THE silver dawn was softened to a mother-of-pearl morning that seemed less primal than autumnal. When Danby came into the sitting-room, he found Jenny, fully dressed for departure, crouched over the ashes of last night's fire. He had a pinched, unwholesome look so early in the day, and was peevish because Jenny's presence kept him from summoning the housekeeper to bring up breakfast.
"We must get something to eat," he said.
"I don't want anything," said Jenny.
"Why not?"
"I've got a headache."
Danby tried to appear sympathetic; but his hands so early were cold as fish, and his touch made Jenny shrink.
"What a nuisance packing is. I've got a fearful lot to do to get to Charing Cross in time for the boat train."
Like many other people he tried to demonstrate his sympathy by enlarging on his own trials.
"Well?" said Jenny, regarding him from eyes pinpointed with revulsion in a critical survey that was not softened by the gray morning light, for whatever silkiness clung to the outside air was lost in the stale room.
"I wish I hadn't got to go away," said Danby awkwardly.
"Why?" Jenny asked, screwing up her eyes as if she had perceived upon the wall an unpleasant insect.
"Well, it seems a pity now that we've—we've got to know each other better."
"You don't think," said Jenny, chiseling the words from the very bedrock of her contempt, "you don't think that because I've been in your flat all a night, you know me? Why, I don't know myself even."
"Aren't you going to come and see me off?" he asked in a ludicrous attempt at sentiment.
"See you off? See you off? Oh yes, that's a game of mine seeing off clothes-props. If you can't move," she added, "I can. Let me pass, please."
Jenny walked towards the door of the contaminated flat followed by Danby in a state of weak bewilderment.
"You'll write to me, little girl?" he asked, making a motion to detain her hand.
"You seem to think I'm struck on you," she rapped out. "But I'm not."
"Well, why did you——"
"Ah, Mr. Enquire Within," she interrupted, "you're right. Why?"
"Surely," he persisted, "the first person who——"
"The first! Hark at Mr. Early Bird. If you go out with your long soppy self like that, you'll miss your train. Ching-a-ling."
So Jenny parted from Mr. Jack Danby as long ago she had parted from Mr. Terence O'Meagh of the Royal Leinster Fusiliers. It was typical of her pride that, in order to rob Danby of any satisfaction in his achievement, she should prefer to let him assume he was merely one of a crowd, a commonplace incident in her progress. Anything seemed more suitable to the fancy of such a despicable creature than the self-congratulation of the pioneer.
Yet, though she bore herself so bravely from the hated room which had witnessed the destruction of her inaccessibility, when she was seated alone in the taxi whirring back to Camden Town, Jenny was very near to an emotional collapse. This was averted by an instinct to review the several aspects of the experience. The actual event, happening in the normal course of a temperament's advance to completeness, scarcely distressed her. On the other hand, the circumstances and actors were abhorrent. The very existence of the Danbys was an outrage, and as for Irene, her behavior was treachery incarnate. What added bitterness to her meditations was the reflection that, however contemptuous she might show herself of the two brothers, they, with Irene to voice their absence, would have the laugh on their side. From one point of view it had been a skillful seduction effected with the deliberation of use. Jenny was maddened by the thought that Irene would believe she had been unable to avoid it, that she had been bewitched by Jack Danby's dissolute accomplishments. She would never be able to impress Irene's stolidity with the fact that she had used Danby for her own purpose. Irene would be bound to consider the wretched business a justification of her own dependence on the elder brother. She would triumph with damaging retorts, pointing out the fallibility of other girls when brought beneath the Danby sway, citing Jenny in a manner that would infuriate her with the impotence of argument. All larger issues were obscured by this petty annoyance, and at first her regrets were confined to wishing she had played the inevitable drama of womanhood in some secret place with only her own soul for audience. Why had she stayed at Greycoat Gardens last night?
After the first vexation of her loss of prestige, deeper commentaries upon the act wrote themselves across her mind. She had intended, while her mother was still alive, to be rigidly unassailable. There was weakness in her failure to sustain this resolution, and Jenny loathed weakness. What had made her carry this experience through against the finest influence upon her life? Well, it was done; but the knowledge of it must be kept from her mother. Regrets were foolish; yet she would make some reparation. She would go and live at home again and, before anything, please her mother for a long time to come. She would be extra nice to May. She would be—in parental terminology—a really good girl.
