Skip to main content

Full text of "A Chelsea householder [by hon. E. Lawless]."

See other formats 


Google 



This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project 

to make the world's books discoverable online. 

It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject 

to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books 

are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover. 

Marks, notations and other maiginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the 

publisher to a library and finally to you. 

Usage guidelines 

Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the 
public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing tliis resource, we liave taken steps to 
prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying. 
We also ask that you: 

+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for 
personal, non-commercial purposes. 

+ Refrain fivm automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine 
translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the 
use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help. 

+ Maintain attributionTht GoogXt "watermark" you see on each file is essential for in forming people about this project and helping them find 
additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it. 

+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just 
because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other 
countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can't offer guidance on whether any specific use of 
any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner 
anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liabili^ can be quite severe. 

About Google Book Search 

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers 
discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web 

at |http: //books .google .com/I 



600073098X 




BODLEIAN LIBRARY 
OXFORD 



A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 



"Is it a little thing 
To have enjoyed the sun, 
To have lived light in the spring, 
To have loved, to have thought, to have done ? " 

M. Arnold. 



IN THREE VOLUMES, 
VOL. II. 

. DEC !FR2 •) 

LONDON: 

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, 
CROWN BUILDINGS, i88, FLEET STREET. 

1882. 
{All rights reserved.') 






C!51. k . nf . 



LONDON : 

•RINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. 



CONTENTS OF VOL. II. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Return of the Householder i 

II. A Domestic Crisis ... ... 33 

III. The Flight of the Vulture... 67 

IV. Art versus Philistia ... ... 36 

V. Mr. Wygram at Home ... 132 

VI. An Impending Ordeal ... ... 155 

VII. The Ordeal is past ... 182 

VIII. Strained Relations ... ... 209 

IX. "At War 'twixt Will and Will 

Not" ... ^ ... 257 



A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 



•«o*- 



CHAPTER I. 

THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 

MuRTEL felt that her pleasant holiday 
had indeed come to an end as she 
drove through the dull streets and dreary- 
squares which lie between Waterloo station 
and the Chelsea Embankment It was a 
dank, drizzling day ; Southampton Water, 
as they passed it in the morning, looked 
like an indifferent drawing in Indian ink, 
faint flickers of sunshine here and there 
touching but hardly lighting its dim grey 
surface. The nearer they got to London, 
the closer and denser of course grew the 
cloud curtain, and by the time they got out 

VOL. II. B 



2 A CPIELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

of the train rain was falling heavily, and 
the air was thick and murky as in Novem- 
ber. She had asked her sister-in-law 
to send the brougham to meet her at 
the station, but a prolonged survey of the 
platform showing no signs of one, she 
and Elizabeth put themselves into a cab 
and drove off together through the gloom. 
The street in which Mrs. Prettyman lived 
came first, so, having deposited her friend 
on the way, Muriel drove on alone to her 
own house. 

It was not until the cabman had rung 
three or four times unsuccessfully at the 
front gate that the bell was at last answered. 
Then a tall woman, in a white cap, put out 
her head with an air of suppressed exas- 
peration, which gave way to a broad beam 
of satisfaction when she espied Muriel. 

" Why, if it ain't eyer Miss Ellis herself," 
she exclaimed, running down to fling open 
the gate. 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 3 

" Didn't Mrs. Skynner tell you to expect 
me, Eliza ? " our heroine inquired, when at 
last she stood in her own hall. 

" No, miss, not a word. Mrs. Skynner, 
she went out early this morning in the 
carriage, she and the other lady that's 
been stopping here. And she didn't 
say nothing except that she'd be back to 
lunch, and Mrs. Hopper was to be sure to 
have the lamb cutlets ready, and the coM 
salmon, and cherry pie, and whipped cream, 
what was ordered, and there they've been 
since two o'clock, and the cutlets as hard 
as iron by this, and Mrs. Skynner hasn't 
never been back, no, nor the other lady, 
either." 

" What other lady ? " was upon the tip 
of Muriel's tongue ; but she saw from the 
worthy Eliza's expression that the question 
would probably unlock a whole volume of 
pent-up wrath and dissatisfaction, so con- 
tented herself with simply begging to have 



4 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

tea brought to her as soon as possible in 
the studio, and then went her way upstairs 
to her own room. 

It was rather a dreary sort of home- 
coming, certainly, she thought, as she took 
off her hat and cloak. Of course Sophia 
might have the best of good reasons for 
not being at home to herself, but it did 
seem odd not giving the servants a 
hint of her arrival. Probably, though, it 
was her own fault, she ought to have 
written herself to either Mrs. Hopper, or 
Eliza ; and then again, who could this lady 
be that Eliza said was staying in the 
house ? and why did Sophia have strangers 
staying there without giving her warning ? 
And having arrived at this point, Muriel 
began to tax herself with unamiability and 
selfishness ; had she not told Sophia scores 
of times that she was to consider the house 
her own, and was she so foolish and un- 
reasonable as to be annoyed simply 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 5 

because her sister-in-law had taken her at 
her word ? 

She went downstairs again to the studio. 
It felt uncomfortably hot and close, and 
she hastened to fling open the windows, and 
let in what little light and air was to be 
had outside, before looking round her. 
It was not a particularly large room, being, 
in fact, merely the ordinary double draw- 
ing-room of a London house with the 
partition knocked down, and the back 
window somewhat enlarged. As a studio, of 
course, it was open to many objections ; the 
sunlight on bright days struggling persist- 
ently in, while the cross lights were a disad- 
vantage which no amount of screens and 
curtains were able entirely to obviate. For 
all that Muriel herself would not have 
exchanged it for the best constructed 
studio in London. Whatever else might 
be wanting, there was always the river 
to fall back upon. And when her day's 



6 * A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

work was over, it was always to her 
an untold treat and refreshment to fling 
back the mufilings and step out over the 
window-sill on to the balcony to look down 
that long silvery highway, with its ever- 
varying freight carried swiftly past without 
.noise or bustle. To-day, however, even 
the Thames itself looked dismal. The 
trees upon the Battersea side of the river, 
showed black as ink through the leaden- 
tinted atmosphere ; the broad mud-coloured 
expanse was churned into sulky yellow 
waves by the passage of a steamer; the 
wet flags, dripping trees, and puddle-starred 
pavement, looked all inexpressibly dreary ; 
so, turning abruptly away from the win- 
dow, she walked round to inspect her 
various possessions, and see how they 
looked after her month's absence. 

For an artist she had not really many 
properties, but what she had were well 
disposed. The room was rather low, with 



THE JRETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 7 

a dark oak floor sparsely scattered over 
with rugs, a large tiger-skin which had 
belonged to her brother John occupying 
the place of honour before the fire-place. 
The walls up to about eight feet from the 
floor were covered with a dull orange- 
coloured matting, against which the brasses 
and bits of Spanish and Moorish pottery — 
not valuable, but quaint, and good as to 
colour— were arranged. Her own paint- 
ings, when not actually in progress, were 
usually set en pdnitence, with their faces to 
the wall. There was a whole now of these 
culprits now awaiting judgment upon the 
opposite side of the floor, so, crossing the 
room, Muriel turned over two or three, 
placing one upon an easel, and stepping 
back a little, the better to inspect it. It 
looked extremely bad, she thought; so, 
indeed, did they all ; and she began to 
wonder whether she would ever again find 
heart and courage to take up her brush, 



8 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

and set vigorously to work upon them. 
Altogether, she felt low and depressed, 
what with the dreariness of the day, and 
the home-coming which had so little of 
home in it ; so, leaving the examination 
of the rest for another time, she drew a 
chair over to the empty fireplace, and sat 
down, feeling out of heart and humour with 
herself, and with all the world besides. 

She had sat there, perhaps, for about five 
minutes when there came a quick tap at the 
door, so, concluding that it was only Eliza 
with the tea, she called out, "Come in," 
without turning, or changing her attitude. 

1 1 was a lighter step, however, than that 
of the excellent Eliza which presently 
crossed the floor, and a pair of small white 
hands, which certainly did not belong to 
Eliza, were laid upon her arm, while a soft 
CQoing voice said in her ear : 

" Here you are, you dear thing ? How 
glad I am to have you back ! " 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 9 

Muriel sprang up, "Why, Kitty/* she 
cried, " is that you ? How in the world 
did you know I was home ? " 

The visitor laughed and Icissed her 
•ecstatically. " I saw the cab drive up to 
the Prettymans', and then, of course, I 
knew you had come, so I just slipped on a 
waterproof cloak, and ran off at once 
through the rain to see you. How well 
you're looking, Muriel ! " 

"And so are you, Kitty — ^better than 
ever, I think," Muriel answered, holding 
her visitor at arm's length, and looking 
admiringly at her from head to foot. 

Miss Kitty King undoubtedly was an 
extremely pretty girl, with a cloud of light 
yellow hair which she was pleased to brush 
up into a sort of semi-masculine crop at 
the side of her head ; a complexion of lilies 
and roses, and a pair of blue eyes as clear 
and as bright ,as the corolla of a SpeedwdL 
Perhaps the prettiest thing about Kitty, 



lO A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

however, were her hands, which, as I have 
just said, were small and white, with the 
tiniest pointed fingers, and the daintiest 
iittle dimples in the world. Strange to 
say, these hands were anything, however, 
but sources of unalloyed delight to their 
owner; indeed, there were moments of 
exasperation, when, for all their beauty, 
Kitty could almost have borne to part with 
them for a more ordinary, but at the same 
time, serviceable pair. It was the constantly 
expressed opinion at all the numerous 
academies and drawing schools she had 
attended, that Kitty King was physically 
incapable of drawing a straight line. 
Whether this really was the case, or not, 
there certainly was no doubt that her draw- 
ing was not what it ought to be, and hitherto 
all her own efforts, and the efforts of all 
her various masters had been powerless to 
make it any better. Her father was a 
London doctor, a busy, over-worked man,. 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. II 

« 

with a large practice, and a larger family, 
Miss Kitty herself being the fourth 
daughter. The Kings were remarkably 
dull, stereotyped sort of people, always 
excepting that wayward young lady her- 
self, who had independence and audacity 
enough in her own small person to have 
set up a whole houseful. Indeed, it 
was currently asserted, and that, too, by 
others besides Elizabeth Prettyman, that 
Kitty had taken up the career of art 
student, not because she cared one single 
button about art, but simply as a sort of 
cloak under the cover of which she might 
the better carry out her own emancipation. 
Of late, however, she had undoubtedly 
turned over several new leaves in this 
respect ; had devoted herself to Muriel, sat 
habitually at her feet, and adopted her 
ways, and under these influences had begun 
to study with greater diligence, if not as 
yet with much more conspicuous success 



12 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

than heretofore. It was upon this subject 
that she now began to enlarge. 

"Fm so longing to see all your new 
sketches, Muriel darling," she exclaimed. 
" Mayn't I come first thing to-morrow 
morning and look at them ? Tm sure 
you've done lovely things down in that 
forest where you've been such ages. Only 
trees are so horribly difficult, aren't they ? 
At least, no, I forgot, not to you, because 
you find nothing difficult, but they are 
to me. Did I tell you that we went down 
a sketching party to Richmond Park the 
other day on purpose to draw them ? Such 
fun ! Everybody brought their own 
luncheon, and we ate it amongst the ferns : 
and after luncheon Fred Archer and I 
— you remember my telling you about 
Fred Archer, who used to be at old 
Mr. Halliburton's ? — we drew caricatures 
of one another, and every one said mine 
was mucA the best. It's true anybody 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. I J 

could draw a caricature of Fred Archer, 
with those extraordinary eyes of his, aad 
his ears sticking out like the handles 
of that jug up there ; still, they all said 
it really was very clever. I must bring 
you my sketch-book to-morrow, and you 
shall see." 

*' And have you been drawing anything 
else besides caricatures, Kitty ? " Muriel 
inquired. 

"Oh, indeed, yes, Muriel; I've been 
working terrifically hard — quite terrifically. 
You just ask them all if I haven't ! Why, 
I've got a great, enormous still life thing 
on hand now — pieces of armour, you know, 
and apples, and a dead pigeon, and a red 
curtain hanging up behind ; and I'm so 
dreadfully sick of it all, only Mr. Malby 
wants me to finish it and send it in for 
the competition. I know it's of no use, for 
they won't give me anything — they never 
will; but still he wants me to try. And 



14 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

oh, Muriel, there's one horribly, horribly 
difficult bit of the armour, just where the 
lights come in ; and though I've tried to do 
it I don't know how often, I can't get it 
right. I do so wish you'd come and do 
it for me. Will you now? There's a 
dear." 

" Very well, Kitty, I'll do my best, but if 
it's so terribly difficult as you say, probably 
I shall not be able to manage it either." 

" Oh, yes, Muriel, you will. I never 
knew anything you couldn't do. In fact, 
if I didn't love you so much I should hate 
you for doing everything so easily. It 
does seem so hard, too, when you are 
so rich, and don't care an atom about 
making money, whereas to poor me it 
would be such a great, great matter. And 
then, I'm always wanting things — clothes 
and all that, you know — and you never 
seem as if you wanted anything at all ! " 

Muriel smiled, and then sighed a little. 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 1 5 

"** I don't think, after all, you need really 
envy me so much, Kitty," she said. " I 
suspect you are decidedly the better off of 
us two in spite of all your wants." 

" Oh, you mean, perhaps, as to relations ? 
Certainly, I wouldn't take that Mrs. Skyn- 
ner of yours in exchange for daddy, or 
any of the girls, not even for Arabella, 
though she is so dreadfully tiresome and 
proper — more proper even than Elizabeth 
Prettyman — always making out that what 
one wants to do isn't correct ; as if people 
had time nowadays to stop and think 
about the correctness of everything. Still, 
not one of them, I will say, is nearly as 
bad as Mrs. Skynner — nasty slimy thing ! " 

" Now, Kitty, I won't have you talk like 
that. You shall just walk straight out of 
the house if you begin to abuse my re- 
lations. I won't have it" 

Well, but, Muriel, she zs a slimy thing. 
I'm sure she's like a slug, or a great leech, 



1 6 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER* 

the way she lives on you. And now she 
has got this other dreadful woman — this^ 
Madame Cairioli — she's worse than ever. 
It made me feel quite ill the other day 
seeing them both driving about in your 
carriage. That Madame Cairioli is the 
most dreadful old woman I ever saw in 
my life. She's for all the world like a 
vulture, with that long scraggy neck and 
those horrible skinny hands ! " 

Muriel, it must be owned, felt no small 
curiosity herself about this mysterious 
Madame Cairioli, who, it would now 
appear, had been staying for some time 
in the house, and whose name she then 
heard for the first time. She did not 
choose, however, to give Miss Kitty the 
satisfaction of knowing how entirely she 
had been kept in the dark, so accordingly 
hastened to change the subject. 

" Have you seen anything of my Uncle 
Hal lately, Kitty ? I thought he would 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 1 7 

have been here to meet me. I hope he is 
not ill." 

" Oh, no, Muriel, Fm sure he is not 
ill, because the other day — the day I went 
to Richmond — I met him as I was going 
to the train, and he had a great enormous 
bunch of keys in his hand, which he told 
me had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey or 
Thomas a Becket, I forget which of them. 
He had just made a great bargain, he 
said, at some curiosity shop. They ought 
to have been cheap enough, I'm sure, for 
they looked to be nothing but rust ; but 
he was quite delighted with them, and I 
think he said he was going to give them 
to you." 

Muriel laughed. " Uncle Hal is always 
giving me presents," she said. " I am 
afraid I shall have to buy a new house 
soon to put them all away in. But I 
wonder he has not been here himself. 
He knew I was to be home to-day." 

VOL. II. G 



1 8 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

''Oh, you may be sure those two 
women have frightened him away. Fm 
sure Mrs. Skynner s tongue is enough to 
frighten any one." 

'* Doesn't it strike you, Miss Kitty, that 
youVe hardly the person to complain of 
other people's tongues ? " Muriel inquired. 

" You mean because I'm a chatterbox ? 
But that's quite a different thing. I don't 
so much mind chatterboxes. Oh, you may 
laugh, Muriel, but it is quite different. 
What's so dreadful about Mrs. Skynner is 
that she's so deliberate ; you seem to get 
wrapped up in words as if you had got 
into the inside of a feather bed, and didn't 
know the way out again. And now she's 
got this other dreadful woman to help her 
I don't know what will happen, or rather, 
I do. They'll frighten all your friends 
away, and then when they've got you all 
to themselves they'll set to work and 
devour you." 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 1 9 

Muriel laughed again, at the same time 
making a sign to the irrepressible Kitty 
to hold her tongue, Eliza being at that 
moment in the act of entering the room 
with tea. 

" Is Mrs. Skynner back yet ? " shq 
inquired. 

" No, miss, not yet." 

"Well, then, Kitty, if you don't mind 
hurrying over tea a little, Til walk back 
with you as far as Uncle Hal's lodging, 
and see for myself how he is." 

" Yes, do, Muriel, for I ought, I know, 
to be getting home, or there'll be the most 
tremendous hue and cry after me. They 
think me capable there of any and every 
enormity. Tm sure if Arabella finds Tm 
gone she'll make sure IVe eloped with some 
one ! As if one would be so stupid — 
missing the presents and everything. But 
that's the way ; once you get a bad name 
they'll believe anything^ of you — anything." 



20 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

And Kitty s blue eyes were turned up with 
an air of unspeakable innocence. 

It was raining still a little as the two 
girls walked down the Embankment, but 
the sky looked lighter than it had done 
all day. Muriels spirits, too, felt all the 
better for Miss Kitty s company. It was 
impossible to be long down-hearted in the 
society of that vivacious small personage, 
whose brisk little tongue kept up an un- 
ceasing chatter the whole time they were 
together. On arriving at Hal Flack's 
lodging he was found to be out, so having 
walked with Miss Kitty far enough to 
see her safe on her homeward way, Muriel 
turned back to her own house. 

On inquiry she found that her sister- 
in-law had in the meantime returned, so 
turned to the downstairs sitting-room, 
which ever since that lady's arrival had 
been set aside sacredly for her uses, and 
knocked at the door. 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 21 

Mrs. Skynner rose from an armchair as 
her sister-in-law entered. As she has not 
yet been formally presented to the reader 
it may be as well to state that she was a 
large> fair, full-faced woman, with some 
pretensions still to looks, a peculiarly 
self-satisfied smile, and a pair of light blue 
eyes, which seemed to be perpetually 
roving in search of something which they 
as perpetually failed to find. 

*' How do you do, my dear Muriel ? I 
am delighted to have the pleasure of 
welcoming you home again," she exclaimed 
with a sort of measured effusiveness, ad- 
vancing her cheek at the same time to her 
sister-in-law's embrace. 

"This is not exactly my first coming, 
though, Sophia," Muriel could not help 
saying. 

"Ah, no, by the way, so the servant 
told me. I was so sorry, really extremely 
sorry, you should have had to come back 



22 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

to an empty house; but it was not my 
fault, Muriel, as I am sure you will believe. 
In fact, I fully intended being back long 
before you could have arrived, but we were 
obliged to go off rather suddenly to the 
Britannia Hall — Madame Cairioli that is, 
and I. Such a superior woman, Muriel ; 
you will be immensely pleased to make her 
acquaintance. So philanthropic too ; nothing 
in the least small or petty in Iter philan- 
thropy either, but such large views. She 
belongs herself to an excellent family ; a 
relation, in fact, of Lord Dhuhallow ; but 
her husband was a foreigner — a Greek, I 
believe— and had great diplomatic appoint- 
ments abroad, and in all sorts of out-of- 
the-way places; and wherever she went 
she interested herself in the regeneration 
of the country — its moral and religious 
regeneration I mean, of course — and has 
kept up with them ever since. The 
meeting to-day at the Britannia Hall was 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 23 

for the evangelization of Bolivia — in South 
America, you know. M. and Madame 
Cairioli were stationed there once, at the 
capital, I forget its name ; and it seems the 
inhabitants are extremely anxious to have 
a Protestant bishop. Unfortunately, there 
are difficulties in the way — want of money, 
and various things — and it was to explain 
them that the meeting was held. I 
really was so extremely sorry that you 
were not able to be back 'in time for 
it; it was intensely interesting, and so 
well attended. Lord Caradoc was there, 
and Sir Thomas Bridgewater, and all the 
Ladies Catt. Oh, and that reminds me, 
coming out I saw that friend of yours, 
Mr. Wygram, the artist, and young Mr. 
Newmarsh, Lord Newmarsh's son, with 
him, and I was just upon the point of 
introducing them to Madame Cairioli, when 
your friend, Muriel, turned away in the 
very oddest manner ; I must say his 



24 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

behaviour was most singular, and I saw 
that it made an extremely bad impression 
upon Madame Cairioli." 

"You didn't tell me in any of your 
letters that Madame Cairioli was staying 
here, Sophia," Muriel said, not feeling 
called upon to take up the cudgels on 
Mr. Wygram's behalf. 

"Did I not, Muriel? Well, that was 
really very thoughtless on my part — very 
thoughtless indeed. I often find that I 
do leave out the principal thing in my 
letters. Madame Cairioli was saying the 
other day that you never ought to judge 
people by their letters; clever people 
write such stupid ones, and stupid people 
write clever; it really is quite singular. 
However, there can be no question about 
Madame Cairioli. Her abilities, I should 
say, are quite first-rate, and .so you will 
say when you see her." 

" Have you known her long "i " Muriel 



THE JIETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 2$ 

asked. *' I don't think I ever remember 
hearing her name before." 

" No, not at all long ; indeed, it was an 
accident, I may say, her coming to stay 
here at all. Of course, if I had sent her 
a regular invitation, I should have been 
careful to inform you beforehand ; for you 
cannot have failed to observe, Muriel, how 
extremely particular I always am about 
that sort of thing, and how careful I am 
always to explain to every one that the 
house is yours, not mine. Though Fm 
sure, to people who knew me formerly, 
when we lived at Cedarville Lodge, and 
who knew how handsomely everything 
was done there, and how little sign of stint 
or economy, or anything of that sort there 
was, it must seem very strange indeed that 
I should not have a house of my own." 

" Yes, but about Madame Cairioli ? " 
Muriel said a little impatiently. 

*'Yes, about Madame Cairioli. Our 



1 



26 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

original meeting took place at one of old 
Mrs. Somerton Crawley's afternoon parties. 
She came, in fact, of her own accord, and 
sat beside me, and told me a great deal 
about herself, and about her relationship 
with the Dhuhallows, and all the different 
places she had been to. And then she 
happened to ask me if I knew of any- 
good hotel she could get into, because 
they seemed to be all so extremely full, 
on account of it being the Derby week ; so, 
finding what a remarkably agreeable per- 
son she was, I naturally offered to take 
her round in the carriage, and we tried 
three or four, and it was quite true, there 
was no room in any of them, and she 
didn't seem to know what to do, as it 
happened, so unfortunately, that all her 
friends were just then out of town. So 
I asked her if she would like to come 
back with me for the night, and she im- 
mediately accepted, and has stayed since. 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 27 

But she is only staying on quite from day 
to day, and could go away at any time. 
And, if I had the least ideay Muriel, 
that you would have disliked my asking 
her, of course I should not have dreamt 
of doing so ; but I have been always so 
used to exercising hospitality myself that 
it comes perfectly naturally to me, and it 
never even occurred to me that you could 
object." 

" But I don't at all object, my dear 
Sophia. On the contrary, I am only too 
glad that you should have bad somebody 

■ 

here to interest and amuse you. I was 
afraid you'd be so very dull all by yourself 
*' Oh, as for amusement, Muriel, that may 
be all very well for you, but, after what I've 
suffered and endured, amusement is about 
the last thing I am likely to think of. 
And as for Madame Cairioli, I can assure 
you that she is a woman of far too high a 
standard to care about mere amusement. 



28 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

She is devoted to the very highest in- 
terests. She Madame Cairioli, this 

is my sister-in-law, Miss Ellis, of whom 
you have heard me speak." 

The object of the above glowing eulogy 
entered the room with a quick, sliding 
step, and it was with a rapid courtesy, 
accompanied by an equally rapid expres- 
sion of rapture, that she received Miss 
Ellis*s greeting. It having been just 
intimated that she was English, Muriel 
was naturally not a little surprised at the 
decidedly foreign accent with which she 
spoke, but concluded that she must have 
acquired it in the course of her long 
residence abroad. In spite of herself, she 
could not help calling to mind Kitty King's 
unflattering comparison as she looked at 
her sister-in-law's new friend. U ndoubtedly 
the philanthropic Madame Cairioli was 
extremely like a vulture. She had all the 
quickness of movement, thinness of neck, 



THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEHOLDER. 29 

and cold hungry look of eye. that one 
associates with a bird of prey. What her 
age might be it was difficult to guess, but 
Muriel decided that it could not well be 
much under sixty. Madame Cairioli was 
attired in a high black silk dress, rather 
skimpy as to the skirt, but particularly 
smart and well adjusted as to the figure. 
Her forehead, which was very yellow and 
wrinkled, was surmounted by numerous 
clusters of small jet-black curls, rising one 
above the other in a succession of tiers ; 
these in their turn being surmounted by 
an elaborate little edifice of lace and 
artificial flowers, not quite a cap, nor yet 
a wreath, but partaking to some extent of 
the nature of both. 

At dinner, to which the three ladies 
almost immediately adjourned, the conver- 
sation ran chiefly upon the proceedings of 
the afternoon, and the high desirability 
of providing a thoroughly satisfactory and 



32 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Sophia was a relation, and as such had a 
clear claim to such hospitality as it was in 
her power to dispense. Madame Cairioli, 
on the other hand, was not a relation, nor 
did she feel at all disposed to admit such 
pleas as she might put forward in that 
direction. It would be extremely unplea- 
sant, of course, to have to hint at anything 
of the kind; it was unpleasant even to 
think of, and would be doubly unpleasant 
to put into execution. At the same time, 
she privately determined that if the neces- 
sity arose, she must not, and would not, 
allow herself to shrink from it. Meantime, 
she devoutly trusted that no such necessity 
ever would arise. 



( 33 ) 



CHAPTER II. 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 



Her thoughts on the same subject next 
morning were not at all more comfortable 
than those of the night before. The more 
she reflected upon Madame Cairioli's pecu- 
liarities, the more she felt convinced that 
she was not a person with whom it would 
be pleasant to be thrown upon terms of 
familiarity. This did not in the least arise 
from any idea of her not being what is 
called a lady. On such points Muriel was 
almost culpably indifferent ; indeed, for so 
intelligent a young lady, there were many 
points connected with the social order of 
things to which she remained, and seemed 
likely to remain curiously unalive. It was 

VOL. ir. D 



/J 



34 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

something totally different from this. A 
vague feeling of dislike and even re- 
pulsion, which came over her whenever 
she thought of her sister-in-law's new 
friend. On the other hand, with this 
feeling there mingled another, one of 
profound pity and commiseration. Lying 
in bed in the morning the image of 
Madame Cairioli, with her haggard, hungry 
eyes, and yellow careworn face rose before 
her like a sort of nightmare. The room 
to which her guest had been relegated was 
next door to her own, and every now and 
then the sound of a low cough reached her 
through the partition. Muriel had that 
quick impressionability which comes of a 
readiness to seize and be influenced by 
outward impressions, and there was some- 
thing in the image of this unhappy-faced 
woman, with her only too transparent 
assumptions, and her piteous attempts at 
fashion, which filled her with a vague dis- 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 35 

quietude, as of something bodeful and 
uncanny which had alighted at her gate. 

Nor were these mingled impressions by 
any means diminished by the events of 
the morning. Mrs. Skynner did not 
appear at breakfast, Muriel and her guest 
were consequently tite-a-tHe. Madame 
Cairioli's appearance was much the same 
as on the previous evening, only that 
the artificial flowers in her cap were 
now replaced by bows of red velvet, the 
daylight showing also still more unmis- 
takably the lines of age, and of other 
lines written in a character new to Muriel, 
and to which she hesitated to give a name. 
Towards the end of breakfast a card was 
brought in, and presented to Madame 
Cairioli, who rose with some appearance of 
agitation, saying — 

" A friend of mine — a gentleman that is, 
with whom I am extremely intimate — 
associated with numerous good works* 



36 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Might I be permitted ? Or is the moment 
inconvenient ? If so " 

" Inconvenient ? Not in the least," 
Muriel said quietly. " Should you like 
to see him here or in my sister-in-law's 
sitting-room ? " 

Madame Cairioli intimated that she 
would prefer to see him in the sitting-room, 
and into the sitting-room the gentleman 
accordingly was shown. Muriel remained 
behind to finish her own breakfast, and tO' 
attend to the wants of Gamalial, her 
Persian cat, who for the last ten minutes 
had been putting forward peremptory 
claims upon the remains of the fish ; after 
which she went upstairs. 

