THE TELEGRAM

Her mother was dead. Her life stood altered.

She would be no poorer, it was not that. She was an orphan, and all her mother had had came to her. That meant seventy thousand pounds, plate, linen and the freehold of a fine old house in Lower Seymour Street, that they had moved into a year before the old lady died.

Things were no more altered socially than they were altered pecuniarily, for the Damers’ set naturally corresponded, as sets do, with their postal district, and Miss Alice Damer could therefore continue to command an entrance into the best circles. Only she realized that she must henceforth enjoy all these good things to the tune of a paid companion, having no poor and amenable relations handy whom she could draft into the household economy, and afterwards snub into a colourless, bare existence.

She was thirty-five, and her years did not weigh on her, except mentally. The first faint physical signs of the debacle were, so far, evident to herself alone, and then only in moods of unusual depression. She was still young enough to need a companion. Her pretty red-gold hair was as red as gold, as pretty as ever, her visits to her dentist as few, her eyes as deep, and her step as elastic, although she had given up dancing. She had made this sacrifice more from a sense of fitness, as a concession to the needs of the young girls coming up all round her, and who deserved their turn on the floor, than of social necessity. As a matter of fact, she had never been really fond of that over-energetic, disordering form of amusement. She loved the world and going up and down in it immensely, and her way of enjoying parties was to sit out if it was a dance, away from the music if it was a concert, and in the back of the box if it was a play. She was a flirt.

Not an outrageous, noisy, ill-bred flirt, but what is known as a quiet flirt, with many strong and efficient strings to her bow. Did one of them, being after all only catgut or mere man, snap occasionally—that is to say, get married out of the circle of her charm—Alice, in her quiet way, promptly renewed the string, and supplied herself with a new admirer, as good at fetching and carrying as the old. In her mind that was the chief use of admirers—to prevent one’s looking neglected—of course one never really was!

She was a woman of many “affairs”; she liked living, not exactly in hot water, but in water at least warm, and was seldom seen talking to women, though she was quite nice to them, as intrusive but law-permitted aliens in the pays du cœur. None of her friends would have dared to ask her to a ladies’ lunch, or any over-womaned party; a man had always to be “got for Alice,” else she would have been hurt, and quite unable to play her part properly. She was unused to, unversed in her own sex.

On the other hand, she played fair and never took other women’s men, or encouraged their husbands to play the pretty game with her. People said that for her, that she never made women unhappy, only men. She was never very sorry for a man’s love-troubles, for she had a theory that a hopeless passion or two did a man no harm and that the more he proposed the merrier—for him. She never told any one how many offers she had refused. Men often did propose to her, and she refused them all, and boasted that she had never been engaged for even an hour, and that no man had ever kissed her. The bloom was not off Alice, unless so much mental coming and going in her courts had produced some such subtle effect.

“Why should I marry?” she used to say to Everard Jenkyns (good old Welsh family), when he importuned her to relax her rule in his favour, and even go so far as making the vast experiment of marriage with him as her partner. “There is no earthly hurry.”

“No, but perhaps a heavenly one,” he had inanely replied.

“I may never marry at all. Girls, economically, don’t need to marry as they used to, and at any rate I am independent so far as money goes.”

“So the way is clear for you to marry for love.”

“I don’t think I shall ever fall in love.”

“Then take a man you like—and you like me?” Everard was not at that time sufficiently far gone in love to make him inattentive to, and unappreciative of the use and value of “cheek,” in discussing such matters with his princess.

“Yes, I like you; but, as you know, I don’t love you. And I’m so made that I must be quite sure in my own mind that I am absolutely, positively incapable of loving madly before I let myself go with any one, even you. Don’t you see, in the interests of morality, one must be sure of oneself, or there might be catastrophe, with a strong nature like mine?”

“No,” said Everard patiently and earnestly. “There would, I am sure, be no danger of that with you. Your husband might feel perfectly safe in your hands.”

“Thanks. Why do you say that?”

