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The Price of Love

by Arnold Bennett · English · Gutenberg #12912 · 655,542 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Price of Love

Author: Arnold Bennett


        
Release date: July 14, 2004 [eBook #12912]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12912

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRICE OF LOVE ***

THE PRICE OF LOVE

A Tale

by

ARNOLD BENNETT

1914







CONTENTS


CHAPTER

I.     MONEY IN THE HOUSE

II.    LOUIS' DISCOVERY

III.   THE FEAST

IV.    IN THE NIGHT

V.     NEWS OF THE NIGHT

VI.    THEORIES OF THE THEFT

VII.   THE CINEMA

VIII.  END AND BEGINNING

IX.    THE MARRIED WOMAN

X.     THE CHASM

XI.    JULIAN'S DOCUMENT

XII.   RUNAWAY HORSES

XIII.  DEAD-LOCK

XIV.   THE MARKET

XV.    THE CHANGED MAN

XVI.   THE LETTER

XVII.  IN THE MONASTERY

XVIII. MRS. TAMS'S STRANGE BEHAVIOUR

XIX.   RACHEL AND MR. HORROCLEAVE





CHAPTER I

MONEY IN THE HOUSE


I

In the evening dimness of old Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room stood the
youthful virgin, Rachel Louisa Fleckring. The prominent fact about
her appearance was that she wore an apron. Not one of those
white, waist-tied aprons, with or without bibs, worn proudly,
uncompromisingly, by a previous generation of unaspiring housewives
and housegirls! But an immense blue pinafore-apron, covering the whole
front of the figure except the head, hands, and toes. Its virtues were
that it fully protected the most fragile frock against all the perils
of the kitchen; and that it could be slipped on or off in one
second, without any manipulation of tapes, pins, or buttons and
buttonholes--for it had no fastenings of any sort and merely yawned
behind. In one second the drudge could be transformed into the elegant
infanta of boudoirs, and _vice versa_. To suit the coquetry of
the age the pinafore was enriched with certain flouncings, which,
however, only intensified its unshapen ugliness.

On a plain, middle-aged woman such a pinafore would have been
intolerable to the sensitive eye. But on Rachel it simply had
a piquant and perverse air, because she was young, with the
incomparable, the unique charm of comely adolescence; it simply
excited the imagination to conceive the exquisite treasures of contour
and tint and texture which it veiled. Do not infer that Rachel was
a coquette. Although comely, she was homely--a "downright" girl,
scorning and hating all manner of pretentiousness. She had a fine best
dress, and when she put it on everybody knew that it was her best; a
stranger would have known. Whereas of a coquette none but her intimate
companions can say whether she is wearing best or second-best on a
given high occasion. Rachel used the pinafore-apron only with her best
dress, and her reason for doing so was the sound, sensible reason that
it was the usual and proper thing to do.

She opened a drawer of the new Sheraton sideboard, and took from it
a metal tube that imitated brass, about a foot long and an inch
in diameter, covered with black lettering. This tube, when she
had removed its top, showed a number of thin wax tapers in various
colours. She chose one, lit it neatly at the red fire, and then,
standing on a footstool in the middle of the room, stretched all her
body and limbs upward in order to reach the gas. If the tap had been
half an inch higher or herself half an inch shorter, she would have
had to stand on a chair instead of a footstool; and the chair would
have had to be brought out of the kitchen and carried back again. But
Heaven had watched over this detail. The gas-fitting consisted of a
flexible pipe, resembling a thick black cord, and swinging at the
end of it a specimen of that wonderful and blessed contrivance, the
inverted incandescent mantle within a porcelain globe: the whole
recently adopted by Mrs. Maldon as the dangerous final word of modern
invention. It was safer to ignite the gas from the orifice at the
top of the globe; but even so there was always a mild disconcerting
explosion, followed by a few moments' uncertainty as to whether or not
the gas had "lighted properly."

When the deed was accomplished and the room suddenly bright with soft
illumination, Mrs. Maldon murmured--

"That's better!"