She had just reached the studio door 
when Madame Cairioli's voice was heard 
calling to her in deprecating accents — 

"Would Miss Ellis be so kind, so verj^ 
kind, as to come into the sitting-room for 
a minute — onlva minute.*' 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 2>7 

Muriel turned, wondering rather. In 
the sitting-room she found a stout pompous- 
looking individual in black, with a large 
smooth-shaven face, a liberal allowance of 
waistcoat, and a black satin stock, coming 
up very close to his chin. 

She was bowing distantly, but Madame 
Cairioli hastened to perform a more 
-elaborate introduction. 

" Permit me, my dear young lady, to 
have the honour of presenting to you Mr. 
Montmorency Smith, a gentleman whose 
efforts in the cause of philanthropy are, I 
may say, /r(7digious. This, Mr. Montmor- 
ency Smith, is the young lady to whose 
generous hospitality is owing my having 
the pleasure of receiving you under her 
roof; one whose genius is only equalled 
by her goodness, and, if I might venture 
to say so, her great personal attractions ! " 

If anything could have annoyed Muriel 
more than this address itself, it would have 



38 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

been the tone of fulsome and obsequious 
compliment with which it was delivered- 
It was impossible, however, for her, she 
felt, to turn round and walk away imme- 
diately, so she simply again bowed slightly, 
and then stood still, waiting for what was 
to follow. 

There seemed to be some little embar- 
rassment on the part of the other two occu- 
pants of the room, the stout gentleman in 
black glancing interrogatively in the direc- 
tion of Madame Cairioli, she in her turn 
looking appealingly towards our heroine^ 
Finally Madame Cairioli cleared her throats 

*' Mr. Montmorency Smith has called 
about a sad, a very sad case," she began, " a 
case the more distressing because there is a 
sentiment, a feeling of family pride, I may 
say a delicacy, which hinders its being 
approached in the more ordinary manner. 
There was a time when my own ears were 
never deaf to such appeals, but that time. 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 39 

as I have been telling my friend, is past, 
and I can only refer them to the kind con- 
sideration of others, and it is for this that 
I would venture " 

" The young lady must promise secrecy, 
though," the gentleman in black inter-* 
rupted, in a thick, deep voice, which 
seemed proceeding directly from the region 
of his waistcoat. 

**Oh, but Miss Ellis will promise," 
Madame Cairioli cried enthusiastically. 

" I cannot say that I like doing so," 
Muriel said coldly. "In fact, I should 
much prefer your not telling me at all, 
if it is a matter that requires secrecy." 

Madame Cairioli clasped her hands, 
glancing at the same time despairingly in 
the direction of her companion. 

" For the present, then, I am willing to 
waive the point," he said majestically. 
'* Doubtless, the young lady's own good 
feeling and sense of propriety will be a 



40 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

sufficient guarantee. You have heard, I 
presume, of the Cholmondeleys, of Chol- 
mondeley," he continued, addressing him- 
self directly to Muriel. 

" No ; I cannot say that I ever have," 
she answered. 

" Indeed ! " The " indeed " being uttered 
in a tone which implied that a person who 
had not heard of the Cholmondeleys of 
Cholmondeley, was hardly entitled to a 
hearing upon any subject. " Not even by 
name ? " 

" Not even by name, I think," she 
answered. 

" That, if you will forgive my saying so, 
is singular — very singular." 

" Oh, but Miss Ellis has led such a 
secluded life," exclaimed Madame Cairioli. 
" She is devoted to Nature — to the beatix 
arts — she is a great artiste^' with a pro- 
longed emphasis on the "r" in the last 
word. 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 4 1 

" Is it about these people that you wish 
to speak to me ? " Muriel inquired with 
some impatience. 

" No ; that is, not directly. The fact is, 
that the lady for whom I would wish to 
appeal to your benevolence is nearly 
related by marriage to the present head of 
the Cholmondeleys of Cholmondeley, a 
fact which alone is enough to denote her 
high social standing, the wealth and dis- 
tinction of that family being — if you will 
again excuse my saying so — world-re- 
nowned. By a combination of circum- 
stances, the relation of which would at 
present delay me too long, this lady, her 
name is Jones — Mrs. Jellaby Jones — has 
been reduced to a condition of extreme 
penury. In fact, I may say that at the 
present moment she is in — Want;" and 
Mr. Montmorency Smith paused to give 
effect to his words. 

" Yes ? " Muriel said inquiringly. 



42 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

"Yes," Mr. Montmorency Smith said 
authoritatively, " the circumstances are 
most pressing." And again he paused. 

" But has she appealed to her relations?" 
Muriel not unnaturally demanded. ** If 
they are as rich as you say, surely they 
would be anxious to relieve her ? " 

" Doubtless they would, but this is pre- 
cisely what she refuses to do. The object 
of myself and of those interested in the 
circumstances is to make up a purse, with- 
out her knowledge, you understand, 
entirely without her knowledge, to be pre- 
sented as a gift — no names being assigned. 
This we conceive to be the most delicate 
way of approaching the matter." And Mr.. 
Montmorency Smith expanded his waist- 
coat with the air of a man warranted to 
speak upon a point of delicacy. 

" I cannot say that I see it in that, 
light," Muriel said gravely. " If I was in 
want myself, I should much prefer being 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 4^ 

relieved by my own relations than by 
strangers, and so, I think, would most 
people." 

Mr. Montmorency Smith smiled disdain- 
fully. 

*' Oh, but surely, surely not," exclaimed 
Madame Cairioli* " Indeed, my dear 
young lady, you cannot judge, you cannot, 
indeed ; how should you ? Besides, a trifle," 
^he added, with sudden insistance, "a 
leetle, leetle trifle ! You would never 
miss it." 

Thus adjured, Muriel put her hand into 
her pocket " I have not got my purse 
here, but I will send you down something 
by my maid," she said. "It can, I fear, be 
only a trifle, as I have had a good many 
calls lately. You will excuse me, please, 
now, as I have some work to do upstairs ; " 
and so saying she left the room. 

As she retraced her steps, Muriel could 
not help feeling that the scene in which 



44 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER* 

she had just borne a part, had been an 
unexpectedly disagreeable one. To turn 
a deaf ear in a case, which, after all, 
miglU be one of real need, was in any 
case painful, yet on the other hand, to 
^ve at all under the circumstances, was, 
she could not help feeling, an act of ex- 
treme folly and weakness. WTiat did she 
know of these people ? These Cholmon- 
deleys of Cholmondeley ? this fat Mr. 
Montmorency Smith ? What did she even 
know of Madame Cairioli herself, except 
that her sister-in law had made her ac- 
quaintance at the house of Mrs. Somerton 
Crawley, an old lady whose good-nature 
had long made her the prey of that not 
inconsiderable portion of the community 
which thrives upon the commiseration of 
others ? Muriel, of course, had not herself 
had for more than twelve months the dis- 
posal of her own fortunes without having 
to run the gauntlet of a good deal of indis- 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 45 

criminate alms-begging ; still, this she could 
not help feeling to be an aggravated case of 
the kind. Did Mr. Montmorency Smith 
go round to every house in the neighbour- 
hood, she wondered ? or why was she 
specially honoured ? And was there, or 
was there not, any Mrs. Jellaby Jones at 
all ? And if not, what was she to think 
of her sister-in-law's friend, Madame 
Cairioli ? 

She was glad (her donation dispatched 
in an envelope by Eliza) to be able to turn 
from these disquieting considerations to 
the serener atmosphere of her studio ; those 
very difficulties, which yesterday appeared 
so formidable, now, on the contrary, pre- 
senting themselves rather as incentives 
than otherwise to progress. She was not 
destined, however, to make any very rapid 
advance that morning. Hardly had she 
seated herself and collected her materials,, 
before a knock came at the door, and Mrs. 



46 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Hopper, the cook, entered, bearing a small 
bundle of books, at sight of which Muriel 
inwardly shuddered. 

" These are the house books, Miss Ellis, 
as you said I was to bring you this morn- 
ing," she said apologetically. 

*' Thank you, Mrs. Hopper, will you 
kindly put them upon that table." 

The books deposited, Mrs. Hopper still 
lingered. *'And I'm sure I hope, miss, as 
you won't think it was I was to blame," 
she said, smoothing down her apron, and 
glancing apprehensively in their direction. 
" But Mrs. Skynner, she really was so very 
particular, and wouldn't hear of nothing 
but the best of everything, and as* to 
cold meat, or the likes of that, why, I 
couldn't so much as breathe it to her, I 
couldn't indeed — not even on Sundays." 

" Thank you, Mrs. Hopper ; I am sure 
you have done your best," Muriel said 
kindly, if a trifle impatiently, " Leave the 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 47 

books there, please, and I will come and 
talk to you about them presently." 

Mrs. Hopper gone, she once more turned 
back to her easel. It was useless, how- 
ever, she found, attempting to do anything 
with those odious little documents staring 
her in the face ; better look them over at 
once, and make an end of them. Drawing 
her chair over, therefore, to the table, she 
sat down doggedly to her task. It proved 
to be a longer as well as an even less 
pleasant one than she had anticipated ; 
indeed, a very short perusal convinced her 
that for that morning, at all events, her fate 
was sealed, and that palettes and paint- 
brushes would have to rest unused where 
they were. 

MurieVs housewifely instincts were by 
nature, it must be owned, but very slightly 
developed ; indeed, she would any day of the 
week have infinitely preferred going without 
her dinner to having to go through the pre- 



48 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

liminary ordeal of ordering it. In this, how- 
ever, as in other respects, she owed much ta 
Mrs. Prettyman's good offices. Of course, 
as long as she remained under her friend s 
roof, her personal experience in the matter 
had been nily but from the moment that 
the positions were reversed, and that she 
herself became the householder, Mrs. 
Prettyman had rigidly insisted upon her 
taking the management into her own hands, 
so far, at least, as the giving of orders were 
concerned. The actual practical trouble^ 
it is needless to say, had still been Mrs. 
Prettyman's, but at least the nominal 
authority had rested with the young mis- 
tress of the house. One advantage of this 
was that when the second change came^ 
and Mrs. Prettyman left, Muriel was to 
some extent equal to the task of regulat- 
ing her own expenditure, Mrs. Skynner 
having fortunately neither genius nor in- 
clination in that direction. On leaving 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 49 

home for the New Forest, she had de- 
posited a sum with the worthy Mrs. 
Hopper, sufficient, so she flattered her- 
self, to tide over the interval. That, as 
a matter of fact, it had not done so, she 
had now to learn, expenses, trifling in 
themselves, having amounted in the aggre- 
gate to a sum not very far short of double 
that laid out for the purpose. One result of 
this discovery was that the attention of our 
heedless young lady was thus perforce 
turned to the state of her own exchequer, 
with results not a little startling. Fifteen 
hundred a year is, undoubtedly, a very 
comfortable little income ; still, the resources 
of fifteen hundred a year are not, as most 
people are aware, inexhaustible. In short, a 
review of the whole financial position 
soon convinced Muriel that unless she was 
prepared to exceed, and pretty considerably 
exceed her income, it would be necessary 
forthwith to retrench — a word which she 

VOL. II. E 



50 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Strongly suspected of having an extremely 
ill-omened sound in Mrs. Skynners ears. 
Before taking any definite step, however, 
she determined to go and talk the whole 
matter over with Mrs. Prettyman — always 
her refuge in times of need. Putting the 
books away, therefore, into a drawer, she 
put on her hat and cloak and walked briskly 
off to call upon her friends. 

Mrs. Prettyman's house was semi- 
detached, with a tiny gravelled yard in front 
of it, the gravel ending in a narrow border 
of flowers, such easily satisfied flowers as 
are good enough to bloom in the dull air 
of our most unflowery metropolis. It was 
a pretty, modest-looking little house, with a 
couple of small neatly finished bow windows, 
ornamented with two rows of flower-pots, 
beyond which Mrs. Pretty man's white- 
capped head, and the top of Elizabeths 
easel were generally to be seen. One 
thing, however, there was about it which 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 5 1 

certainly could not be called modest, and 
that was its name — Casa Manfredonia — 
which sprawled itself in an audacious and 
unmeaning fashion across both sides of the 
small green-painted doorpost. For this 
piece of extravagance the present occu- 
pants, however, were plainly not respon- 
sible ; indeed, Italian names — the offspring 
of some builder with a turn for the sonorous 
— predominated largely in the vicinity ; 
the house next door to Mrs. Prettyman, 
which was occupied by Dr. King, being 
not unsuggestively styled Qui-si-sano, and 
beyond that again there was a Sorrento 
Lodge, and a San Severino Villa a little 
further down. Mrs. Prettyman's house, 
however, was the smallest, as well as 
admittedly the prettiest of the whole row, 
with a certain air of frugal trimness, and 
propretdy peculiarly characteristic of the 
inmates. To-day, however, this aspect was 
less conspicuous than usual ; nor was it, 



52 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

as our heroine soon found, by any means 
a propitious moment for securing that 
undivided attention which her own affairs 
needed. The threatened invasion of Indian 
grandchildren had taken place that morn- 
ing, and the effect, for the moment at all 
events, was chaos. Looking round her, 
Muriel could not help being amused by the 
change which those three or four hours had 
already sufficed to make. Indian children 
are not, as a rule, exuberant, and these ap- 
peared to be peculiarly limp and colourless 
specimens of their kind ; still the mere fact 
of there being children in the house at 
all, seemed forthwith to revolutionize the 
mdnage. A dusky-faced ayah was shaking 
her bangles upon a rug in the little outer 
hall; cups of milk stood about on all the 
drawing-room tables ; toys, and broken 
pieces of rusk and biscuit were scattered 
over the hitherto spotless carpets ; the whole 
house had a disorganized, nursery-ridden 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 53 

aspect which seemed wholly to change its 
character. As Muriel had foreseen, the 
chief sufferer from the invasion was evi- 
dently poor Elizabeth, whose face already 
wore an expression of resolutely suppressed 
disturbance. Mrs. Prettyman, on the con- 
trary, was radiant ; whole vistas of new 
and hitherto unforeseen activities rising 
vividly before her in the future. Seizing 
an opportunity of whispering to the former 
that for the future she must look upon 
the Cheyne Walk studio as her own, 
Muriel hastened away, feeling that what- 
ever ordeals might be in store for the 
newly-amalgamated household were not at 
all likely to be lessened by the presence 
even of the most sympathizing of out- 
siders. 

Her next visit was to her Uncle Hal, 
who occupied rooms in a house midway 
between the Prettymans' and her own. 
On inquiry she was told that he was 



54 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

at home, so hastened upstairs to see 
him. He was not in the sitting-room, 
however, when she entered, and she had 
time to look around her before he ap- 
peared. 

Hal Flack's own artistic aspirations had 
long since died a natural death ; but on 
another, and in many people's opinion a 
scarcely less important branch of art, he 
still retained a hold. He was an assiduous 
collector, an avocation for which a well- 
filled purse is generally held an indis- 
pensable requisite. In this case, however, 
the hindrance did not appear to have 
acted disadvantageously. Hal attended 
every sale, and if he seldom bought any- 
thing, he, at all events, always believed 
himself to be on the point of buying, or 
only deterred by some want of absolute 
perfection in the article in question — by 
anything and everything, in fact, except a 
want of the necessary ready money. He 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 55 

did not by any means confine himself, 
however, to what are commonly regarded 
as works of art, his tastes in this respect 
being larger and more catholic, and any- 
thing which struck him as odd, novel, or 
curious was admitted without hesitation 
amongst the miscellaneous lumber which 
covered his walls and floor. Queer look- 
ing pebbles, to which the caprice of the 
waves had imparted an unusual, or what 
appeared to Hal an unusual, appearance ; 
pieces of wood, dropped by vessels on 
their way up or down the Thames ; bits of 
metal, melted and twisted at the foundry ; 
bottles containing snakes ; fragments of 
tapa or cocoanut ; lumps of vitrified glass ; 
old keys ; Turkish slippers ; broken toys — 
these and thousands of other things, which 
it would take a week to describe, all found 
a place on his shelves, and were all duly 
ticketed and catalogued. In early days he 
had been an assiduous collector of birds' 



56 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

eggs, peacocks feathers, dried grasses, and 
such like spoil of the fields, not in the least 
from any turn for natural history, but simply 
for the sake of the things themselves. In 
short, he was a born collector, as other 
men are born actors or born orators. He 
had no ulterior object; he never for an 
instant dreamt of making money by his 
various possessions ; he simply hoarded 
his trash as a miser hoards his gold, in 
obedience to some vague, mysterious im- 
pulse of acquisitiveness. Of late he had 
taken to collecting, not for himself, but for 
his niece, somewhat to the dismay of the 
latter, whose studio and passages threatened 
to become the receptacles of a perfect 
avalanche of such miscellaneous and 
heterogeneous objects of interest. 

While she was still looking round the 
walls, and inwardly wondering which of 
their various adornments would next be 
tendered for her own acceptance, the 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 57 

bedroom door opened, and her uncle 
entered. 

Poor Hal Flack had never been hand- 
some, and time had certainly not improved 
him in this respect. He was a thin, 
wizened-looking little man, with pale, 
watery-blue eyes, and hair once fair, 
now fast becoming white, without, how- 
ever, entirely losing its original flaxen tints. 
His clothes, too, had a bleached, battered, 
dust-laden air, as if he and they had been 
alike exposed to some parching, dessicating 
influence, which had left them the mere 
ghosts and mummies of what they once 
were. 

Muriel, with a sudden impulse of pity 
and affection, got up and went to meet 
him. It seemed to her as if he had grown 
perceptibly whiter and older in the month 
that had passed since they met. 

" Why, Uncle Hal, youVe not half such 
a dandy as you used to be," she said 



58 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

caressingly. " I see I shall have to come 
and overhaul your wardrobe if you let 
yourself get out of repair. Look here ! " 
brushing away a big clot of dust which 
had adhered to his sleeve. 

The little man smiled — a smile bringing 
all his wrinkles into sudden play. "Ah, 
my dear, you see I've not been having 
visitors ; I've not had any beautiful young 
ladies coming to see me since you left,'' he 
said admiringly. " Besides, I've been 
busy, Muriel — very busy. I've secured 
treasures — such treasures ! " waving his 
arms exultingly towards the shelves. 

"Well, but Uncle Hal, you must really 
make yourself nice and spruce this after- 
noon," his niece persisted, " for I'm coming 
in the carriage to pick you up and take 
you off for a drive. We'll go to the park 
and see all the fine people, and you shall 
tell me their names ; and after that, if 
you like, we'll go to some of the picture 



' A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 59 

galleries, and then you must come back 
and dine with me." 

He laughed, nodding his head and rub- 
binghis hands togetherwith childish delight. 
" We will, Muriel; we will. But you 11 take 
a look at the things now, won't you ? " he 
added, with sudden piteousness, seeing that 
his niece was preparing to depart. 

"Not to-day. Uncle Hal," she said 
soothingly. " Another time I will come 
early on purpose, but to-day I really must 
hurry back ; and don't forget three o'clock ; 
and mind that I shall expect you to make 
yourself very smart ! " 

As she was coming out of the house, 
Muriel heard her name called, and, turning 
round, saw a gentleman making his way 
across the street towards her- -a tall, 
strikingly handsome man — a curious con- 
trast in all respects to the little being she 
had just left. 

" Miss Ellis, this is indeed a pleasure ! " 



6o A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

he exclaimed, as he lifted his hat. " When 
did you return to town ? " 

** Only last night. I hope you are quite 
well, Mr. Wygram ? " 

For an artist Mr. Wygram had certainly 
effectually succeeded in divesting himself 
of anything distinctively artistic in his 
outward man, his appearance suggesting 
rather that of some important official or 
local dignitary ; indeed, in country parts it 
was said that he was apt to be instinctively 
addressed by appreciative rustics as " my 
lord." His age was forty, or perhaps a 
trifle more, but not a tinge of grey had as 
yet assailed the magnificence of his auburn 
beard — a beard asserted by connoisseurs to 
be without its equal in London. 

" May I walk with you as far as your 
house ? " he said deferentially. '* There is 
a subject, indeed, I may say, there are 
two subjects, on which I particularly want 
to speak to you. In fact, I had thought 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 6 1 

of writing this afternoon had I not been so 
fortunate as to meet you." 

Muriel assented, outwardly readily, in- 
wardly, however, not without some little 
trepidation. For some time Mr. Wygram 
confined himself, however, to generalities ; 
spoke of the Academy, and bemoaned the 
falling off which in certain quarters had of 
late befallen its walls ; praised her own 
modest contribution, pointing out, at the 
same time, one or two details to which she 
would do well in future to direct her atten- 
tion. It was not, indeed, until they were 
nearing Muriers house that he suddenly 
interrupted himself in the midst of his dis- 
quisitions to say — 

" You will not, I am sure, think me 
intrusive, Miss Ellis, if I venture to ask 
you a question. Is there not a person 
calling herself Madame Cairioli at present 
staying in your house ? " 

" Madame Cairioli ? Oh, yes/* she an- 



64 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

prise. " Why, what doubt can there be ? 
Of course she must leave your house at 
once," he said. 

" Well, but, you see, as I told you, she 
is my sister-in-law s guest, not mine." 

** But your sister-in-law would surely not 
wish to keep her once she was made 
acquainted with her history ? " 

*' Oh no, of course not. Only that it is 
such an extremely painful thing to have to 
tell — in one's own house especially." 

" Then let me do it for you," he said 
eagerly. ** I would take any step rather 
than that you should be exposed to 
annoyance. Shall I call this afternoon 
and explain the whole matter to your 
sister in-law ? Do allow me." 

" Thank you ; that would be very kind," 
she answered, still, however, with a little 
hesitation. 

'' Not at all ; I should be delighted. 
Surely you know, Miss Ellis, that I would 



A DOMESTIC CRISIS. 65 

do more than that for you ? " he added 
emphatically. " Or, stay, what do you 
think of my sending my cousin New- 
marsh ? Perhaps that would be even 
better under the circumstances. He knows 
more about it than I do ; in fact, it was he 
that first put me upon the scent. It seems 
that this woman was once in his mother's 
service, and has been an untold source of 
annoyance to them ever since.*' 

" Thank you ; I believe that would, 
perhaps, be the best plan," Muriel answered 
in a tone of relief. " And yet it seems 
hard on the poor woman, too," she added 
in another moment. " After all, begging 
is not a crime." 

Mr. Wygram smiled — almost as a man 
smiles at the amiability of a child. " You 
are too charitable. Miss Ellis; you are, 
indeed," he said. " Not that one would 
wish you otherwise," he added hastily. 
" Only that you ought to have some one 

VOL. II. F 



66 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

at hand to see that your goodness and 
amiability are not imposed upon. I am 
afraid after what has happened your sister- 
in-law cannot be called a very efficient 
guardian." 

** Thank you ; but I do not see that 
I require any particular guardianship," 
Muriel answered in rather an offended 
tone of voice. " I am much obliged to 
you all the same for your suggestion," she 
added. '' I believe my sister-in-law will 
be at home all this afternoon if your 
cousin is kind enough to call." 

She stopped and offered him her hand, 
and he had no resource but to leave her ; 
nor was it until nearly five minutes later 
that she remembered that there were to 
have been two special subjects of conver- 
sation, and that so far only one had been 
touched upon. On the whole, however, 
she decided that she was just as well con- 
tented that the other should remain unsaid. 



( (>! ) 



» K 



CHAPTER III. 

THE FLIGHT OF THE VULTURE. 

It was with no little satisfaction that 
Muriel learned on entering the house that 
Madame Cairioli was not expected back to 
luncheon, so, as she herself would be out 
the whole of the afternoon, there would 
be little or no danger of their meeting. 
When she returned about six o'clock, 
having first deposited Hal Flack at his 
own lodgings with injunctions shortly to 
follow, she found that the bolt had sped. 
Mrs. Skynner came to meet her in a high 
state of excitement and indignation. 

" Conceive, Muriel, only conceive ! " she 
said, when she had drawn her into her 



68 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

own sitting-room, and shut the door. 
*' That creature, that woman, that Madame 
Cairioli, whom I took in, and was so kind 
to, believing her to be a relation of the 
Dhuhallows, and married to a man in 
the diplomatic service, it seems now that 
she was nothing of the kind. Young Mr. 
Newmarsh, Lord Newmarsh's son, has 
been here this afternoon — such a charm- 
ing young man, Muriel, and so considerate, 
so anxious that I should not be deceived, 
that my kindness, as he says, should not 
be imposed on — he has told me all about 
her, and it seems that she was nothing 
better than a bonne, a French bonne, or 
nursery governess, or something of that 
kind, and married to a courier — only 
imagine, a common courier ! — and since 
he died she has had nothing to live 
upon, and has taken to going about and 
imposing upon people — I am not the first, 
Mr. Newmarsh says, by many, she has 



THE FLIGHT OF THE VULTURE. 69 

taken in — and always mixing herself up 
with charitable things, and pretending to 
collect money for good ends when all the 
time it was really for herself. A pro- 
fessional beggar, that's what he called her. 
A professional beggar ! Can you conceive 
anything more dreadful ? " 

"Well, she might have been a profes- 
sional thief; that would have been worse 
still, would it not ? " Muriel said a little 
maliciously. 

" Muriel ! I am surprised at you, I am 
indeed ! Worse } I don't see that any- 
thing can be worse. How you can excuse 
such conduct } And as for that Mrs. 
Somerton Crawley, I really think there 
ought to be an action taken against her. 
Imagine her having people like that in her 
house and imposing them upon others ! " 

*' Perhaps she may have been imposed 
upon herself," suggested Muriel. 

** Imposed upon ? I dare say she was ; 



70 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

rui)' one Tm sure could impose upon such 
a foolish, vain old creature as that ! You 
may be certain the woman got round 
her by flattering all her foibles. And 
when I think how kind Fve been — having 
her staying here nearly a whole week, and 
driving her about in the carriage, and 
introducing her to people ! Now I shall 
have to go round first thing to-morrow 
and tell them all about it. It really is 
too trying. She shall go at once, how- 
ever, this very minute, that I am resolved ; 
in fact, Tm only waiting till she comes 
in to tell her so. Fortunately, there's no 
luggage, so that it won't even be necessary 
to send for a cab. And I, too, that never 
suspected anything, because she assured 
me that her luggage was all waiting for her 
at the Paddington station ! But it's exactly 
what poor dear Theodore always said, Fm 
far too charitable and unsuspecting ; I am, 
indeed ! " . 



THE FLIGHT OF THE VULTURE. 7 1 

" Don't you think it is rather late for 
her to go to-night, Sophia ? " Muriel said 
doubtfully. " I don't see that there would 
be any harm in letting her remain until 
the morning." 

*' No harm ! Muriel, you shock me ; 
you perfectly shock and horrify me ! What 
your poor brother would say if he were 
alive to hear you I cannot think — he, 
too, that had such an insuperable ob- 
jection to beggars ! Are you aware that 
at Cedarville Lodge no beggar was ever 
allowed so much as to come near the 
door. He used to keep that big dog. 
Nelson — I dare say you may remember 
Nelson, for it always ran after the 
carriage, and you may have seen it when 
we went to call at that horrid place, I 
forget its ridiculous name, that you used to 
live in near the Fulham road — Theodore 
kept that dog for nothing but to frighten 
beggars away, and if he could have heard 



72 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

you, Muriel, excusing a woman whom you 
know to be a professional beggar — a 
common professional beggar ! — I don't 
know what he would have said ; I really 
don't.'*' 

" But Tm not excusing her, Sophia/' 
Muriel said somewhat impatiently. " I am 
only saying that it is rather late to turn 
her out of the house. Probably she would 
have a difficulty in finding lodgings at 
this hour." 

