Paul Kelver

PAUL KELVER

of creation. When the woman sins, she sins not only against her conscience, but against her every instinct. But to the man Nature whispers: ‘Yield.’ It is the Law alone that holds him back. Therefore every woman in the world, knowing this, will be just to you – every woman in the world but one – the woman that loves you. From her, hope for no sympathy, hope for no justice.”

“Then you think – ” I began.

“I think,” said the Doctor, “that your father loved your mother devotedly; but he was one of those fighters that for the first half-dozen rounds or so cause their backers much anxiety. It is a dangerous method.”

“Then you think my mother – ”

“I think your mother was a good woman, Paul; and the good woman will never be satisfied with man till the Lord lets her take him to pieces and put him together herself.”

My father had been pacing to and fro the tiny platform. Now he came to a halt opposite my mother, placing his hands upon her shoulders.

“I want you to help me, Maggie – help me to be brave. I have only a year or two longer to live, and there’s a lot to be done in that time.”

Slowly the anger died out of my mother’s face.

“You remember that fall I had when the cage broke,” my father went on. “Andrews, as you know, feared from the first it might lead to that. But I always laughed at him.”

“How long have you known?” my mother asked.

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CHAPTER VIII

HOW THE MAN IN GREY MADE READY FOR HIS GOING

The eighteen months that followed – for the end came sooner than we had expected – were, I think, the happiest days my father and mother had ever known; or if happy be not altogether the right word, let me say the most beautiful, and most nearly perfect. To them it was as though God in His sweet thoughtfulness had sent death to knock lightly at the door, saying: “Not yet. You have still a little longer to be together. In a little while.” In those last days all things false and meaningless they laid aside. Nothing was of real importance to them but that they should love each other, comforting each other, learning to understand each other. Again we lived poorly; but there was now no pitiful straining to keep up appearances, no haunting terror of what the neighbours might think. The petty cares and worries concerning matters not worth a moment’s thought, the mean desires and fears with which we disfigure ourselves, fell from them. There came to them broader thought, a wider charity, a deeper pity. Their love grew greater even than their needs, overflowing towards all things. Sometimes, recalling these months, it has seemed to me that we make a mistake seeking to keep Death, God’s go-between, ever

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from our thoughts. Is it not closing the door to a friend who would help us would we let him (for who knows life so well), whispering to us: “In a little while. Only a little longer that you have to be together. Is it worth taking so much thought for self? Is it worth while being unkind?”

From them a graciousness emanated pervading all around. Even my aunt Fan decided for the second time in her career to give amiability a trial. This intention she announced publicly to my mother and myself one afternoon soon after our return from Devonshire.

“I’m a beast of an old woman,” said my aunt, suddenly. “Don’t say that, Fan,” urged my mother.

“What’s the good of saying ‘Don’t say it’ when I’ve just said it,” snapped back my aunt.

“It’s your manner,” explained my mother; “people sometimes think you disagreeable.”

“They’d be daft if they didn’t,” interrupted my aunt. “Of course you don’t really mean it,” continued my mother.

“Stuff and nonsense,” snorted my aunt; “does she think I’m a fool? I like being disagreeable. I like to see ‘em squirming.”

My mother laughed.

“I can be agreeable,” continued my aunt, “if I choose. Nobody more so.”

“Then why not choose?” suggested my mother. “I tried it once,” said my aunt, “and it fell flat. Nothing could have fallen flatter.”

“It may not have attracted much attention,” replied my mother, with a smile, “but one should not be agreeable merely to attract attention.”

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“It wasn’t only that,” returned my aunt, “it was that it gave no satisfaction to anybody. It didn’t suit me. A disagreeable person is at their best when they are disagreeable.”

“I can hardly agree with you there,” answered my mother. “I could do it again,” communed my aunt to herself. There was a suggestion of vindictiveness in her tones. “It’s easy

enough. Look at the sort of fools that are agreeable.” “I’m sure you could be if you tried,” urged my mother.

“Let ‘em have it,” continued my aunt, still to herself; “that’s the way to teach ‘em sense. Let ‘em have it.”

And strange though it may seem, my aunt was right and my mother altogether wrong. My father was the first to notice the change.

“Nothing the matter with poor old Fan, is there?” he asked. It was one evening a day or two after my aunt had carried her threat into effect. “Nothing happened, has there?”

“No,” answered my mother, “nothing that I know of.” “Her manner is so strange,” explained my father, “so – so

weird.”

My mother smiled. “Don’t say anything to her. She’s trying to be agreeable.”

My father laughed and then looked wistful. “I almost wish she wouldn’t,” he remarked; “we were used to it, and she was rather amusing.”

But my aunt, being a woman of will, kept her way; and about the same time that occurred tending to confirm her in her new departure. This was the introduction into our small circle of James Wellington Gadley. Properly speaking, it should have been Wellington James, that being the order in which he

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had been christened in the year 1815. But in course of time, and particularly during his school career, it had been borne in upon him that Wellington is a burdensome name for a commonplace mortal to bear, and very wisely he had reversed the arrangement. He was a slightly pompous but simpleminded little old gentleman, very proud of his position as head clerk to Mr. Stillwood, the solicitor to whom my father was now assistant. Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal dated back to the Georges, and was a firm bound up with the history – occasionally shady – of aristocratic England. True, in these later years its glory was dwindling. Old Mr. Stillwood, its sole surviving representative, declined to be troubled with new partners, explaining frankly, in answer to all applications, that the business was a dying one, and that attempting to work it up again would be but putting new wine into worn-out skins. But though its clientele was a yearly diminishing quantity, much business yet remained to it, and that of a good class, its name being still a synonym for solid respectability; and my father had deemed himself fortunate indeed in securing such an appointment. James Gadley had entered the firm as office boy in the days of its pride, and had never awakened to the fact that it was not still the most important legal firm within the half mile radius from Lombard Street. Nothing delighted him more than to discuss over and over again the many strange affairs in which Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal had been concerned, all of which he had at his tongue’s tip. Could he find a hearer, these he would reargue interminably, but with professional reticence, personages becoming Mr. Y. and Lady X.; and places, “the capital of, let us say, a foreign country,”

