I

The street door opened straight into the shop. The shop went back a long way, and was very dark and crowded with objects; everything seemed to have something else super-imposed upon it, either set down or hanging; thus against the walls dangled bunches of masks, like bunches of bananas, weapons of all kinds, shields and breastplates, swags of tinsel jewellery, wigs; upon the tops of the cupboards stood ewers, goblets, candelabra, all in sham gold plate; and the counters themselves were strewn with a miscellany of smaller theatrical necessities. It was only little by little that the glance, growing accustomed to the obscurity of the shop, began to disentangle object from object in this assortment. Everything was very dusty, with the exception of the shields and stray pieces of armour, which were brightly furbished and detached themselves like mirrors in their places on the walls, giving a distorted reflection in miniature of the recesses of the shop. There were stuffed animals, particularly dusty, with glass eyes and red open mouths showing two rows of teeth. There were grotesque cardboard heads, four times life-size, for giants. There was the figure of a knight in a complete suit of armour, with a faded blue cloak embroidered with the lilies of France hanging from his shoulders, and a closed helmet from which sprang a tuft of plumes that had once been white, but that were now grey with dust and age. This knight stood on the lowest step of the staircase that started in the middle of the shop and led to the upper floors of the house. A door across the top of the flight shut off the secrets of the upper storey from the observation of customers in the shop on the ground floor.

On the upper floors the house was old and rambling. It straggled up and down on different levels, along dark passages and into irregular little rooms, badly lit by small windows, and, like the shop, encumbered with objects; not only by the furniture, which was much too bulky for the size of the rooms, but also by properties which belonged to the shop, and which at various times had been huddled upstairs in the course of a clearance below. There were rows of dresses hanging on hooks, halberts and muskets propped up in the corners, albums of photographs for reference lying on the tables, pairs of boots and buskins thrust away behind the curtains and under the valences. You felt convinced that every drawer was packed so that it could only just be induced to shut, and that if you opened the door of a cupboard a crowd of imprisoned articles would come tumbling out helter-skelter. Everything was old and fusty; tawdry, and pretentious under its grime. Outside, the snow had gathered in tiny drifts along the leadwork of the latticed windows, making the rooms darker than they already were, and had heaped itself against the panes two or three inches above the window-sills. In the mornings the frost left fern-frond patterns on the panes; but although it was thus rendered almost impossible to see out, the bright frost and snow were a not unpleasant relief, for they were something clean and fresh, something of quite recent arrival and of certain departure, in contrast to the contents of the house, which had lain there accumulating for so many years, and which offered no promise of a disturbing hand in the years to come.

Over the shop door, on to the street, gold letters on a black ground said: Lydia Protheroe, Theatrical Costumier and Wig-maker. Lydia was not the name by which the proprietress of the shop had been baptized, neither was Protheroe the name of her parents; her husband’s name it could not be for she had never had a husband. What her real name was she had long since preferred to forget, and it was not difficult to do so, for as Lydia Protheroe she had made her fame, and in the town where she had come as a stranger there was no one to know her as anything else. The fame and the business she had built up together, amorously, jealously. It had taken her forty years. Somewhere back in the eighties she saw herself, young, determined, deaf to the outcry of her family; a young woman in a bombazine gown, with smooth bands of hair like Christina Rossetti, and arms folded, each hand clasping the opposite elbow; she saw herself thus, standing up, surveying the circle of her relations as they expostulated around her. They were outraged, they were aggrieved; they were respectable people who naturally disapproved of the stage; and here was Lydia—only to them she had not been Lydia, but Alice—announcing her intention of setting up a business which would engage her inevitably in theatrical circles. That a young woman should think of setting up business on her own account was bad enough, but such a business was an affront beyond discussion. She would bring shame upon them (here the personality of Lydia Protheroe first brilliantly germinated in Alice’s mind). They threw up their hands. Alice, who might enjoy all the advantages of a gentlewoman; Alice, who might reasonably have looked for a husband, a home, a family, of her own; Alice, who up to the age of twenty-one had given them scarcely any anxiety, who had been so very genteel, all things considered—in spite of a certain element of Puckishness in her which had peeped out so very rarely, a certain disrespect of their ideals—a mere trifle, a mere indication, had they but had the wit to read, of what was brewing beneath.

And what did she reply to their remonstrance? In what phrase, maddening because irrefutable, did she finally take refuge? That she was of age.