" And as if it was any business of ours, 
Muriel, where she sleeps, or what she does 
with herself ! One would think you did it 
for nothing but to annoy me ! Have you 
no feeling or consideration for the way in 
which I have been treated ? And as to 
allowing her to remain another night, I must 
beg and insist that you will do nothing of 
the kind. I couldn't sleep a wink if I 
knew she was in the house, now that I know 
what she is. Who knows but what " 



THE FLIGHT OF THE VULTURE. 'J'i^ 

At that moment there came a sudden 
ring at the hall-door bell, and Mrs. 
Skynner flew to her own door, so as 
to be in readiness to pounce upon the 
culprit the instant she appeared. Muriel 
hesitated a moment, and then decided that 
on the whole it would be just as well for 
her to be out of the way. To defend 
Madame Cairioli under the circumstances 
was of course impossible, while on the 
other hand she had no desire at all to 
assist Mrs. Skynner in pouring out vials 
of wrath upon that devoted woman s head. 

The encounter, whatever occurred at it, 
did not last long. Hardly had Muriel 
reached her studio when a loud confused 
medley of tongues arose in the hall. Two 
minutes after steps were heard flying 
nimbly past ; yet another, and an upstairs 
door shut with a resounding bang. 

She waited a little longer, and then 
went up to her own room to get ready for 



74 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

dinner. Upon reaching the landing an 
odd choking, gurgling sound was heard 
proceeding from the room in which Madame 
Cairioli slept. Deciding that it was 
wisest to take no notice she went on to 
her own room, but after a while, finding 
that the sound continued, a feeling of 
humanity prompted her to go and knock 
at the door. Possibly Madame Cairioli 
might be ill. 

Receiving no answer to her summons, 
and the sound continuing, she turned the 
handle of the door and walked in. Madame 
Cairioli was sitting bolt upright upon a 
chair in the middle of the room, her feet 
stuck out before her, her hands clenched, 
her face distorted with passion. On the 
floor beside her lay her bag, her bonnet, 
her parasol, her beautiful bunches of jet 
black hair ; if she looked like a vulture 
before she certainly looked a good deal 
more like one now; her yellow wrinkled 



THE FLIGHT OF THE VULTURE. 75 

neck was uncovered ; her head bare of 
all covering, its thin hair wildly disordered, 
as if it had just been violently clutched at. 
At Muriers entrance she started fiercely 
to her feet. 

" Ah, so you have come to turn me out ! 
It is well, it is well, I go ! " she cried 
furiously. 

" But, indeed, I have not come for 
anything of the kind," Muriel said ear- 
nestly. " I came because I thought you 
were ill. Are you ill ? If so, you need 
not go to-night." 

Madame Cairioli stood and stared at 
her. " I need not go ?" she repeated. ** You 
have noi come then to turn me out ? You 
are not then like that other — that cat, 
that fool, that mean, false, hideous Madame 
Skynner. She ordered me straight into 
the road — then, that minute. She spoke 
to me like a dog ; before that woman, too, 
that insolent Eliza. She called me liar, 



76 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

beggar, thief. Alon DieUy I am not a thief ! 
How dared she call me thief .»*" 

" She ought not certainly to have called 
you that," Muriel said gravely ; " but you 
must remember that she is naturally ex- 
tremely angrj\ You have deceived her. 
You came here under false pretences. You 
cannot expect her not to be angry." 

** False, false ! Ah, yes, it is so easy 
to talk ; so easy, mon Dieu, for you who 
want nothing. How is it for me who 
want ever)'thing ? How is it to wander 
about ; to ask and not to get ; to go from 
door to door ; to be hungry ; to be ill ; to 
be dvinor. and have no home, no food ? 
Mon Duu^ at my age is it right ; is it 
fair ? This ver)^ night — this verj- night 
probably I shall not eat ! " And Madame 
Cairioli flung herself back into the chair. 

*• No, no, do not think that ; on the 
contrar\\ I am going to send up some 
dinner to vou here at once." Muriel cried. 



THE FLIGHT OF THE VULTURE. 77 

a sudden pity for the woman springing up 
within her. " You need not leave to-night, 
either, indeed you need not if you have 
nowhere else to go. I have told my 
sister-in-law so already. To-morrow you 
must go, but not to-night," and she turned 
to leave the room. 

Madame Cairioli sprang suddenly after 
her, and seized her hand. " Ah, you are 
good, you are good ; you are an angel ! " 
she cried. " You feel pity ; you are not 
like that other — that horrible one — that 
Skynner. But no, I will not stay. I will 
not sleep under the same roof with that 
woman. I might murder her ! " she added 
suddenly dropping her voice into a melo- 
dramatic whisper. 

Muriel drew her hand away. " Do not 
talk like that," she said coldly. " Sit down, 
and I will send some dinner to you," and 
so saying she left the room. 

Going downstairs to the studio, she 



78 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

found that Hal Flack had meantime 
arrived, and was sitting nursing- a huge 
and appallingly ugly Chinese image, him- 
self by no means unlike another image, 
with his small wizened face, and pale 
dust-coloured hair. Begging him to wait 
until she returned, Muriel went down 
to the dining-room, and rang the bell for 
Eliza. 

While she was still giving orders to that 
reluctant damsel about the dinner that was 
to be taken to Madame Cairioli, Mrs. 
Skynner issued from her own room. 

" Surely, Muriel, you are not allowing 
that creature to remain in the house ? " she 
exclaimed wrathfully. "If she does, I 
warn you that I shall go — I shall indeed. 
What poissesses you, I cannot imagine ; 
unless it is for the express purpose of 
annoying me,'* 

" I don't think she will stay, but I have 
told her that she may if she has nowhere 



THE FLIGHT OF THE VULTURE. 79 

else to go, Sophia," Muriel said firmly. 
" I am sending her up some dinner now. 
Whatever else she is," she added, lowering 
her voice, " remember she is poor, and old, 
and ill. It would be brutal to turn her 
out hungry into the street at this hour." 

" Brutal, Muriel ! Really, what language 
you use ! Am I a person likely to be 
brutal, do you think ? And as for sending 
her up any dinner, I must beg that you 
will do nothing of the kind. I beg and 
insist that you will let her leave at once." 

" I cannot, Sophia ; I really cannot. I 
wonder you do not see it yourself," Muriel 
said, in a tone of distress ; while Eliza, 
whose brow had hitherto remained clouded, 
suddenly brightened up, and sped away to 
the kitchen to execute her young mistress's 
behests. 

Mrs. Skynner flung herself indignantly 
into a chair. " Really, Muriel, I don't see 
how I am to go on living with you if you 



8o A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

set yourself to oppose me in every way/' 
she cried wrathfully. " As if I was not a 
thousand times more likely to know what 
was fit and proper to do than a girl like 
you, even if your brother was Lord Dum- 
belton. I come and stay with you, and 
put myself to every kind of inconvenience, 
on purpose to do my duty by you, and take 
you out into society, and hinder you from 
being lonely, and this is the way you repay 
me — ^^setting yourself against me in every 
way, and teaching your servants to disobey 
my orders. I must say it is extremely 
wicked and ungrateful ! " and Mrs. Skynner 
dissolved into tears. 

Muriel turned rather pale. "If you are 
not happy here, I hope and trust that you 
will not remain upon my account, Sophia," 
she said gravely. " I should be exceed- 
ingly grieved to think of your doing so. 
As for my being lonely. Uncle Hal would 
always be ready to come and keep me 



THE FLIGHT OF THE VULTURE. 8 1 

company. Meanwhile, I have left him 
alone upstairs in the studio, so I must go 
back." 

Left to herself, Mrs. Skynner felt not 
a little scared at the effect of her own 
words. The last thing in the world she 
desired was to leave Chelsea, or give up 
living with Muriel. Where else could she 
secure either a position equally desirable, 
or those physical comforts even more 
immediately dear to her heart ? On the 
other hand, she had so often assured her- 
self and others, that she remained entirely 
upon her sister-in-law's account, that her 
presence there was an incalculable blessing 
and benefit to Muriel, that to come down 
suddenly from that pedestal, to descend 
from the high ground of benefiting, to the 
low ground of one who receives benefits, 
was a derogation to which it was impossible 
she felt to submit. One thing, however, she 
did determine, and that was that no matter 

VOL. II. G 



82 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

how annoyed she might be by Muriel's 
extraordinary and most unaccountable ways 
of behaving, nothing should again tempt 
her to hold out a threat of departure — 
one which might, she now perceived, be 
attended with extremely inconvenient con- 
sequences to herself. One result of this 
determination was that when Muriel and 
her uncle came down to dinner half an 
hour later, Mrs. Skynner had completely re- 
covered her serenity, extending her gracious- 
ness even to poor Hal, whose presence she 
generally treated with the most sovereign 
contempt. She was not destined, however, 
to get through that meal without another 
and an even more violent assault upon her 
equanimity. Just as the dessert was placed 
upon the table, the door was suddenly 
thrown open, and Madame Cairioli sailed 
in, her parasol in her hand, the bag contain- 
ing her worldly goods slung over her arm ; 
her hair was once more arranged in all its 



THE FLIGHT OF THE VULTURE. i>3 

pristine elegance ; her mantle disposed with 
true Parisian grace over her shoulder ; the 
jet drops and artificial flowers in her bonnet 
twinkled resplendent in the candle-light. 
Sweeping a magnificent courtesy to the 
room she addressed herself to Muriel. 

** Believe me, my dear young lady, I most 
deeply regret being unable to avail myself 
of your so kindly expressed invitation,'' 
she said with elaborate graciousness. 
" To do so, I assure you, would have 
afforded me the very highest satisfaction. 
Unhappily it is .impossible. Charming and 
delightful as you are yourself, you have 
the misfortune to possess a relative so 
grossiere, so mal-Hevde, so inexpressibly 
shocking to every delicate taste and per- 
ception, that even your entreaties could not 
induce me further to overlook it. You 
will, therefore, kindly permit me to wish 
you adieu." 

Mrs. Skynner started to her feet. " Leave 



84 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

the house at once, you impertinent 
woman," she exclaimed. " How dare you 
stand there before me ! — a detected im- 
postor, a beggar, a low creature out of the 
streets ! Leave the house at once, I say. 
Muriel, send her away." 

Madame Cairioli only continued to smile 
with redoubled graciousness. " Ah, comme 
je vous plains ! " she cried, still addressing 
herself to Muriel, " Chlre demoiselle, believe 
me you have my truest sympathy. Let 
me, then, before I go, offer you but one 
leetle piece of advice, only one — send her 
away. Faites la filer !'' And, kissing the 
tips of her fingers with airy grace, she 
again vanished from the room ; the next 
instant the hall door shut, and she was 
gone. 

" Muriel, this x^your doing ! " Mrs. Skyn- 
ner exclaimed, crimson with passion. " You 
invited that creature to remain here on 
purpose that she might have the satisfac- 



THE FLIGHT OF THE VULTURE. 85 

tion of insulting and triumphing over me. 
You plotted together to humiliate me, you 
know you did ; you have always disliked 
and been jealous of me, and this — this is 
how you have revenged yourself!" And 
gathering her draperies around her, Mrs. 
Skynner, too, swept from the room, and 
Muriel and her uncle were left to finish 
their gooseberries and cracknels with such 
relish as the events of the evening might 
have spared them. 



86 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 



CHAPTER IV. 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 



Miss Ellis had a cousin on her fathers 
side, a certain Lady Rushton, whose name 
has been once before mentioned in this 
history. This Lady Rushton was a widow 
— rich, good-natured, middle-aged — very 
fond of society, particularly fond of the 
society of what she called artists, by 
which she meant anybody who could be 
induced to play, or sing, or act, or other- . 
wise amuse her. It must be owned that 
in that society she was not invariably ' 
popular, being accused, whether truly or 
not, of adopting people with immense zest 
and enthusiasm, clasping them, as it were, 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 87 

to her very heart and home, and then, 
when the novelty had a little subsided, or 
the first gloss of their accomplishments 
a trifle waned, calmly and dispassionately 
dropping them again. Whatever amount 
of truth there was in this allegation, it is 
at all events certain that she had never 
dropped Muriel ; indeed, of all that Ellis 
kith and kin which for a time had gyrated 
so busily about the little house in Thistle 
Street, Lady Rushton may be said to have 
been the only one who had never failed to 
keep up friendly relations with our heroine. 
Since Muriel had gone to live in 
Chelsea she had more than once been 
invited to stay with her cousin, but 
hitherto had invariably declined. Now 
and then, however, she lunched, or drove 
out, or took tea with Lady Rushton, always 
in response to an urgent appeal to that 
effect. Such an appeal had reached her a 
few days after the events recorded in the 



88 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

last chapter, and in compliance with it she 
started one afternoon to walk from her 
own house to that other and much more 
sumptuous abode in Queen's Gate, wherein 
Lady Rushton had established herself for 
the season. 

Matters had not been progressing very 
comfortably in the interval. Mrs. Skynner's 
anger at the part Muriel had taken with 
regard to Madame Cairioli had by no 
means diminished as the days went on ; 
rather it seemed to increase. A certain 
garnet brooch belonging to that lady was 
found to have disappeared next morning, 
and this, it need hardly be said, was 
at once set down to the agency of that 
unfortunate delinquent. This Muriel did 
not believe, alleging — certainly with some 
plausibility — that had Madame Cairioli been 
desirous of stealing, she could easily have 
laid hands upon something of considerably 
greater value than a garnet brooch. Mrs, 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 89 

Skynner was indignant at this suggestion ; 
indeed her indignation at the doubt cast 
upon her suspicions appeared to be even 
greater than her indignation at the theft 
itself. If it was not Madame Cairioli, she 
declared, why then it must be one of the 
servants of the house ; in any case she 
must and would have her property. The 
brooch was a peculiar one, of particular 
value to herself — in short, irreplaceable. 
A policeman accordingly was sent for ; 
everything and everybody in the house 
examined, and the whole establishment 
turned completely upside down from garret 
to basement. 

Muriel was particularly worried and dis- 
turbed about this affair. She did not in 
the least believe that Madame Cairioli had 
had anything to say to the disappearance 
of the brooch, and thought it therefore 
extremely hard that the police should have 
been set upon her track. As for the ser- 



90 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

vants, she had known them all a long time, 
and it was perfectly ridiculous, she con- 
sidered, to suppose that they could have 
anything at all to say to it. Added to 
this, the whole atmosphere of distrust and 
suspicion was particularly abhorrent to 
her, so abhorrent that it was with a perfect 
feeling of thankfulness that she escaped 
that afternoon, even for a few hours, into 
the fresh air, away from the incessant 
recriminations, the endless provings and 
disprovings, assertions and counter-asser- 
tions which for the last few days had 
almost incessantly assailed her ears. 

Strictly speaking it was not, however, 
particularly fresh out of doors that after- 
noon. It was a dull, sunless day, the sort 
of day which appears peculiarly dull and 
sunless in London, when nothing we see 
seems to present any definite outline, and 
no one we meet to have any distinguish- 
ing trait by which it would ever be 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. QI 

possible to recognize them again. Per- 
haps it was owing to this unattractive 
quality of the atmosphere, or possibly to 
the still less attractive state of things which 
she had left behind her, that Muriel found 
herself walking along in what is commonly 
called a brown study ; a state of abstrac- 
tion from which she was only roused by 
finding herself brought up short at a cross- 
ing — a phaeton, drawn by a tall horse and 
driven by a small gentleman in pale lavender 
kid gloves, having come suddenly towards 
her round a corner. 

Glancing up, she saw that the impetuous 
driver was no other than her. late acquaint- 
ance, Mr. Roger Hyde. He too perceived 
her, and sprang instantly down, flinging 
the reins to a groom as he did so. 

"How do you do. Miss Ellis? Welcome 
back to London. I am afraid I nearly 
inaugurated our meeting by running over 
you,** he exclaimed breathlessly. 



92 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" No, no ; not quite so bad as that," she 
answered smiling. ** I was only startled 
for the moment. How funny, though, that 
it should just happen to be you." 

"It wouldn't have been a bit funny for 
me, I assure you, if I had run over you ! " 

" No, nor for me either. I don't think, 
though, that there was really any particular 
danger. In any case, it was nobody's fault 
but my own." 

" It is very generous of you to say so," 
he answered. 

Roger Hyde was looking radiant. The 
gardenia in his button-hole appeared to 
have been freshly gathered that very 
instant ; his boots, his hat, his horse, his 
phaeton, his groom — all might have served 
as perfect models of their kind. He 
appeared unfeignedly delighted, moreover, 
at meeting Miss Ellis. 

" And how long have you been back ? " 
he inquired. 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 93 

*' Only since last Tuesday." 

" Did you see poor old Halliday again ? " 
was the- next question. 

" Yes, I saw Mr. Halliday the very day 
before I left." 

" And how was he looking ? " 

She glanced at him. " Do you mean as 
to health ? " she inquired. 

" Health ? bless him, no, he never had 
a day's illness in his life. I mean as to 
spirits. Didn't he strike you as deplorably 
out of sorts ? " 

Muriel hesitated. " I did not think 
Mr. Halliday appeared particularly cheer- 
ful, certainly," she replied gravely. 

*' Of course not. You think me a 
heathen I know. Miss Ellis, but I wish 
to goodness he had never gone into the 
Church ! " 

She glanced at him again. " Do you 
suppose that he wishes it himself?" she 
asked. 



94 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" I don't know what he wishes. Halli- 
day's wishes are inscrutable. Anybody can 
see, however, that it doesn't suit him. 
Doesn't it strike you so ? " 

" I am not sure," she answered slowly. 
" You see, I know him so little. But isn't 
he — surely he is very — very conscien- 
tious ? " 

Hyde laughed. " Conscientious ! I 
should think he was. The most con- 
scientious man alive ! That's exactly it ; 
that's precisely why I wish he wasn't a 
parson." 

*' Your motives must be very profound, 
then," Muriel said, smiling ; •* for super- 
ficially, you know, that seems to me rather 
a good reason for his being one." 

" Not a bit of it. Miss Ellis. Don't you 
see, if he had been anything else there 
would have been a chance some day or 
other of his being satisfied with himself — 
with his own performances, I mean. As 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 95 

it is, hell always be dissatisfied. Hell 
always to the end of time think that he 
might be doing better; might, in some 
way or other, be making himself or some 
one else a little more uncomfortable, that 
is.'* 

** All the same that doesn't seem to me 
a sufficient reason," she answered, shaking 
her head. 

" Doesn't it ? Well, it does to me. 

However, I mustn't keep you talking here 

in the middle of the street, particularly as 

if we talked from now till midnight it 

wouldn't do the smallest iota of good. Are 

you on your way home ? " 

" No ; I am going to pay a visit in 

South Kensington." 

" Ah ! yes, and your house is in Chelsea ; 

so I remember you told me that day in the 

forest. May I come and see you ? Do 

let me. I was going to ask you once 

before, but something interfered." 



96 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" Certainly. My sister-in-law and I will 
be delighted to see you." 

*' Does that mean that I am bound to 
ask for your sister-in-law ? " Hyde in- 
quired, with an air of tragi-comical dismay. 
" Why, how upon earth can I .-^ I don't 
even know her name ! " 

"Her name is Mrs. Skynner. I don't 
know about being bound. I shall be very 
glad to see you in the studio, and I can 
introduce you to her afterwards." 

" Do, and to your pictures too. What 
I have seen of them has simply whetted 
my appetite for the rest. We must settle 
about Miss Prettyboy's miniatures, too. 
How is Miss Prettyboy, by the way ? " 

"Very well. Her name is Pretty man, 
as it happens." 

" Prettyman, of course, yes ; I meant 
Prettyman. Don't, for heaven's sake, go 
and tell her I called her Prettyboy ! " 
With this they parted, and Muriel pursued 
her way to Queen's Gate. 



. ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 97 

Lady Rushton had said something about 
a recitation which it was to be her privilege 
to listen to that afternoon, but her note had 
hardly prepared Muriel to find the door 
literally besieged with guests, and a long 
line of carriages extending right across the 
middle of the street. She would have 
turned back, but that she had actually 
promised to present herself that afternoon ; 
as it was, it was a good ten minutes at 
least before she made her way into the 
drawing-room, so dense was the crowd at 
the doorway. When she did, the first thing 
she beheld was a tall young lady in a long 
white garment, reciting something upon a 
platform in the middle of the room. The 
recitation was in French, and appeared to 
consist of selections from Corneille, de- 
livered with a good deal of tragic emphasis, 
and a tremendous rolling of the rs. 
Muriel's attention, however, was not a little 
diverted from the performance by the 

VOL. II. H 



98 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

extraordinary pallor, not to say cadaverous- 
ness, of the performer herself, who, with 
her trailing garments, hollow eyes, and 
ghostly complexion, might fairly have 
posed as the very genius and impersoni- 
fication of tragedy. 

During the interval and buzz of talk 
which succeeded this effort. Lady Rushton 
bustled over to her. 

" So delighted that you were able to come 
this afternoon, dear; I really thought I 
was never going to see you again. Isn't 
she a wonderful creature ? " pointing to the 
young lady in white, who had just sunk in 
apparent exhaustion upon a sofa. 

" Who is she ? " Muriel inquired. 

" Mademoiselle Grigorovitch — sl Russian. 
She recites in three languages, and speaks 
two more. They call her the female 
Mezzofanti. That fat man there is her 
father." 

" She looks very ill." 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 99 

" Yes, doesn't she ? but I don't think 
she is really; at least, it never seems to 
interfere with her recitations. And how- 
are you yourself, Muriel ? As handsome 
as ever, I see ; only I expected you to bring 
back a redder pair of cheeks than those. 
What is the use of going and burying 
yourself alive in a forest in the middle 
of the season, if you can't do better than 
that ? " 

" My cheeks never were very brilliant, 
were they ? " Muriel said, smiling. 

" No, and I believe myself it's all that 
painting. You work too hard, Muriel ; 
you really do. No one, Fm sure, can 
accuse me of not sympathizing with art 
and all that sort of thing; but upon my 
word you overdo it ; you do, indeed. Of 
course for professionals it's all very right 
and proper ; how else are they to make a 
living ? But for you, with your fortune 
and appearance and everything, I call it 



I(X) A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

ridiculous ; and if you had had any one to 
look after you, it would have been put a 
stop to long ago." 

Muriel only smiled. She was used to 
being lectured upon the subject by Lady 
Rushton, and was just upon the point of 
putting another question to that lady with 
regard to the mysterious Mademoiselle 
Grigorovitch, when there came a move- 
ment in the group about the platform, and 
the mistress of the house jumped up sud- 
denly from her chair. 

"Oh, there^s Mr. Fitzwilliam Griggs!" 
she exclaimed. "He has promised to 
recite his Scandinavian war-song for me. 
So kind of him, for he suffers dreadfully 
from nervousness. Last time, do you 
know, I had to give him two whole glasses 
of brandy-and- water, before I could bring 
him up to the point." 

Mr. Fitzwilliam Griggs was a very 
short gentleman, with a round, freckled 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. lOI 

face, and an extremely nervous manner; 
the very last man in the world one would 
have selected as likely to put himself 
forward for the amusement of other people. 
The poem in question appeared to require 
a prodigious amount of action. Now Mr. 
Fitzwilliam Griggs sprang forward, and 
shook his fist in the audience's face ; again 
he flung himself violently on to a chair, as 
if in the act of springing astride of some 
mettlesome charger ; throughout the whole 
exhibition, however, the frightened expres- 
sion never for an instant left his face, sug- 
gesting the idea of a person constrained 
by some superior power to perform against 
his will. Muriel pitied him extremely, and 
was very glad when at length this recita- 
tion, too, came to an end. 

After this, she thought she had heard 
enough for the present, so, having sought 
out her hostess, and escaped with some 
difficulty from her amiability, she was 



I02 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

making her way towards the entrance, when 
she suddenly encountered Mr. Wygram. 

His face brightened at the sight of 
her. 

" Miss Ellis, this is fortunate ! It struck 
me as possible that you might be here this 
afternoon," he exclaimed. 

" I have been here some little time, and 
am just going," she answered. 

" Going ? " in a tone of disappointment. 
" And I have only just come. Let me, 
at least, see you to your carriage, and 
give you an ice on the way," he added 
offering her his arm. 

"You may give me an ice if you will, 
but I have no carriage," she answered. 
" I am walking." 

" Alone ? " 

" Yes, all alone. Does that shock you ? " 

" Shock me, no. Why should you sup- 
pose for a moment that it would shock me ? " 

" I don't know ; I fancied you spoke in 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. IO3 

rather a scandalized tone. The truth is, 
I believe I am a little thin-skinned on the 
subject; I am so used to being lectured 
about my lack of decorum. If Lady 
Rushton realized that I was setting off 
by myself, she would probably think it 
necessary to send a footman or a couple of 
maids flying after me down the street." 

"Oh, but Tm not at all like that," he 
answered quickly. "On the contrary, I 
think an artist — a true artist, like yourself, 
Miss Ellis — cannot too soon learn habits 
of. independence. How else is she to 
study nature ? How else to acquire that 
thorough and intimate knowledge of action 
and expression which is so. pre-eminently 
essential ? A true artist ought to be 
always studying — when she is walking, 
' talking — whatever she may be doing." 

" When she is eating ices and listening 
to Scandinavian war-songs.'^" Muriel in- 
quired, smiling. 



I04 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

"Yes, always," he answered seriously. 
" Will you do me a favour ? " he added 
abruptly. 

" Certainly, if I can," she replied. 

" I want you to come and pay me a visit 
at my studio. You have not been there 
for ages, and I have a picture now on 
hand about which I particularly want your 
opinion. You really would gratify me 
extremely if you would do so," he added 
emphatically. . 

Muriel hesitated. 

"If you dislike — if you have any scruple 
about coming alone, I can easily ask my 
sister, Mrs. Boldero, to come and meet 
you," he continued, "or you could bring 
Mrs. Skynner with you." 

"Thank you, but I don't think that 
would be at all necessary," she answered, 
smiling. " As I told you just now, my 
conscience upon these sort of points is a 
very easy one. I should like to bring my 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. IO5 

friend, Miss King, though, if I may ? She 
is a devout admirer of yours, and would 
immensely enjoy seeing your pictures." 

" Pray do. I shall be delighted, of 
course, to see Miss King," he answered, 
without, however, evincing any particular 
delight in his tone. " What day would 
suit you ? Could you come to-morrow ? 
Not in the morning, as I have sitters, but 
in the afternoon — say about five o'clock ? " 

" Yes, I think so." 

They were now in the tea-room, so. he 
left her for a minute to go in pursuit of 
an ice. 

" You have not told me yet how you got 
through your difficulties the other day," he 
said, as he returned. " Newmarsh seemed 
to think that your sister-in-law was properly 
impressed ; so I hope that you got rid of 
your impostor without any trouble ? " 

" Oh, yes, poor woman, she was got rid 
of easily enough," Muriel said, with a sigh. 



106 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" You speak as if you were sorry. Surely 
you cannot regret such a creature ? " 

" No, not that exactly. Still I feel as 
if I ought not to have let her go without 
ascertaining her address. She seemed so 
ill and destitute, poor thing! After turn- 
ing her out of the house like that, I think 
I was bound to see after her a little more." 

Mr. Wygram looked disturbed — more 
than that, he looked positively annoyed. 
" I do hope and trust. Miss Ellis, that you 
have not got infected by any of those new- 
fangled, philanthropic crazes ? " he ex- 
claimed irritably. " Forgive me, if I seem 
to dictate," he added immediately ; " but it 
does seem to me that it would be such an 
error of judgment — excusable, of course, 
but still a very great one — if you allow 
yourself to be taken from your own proper 
sphere by anything of the kind. There 
are women enough, plenty of women, be- 
lieve me, in London, to visit poor people 



ART VERSUS PklLISTIA. IO7 

and nurse sick ones without your being 
drawn into that vortex. Art cannot spare 
you ; it cannot, indeed." 

A few weeks earlier the speech would 
have delighted Muriel. To be told, and to 
be told, too, by so competent an authority 
as Mr. Wygram, that art could not spare 
her — 'that she was one of those whose 
achievements were waited for, and whose 
success was believed in — would have given 
her the very keenest possible satisfaction. 
Now, however, strange to say, she listened 
to it not only without pleasure, but even 
with a distinct feeling of ^/^pleasure — a 
feeling as if, not her powers, but her 
limitations were thus somehow or other 
being forced home to her. Why should 
she not be allowed to make herself useful 
like other women ? she thought resentfully. 

