The Folly of Eustace | Page 9

and touched the hand of one's hostess, and swung round in a final gallop, and said how much one has enjoyed it all--one wants to go home."
"Does one?" Eustace said. "Home you call it!"
He shuddered.
"I call it what I want it to be, what I think it may be, what the poor and the weary and the fallen make it in their lonely thoughts. Let us, at least, hope that we travel towards the east, where the sun is."
"You have strange fancies," he said.
"I! Not so strange as yours."
She looked at him in the eyes as she spoke. He wondered what that look meant. It seemed to him a menace.
"I must keep it up--I must keep it up," he murmured to himself as he left the room. "Winifred loves fancies--loves me for what she thinks mine."
He went to his library, and sat down heavily, to devise fresh outrages on the ordinary.
His pranks became innumerable, and Society called him the most original figure of London. The papers quoted him--his doings, not his sayings. People pointed him out in the Park. His celebrity waxed. Even the Marble Arch seemed turning to gaze after him as he went by, showing the observation which the imaginative think into inanimate things.
At least, so a wag declared.
And Winifred bore it, but with an increasing impatience.
At this time, too, a strange need of protection crept over her, the yearning for man's beautiful, dog-like sympathy that watches woman in her grand dark hour before she blooms into motherhood. When she knew the truth, she resolved to tell Eustace, and she came into his room softly, with shining eyes. He was sitting reading the Financial News in a nimbus of cigarette smoke, secretly glorying in his momentary immunity from the prison rules of the fantastic. Winifred's entry was as that of a warder. He sprang up laughing.
"Winnie," he said, "I think I am going to South Africa."
"You!" she said in surprise.
"Yes; to give acrobatic performances in the street, and so pave the way to a position as a millionaire. Who ever heard of a man rising from a respectable competence to a fortune? According to the papers, you must start with nothing; that is the first rule of the game. We have ten thousand a year, so we can never hope to be rich. Fortune only favours the pauper. I am mad about money to-day. I can think of nothing else."
And he began showing her conjuring tricks with sovereigns which he drew from his pockets.
She did not tell him that day. And when she told him, it was without apparent emotion. She seemed merely stating coldly a physical fact, not breathing out a beautiful secret of her soul and his, a consecrated wonder to shake them both, and bind them together as two flowers are bound in the centre of a bouquet, the envy of the other flowers.
"Eustace," she said, and her eyes were clear and her hands were still, "I think I ought to tell you--we shall have a child."
Her voice was unwavering as a doctor's which pronounces, "You have the influenza." She stood there before him.
"Winifred!" he cried, looking up. His impulse was to say, "Wife! My Winifred!" to take her in his arms as any clerk might take his little middle-class spouse, to kiss her lips, and, in doing it, fancy he drew near to the prison in which every soul eternally dwells on earth. Finely human he felt, as the dullest, the most unknown, the plainest, the most despised, may feel, thank God! "Winifred!" he cried. And then he stopped, with the shooting thought, "Even now I must be what she thinks me, what she perhaps loves me for."
She stood there silently waiting.
"Toys!" he exclaimed. "Toys have always been my besetting sin. Now I will make a grand collection, not for the Pope, as people pretend, but for our family. You will have two children to laugh at, Winnie. Your husband is one, you know." He sprang up. "I'll go into the Strand," he said. "There's a man near the Temple who has always got some delightful novelty displaying its paces on the pavement. What fun!"
And off he went, leaving Winifred alone with the mystery of her woman's world, the mystic mystery of birth that may dawn out of hate as out of love, out of drunken dissipation as out of purity's sweet climax.
Next day a paragraph in the papers told how Mr. Eustace Lane had bought up all the penny toys of the Strand. Mention was again made of his supposed mission to the Vatican, and a picture drawn of the bewilderment of the Holy Father, roused from contemplation of the eternal to contemplation of jumping pasteboard, and the frigid gestures of people from the world of papier-mache.
Eustace showed the paragraph to Winifred.
"Why will