It was true. She was twenty-one, and she had a thousand pounds left her by her grandfather. She could snap her fingers at them all if she chose. She did not literally snap her fingers; she was gentle and regretful, she said she did not wish to cut herself adrift from her family, and saw no reason why they should cut themselves adrift from her. She would not bring their name into disrepute. She would trade under another name; she would cease to be Alice Jennings, she would become Lydia Protheroe. Secretly she was elated to escape from a name of whose homeliness she had always been ashamed, but this she was careful not to betray to her family; to her family she made the announcement with an air of sacrifice. Since they were humiliated by her, and by the trade she had chosen, she would go away; she would conceal her identity in a distant town. No; she shook her smooth head in answer to their protestations; what she had declared she would carry out; they should never say they had cause to blush whenever they opened a theatre programme. “Wigs by Jennings.” That should not offend their eyes. “Wigs by Protheroe,” and they could sit snugly in their stalls, being Jennings, looking Jennings; connected with the stage in any way? oh dear, no! Let them only think kindly of her in her lonely and distant—yes, distant—struggles. No doubt Miss Protheroe would find it hard at first, unfriended and unsupported; but armed with her thousand pounds she would survive the first reverses; and adversity was good for the character. Indeed, as she talked, always gentle and regretful, but perfectly obdurate, she felt her character stiffening under the test of this first adversity. The Presbyterian that was in her, as it was in all her relatives, welcomed in its austere and cheerless fashion this trial that made a demand upon her endurance. She enjoyed the self-satisfaction of the martyr. And yet, secretly, all the while, a little voice gibed at her “Hypocrite!” She knew her hypocrisy because, in spite of her affectation of martyrdom, she was rejoicing in her new isolation. She knew that she would embark on her adventure with a greater gusto since she was not to embark on it with the approval of her family. It was all very well for her to appeal to their sympathy with poor Miss Protheroe, unfriended and unsupported; the phrase sounded well, but the truth was that she wanted neither their friendship nor their support. “I want to get away from all this,” she cried suddenly and despairingly. She wanted independence; she wanted the fight. She would have been defrauded of both, by the lap of a comfortable middle-class family spread out behind her to receive her if she fell. Backed up by her family, she would have felt herself backed up by the whole of the English middle-class, cushioned, solid in the consciousness of its homogeneity and resources, an enormous family of Jennings, swarming in every town and with its place of assembly in every town-hall, inimical to the exotic, mistrustful of the new, tenacious of the conventions that were as cement to its masonry; a class sagacious and shrewd, nicely knowing safety from danger, and knowing, above all, its own mind, since nothing was ever admitted to that mind to which it could not immediately affix a label. This was the class to whose protection Alice Jennings had the birthright now rejected by Lydia Protheroe. She marvelled how she could have endured it for so many years. She made a gesture as she finally rejected it; the hands that had been clasping the elbows were unloosed, and the right hand tossed up in a gesture definitely histrionic, as one who tosses a feather to the wind. Her family had almost groaned when they saw it, for they recognized it as a defiance, a symbol and an enemy. She stood there, in their midst, a slim revolutionary, not visibly tremulous, and although her hair still lay in those sleek bands plastered down on her forehead, they felt that the moment was near at hand when they would cease to be sleek and would become rumpled; even curly; even puffed out; and that the snuff-coloured bombazine of her gown would become metamorphosed into some gaudy intolerable fustian. They looked at her as though they were looking their last. They uttered a preliminary caution; she smiled. Seeing her smile, they ceased the expostulations which had been wrung from them in their first dismay; they gathered themselves up in dignity and sorrow; they said that since nothing would turn her from this reckless, this unbecoming, this ... in short, this idea, and that since she was of age, as she had not scrupled to remind them, she must, they supposed, be allowed to follow her own course. But let her not expect to return to them when the consequences of her folly were heavy upon her. Let her not (it was her father who enunciated this figure of speech, shaking his finger solemnly at her), let her not hope to exchange for the glare of the lamplight the oil-lamp of the warm parlour of home. Once an outcast she should remain an outcast for ever. She had a sudden attack of panic as these impressive words boomed upon her ears. She saw herself alone in a deserted theatre, the holland covers over the stalls, the lights turned out, and the great pit of the stage yawning at her in front of the gaunt skeleton of the scenery; and simultaneously she saw the circle of her family—who were, after all, familiar, even if not particularly enlivening—seated at their snug evening tasks in the glow of that oil-lamp of which her father had reminded her. She came near to weakening; she knew that if she held out her hands to them, even now, they would receive her again into their bosom—but how they would cackle over her! they would pat her kindly; they would talk of her having come to her senses, of being once more their little Alice; and this her pride would not endure. She discovered that she could tolerate patronage even less than security; and for the rest of her days, if she capitulated now, she would be at the mercy of her family. She would be among them on sufferance. Sooner any loneliness, any quandary, sooner even starvation, than shelter on such terms. Inclining her head, she accepted her ostracism without a protest. As soon as she had accepted it—as soon, that is, as the worst had been definitely spoken and she had definitely survived it—she felt the sense of her liberty flooding over her. Her very name dropped from her like a piece of old skin. She became that unique being, the person who has no relations. Alice Jennings had had relations, Lydia Protheroe had none, Lydia Protheroe had never even had a mother. Independence could scarcely go further. She swept one last slow look around their circle, and passed out of the room.

III

After she had left them—for she had gone then and there, in her own phrase, “out into the night”—they had uttered, when they recovered a little from their consternation, all the things they might have been expected to utter. They were very hot and angry. Her father, a stout man, had blown out his cheeks, tugged at his whiskers and pronounced, “No daughter of mine.” It was an excommunication. “The ingratitude. To think that ever...” her mother had whimpered. Her aunt, who was elderly, frail, and timorous, had bleated, “Oh, and to think of all the horrible men in the world.” Her brother, a severely good young man, had said, “All I ask, father, and you, too, mother, is that I may NEVER hear her name again,” and his wife, who was like a little brown wren, his mere echo, had said, “Oh, dear, it does seem hard, doesn’t it? but Bertie is always right about these things.”

Her sister, who was engaged, summed up their main unspoken thought as she said fretfully and anxiously, “But what are we to say to people?”

IV

Lydia Protheroe, whose mind worked instinctively in terms of drama, always saw herself afterwards, in retrospect, standing alone in the rain on the pavement outside her father’s house wondering where she should go. She had not expected events to be so rapid or so complete. She had foreseen long weeks of argument, during which her family would slowly be worn down to some reluctant compromise, and although this had not been much to her satisfaction as a prospect, she had resigned herself to hope for nothing more. She found herself now, triumphant indeed, but a little disconcerted, with no luggage and too much pride to slip into the house again in order to pack. No doubt they counted on her doing so; no doubt their ultimatum had been but bluff. Probably they were even now sitting expectant, waiting to hear her key in the door, waiting to rush out and overwhelm her in the passage, and to pull her in with cries of “Alice, dear, we didn’t mean it!” Let them wait! She started down the wet street, where the gas-lamps shone reflected in the roadway, and as she went she turned up the collar of the overcoat she had snatched off the row of hooks in the passage, for the rain was dripping into her neck. It then occurred to her that the overcoat was not her own. She had taken her own hat, cramming it down as far as her eyebrows; but she had got the wrong coat. She investigated it: it was her brother’s—Bertie’s. This seemed to her to be an extremely good joke—and Bertie, too, was always so particular about his things. She felt quite disproportionately heartened by this occurrence, and as she thrust her hands into the pockets to keep them dry she pretended to herself that she was a man, to give herself additional courage; she even affected a masculine stride, and whispered to herself, “Lydia Protheroe... Richard Protheroe ... who am I?” and she skipped two or three paces in her excitement and trepidation. There was a pipe in the pocket of the coat; she curved her fingers round its little friendly bowl, and for a minute she even took it out and stuck it in her mouth, sucking at it as she had seen Bertie do, but almost immediately she slipped it back again with a guilty air and the sense of having done something inordinately daring, grotesque, and improper. The extravagance of her adventure was indeed going to her head. She had been for so long enveloped in the cotton-wool of her family that to be free of it was, simply, incredible. No father, no mother, no Bertie, to madden her with their injunctions and their restrictions. She skipped again, another two or three paces. But in the meantime she had no idea of where she was going or of what she meant to do. This irresponsibility was all very well, this release very delightful, but from Lydia Protheroe masquerading down a dark wet street in her brother’s overcoat, to Lydia Protheroe the proprietress of a flourishing theatrical business, with her name over the door and fat ledgers on her desk, was a far cry; and she had nowhere to sleep that night.