She was sitting in her arm-chair by the glitteringly set table, which,
instead of being in the centre of the floor under the gas, had a place
near the bow-window--advantageous in the murky daytime of the Five
Towns, and inconvenient at night. The table might well have been
shifted at night to a better position in regard to the gas. But it
never was. Somehow for Mrs. Maldon the carpet was solid concrete, and
the legs of the table immovably embedded therein.

Rachel, gentle-footed, kicked the footstool away to its lair under the
table, and simultaneously extinguished the taper, which she dropped
with a scarce audible click into a vase on the mantelpiece. Then she
put the cover on the tube with another faintest click, restored the
tube to its drawer with a rather louder click, and finally, with a
click still louder, pushed the drawer home. All these slight sounds
were familiar to Mrs. Maldon; they were part of her regular night
life, part of an unconsciously loved ritual, and they contributed in
their degree to her placid happiness.

"Now the blinds, my dear!" said she.

The exhortation was ill-considered, and Rachel controlled a gesture of
amicable impatience. For she had not paused after closing the drawer;
she was already on her way across the room to the window when Mrs.
Maldon said, "Now the blinds, my dear!" The fact was that Mrs. Maldon
measured the time between the lighting of gas and the drawing down of
blinds by tenths of a second--such was her fear lest in that sinister
interval the whole prying town might magically gather in the street
outside and peer into the secrets of her inculpable existence.



II

When the blinds and curtains had been arranged for privacy, Mrs.
Maldon sighed securely and picked up her crocheting. Rachel rested her
hands on the table, which was laid for a supper for four, and asked in
a firm, frank voice whether there was anything else.

"Because, if not," Rachel added, "I'll just take off my pinafore and
wash my hands."

Mrs. Maldon looked up benevolently and nodded in quick agreement.
It was such apparently trifling gestures, eager and generous, that
endeared the old lady to Rachel, giving her the priceless sensation
of being esteemed and beloved. Her gaze lingered on her aged employer
with affection and with profound respect. Mrs. Maldon made a striking,
tall, slim figure, sitting erect in tight black, with the right side
of her long, prominent nose in the full gaslight and the other heavily
shadowed. Her hair was absolutely black at over seventy; her eyes were
black and glowing, and she could read and do coarse crocheting
without spectacles. All her skin, especially round about the eyes, was
yellowish brown and very deeply wrinkled indeed; a decrepit, senile
skin, which seemed to contradict the youth of her pose and her glance.
The cast of her features was benign. She had passed through desolating
and violent experiences, and then through a long, long period of
withdrawn tranquillity; and from end to end of her life she had
consistently thought the best of all men, refusing to recognize evil
and assuming the existence of good. Every one of the millions of her
kind thoughts had helped to mould the expression of her countenance.
The expression was definite now, fixed, intensely characteristic after
so many decades, and wherever it was seen it gave pleasure and by
its enchantment created goodness and goodwill--even out of their
opposites. Such was the life-work of Mrs. Maldon.

Her eyes embraced the whole room. They did not, as the phrase is,
"beam" approval; for the act of beaming involves a sort of ecstasy,
and Mrs. Maldon was too dignified for ecstasy. But they displayed a
mild and proud contentment as she said--

"I'm sure it's all very nice."

It was. The table crowded with porcelain, crystal, silver, and
flowers, and every object upon it casting a familiar curved shadow on
the whiteness of the damask toward the window! The fresh crimson and
blues of the everlasting Turkey carpet (Turkey carpet being the _ne
plus ultra_ of carpetry in the Five Towns, when that carpet was
bought, just as sealskin was the _ne plus ultra_ of all furs)!
The silken-polished sideboard, strange to the company, but worthy
of it, and exhibiting a due sense of its high destiny! The sombre
bookcase and corner cupboard, darkly glittering! The Chesterfield
sofa, broad, accepting, acquiescent! The flashing brass fender
and copper scuttle! The comfortably reddish walls, with their
pictures--like limpets on the face of precipices! The new-whitened
ceiling! In the midst the incandescent lamp that hung like the moon
in heaven!... And then the young, sturdy girl, standing over the
old woman and breathing out the very breath of life, vitalizing
everything, rejuvenating the old woman!

Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room had a considerable renown among her
acquaintance, not only for its peculiar charm, which combined and
reconciled the tastes of two very different generations, but also for
its radiant cleanness. There are many clean houses in the Five Towns,
using the adjective in the relative sense in which the Five Towns is
forced by chimneys to use it. But Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room (save for
the white window-curtains, which had to accept the common grey fate of
white window-curtains in the district) was clean in the country-side
sense, almost in the Dutch sense. The challenge of its cleanness
gleamed on every polished surface, victorious in the unending battle
against the horrible contagion of foul industries. Mrs. Maldon's
friends would assert that the state of that sitting-room "passed"
them, or "fair passed" them, and she would receive their ever-amazed
compliments with modesty. But behind her benevolent depreciation she
would be blandly saying to herself: "Yes, I'm scarcely surprised it
passes you--seeing the way you housewives let things go on here."
The word "here" would be faintly emphasized in her mind, as no native
would have emphasized it.

Rachel shared the general estimate of the sitting-room. She
appreciated its charm, and admitted to herself that her first vision
of it, rather less than a month before, had indeed given her a new and
startling ideal of cleanliness. On that occasion it had been evident,
from Mrs. Maldon's physical exhaustion, that the housemistress had
made an enormous personal effort to _dazzle_ and inspire her new
"lady companion," which effort, though detected and perhaps scorned by
Rachel, had nevertheless succeeded in its aim. With a certain presence
of mind Rachel had feigned to remark nothing miraculous in the
condition of the room. Appropriating the new ideal instantly, she
had on the first morning of her service "turned out" the room before
breakfast, well knowing that it must have been turned out on the
previous day. Dumbfounded for a few moments, Mrs. Maldon had at length
said, in her sweet and cordial benevolence, "I'm glad to see we think
alike about cleanliness." And Rachel had replied with an air at once
deferential, sweet, and yet casual, "Oh, of course, Mrs. Maldon!" Then
they measured one another in a silent exchange. Mrs. Maldon was aware
that she had by chance discovered a pearl--yes, a treasure beyond
pearls. And Rachel, too, divined the high value of her employer, and
felt within the stirrings of a passionate loyalty to her.



III

And yet, during the three weeks and a half of their joint existence,
Rachel's estimate of Mrs. Maldon had undergone certain subtle
modifications.

At first, somewhat overawed, Rachel had seen in her employer the Mrs.
Maldon of the town's legend, which legend had travelled to Rachel
as far as Knype, whence she sprang. That is to say, one of the
great ladies of Bursley, ranking in the popular regard with
Mrs. Clayton-Vernon, the leader of society, Mrs. Sutton, the
philanthropist, and Mrs. Hamps, the powerful religious bully. She had
been impressed by her height (Rachel herself being no lamp-post), her
carriage, her superlative dignity, her benevolence of thought, and
above all by her aristocratic Southern accent. After eight-and-forty
years of the Five Towns, Mrs. Maldon had still kept most of that
Southern accent--so intimidating to the rough, broad talkers of the
district, who take revenge by mocking it among themselves, but for
whom it will always possess the thrilling prestige of high life.

And then day by day Rachel had discovered that great ladies are, after
all, human creatures, strangely resembling other human creatures. And
Mrs. Maldon slowly became for her an old woman of seventy-two,
with unquestionably wondrous hair, but failing in strength and in
faculties; and it grew merely pathetic to Rachel that Mrs. Maldon
should force herself always to sit straight upright. As for Mrs.
Maldon's charitableness, Rachel could not deny that she refused to
think evil, and yet it was plain that at bottom Mrs. Maldon was not
much deceived about people: in which apparent inconsistency there hid
a slight disturbing suggestion of falseness that mysteriously fretted
the downright Rachel.

