Tommy and Co.

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So Billy was right, after all, thought Tommy to herself, the piano
does help.

"It was so incongruous--a piano in Crane Court--I looked to see
where the noise came from. I read the name of the paper on the
doorpost. 'It will be my last chance,' I said to myself. 'This
shall decide it.'"

He came back to her. She had not moved. "I am not afraid to tell
you all this. You are so big-hearted, so human; you will
understand, you can forgive. It is all past. Loving you tells a
man that he has done with evil. Will you not trust me?"

She put her hands in his. "I am trusting you," she said, "with all
my life. Don't make a muddle of it, dear, if you can help it."

It was an odd wooing, as Tommy laughingly told herself when she
came to think it over in her room that night. But that is how it
shaped itself.

What troubled her most was that he had not been quite frank with
Peter, so that Peter had to defend her against herself.

"I attacked you so suddenly," explained Peter, "you had not time to
think. You acted from instinct. A woman seeks to hide her love
even from herself."

"I expect, after all, I am more of a girl than a boy," feared
Tommy: "I seem to have so many womanish failings."

Peter took himself into quite places and trained himself to face
the fact that another would be more to her than he had ever been,
and Clodd went about his work like a bear with a sore head; but
they neither of them need have troubled themselves so much. The
marriage did not take place till nearly fifteen years had passed
away, and much water had to flow beneath old London Bridge before
that day.

The past is not easily got rid of. A tale was once written of a
woman who killed her babe and buried it in a lonely wood, and later
stole back in the night and saw there, white in the moonlight, a
child's hand calling through the earth, and buried it again and yet
again; but always that white baby hand called upwards through the
earth, trample it down as she would. Tommy read the story one
evening in an old miscellany, and sat long before the dead fire,
the book open on her lap, and shivered; for now she knew the fear
that had been haunting her.

Tommy lived expecting her. She came one night when Tommy was
alone, working late in the office. Tommy knew her the moment she
entered the door, a handsome woman, with snake-like, rustling
skirts. She closed the door behind her, and drawing forward a
chair, seated herself the other side of the desk, and the two
looked long and anxiously at one another.

"They told me I should find you here alone," said the woman. "It
is better, is it not?"

"Yes," said Tommy, "it is better."

"Tell me," said the woman, "are you very much in love with him?"

"Why should I tell you?"

"Because, if not--if you have merely accepted him thinking him a
good catch--which he isn't, my dear; hasn't a penny to bless
himself with, and never will if he marries you--why, then the
matter is soon settled. They tell me you are a business-like young
lady, and I am prepared to make a business-like proposition."

There was no answer. The woman shrugged her shoulders.

"If, on the other hand, you are that absurd creature, a young girl
in love--why, then, I suppose we shall have to fight for him."

"It would be more sporting, would it not?" suggested Tommy.

"Let me explain before you decide," continued the woman. "Dick
Danvers left me six months ago, and has kept from me ever since,
because he loved me."

"It sounds a curious reason."

"I was a married woman when Dick Danvers and I first met. Since he
left me--for my sake and his own--I have received information of my
husband's death."

"And does Dick--does he know?" asked the girl.

"Not yet. I have only lately learnt the news myself."

"Then if it is as you say, when he knows he will go back to you."

"There are difficulties in the way."

"What difficulties?"

"My dear, this. To try and forget me, he has been making love to
you. Men do these things. I merely ask you to convince yourself
of the truth. Go away for six months--disappear entirely. Leave
him free--uninfluenced. If he loves you--if it be not merely a
sense of honour that binds him--you will find him here on your
return. If not--if in the interval I have succeeded in running off
with him, well, is not the two or three thousand pounds I am
prepared to put into this paper of yours a fair price for such a
lover?"

Tommy rose with a laugh of genuine amusement. She could never
altogether put aside her sense of humour, let Fate come with what
terrifying face it would.

"You may have him for nothing--if he is that man," the girl told
her; "he shall be free to choose between us."

"You mean you will release him from his engagement?"

"That is what I mean."

"Why not take my offer? You know the money is needed. It will
save your father years of anxiety and struggle. Go away--travel,
for a couple of months, if you're afraid of the six. Write him
that you must be alone, to think things over."

The girl turned upon her.

"And leave you a free field to lie and trick?"

The woman, too, had risen. "Do you think he really cares for you?
At the moment you interest him. At nineteen every woman is a
mystery. When the mood is past--and do you know how long a man's
mood lasts, you poor chit? Till he has caught what he is running
after, and has tasted it--then he will think not of what he has
won, but of what he has lost: of the society from which he has cut
himself adrift; of all the old pleasures and pursuits he can no
longer enjoy; of the luxuries--necessities to a man of his stamp--
that marriage with you has deprived him of. Then your face will be
a perpetual reminder to him of what he has paid for it, and he will
curse it every time he sees it."