She turned towards the station. Where did the next train go to? There would she go, even if it carried her to Wick or Thurso. Since she had abjured all the common prudences, she would allow fate to decide for her hap-hazard: fate was a Bohemian, if ever there was one, overthrowing careful plans and disregarding probabilities—a random deity which must henceforth be her guide. Before very long, she reflected, scoffing, though a little uncertainly, at herself meanwhile, she would be ordering her life by the spin of a coin or the conjunction of the planets, since here she was already, with not ten minutes of liberty behind her, resigning her destination into the keeping of Bradshaw. She hurried on towards the station, huddled inside the coat that was much too big for her, frightened but indomitable: still pretending to herself that she was a man—a boy, rather, and such phrases as “He ran away to sea” kept flitting through her mind, inconsequent but vaguely inspiriting—and although she was thereby transporting herself into a world of pretence, she could not help feeling, with exultation, that she had discarded for ever the world of true pretence, of casuistry and circumspection, growing richer, more emancipated by the exchange. Presently she stood upon the railway bridge, looking down upon the station, an etching in silver-point never by her forgotten. The rails were lines of polished silver, the low black sheds of the station were spanned by girders against a black and silver sky. Only a few yellow lights gave colour; and, high up, the light of a signal, like a high and isolated ruby, burned deep upon the wrack of the silver-rifted clouds.

V

The difficulties of life had not sobered her. On the contrary, as she disencumbered herself more and more from the oppression of the traditions in which she had been brought up, her mettle had risen with proportionate buoyancy. She soared, as the weights dropped from her. She fled from these realities with increasing determination into the realms of make-believe. In her worst moments—for there had been bad moments, hours in her career which would have seemed to anyone else unpromisingly dark, hours when dishonesty saddened and failure discouraged her—she could always say to herself, “I don’t exist at all. There’s no such person as Lydia Protheroe.” And she thought of all the parish ledgers, serious and civic, in which the birth, baptism, and other faits et gestes of Lydia Protheroe ought properly to be recorded, and from which Lydia Protheroe was so gratifyingly absent. This habit of mind grew upon her, until every suggestion of her actual existence as a citizen and a ratepayer was enough to throw her into a state of indignation. Who was Lydia Protheroe, that unsubstantial and fantastic being, that she should be bound down to the orthodoxy of an urban district council form for the payment of property-tax or house-duty? that she should be asked to account for her income and to contribute a shilling in the pound towards the upkeep of her country? she who had no country, no status? she who was so impudently and audaciously a myth? It was manifestly impossible to induce the tax-collectors to take this view. It would have entailed, moreover, the betrayal of Lydia Protheroe’s secret, and the asking of questions leading inevitably to the resurrection of Alice Jennings. She consoled herself, therefore, in the midst of her mortification as she filled in her forms (never until “third application” glared across the top of the paper), by reflecting that she was playing a trick on the authorities with her tongue well thrust into her cheek. But there was nothing she would not do to evade the census returns, when they came round in 1891, and again in 1901, and again in 1911.

VI

Her family had been quite wrong when they predicted a change in her appearance. The sleek brown bands remained the same, the snuff-coloured gown, though of necessity every few years it had to be replaced by a successor, to outward appearance was unaltered. Lydia Protheroe, inheriting an odd and incongruous remnant of Presbyterianism from the late Alice Jennings, considered freedom of the spirit of more consequence than eccentricity of garb. Therefore, her external sobriety gave no hint of her internal flamboyance. People used to remark that the only thing in the shop devoid of all fantasy was the proprietor behind the counter. “Proper Protheroe” they called her, and similar names. But they had to admit her supremacy on all questions of travesty. She had more than the mere technical, the mere historical, knowledge; she had a flair and an imagination which surprised and convinced, unarguably. Without a trace of enthusiasm she issued her directions, coldly pointing with a ladylike forefinger, and when the finger was not in use she resumed that characteristic, tight little attitude, which had remained with her, of clasping her elbows with the opposite hand, while she watched her directions slavishly carried out. Her customers wondered whether she was ever gratified by her complete success. If so, she never betrayed it. The utmost approval that she was known to bestow, was a chilly “That will do.” And yet, after her forty years of labour, she was a recognized authority in her profession; hidden away in her provincial town, she was the court of appeal in all problems connected with her trade, an arbitrator to whom even London had recourse. People said that as time went on she became grimmer and more intimidating. Certainly she became more self-contained, and none knew what passed beneath the sleek brown bands in their unvariable neatness, or behind the gown that buttoned, like a uniform, down the front. Something of a legend grew up around the personality of Lydia Protheroe. It became the fashion for strangers in the town to pay a visit to the shop, buying a box of powder or a stick of lip-salve to provide themselves with an excuse, while they covertly observed the ambiguous gentlewoman. The legend gradually became enhanced by scraps of gossip that crept into circulation about Lydia Protheroe. It was known in the town that she no longer allowed her solitary servant to sleep in the house, but that at six o’clock punctually, when the staff of the shop, consisting of three, left the premises, the servant-girl went with them. The bell over the door would tinkle for the last time of the day, the three assistants, turning up their collars or burying their hands in their muffs, would issue out one by one into the street, the servant-girl bringing up the rear; three “Good-night, Miss Protheroe’s” would be rapped out, and one “Good-night, miss,” from the servant, always scared and never in the least devoted; and the door would be shut behind them, and there would be the sound of the key turning in the lock.

VII

Darkness and silence then descended on the house. In one of the upper rooms a light would appear behind the blind; a light which sometimes moved from room to room, as though someone were carrying it about; and it had been seen, also, in the shop through the chinks of the shutters. But, although the curious had often lingered round the door, no one had ever been seen to emerge after dark.

