No Hero | Page 2

but
she did not say what the difficulty was. For one unworthy moment the
thought of money entered my mind, to be ejected the next, as the
Catherine of old came more and more into the mental focus. Pride was
the last thing in which I had found her wanting, and her letter indicated
no change in that respect.
"You may wonder," she wrote just at the end, "why I have never sent
you a single word of inquiry, or sympathy, or congratulation!!
Well--suppose it was 'bad blood'!! between us when you went away!
Mind, I never meant it to be so, but suppose it was: could I treat the
dear old you like that, and the Great New You like somebody else?
You have your own fame to thank for my unkindness! I am only
thankful they haven't given you the V.C.!! Then I should never have
dared--not even now!!!"
I smoked a cigarette when I had read it all twice over, and as I crushed
the fire out of the stump I felt I could as soon think of lighting it again
as I should have expected Catherine Evers to set a fresh match to me.
That, I was resolved, she should never do; nor was I quite coxcomb
enough to suspect her of the desire for a moment. But a man who has

once made a fool of himself, especially about a woman somewhat older
than himself, does not soon get over the soreness; and mine returned
with the very fascination which made itself felt even in the shortest
little letter.
Catherine wrote from the old address in Elm Park Gardens, and she
wanted me to call as early as I could, or to make any appointment I
liked. I therefore telegraphed that I was coming at three o'clock that
afternoon, and thus made for myself one of the longest mornings that I
can remember spending in town. I was staying at the time at the
Kensington Palace Hotel, to be out of the central racket of things, and
yet more or less under the eye of the surgeon who still hoped to extract
the last bullet in time. I can remember spending half the morning
gazing aimlessly over the grand old trees, already prematurely bronzed,
and the other half in limping in their shadow to the Round Pond, where
a few little townridden boys were sailing their humble craft. It was near
the middle of August, and for the first time I was thankful that an
earlier migration had not been feasible in my case.
In spite of my telegram Mrs. Evers was not at home when I arrived, but
she had left a message which more than explained matters. She was
lunching out, but only in Brechin Place, and I was to wait in the study
if I did not mind. I did not, and yet I did, for the room in which
Catherine certainly read her books and wrote her letters was also the
scene of that which I was beginning to find it rather hard work to forget
as it was. Nor had it changed any more than her handwriting, or than
the woman herself as I confidently expected to find her now. I have
often thought that at about forty both sexes stand still to the eye, and I
did not expect Catherine Evers, who could barely have reached that
rubicon, to show much symptom of the later marches. To me, here in
her den, the other year was just the other day. My time in India was
little better than a dream to me, while as for angry shots at either end of
Africa, it was never I who had been there to hear them. I must have
come by my sticks in some less romantic fashion. Nothing could
convince me that I had ever been many days or miles away from a
room that I knew by heart, and found full as I left it of familiar trifles
and poignant associations.

That was the shelf devoted to her poets; there was no addition that I
could see. Over it hung the fine photograph of Watts's "Hope," an
ironic emblem, and elsewhere one of that intolerably sad picture, his
"Paolo and Francesca": how I remembered the wet Sunday when
Catherine took me to see the original in Melbury Road! The old piano
which was never touched, the one which had been in St. Helena with
Napoleon's doctor, there it stood to an inch where it had stood of old, a
sort of grand-stand for the photographs of Catherine's friends. I
descried my own young effigy among the rest, in a frame which I
recollected giving her at the time. Well, I looked all the idiot I must
have been; and there was the