*' I don't think there is the slightest 
danger of my being drawn into any philan- 
thropic vortex," she said coldly. " I wish 



108 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

there was. Unfortunately, I am a great 
deal too lazy and self-indulgent." 

She had by this time finished her ice, 
and drawn on her gloves, and now made 
a decided movement to depart. 

*' Won't you come upstairs again ? " Mr. 
Wygram said persuasively. 

*' I thank you, no ; I have said good-bye 
to my cousin already," she answered, 
moving resolutely on towards the door, an 
ungrateful desire to escape from her only 
too amiable companion coming suddenly 
over her. 

As she walked back through the silver- 
grey atmosphere her thoughts ran a good 
deal, however, upon the subject of Mr. 
Wygram. Her momentary resentment 
over, she felt disposed to take herself to 
task, to accuse herself of inconsistency, and 
even of ingratitude on his account. Ever 
since the beginning of their acquaintance- 
ship, she had been in the habit of looking 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. lOQ 

up to him as a great authority — on art, of 
course, in the first instance, but indirectly 
upon other subjects. His friendship for 
her had been a source of no small pride and 
satisfaction to her. She liked knowing that 
he regarded her as worthier of a reason- 
able man's attention than the generality of 
young ladies. Nothing — at all events until 
quite lately — could possibly have been less 
lover-like than his behaviour. His manner 
had been kindly, authoritative, almost 
paternal. He had talked to her chiefly 
about art, occasionally even lecturing her 
gently upon the subject, and she had 
always been glad that he should do so. 
There was a certain recklessness, a random 
confidence in her own powers, and a 
harum-scarum style of art which had given 
her friend a good deal of uneasiness. He 
wished her to take art seriously — as he 
took it himself ; to look upon it as a grave 
responsibility, an endowment to be culti- 



IT2 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

home. Her studio, generally the resort 
of all her moods and fancies, was too 
intimately bound up with the present ques- 
tion to offer itself as an acceptable refuge, 
and except the studio she did not feel as 
if there was so much as a single corner in 
the house which she could call her own. 

She walked slowly on along the Em- 
bankment, glancing from time to time 
across the dun- coloured expanse of water. 
Where she was, was comparatively deserted, 
but upon the opposite side the grass and 
towing-path seemed to be populous with 
idlers. A procession of charity children 
passed, their blue frocks and white tippets 
forming a conspicuous feature in the land- 
scape. The grey pall had lifted a little, and 
the clouds were banked in big slumberous 
masses above the slow rise of country 
beyond Sydenham. Turning away from 
her own house, she passed the bridge, and 
stood for a few minutes beside the parapet 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. II3 

of the Embankment. A big ugly coal 
barge was slipping down towards West- 
minster on the current, its black clumsy 
hull well defined against the pale satiny 
curves below. Next followed a steamer, 
heading up against the tide, the water 
running in tiny wavelets against its side. 
Muriel waited to see it discharge its burden 
at the pier, and then, crossing the road, 
paused a moment beside the iron gates 
leading to the Botanic Gardens. A gardener 
had just gone in, leaving one of them 
ajar, so she entered, and strolled to and 
fro amongst the mouldering flower-beds. 
Except the gardener and herself, there 
was not a soul in the place; the solitary 
cedar, grim with nearly two centuries of 
London dust and smuts, appearing to pre- 
side sadly over the deserted-looking enclo- 
sure. Often as she had passed it before, 
Muriel had never previously been inside, 
and now she felt pleased with the place, 

VOL. II. I 



114 A.CHELSEA H0USEH0LDE;R. 

and glad of the chance which had admitted 
her. Grim and unattractive as it was in 
some aspects, there was yet a dim indefin- 
able flavour of antiquity, a certain secluded 
charm which just then fitted into her mood. 
Odd, disjointed fragments of sound reached 
her from beyond the railings ; sounds from 
the road, from the river, from the great 
encompassing ocean of humanity. Her 
own thoughts, as she wandered up and 
down, seemed to her not very much more 
coherent or connected. She had got away 
from the art problem now, and was busying 
herself about other and more immediately 
personal troubles, turning them over and 
over with that strange but by no means 
unusual ingenuity which makes us so often 
select the subjects of all others which we 
least like dwelling on, to be our continual 
guests, the sharers of our bed and hearth 
and board. 

Like every nature which is at once strong 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. II5 

and feminine, Muriel had a keen, almost a 
passionate need of loving and being loved, 
and with the best intentions possible in 
that direction she could not certainly love 
her sister-in-law, Mrs. Skynner. More 
than this, she knew very well that her 
sister-in-law did not love her. If she had 
ever cherished any illusions on that subject 
the last few days would have been sufficient 
to dispel them. Mrs. Skynner had all the 
easily-aroused, hard-to-be-appeased resent- 
fulness of a small, self-centred nature, and 
it was evident that the incidents which had 
just taken place had strongly aroused that 
resentfulness. Nor had other causes since 
been wanting. Partly on Mrs. Prettyman's 
advice, partly from her own sense of the 
utter folly and madness of indebtedness, 
Muriel had resolved to cut the knot of her 
financial difficulties in a vigorous fashion, 
and amongst other obvious economies had 
determined, for the present at all events, to 



Il6 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

dispense with a carriage — ^a resolution 
which, as she herself justly anticipated^ 
had given mortal offence to Mrs. Skynnen 
That economy, or any motive except a 
wish still further to slight and annoy 
herself, had been at work in the matter, 
that lady utterly declined to believe. She 
did not reproach Muriel ; she did not again 
hold dut any threat of her own departure ; 
she did not even allude to the matter, 
except indirectly ; but it rankled steadily ; 
it went to swell a small pent-up stream 
of bitterness which for months past had 
been slowly but surely gathering within her. 
As they sat at luncheon or dinner together, 
Muriel, looking suddenly up from her plate,, 
would catch her sister-in-law's eyes fixed 
upon her with a sort of stony aggressive- 
ness. Mrs. Skynner had not particularly 
expressive eyes, but there was something 
in the cold irresponsive gaze of those light 
prominent orbs which affected Muriel with 



ART VERSUS PHIUSTIA. II J 

^extreme discomfort. She was beginning 
to dread those meals, to hail any inter- 
ruption — no matter how little otherwise 
wdcome — which broke in upon that in- 
evitable tHe-cL-tite. Would Mrs. Skynner 
ever be induced to select some other 
place of abode ? she was beginning secretly 
to ask herself. Unfortunately, it was im- 
possible for her to move in the matter. 
If such a suggestion would only have 
^emanated from the other side, she for her 
own part would have hailed it with some- 
thing very little short of rapture, but it was 
impossible for her to t^ke the initiative ; 
her hands were tied, and tied — short of 
some as yet unforeseen intervention — ^they 
must inevitably, she felt, remain. 

Casting back to the beginning of their 
joint companionship, Muriel used to try 
sometimes examine herself as to whether 
— ^apart from those later offences — she had 
done anything, or left undone anything, 



Il8 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

the omission or doing of which would help 
to account for the present uncomfortable 
state of things ; whether, in short, Mrs.. 
Skynner really had any just and reason- 
able grounds of complaint against hen 
That Mrs. Skynner conceived herself to 
have such grounds she, at all events, knew 
unfortunately only too well. Apart even 
from the later offences, there had long 
been a rankling sense of wrong and in- 
justice. Why should Muriel have money, 
and servants, and a house, and she have 
none? that was the recurrent burden of 
her thoughts. True, Mrs. Skynner had 
not been made any the poorer by Muriel 
having money — quite the contrary ; but 
then this argument was probably the very 
last that could have been brought forward 
with effect. 

Sometimes it used to strike our heroine 
with a sort of amused self-wonder that 
she did not more seriously resent Mrs.. 



ART VERSUS rHlLISTIA. II9 

Skynner's too evident and really very 
unreasonable animosity. She was not 
generally so meek or inapt to resent 
injury. Why, then, was she so meek 
now ? Whether or not she succeeded in 
discovering the clue to the enigma herself, 
it may be permitted to her biographer to 
surmise that this remissness came partly 
from a sense of obligation which, as we 
know, had always been largely exercised 
on Mrs. Skynner's behalf; partly from the 
fact that she did not weigh that lady's say- 
ings and doings in exactly the same scales, 
or with the same precision of measurement, 
as she might have weighed the sayings 
and doings of another. People come to 
meet us upon different levels, and we 
instinctively accept them upon their own 
and not upon any other level. There 
was an amount of fatuity about Mrs. 
Skynner which really at times amounted 
to sublimity — which seemed to open up 



I20 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

new and surprising vistas as to the 
capacity of human nature in this direction. 
How object to being misprized, or how 
seriously demand generous or even just 
appraisement where all, or nearly all, the 
avenues of sense and perception appeared 
to be hermetically shut and sealed ? As 
well insist upon a fine ear for music or 
a delicate perception of harmony from a 
man who has had the misfortune to be 
born deaf! I do not mean to say that 
Muriel exactly originated this estimate 
herself, but it, or something very like it, 
lay undoubtedly at the root of that large, 
if hardly flattering, tolerance which she 
instinctively extended, not merely to all 
Mrs. Skynner's present sayings and doings, 
but to anything which that lady might be 
moved to say or to do in the future. 

Meanwhile, the afternoon was getting 
on, and it was time for her to be going 
homeward. She felt a whimsical disin- 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 121 

clination to leave the place — a feeling as 
if all those troubles and worries she had 
escaped from were standing ready to 
pounce upon her the instant she set foot 
outside that spiked and barred enclosure. 
If she could only get away to the forest 
and go mothing again with Partridge ! 
she thought, smiling to herself as she stood 
looking up into the big cedar stretching 
its dust-coated network of twigs hither and 
thither above her head. How bright it 
looked, that New Forest episode, looking 
back at it now out of the midst of her 
present embroglio. Her thoughts flew to 
that last day — the day she had stood with 
Halliday in the churchyard — it seemed as 
if shQ could almost smell again the scent 
of the flowers, and see the shadows made 
by the passing birds. Where was Mr. 
Halliday ? she wondered. Was he back 
again in London, and toiling away in the 
midst of those briers and thorny squeaches 



122 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

which he expected to find so dense and sa 
uninviting ? Well, at least, if he was, he 
had a definite purpose, a clear goal before 
him, and, moreover, an unselfish one; he. 
might fail, but even to fail under such 
circumstances would be better, she thought, 
than a good deal of the rather equivocal 
success which she saw about her. Mr*. 
Hyde had called him a Philistine, and 
doubtless the epithet was not undeserved* 
On the other hand, the artistic and 
aesthetic side of things had latterly beea 
so pressed upon Muriel as a solemn re- 
sponsibility that she was beginning from 
sheer opposition to feel as if it might be 
possible to make out a case for its opposite. 
If art was to fail her — and she was con- 
scious that art was not quite the be-alt 
and end-all, the one utterly sufficing refuge 
and resource that it had seemed in her 
younger and more enthusiastic days — what 
remained ? To what else was she to- 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 1 23 

turn ? Could she, too, she wondered, so 
use her life that even her very failures^ 
like Halliday's, might redound to some 
one's advantage ? True, she was shackled 
by certain obvious disabilities from which 
he was free ; but then, on the other hand, 
she was very much less shackled with 
those disabilities than most of her own sex 
and standing. Not only had she health 
and strength, youth and vigour, but she 
had a certain command of means, and 
absolute, or pretty nearly absolute, inde- 
pendence ; surely, then, it must be her own 
fault if, with all those advantages, she 
failed to extract anything out of life 
beyond what she now saw immediately 
around her? And yet, scan the horizon 
up and down as she would, she could see 
nothing — nothing, that is, but pictures ; 
more pictures, and then beyond those 
again other pictures still — ^with herself 
too, always as the principal figure in every 



124 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

canvas! It was all very delightful, doubt- 
less, but still surely, surely, she thought, it 
was not enough ? surely life must hold 
something else, more vital, more real, 
more binding than pictures ? Yet where, 
or in what direction even, she was to 
look for that something was what as yet 
she entirely failed to discover. 

From these somewhat futile debatings 
she aroused herself at last with a start 
It really was late now. The light was 
beginning to fail, and there was a tint of 
sunset over the trailing smoke-coloured 
clouds above Battersea. The gardener, 
too, had finished whatever had brought him 
to the place, and was standing in amicable 
conversation with a one-armed Chelsea 
pensioner, who stood smoking his pipe 
by the railings. Muriel passed out, be- 
stowing a gratuity upon the former as 
she did so ; then she wended her way at 
last to her own house. 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 12$ 

It need hardly be said of a young lady 
so independent as Miss Ellis that she 
possessed a latch-key. This latch-key she 
now made use of to enter the house with- 
out disturbing the rest of the inmates. 
Pausing an instant to put her umbrella 
into the stand, she heard the slow, mono- 
tonous tones of Mrs. Skynner's voice pro- 
ceeding from the depths of her own 
apartment Not a syllable was actually 
audible, still it did not require any great 
stretch of ingenuity to perceive that it was 
the tale of her late wrongs and injuries 
which was thus being poured out into 
some sympathizing visitor's ear. Hurry- 
ing past, Muriel betook herself to her 
own room to take off her walking things. 
This done, she felt somewhat puzzled 
where to bestow herself She did not 
want to paint, or even to look at her 
paintings ; something seemed to have come 
between them and her; a vague some- 



126 ' A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

thing, hardly a shadow, but still sufficient 
to make her feel that their company just 
then would be likely to prove very much 
the reverse of soothing. 

Turning away, therefore, from the studio, 
she entered a small room off the staircase, 
where there were a few book-cases, and 
where she was in the habit of seeing such 
tradesmen or men of business as might 
happen to call to see her. It was an 
ugly little room, and a noisy one to boot, 
She could still hear the measured tones 
of Mrs. Skynner's voice, as well as the 
more boisterous accents of Eliza and her 
compeers coming up from the servants' 
region below the area, steps. She took 
up a book, and then laid it down again ; 
wandered round the room, and, finally, 
stood gazing out of the smut-stained 
window, which commanded a view over a 
couple of neighbouring mews. It wanted 
a full hour yet of dinner time, and out 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 12/ 

oh the river side the light still lay bright 
and warm ; but here, amongst the back 
walls and chimney-pots, everything was 
dull, grey, and smoke-saturated. Muriel, 
too, felt dull and grey herself. She was 
not, as a rule, addicted to the folly of 
self-pity, but at this moment she certainly 
did feel as if her own position in the house 
was a somewhat anomalous and unsatis- 
factory one. If Kitty King or Elizabeth 
Prettyman, or any friend, would only come 
and see her, she thought, how gladly, hpw 
very, very gladly she would have welcomed 
them! Yet, after all, kind as they were, 
and fond as they were of her, they had 
their own duties and interests, and she 
had no right to lay any more claims upon 
them, she felt, than they were willing of 
themselves to concede. 

Presently, however, her solitude was 
broken in upon by a visitor. The door, 
which was slightly ajar, was suddenly 



128 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

pushed open, and Gamaliel entered, his 
white tail curling proudly over his back. 
Gamaliel was an extremely /^j/ and digni- 
fied animal, quite above kittenish ways, 
and not at all demonstrative. Still, in his 
way, he had a lurking if a somewhat super- 
cilious sort of regard for his mistress, and 
now he proceeded to evince his satis- 
faction at finding her there and alone by 
first rubbing himself to and fro against her 
dress, and then, finding these demonstra- 
tions acceptable, by leaping up, and thrust- 
ing his white head and ridiculous pink 
nose into her face, arching his back, 
stretching out his claws, and purring with 
unmistakable feline enjoyment. 

Muriel stooped down and stroked him,, 
laying her hand caressingly against his 
soft yielding fur. Even Gamaliel, she 
thought, was better than nobody. He 
was a trifle egotistical and self-absorbed, 
perhaps; even now it was just possible 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. 1 29 

that his attentions were not wholly devoid 
of a faint flavour of interested motives. 
She was not, however, in a mood to 
scan too closely anything that looked like 
affection. If Gamaliel liked her, why, 
then, so much the better for herself, she 
felt, as well as for Gamaliel. What, how- 
ever, she really wanted was not so 
much something to like, or even to love 
her, as something or somebody that she 
herself could care for — really, stringently, 
vitally. She had better never have been 
born at all, she told herself bitterly, if she 
was never going to have any more vital, 
less selfish, less lukewarm interests than 
she had at present. Could it be that she 
was incapable of anything warmer ? she 
wondered ; there were souls so faint and 
flaccid as to be unable to take more than 
a tepid interest in anything or anybody. 
But then, again, she remembered how 
passionately she had loved her mother and 

VOL. II. K 



130 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

John ; how even now, though such years 
had passed since their loss, that loss still 
throbbed with a dull, retentive ache within 
her. No, it was not that. It was simply 
that she had not yet found her niche. It 
must be to be found. Somewhere in this big, 
ugly world of London there must be that 
corner or that duty which called upon her, 
and her in particular, to fill it. Charity ? 
The word looked as dead and dried up as 
a parchment code — a mere abstraction ; 
no more binding or living than a problem 
in Euclid. And yet it was certainly some- 
thing of this kind she wanted— some living, 
and yet at the same time, if possible, 
impersonal interest. No amount of per- 
sonal achievement (even had the road to 
such achievement lain open before her) 
would have fed this particular craving 
which ached within her. Why should 
such cravings, in fact, be given at all, she 
asked herself, but that somehow or other 



ART VERSUS PHILISTIA. I3I 

they were meant to be fulfilled ? And 
yet again, she thought with a sudden 
revulsion, as she turned, and slowly 
wended her way upstairs to her own 
room, such cravings and hankerings as 
these were, after all, the very commonest 
things in the whole world. Were there 
not probably at that moment some thou- 
sands, nay, some hundreds of thousands of 
women in much the same sort of plight, 
with much the same sort of disquieting 
visions, and much the same sort of vague 
dissatisfied yearning. And was it, could 
it, after all, be honestly said to be such 
a very, very serious matter that she, Muriel 
Ellis, should be called on to make one of 
those thousands ? 



132 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 



CHAPTER V. 

MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. 

Mr. Wygram's house was almost large 
enough to be called a mansion. It was 
a big, red-fronted edifice standing in one 
of the streets which lie at right-angles to 
the river. He had built it himself, but at 
present it was altogether too large for his 
own requirements. Even after the most 
liberal deductions for sitting-rooms, studios, 
and bedrooms, there still remained a con- 
siderable space to be disposed of, and this 
space had been allotted by him into studios 
for some of the less fortunately domiciled of 
his artistic brethren. Amongst the younger 
artists there was, indeed, a brisk competi- 



. MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. 1 33 

tion for these studios, partly for their own 
merits, which were super-excellent, but still 
more on account of the exalted reputation 
borne by Mr. Wygram as a landlord. 
Not only was he reputed to be extremely 
lenient as regards the payment of rent, 
but on more than one occasion he had 
been known to dispense with that cere- 
mony altogether. What wonder, then, if 
his studios were never vacant ? These 
supplemental studios were in a different 
part of the house, and approached by a 
totally different entrance and staircase to 
that occupied by the owner himself, so that 
it was perfectly possible to visit the latter 
without being even so much as aware of 
the existence of the former. 

Nothing could be less fantastic, or less 
tainted with the taint of prevailing affecta- 
tions than Mr. Wygram's house and studio. 
High art, in the modern sense of the word, 
he detested. He had inherited a few 



134 ^ CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

good pictures, and had purchased for him- 
self a few more. A couple of Cuyps, 
radiant in all the glow of their aerial per- 
spective, hung to right and left of his 
studio mantelpiece. There were two or 
three Romneys and Gainsboroughs in the 
dining-room, and at least one indisputable 
Van Ostade in the hall. Look where you 
would, you saV none of those surprising 
embellishments which in the last few years 
have so lavishly overflowed our houses. 
No Japanese fans, or kaleidoscopic parasols; 
no sad-coloured stuffs, no preposterous 
wall-papers, and no sunflowers. Every- 
thing was solid, substantial, workmanlike ; 
stamped, as all possessions ought to be, and 
as, alas ! so few of our possessions are, with 
the character and impress of their owner. 

Mr. Wygram was one of those men 
whose reputation seems to stand at even a 
higher level than any of their actual 
achievements. Amongst the men of his 



MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. 1 35 

6wn Standing, as well as with many both 
older and younger than himself, he enjoyed 
a very unusual degree of consideration ; 
partly, no doubt,, for his talents, which 
were considerable, but still more for 
a certain weightiness and solidity which 
attended everything that he said and did. 
He was indeed emphatically a solid man 
— practical, clear-headed, self-centred — full 
to the very brim of that " large, sound, 
roundabout sense," which Locke has 
stamped for us with his most emphatic 
approval. Though a sociable man, he 
was not by any means one that invited 
familiarity ; indeed, even those who knew 
him best, to the last were a little in awe 
of him, an assertion which may be tested 
by the simple fact that, although his name 
was John, no human being had ever yet 
been heard to call him Jack! If genial, 
too, to the point of good-nature as regards 
his neighbour's interest, on his own affairs 



136 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

he was almost invariably taciturn and 
uncommunicative. Even this, however, 
gained him prestige. " Wygram was a deal 
a richer fellow than any one supposed," 
men were wont to declare to one another ; 
an assertion which may or may not have 
been based on fact, but of which the 
reputation, at all events, it is safe to say, 
did him no harm. 

For so successful a man it was wonderful, 
too, how little Mr. Wygram seemed to 
offend by his success, the more so that his 
manner was certainly not devoid of a certain 
clearly-definable touch of self-importance. 
It was not offensive self-importance, how- 
ever, not that most odious of all kinds 
which finds its own aliment in wounding 
the self-love and importance of others ; still 
less of that carping, smirking, uneasy 
variety which, finding the world's estimate 
to be below its own merit, seeks by per- 
petual posing to repair that injustice. 



MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. 1 37 

Rather it partook of the easy insouciant 
self-importance of some pleasant-mannered 
chief or head of department, with a whole 
world of underlings to keep in order 
and good humour. It shone out of his 
broad complacent physiognomy, and spoke 
in his easy imperturbability, which nothing 
seemed ever to ruffle or displace. Mr. 
Wygram was not one of those painters, 
either, who can do nothing but paint ; 
on the contrary, he possessed a variety 
of the gifts which tend to give a man 
weight and prestige in the world of 
men. He was a good shot, and a fair 
billiard-player ; rode well to hounds, and 
was reported to play an excellent game of 
whist at his club. True, there were whole 
realms and regions of which he knew 
nothing, but then of these he kept discreetly 
clear, never committing himself by any in- 
opportune or ill-advised judgments. Poetry, 
for instance, and what is commonly classed 



138 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER, 

as light literature generally, he abjured ; 
indeed, he was seldom known to take up 
a book of any kind for the mere frivolous 
purpose of entertainment On the other 
hand, he was an assiduous reader of the 
newspapers, and was understood to hold 
clear and well-considered views upon 
politics, inclining to a somewhat high and 
dry type of Whiggism. Why Wygram 
had never married was a question much 
debated in his own circle ; all sorts of 
different and generally wholly hypothetic 
reasons being assigned. That it was not 
due to any rooted or morbid dislike to 
the sex in the abstract was at any rate 
perfectly clear; on the contrary, he both 
enjoyed ladies* society, and was extremely 
popular in that society ; his studio, large 
as it was, being often even inconveniently 
crowded on the days set apart by him 
for receiving his friends. 

The afternoon upon which Muriel and 



MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. 1 39 

Miss King appeared by appointment was 
not, however, one of these— -only three 
persons being, in fact, in it when they 
entered ; — the artist himself, who came 
forward with much empressement to meet 
them ; a stout elderly gentleman in 
spectacles, who looked at his watch and 
vanished as they entered ; and a tall 
strongly-built youth, with a closely-cropped 
head, and an extremely ruddy complexion, 
which latter became ruddier still at sight 
of Miss Ellis's companion. 

" How do you do, Miss Ellis } How do 
you do, Miss King } — What, Mackalister, 
are you off.'^" this to the gentleman 
who was making for the door. " Let me 
introduce you to Mr. Archer, Miss Ellis. 
Miss King, I think you and Mr. Archer 
are acquainted already." 

" Yes, I know Mr. Archer," Kitty King 
replied demurely. " He and I painted 
one another's portraits the other day." 



I40 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" Indeed ? You did not show me Miss 
Kings portrait, Archer. I generally am 
privileged to see all your doings." 

" Oh, it was nothing— a horrible thing ; 
not a bit like — in fact, I tore it up," that 
gentleman mumbled apologetically. 

" That wasn't at all nice of you. I didn't 
tear up your picture, I assure you, 
Mr. Archer ; I have it quite safe still 
in my sketch book," Kitty King said 
meaningly. 

"It was a very cruel one, I know," poor 
Mr. Archer responded, blushing. 

** I don t know about being cruel. It 
was very like. I suppose if one paints a 
person's portrait, it ought to be like ; 
oughtn't it ? " 

While this unequal war of wits was 
going on, Mr. Wygram had drawn Muriel 
to the opposite side of the studio, and in 
front of a large canvas which stood 
propped upon an easel. 



MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. I4I 

" See, Miss Ellis, this is the picture I 
spoke to you about yesterday," he said, 
turning it round so as to bring it into a 
better light. " I have a favour to ask you 
in connection with it. Look at it and see 
if yon can tell me what it is." 

Muriel obeyed. The picture apparently 
represented a trial for witchcraft ; a semi- 
circle of hard-faced men, seated about a 
table ; to the left a crowd of witnesses ; 
in the centre the victim — her head erect, 
and arms extended — the latter*s face was 
barely indicated, but the attitude was 
vigorous, and not wanting in a certain 
promise of beauty. " You see what it is, 
don't you ? " continued the artist. " I 
want you to sit to me for my sorceress." 

" The compliment sounds a dubious one," 
Muriel said, smiling. 

" Dubious ? Not in the least. I want 
a face that can tell its own story — can 
announce its own innocence without my 
having to put it into the catalogue." 



142 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Miss Ellis blushed a little. " I should 
not have thought that mine was particularly 
suitable for that purpose," she said grlvely. 
The words might have sounded coquettish, 
but the tone certainly was not. 

Mr. Wygram appeared amused. " Why ? 
Do you think you look as if you are likely 
to commit deeds of darkness ? " he inJjuired. 

** Not exactly that, perhaps, but still one 
has an idea of the type, and I do not 
think mine at all corresponds to it. Kitty 
King's face, now," she added, glancing 
across the room ; ** that I should say 
came very much nearer to your ideal." 

Mr. Wygram followed the glance to 
where that young lady was standing under 
one of the large windows, her white dress, 
with its coquettish touches of blue, setting 
off her trim little figure and fresh, flower- 
like face. " Miss King looks a great deal 
too artless for my purpose," he said, 
smiling. " Any one can see that there 



MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. 1 43 

must be an infinity of guile behind such 
an assumption of innocence as that. In 
one sense, however, she certainly is a 
sorceress," he added, lowering his voice. 
" She has fairly bewitched that poor lad 
Archer. I am not, of course, supposed 
to know anything of it personally, but he 
has one of the studios here, and I hear 
from some of the other men that he is 
simply crazed about that little golden- 
haired friend of yours." 

" Indeed !" Muriel said eagerly. 

" You had heard nothing of it before ? " 

" N*o ; and I generally hear of all Kitty's 
achievements in that line. What is Mr. 
Archer like ? " she added. 

"An excellent lad. Not clever, but I 
think he will make a painter in time ; that 
is, if he sticks to it. I hear, though, that 
there is an uncle in the air — I mean in 
the city — a stockbroker, or something of 
that sort, who is anxious to provide our 



144 ^ CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

friend with a stool in his office, which, 
doubtless, would be the best thing that 
could happen for his pecuniary interest." 

" I like his looks," Muriel said thought- 
fully. "He is ugly, but it is a face that 
one could trust." 