The face of the house and the closed door kept their counsel as to whatever might be enacted behind them. All that the town ever knew was that evening after evening Lydia Protheroe was undisturbed at her own occupations, and although it was improbable to imagine that occupations otherwise than innocent could engage the leisure of so decent and correct a lady, there grew up, nevertheless, an impression of some mischievous background to the frontage of honest trade which everyone was allowed to see.

Why did she remain in this insignificant town, she who both by wealth and repute was amply justified to move herself and her chattels to London? Why had she chosen this ancient house, with its latticed windows and overhanging gables in a narrow side-street, rather than one of the new buildings in the main street, where were the other shops that, unashamed, did not have to tuck themselves away? Why did she sleep there alone at nights, among her oddments that were enough, when the mystery of dusk began to shroud them, to give an ordinary Christian the shivers? Why did she hold herself so frigidly aloof from the conviviality of the town? Perfectly civil always, they would say that much for her; and quite the lady, they would say that too. And good to the poor; oh, absurdly! That was only another one of the grievances they had against her: she spoilt the market for everybody else. But why—the questions would begin again. There was a mutter of innuendo; and yet, when they were pinned down to it, there was not one of her fellow townsmen who could say that she was otherwise than harmless. And they were all afraid of her, although she never said a sharp word; and they all respected her, grudgingly, and admitted her rigid integrity. But when these admissions had been extracted from them, the questions and the mutter would begin again.

Nobody knew whether she herself was aware of them; if she was, then she treated them with complete indifference. In point of fact, her mental isolation was such that she had long since ceased to bother her head about what people might say or might leave unsaid; she imagined herself encased in armour like the knight who stood eternally on the lowest step of her stair. She was happy. If she was forbidding, it was because she wanted no intimacy; she wanted to keep her happiness to herself. There were moments when she even resented the intrusion of customers into her shop, and the presence of the three assistants and the servant, but she tried to be severe with herself over this crotchet. Generally her severity was successful; but sometimes her resentment gained the upper hand, and on those occasions she would observe her hirelings with real dislike, angry with them because they, poor souls, went innocently on with their business, turning over the wares in the course of serving customers, until Miss Protheroe, unable longer to endure the sight of their hands fumbling among the objects got together by her and so dear to her heart, descended upon them from behind the counting-desk and brushed them aside, not rudely, for Miss Protheroe was never rude, but with a thin disdain that was twice as humiliating. For years she was deeply ashamed after these manifestations; then she grew to be less ashamed, and they increased in frequency. She became, coldly, more autocratic; would not have anything touched without her permission; received any comment with a scornful disapproval that would not permit her to answer. She was happy, but she was only truly and completely happy after six o’clock, when she had turned the key in the lock and was left alone in the house.

And yet she had a weakness, an inconsistency; she fretted over the defection of her family.

It was absurd. She wanted independence, and she had got it, full measure, pressed down and running over. She had been glad. She had been unobserved, left alone to do the little daring, extravagant things which bubbled up so surprisingly from beneath that ladylike exterior, little things like pretending she was a boy in her brother’s overcoat, and drawing his pipe from the pocket to put it between her teeth. She had always done them surreptitiously, even though she knew she was quite alone. Sometimes she had made up her face with her own grease-paints, and, to the light of her candle, minced round the shop in a wig and a bustle. These were not things she would have had the courage to do with her family in the neighbourhood. She had believed that she would shed her family quite lightly, blissfully, and for some time she had even deluded herself into the conviction that this was so. Then she was forced to the realization that their conduct had, in fact, sunk very deeply into the tender parts of her being. This realization took a long time to come. She had her first misgivings when she found that she could not think of them without a surge of anger uneasily allied to a surge of pain. Their silence had surprised her extremely. Daily she had expected to have some news of them; she had expected that they would trace her out—nothing easier—and many times in her mind she rehearsed the scene when one of their number, probably Bertie, would appear in the doorway of the room, and turn by turn, menacing, cajoling, and alarmed, would try to persuade her to return. These persuasions she would reject; of that she had been fully determined. It was not that she hankered after forgiveness and the evening circle round the lamp; it was not that she had desired the rÔle of the prodigal child, picturesque and doubly precious after her escapade; no, it was not that she had wanted her family, but rather that she had wanted her family to want her. And not that alone. It was not, as she told herself plaintively, merely the petty, personal grievance that had hurt her. It was a wider, deeper injury. She despised them—she was compelled to despise them—because of their miserable cautiousness, their rejection of her, who was of their own blood, when she became a danger to their respectability. How politic they had been! how sage! She hated them because they had made her ashamed of them. They had become, to her, symbolic of that wary, chary majority whose enemy she was.

For the appearance of Bertie, however, she had waited in vain. They had made no attempt to retrieve her, nothing to show that they cared whether she lived or died, starved or prospered. Her expectation had turned to surprise, surprise to indignation. When it had finally become quite clear that they intended to take no steps towards getting her back, she accepted their indifference with a shrug that she tried to make equally indifferent. But the sore had remained; more, it had eaten its way down into her. There was no affection left now; but before she died she would be even with them. It was not a sore that impaired her happiness. Rather she nursed it, as she nursed all the secrets of her inner life; and it provided an incentive, if she had needed one, a sort of aim and raison d’Être. Not a day passed but she wondered whether they heard the name of the celebrated Lydia Protheroe, and connected it with that of the little Alice they had so improvidently driven from their midst. She hoped so; spitefully she hoped so. She even contemplated going to London, where her reputation would widen with more chance of reaching their ears; but she could not uproot herself from her old clandestine house. She loved it, for the sake of six o’clock and the turning of the key in the lock.

So she lived with her two passionate secrets side by side: her vindictiveness and her absorption in the unreality of her own existence.

The one intensified the other. An outcast from the auspices of middle-class propriety, she was driven into the refuge of her queer fantastic world. She sought that refuge fanatically, it was a facet of her vindictiveness. From out of that world of shadows she should, some day, thrust the rapier of mischief into the paunch of their gross solidity. It was all a little confused in her mind. But she felt that she owned, by right of citizenship—unshared citizenship, and consequent sovereignty, a sovereignty like that of Adam in Eden—she felt that she owned those privileges which had always given to the hero of mythical combat an advantage so preponderatingly unfair and so divine: the cap of invisibility, the armour that no sword could pierce, the sword that could pierce all armour, the winged shoes, the nightingale for counsellor, the philtre of oblivion, the mirror of prophecy. And at night, flitting round her house or down into her shop, to the echo of her own low laughter, now masked, now sandalled, now casqued within a head incongruous to the body and more incongruous to the feet, like the unfolding in a game of drawing Consequences, she knew herself elusive, evanescent, protean.