Again, beneath Mrs. Maldon's modesty concerning the merits of her
sitting-room Rachael soon fancied that she could detect traces of an
ingenuous and possibly senile "house-pride," which did more than fret
the lady companion; it faintly offended her. That one should be proud
of a possession or of an achievement was admissible, but that one
should fail to conceal the pride absolutely was to Rachel, with her
Five Towns character, a sign of weakness, a sign of the soft South.
Lastly, Mrs. Maldon had, it transpired, her "ways"; for example, in
the matter of blinds and in the matter of tapers. She would actually
insist on the gas being lighted with a taper; a paper spill, which was
just as good and better, seemed to ruffle her benign placidity: and
she was funnily economical with matches. Rachel had never seen a taper
before, and could not conceive where the old lady managed to buy the
things.

In short, with admiration almost undiminished, and with a rapidly
growing love and loyalty, Rachel had arrived at the point of feeling
glad that she, a mature, capable, sagacious, and strong woman, was
there to watch over the last years of the waning and somewhat peculiar
old lady.

Mrs. Maldon did not see the situation from quite the same angle. She
did not, for example, consider herself to be in the least peculiar,
but, on the contrary, a very normal woman. She had always used tapers;
she could remember the period when every one used tapers. In her
view tapers were far more genteel and less dangerous than the untidy,
flaring spill, which she abhorred as a vulgarity. As for matches,
frankly it would not have occurred to her to waste a match when fire
was available. In the matter of her sharp insistence on drawn blinds
at night, domestic privacy seemed to be one of the fundamental
decencies of life--simply that! And as for house-pride, she considered
that she locked away her fervent feeling for her parlour in a manner
marvellous and complete.

No one could or ever would guess the depth of her attachment to that
sitting-room, nor the extent to which it engrossed her emotional life.
And yet she had only occupied the house for fourteen years out of the
forty-five years of her widowhood, and the furniture had at intervals
been renewed (for Mrs. Maldon would on no account permit herself to
be old-fashioned). Indeed, she had had five different sitting-rooms in
five different houses since her husband's death. No matter. They were
all the same sitting-room, all rendered identical by the mysterious
force of her dreamy meditations on the past. And, moreover, sundry
important articles had remained constant to preserve unbroken the
chain that linked her to her youth. The table which Rachel had so
nicely laid was the table at which Mrs. Maldon had taken her first
meal as mistress of a house. Her husband had carved mutton at it, and
grumbled about the consistency of toast; her children had spilt jam on
its cloth. And when on Sunday nights she wound up the bracket-clock on
the mantelpiece, she could see and hear a handsome young man in a long
frock-coat and a large shirt-front and a very thin black tie winding
it up too--her husband--on Sunday nights. And she could simultaneously
see another handsome young man winding it up--her son.

Her pictures were admired.

"Your son painted this water-colour, did he not, Mrs. Maldon?"

"Yes, my son Athelstan."

"How gifted he must have been!"

"Yes, the best judges say he showed very remarkable promise. It's
fading, I fear. I ought to cover it up, but somehow I can't fancy
covering it up--"

The hand that had so remarkably promised had lain mouldering for a
quarter of a century. Mrs. Maldon sometimes saw it, fleshless, on a
cage-like skeleton in the dark grave. The next moment she would see
herself tending its chilblains.

And if she was not peculiar, neither was she waning. No!
Seventy-two--but not truly old! How could she be truly old when she
could see, hear, walk a mile without stopping, eat anything whatever,
and dress herself unaided? And that hair of hers! Often she was still
a young wife, or a young widow. She was not preparing for death; she
had prepared for death in the seventies. She expected to live on
in calm satisfaction through indefinite decades. She savoured life
pleasantly, for its daily security was impregnable. She had forgotten
grief.

When she looked up at Rachel and benevolently nodded to her, she saw
a girl of line character, absolutely trustworthy, very devoted, very
industrious, very capable, intelligent, cheerful--in fact, a splendid
girl, a girl to be enthusiastic about! But such a mere girl! A girl
with so much to learn! So pathetically young and inexperienced
and positive and sure of herself! The looseness of her limbs, the
unconscious abrupt freedom of her gestures, the waviness of her auburn
hair, the candour of her glance, the warmth of her indignation against
injustice and dishonesty, the capricious and sensitive flowings of
blood to her smooth cheeks, the ridiculous wise compressings of
her lips, the rise and fall of her rich and innocent bosom--these
phenomena touched Mrs. Maldon and occasionally made her want to cry.