"Yes, he is an excellent lad," Mr. 
Wygram repeated, this time however care- 
lessly, as if the subject of Mr. Archer's 
merits might in time become monotonous. 
" So you won't give me an answer about 
my sorceress, Miss Ellis ? Well, I must 
only wait, and hope to find you in a more 
complacent mood. Meanwhile, come and 
let me give you some tea," he continued, 
drawing back a curtain, and leading the 
way into a small room or alcove off the 
studio, lined with brown leather stamped 
in relief, a small table, temptingly heaped 
up with fruit and flowers, standing in the 
centre. "Archer, come and get some tea 
for Miss King," he called back as he 
entered. 



MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. I45 

As the young man thus summoned ap- 
peared at the entrance of the alcove, 
Muriel turned to look at him with some 
attention. He possessed what is generally 
called a very Anglo-Saxon face, furnished 
with a rudimentary moustache, his round, 
dosely-cropped head being flanked with a 
pair of cruelly prominent ears ; his hands 
and wrists, too, were remarkably large and 
red; but for all that there was a certain 
straightness and soldierliness about his 
bearing which won her approval, despite 
his present undeniable air of sheepishness 
and depression. He brightened up some- 
what when sent to summon Miss King to 
tea, but presently returned, looking more 
woebegone than ever, to say that she 
would come soon, but that at present she 
was too much absorbed in looking at the 
pictures. " She wants you to go and ex- 
plain something to her, Mr. Wygram," 
he added gloomily. 

VOL. II. L 



146 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Mr. Wygram obeyed, with an amused 
glance at Muriel as he did so. 

Left tite-d-tite with Mr. Archer, Miss 
Ellis tried to exchange some remarks with 
that melancholy young gentleman, but he 
was so evidently distrait that she soon 
desisted from the attempt, and contented 
herself with watching the proceedings of 
the other two as seen through the door- 
way of the alcove. 

Miss King appeared to be actuated with 
the strongest curiosity about the highest 
and consequently the least accessible por- 
tions of Mr. Wy gram's pictures. There 
was a set of steps at hand, which the 
artist used in painting, and up and down 
these she kept incessantly flitting, now 
pausing on one step, and now on another, 
as she turned to appeal to her host 
Muriel at last began to wish that Kitty 
would not go up and down those steps quite 
so often. Tier feet were extremely prett}' — 



• MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. 1 47 

-quite as pretty as her hands — and were set 
off to-day by the most bewitching little 
pair of high-heeled shoes, admitting occa- 
sional 'glimpses of sky-blue stockings 
above. These glimpses, however, kept 
on recurring with a greater frequency 
than appeared essential ; moreover, it was 
evident, even to her indulgent perceptions, 
that Kitty s new-born enthusiasm for the 
fine arts was largely attempered by another 
and a somewhat less laudable sentiment. 
At last, however, that enthusiasm ap- 
peared appeased, and she and Mr. Wygram 
returned to the alcove. 

*' r do so love a studio ; I should like to 
live in one always!" Kitty exclaimed 
rapturously, as she seated herself on the 
sofa beside Muriel. 

" There is only one thing to be done, 
then, Miss King — you must marry an 
artist," Mr. Wygram said, with his semi- 
paternal air of gallantry, heaping up her 



148 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

plate with strawberries and cream as he 
spoke. 

At this Miss Kitty, however, only tossed 
her head and pouted her lips, as much as 
to say that that was a contingency for 
which she was entirely unprepared. 

After she had eaten up her strawberries, 
and the tea was all finished, they again 
wandered about among the pictures. 
There were a good many portraits amongst 
them, and these especially attracted Muriel's 
attention. As a painter of what are called" 
"fancy" subjects, she privately thought 
Mr. Wygram a trifle hard and realistic — 
too realistic, at least, for her taste; that 
broad streak of prose, which showed in 
everything he said and did, coming out 
particularly strongly in such matters. His 
portraits, on the other hand, particularly 
his portraits of men, were admirable ; full 
of vigour, and stamped with an indefinable 
stamp of truth and realit)^ One especially 



• MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. 1 49 

— that of an old man, a professor of some 
abstruse science or other — particularly at- 
tracted her attention. It had much of that 
harmony and strongly marked individuality 
which we look for in a Rembrandt or a 
Gerard Dow; indeed, it was not at all 
unlike one of those delightful old doctors 
or burgomasters that look down at us 
with wrinkled eyes from the walls of so 
many a Dutch and Flemish picture gallery. 
Kitty, on the other hand, could not for her 
part conceive how Muriel could care to 
go on looking at that stupid old man 
when there were such quantities of other 
and more interesting pictures about. Of 
course, it was beautifully painted — all Mr. 
Wygram's pictures were — but then the old 
gentleman himself was so dreadfully snuffy 
and ugly. She couldn't herself imagine 
how people could possibly wish to have 
their portraits painted when they came to 
be as old and ugly as that 



^150 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" Possibly his relations may wish to have 
It, even if he doesn't himself," Muriel 
suggested, 

'* Tm quite sure / shouldn't wish for a. 
portrait of any one belonging to me who 
looked like that,'' Kitty declared positively^ 
"Should you, Mr. Archer?" 

Mr. Archer did not appear to be pre- 
pared with a reply, and it was left to 
Mr. Wygram to explain that the portrait 
in question had been ordered by the 
college to which the learned professor 
belonged, being destined to be in due 
time hung in a place of honour upon one 
of the walls of their dining hall. 

After this, Muriel announced that they 
must be going, the two gentlemen ac- 
companying them to the door. On open- 
ing it, it was found, however, to be 
raining, so a servant was despatched for 
a cab. He returned shortly, however, say- 
ing that no cabs were to be found in the 



MR. WYGRAM AT HOME. I5I 

neighbourhood, but that if the ladies liked 
he would fetch one from Knightsbridge* 
This Muriel declared to be quite un- 
necessary, as they were perfectly able to 
walk. Finally it was agreed that they 
should do so, under the shelter of the two 
gentlemen's umbrellas, an arrangement the 
more desirable seeing that Miss King's 
provision against the weather was found 
to consist of a white lace parasol, orna- 
mented with two bunches of flowers to 
match the ribbons on her dress. 

They set forth accordingly, Muriel and 
Mr. Wygram first, Miss King and Mr. 
Archer bringing up the rear. Just as 
they were nearing MurieFs house, Kitty — 
who had hitherto lingered some distance 
behind^ — suddenly came up, followed breath- 
lessly by Mr, Archer and the umbrella, 
and insisted upon walking abreast of the 
others for the remainder of the way, to 
the no small inconvenience of other pedes- 



152 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

trians. Arrived at the house, she refused, 
moreover, to be escorted further, alleging 
her intention of remaining. No sooner, 
however, had the two gentlemen departed,' 
than she snatched up an umbrella, and 
declared that she must be off. 

" But, my dear Kitty, what in the world 
possesses you ? " Muriel said, in a tone of 
amazement. " A minute ago you said 
you were going to stay." 

" I know I did, Muriel ; but I can't I 
only said it to get rid of them — of him, 
I mean." 

" Of them ? — of him ? Does that mean 
Mr. Wygram and Mr. Archer? What 
have they done that you should be so 
desperately anxious to fly them ? " 

"Mr. Wygram has done nothing — 

nothing, at least, that I know of; but 

Mr. Archer has done everything!" Kitty 

replied, succinctly. 

' " Everything ? That is a sweeping 



. MR. WYGRAM AT HOME,. 1 53 

accusation ! He seemed to me to be 
very harmless. Do tell me, Kitty, what 
he has done," Muriel said, smiling. 

" I can't, Muriel — not now, at any rate, 
ril come to-morrow, if you like, and tell 
you ; but I must go home now." 

" This is all very mysterious, Kitty," 
Muriel said, unable to help laughing at 
the portentous air of gravity assumed by 
her generally volatile and inconsjequent 
little friend. 

'^ I don't know what you call mysterious,- 
Muriel," that young lady answered in an 
offended tone. " I call it simply idiotic. 
That Fred Archer is the very greatest 
booby I ever came across in my whole 
life!" 

*' Poor young man ! Really, Kitty, you 
have quite aroused my curiosity. Pray 
tell me what this is all about." 

" I can't indeed, Muriel." 

" If you don't, I warn you that I shall 



154 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

probably think it a great deal more serious 
than it really is." 

" You caiit think it more serious than it 
is— in one sense, at least, I mean." 

"In one sense ? In what sense ? Does 
all this mean that I am shortly to have 
the honour of congratulating you, Miss 
King ? " Muriel inquired, smiling. 

Kitty's blue eyes expanded in fierce 
disdain. " Indeed, Muriel, you are to do 
nothing of the sort ! " she cried indignantly. 
''Quite the contrary!" And, snatching 
up the umbrella, she flew out of the house 
and down the street, turning rapidly in the 
direction of her own home. 



( 155 ) 



CHAPTER VI. 

AN IMPENDING ORDEAL, 

Muriel awoke next morning with a vague 
impression of something bright and plea- 
sant in the immediate past; that odd, 
undefined, unlocalized impression of some- 
thing pleasurable — or too often of some- 
thing extremely the reverse — ^which is 
such a familiar experience to most of us. 
In this case it did not take her very long 
to localize the impression. Certainly it did 
not refer to anything in her own home> 
where matters of late had been about as 
little enjoyable as could well be conceived. 
No, that bright streak which lay like a 
gleam across her memory, referred to the 
pleasant hour which she and Kitty King 



156 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

had Spent the day before in Mr. Wygram's 
studio. What had particularly remained 
on her mind as comforting and satisfactory 
had been the artist's own manner, and 
especially his manner to herself. Poor 
Muriel had all her life been so stinted 
and starved in the matter of real ties that 
she was apt to cling with more than 
common tenacity to those friendships 
which had either come to her accidentally, 
or which she had made for herself; and 
amongst these self-made friendships Mr. 
Wygram's had been chief. He had been 
extremely kind to her, and she had 
thoroughly appreciated his kindness ; he 
had liked her, and she had reciprocated 
his liking. She had come to look upon 
this friendship of his as a sort of posses- 
sion — a bond of freemasonry which she 
owned, and by no means one of the least 
pleasant consequences which she owed to 
her art. Of course she had not entirely 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. I57 

escaped innuendoes as to the probability 
of that bond being some day or other ex- 
changed for a warmer one ; but these she 
had been able hitherto honestly to dis- 
regard. Mr. Wygram had never himself,, 
she thought, given any countenance to 
5uch a notion, and certainly it was the last 
thing which she desired herself. Besides, 
though still to all intents and purposes a 
young man, the difference of age between 
them — nearly twenty years — was un- 
doubtedly great; almost great enough to 
entitle him, if he chose, to regard her as 
a daughter. Not that, of course, she sup- 
posed for a moment that he did regard her 
as a daughter. He was both too young 
for his age, and she too old for hers, for 
anything of the sort to be possible. Still 
she really did conscientiously believe that 
he looked upon her simply as a friend — a 
very near and dear friend ; one in whose 
welfare he would always take the warmest 



158 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

interest, as he might take in that of a sister 
or of a favourite cousin — but nothing 
more. Of late, however, especially since 
her return from Hampshire, this confidence 
had been somewhat shaken. Not that 
Mn Wygram had said anything that could 
be construed even by the most hyper- 
sensitive of ears into a declaration of love, 
but there had been a certain emphasis 
and eagerness in his manner of which 
^he could not help being conscious, and 
ivhich had filled her with vague uneasiness. 
She liked him so very, very much ; she 
valued his friendship so highly, that it 
troubled her to think that she could ever 
lose that friendship. Since she did not 
certainly wish him to be more than a 
friend, every change in this direction must 
plainly be a loss. Yesterday, however, at 
the studio, it seemed to her as if all the 
old pleasant footing had been regained. 
Mr. Wygram had been friendly, but he 



. AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. 1 59 

•had certainly not been anything more than 
friendly. In his disquisitions about art. 
in his amused perception of Kitty King's 
very evident coquetry, in everything he 
had said or done, he had been exactly his 
old self — kind, thoughtful, considerate, 
authoritative. She was able, therefore, to 
make .up her mind that whatever had 
seemed different in his manner had been 
purely the result of accident, and that for 
the future, in short, she might safely dis- 
miss all idea of danger in this direction 
as utterly and entirely chimerical. 

It was just while she was dwelling on, 
and inwardly congratulating herself upon 
this result, that a note was put into her 
hand by Eliza. It contained but a few 
lines, and ran as follows : — 

" Dear Miss Ellis, 

'* Could you see me to-day at 
three o'clock ? Pray do not refuse. It 



l6o A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

is of very particular importance to my 
happiness that I should see you. 
" Yours in any case devotedly, 

" John Phillpots Wygram.*' 

To say that Muriel was disturbed at the* 
receipt of this letter is to say little. She 
was appalled, aghast, consternated. The 
whole fabric she had just been so carefully 
rearing in her mind seemed to come 
toppling about her, like a house of cards^ 
and in its place seemed to arise a new 
one — that of Mr. Wygram, angry, disap- 
pointed, perhaps alienated from her for 
ever. What could he possibly have to say,, 
that required such a serious, nay, such a 
solemn preamble, except the one thing of 
all others which she had hoped never to 
hear from his lips ? Should she refuse to 
see him at all, she thought, and so escape 
the dilemma ? A little reflection, however,, 
convinced her that that would be simply 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. l6l 

useless, nay, ridiculous — a mere postpone- 
ment of the evil day. If Mr. Wygram 
had made up his mind to speak, speak he 
would, whatever she might say or do. 
She took up the letter again, trying to 
extract some other and less formidable 
meaning from the words. But no, in its 
brevity, and conciseness, in its wery absti- 
nence from all the usual social forms, she 
could only read one meaning — the very 
last she desired to discover there. Mean- 
time, thie messenger was waiting, and it 
was obviously necessary to return some 
answer ; the question was what was that 
answer to be ? At length, though not 
until after considerable hesitation, she 
despatched a note to the effect that she 
would be at home at the hour named, 
and then went down to breakfast, feeling 
as if some sort of cataclysm or moral 
earthquake had suddenly opened across 
her path. 

VOL. II. M 



1 62 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

After breakfast she went upstairs again 
to her studio. The rain had continued all 
night, and still fell heavily, dropping down 
from every roof, and turning the whole 
road into a perfect labyrinth of puddles. 
It was just the day of all others for settling 
down to some steady regular indoor work, 
but Muriel felt incapable of settling 
steadily to anything. Her mind was in a 
perfect whirl, disorganized, restless, full of 
that vague sense of expectancy, the most 
antagonistic, perhaps, of all others tx) 
steady effort. She took down all the care- 
fully arranged mufflings from the window, 
and stood looking out across the dripping 
bushes, at the black shiny railings, spongy 
trees, and yellow river rolling so sleepily 
and sullenly by. A big timber-barge was 
coming slowly down upon the current ; 
so slowly, indeed, that it was only by 
measuring its progress against the opposite 
shore that she was able to see that it 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. 1 63 

moved at all. A single figure, armed with 
a long black pole, stood at the prow, 
tugging it back into the current, whenever 
the big, overladen thing seemed disposed 
to sway towards the one bank or the other. 
Hours must have elapsed since he left his 
moorings a few miles up the river, and 
hours would yet elapse before he reached 
his destination a few miles lower down. 
Muriel found herself watching that man, 
and speculating about his life, and what 
he thought of as he plied his way up 
and down that grim, smoke-enveloped 
water-way. After the timber-barge came 
a long train of coal-boats, under the con- 
veyance of a tug, looking black enough 
and lugubrious enough in that murky grey 
atmosphere, to serve for some funeral 
procession adown the fated Styx. Then 
these, too, passed on, and the river for a 
while was left tenantless. 

Presently there came a ring at the outer 



1 64 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

bell, and, looking out, Muriel saw that a 
cab was standing at the entrance. Was it 
Kitty King, she wondered, come back to 
explain her mysterious conduct of the 
evening before ? A second glance, how- 
ever, showed that the cab had not brought 
any one, but was waiting for some one 
from the house ; indeed, a minute later 
the door opened, and Mrs. Skynner ap- 
peared in full visiting attire, sailing down 
under the shelter of an umbrella held over 
her by Eliza. At the same moment the 
bell rang again, and this time it really was 
Kitty who stood, umbrella in hand, at the 
gate. Muriel could not help wondering 
whether these two very antagonistic spirits 
would meet, and if so with what result 
Before long it became apparent that they 
had met, and that the concussion must 
have been even a more violent one than 
usual, for Kitty came into the room literally 
dancing with rage. 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. 1 65 

" That horrible, nasty, ill-tempered old 
cat ! " she exclaimed. 

" Kitty, be silent," Muriel cried angrily. 

Miss King obeyed this injunction by 
turning round and staring at her interlocu- 
trix with all the power of her widely 
opened blue eyes. 

" Well, Kitty, what now ? What are you 
looking at ? " inquired the latter. 

" Vm looking at you, Muriel,*' she 
replied calmly. " Tm trying to make you 
out." 

" Trying to make out what, Kitty ?" 

" Vou, I tell you, you ; Tm trying to 
make you out." 

*' I should say that you had a very easy 
task there," Muriel said, smiling. 

" Easy ? Not a bit of it — very difficult, 
quite as difficult as any of those nasty 
problems in perspective Mr. Malby is 
always setting me, and the more I look the 
less I understand." 



1 66 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Miss Ellis turned away towards the 
writing-table. " You seem to have de- 
veloped a new talent for mysteries, Kittys ; 
perhaps in time you'll kindly explain your- 
self," she said, taking up a pen, and begin- 
ning to write a note. 

Kitty followed and stood in front of her. 
" Now, Muriel, listen to me ; I want you 
to answer my question," she said. " You're 
very proud ; you know you are, you can't 
deny it; in fact, I don't know anybody 
prouder in their own way than you are, 
and yet you let that horrible vulgar woman 
bully you, and tyrannize over you, and 
insult your guests just for all the world as 
if you liked it. What do you do it for ? 
that's what I want to discover. No one 
can oblige you to have her here if you 
don't like ; then why do you ? Is it for a 
penance, or what ? Do now please tell 
me, there's a dear, and I'll promise never 
to repeat." 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. 1 67 

Muriel threw down her pen impatiently. 
" Once for all, Kitty, you will really make 
me extremely angry if you go on like 
this," she said in a tone of annoyance. 
" How often must I tell you that I cannot 
and will not sit still and hear my nearest 
relations abused ? " 

" Your nearest relations ! The widow 
of a half-brother whom you have told me 
yourself you hardly knew ! " 

"That doesn't prevent her from being 
one of my nearest relations." 

" You poor dear ! Fm sure I wish with 
all my heart you had any number of 
relations — * Not in ones or twos, but in 
dozens — fathers and mothers, aunts, sisters, 
and cousins,' " the inconsequent Kitty ex- 
claimed effusively. 

Muriel could not help laughing. " I 
don't think that would suit me, at all," she 
said. " I should feel smothered under 
such a weight of kindred as all that." 



l68 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" Then why keep that odious woman 
living with you ? " the other responded 
promptly. " Besides, that's not all, Muriel. 
Tve something else to tell you, something 
really very serious." 

Muriel smiled. 

" No, don't smile, Muriel. It is, I tell 
you, very serious ; and what's more, it will 
make you furious." 

" Then probably, Kitty, you had better 
not tell me." 

" Oh, but I must. I've kept it bottled 
up so long, that I should burst if I 
didn't. Now, will you promise not to 
be angry ? " 

" That entirely depends upon what it is ?" 

" Oh, it's something that I know wt/l 
make you angry. You will declare it is all 
my nonsense and spite, and wicked imagi- 
nation. But I know it's true. I've been 
suspecting it this long time, and now Tm 
certain — quite, quite certain." 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. 1 69 

" And what is it all about, this terrible 
something, Kitty ? " 

"About? Why, of course, it is about 
Mrs. Skynner." 

"Still about Mrs. Skynner.? I really 
thought that you had at last exhausted 
everything that even your powers of vitu- 
peration could find to say upon that score." 

" Not a bit of it, Muriel. This is some- 
thing quite new ; something that IVe 
never even hinted at before. In fact, I've 
only felt certain of it the last few days 
myself. It is that she — now don't be 
angry — that she — that I think — that Tm 
sure, she — doesn't like you. There ! Now 
it's out, and I feel ever so much better." 

Muriel smiled. " So this is your mighty 
mystery, is it, my poor Kitty ? " she said. 

" Muriel ! You don't mean to say that 
you suspected it yourself ? " 

"Well, yes, Kitty. I suppose I did 
suspect it." 



T70 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" You mean that you knew it — you knew 
she didn't like you ? " 

" I don't know about not liking. I don't 
fancy she is exactly fond of me, and after 
all, why in the world should she be ? She 
is not in the least bound to be that I can 
see ; and if she were even, we can't 
always regulate our likings and dislikings. 
I have disliked people myself without any 
particular reason. Not that I mean to say 
that Mrs. Skynner has no particular reason 
— very likely she has — but I mean that I do 
not think she is to be blamed. It is 
not a crime disliking me. Probably she 
would prefer to like me if she could." 

Kitty's face was a picture. " Well, 
Muriel, I never heard such a thing in my 
life," she exclaimed. '* Keeping a woman 
living in your house, and at your expense, 
who hates you ! " 

" Once for all, Kitty, you are not to go 
on repeating that nonsense," Muriel said 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. 1 71 

angrily. " As for its being my house, as 
long as it suits Sophia Skynner to live 
here it is as much hers as mine. She 
is my brother s widow, and when I was 
poor they helped me, and if she likes to 
stay here, why, stay she shall till the end 
of time, as far as I am concerned." 

" Even if she hates you ? " 

" Whether she hates me, or whether she 
loves me ; I don't see what that has got 
to say to it. And now, please, Kitty, have 
the goodness to leave the subject of Mrs. 
Skynner alone, and talk of something else. 
Remember that you have still to account 
for your mysterious conduct last night, and 
you have not yet told me what it was that 
poor unfortunate Mr. Archer said which so 
infuriated you ? *' 

It was now Kitty's turn' to assume an 
air of reticence. 

" I don't see that there is anything in 
particular to tell you, Muriel," she said, 



172 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

taking up a pencil and beginning to 
balance it nonchalantly upon her finger. 

" Nothing particular ? Not after ex- 
pressly promising to come and tell me all 
about it this morning ? " 

" Oh, as far as that goes, it doesn't re- 
quire a conjuror, I suppose, to guess what 
he did say," Kitty replied poutingly. 

Muriel smiled. "Well, if you put it 
like that, I suppose I can only guess one 
thing," she said. " I can only conclude 
that he asked you to marry him." 

Miss King nodded. 

" And what answer did you give him ? " 

" I gave him no answer at all. I simply 
ran away and left him there." 

" But, Kitty, you will have to give him 
an answer sooner or later. Every man 
expects an answer to that question." 

" Oh ! if that's all he wants, Muriel, I 
can easily give him an answer. Til give 
him a ' No ' as big as this house." 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. 1 73 

" Probably he would prefer a * Yes/" 

" I dare say he would, but he won't get 
it. In fact, I don't think that he deserves 
any answer at all. What right had he to 
torment me ? — taking advantage of my 
having to walk under his umbrella, too — 
I call it very dishonourable ! " 

" Perhaps he was afraid of not getting 
another opportunity," Muriel suggested. 

" rU take very good care he never does 
get another," Kitty responded tartly. 

" Do you know, Kitty, I think you're 
really extremely unkind and unfair to that 
poor young man," Muriel said. " What 
greater compliment, after all, could he or 
any man pay you than to ask you to be 
his wife ? " 

" I don't want such compliments — at 
any rate, not from him." 

"Well, but, Kitty, I think you used to 
like him. I remember you used to tell 
me a great deal about him when you first 



174 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

went to that drawing school. How 
good-natured he was, and how he used 
to help you with your drawings, and see 
that you were not put to sit in a draught. 
Have you forgotten all that ? " 

** No, Muriel, I haven't forgotten it, only 
you must remember that I was little better 
than a child then, so of course I liked 
anybody that was the least bit civil or 
kind to me. Besides, he has got worse — 
ever so much worse since then. He 
never was to say bright, but he wasn't 
nearly — not half — so stupid then as he is 
now." 

" But, indeed, Kitty, Mr. Wygram says 
that he is not stupid at all. On the 
contrary, that he paints, or will paint, ex- 
tremely well ; and in any case it's evident 
that he has cared for you a long time, so 
that I really think he deserves a little more 
courtesy and consideration at your hands 
than you seem disposed to show him." 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL, 1 75 

Kitty's face assumed an expression well 
known to her relations — an expression 
which meant that she was not going to 
be coerced into doing anything that she 
didn't choose. 

** Oh ! it s all very fine for you, Muriel ! " 
she exclaimed resentfully. "YouVe not 
asked to marry a lout of a creature, with 
ears like a barn-door owl, who blushes 
whenever he is spoken to. Mr. Wygram 
is a very different thing. Nobody need 
be ashamed of him ! " 

Muriel, who was putting away some 
drawings in a portfolio, turned round at 
this. 

** Mr. Wygram ? " she repeated. " What 
has he got to say to it ? Why do you talk 
to me about him, Kitty } " 

Kitty stared. " Why, Muriel, I did not 
know that it was a secret," she said. 

"You did not know that what was a 
secret ? " 



t( 



(( 



176 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" That you were going to marry him." 

"It certainly is a secret from me. I 
never heard of it before." 

This time Kitty's face expressed genuine 
amazement. 

You re noi ? " she exclaimed. 
Certainly not." 

"But everybody says you are." 

" Everybody knows nothing about it. 
Besides, everybody says nothing of the 
kind." 

" But indeed, indeed, I assure you, 
Muriel, they do. Why, even that stupid 
Fred Archer asked me yesterday when 
it was to be, and whether it hadn't been 
going on a long time." 

Muriel coloured angrily. " People are 
extremely kind to concern themselves with 
my affairs," she said haughtily. 

" Then have you refused him, Muriel } " 
Kitty inquired, in rather awestricken tones. 
To refuse a personage of Mr. Wygram's 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. I 77 

calibre seemed to her a very different 
matter from refusing a mere beardless 

nobody like the hapless Archer. 

"Certainly not. There has been no 
necessity. Mr. Wygram has never said 
anything of the kind to me." 

" But he will, Muriel ; you know per- 
fectly well that he means to. You can't 
deny that," Kitty persisted triumphantly. 

Muriel hesitated. Yesterday — this morn- 
ing, even — she would have denied it, and 
that too emphatically, but now, with that 
letter in her pocket and this dreadful inter- 
view hanging over her, a denial was not so 
easy. She would not prevaricate ; there 
was nothing for it, therefore, but to put a 
summary stop to Miss Kitty's loquacity. 

" I know nothing about Mr. Wygram, or 
his intentions," she said coldly. " And if I 
did, it would be the last thing I should talk 
about. So, please, oblige me, Kitty, by find- 
ing some other subject of conversation." 

VOL. II. N 



l8o A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

if he came home and found that it was 
gone. 

Muriel was quite ready not only to 
forgive her, but further, to press her to 
stay for luncheon, as their own would 
probably be over before she returned. 

" Now, isn't that just my family all over?" 
Kitty exclaimed indignantly. " They can't 
so much as mislay a key, but they must 
instantly rush to the conclusion that / 
have taken it. So likely that I would go 
out visiting with a great hulking key stick- 
ing out of my pocket ! I wonder that 
they don't say I've pawned it, or sold it 
to the tinkers for old iron ! " 

" Arabella only thought you might have 
taken it, Kitty," her sister said depre- 
catingly. "You know you do sometimes 
put your things in there when you are 
in a hurry." 

This second Miss King was a plain, 
stolid-looking girl, very unlike her more 



AN IMPENDING ORDEAL. l8l 

brilliant and versatile sister, whom she, 
for her part, appeared to regard with the 
sort of wonder, not unmixed with awe, 
which some honest brahmin or dorking 
might be supposed to feel for the more 
dazzling-hued peacock or silver pheasant 
which fate had allotted to the same 
poultry-yard. Indeed, Kitty, it must be 
said, enjoyed to the full that peculiar 
sort of prestige which attaches to the one 
brilliant and attractive member of a some- 
what dull and uninteresting family. Her 
sisters, even while actually suffering under 
her flightiness and capricious humours, 
being not unalive to the lustre which this 
very flightiness and capriciousness lent to 
their own more sterling and unequivocal 
qualities— qualities which, without some 
such foil as this, might, in so unappre- 
ciative a world, have possibly passed with- 
out recognition altogether ! 