But no one must know, no one must suspect.

VIII

It was on an evening in December that Bertie’s letter came. She was alone in the shop when she heard the click of the letterbox, and, getting the letter out, she instantly recognized the writing, and her heart, for a second, ceased to beat. She stood holding the letter, incredulous, and strangely afraid. Without knowing in exactly what way the opportunity would come to her, she had never for one instant doubted that somehow or other it would come. She tore the flap and read:

“It is now some forty years since that terrible and painful scene which ended in our separation, and I think you will agree with me that so many years should have sufficed to heal our differences. We are both, my dear sister, past the prime of our life, and it is my earnest wish (as I trust it may be yours also) that a reconciliation should sweeten the advent of old age. I write, therefore, to propose that we take advantage of this season of good-will to bury the feud which has so long severed us. Our father and mother, as you must be well aware, have long since gone to their rest; but I remain (an old fellow now), and my dear wife and Emily and her husband. Would you give us a welcome if we came to visit you this Christmas-tide? I will add no entreaty, but leave the rest to the dictates of your heart.—Your brother,

She recognized Bertie’s style; he had always been partial to books. She was convulsed by an inward laughter. So they had got wind of her riches! So they had an eye on her will! So her prosperity might sanction, at last, her discreditable trade! Would she welcome them, indeed? They should see how she would welcome them. Bertie, his wife, Emily, her husband—that would make four. She would have them all. There was plenty of room, fortunately, in the old house upstairs. She would have them on Christmas-eve. For a clear day, Christmas-day, she would have them to herself; all to herself! Her mind worked rapidly. She sat perched on a stool beside the counter, nibbling the tips of her fingers and making her plans. Her excitement was such that she found it difficult to keep the plans in her head consecutive; but she knew it was urgent that she should do so; she grabbed back her intentions as they tried to evade her. The envelope—Bertie had addressed her as “Miss Lydia Protheroe.” He must have winced as he saw himself confronted by the necessity of writing that name. Bertie must be sixty-five now; Emily must be fifty-nine. So Emily had married—the little sister; she had always been a sly, mercenary little thing. Emily, Bertie, Bertie’s wife—they all rushed back to her in their old familiarity. Bertie must have grown very like his father; she hated the implication of continuance. Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa; that was not the case with people like her father and Bertie. They were always the same. Their moral timidity extended itself into physical plagiarism. What would Emily’s husband be like? All sugar to the rich sister-in-law, well-primed by the rest of the family. She let out a shrill of laughter. She would get them all into the house. She would put up the shutters and turn the key, and her Christmas entertainment would begin.

They arrived in response to her invitation, on Christmas-eve, all four of them, driving up in the station fly, Bertie on the box. She stood on the doorway, awaiting them, and “Lydia Protheroe, Theatrical Costumier and Wig-maker,” flaunted over her head in the gilt lettering on the black ground. She was conscious of her exquisite disparity with this description. Sleek bands, and snuff-coloured gown; Bertie and Emily should find her as they had left her; the difference should only by degrees dawn upon them. She was glad now that she should have rejected the alteration in her appearance which, to a less subtle mind, would have been so blatantly indicated. There was nothing blatant about Lydia Protheroe; oh no! it was all very surreptitious, very delicate; she was an artist; everybody said so; her touch very light, but very certain. She was a rapier to Bertie’s bludgeon. Bertie: he had descended from the fly, he had taken both her hands in his, he had grown whiskers like his father’s, his father’s watch-chain (she recognized it) spanned his stomach, he was pressing her hands and looking into her eyes with what she was sure he inwardly phrased as “a world of tenderness and forgiveness,” while simultaneously he tried to scan out of the corner of his eye the wares displayed in her shop-window—the dragon’s head, the waxen figure of a fairy, the crowns and harps—and she saw him wince, but at the same time, she saw his determination to ignore all this, or to accept it, if he was forced to, in a spirit of jovial resignation; and now Emily was kissing her, Emily with those same thin ungenerous lips and pointed nose, so like her own features and yet so different, because of a recklessness in Lydia’s eyes which was not in Emily’s—subtle again—and now Bertie’s wife enveloped her in a soft, fat little hug; and there was Emily’s husband, whom they called Fred, and who was a pink-faced little man in a bowler hat and, for some reason, an evening tie, pushed forward to embrace his sister-in-law with a reluctance he tried to turn into enthusiasm.

Lydia brought the brood into the shop; it gave her a strange pang to see them cross her threshold, succeeded by an exaltation to have got them safely there. She did not talk much; she let them do the talking while she surveyed them. Bertie was voluble; he had a lot of information to give her, mixed in with small outbursts of sentimentality. He had grown portly, and he was most anxious to conciliate her; she took the measure of Bertie in a moment. The others, clearly, were in his charge. His wife, as ever, watched him for her cues with little twinkling, admiring eyes. Emily produced a sour and unconvincing smile whenever Lydia’s eyes rested on her. As for Fred, he smiled nervously the whole time, and looked as though he felt himself very much of a stranger.

X

She had got them all into their rooms for the night. She relished the feeling that she had got them all safely shut in, and as she stood at the top of the stairs looking first to left and then to right along the dim passage, she felt the jailer of all those four people behind the closed doors. She would have liked a bunch of keys dangling from her belt. Squeezing her hands tightly together, she swayed backwards and forwards as she controlled her laughter. A single gas-jet, turned low, lit the passage. She wandered away. She wandered down into the shop, where the polished shields on the walls threw back the sharp flame of her candle, and the indistinct, peopled obscurity of the shop. She thought vaguely that the shop was too full—had always been too full—she must have a clearance—but there was no longer any room upstairs—she ought to scrap half her things—but no, they were too precious. She wandered away again, up into the attic. She peered round, thrusting the candle into the dark corners. A rat scurried past. Old trunks, too full to shut; velvet and damask and leather protruded; too full. Like life; too full. Like her head; too full. She wandered back to the dim passage. Closed doors. The gas-jet. She could turn off the gas at the main; that would put the house in darkness. They would not understand what had happened. They would run out of their rooms, and up and down the house, looking for light; finding none; blundering against objects in the dark. She would hear their footsteps, running; their hands, perhaps, beating at last upon the shutters. She had seen clearly enough that they already thought her strange. She had accompanied Bertie and his wife to their rooms, and under her scrutiny they had continued their talk; they had drawn a picture of the social life in their town; they had spoken of nice little parties. “Not so nice as the little party I’m giving now,” Lydia had cried, and left them.

