, rather puzzling him: "I know you've forgiven me, Tite dear!"

He was moved as well as puzzled. "But, my dearest girl," said he, "what have I to forgive?"

"What I said in my letter." Whatever this woman's faults were, she was always downright.

"But, dear old goose, what did it all come to? You couldn't get away from home just now, or something. What did it matter? That was all right!" Oh, how he wished he could have added, "Come next time"! But, alas!—that was all over now; reasons why jostled each other in his brain. No more Royd!

"I didn't mean that," says the downright one, pushing facts home. "I meant what I wrote at the end, on the back of the last sheet. It was all nonsense, you know; I never meant it."

"I didn't see the back of the last sheet. I read it in a great hurry just going in to dinner last night."

"Well!—it was there. Don't read it; burn it! Can't you get it now, and burn it for me to see? I would so much rather."

Challis should have replied that he had got the letter safe somewhere, he knew, and he would look it up after he had finished his half-pipe. The reprobates the story has referred to would have done so; would probably have gone the length of turning out their pockets, slapping themselves on those outworks; would even have said, being men of spirit, Dammy, madam, the Devil was in it if they could tell what had become of the letter! Come what might, they would have cut a figure! Challis cut none, or if he did it was a poor one. The fact is that, considered as a liar, he was good for nothing—had a very low standard of mendacity; and, indeed, had suffered so much over this affair of Judith that it was a luxury to him to say something, at last, without any reserves.

"It's burned already, Polly Anne. So you may be easy. Ta-ta!" He had said it before he remembered how unready he must perforce be with details.

"Oh!" rather curtly. "I suppose you lit your pipe with it? Very well!"

He had better have let misapprehension stand. Better that amount of false construction than the actual facts. But he must needs clear his character. "No, Polly Anne; it was really no fault of mine. It was the merest accident...." He stuttered over it; and she, seeing he had some tale to tell or reserve about it—but, to do her justice, without any idea of a lion in ambush—waited with patience. This, as you know, is the deadliest way in which stammered information can be received.

"It really was—you know how imp ... difficult it is to read by moonlight—and my wax vesta I lit to read it with was the last I had. It was when I threw it away—yes, when I threw it away it set fire to the letter. It burned my fingers, and I threw it on the ground." What a lame business! And he dared not mention Judith, and knew it.

Marianne's voice is changing a little as she repeats: "It burned your fingers, and you threw it on the ground?" She does not use the words "Please explain!" aloud. She merely leaves them unspoken.

But her husband has only begun saying "Yes ..." uneasily, when she cuts him short. "Were they dining by moonlight at Royd last night?"

"No—no—of course not! You don't understand...."

"I don't."

"I had read the letter myself just before dinner, and I missed reading the postscript, because it was late, and the dinner-gong sounded. This of the wax match was in the garden, after." It is coming slowly—the inevitable—and he is beginning to know it. Maybe Marianne sees the flush mounting on his face.

"I thought you never saw the back of the last sheet? Why did you want to read the rest again? Had I said anything wrong?"

"No, dear!—you don't understand. Listen...."

"Yes—go on!" Because what has to be listened to seems to hang fire However, it comes in the end.

"It was not I myself that wanted to read the letter again just then...."

"Who had read it before?"

"I didn't mean that, either, dear—do wait!"

"I am waiting ... tell me ... tell me at once!" Surely Marianne's breath came a little short on the last words, and she is leaning on the banister-rail perceptibly. His answer comes in the quick undertone of one who wishes to get something said that he would have been glad to leave unuttered.

"I was asked if I thought you would mind your answer to their invitation being shown, and I could not remember a word in the letter that I thought you could possibly object to my showing...."

"Who do you mean by 'they'?" "The—the family. Lady Arkroyd...."

"My message was to Judith Arkroyd, who wrote to me. Do you mean her when you say they? Who else was there when she saw the letter?"

"No one."

"You had better tell me exactly what happened."

"I had. They had a party, and dancing going on. I went away to a quiet garden there is, to be out of the noise, and Miss Arkroyd was there. She had seen your letter arrive for me when the post came, and had seen me after reading it just before dinner, and seen me slip it in my pocket. She asked to be allowed to see it—I know with some idea of inducing you to change your mind and come, and I ... I may have been wrong, you know ... only remember I had not read the postscript you speak of ... well! I let her look at it."