Whatever agony Maurice's love had caused her to bear, this sacrifice of her youth upon a tawdry altar had finally and effectually deadened. She could meet without a tremor now the cause of all the miserable business. Things might have been different, were fidelity an imaginable virtue. But it was all over now; she had consummated the aspirations of youth. There should be an end of love henceforth. For what it was worth of bitter and sweet, she had known it. No longer was the viceroy of human destiny a riddle. He had lost his wings and lay like a foundling in the gutter. No more of such a sorry draggled god for her. Jenny's ambition now was in reconciliation with her mother to be reëstablished in the well-beloved house in Hagworth Street, and in affection for old familiar things to forget the wild adventures of passion.
The taxi swept on down the Hampstead Road until it turned off on the right to Camden Town, whose curious rococo squares mildewed and queerly ornamented seemed the abode of a fantastic depression. For all the sunlight of St. Valentine, the snowdrops looked like very foolish virgins as they shivered in the wind about the blackened grass, good sport for idle sparrows. The impression of faded wickedness made on Jenny's mind by Stacpole Terrace that morning suited her disgust. Every window in the row of houses was askew, cocking a sinister eye at her reappearance. Every house looked impure with a smear of green damp over the stucco. Stacpole Terrace wore an air of battered gayety fit only for sly entrances at twilight and furtive escapes in the dawn; while in one of the front gardens a stone Cupid with broken nose smirked perpetually at whatever shady intrigue came under his patronage.
It was nearly eleven o'clock when Jenny, entering the sitting-room, found Irene bunched sloppily over the fire. Mrs. Dale and her youngest daughter were busy in the kitchen. Winnie was not yet out of bed, and the head of the family was studying in the dust of his small apartment the bargains advertised in yesterday's paper.
"Why didn't you call for me last night?" Jenny demanded straight and swift.
"Oh, well, it was too wet," grumbled Irene, covering as well as she could her shame with nonchalance.
"Ireen, I think you're a rotter. I think you're real mean, and nothing won't ever make me believe you didn't do it for the purpose. Too wet!"
Irene declined to admit herself in the wrong.
"Well, it was too wet. You could easy have come home in a taxi if you'd wanted to."
Jenny stamped with rage.
"What I could have done hasn't got nothing to do with it all, and you know it hasn't. You said you were coming for me and you didn't, and I say you're a sneak. Because you and your massive sister behave anyhow, you'd like to make everyone else as bad."
Irene, contending even with unclasped stays, made an effort at dignity.
"You can just shut up, Jenny Pearl, because you know very well my mother wouldn't allow me to do anything. You know that."
Jenny fumed with indignation.
"Your mother? Why, when she's got half a bottle of gin to cry with over her darling Ireen or darling Winnie, she's very glad to pawn what her darlings get given to them."
"You've got very good," said Irene, bitterly sarcastic, "since this night out."
"Which you meant for me to spend out from the moment you introduced me to him."
"What do you take me for?" inquired Irene rashly.
"I take you for what you are—a rotter. God! and think what you will be one day—I know—a dirty old woman in a basement with a red petticoat and a halfpenny dip and a quartern of gin."
Irene's imagination was not extensive enough to cap this prophecy, so she poked the fire instead of making the attempt.
"Nobody wants you to stay here," she muttered.
"Don't you worry yourself. I'm going upstairs to pack my things up now."
Jenny was not able to make a completely effective departure with cab at the door and heaped-up baggage, because her taxi back from Victoria and the payment of a week's board at Stacpole Terrace had exhausted her ready money. However, she had the satisfaction of seeing her portmanteau, her hatbox and a small bag stacked in tapering stories upon the bedroom floor, there to await the offices of Carter Paterson.
Mrs. Dale emerged from the kitchen at the rumor of change and, as morning did not evoke sentiment, indulged in a criticism of Jenny's personal appearance.
"I don't like that hat of yours and never did," she announced. "I can't get used to these new-fangled fashions and never shall."
"What of it?" said Jenny, with marked indifference.
"Oh, nothing at all, if it pleases you. You've got to wear it and I suppose there's nothing more to be said. But I think that hat is vulgar. Vulgar it would have been called when I was a girl. And I can't think what you want to go all of a sudden for like this. It isn't often I make a beefsteak pudding."
Jenny was in a flutter to be away.
"Good-bye, Mrs. Dale," she said firmly.