1 82 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER* 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 



Luncheon over, the two sisters still 
lingered. The elder Miss King had never 
been in the studio before, and accordingly 
Kitty took upon herself to act as show 
woman, pulling out portfolios and ex- 
pounding upon their contents with much 
gusto and satisfaction. As three o'clock 
drew near, Muriel began to feel extremely 
nervous. The thought of this impending 
interview weighed upon her like a night- 
mare. What would Mr. Wygram say ? 
she wondered. Could she by any art 
or ingenuity so contrive as to ward off this 
most terribly unwelcome declaration which 
seemed impending ? Or was it possible — 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 183 

thrice blessed possibility — that she could, 
after all, have mistaken the drift of his 
meaning, and that nothing could be further 
from his intention than to make any- 
such declaration at all ? In that case 
she would have, she felt, to blush for her 
own vanity and folly, but surely any 
amount of such blushing would be better 
than what at present seemed awaiting her ? 
Should she keep her present guests all 
through his visit, she thought, or would 
it be better to hurry them off at once, and 
so leave the stage clear for what was to 
follow ? 

All this and a good deal more went on 
in her mind under the cover of Kittys 
volubility, every knock that came to the 
door set her heart throbbing excitedly. 
When, however, punctual to the moment, 
Mr. Wygram appeared, she felt herself, 
on the contrary, getting cold with nervous- 
ness, and could hardly go through the 



184 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

ordinary form of receiving him. She got 
up for a minute, and then sat down again, 
a sense of guilt seeming to pervade her 
entire being. Mr. Wygram, however, did 
not sit down. He stood, with his hat in 
his hand, looking about him with his usual 
air of suave superiority, a suavity slightly 
clouded at present by an evident impres- 
sion that matters might have arranged 
themselves on this occasion in better 
accordance with his wishes. 

This air of his had such an effect upon 
the elder of the two Miss Kings that she 
presently got up, and declared that she 
must be going ; Kitty could follow if she 
liked. That latter young lady, however, 
whose blue eyes had been twinkling 
maliciously ever since Mr. Wygram's 
arrival on the scene, declared positively 
that nothing earthly would induce her to 
remain an instant ; an assertion which she 
qualified by explaining that what she 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 185 

meant was that nothing would induce her 
to be out of the way when the investiga- 
tion as regards the whereabouts of the key 
came off ; if she did, her family, she knew, 
would inevitably give it against her. 

The sisters departed, Muriel prepared 
herself for the worst. Mr. Wygram did 
not, however, appear to be in any par- 
ticular hurry to avail himself of their 
absence. He even left his place, and 
moved a little about the room, looking at 
one thing and another. Presently he took 
up a portrait of Mrs. Prettyman, which 
Muriel had begun a few days before, and 
turned it round, so that the light might 
fall upon it. 

" Admirable ! " he exclaimed. " How 
well you have caught the look — that small 
fine smile, and the alert look about those 
old eyes ! Now, do you know, I couldn't 
have done that. I shouldn't have seen 
it," he continued, turning round to her. 



1 86 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Muriel smiled, and shook her head, feel- 
ing rather mystified. 

" No, upon my honour ; a man's eyes 
. are duller. And the painting, too, is good 
— round and firm and solid. You should 
take to portraits, Miss Ellis ; you should 
indeed ; you have it all there," tapping 
the stretcher of the canvas. 

*' Take to portraits ? " she repeated 
vaguely. " Do you mean have people 
coming here to sit to me ? " 

*' Yes ; why not ? Should you dislike 
that ? " 

"Well, yes, I think I should dislike it 
rather." 

" But why ? Do .tell me why ? " 

"Well, for several reasons. I like 
painting my own friends and choosing my 
own types. Rich people, who pay for 
having their portraits painted, are generally 
very ugly types." 

" Not all. Look at Lady Hermione 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 187 

Dalrymple ; I showed you her portrait 
yesterday. Where could you find a better 
model ? " 

" I did not mean all, of course ; still, if 
once I began, I suppose I should have 
to paint them all, ugly or not, and I think 
I should prefer not." 

Mr. Wygram put back the picture 
against the wall, not impatiently, but as 
much as to say that there was an end of 
that matter ; then, coming back, he stood 
in front of Muriel, looking down on her as 
she sat at work. 

" You don't care for art as you did," he 
said, with a sort of mild reproachfulness. 
*' You are getting tired of it. You don't 
mean to stick to it — not seriously." Then, 
as Muriel attempted a denial, " No, no, do 
not deny it. I have seen it coming on 
a long time," he continued. "You are 
getting sick of it ; you have had enough. 
It. bores you." 



1 88 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

A sudden inspiration seized Muriel. If 
she could only get into an argument with 
him, she thought, and even quarrel a little, 
the dreaded interview might pass safely 
by, and all would be well. 

" Really, Mr. Wygram, I don't think 
that is fair ; I don't see that you have any 
right to reproach me," she exclaimed in a 
tone of spirited remonstrance. " You 
yourself are not by any means such a slave 
to your brush. In fact, I suspect that you 
take many more holidays, and go about 
a great deal more than I do, if the truth 
was only known." 

"Very likely, but still that is different, 
you know it is.'* He changed his position 
slightly, still, however, standing and look- 
ing down at her. " I used to think. Miss 
Ellis, that you were made to be an artist's 
wife," he then said slowly. 

Muriel started, and involuntarily looked 
up. 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 1 89 

"Yes, that was my hope — I may say 
my conviction/' he continued in the same 
level, unaccentuated tone ; " but now — now 
I begin to doubt." 

He paused, as if to allow her to speak ; 
but Muriel remained dumb. What was 
she expected to say ? she wondered. Was 
that meant for a declaration or was it not ? 
or did it possibly mean that he had once 
intended to make her such a declara- 
tion, but that further acquaintance had 
convinced him of her unfitness for it ? 
Certainly his words admitted of either 
interpretation. 

Mr. Wygram did not, however, leave 
her long in doubt. 

"Yes, that was my hope," he repeated. 
"It has always seemed to me that it would 
be a perfect life — two people working 
together — caring for the same things, en- 
joying their own work, and yet each at 
the same time proud of the other's sue- 



I go A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

cesses. I fancied you thought so too — 
until lately." 

He paused again, but she still said 
nothing. " Could you, do you think, be 
happy as an artist's wife ? " he then in- 
quired ; and this time there was an ardour 
and an emphasis in his voice which gave 
unmistakable point to the question. 

Muriel felt that the dreaded moment 
had indeed come ; still she was not with- 
out some hope of passing the whole thing 
off easily. It was quite true that she had 
often thought that the life here sketched 
would, in the abstract, be a very delightful 
one. More than that, she had even 
thought that, if she herself ever married, 
she should certainly prefer her husband — 
in the abstract — to be a painter. Now, 
however, the question was by no means in 
the abstract; on the contrary, extremely 
concrete — standing there in remarkably 
substantial flesh and blood before her. If 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. I9I 

she now said " Yes " therefore would it not 
be equivalent to a formal acceptation, 
unless, of course, she was discourteous 
enough to add that, though she would 
marry an artist, she would not marry this 
particular artist here present ! There was 
nothing for it therefore but to say " No." 

" I am afraid that it would not suit me 
to be an artist's wife," she said gravely. 

To her surprise, Mr. Wygram, far from 
looking discomfited, or abruptly changing 
the conversation, appeared rather relieved 
than otherwise by her answer. He took 
a chair and sat down, looking more alert 
and like himself than he had done yet. 

" That was what I thought ; that, in 
fact, was what chiefly brought me here 
to-day," he said eagerly. Then he paused, 
and began again in a different tone. " I 
need not, I am sure, Miss Ellis, tell you 
what my feeling for you is ; you must have 
seen it — every one, I think, has seen it. If 



192 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

I have hesitated to put it into words it 
was because I feared to startle you. I 
hoped that time might stand my friend ; 
that you would grow used to me, and that 
growing used to me you might come to 
feel that I was a man whom you might 
trust. No, do not answer yet," he added 
hastily. " Let me say my say ; it will 
not be a very long one. What I came 
to-day to tell you was, that if you would 
prefer my not being an artist, I am 
ready to give up even that. I would give 
up art altogether, if you wished. You 
could live where you liked, and how you 
liked ; I would take a place in the country 
or anywhere you preferred ; I have money 
enough, as far as that goes, apart from 
anything I earn." He paused a little, 
and then said, very slowly and deliber- 
ately, " I am fond of my art, as you know, 
Muriel ; but I care more, very much more 
for you." 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 1 93 

Muriel, whatever her previous determi- 
nation, could not but be deeply touched 
with those concluding words. It was no 
light sacrifice that was being offered 
her. Mr. Wygram's devotion to his art 
was almost a by-word ; a rich man, 
without the usual spur and incentive of 
necessity, no allurements or temptations 
had hitherto succeeded in weaning him 
from his brush. She could judge, there- 
fore, of the cost and value of what was 
here offered her. 

" Oh, Mr. Wygram, I am so sorry, so 
very sorry," she said tremulously, " but 
indeed it is impossible ; quite impossible.'' 

He drew back a little. " What is im- 
possible ? *' he asked. 

" What you wish." 

" Impossible that you can marry me ? " 

" Yes." 

He stood still, looking steadily at her 
a moment without speaking. 

VOL. II. o 



194 ^ CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" Why ? " he said at last. 

'* Oh, but for so many, many reasons." 

" Tell me one." Then, as she hesitated, 
" Is it on account of the difference of our 
ages ? " 

" Oh no, no, not that, indeed — ^but " 

" Well ? " 

" Because, well, because — because I do 
not love you ; that is the chief reason,'* she 
cried, driven to desperation. 

" Oh, but that is not a sufficient reason ; 
it is not, indeed," he said eagerly. " I 
mean that I did not expect it; I never 
flattered myself that you were what people 
call in love with me. Many things — my 
age, the difference of our tastes, a variety 
of circumstances might prevent that." 
He returned and stood in front of her. 
" If you will only confide yourself to me, 
Muriel," he said ardently ; " if you will 
only trust me, I know that I can make 
you happy ; I feel certain, absolutely 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 1 95 

certain of that. I have studied your 
tastes, your feelings, your disposition. I 
know you thoroughly — even your faults. 
Indeed, you may trust yourself to me. 
You will never repent it — never, never." 

Muriel felt that the task before her was 
not less difficult than she anticipated, but, 
on the contrary, ten thousand times more 
so. What was she to say to a suitor who 
offered so much and asked so little ? who 
was so kind, so patient, so confiding ? 

"Oh do not please be angry with 
me," she cried. " Be generous — be like 
yourself. Believe me when I say that 
it cannot be — never — never. Indeed, I 
would not wound you if I could help it. 
Believe me that it is impossible — quite, 
quite impossible." 

" I cannot believe that," he said slowly. 
" I may have been misled by my hopes, 
but certainly I thought you liked me — 
once. You have changed, Muriel — 



196 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

changed about other things besides paint- 
ing. A month ago you would not have 
dismissed me so summarily. Something 

has changed you. What is it ? Tell 

>> 
me. 

" But, indeed, indeed I have not 
changed," she said earnestly. "It would 
have been impossible always — just as im- 
possible as it is to-day." 

He shook his head. 

" No, it would not," he replied. '* You 
may say it, you may even think it, but 
it is not so. I know you better than you 
know yourself. I have felt the difference 
every time we have met lately. I feel 
it now." 

He walked away towards the door, then 
turned hastily back. 

" All the same, I cannot give it up like 
this," he cried, and there was a passion 
in his voice now that there had not 
been yet. " I am not a boy, Muriel, to 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 1 97 

take things lightly — to choose and to 
change again. I have thought of this for 
so long — ever since I first knew you. I 
cannot give it up. But I will wait," he 
added hastily, "wait as long as ever you 
like — only tell me that I may hope." 

" But I cannot — indeed I cannot ! " she 
exclaimed, clasping her hands. " It is 
impossible." 

His face darkened. "At least, then, tell 
me what has changed you ? " he said 
sternly. " Something has. What is it ? " 

" Indeed, no. Nothing." 

" Do not say so ; you have always 
been truthful, Muriel ; be truthful now. 
Dismiss me, of course, if you choose ; but 
at least tell me why — tell me who " 

He stopped, and looked towards the 
door. Steps were heard approaching. It 
opened, and Eliza entered to announce a 
visitor, followed the next moment by — 
Mr. Roger Hyde. 



igS A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Muriel, of course, expected that her 
late suitor would forthwith seize an early- 
opportunity of departing, but apparently 
this was not the course which commended 
itself to him. He and Hyde were slightly 
acquainted, but, after the first minute, 
Mr. Wygram contributed nothing to the 
conversation, which indeed was entirely 
sustained by the new comer, Muriel herself 
throwing in an occasional yes or no at 
random, her mind in a perfect whirl, unable 
to detach itself from the scene in which 
she had just been bearing a part. 

Whether any perception of something 
feverish and electric in the air did or did 
not convey itself to that astute little 
gentleman's perceptions, he, at all events, 
proved himself as usual fully equal to the 
emergency. Selecting the lowest chair in 
the room, he seated himself in the easiest 
of conversational attitudes, and proceeded 
to pour forth a succession of such small 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. IQQ 

social particulars as happily required little 
or no response upon Muriel's part. 
Had Miss Ellis heard, he inquired, of 
the prince that had just arrived ? the 
blackest prince ever yet seen in London. 
He was at Lady Hatherton's ball last 
night, and nobody else had a chance 
beside him. As for Lady Hildegarde 
St. Vincent, she was so struck that her 
mother, the duchess, thought it advisable 
to take her away before the cotillon, for 
it would be a pity, of course, if her en- 
gagement to her cousin. Lord Seldon, 
was disturbed in consequence ; particularly 
as the prince (Miss Ellis must really 
excuse his not attempting his name) had 
already four wives, so that it was ex- 
tremely improbable he would be willing 
to embark upon a fifth, even if the Dale- 
shires would consent to the alliance, which 
very likely they would not. Though 
indeed nowadays, when dukes' daughters 



200 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

married tallow-chandlers, and worse, there 
was nothing so very outrageous in one of 
them marrying a prince, whatever might 
be the colour of his skin. 

To all this, and a good deal more, of the 
same kind, Muriel listened, feeling as if the 
voice was coming to her out of the middle 
of a dream. Would he ever go ? she won- 
dered. How extraordinarily stupid it was 
of her not to have taken the precaution of 
forbidding any other visitor being admitted 
while Mr. Wygram was there. Once she 
ventured to look in the latter's direction, 
but his head was turned away, and she 
could not see his face. A yellow railway 
novel happened to be lying on the table, 
which Kitty King had left the day before 
with an entreaty that Muriel would read 
it. Outside this work was adorned with 
one of those portentous designs against 
which the wave of sestheticism has hitherto 
broken in vain. A gentleman, arrayed in 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 20I 

a green cut-away coat and a pair of re- 
markably tight trousers of the lightest 
possible shade of blue, was apparently 
swooning in the arms of a lady, described 
inside as a miracle of beauty and elegance, 
but whose portrait depicted her in a 
costume of red and yellow bed-curtains, 
surmounted by a waving edifice of ostrich 
feathers. This engaging design Mr. 
Wygram had taken up, and was now 
poring over it as if entranced with its 
loveliness ; nor did he so much as once 
raise his head or change his position all 
the time that the visitor remained. 

Muriel's already tolerably acute remorse 
became naturally deepened and widened 
tenfold at seeing him thus. Mr. Wygram 
had always stood to her so completely 
as the ideal of imperturbability and 
social success, that to see him thus hors 
de combat, unable to rally or take part 
in the passing moment, gave her a shock 



202 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

■ 

greater than the apparent cause. It 
seemed to show that the barb which her 
hand so unwittingly had launched must 
have gone deeper than she had even 
feared. What was she, she thought, with 
a sudden pang of self-abasement, that 
such a man, so good, so kind, so gallant 
a gentleman, should be thus mortified and 
made miserable upon her account ? 

At last, after an interval which to her 
perceptions seemed endless, but which had 
really barely lasted ten minutes, Hyde 
got up, and prepared to take his leave, 
still, however, discoursing volubly. Had 
Miss Ellis seen anything of Halliday since 
his return ? he inquired. Probably not. 
He was the worst visitor in the world. 
He himself had made one effort to go and 
see him, but even friendship had its limits, 
and he drew the line at Whitechapel. 
Extraordinary piece of perverted con- 
scientiousness, certainly, that notion of 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 203 

Halliday's that duty required him to live 
in such a place, and spend the best years 
of his life coddling old women and wash- 
ing charity children's faces, when there was 
that father of his, too, whose only request 
had been that he would spend as much 
money as he liked, and live like a gentle- 
man. True, old Halliday's notion of living 
like a gentleman was probably of a very 
roturiere order, but still the son ought to 
have had no difficulty in modifying that 
to his own taste. And, after all, the old 
fellow was really perfectly right. Nothing 
would suit Halliday so well as to be a 
country squire, unless, of course, he could 
go off to the ends of the earth as a 
Franklin, or a Livingstone, or something 
of that sort. In any case, could anything 
be more preposterous than his own notion 
of going and settling himself amongst a 
pack of curates and district visitors, whose 
wildest idea of adventure was a tea-party 



204 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

or a mothers* meeting ? — a man with a 
physique like that! He was the best 
fellow in the world, but he had clearly 
mistaken his vocation. He was not a 
St. Vincent de Paul, or a St. Augustine, 
or anything even remotely resembling 
them. What nature really intended him 
to be was a sort of idealized Squire 
Western, a pattern of all the manly accom- 
plishments, and the great patron of field 
sports in his neighbourhood, not a parson 
whose cloth forbids him even to hunt or 
to shoot ! 

At another time all this would have 
interested Muriel extremely. She had 
often wondered what Halliday's relations 
with his own family really were, and 
whether those relations could have any- 
thing to say to that depression and self- 
dissatisfaction which so evidently weighed 
upon him. At present, however, her feel- 
ing was that it was a sort of treason to 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 20$ 

Mr. Wygram to allow herself even to 
think of any one else, her one desire 
being that Hyde would go, and that 
the situation — the tension of which was 
beginning to tell upon her own nerves 
— should, somehow or other, come to an 
end. 

At last that desirable consummation 
came to pass, and she and Wygram were 
alone. The instant the door closed, Muriel 
crossed the space dividing them, and laid 
her hand timidly upon his sleeve. 

" Mr. Wygram," she said, '* do speak 
to me ; do tell me you will forgive me. 
I feel so dreadfully conscience-stricken at 
having grieved you — you, too, who have 
always been so good to me. Say that 
you do not blame me — that you will not 
cease to be my friend ? " She paused, 
and stood looking appealingly at him. 

He looked up. " Blame you ? no, I 
don't blame you exactly," he said slowly. 



202 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

greater than the apparent cause. It 
seemed to show that the barb which her 
hand so unwittingly had launched must 
have gone deeper than she had even 
feared. What was she, she thought, with 
a sudden pang of self-abasement, that 
such a man, so good, so kind, so gallant 
a gentleman, should be thus mortified and 
made miserable upon her account ? 

At last, after an interval which to her 
perceptions seemed endless, but which had 
really barely lasted ten minutes, Hyde 
got up, and prepared to take his leave, 
still, however, discoursing volubly. Had 
Miss Ellis seen anything of Halliday since 
his return ? he inquired. Probably not. 
He was the worst visitor in the world. 
He himself had made one effort to go and 
see him, but even friendship had its limits, 
and he drew the line at Whitechapel. 
Extraordinary piece of perverted con- 
scientiousness, certainly, that notion of 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 203 

Halliday's that duty required him to live 
in such a place, and spend the best years 
of his life coddling old women and wash- 
ing charity children's faces, when there was 
that father of his, too, whose only request 
had been that he would spend as much 
money as he liked, and live like a gentle- 
man. True, old Halliday's notion of living 
like a gentleman was probably of a very 
rottiriere order, but still the son ought to 
have had no difficulty in modifying that 
to his own taste. And, after all, the old 
fellow was really perfectly right. Nothing 
would suit Halliday so well as to be a 
country squire, unless, of course, he could 
go off to the ends of the earth as a 
Franklin, or a Livingstone, or something 
of that sort. In any case, could anything 
be more preposterous than his own notion 
of* going and settling himself amongst a 
pack of curates and district visitors, whose 
wildest idea of adventure was a tea-party 



204 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

or a mothers* meeting ? — a man with a 
physique like that! He was the best 
fellow in the world, but he had clearly 
mistaken his vocation. He was not a 
St. Vincent de Paul, or a St. Augustine, 
or anything even remotely resembling 
them. What nature really intended him 
to be was a sort of idealized Squire 
Western, a pattern of all the manly accom- 
plishments, and the great patron of field 
sports in his neighbourhood, not a parson 
whose cloth forbids him even to hunt or 
to shoot ! 

At another time all this would have 
interested Muriel extremely. She had 
often wondered what Halliday's relations 
with his own family really were, and 
whether those relations could have any- 
thing to say to that depression and self- 
dissatisfaction which so evidently weighed 
upon him. At present, however, her feel- 
ing was that it was a sort of treason to 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 20$ 

Mr. Wygram to allow herself even to 
think of any one else, her one desire 
being that Hyde would go, and that 
the situation — the tension of which was 
beginning to tell upon her own nerves 
— should, somehow or other, come to an 
end. 

At last that desirable consummation 
came to pass, and she and Wygram were 
alone. The instant the door closed, Muriel 
crossed the space dividing them, and laid 
her hand timidly upon his sleeve. 

" Mr. Wygram," she said, " do speak 
to me ; do tell me you will forgive me. 
I feel so dreadfully conscience-stricken at 
having grieved you — you, too, who have 
always been so good to me. Say that 
you do not blame me — that you will not 
cease to be my friend ? " She paused, 
and stood looking appealingly at him. 

He looked up. " Blame you ? no, I 
don't blame you exactly," he said slowly. 



206 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" I am unhappy, and it is your doing, 
but it is hardly your fault. You gave 
me no right to think that you were likely 
to give me any better hearing, though 
somehow or other I did think it — mas- 
culine vanity, I suppose you will say ? " 
He got up and stood looking down at 
her. " You are positively certain, Muriel, 
that this is all quite impossible ? " he 
then said quietly. 

" Indeed, yes, quite," she answered sadly. 

" Very well, then, there is an end of it ; " 
— he gave himself a sort of shake. " I 
have been thinking what I will do all the 
time that little rattlepate has been here. 
I will go abroad. I will go " — he paused 
an instant — " to America." 

" To America ? " she repeated in a tone 
of dismay. 

"Yes. I have often thought of going 
there. I should like to see the country 
— Niagara, you know, and all that sort of 



THE ORDEAL IS PAST. 207 

thing. They are a wonderful people, too ; 
and I hear they are making great efforts 
in the direction of getting up a good 
school of art. Very likely I shall go on 
then to Japan ; I should rather like to see 
those potteries of theirs at home." He 
held out his hand, and she gave him both 
hers, and he held them in a tight grasp. 
'*You see, not having cared for any one 
else — at all events, since I was a boy — 
makes it seem worse to me than it would 
to another," he said in a sort of half 
apologetic tone. " Never mind, Muriel ; 
ril get over it, so don't you worry your- 
self." 

Muriel, of course, felt a thousandfold 
more conscience-stricken by this magnani- 
mous abstention from reproach, than she 
would have been by the wildest and 
bitterest invectives. Oh, why could she 
not do as he wished ? she thought. Where 
else could she find any one so good, so 



2o8 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

kind, so true ? What fatality was it urged 
her into sending him away from her ? 

" Indeed, indeed you will," she cried 
eagerly. "You will see some one else, 
too, better — far better and worthier of you 
than I am ! " 

He smiled rather ruefully. " Perhaps I 
shall," he answered. " In Japan, who 
knows ? At any rate, don't you blame 
yourself. It was to be, as the fatalists say, 
and so it is, and there's an end of it." 

He let go her hand, and moved towards 
the door. " All the same you have 
changed, you know," he added in another 
tone. 

Then he opened the door and went out, 
and Muriel remained alone. 



( 209 ) 



CHAPTER VIII. 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 



Mrs. Skynner — or Mrs. Theodore Skynner 
as she herself preferred being called — ^has 
not hitherto come in for any very large 
share of attention or consideration at our 
hands. It may, therefore, serve as some 
slight reparation for past neglect if I 
hasten to say that her position in the 
present juncture of affairs between herself 
and her sister-in-law merits our warmest and 
most candid commiseration. To be obliged 
to live in close companionship with a person 
whose tastes and sympathies are utterly 
at variance with yours, and against whom 
you yourself are conscious of cherishing an 

VOL. II. P 



2IO A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

antipathy, cannot under any circumstances 
be said to be comfortable. When, how- 
ever, in addition to this original source of 
discomfort it further happens that the 
individual in question stands to you in the 
relation of a benefactor — is the medium to 
which you are indebted for the bread you 
eat, for that roof under whose shelter you 
sleep— then the discomfort of the situation 
may be said to have reached its height 
True, it may be retorted that no one need 
voluntarily remain in that position, but 
should, on the contrary, make up their 
minds either to the one course or the other 
— to forswear namely either their antipathy 
or their obligation. Mrs. Skynner, how- 
ever, did not see the matter at all in that 
light. Little as she liked Muriel, and little 
as she relished the hospitality which she 
received under her roof, she relished the 
idea of leaving that roof and facing such 
discomforts as might be in wait for her 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 2X1 

outside very considerably less. What had 
remained to her after ' the crash of her 
husband's fortunes, and the dispersing of 
their properties, constituted, it must be 
owned, but an extremely meagre income ; 
enough to enable her with strict economy 
to live by herself in a very small way. 
Now, Mrs. Skynner, as it happened, had 
a particular objection to living in a small 
way. Muriers establishment was certainly 
by no means luxurious — utterly wanting, 
in fact, in thousands of things which she 
herself considered indispensable — still, as 
far as it went, it was a liberal one. There 
were no cheese-parings ; no pinchings to- 
day in order to make an effect to-morrow. 
Personally, had the establishment been / 
her own, she would have preferred a 
little more such private pinching in order 
to have a wider margin for greater ex- 
ternal brilliancy ; this, however, was not 
the way of the house, and as the brilliancy 



212 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

-would not have redounded particularly to 
her own credit, Mrs. Skynner was content 
to leave things as they were, and to reap 
the beixefit of the opposite system. As 
to the idea that any return could be ex- 
pected upon her part, such a notion never 
for an ao3tant crossed her mind. The 
benefits, in fact, she considered were all 
the other way. It stood to reason that 
a mere unmarried girl like Muriel could 
not by any possibility live alone without 
the countenance and chaperonage of some 
<experienced matron, and where could she 
find any one of larger experience, or 
whose countenance would confer wider or 
greater lustre than Mrs. Skynner herself ? 
It was indeed only part of Muriel's 
obstinacy and her unaccountable way of 
looking at things which had caused her to 
fail in reaping the full benefit of that 
companionship. When she had first cpme 
to Chelsea she had offered repeatedly to 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 213 

introduce her into society, aiid to take her 
out into that circle which she herself had 
formerly so adorned ; but this Muriel had 
declined, alleging that she did not care 
for evening parties^ and that going about 
in the daytime hindered her from getting 
on with her painting. Mrs. Skynner 
resented this as a slight. Little as she 
herself admired Muriel, she was aware 
that by the outer world she was con- 
sidered handsome and attractive, and was 
not, therefore,' averse to such advantages 
as might accrue from her companionship 
— the more desirable, seeing that her 
relations with her own former friends had 
not, perhaps, of late been altogether so 
cordial as might have been wished. 