"You don't know him," the girl cried. "You know just a part of
him--the part you would know. All the rest of him is a good man,
that would rather his self-respect than all the luxuries you
mention--you included."

"It seems to resolve itself into what manner of man he is," laughed
the woman.

The girl looked at her watch. "He will be here shortly; he shall
tell us himself."

"How do you mean?"

"That here, between the two of us, he shall decide--this very
night." She showed her white face to the woman. "Do you think I
could live through a second day like to this?"

"The scene would be ridiculous."

"There will be none here to enjoy the humour of it."

"He will not understand."

"Oh, yes, he will," the girl laughed. "Come, you have all the
advantages; you are rich, you are clever; you belong to his class.
If he elects to stop with me, it will be because he is my man--
mine. Are you afraid?"

The woman shivered. She wrapped her fur cloak about her closer and
sat down again, and Tommy returned to her proofs. It was press-
night, and there was much to be done.

He came a little later, though how long the time may have seemed to
the two women one cannot say. They heard his footstep on the
stair. The woman rose and went forward, so that when he opened the
door she was the first he saw. But he made no sign. Possibly he
had been schooling himself for this moment, knowing that sooner or
later it must come. The woman held out her hand to him with a
smile.

"I have not the honour," he said.

The smile died from her face. "I do not understand," she said.

"I have not the honour," he repeated. "I do not know you."

The girl was leaning with her back against the desk in a somewhat
mannish attitude. He stood between them. It will always remain
Life's chief comic success: the man between two women. The
situation has amused the world for so many years. Yet, somehow, he
contrived to maintain a certain dignity.

"Maybe," he continued, "you are confounding me with a Dick Danvers
who lived in New York up to a few months ago. I knew him well--a
worthless scamp you had done better never to have met."

"You bear a wonderful resemblance to him," laughed the woman.

"The poor fool is dead," he answered. "And he left for you, my
dear lady, this dying message: that, from the bottom of his soul,
he was sorry for the wrong he had done you. He asked you to
forgive him--and forget him."

"The year appears to be opening unfortunately for me," said the
woman. "First my lover, then my husband."

He had nerved himself to fight the living. This was a blow from
the dead. The man had been his friend.

"Dead?"

"He was killed, it appears, in that last expedition in July,"
answered the woman. "I received the news from the Foreign Office
only a fortnight ago."

An ugly look came into his eyes--the look of a cornered creature
fighting for its life. "Why have you followed me here? Why do I
find you here alone with her? What have you told her?"

The woman shrugged her shoulders. "Only the truth."

"All the truth?" he demanded--"all? Ah! be just. Tell her it was
not all my fault. Tell her all the truth."

"What would you have me tell her? That I played Potiphar's wife to
your Joseph?"

"Ah, no! The truth--only the truth. That you and I were a pair of
idle fools with the devil dancing round us. That we played a
fool's game, and that it is over."

"Is it over? Dick, is it over?" She flung her arms towards him;
but he threw her from him almost brutally. "The man is dead, I
tell you. His folly and his sin lie dead with him. I have nothing
to do with you, nor you with me."

"Dick!" she whispered. "Dick, cannot you understand? I must speak
with you alone."

But they did not understand, neither the man nor the child.

"Dick, are you really dead?" she cried. "Have you no pity for me?
Do you think that I have followed you here to grovel at your feet
for mere whim? Am I acting like a woman sane and sound? Don't you
see that I am mad, and why I am mad? Must I tell you before her?
Dick--" She staggered towards him, and the fine cloak slipped from
her shoulders; and then it was that Tommy changed from a child into
a woman, and raised the other woman from the ground with crooning
words of encouragement such as mothers use, and led her to the
inner room. "Do not go," she said, turning to Dick; "I shall be
back in a few minutes."

He crossed to one of the windows against which beat the City's
roar, and it seemed to him as the throb of passing footsteps
beating down through the darkness to where he lay in his grave.

She re-entered, closing the door softly behind her. "It is true?"
she asked.

"It can be. I had not thought of it."

They spoke in low, matter-of-fact tones, as people do who have
grown weary of their own emotions.

"When did he go away--her husband?"

"About--it is February now, is it not? About eighteen months ago."

"And died just eight months ago. Rather conveniently, poor
fellow."

"Yes, I'm glad he is dead--poor Lawrence."

"What is the shortest time in which a marriage can be arranged?"

"I do not know," he answered listlessly. "I do not intend to marry
her."

"You would leave her to bear it alone?"

"It is not as if she were a poor woman. You can do anything with
money."

"It will not mend reputation. Her position in society is
everything to that class of woman."

"My marrying her now," he pointed out, "would not save her."