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or “a certain town not a thousand miles from where we are now sitting.” The majority of his friends, his methods being somewhat forensic, would seek to discourage him, but my aunt was a never wearied listener, especially if the case were one involving suspicion of mystery and crime. When, during their very first conversation, he exclaimed: “Now why – why, after keeping away from his wife for nearly eighteen years, never even letting her know whether he was alive or dead, why this sudden resolve to return to her? That is what I want explained to me!” he paused, as was his wont, for sympathetic comment, my aunt, instead of answering as others, with a yawn: “Oh, I’m sure I don’t know. Felt he wanted to see her, I suppose,” replied with prompt intelligence:

“To murder her – by slow poison.” “To murder her! But why?”

“In order to marry the other woman.” “What other woman?”

“The woman he had just met and fallen in love with. Before that it was immaterial to him what had become of his wife. This woman had said to him: ‘Come back to me a free man or never see my face again.’”

“Dear me! Now that’s very curious.” “Nothing of the sort. Plain common sense.”

“I mean, it’s curious because, as a matter of fact, his wife did die a little later, and he did marry again.”

“Told you so,” remarked my aunt.

In this way every case in the Stillwood annals was reviewed, and light thrown upon it by my aunt’s insight into the hidden springs of human action. Fortunate that the actors

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remained mere Mr. X. and Lady Y., for into the most innocent seeming behaviour my aunt read ever dark criminal intent.

“I think you are a little too severe,” Mr. Gadley would now and then plead.

“We’re all of us miserable sinners,” my aunt would cheerfully affirm; “only we don’t all get the same chances.”

An elderly maiden lady, a Miss Z., residing in “a western town once famous as the resort of fashion, but which we will not name,” my aunt was convinced had burnt down a house containing a will, and forged another under which her children – should she ever marry and be blessed with such – would inherit among them on coming of age a fortune of seven hundred pounds.

The freshness of her views on this, his favourite topic, always fascinated Mr. Gadley.

“I have to thank you, ma’am,” he would remark on rising, “for a most delightful conversation. I may not be able to agree with your conclusions, but they afford food for reflection.”

To which my aunt would reply, “I hate talking to any one who agrees with me. It’s like taking a walk to see one’s own looking-glass. I’d rather talk to somebody who didn’t, even if he were a fool,” which for her was gracious.

He was a stout little gentleman with a stomach that protruded about a foot in front of him, and of this he appeared to be quite unaware. Nor would it have mattered had it not been for his desire when talking to approach as close to his listener as possible. Gradually in the course of conversation, his stomach acting as a gentle battering ram, he would in this way drive you backwards round the room, sometimes, unless

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you were artful, pinning you hopelessly into a corner, when it would surprise him that in spite of all his efforts he never succeeded in getting any nearer to you. His first evening at our house he was talking to my aunt from the corner of his chair. As he grew more interested so he drew his chair nearer and nearer, till at length, having withdrawn inch by inch to avoid his encroachments, my aunt was sitting on the extreme edge of her own. His next move sent her on to the floor. She said nothing, which surprised me; but on the occasion of his next visit she was busy darning stockings, an unusual occupation for her. He approached nearer and nearer as before; but this time she sat her ground, and it was he who in course of time sprang back with an exclamation foreign to the subject under discussion.

Ever afterwards my aunt met him with stockings in her hand, and they talked with a space between their chairs.

Nothing further came of it, though his being a widower added to their intercourse that spice of possibility no woman is ever too old to relish; but that he admired her intellectually was evident. Once he even went so far as to exclaim: “Miss Davies, you should have been a solicitor’s wife!” to his thinking the crown of feminine ambition. To which my aunt had replied: “Chances are I should have been if one had ever asked me.” And warmed by appreciation, my aunt’s amiability took root and flourished, though assuming, as all growth developed late is apt to, fantastic shape.

There came to her the idea, by no means ill-founded, that by flattery one can most readily render oneself agreeable; so conscientiously she set to work to flatter in season and out.

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I am sure she meant to give pleasure, but the effect produced was that of thinly veiled sarcasm.

My father would relate to us some trifling story, some incident noticed during the day that had seemed to him amusing. At once she would break out into enthusiasm, holding up her hands in astonishment.

“What a funny man he is! And to think that it comes to him naturally without an effort. What a gift it is!”

On my mother appearing in a new bonnet, or an old one retrimmed, an event not unfrequent; for in these days my mother took more thought than ever formerly for her appearance (you will understand, you women who have loved), she would step back in simulated amazement.

“Don’t tell me it’s a married woman with a boy getting on for fourteen. It’s a girl. A saucy, tripping girl. That’s what it is.” Persons have been known, I believe, whose vanity, not checked in time, has grown into a hopeless disease. But I am inclined to think that a dose of my aunt, about this period,

would have cured the most obstinate case.

So also, and solely for our benefit, she assumed a vivacity and spriteliness that ill suited her, that having regard to her age and tendency towards rheumatism must have cost her no small effort. From these experiences there remains to me the perhaps immoral opinion that Virtue, in common with all other things, is at her best when unassuming.

Occasionally the old Adam – or should one say Eve – would assert itself in my aunt, and then, still thoughtful for others, she would descend into the kitchen and be disagreeable to Amy, our new servitor, who never minded it. Amy

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