Husband and wife indeed thought her very odd; the wife was puzzled and uneasy. All through dinner Miss Protheroe had been very silent, from her place at the head of the table where she sat surveying her guests, only occasionally she had given vent to some such outburst, which she had at once restrained; and the dining-room had been odd too, a room at the back of the shop, full of queer theatrical things, and a great figure of a Javanese warrior in one corner, seven feet high, with a bearded yellow mask under his helmet, and a lantern swinging from the top of the spear he held in his hand. Bertie’s wife thought this a novel and unpleasing method of lighting a room. She had begun to wish they had never come. For the rest, there had been a barbaric flavour about the meal, unsuitable to one so obviously an English spinster; they had eaten off the sham gold plate, and had drunk out of the sham gold goblets; the sham gold candelabra had flared in the middle of the table with its eight or ten candles, above a great golden bowl of artificial fruit.

It was difficult to believe that that setting was the invention of Lydia, sitting there so prim in the unchanged gown of bombazine. It was as disconcerting an indication as if Lydia had gotten up and danced.

Out in the dim passage Lydia paused before Emily’s door. If she despised Bertie, she fairly hated Emily. Not one of Emily’s childish sneakings and whinings was forgotten; and Emily was unchanged: she had been dragged here, reluctant, by Bertie, tempted by the pictures Bertie drew of Lydia’s wealth; unable to resist that, she had come, but she was bitter and ungracious, wringing out that thin, sour little smile whenever Lydia looked at her. That supposed wealth, now become one of Lydia’s dearest jokes! They wouldn’t find much—the vultures—they would find that Lydia hadn’t hoarded, hadn’t kept back more than the little necessary to her own livelihood, so long as charity had stretched out to her its piteous hands. It was not part of Lydia’s creed to feast while others went hungry. Not for that had she broken away from her traditions and her family. She would have liked now to sham dead just for the sake of seeing their faces and hearing their comments.

She wasted no time on Emily; she needed no sight of Emily’s face in order to whet her vindictiveness. She knew well enough what was going on behind all those closed doors. Whispers of cupidity, to the ugly accompaniment of the calculation of Lydia’s prosperity, oh, she knew, she knew! Mean souls! mean, prudent souls! They had thrown her out when she was poor; they fawned on her now that they thought her rich. Well, she would teach them a lesson; she would give them twenty-four hours’ entertainment which they would not be likely to forget.

She crept away, down the dark stairs into her shop. At home again, among her fanciful and extravagant confederates! She held out her arms towards her shop, as though to embrace it. They were allies, she and it, the world of illusion against the world of fact.

She set to work.

XI

Next morning her guests came down to breakfast with white faces. They shot doubtful glances at Lydia when she blandly wished them a happy Christmas. There were parcels put ready for them beside all their plates, and Lydia observed with sarcasm their reviving spirits as they opened them in optimistic expectancy, and their consternation as they discovered the contents: a big, pink turned-up nose for Bertie, a blue wig for Bertie’s wife, a pair of ears for Fred, and a black moustache for Emily. Led by Bertie, they tried at first to disguise their vexation under good-humour:

“Ha! ha! very funny, my dear,” said Bertie, putting on the nose and poking it facetiously into his wife’s face.

“But you must all put them on,” said Miss Protheroe, without a smile.

They looked at her: she was perfectly serious and even compelling. They began to be a little afraid, though they were even more afraid of showing it. They tried to expostulate, still good-humouredly, but, “If you don’t like my presents, you can’t eat my breakfast,” said Miss Protheroe.

They had to comply. Lydia presided gravely, while the four sat round the table, eating kippers, tricked out in their respective presents. Emily, whose black moustache worked up and down as she ate, was controlled only by the beseeching gaze of Bertie’s eyes over the top of the enormous nose; Bertie’s wife shed silent tears which fell into her plate.

“Shall you expect us, my dear,” Bertie said towards the end of that grim meal, feeling that it was becoming urgent to break the silence, “to go to church like this?”

“Church? you aren’t going to church,” replied Lydia.

There was a chorus: Not go to church on Christmas-day?

“No,” said Lydia; “but,” she added suddenly, “you can give me your offertory, and I’ll see that it reaches the proper quarter. Charity at Christmas time! Turn out your pockets.”

“Look here, Alice,” said Bertie, standing up, “this is going beyond a joke. Be very careful, or we shall be obliged to leave your house.”

“You can’t,” said Miss Protheroe. “The doors are locked, the shutters are locked and barred, and you stay here for as long as I choose to keep you. You are my guests—see? And I’ve waited for you, for forty years. I shan’t let you go now.”

They heard her words; they stared at one another with a sudden horror leaping in their eyes.

XII

Bertie’s wife began to weep, loudly and helplessly.

“Oh, let me get out of this,” she cried; “why did we ever come? Bertie, it was your fault. Oh, why didn’t you leave her alone? the wicked, mad woman? Think of the noises in the night. The house haunted, and Alice mad! For God’s sake let’s clear out.”

“She’s in league with the Devil,” said Emily in the black moustache.

They had all forgotten, by now, about the appearance they variously presented, and all stared at each other fearfully, grotesque, ridiculous, but unheeding.

“Christmas morning!” cried Bertie’s wife, and wept more bitterly than before.

“Here, I’ve nothing to do with this—I never turned you out,” said Fred to Lydia, speaking for the first time.

“You haven’t given me your offertory yet,” said Lydia. “Now then,” she said, “out with it! Bertie, you used to be a churchwarden at home; you take round the plate.”

Bertie’s wife screamed when she saw a revolver in Lydia’s hand.

“Keep quiet, you women!” said Bertie, playing the male; “if she’s mad, we must humour her. Where’s your money?”