“Because the power to flirt never implies the power to love, I am afraid.”

“Well, Everard, you can’t say that I flirt with you!” she exclaimed noisily.

“Oh, no. Your knowing that I am desperately, dully serious about you protects me a little, and you do pay me the doubtful compliment of taking no trouble to attract me. You honestly never put your best foot foremost with me, or pose like a heroine to your most humble valet.”

“Yes,” Alice agreed, laughing a little bitterly. “I promise you never to encourage you in any way. I would let you see me with my hair in curlers, if I wore them! Anything to convince you of the purity of my intentions. I simply will not have you say that I lead you on or encourage you.”

“My God, Alice! I don’t say it! I know well enough I am a d——d fool and have nothing whatever to go on.”

“A fool to love me?”

“A fool because I am a lonely man and don’t like being a lonely man, and yet this feeling of mine towards you will keep me so, so far as I can see. I don’t suppose I shall ever marry. I know I shan’t. That’s what you’ve done, Alice, and I may just as well go away and make my will in your favour, for I shall never have any wife or child to leave my money to. I feel that it will be so.”

“Really, my poor Everard”—she tried very hard not to look flattered—“this is most sad. I couldn’t have believed there was such fidelity left in this wicked world, and to tell you the truth I don’t believe it possible, even now. I’m really not vain enough—if I am cruel.”

“Not so very vain, and not a bit cruel. I honestly believe if you thought you could get up any sort of feeling for me, you’d say so. You never will say it to me—but to some one else, I suppose. You are human like every one else. It’s all rot about not being capable of loving; every woman is or is able to think she is, and that’s enough in a great many cases. Oh, you’ll find the man sooner or later, and I—well, I shall wish you every happiness and be godfather to the kids. Nice little flirt’s kids, with pretty hair like yours. Now, I’d better go away to the Temple and make that will, as I’ve quite made up my mind to die a bachelor.”

“Nonsense,” said Alice sharply, more touched than she liked to own; “I won’t even be friends with you if you go on like that. Leave things open. Not for me, of course. It must be quite understood that I don’t accept any such sacrifice of your life as waiting for me would entail. Believe me, I know myself, and I know, somehow, deep down, that I shall never fall in love with you. That being the case, don’t you think I should be really behaving rather badly if I allowed you to think that you could ever melt me by faithful service, and little things like that?”

“All right. Beggars don’t choose. You shall have the faithful service all the same, and it shall not hope to melt you. Will that suit you?”

“We’ll leave it at that, then,” said Alice, permitting the young and promising barrister to kiss her hand, and devote his wits and energies and the rest of his life to her use. She could always find work for him.

He did it all as he had said. He was thus able to be “about the house.” That was his retaining fee. Whether it was painful to him or not in his present state of mind to see so much of Alice Damer, it was a fact that he did have to meet her continually. She sent little business-like notes round to his chambers nearly every day—short, sensible, not encouraging notes. He made all the arrangements for their journeys and their parties and their entertaining of their friends. He saw her mother and herself off to the Continent every year when they went to do their cure, was attentive at the carriage door, bought the railway literature, and pumped up the air cushions. He could always be counted upon to be odd man at a dinner party, and if it was humanly possible, and sometimes when it was inhumanly impossible, threw over any other important engagement that he might have had—important to himself, be it understood. His clerk thought he led a “dog’s life.” What Everard thought was never recorded. What Alice thought was simply this, that Everard liked doing little things

for her and was by temperament a born bachelor, although he still cultivated that touching delusion that he was lonely and wanted a companion. It was only that he wanted her, and seeing her this way, every day off and on, was really the pabulum his soul cried for; other and more full-blooded men would not have been content with so merely spiritual a sustenance. At any rate, he never showed any tendency to stray from the portal and outer courts of this austere temple of respectful worship. Alice had no cause for jealousy. Her victim never twisted or wriggled on the hook of her attraction, his ready smile on seeing her flourished as ever, only there was more “drawing” in it, as expressed by the hatchet lines of his mouth. In short, Everard grew thin.