During the month which Muriel had 
spent in Hampshire, matters in iMs 
respect had somewhat mended; indeed, 
several of the later comers had failed fo' 
realize that the house in Chelsea had any 



214 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Other proprietor or occupier than herself! 
This desirable state of things had, how- 
ever, received a severe check, in conse- 
quence both of the episode of Madame 
Cairioli with its unfortunate ending, and 
still more (so, at least, she herself con- 
sidered), in consequence of the deprivation 
she had sustained in the matter of a suit- 
able equipage, both which misfortunes 
stood charged in equal measure at MurieFs 
door. It was, indeed, a not uninstructive 
instance of the ease with which an anti- 
pathy can provide its own aliment, that 
Mrs. Skynner really and honestly did 
believe that most of the misfortunes 
which had come to her in the course of 
her life were somehow or other attributable 
to Muriel. Had not the husband who 
had ruined and deserted her been the 
latter s brother ? and had not she herself 
originally been rich, and Muriel poor,, 
whereas now she was poor and Muriel 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 21$ 

rich — comparatively so, at least? What 
clearer proof could be wanted that the 
one had in some way or other battened 
and prospered at the expense of the other ? 
People are apt to talk largely of the 
beneficial effects of what is vaguely termed 
the discipline of life, as well as of the 
softening and humanizing results which 
spring from a community of woes, but they 
fail sometimes to take into consideration 
that these, like most other natural effects, 
depend largely, if not entirely, for their 
results upon the nature against which they 
are directed. There are mental and moral 
shallows which nothing seems able to affect ; 
where all the winds of adversity may blow 
and blow in vain. Mrs. Skynner had had 
her share, and, as she herself not un- 
warrantably considered, more than her 
fair share of troubles. Children had been 
born to her and had died; she had lost 
her home, her husband, and her fortune ; 



2l6 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

but nothing had made the smallest dif- 
ference ; whole seas and cataracts of 
misfortune might, indeed, have washed 
over her, and it would have been all the 
same — ^the same, that is^ as far as the 
smallest capacity of sympathy, or anything 
approaching sympathy, was concerned. 
Many women, whom the larger joys and 
interests of their neighbours find unmoved, 
make it up in care and zeal for the lesser 
'ones, but Mrs. Skynner was not one of 
these. You might have gone to see her, 
after having succeeded to a fortune, led a 
forlorn hope, or found your lost umbrella, 
and you would alike have found yourself 
coming away again without having once 
touched, or even thought of touching, upon > 
any of these various sources of elation. 
As for your troubles, they were things 
that had no business to exist — that is, in 
her presence ; indeed, one of her chief 
grievances against Muriel was the per- 




STRAINED RELATIONS. 21 7 

sisteney with which the latter insisted 
upon dragging forward other people's affairs 
and other people's foolish or uninteresting 
troubles — ^people too, who, as Mrs. Skynner 
often pointed out, had really, many of them, 
no social position at alL 

One not unnatural result of the state of 
things I have been depicting was that the 
two relations at this time saw but little of 
one another — as little, indeed, as was com- 
patible with the fact of their both living 
under the same roof. They took their 
meals, that is, together, but at all other 
times they were apart-^one in the studio, 
the other in her own apartments at the 
hottom of the house. As the summer wore 
on, Muriel began to feel a little lonely, a 
little dispirited. She had of late renewed 
her attendance at the Academy, and this 
was an immense resource. Still there were 
many hours when she could not paint, and 
•when even painting itself seemed but a 



2l8 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

folly and a weariness, an objectless toiling 
after something of no kind of serious 
importance either to herself or to anybody 
else. 

Of Mr. Wygram since they parted, as 
described in the last chapter, she had 
heard nothing; not even whether he had 
actually carried out his proposed intention 
and sailed for America. Well as she had 
known him, she had known but few of his 
friends, and none of his relations, so that 
her opportunities of information were scanty^ 
Hyde, too, had only called once, when he 
came to make some final arrangement with, 
regard to the miniatures. Halliday never. 
Why was this ? she sometimes wondered. 
He must know her address ; at all events^ 
the information was not unattainable, and, 
after the acquaintanceship that had sprung 
up between them in Hampshire, it was 
hardly courteous, not to say friendly, not 
once even to take the trouble of coming to* 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 219 

inquire after her. Altogether, what with 
one thing and another, she felt, as I say, a 
trifle lonely and dejected. Her indepen- 
dence she certainly still possessed, but 
even her independence seemed to have 
fewer charms for her than heretofore. 
Lady Rushton had gone out of town, sa 
that that source of recreation and improve- 
ment was cut off ; her artistic friends, too> 
seemed somehow to have deserted her; 
even Kitty King — her staunchest and 
truest ally — was less with her than formerly. 
Partly, no doubt, in obedience to her own 
trouble-hating instincts, but still more — ^sa 
at least she herself intimated — with the 
object of snubbing the only too readily 
daunted Mr. Archer, Kitty had of late 
forsworn her short-lived artistic ardour, 
and had given herself up without reserve 
'to such limited distractions and dissipations 
as lay within her reach. Occasionally 
Muriel used to inquire after that misprized 



220 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

young gentleman, but always with the 
same results. As, however, she heard of 
parties to the plays and expeditions to 
Richmond and Greenwich, in all of which 
he seemed* to bear a part, she came to 
the conclusion that he was not altogether 
so despondent with regard to his own 
ultimate success as the language of his 
fickle fair one might seem to warfartt. 
Another Miss King, the youngest but 
one of thci sisters, had engaged herself 
to a Mr. Gosling, a thriving young stock- 
broker, much to the joy and satisfaction 
of all her belongings, with the exception, 
indeed, of Kitty, who declared that if she 
had ever been tempted to engage herself 
to any man, the sight of that ridiculous 
Amelia billing and cooing with her pre- 
posterous, carrotty-haired Gosling, would 
alone have been enough to put h6r off 
for ever from that idea. 

Thus of all Muriel's inmost circle of 




STRAINED RELATIONS. 221 

intimates only the Prettymans remained, 
and of them, indeed, she saw something 
almost every day. One of the little Indian 
grandchildren had fulfilled Elizabeth's fore- 
bodings by falling seriously ill shortly after 
its arrival, and Mrs. Prettyman's whole 
thoughts and energies seemed now to be 
concentrated upon nursing and caring for it. 
It was a tiny, little, waxen-faced creature^ 
with the most perilously precarious hojd 
upon life, and Muriel could not but tremble 
for the effect on her old friend whenever 
that all-too-fragile thread was at length 
snapped. The brown ayah and her bangles 
had long since returned to a happier clime, 
and the remaining children were almost 
more than Elizabeth could manage^ her 
forte, as she herself readily acknowledged, 
not by any means lying in that direction. 
Accordingly, Muriel got into the habit of 
going down every day and seeing what 
could be done in her overtaxed friend's 



222 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

behalf. An act of heroism which generally 
ended in her carrying off the eldest of the 
group, a boy of about eight, so as to leave 
the latter's hands freer for the rest. 

This master Caspar Prettyman was a 
sallow-faced lanky young gentleman, with 
that peculiarly languid, insouciant manner 
which Indian children seem to be born to. 
It was anything, therefore, but a particularly 
easy task to cater for his amusement, even 
the accumulated treasures of Hal Flack's 
lodging failing to afford him the smallest 
gratification, everything great and small 
being referred to some mysterious Indian 
standard, to which nothing in his present 
surroundings seemed able to attain. Once 
in despair Muriel carried him off to the 
gardens in the Regent's Park, in hopes that 
the inmates of the monkey house would 
prove too much for his stolidity, but while 
there he walked about amongst the cages 
of the tigers and hyenas with an air of 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 223 

such supercilious acquaintanceship — ^the air 
of one called on to notice objects familiar 
to him from his earliest infancy — that she 
did not feel at all disposed to repeat that 
experiment One thing, however, the 
young gentleman fortunately did condescend 
to like, and that was the river, and the 
sight of the boats and boat-building below 
Battersea bridge. Muriel had an old 
friend, a boatman with a good safe boat, 
and in this she and Master Caspar used to 
take long rows, coming back in the cool of 
the evening upon the returning tide. She 
herself had always been fond of the river, 
and in the loneliness of her present life 
she seemed to grow fonder of it than ever. 
For its sake alone she would not have 
exchanged her house, remote as many 
people called it, for all the palaces of 
Pimlico and Belgravia. Often in the 
evening, after coming back from one of 
these innocent expeditions, she would lean 



224 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

long from her window, looking out at the 
dusky town, with its faintly dotted lines 
of light, following the slow swelling cur- 
vatures of the Embankment. Now and 
then a far-off whistle, or the heavy ster- 
torous breathing of some passing tug, 
would reach her from the river; sparkles 
and flashes, the reflection from fast moying 
lights above, glancing along the bJack 
surface ; an occasional footfall or sound of 
voices under her windows serving only to 
intensify the stillness of the place, a still- 
ness which seemed to deepen and deepen 
as the summer days stole slowly by. 

Despite the hand of the renovator, which 
of late has been laid rather heavily upon 
it, Chelsea yet retains not a few haunts 
where a fairly active imagination may still 
conjure up pictures of a past, not very 
remote, perhaps, as regards time, but 
very remote indeed as regards every- 
thing that we see and hear around us. 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 225 

Muriel's imagination was of a decidedly 
active order, and she got to know and 
care for all of these. She got, too, into 
the commendable habit of attending the 
various services of her parish church, 
that church whose tower of blackened 
brickwork was visible from her bedroom 
window. She liked its monuments for 
one thing-; those quaint mural tablets, with 
their cruelly defaced edges and half ob- 
literated lettering. There was one in 
particular to a " Compleat gentleman," who 
died somewhere about the year 1720, 
towards which she used to find her eyes 
straying when they ought to have been 
otherwise occupied. Near it was another 
and a smaller one to three infants, who, 
had they now been alive, would have been 
considerably more than centenarians. 
The legs and noses of these latter effigies 
were very smooth and shiny, much as if 
they had been modelled in wax or sugar. 

VOL. II. O 



226 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

The inscription, too, which told of their 
lamented deaths, was fast becoming 
illegible, as was also the case with the 
other and more gorgeous gilded and 
Latinized inscription upon the wall be- 
yond ; to our fanciful-minded heroine, how- 
ever, they appeared none the worse for all 
that. Like Caspar, too, she enjoyed the 
more bustling and vulgar region below 
Battersea Bridge, with its throngs of 
boats, its floating rafts, black barges, 
and half submerged piers, the river 
broadening away towards Putney, and 
on the further side the scattered clumps 
of chimneys, with here and there a taller 
house or church spire — the whole not 
unlike some sort of smoky Venice wrecked 
upon these alien shores. Still, in spite of 
all these various resources, and in spite of 
all the other alleviations which she could 
either find or invent for herself, the 
summer, for the first time in her life. 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 22/ 

seemed to. trail. It had been settled that 
she was to go down to Norfolk early in 
September, but it was as yet only the 
middle of August, and it appeared to 
Muriel as if that month had never before 
had so iriany days in it as it had this 
year. 

One afternoon, towards the middle of 
that laggard month, it happened that she 
and Caspar were proceeding down the 
Embankment in the direction of their 
friend the boatman . A steamer passed as 
they were nearing the bridge, shooting 
down on its way to the landing-place. 
Caspar wished to see the people disem- 
bark, so to oblige him Muriel sat down 
upon one of the benches to wait until 
that excitement was over. It was very 
hot, and silent, and dusty. The plane- 
trees were shedding their soot-encrusted 
bark, which lay on the ground below them 
in a light brownish deposit. It seemed 



228 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

to her as if the region had grown per- 
ceptibly depopulated even within the last 
few days. A nursery-maid, with her 
charges depending in a limp and uncom- 
fortable fashion from a perambulator, made 
a conspicuous figure in the middle distance. 
Further on, a couple of Chelsea pensioners, 
were coming towards her with the easy,, 
loitering step of men whose work in the 
world is satisfactorily over and done with. 
Glancing along the grey satin surface 
below, she could see a pair of coal-black 
barge sails expanded in hopes of catching 
a breeze where breeze there was none to 
catch. Presently the people from the 
steamer began to pass. A gentleman with 
an umbrella, two old ladies with handbags, 
some workmen with their tools on their 
backs ; then more ladies, old and young. 
After these a young man, hurrying along 
as if to make uy for lost time. Muriel 
thought she recognized that long, swing- 




STRAINED RELATIONS. 229 

ing Stride and the tall, muscular figure . 
with its somewhat incongruous-looking 
habiliments of sober black. Another > 
moment, and there could be no further 
question about it — Halliday, and no one 
else, was passing her. 

A sudden impulse to speak to him seized 
her, and she put out her hand, at the same 
time calling him by his name. He turned, 
and uttered an exclamation of surprise. 

" Miss Ellis ! I was just on my way to 
your house." 

"Were you, really? It is quite near. 
Will you not come back with us now ? " 

" Thank you, yes, I will. Don't think, 
thoughj that I was going to trouble you 
with a mere afternoon call," he added 
hastily. Muriel was upon the point of 
assuring him that there was not the least 
likelihood of her falling into any such 
error, but he gave her no time. " What I 
came for was to ask you a favour, to ask if 



230 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

you would help a Do you, in shorty 

know a Madame Cairioli, or a persoR 
calling herself so ? " 

" Madame Cairioli ? to be sure I do," 
she answered. " She stayed with us some 
months ago, and left us quite suddenly. I 
have often felt anxious to know what 
became of her. She seemed so ill, poor 
thing." 

" She is dying now." 

'* Dying ? Oh, poor woman ! Where 
is she ? I should like to go and see her 
at once," Muriel exclaimed, springing up 
from her bench in her eagerness. 

" No, no, that is not necessary. In fact, 
it is not a place where you could well go 
to. What I came about to-day was that 
— ^well, she mentioned your name, and I 
thought perhaps you would be willing — 
of course you must understand that I 
haven't the very slightest claim upon you. 
Still, as I can*t get it from any of the 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 23 1 

regular sources, I thought perhaps you 

or your friends might be able In 

short, what I came about was — money." 
The last word came out with a sort of 
jerk, and the young man stood before her 
looking the very picture of constraint and 
embarrassment. 

" Money ! is that all ? " Muriel said, 
wondering not a little at his confusion. 
" Why, of course. Do you want very 
much though ? forty or fifty pounds ? " 

He shook off his embarrassment with 
a laugh. '* Forty or fifty pounds ! " he 
exclaimed.. " Oh, no ; four or five will be 
nearer the mark. I only want to take her 
out of the place she is in, and to give her 
a few comforts, poor soul. She can't last 
long." 

" Four or five pounds ? Oh, but I think 
I have that now in my purse," Muriel 
said, putting her hand into her pocket. 
" But, indeed, Mr. Halliday, I must insist 



232 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

upon your taking me to see her," she 
added. " You don't know how self-re- 
proachful I have been feeling about her 
all the summer. I do not think we be- 
haved at all rightly or kindly to her. She 
came to stay with us at my sister-in-law's 
invitation, and then, not for anything she 
did, but simply on account of something 
we heard about her, she was almost turned 
out of the house into the street. I should 
never forgive myself if I did not do the 
little I can now to make amends." 

Halliday looked doubtful. "I don't 
think it is a place for you to go to, really. 
Miss Ellis," he said. " I am sure your 
relations would never hear of your doing so." 

" My relations ? I have no relations-—, 
none, at least, that the question affects." > 

"Well, for yourself, then. It is a 
wretched, dirty room on the top of a 
wretched house, in one of the worst 
parishes in London." 




STRAINED RELATIONS. 233 

"The more wretched it is, the more 
reason that people should go, in order to 
see what can be done — one would think 
you thought I was a child or a doll, Mr. 
Halliday ! No, please don't say another 
ivord. My mind is made up. Only tell 
me the best way to get there. How 
were you going back yourself ? " 

" I was going back by the river," he 
answered. 

"Then I will go back with you by the 
river. Or no, I forgot. I must go first 
to Mrs. Prettyman's house to leave her 
grandson there. We will take a cab; I 
suppose we shall be able to find one.*' 

As it happened, a hansom was at that 
moment coming slowly towards them, its 
driver looking about him with the dis- 
engaged air of a man who considers his 
'chajice of a fare to be a remarkably remote 
one. Muriel hailed it and jumped in. 

" Get in, Caspar," she said. " Will 



234 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

you come in too, please, Mr. Halliday. 
You won*t mind our being a little crowded 
for a few minutes, I know." 

Halliday obeyed, not indeed seeing his 
way to doing anything else. Arrived 
at Mrs. Prettyman's, Muriel jumped out 
without waiting to be helped, and ran 
up the little walk to the house, where, 
having deposited Caspar, she turned 
hastily back — not, however, without first 
catching a glimpse of Elizabeth, her eyes 
wide with dismay at sight of her own com- 
panion — then she re-entered the hansom,. 
Halliday gave the order, and they bowled 
rapidly away eastwards. 

Now that the first excitement and 
satisfaction of getting her own way 
was over, Muriel began to feel a little 
embarrassed. It struck her, too, that her 
companion was extraordinarily uncommuni- 
cative — more so than she even remembered 
him. He looked older too, and thinner 



Ik 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 235 

than when she had seen him last ; indeed, 
but for Hyde's reiterated assertion as ta 
his unbounded and unfailing health and 
Strength, she would have said that he was 
decidedly looking ill. 

"Don't you think it would be a good 
plan if we were to get some soups or 
strengthening things to take with us ? " 
she inquired, as they were passing up 
Piccadilly. It was almost the first remark 
that had been made since they left the 
Prettymans' house. 

" Perhaps it would," he answered. — 
" Brand, or something of that sort ; there 
is an old woman fortunately, too, at the 
lodging, who could heat it up." 

The order was given, and the cab pre- 
sently drew up at a grocer's shop. Muriel 
was for buying everything suitable to an 
invalid upon which she could lay her 
hands, but Halliday insisted on their keep- 
ing strictly to the original suggestion, de- 



236 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

"daring anything else to be entirely beyond 
the powers of Mrs. O'Connor, the old 
woman in question. 

Hurrying back to the cab, Muriel almost 
brushed in her haste against a young 
man who was strolling down the street — 
a short, dark-complexioned, rather foreign- 
looking young man, and it was with rather 
a foreign air that he lifted his hat, stepping 
back at the same time to make way for 
her. 

As he did so he caught sight of 
Halliday. 

" Stephen ! Can I believe my eyes ? " 
he exclaimed. ** You in this part of the 
town ? " 

"How do you do, Conroy ? Wait a 
moment ; my hands are full." 

Halliday assisted Muriel into the han- 
som, deposited the parcels on the seat, and 
then turned back a moment to speak to 
his friend. 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 237 

*'Why have you never come to look 
us up ? " the latter demanded as he drew 
near. 

" I have never had time." 

" Oh ! " — with a glance in the direction 
of the hansom. 

Halliday turned impatiently away. 

" I say, don't forget you're expected at 
Chudleigh without fail on the twenty- 
eighth," the other man called after him 
as the cab drove off. 

"Was that a foreigner?" Muriel in- 
quired. 

" No, he is not a foreigner. His name 
is Beachamp. He is a cousin of mine." 

" The son of your uncle in Norfolk ? ** 

''Yes. His grandmother was Spanish, 
which accounts, I suppose, for his dark 
looks." 

" His grandmother ? Was she not your 
grandmother then, also ? " 

"Yes— my mother's mother. She was 



238 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

a hateful old woman/' HalHday added. 
"She made my mother's life miserable — 
shortened it, many people say." 

" Your mother is dead ? " 

" Yes, years ago. She died when I was 
two years old." 

Muriel hesitated to inquire further. 
What Hyde had told her as to the family 
disagreements being strongly present with 
her. Still, the impulse to elicit something 
more from her uncommunicative companion 
was, to say the least, equally so. 

" You have no brothers or sisters, 
then ? " she said at last inquiringly. 

" I have two half brothers," he answered. 

" That is more than I have. I have no 
very near relations." 

"My half brothers are not particularly 
near ; the youngest is nearly twenty 
years older than myself, and I have not 
seen either of them for more than a 
year." 



. STRAINED RELATIONS. 239 

The tone in which this was said was 
not particularly provocative of further con- 
versation, so Muriel relapsed into another 
silence, which this time was not broken 
for nearly a mile. 

They were already fast leaving behind 
them all' the landmarks with which she 
was acquainted. Cheapside and Cornhill 
and Leadenhall Street were now succes- 
sively past, 'and they entered upon a 
labyrinth of narrow streets debouching 
off some of the yet remoter thorough- 
fares beyond. It was not a particularly 
well-favoured region, any of it, but what 
followed was infinitely worse than any- 
thing that had gone before. The sun had 
been shining brightly when they left the 
embankment, but it seemed to have gone 
out long before they reached their destina- 
tion ; indeed, looking out from her hansom, 
it appeared to Muriel as if the sun never 
could shine there, or if it did, it would only 



240 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

be to make the hideousness more hideous. 
Her brain began at last to grow dizzy with 
the ugliness and monotony of it all ; street 
after street, house after house, doorway 
after doorway, each apparently the very 
facsimile of the last — the same grimy 
entrances, the same patched and broken 
windows, the same squalid, unkempt 
children, the same mean, ugly, care- 
driven faces, the same filth, • want, priva- 
tion, misery — the same, yet all different; 
and all, as she remembered with a gasp,. 
a fragment only, the merest fractional 
part, of the terrible sum-total Once 
or twice the cabman went wrong, be- 
wildered by the tortuousness of the region, 
HalUday standing up to direct him into 
the proper turnings. At last, however, 
they got into the right street, and drew 
up before a house several degrees cleaner, 
and less forbidding than any that they had 
lately past. 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 24 1 

Muriel felt relieved. "Oh, but I don't 
call this so very bad, after all," she ex- 
claimed cheerfully. 

"Ah but this is not it," Halliday 
answered. " We cannot, in fact, drive up 
to where she is. These are my lodgings, 
where I must ask you to wait a few 
minutes until I return." 

He opened the door with a latch-key 
as he spoke, and ushered her into a room 
near the Entrance; a moderately large, 
and very clean room, but bald and bleak 
to a depressing degree — the baldest and 
bleakest room, Muriel thought, she had 
ever seen. A big deal table covered with 
writing materials, stood in the window, a 
similar one, but empty, in the middle of 
the room ; there were a few chairs of 
decidedly uneasy varieties, and a small 
wooden bookcase of very unattractive 
looking books in a corner. Apart, how- 
ever, from all these, and rather pushed 

VOL. II. R 



242 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

aside as if to elude observation, was a' 
small table, covered with an embroidered 
cover, upon which stood a single rose in a 
pretty little spindle-shanked vase, a couple 
of smartly-bound devotional books lying 
beside it. There was something abou 
this table that immediately puzzled Muriel; 
for the life of her she could not associate 
all that red embroidery and gilded lettering 
with her present companion. 

" If you will kindly wait here a few 
minutes," the • latter said hastily. '* I will 
not keep you longer than I can help.*' 
He went out, shutting the door behind 
him, and Muriel was left alone. 

She looked round. Despite the melan- 
choly errand on which she had come, she 
could not help being amused at finding 
herself for the time being the sole pro- 
prietress of such peculiarly clerical and 
bachelor quarters. Certainly they were 
not of a nature to make her sigh for the 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 243 

joys of bachelorhood ! anything in fact 
grimmer, uglier, more forbidding she had 
never before imagined ! She got up pre - 
sently, and wandered about a little ; ex- 
amined the volumes in the shelves, all works 
of divinity of a somewhat antique and rococo 
type ; the newer, and presumably more 
personal books she did not feel warranted 
in touching, but she smelt at the rose, 
and then moved away toward the window. 
This, unlike its neighbours, was scrupulously 
bright and clean — a doubtful advantage, 
possibly, considering what it looked on. 
She had just turned away, and was about 
to resume her original seat, when there 
came a quick tap at the door, which imme- 
diately opened, and a slight, fair, evidently 
short-sighted man, with a peculiarly candid 
and confiding expression, entered, tripping 
over a hole in the carpet as he did so. 

" Oh, if you please, Halliday, I am afraid 
I must trouble you to come out at once," 



248 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

"To-morrow?" Halliday repeated, in a 
tone of amazement. " Poor Skellett ! what 
a fright he must have been in to say- 
that ! '* he added, smiling. ** Why, he lives 
here. The rooms are his as much as 
mine ; more so, indeed. Those flowers 
and things there are all his," — indicating the 
rose and illuminated volumes of devotion 
upon the table. 

" And I pressed him to sit down in his 
own room ! " Muriel said, laughing. " No 
wonder he looked so scared at seeing me. 
I am afraid he wanted you rather badly," 
she added. "He seemed to be in a great 
hurry about something." 

" Oh, I dare say that it will keep," Halli- 
day replied. " He is the best and kindest 
little fellow in the whole world," he added ; 
" but he cannot, and never will, accustom 
himself to the ways of this place." 

"And has he got to live here, poor 
man ? " Muriel said pityingly. 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 249 

" Yes ; he is one of the curates. There 
are four of us altogether." 

"Oh, then probably the other — a tall, 
dark, rather stern-looking young man — 
was a curate also ? " 

"Yes; that must have been Porter," 
Halliday answered. 

They had now- nearly got to the end 
of the street, when he turned suddenly up 
a court or alley — a sort of human back- 
water, and, like a backwater, the receptacle 
of all the unpleasant flotsam and jetsam of 
the neighbourhood. Then up a staircase, 
foul, dark, crumbling, decaying, into a 
room or garret, so dark that at first Muriel 
could see absolutely nothing. 

A decrepid old crone — evidently the 
Mrs. O'Connor of whom mention had been 
made — came forward to meet them, and 
presently Muriel found herself standing 
beside a sort of bed or crib in a corner, 
upon which lay the figure of a woman. 



250 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Ill as Madame Cairioli had looked when 
she saw her last, Muriel would hardly have 
recognized her again. The poor woman 
appeared to be nothing but skin and bone ; 
one thin hand depended outside the ragged 
coverlet, which constituted her only bed 
covering. She seemed unconscious, too, 
of any one's vicinity,' merely moaning 
slightly, but without opening her eyes. 

"The doctor has not been here since, 
has he, Mrs. O'Connor?" Halliday in- 
quired of the old woman. 

She shook her head. " Nor won't, yer 
rivirence," she whispered mysteriously. 
" 'Tis into the hospital he says she should 
be tuk." 

The patient in the bed stirred and 
moved her hand. "No hospital, no 
hospital," she murmured. 

" Her mind is set against that," Halli- 
day said to Muriel. " Indeed, I doubt 
their taking her into any now, unless it 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 25 I 

was an incurable one," he added, lowering 
his voice. "We must see what can be 
done elsewhere. Had we not better be 
going, Miss Ellis ? I doubt her recog- 
nizing you now, and some of the other 
people of the house will probably be 
coming back shortly." 

In effect, the door, as he spoke, was 
burst open, and some five or six women 
entered, who, after a preliminary stare at 
the intruders, proceeded without further 
ceremony to fling themselves upon the 
various bundles of rags which served as 
seats, and there divide the food they had 
brought with them, not without a good deal 
of shrill squabbling amongst themselves. 
They were not particularly heartless, poor 
things, only too inevitably hardened to the 
sight of suffering to trouble their heads 
about one old woman more or less. To 
Muriel, however, who was not used to it, 
this callousness seemed terrible. 



252 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

"Ah, yes, pray, pray let us go,'* she 
said. " Do let us see if we cannot find 
somewhere else — somewhere where she 
can be at peace." 

It was not so easy to find anything in 
that densely overcrowded neighbourhood ; 
still, after her late experience, Muriel was 
not so critical as she would have been half 
an hour before. The room secured, there 
still remained the further question of a 
nurse. At last this too, however, was 
accomplished, and she and Halliday stood 
together in the street where she had left 
the hansom. 

'* I am afraid I must not offer to see you 
home. Miss Ellis," he said. " I shall have 
to read service at one of the hospitals in 
another half-hour." 

" Oh, thank you, but indeed, in any case, 
it would be quite unnecessary ; nothing is 
at all likely to happen to me between this 
and Chelsea," she answered. 



STRAINED RELATIONS.. 253 

Now that they were about to part, and 
that the business which had brought them 
together was over, an unaccountable em- 
barrassment seemed to have sprung up 
between them ; a mutual self-conscious- 
ness, of which both were aware, and both 
equally anxious to ignore. Muriel began 
talking quickly, to shake off the impression. 

"You will let me know how Madame 
Cairioli goes on, and whether I can do 
anything further for her, will you not ? *' she 
said. ** Even if I have left London, your 
letter, of course, will be forwarded. Though, 
indeed, Mr. Halliday, you ought to take a 
holiday yourself. I know you are very 
strong, but still there is a limit to every 
one's strength, and you are certainly look- 
ing ill. You ought to have a change." 

" Thank you, I am not in the least ill," 
he answered stiffly. " I am going away, 
however, soon," he added ; " next week, in 
fact." 