"Then about the matches and the fire?"

"Just an accident. I held a match for her to read by, and it caught a gauze veil she had. It was just got clear in time to save her a bad burning. But the letter caught in the blaze, and was burned before I could save it. That is all!"

"Is that quite all?"

"Quite all!"

"It is quite enough. Good-night!"

"Oh, Polly Anne, Polly Anne!—don't think—don't believe?..."

"Go on. What?"

"... anything but what I've told you.... Oh, my dear!..."

But Marianne has left him, and is on her way upstairs. She is quite changed from the Polly Anne who was standing by the window but now. She walks stonily, and looks white. But her fortitude only lasts as far as the return of the staircase. As she turns, and knows that he can see her face from below, lighted as it is by the gas on the landing above, she breaks down altogether, and reaches her bedroom-door in a passion of hysterical tears.

"No—no—no—no!" she cries. "Take away your hands. Go away and leave me." For her husband has followed her, three steps at a time. He knows, and the knowledge is a knife in his heart, how wrong he has been; not in falling in love out of bounds—a thing he had no control over—but in showing that letter, which he could easily have refused to do. Passion and action live on opposite sides of the river. Now, what worlds would he give to find palliation for himself in his inner conscience!—it is the want of that that ties the tongue of his explanation to her. Yet he must qualify his contrition, if only that plenary admission of guilt would be taken to imply still more, and worse, to come.

"Polly Anne dearest, for God's sake don't run away with a false idea! A great deal too much is being made of a trifle. If you would only be patient with me!..."

"I am patient. Now tell—what is the false idea? Why is it too much? Why is it a trifle?—showing my letter to—to that woman before you had read it yourself!" She is killing her sobs as she speaks, and has a hard struggle. They are heads of a LernÆan Hydra.

"Don't be unfair to me, dear! I had read it, all except that one bit on the back. It was so easy to miss it!"

"I never do—things on the back of letters."

"It was stupid of me. But what you don't understand, dear, is that I wanted Miss Arkroyd to read your message herself. There was certainly nothing you could have minded her seeing in the letter itself."

"Indeed! How do you know?"

"Well!—I don't know; I think."

"And when you had put Miss Arkroyd out, what happened?"

"How do you mean 'what happened'?"

"Oh, don't tell me if you don't like! I am out of it!"

Now, Challis would have liked to be able to say, "It is by your own choice that you are out of it; and the whole of this misunderstanding has grown, through a good intention of this lady you hate, to bring you into it." But he had tied his own tongue. "It"—whatever it was—had ceased to exist for him now at Royd. And probably his future intercourse with Grosvenor Square would be limited to just such an allowance of formal calls as would draw a veil over strained relations, and silence suggestion of ostracism. His behaviour of the previous evening had created a no-thoroughfare; but the conversation had hardly arrived at the notice-board.

"Nothing happened; the burns were not bad." His words were almost true—the prevarication, in this form, of the slightest, but the notice-board was clearly legible by now. "We left the garden, and no more was said about the letter, because some men from the house joined us, talking politics."

But Marianne has gone stony. Her manner rejects the men from the house, who talked politics. "I s-see," she says, fully expressing the closure of her mind against all extenuations, palliations, evasions, or excuses. "The letter was burned, and there was an end of it." "Exactly! An end of it!" He extended the phrase in his mind to his relations with Royd, and all belonging to them.

Marianne waited so incisively for anything further to be said by her husband, and he felt so certain that if the no-thoroughfare notice were disregarded, the trespassers would suffer penalties—his own being enforced disclosure of what would be injurious to both, and quite useless—that he was almost glad when his wife said stonily: "Your whisky is getting cold. Perhaps you had better take it." He answered drearily, "Perhaps I had," and went away, but not to the dining-room. He went to his own study, and sat there aimlessly, thinking, in the half-dark. Presently, making as little noise as possible, he went downstairs, put out the lights that had been left burning, and, going stealthily out at the front-door, went for a walk in the moonlight.

But that carefully mixed nightcap remained untouched, and was placed by Harmood on the sideboard, as an embarrassment difficult to dispose of where no man-servant was kept. And there it reproached its maker and its non-consumer in the morning.