His chest was rather narrow. He coughed often and tiresomely. Lung symptoms seemed to be developing themselves there. Alice, out of gracious regard for him, had suggested his accompanying her mother and herself to the Riviera one winter, instead of seeing them off and falling back into the fog of Charing Cross as usual. He had refused on the score of his pressing work, promising, however, to wear a respirator on the very bad days.

It was a pity he had not gone with them that time. For all that she was a flirt, and men were her material; Alice didn’t know them at all. She met a man out at Cap Martin, a man Everard would have seen through at a glance. This common adventurer made love to her; he managed to engage the poor flirt’s affections. There was nothing in it, no magnetism. He was a better flirt than she was, that was all, and while Alice had money, he had none.

She returned, and confided her woes. Everard had his work cut out for him. He interviewed this handsome predatory person, and succeeded in retrieving Alice’s letters for her. It was a supreme bit of service, and Alice was truly grateful to him. The wretch went out of her life, leaving her in a rather deplorable condition of nerves and mind.

And Everard threw himself into the situation as no man who is not deeply attached to a woman unpicturesquely lovesick for another could have done. He visited her every day, and comforted and consoled her by allowing her to talk about it all. Alice’s grief furnished the theme for many a dreary summer’s afternoon, when Everard used to take her up the river to distract her mind. It was a trip she had always firmly refused to take with him in the old days on the score of propriety, an excuse that masked dread of boredom. Boredom was not in it now—it was acute tragedy. Poor Alice forgot all propriety when once she was towed well out into mid stream. There she gave way and allowed the echoes of Datchet and Laleham to echo with her sobs. For she had been awfully hard hit. Once, indeed, Everard remembered, but with no pleasurable sense of a lover’s guerdon gained, she had leaned forward in the boat with the abandon of despair and kissed her patient confidant. It was the only woman’s kiss Everard had ever received in his life, and it

had tasted of salt tears! Still, it was a love symbol, the nearest Alice could do in the line he wished, or had wished, for perhaps he did not now desire her quite so urgently as he had done.

Everard had never been handsome at the best of times, but that summer season rang the final knell of his good looks. His crow’s feet and his cheek and jaw lines were awful—Alice herself noticed them.

“I believe it is you, Everard, who are going to break down now!” she said to him once when it was all over, her misbegotten love buried fathoms deep, and she cared to look round her a little and notice what other people were doing.

The very violence of her passion had perhaps caused the flame to burn itself out in this young lady of the world, this parlour warrior, this heroine of a hundred ball-room fights. At any rate, her emotional crisis passed away, leaving her who was already hard a little harder than before to Everard’s business precautions and his adroit playing of animated safety-valve to the deserted one. Alice, luckily for her, had not needed to confide in a member of her own sex.

Her zest for “the noble game” of flirtation had died down, too. She was less interested in men, and rather more interested in herself than she had been, and condescended to enjoy a party, even if she came away from it without the tendrils of a heart of sorts reaching after her. Her superficial bloom returned; she had never lost, only temporarily mislaid it. She was a fundamentally good-looking woman, with neat, regular features, a good figure and perfect constitution to fall back on. To Everard’s satisfaction she now proved the validity of these fine assets of beauty.

But she had spoken a true word in jest. Everard Jenkyns went and had a bout of brain fever. He was popularly supposed to have broken down from overwork.

Alice Damer and her mother were most kind and solicitous, and as fussy about him as they could be without setting the public tongue a-wagging. Alice now worshipped on the altar of convention again, and would not have been seen up the river with Everard or near his rooms in Paper Buildings for anything. Her mother was old and unwieldy. So they “wrote.” They were quite careful—but as it was, old friends opined that Miss Damer was going to settle down and take up with her old and tried suitor. When taxed with this by the ill-bred privileged she maintained boldly that there was nothing in it, that she and Mr. Jenkyns thoroughly understood each other. So they did. Everard was grateful without any expectation of favours to come, and thanked her prettily for grapes and books and things.