254 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

" I want, too, to tell you how extremely 
obliged I am to you for having come to 
me to-day," Muriel continued hurriedly. 
"You might just as easily have gone 
to some one else instead, might you 
not ? " 

" I suppose I might," he answered. 

" And then I should have been so sorry. 
It would have robbed me of the poor 
satisfaction of being able to do something 
for this poor woman, who I cannot help 
feeling was treated badly at my house. 
How curious it is the way things happen," 
she went on. " If we had not chanced to 
meet in the New Forest you would never 
have — have " 

She stopped short in the middle of her 
observation, her voice dying away from 
sheer astonishment. What had happened ? 
she asked herself. Nothing had happened. 
The sky had not fallen, the street had not 
opened under her feet ; nothing at all had 



STRAINED RELATIONS. 255 

happened ; nothing but that as she uttered 
the last few words she chanced to catch 
her companion's eyes fixed upon her with 
a pecuHar intentness. But what of that ? 
What was there in his expression, or 
anybody's expression, that could account 
for such a sensation — one which, though 
she failed to give it any name, seemed 
to amount for the moment to the strength 
of a revelation ? But a revelation of 
what? she asked herself irritably. Of 
something in him or of something in her ? 
Not in the latter, certainly, she imme- 
diately answered. Why should there be ? 
What was there in this young man, whom 
at most she had not seen more than some 
five or six times, to account for anything 
of the kind ? She respected him because 
he seemed in earnest — more so than most 
of the people she saw about her — she 
would respect any one, no matter who he 
might be, who tried, however unsuccess- 



256 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

fully, to do his duty ; but as for anything 
further! Meantime the chief immediate 
result, over and above a feeling of irri- 
tation against Halliday himself, was to 
inspire her with a desire to get away. 
Hardly another word passed between 
them. In silence he handed her into the 
hansom, and in silence they shook hands. 
The order was given to the driver, and 
Muriel departed, too bewildered by what 
had just occurred to be able even to ex- 
perience the natural feeling of satisfaction 
in escaping from her late surroundings, 
and once more seeing the sun, and breath 
ing the — comparatively, at all events - - 
uncontaminated air of heaven. 



^ 



( 257 ) 



CHAPTER IX. 

"at war *twixt will and will not." 

Halliday went back to his ugly sitting- 
room, and sat hastily down upon the 
first chair he came to. To him, too, the 
last five minutes had constituted some- 
thing of an epoch, though in a different 
way from Muriel. What to her had been 
so new and startling — so startling that she 
had failed as yet even to take in the 
meaning of it — to him was neither new nor 
startling at all. Ever since the second 
time they had met he had known what his 
feeling for Muriel Ellis was just as well as 
if it had been all written down for him 
in a book. Though he had never been 

VOL. II. s 



258 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

in love before, he knew very well that he 
was in love now; he had fought against 
the feeHng, and was fighting against 
it still, but he had never attempted to 
deny it. What would have been the 
use ? the fact was there, and his was 
one of those stubbornly constituted minds 
to which a fact remained a fact, and a 
spade a spade, however desirable it might 
be that they should both be something 
totally different. I said just now that he 
had never been in love before, a statement 
generally taken to mean that So-and-so 
had never been in love in quite the same 
fashion, or possibly even quite to the 
same extent. In this case, however, as it 
happens, it was meant to be taken, not 
liberally, but literally. Halliday literally 
never had been in love before ; it had not 
come in his way, and he had not certainly 
gone out of his way to look for it. Even 
Muriel herself, the first time he had met 



"AT WAR *TWIXT WILL AND WILL NOT." 259 

her, had failed to make any particular 
impression upon him, despite the un- 
doubted romance of the situation. He 
had thought her handsome, but he had 
thought no more about her, and indeed 
had well-nigh forgotten her existence 
before they again met. It was this second 
time, when there had been nothing in the 
least romantic in the situation, and no 
apparent provocation at all, then it was 
that the mysterious, unaccountable bolt 
had found him out. He remembered as 
well as possible the very spot in the wood 
where the discovery had first dawned 
upon him. It was the day they had met 
nea:r the Partridges* cottage, and that she 
had told him that old John Flack was her 
grandfather. He was marching back to 
his lodging filled with vague disgust, sur- 
prise, and annoyance at the notion ; angry 
with her for having told him, angry with 
himself for minding, doubly angry with 



26o A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

the fact Itself, with the preposterous notion 
of her being in any way connected with 
those vulgar, hide-bound people in Nor- 
folk. Suddenly it occurred to him to 
ask himself what in the world it mattered 
to him ? Of what possible business was 
it of his whose granddaughter she was, 
or whether, in point of fact, she had or 
had not any grandfather at all ? Then 
swift, sudden, overwhelming, had come 
the answer ; the reason was because 
he loved her; that was simply the long 
and the short of it. It was all done 
and over in a minute. He did not 
even give himself the trouble of con- 
sidering why he loved her, or what there 
was in her to arouse the sensation, he 
accepted it simply as a fact. Not, how- 
ever, by any means a satisfactory one; 
on the contrary, a particularly incon- 
venient, not to say humiliating fact ; but 
still just as certainly one as that he himself 



" AT WAR *TWIXT WILL AND WILL NOT." 26 1 

was at that moment a living and breathing 
man, and every bit as much needing to be 
taken into account. All that summer he 
had fought against it, had thrown himself 
into his work, had resisted going to see 
her, and had tried to put the idea bodily 
out of his head ; and this was the result — 
that he thought of it and of her more 
than ever, that it seemed to him as if he 
never for a single instant thought of any- 
thing or anybody else, and that when her 
name came casually up in connection with 
Madame Cairioli, the impulse to see and 
speak to her had been more than he had 
been able to resist. 

Even in doing this, however, Halliday 
had felt not a little ashamed. He was 
not generally given to devising small 
expedients in order to carry out his 
own wishes, and in appealing to Muriel 
rather than to Hyde or any of his 
other and richer friends, he felt that 



262 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

he had been guilty of such a small 
and pitiful expedient. Well now, he 
said to himself, he had had his wish ; 
he had had what he schemed for, and 
what was the result ? Was he any better, 
easier, more satisfied on that account ? On 
the contrary, he was a thousand times 
less happy, less easy, more dissatisfied. 
He had not even enjoyed the few poor 
minutes he had spent in her company, his 
whole time and thoughts having been 
taken up with the dread of self-betrayal, 
and the result was that he had been 
positively discourteous, nay, brutally un- 
civil to her, and that she must think him 
a greater bear and Goth than ever. 

The truth was that, like many another 
and a greater hero, poor Halliday had 
got into a decided quandary, none the 
less serious, either, because it was so 
entirely of his own making. He had 
rushed into his work with all the zeal 



"at war 'twixt will and will not." 263 

of an enthusiast, tossing ease and idleness 
away from him as ignoble things, believing 
that in work, and work alone, he was to 
find satisfaction, and now, alas, alas, for 
fact ! he was beginning to find that it was 
not so. He was beginning to find that he 
did hanker for a good many things which 
were clearly not nominated in the bond, 
— which lay distinctly outside that arena 
within which of his own free-will he had 
restricted himself. As Hyde truly re- 
marked, he was not by any means a St. 
Augustine, or a St. Vincent de Paul, or 
anything even remotely resembling them — 
not one of those lofty spirits, whose parish, 
as it has been said, is the world, and their 
family humanity — he was simply a very 
honest, very well-intentioned, somewhat 
bornd young man, with strongly developed 
personal wishes, and an extremely obsti- 
nate individuality of his own, an indi- 
viduality which had an awkward trick of 



264 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Starting into prominence just when it was 
supposed to be most effectually coerced. 
AH that summer he had been trying to 
coerce it, and the result was that it had 
never perhaps been louder or more clamo- 
rous than it was at that very moment. 
Try to turn his thoughts into other 
channels as he would, he could think of 
nothing, absolutely nothing but Muriel. 
Her presence, look, gesture, the very way 
she had of turning her head and smiling, 
kept presenting themselves over and over 
again to his mind with the persistency of a 
vision. He must see her again, he felt ; 
he must tell her all that was in his mind. 
True, he had not the slightest expectation 
of bettering his case by so doing; quite 
the contrary. But what then ? even the 
very act of speaking would be a relief. 
Why should a man not say what was in 
his mind } Was a man, in fact, a man 
at all who dared not speak; his own 



"AT WAR 'tWIXT WILL AND WILL NOT." 265 

mind, who dared not put his wishes to 
the touch even if he was certain to fail ? 
And, after all, why should he be so abso- 
lutely certain to fail ? he asked himself. 
Could any man know his fate until he 
tried it ? And if he did succeed, if she 
did love him, why then 

Halliday started up, and strode rapidly 
to and fro his narrow room, his brain 
fevered with the thoughts which the last 
idea had suddenly conjured up. A whole 
crowd of words, eager, persuasive, remon- 
strative, seemed to come crowding at once 
to his lips and clamouring for utterance. 
Yes, he would go and see her again, he 
decided — to-morrow, the first thing. He 
would not play the coward as he had done 
to-day. He would tell her what he felt — 
what he had been feeling ever since they 
first met, and perhaps, perhaps 

Suddenly, as he was striding to and fro, 
his foot caught in a hole in the carpet — 



266 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

the same hole in which Mr. Skellett had 
caught his an hour before. SHght as 
the jar was, it seemed to bring him to 
his senses, for he stopped and looked 
round him ; looked carefully round at the 
bare white-washed walls, the mean, ugly 
furniture, the cheap, sordid, dingy look of 
everything; then across the street at the 
shabby little shops, with their soot-grimed 
fronts, and uninviting - looking wares. 
Halliday did not notice such things once 
in a month as a rule, but now he looked 
at them all carefully, thoughtfully, as if 
he was trying to learn them off by heart. 
Finally he broke into a laugh. 

" A nice place, certainly, to ask a woman 
to come and live in — a very nice place ! " 
he said scornfully. ' 

He had hardly uttered the words before 
the door opened, and his little fellow- 
lodger entered, glancing cautiously round 
as he did so. 



"at war *twixt will and will not." 267 

"Why, youVe all alone, Halliday!" he 
said wonderingly. " Didn't I hear you 
talking to some one as I came in ?." 

" You did ; I was talking to a fool," 
Halliday said curtly. 

" Oh ! And has he gone ? " 

" Yes, he has gone — I hope so, at least." 

" That's odd now, for Tm sure I didn't 
see any one go by," the other man 
said naively. " I thought, you know, at 
first it might be that young lady," he 
added, blushing. " The tall young lady, I 
mean, who I saw sitting here when I 
looked in half an hour ago ? " 

" No, it was not her ; she is gone too, 
though," Halliday answered. 

" Oh." Then, after a pause, " How 
handsome she was ! wasn't she, Halliday ? " 

"Yes, I suppose so." 

" Oh, I'm sure of it. So tall and grace- 
ful, you know, and such beautiful eyes. 
Such a lady, too, she looked. It seems 



268 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

SO long since I have seen a lady — a real 
one, I mean," the little man ended, with a 
sigh. 

''They don't abound about here cer- 
tainly," replied his friend. 

'* No," with another sigh. " And yet I 
suppose one ought hardly to allow one's 
self to say that either," he added penitently. 
"There's Mrs. William Hickson, you 
know, and those Miss Greens who help 
with the singing ; they're very nice and 
kind, I'm sure. Still it is different, now 
isn't it, Halliday ? " 

This time Halliday did not respond to 
the call. He had sat down again, and 
drawn towards him one of the numerous 
parochial-looking books which lay scattered 
over the table. Mr. Skellett stood and 
watched him. He was not to be taken 
in with that pretence of occupation ; he 
saw well enough that something had 
gone wrong, though what it was he failed 



"AT WA^. 'tWIXT will AND WILL NOT." 269 

to guess, and would not for the whole 
world have dreamt of asking. Presently, 
fearing lest even his discreet and delicate 
observation might prove troublesome, he 
moved away, and taking up one of his 
own gilded books of devotion, appeared 
to bury himself in its contents. Over 
the top of it, however, he might have 
been observed stealing anxious glances 
in Halliday's direction, his air of solici- 
tude lending a feminine, almost a motherly, 
expression to his little prim, neatly-finished 
face. They had sat thus for about ten 
minutes when a bell began ringing, the 
bell of the chapel belonging to a hospital 
where the two young men took turns to 
read the service. After it had rung for 
a few minutes, Halliday got up, threw his 
report down on the table, and took up 
his hat to go out. 

"Shouldn't you like me to go this 
evening instead of you, Halliday ? " Mr. 



270 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

Skellett inquired. "It won't really make 
any difference." 

*' Go instead of me ? Why on earth 
should you do that ? " 

" I don't know. I fancied you didn't 
look quite the thing. Perhaps you have 
got a headache ? " 

*'Am I in the habit of having head- 
aches ? " Halliday inquired curtly, as he 
went out, letting the door swing behind 
him. 

He had not gone more than two steps 
before, however, his heart smote him for 
snubbing anything so very meek and easily 
repulsed, and he turned hastily back. 

" I say, Skellett, I'm a brute to speak 
to you like that," he said hurriedly. " And 
it's true, I am put out about something, 
though I've not got a headache. You 
don't mind, do you ? " laying his hand 
hastily upon the other's shoulder. 

" Mind ? Why, of course I don't mind. 



"AT WAR 'tVVIXT WILL AND WILL NOT." 27 1 

Halliday," the little man answered cheerily. 
His friend's grasp was rather vigorous — 
more vigorous probably than he was aware 
^ — but that he scorned to mention. 

" That's all right ; " and, with another 
energetic, if well-meant thump, Halliday 
departed, leaving his little coadjutor — 
mentally, at all events — not a little 
soothed and comforted by this unexpected 
return. His devotion to Halliday was 
simply unbounded ; he seemed, indeed, 
to feel the sort of vicarious joy and pride 
in his strength and vigour that a child 
sometimes shows in that of some big dog, 
which he chooses to regard as his own 
private and peculiar property. At first, 
in the earlier days of their acquaintance, 
there was something indeed almost start- 
ling, and even terrifying to his imagi- 
nation, in being brought into contact with 
anything so strong and large, and so 
extremely alive as Halliday — a being who 



272 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

never appeared afraid of anything or any- 
body, but, on the contrary, to have an 
odd, mysterious pagan relish for any- 
thing like a physical encounter. Halli- 
day, as we know, was a very combative 
young man, and now and then something 
in his new surroundings would awaken 
the old Adam, and he would plunge 
into the strife with a vigour totally at 
variance with all the dictates of clerical 
propriety, even to the length of occasionally 
interfering between man and wife — an 
unwarrantable presumption, as everybody 
knows ! On such occasions little Skellett 
would stand by in a perfect agony of 
mingled pride and dismay, uncertain what 
to do — whether to rush to the assistance of 
his friend, or to run and scream vigorously 
for the police. All friendships, we know, 
are one-sided affairs, and this certainly 
was no exception to the rule. Still, if his 
affection was not quite of the same calibre, 



"at war 'twixt will and will not." 273 

HalHday had at any rate a warm regard 
and liking for the little man ; indeed, since 
the departure of his original friend, Mild- 
may, Mr. Skellett may be said to have 
been the only ally he possessed in the 
parish. The other two curates being both 
highly exemplary young divines, conscien- 
tious and orthodox indeed to the utmost 
degree ; but not perhaps particularly 
available in the way of companionship. 
Though very far from an intellectual man 
himself, Halliday was too big somehow, 
mentally as well as physically, for his 
companions, the result being a mutual 
antagonism ; he in his own mind inclining 
to set them down as a trifle priggish, they 
in return not unnaturally retorting with 
comments upon those traits of his which 
even his best friends could hardly call 
spiritual. Indeed Porter, who was the 
leading spirit of the two, had more than 
once declared that Halliday was nothing 

VOL, XL T 



276 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

day felt particularly grateful, for his own 
sake as well as for the patients. It is a 
terrible charge, I am well aware, to bring 
against a clergyman, but Halliday, it had 
better be confessed at once, by no means 
relished his privileges as a preacher. 
Though far from regarding himself as a 
success in other respects, there was never- 
theless a good deal of his work which he 
both liked, and was conscious of performing 
creditably. He could even lecture in a 
rough and ready week-day fashion to the 
young men who came about him ; but 
when on a Sunday he found himself aloft 
amongst the cushions of a pulpit, a feeling, 
which It is hardly an exaggeration to call 
despair, seemed to take possession of the 
young man's mind. What was he to say 
to these people ? he used to ask himself. 
These women, especially, with their terrible 
Sunday bonnets, and their yet more terrible 
airs of Sunday self-consciousness ? Was 



"at war *twixt will and will not." 277 

it probable, was it even possible, that any- 
thing he could think of to say was likely 
to be of any particular use or benefit to 
them ? And if not, was it not a cruel fate 
to be set up there to attempt the im- 
possible ? To-day, however, no such un- 
easy self-questionings were in store for 
him. Within half an hour of the com- 
mencement, the last hymn was sung, the 
last prayer prayed, and Halliday, with 
his books under his arm, was trudging 
back on his homeward way. 

He did not, however, at once return to 
his lodgings. Much as he liked little 
Skellett, there were moments when his 
companionship was apt to prove a trifle 
oppressive, so that, on the whole, he pre- 
ferred to make a circuit. There were not 
many places in that neighbourhood which 
could be called enjoyable to walk in ; 
none, in fact, which were not more or 
less of an offence to every sensitively 



278 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

constituted organ, but to this Halliday was 
tolerably indifferent. His organs, happily 
for himself, were not sensitive, and he 
could stand sights and stomach smells 
which would have turned most men sick, 
and which, to little Skellett, for instance, 
were simply a daily and hourly purgatory. 
This afternoon, however, he seemed to 
himself to have suddenly awoke to the 
hideousness of everything, and to see it 
in all its naked deformity. As he walked 
along the narrow streets, the squalor, ugli- 
ness, filth, misery impressed him as they 
had never impressed him before. The 
truth was, he was looking at it, not with 
his own eyes, but with another's — with 
the eyes of his visitor of that afternoon. 
If that which he desired, but perfectly 
well knew to be hopeless, had even come 
to pass, and Muriel Ellis had loved him, 
had been willing to throw in her lot 
with him, could he have asked her to 



''at war *twixt will and will not." 279 

share such a lot as this ? Could he have 
proposed that she should come and live 
there ? be exposed to such sights and 
sounds and smells as were at that moment 
about him ? If even he had been perfectly- 
certain of the great value and importance of 
the work he himself was doing there, then 
perhaps it might be different; then possibly 
he might have appealed to her upon those 
grounds. He had an instinctive belief in 
her capacity for devotedness and self- 
immolation, but was that, he asked himself, 
enough } Before inviting others to immo- 
late themselves, one must be pretty sure 
not only of the inherent goodness of one's 
cause, but also of one's own special and 
peculiar fitness for it, and this was exactly 
where- Halliday by no means felt sure. 
Somehow or other he was unlucky. 
Things which he took in hand had a 
tendency to fail, and people he took in 
hand to make greater haste to go* to the 



28o A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

dogs than their neighbours. There was 
Tom Brattle, the tinker, whom he had 
undertaken to cure of his drunkenness, and 
whom he believed that he had cured, and 
what was the end of it? The man was 
worse now than ever, and had been taken 
up only that very week on a charge of 
assaulting his own father ! True, Halliday 
was just in the mood to exaggerate all this; 
still that there was a certain amount of truth 
in the allegation is undeniable. He was 
rather in the position of a man who flings 
everything else to the winds in order to 
follow the bent of his genius, and then finds 
his genius growing thinner and thinner, 
and threatening to vanish altogether on his 
hands. To rush away from all your other 
duties in order to betake yourself to one 
special and chosen phase of usefulness, 
and then to find that your success in that 
one chosen phase is not, after all, so 
particularly marked, cannot be said to be 



**AT WAR 'tWIXT WILL AND WILL NOT." 28 1 

exactly a satisfactory experience! Apart 
from these remoter considerations, how- 
ever, there was the simple, practical, every- 
day question of ways and means. Even 
in Whitechapel people are not expected 
to live upon air, and what had he to 
offer ? Nothing absolutely but the scanty 
remains of the three thousand pounds 
which he had inherited from his mother, 
and some eighty pounds a year or so 
which he received as a curate. Could 
he, could any man, venture to ask a 
woman to marry him upon that ? As to 
whether Muriel had or had not means of 
her own, that somehow did not enter into 
his calculations. From what he had seen 
of her in Hampshire, he concluded that 
either she or her relations must be in fairly 
easy circumstances — sufficiently so, at all 
events, to be appealed to in a case of 
urgent charity — but beyond that he had 
not given, and even now hardly gave, the 



282 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

question a thought. What, then, remained? 
Nothing but an appeal to his father; and 
from this he shrank. Even for Muriel's 
sake — even to have the right of going boldly 
forward and asking her to be his wife — 
he felt he could hardly do that. It was 
not so much that he objected to the 
part of the returning prodigal, but he 
shrank from the imputation — the natural 
and inevitable imputation which attaches 
to the occupier of that rSle. Certainly 
no one could say that poor Halliday had 
wasted his substance in riotous living, his 
follies being all of a very different kind 
from those of that memorable scape- 
grace. For all that there were points 
of similarity sufficient to make the situa- 
tion an awkward one. With what face 
could he who had so sc6rnfully rejected 
his father s generosity merely because the 
conditions displeased him, now go forward 
and appeal to that generosity 1 and that 



"at war 'twixt will and will not." 283 

his father, under any conceivable circum- 
stances, would come forward without being 
appealed to, he knew him rather too well 
to expect. No, turn and twist the matter 
how he would, he could see no way — 
no light, however remote in the dark- 
ness — nothing on every side but a sort 
of hopeless and inevitable dead lock. 
He could not, he saw plainly, hope to 
win her ; he could not, and he would not, 
make up his mind to give her up ; he 
would not and he could not settle down 
rationally to anything else; his life was 
stunted, worthless, done for. And, having 
arrived at this thoroughly satisfactory and 
comfortable conclusion, he was fain at 
last to retrace his steps to his deserted 
lodgings, and to the anxiously expectant 
Mr. Skellett. 

When at length he got in, he found 
the gas lit, and the evening meal duly set 
out on the central table, his little fellow- 



284 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

curate looking very neat and spruce in his 
snow-white necktie. The two young men 
were in the habit of dining in the middle 
of the day, that being the most convenient 
hour for their work. This meal, accord- 
ingly, was called tea, and to Skellett it 
really was tea, and nothing else, the chief 
indulgences he relished lying in the direc- 
tion of jam and marmalade, with an occa- 
sional muffin or crumpet, which he bought 
and carried home in his pocket from the 
bakers. Halliday, however, had a pre- 
ference for coarser and more substantial 
viands, in the form of cold meat, which 
he used to produce from a cupboard, and 
into which he nightly made inroads 
which secretly not a little scandalized his 
friend. This evening there happened to 
be nothing in particular to do out-of-doors, 
so after the tea was drunk, and the muffins 
and cold meat disposed of, the two young 
men settled themselves down to read ; 



**AT WAR 'tWIXT WILL AND WILL NOT." 285 

Halliday with a newspaper which he had 
bought in the course of his walk, Mr. Skel- 
lett with a neatly covered brown volume 
which he had procured that afternoon from 
the parish library. The latter, whose eyes 
were weak, had a small green-shaded 
lamp which stood on his own particular 
table, and close to which his book was 
held. There was, of course, no fire, the 
night being hot and close ; still, what with 
the glow of the gas, and the more sub- 
dued radiance of Mr. Skellett's lamp, the 
room looked several degrees less grim and 
forbidding than in the daytime. It was 
indeed the sort of familiar background 
against which one instinctively pictures a 
family group, or perhaps three or four old 
ladies dozing over their knitting, rather 
than a pair of young men, neither of 
whom had yet struck thirty. 

Apparently Halliday's newspaper was 
not much to his liking, for he presently 



286 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

flung It down, and, walking over to the 
window, pulled aside the curtain. Across 
the narrow street he could see into the 
little interior which matched theirs upon 
the opposite side. A naked gas-burner 
was flaring overhead, lighting up the whole 
scene. The master of the house, he could 
see, had just come in, and had taken off 
his paper cap and was bestowing his bag 
of tools in a corner. Then from his post 
of observation Halliday saw the wife enter 
from a back room, with a baby in her arms, 
which she made over to the father, and 
began bustling about to get the latter his 
supper. It was the commonest of all 
common domestic scenes, utterly wanting 
in anything like charm or picturesque ness, 
yet for the moment it seemed to have a 
certain fascination for the young man, for 
he stood gazing fixedly at it for several 
minutes. Outside the usual draggled look- 
ing objects were slouching by, with the 



"AT WAR 'tWIXT WILL AND WILL NOT." 287 

usual policeman looking stolidly on at them 
from the footpath. Further down he could 
see another and a brighter blaze which 
told of the whereabouts of the public- 
house ; and here, too, was a slow stream 
of figures, hardly human to look at in 
their filth and degradation. Turning 
abruptly away from all this, Halliday 
looked back into the room, and at his 
companion. That little gentleman, with 
his spectacles on his nose, was deeply 
engrossed in his volume, so engrossed 
as to be utterly unconscious of any 
observation. It was a romance, of a very 
innocent not to say edifying type, but 
still abundantly thrilling to little Skellett, 
whose imagination had never been per- 
verted by anything sensational, far less 
piquant, in the way of literary provender. 
The hero was a young and ascetic divine, 
the heroine an earl's daughter, gloriously 
beautiful and inexpressibly haughty, but 



288 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

passionately in love with the Reverend 
Theophilus ; indeed, the greater part of 
the work was taken up with conversations 
in which that haughty damsel laid bare 
her passion in language more creditable 
on the whole, perhaps, to her feelings than 
to her maidenly decorum. Mr. Skellett 
had just reached the point where Lady 
Zelina, despairing of moving the rigid 
heart of her Theophilus, had announced 
her intention of forthwith retiring for life 
into a convent, when his attention was 
distracted by Halliday, who came hastily 
back into the room, and took down his 
hat from a peg in the corner. 

" Have you been sent for ? Are you 
going out ? " he said, jumping up. 

" I have not been sent for, but I am 
going out/* the other answered. 

" Where are you going to ? " 

*'I dont know exactly; to Tower Hill, 
perhaps." 



"AT WAR 'tWIXT WILL AND WILL NOT." 289 

" To Tower Hill ? " Mr. Skellett stood 
with his mouth slightly ajar, and his 
spectacles slipping off his nose, all sorts 
of vague images, called up by the name, 
coursing one another rapidly through his 
brain. "What will you do on Tower Hill 
at this hour of the night } " he inquired in 
a tone of bewilderment. 

" Do } Nothing at all. Very likely I 
shan't go there ; as likely as not, I shall 
go to one of the parks instead. I only 
want a walk. I must get away from 
this place. The smells are simply sicken- 
mg. 

"Why, Halliday, I never knew you 
minded them before." 

" Didn't you } well, I do now. Don't 

sit up, Skellett," he continued, as he pulled 

on an overcoat. " I can let myself in at 

any hour, you know ; I dare say I may 

be late." 

" You'll not get into any — ^any trouble, 
VOL. n. u 



290 A CHELSEA HOUSEHOLDER. 

will you, Halliday ? " his fellow curate 
inquired hesitatingly. 

Halliday laughed. ** I hope not, Tm 
sure," he said. " If I do, you 11 be certain 
to hear about it, that s one comfort. All 
the police know me." 

" I don't see that that will be any 
comfort at all," his friend replied discon- 
solately. 

"It will be a comfort rather to Porter, 
I think. It will justify some of those dark 
suspicions of his." 

Mr. Skellett looked extremely grave. 

** I don't think you're fair upon Porter, 
Halliday ; I don't, indeed," he said 
anxiously. " I have often told you so." 

** Am I not ? Well, perhaps, he is not 
quite fair upon me. Apparently we both 
cherish misgivings of one another, and 
probably we are both of us very harmless 
sort of fellows at bottom. Anyhow, good- 
night, Skellett ; don't sit up ; " and before 



" AT WAR 'tWIXT WILL AND WILL NOT." 29 1 

his little coadjutor could form any further 
remonstrances, HalHday had pulled the 
door after him, and was away down the 

street. 



END OF VOL. II. 



LONDON : PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. 



i