They fumbled, the two men in their pockets, the two women in their bags, not one of them daring to take their eyes off Lydia for an instant.

“Is that all you’ve got?” asked Lydia, when the plate presented by Bertie was filled with silver, copper, and notes; “turn out the linings.” They obeyed. “You may go to your rooms now, if you like,” she added, “but don’t be late for dinner; we’ll have it at one. And mind you come down as you are now. You’re no more disguised like that, let me tell you, than you are with your every-day faces. There’s no such thing as truth in you, so one disguise is no more of a disguise than any other. Your shams are just as much shams as my shams. And that’s one of the things you can learn while you’re here.”

They filed out of the room, past the tall figure of Lydia, who, like a grim grenadier, watched them go, still perfectly grave, but with an awful mockery in her eyes. She savoured to the full the absurdity of their appearance. There was no detail of incongruity which escaped her glance. When they had all got out of the room, and she had heard them scurrying, frightened rabbits, up the stairs, she sat down again in her chair and laughed and laughed. But it was not quite the wholesome laugh of one who plays a successful practical joke; it was, rather, a cackle of real malevolence, the malevolence that has waited and brooded and been patient, that has dammed up its impulse for many years. She sat and laughed at the head of her table, with the debris of the brown paper parcels strewn beside every plate.

XIII

Down to dinner under the threat of the revolver. She was intolerant now of the smallest resistance. She got them sitting there in the same travesty, forced them to eat, forced them to entertain her with their conversation. “No glum faces!” she said sharply. It was hard enough to look glum under those additions to nature; Bertie’s nose especially had a convivial air, it imposed upon him a gross jollity he was very far from feeling. They ate turkey and plum-pudding, unwillingly, choking back, according to their natures, their fury or their tears. Lydia had not stinted their fare; but then, she had never been niggardly. There was a lavishness in her providing; there were raisins, almonds, brandy; and she urged the appetites of her guests with an ironical though genuine hospitality. “Christmas dinner, you know,” she said to them as she heaped the food upon their plates. They protested; she nearly laughed at the piteous protest in their eyes shining out through their ridiculous trappings. But she remembered the forty years, and the laughter died unborn.

Forty years—and she had got them to herself. She would let them off nothing.

XIV

After dinner they huddled all four together in the same room. They could not lock themselves in, because Lydia had removed all the keys.

They whispered together a good deal, running up and down the scale from apathy to indignation. They had even moments of curiosity, when they ferreted among the hotch-potch of things they found stuffed away in the cupboards and drawers, and under the bed; and speculated marvelling on the queerness of Alice’s existence among these things: forty years of masquerade! But for the most part they sat gloomy, or wandered aimlessly about the room, dwelling in their own minds upon their several apprehensions. Bertie’s wife said, “It’s all so vague—only hints, so to speak,” and a background of shadows leapt into being.

Steps prowled past in the passage; they prowled up and down. The four in the room looked at one another. There was a faint cry outside, and a laugh.

“Two people, or one?” they whispered.

There was no telling how many people the house might conceal. The resources of the shop alone could transform Lydia into a hundred different characters. She would change her personality with each one. They could not contemplate this idea. It credited her with uncanny powers. Their imaginations, which had never in their lives been set to work before, now gaped, pits full of possibilities.

They peeped and were afraid.

Towards four o’clock it grew dark and they lit the gas, but after an hour or so it suddenly went out. They could not find any matches, hunting round in the dark. “Is there no light?” said their voices. Somebody found the door, opened it, and fled out: it was Fred. They heard him running down the passage, and his steps upon the stair. He would get down into the shop; he must look after himself. They sat down in the dark, pressed together to listen and to wait.

XV

It was the silence in the house, all that afternoon and evening, which frightened them. They were left to themselves, there was no sign of Lydia; there was no sound in the house but the sounds they made themselves. Now and then one of them would get up and go restlessly over to the window: but though they debated whether they should hail a passer-by in the street they feared too greatly the consequences of the scandal. Whatever happened, this thing must remain a secret for ever; on that point they were agreed and decided. This consideration kept them from the violence they might otherwise have attempted. No one must know... poor Lydia... her shame was their shame... madness in the family.... So they kept silent; meekness was the only prudence. Weary, they realized that they were old, and looked at one another with a kind of pity. They spoke very little. Their lives stretched out behind them, enviable in their secure monotony. Never had they envisaged the grotesque as a possible element. The only grotesque that had had a place in their minds, was death; and that, by virtue of much precedent, was sanctioned into conformity.

“She’s got the better of us,” said Emily once.

“No, no, no,” said Bertie with sudden energy; he could not admit it. “No, no,” he said again, getting up and walking about. “No,” he said, striking with his fist into the palm of the other hand.

They waited till the evil hours should have passed and the normal be reasserted.

XVI

There remained the evening and the night. Lydia had said Christmas-day, and for some reason they took for granted that after Christmas-day was passed all would be over—one way or the other. The shutters would be unbarred, the shop reopened, and life would return to the cloistered house. Still the evening and the night. What a Christmas-tide! And they were old; too old for such pranks. Bertie was sixty-five. Old, too old. They were tired of the strain of the silent day. Hungry, too, although they had not noticed it. They went downstairs meekly when Lydia summoned them to supper. Nose, ears, moustache, blue wig; no attempt at rebellion. They sat round the table, waiting to be given their food and drink. They had half hoped that Lydia would present some unexpected appearance; if she was mad, she ought to look mad; that would be less terrifying. It was horrible to be so mad and to continue to look so sane. She might have been an old family governess; a strict one. Whereas they were condemned to sit there, so ludicrous; knowing, moreover, that she lost none of the full savour of the paradox.

“You shall drink my health,” she said, at the opening of the meal.

They drank it, in neat spirit. She plied them with more.

“I never touch anything,” said Emily feebly.

“No, but this is an exception.” She poured freely into Emily’s glass, drinking nothing herself.

The Javanese warrior holding the lantern on his spear grinned down at them with his yellow mask. The candles flickered in the great sham candelabras. The spirit was tawny in the shining glasses.

“Drink! it’s our last evening together.”

Emily looked at Lydia, they were sisters; had the same features; were not unlike one another.

“We shared a bedroom, Alice, didn’t we? I got into your bed once, when I was frightened at night. There was a box made of shells on the dressing-table, do you remember? Mother gave it to us at the seaside.”