He recovered, and went about his own business as usual. Alice’s business was not pressing just now, so the two rather lost sight of each other, Alice holding him in reserve for future extremity. She supposed, sometimes aloud, that he was “busy getting on” and making up for the time lost in his illness. There could be no woman in it?

“Rather a wreck—poor old Jenks!” his friends observed with affection, for he was a general favourite with men, and most unfairly persisted in attributing his state, not to the illness he had undergone, but to Alice Damer’s fast-and-loose playing. She heard this, but tossed her head, confident in the good understanding that subsisted between her and her slave.

“I have never encouraged Everard. He knows I haven’t,” she declared to her mother.

“He says so. I think you have been quite horrid to him, Alice!” was the old lady’s single solitary pronouncement on the situation. She said this lying on her bed during what was to prove her last illness. Alice was gentle and kind, but repressed all sentimental leanings on the part of the invalid, who had a mother’s natural wish to see a vagrant-hearted daughter settled in love and marriage before she died.

“Mother, how often must I tell you that Everard—Mr. Jenkyns—and I understand each other?” she repeated coldly. She had never chosen to call Everard by his Christian name, though her mother, who was fond of him, always insisted on doing so, and Everard obviously liked it, and clung to this side entry into the intimacy of Alice’s family. It did not matter. Alice and he, as before said, understood each other, and old ladies, every one knows, have a way of attaching themselves to young men, and selecting their daughters’ suitors for them by the light of their own predilections.

* * * * * * *

And now, her dear, silly old mother was dead and buried, and the proud, sensible daughter sat all alone in the big Seymour Street drawing-room, with the three large windows that needed so much stuff for their curtains, and the beautiful Adams mantelpiece whose shelf Alice could hardly see over. The Damers had only been in the house a year; it was freehold, and Alice’s. It was rather a large and dreary abode for one young woman to inhabit permanently, yet the young woman thought she meant to do so!

A companion, she sadly supposed, in that case must be procured sooner or later—later, preferably; if she could have her way, not at all!

Alice was nearly forty, though she looked younger. Why should she not use her age for all it was worth and establish herself on the easy footing of years of discretion? Nay, there would be complications there; her womanly instincts rebelled against the aspersion of “discretion” and the constant assertion of her maturity which would be involved in her adoption of that attitude. She would be asked to play chaperon herself, she would have to “dress old.” No, she looked so young for her age, it would be ridiculous, when she could as easily carry the other theory through and pose as a breakable, compromisable commodity.

She must make up her mind to accept the duenna—she must get in a woman to quarrel with! It came very hard! She had been used to going about alone and receiving guests by herself in this house; for the last year Mrs. Damer had been unable to dine down or preside at her own table. She appeared beautifully capped and lappeted, to set the seal of chaperonage for a few minutes before dinner, and then prettily said good-night to her young guests when dinner was announced. Alice was quite equal to it, and always invited another woman, preferably married, to her charming dinners.

A companion would, by the conditions of her office, take part in every function, “quiet” dinners as well as noisy ones. It would be far worse than a husband, for a husband would at least leave the tea-hour free. All Alice’s serious tête-à-têtes had been used to come off then, in the little room off the stairs, that was really part of the hall and in no way shut off, but so delightfully private. Little, soft, rosy cosy late teas had been Alice’s great social weapon; all the more fetching were these free and easy interviews in that she wasn’t in the least like an American, though she did see young men alone, with a mother stowed away somewhere in the upper fastnesses of the house.

This problem of the companion was associated with the first glimmering in Alice Damer’s mind, of the possibility of a husband’s suiting at this juncture. The notion of a companion precipitated him. He came in by the door of convenience.

A husband! Well, who was it wanted to marry her at that moment?

Men’s names, long shelved, came into her mind, but not Everard’s. Like the poor, she had him always with her. He was always available, but the others, unaccountably enough, did not rush into the arena of her requirements at once.