"Practically speaking it would," the girl pleaded. "The world does
not go out of its way to find out things it does not want to know.
Marry her as quietly as possible and travel for a year or two."

"Why should I? Ah! it is easy enough to call a man a coward for
defending himself against a woman. What is he to do when he is
fighting for his life? Men do not sin with good women."

"There is the child to be considered," she urged--"your child. You
see, dear, we all do wrong sometimes. We must not let others
suffer for our fault more--more than we can help."

He turned to her for the first time. "And you?"

"I? Oh, I shall cry for a little while, but later on I shall
laugh, as often. Life is not all love. I have my work."

He knew her well by this time. And also it came to him that it
would be a finer thing to be worthy of her than even to possess
her.

So he did her bidding and went out with the other woman. Tommy was
glad it was press-night. She would not be able to think for hours
to come, and then, perhaps, she would be feeling too tired. Work
can be very kind.

Were this an artistic story, here, of course, one would write
"Finis." But in the workaday world one never knows the ending till
it comes. Had it been otherwise, I doubt I could have found
courage to tell you this story of Tommy. It is not all true--at
least, I do not suppose so. One drifts unconsciously a little way
into dream-land when one sits oneself down to recall the happenings
of long ago; while Fancy, with a sly wink, whispers ever and again
to Memory: "Let me tell this incident--picture that scene: I can
make it so much more interesting than you would." But Tommy--how
can I put it without saying too much: there is someone I think of
when I speak of her? To remember only her dear wounds, and not the
healing of them, would have been a task too painful. I love to
dwell on their next meeting. Flipp, passing him on the steps, did
not know him, the tall, sunburnt gentleman with the sweet, grave-
faced little girl.

"Seen that face somewhere before," mused Flipp, as at the corner of
Bedford Street he climbed into a hansom, "seen it somewhere on a
thinner man."

For Dick Danvers, that he did not recognise Flipp, there was more
excuse. A very old young man had Flipp become at thirty. Flipp no
longer enjoyed popular journalism. He produced it.

The gold-bound doorkeeper feared the mighty Clodd would be unable
to see so insignificant an atom as an unappointed stranger, but
would let the card of Mr. Richard Danvers plead for itself. To the
gold-bound keeper's surprise came down the message that Mr. Danvers
was to be at once shown up.

"I thought, somehow, you would come to me first," said the portly
Clodd, advancing with out-stretched hand. "And this is--?"

"My little girl, Honor. We have been travelling for the last few
months."

Clodd took the grave, small face between his big, rough hands:

"Yes. She is like you. But looks as if she were going to have
more sense. Forgive me, I knew your father my dear," laughed
Clodd; "when he was younger."

They lit their cigars and talked.

"Well, not exactly dead; we amalgamated it," winked Clodd in answer
to Danvers' inquiry. "It was just a trifle TOO high-class.
Besides, the old gentleman was not getting younger. It hurt him a
little at first. But then came Tommy's great success, and that has
reconciled him to all things. Do they know you are in England?"

"No," explained Danvers; "we arrived only last night."

Clodd called directions down the speaking-tube.

"You will find hardly any change in her. One still has to keep
one's eye upon her chin. She has not even lost her old habit of
taking stock of people. You remember." Clodd laughed.

They talked a little longer, till there came a whistle, and Clodd
put his ear to the tube.

"I have to see her on business," said Clodd, rising; "you may as
well come with me. They are still in the old place, Gough Square."

Tommy was out, but Peter was expecting her every minute.

Peter did not know Dick, but would not admit it. Forgetfulness was
a sign of age, and Peter still felt young.

"I know your face quite well," said Peter; "can't put a name to it,
that's all."

Clodd whispered it to him, together with information bringing
history up to date. And then light fell upon the old lined face.
He came towards Dick, meaning to take him by both hands, but,
perhaps because he had become somewhat feeble, he seemed glad when
the younger man put his arms around him and held him for a moment.
It was un-English, and both of them felt a little ashamed of
themselves afterwards.

"What we want," said Clodd, addressing Peter, "we three--you, I,
and Miss Danvers--is tea and cakes, with cream in them; and I know
a shop where they sell them. We will call back for your father in
half an hour." Clodd explained to Miss Danvers; "he has to talk
over a matter of business with Miss Hope."

"I know," answered the grave-faced little person. She drew Dick's
face down to hers and kissed it. And then the three went out
together, leaving Dick standing by the window.

"Couldn't we hide somewhere till she comes?" suggested Miss
Danvers. "I want to see her."

So they waited in the open doorway of a near printing-house till
Tommy drove up. Both Peter and Clodd watched the child's face with
some anxiety. She nodded gravely to herself three times, then
slipped her hand into Peter's.

Tommy opened the door with her latchkey and passed in.

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