"Well, good-bye, Jenny. You mustn't mind shaking hands with me all covered in suet. As I say, it's very seldom I do make a beefsteak pudding. I won't disturb my old man. He's busy this morning. Come and tell us how you get on soon."
It was a relief to be seated inside the tram and free of Stacpole Terrace. It was pleasant to change cars at the Nag's Head and behold again the well-known landscape of Highbury. A pageant of childish memories, roused by the sight of the broad pavements of Islington, was marshalled in Jenny's brain. Somehow on the visits she had paid her home during the last year these aspects were obscured by the consciousness of no longer owning any right to them. Now, really going home, she turned into Hagworth Street with a glow of pride at seeing again its sobriety and dignity so evident after the extravagant stucco and Chinese balconies of Camden Town's terraces and squares. There was Seventeen, looking just the same, prophetic of refuge and solid comfort to the exile. She wondered what freak of folly had ever made her fancy home was dingy and unpleasant, home that held her bright-eyed mother's laugh, her absurd father always amusing, and her little sister May. Home was an enchanted palace with more romance in each dear room than was to be found elsewhere in the world. Home was alive with the past and preserved the links which bound together all the detached episodes of Jenny's life. As she turned into the garden that once had seemed a district, as she rattled the letter-box—in the days of her estrangement she always rang the bell—remorse came welling up in tears. She remembered what good times had been recurrent through the past, tea-parties and pantomimes and learning to ride a bicycle in the warm sunsets of June. And in the house opposite nothing was altered, not a fold of the lace curtains, not a leaf of the dusty aspidistra that took all the light in the ground-floor window.
What a long time they were opening the door. She rattled the letter-box again and called out to May. It was like coming home after summer holidays by the blue sparkling sea, coming home to dolls and toys and the long, thin garden at the back which from absence had acquired an exaggerated reputation for entertainment.
Suddenly May opened the door, peeping round over the latch, much scared apparently.
"How quick you've been," she said.
"Quick?" repeated Jenny.
"Didn't you get my telegram?"
"No," said Jenny, and perceiving that May's eyes were red with weeping, her delightful anticipation was clouded with dread. "What did you want to telegraph for? Not—not about mother?"
May nodded.
"She isn't dead?" Jenny gasped.
"No, she isn't dead. But she's had to be took away. You know. To an asylum."
"Go on," said Jenny. "Oh, what a dreadful thing."
"Well, don't stand there," May commanded. "There's been crowd enough round here this morning as it is."
In the kitchen she unfolded the story. It seemed that for the last fortnight their mother had been queer.
"Oh, she was funny," said May. "She used to sit moping over the fire—never doing nothing and saying all the time how her head hurt."
"Didn't dad fetch in a doctor?" Jenny demanded.
"Not at first he wouldn't. You know what dad's like. I said she was really ill and he kept on saying: 'Nonsense, why look at me. I'm as ill as I can be, but I don't want no doctor. I've got a sort of a paralytic stroke running up and down my arm fit to drive anybody barmy. And here am I going off to work so cheerful, the chaps down at the shop say they don't know how I does it.'"
"He ought to be bumped," Jenny asserted wrathfully. "I only wish I'd been at home to tell him off. Go on about mother. And why wasn't I sent for directly?" she asked.
"Well, I did think about fetching you back. But I didn't really think myself it was anything much at first. She got worse all of a sudden like. She took a most shocking dislike to me and said I was keeping her indoors against her will, and then she carried on about you, said you was—well, I don't know what she didn't say. And when the doctor come, she said he was a detective and asked him to lock you and me both up, said she had the most wicked daughters. I was quite upset, but the doctor he said not to worry as it was often like that with mad people, hating the ones they liked best. And I said, 'She's never gone mad? Not my mother? Oh, whatever shall I do?' And he said, 'She has,' and then she started off screaming enough to make anyone go potty to hear her, and a lot of boys come and hung about the gate and people was looking out of windows and the greengrocer was ringing all the time to know if there was any orders this morning."
"When was all this?" asked Jenny, frozen by the terrible narrative.
"This morning, I keep telling you."
"Just now?"
"No, early. They come and took her away to an asylum somewhere in the country and we can go and see her once a fortnight. But she's very ill, the doctor says—some sort of abscess on her brain."
"Where's dad?"
"He went round to the 'Arms.' He said he felt quite shaky."
Jenny sat mute and hopeless. Would her mother never recognize her? Would she die in the belief that she was neither loved nor appreciated?