She laughed; her laugh was almost tender.

“I used to pull your hair, Alice,” said Bertie.

They were suddenly confident that Alice would do them no harm.

“Forty years,” said Lydia, looking down the table at them.

“A waste of time,” said Bertie, “when we were brother and sisters together. But you’ve paid us out, Alice, you’ve paid us out.”

“Not yet,” said Lydia, “not fully.”

“I daresay I should have done the same myself,” said Bertie’s wife, surprisingly. “After all, it was a joke, Alice; why not take Alice’s joke in good part?” She looked round, as though she had made a discovery.

“If you prefer,” said Lydia, unmoved.

“Ha, ha!” said Fred, and was suddenly silent.

They began to eat what Lydia had given them. Beyond the open door of the dining-room the shop was dark and jumbled. Lydia ate primly, and the little black revolver lay beside her plate. The light glinted along its barrels. They viewed it without apprehension. This was their last evening; they were confusedly sorry; Alice, hospitable if eccentric; and what, indeed, was eccentricity? She was giving them champagne now; it was wrong to begin with spirits, and to go on to champagne; but what matter? Alice was well-meaning; generous. That little revolver: like a little black, shining bull-terrier, squat, bulbous. They heard themselves laughing and making jokes. Alice seemed pleased, she was smiling; up to the present she had not smiled at all; but now the smile was constant on her face as she watched them. They exerted themselves to entertain her. Their efforts were successful; she watched them with evident approval, swaying a little, backwards and forwards, as she sat. They ventured more; still she smiled, and her hand poured generously, though she did not empty her own glass. They had forgotten that they were old. Looking at one another, they laughed very heartily over the trappings Alice had provided for them. “Christmas!” said Bertie, tapping his nose. Emily leant back in her chair; she was sleepy and happy. She roused herself to accept the sweets which Lydia offered her. “Sleepy,” she murmured, smiling at Bertie’s wife; “your hair...” she toppled off to sleep in the midst of her sentence. Fred wanted to prop her up. “Let her be,” said Lydia benignly. “All happy,” said Bertie. They pulled crackers, and put the paper caps on their heads; the table under the candelabra was littered with the coloured paper off the crackers, and there was a discord produced by the whistles and small trumpets that came out of them. Bertie was on his feet, trying all these toy instruments in turn; he swayed round the table, collecting them, and reading out the mottoes. He paused to look at his wife, who had fallen forward with her arms on the table and her head on her arms. “Asleep,” he said, with a puzzled expression. Lydia still sat bolt upright at the head of the table, letting them all have their way as it seemed best to them, whether in sleep or hilarity; with her hands she clasped her elbows, and the bands of hair lay undisturbed upon her brows. She examined her guests in turn; Emily, who slept, slipped sideway in her chair, the moustache still stuck on her upper lip; Bertie’s wife, who slept likewise, her face hidden, the blue wig uppermost; Fred, who between the ears stared vaguely before him; and Bertie, who, portly and irresponsible, wandered round the table searching among the litter of the crackers. Lydia at last, having scrutinized them all, gave out a sudden creaking laugh. Her party was to her satisfaction. “Forty years!” she said, nodding at Bertie, “forty years!” When she laughed he looked at her, dimly startled through his confusion. “Christmas,” he replied, blinking; he intended it to be an expression of good-will, an obliteration of those forty years. At last, he thought, they had found out the right way to treat Alice: not solemnly, not as though they were afraid of her, but in a light-hearted and jocund spirit. “Christmas,” he repeated, leaning up against her chair.

She began to laugh. Her laughter grew; it creaked at first, then grew shrill; she pointed derisively at them all in turn. Bertie was not alarmed; he joined in. He relished at last the humour of the situation, which Alice had been relishing now since yesterday. She had got twenty-four hours’ start ahead of him: an unfair advantage. He made up for lost time by trying to laugh more heartily than she did. She observed this with a dangerous appreciation; her fingers began to play with the butt of the revolver. Forty years. Forty Christmases spent in solitude. Her sudden rage blackened out the room before her eyes. She lifted the revolver uncertainly, then laid it down again. “Subtle, subtle. Not blatant,” she muttered to herself, an often-rehearsed lesson, and tapped her fingers against her teeth. She felt slightly helpless, as though she were unable to make the most of her opportunity. She knew she had had many schemes, but they all seemed to be slipping away from her. It was difficult to hold on to one’s thoughts, difficult to concentrate them; they scattered as one came up to them, like a lot of sparrows. A pity—she must make an effort—because the opportunity would not come again.

Just then she heard the front-door bell ring sharply through the house.

A little dazed, she got up to answer it. A messenger from outside? Perhaps an unexpected help in her emergency? She left the dining-room, where Bertie fumbled and tried to detain her; she passed through the shop, and, moving like a sleep-walker, unlocked and undid the many fastenings of the door. Outside in the street stood a group of men, carrying lanterns; the snow sparkled on the ground; the narrow street was like an illustration of old-fashioned Christmas. She stood holding the door open. She recognized many of her fellow-tradesmen; she heard their words, “Your well-known charity, Miss Protheroe... never turn away an appeal unanswered.... Christmas-time... trust we don’t intrude...” and heard the rattle of coin, and saw the collecting-boxes in their hands.

“You don’t intrude,” she said. “Come in.”

Inwardly she knew they wanted an excuse to find out how Miss Protheroe spent her Christmas. They should see. They came in, removing their hats, from which the melting snow began to drip, and scraping the snow from their boots on the wire mat; their faces were red and jovial. She led them through the jumbled shop, through into the dining-room, where Bertie leant up against the littered table, and the two women slept, and Fred gaped stupidly.

They were at a loss to say anything; checked in their joke of routing out old Miss Protheroe, they gazed uncomprehending at the scene before them. Their eyes turned again towards Miss Protheroe; she stood erect and prim, her hands clasping her elbows.

“You don’t know my relations,” she said, and, indicating them, “my sister, my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my brother.” She effected the introduction with irreproachable gravity.

“She’s mad,” cried Bertie suddenly, reason flooding him, and he pointed at her with a denouncing hand.

They stared, first at those four crazy figures, and then at the stiff correctness of Miss Protheroe as they always knew her.