Thought she: "_I_ was never so young as that at twenty-two! At
twenty-two I had had Mary!" The possibility that in spite of having
had Mary (who would now have been fifty, but for death) she had as a
fact been approximately as young as that at twenty-two did not ever
present itself to the waning and peculiar old lady. She was glad that
she, a mature and profoundly experienced woman, in full possession
of all her faculties, was there to watch over the development of the
lovable, affectionate, and impulsive child.



IV

"Oh! Here's the paper, Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel, as, turning away to
leave the room, she caught sight of the extra special edition of
the _Signal_, which lay a pale green on the dark green of the
Chesterfield.

Mrs. Maldon answered placidly--

"When did you bring it in? I never heard the boy come. But my
hearing's not quite what it used to be, that's true. Open it for me,
my dear. I can't stretch my arms as I used to."

She was one of the few women in the Five Towns who deigned to read
a newspaper regularly, and one of the still fewer who would lead the
miscellaneous conversation of drawing-rooms away from domestic chatter
and discussions of individualities, to political and municipal topics
and even toward general ideas. She seldom did more than mention a
topic and then express a hope for the best, or explain that this
phenomenon was "such a pity," or that phenomenon "such a good thing,"
or that about another phenomenon "one really didn't know what to
think." But these remarks sufficed to class her apart among her sex as
"a very up-to-date old lady, with a broad outlook upon the world,"
and to inspire sundry other ladies with a fearful respect for her
masculine intellect and judgment. She was aware of her superiority,
and had a certain kind disdain for the increasing number of women
who took in a daily picture-paper, and who, having dawdled over its
illustrations after breakfast, spoke of what they had seen in the
"newspaper." She would not allow that a picture-paper was a newspaper.

Rachel stood in the empty space under the gas. Her arms were stretched
out and slightly upward as she held the _Signal_ wide open and
glanced at the newspaper, frowning. The light fell full on her coppery
hair. Her balanced body, though masked in front by the perpendicular
fall of the apron as she bent somewhat forward, was nevertheless the
image of potential vivacity and energy; it seemed almost to vibrate
with its own consciousness of physical pride.

Left alone, Rachel would never have opened a newspaper, at any rate
for the news. Until she knew Mrs. Maldon she had never seen a woman
read a newspaper for aught except the advertisements relating to
situations, houses, and pleasures. But, much more than she imagined,
she was greatly under the influence of Mrs. Maldon. Mrs. Maldon made
a nightly solemnity of the newspaper, and Rachel naturally soon
persuaded herself that it was a fine and a superior thing to read the
newspaper--a proof of unusual intelligence. Moreover, just as she
felt bound to show Mrs. Maldon that her notion of cleanliness was as
advanced as anybody's, so she felt bound to indicate, by an appearance
of casualness, that for her to read the paper was the most customary
thing in the world. Of course she read the paper! And that she should
calmly look at it herself before handing it to her mistress proved
that she had already established a very secure position in the house.

She said, her eyes following the lines, and her feet moving in the
direction of Mrs. Maldon--"Those burglaries are still going on ...
Hillport now!"

"Oh, dear, dear!" murmured Mrs. Maldon, as Rachel spread the newspaper
lightly over the tea-tray and its contents. "Oh, dear, dear! I do
hope the police will catch some one soon. I'm sure they're doing their
best, but really--!"

Rachel bent with confident intimacy over the old lady's shoulder, and
they read the burglary column together, Rachel interrupting herself
for an instant to pick up Mrs. Maldon's ball of black wool which had
slipped to the floor. The _Signal_ reporter had omitted none of
the classic _clichés_ proper to the subject, and such words
and phrases as "jemmy," "effected an entrance," "the servant, now
thoroughly alarmed," "stealthy footsteps," "escaped with their booty,"
seriously disquieted both of the women--caused a sudden sensation of
sinking in the region of the heart. Yet neither would put the secret
fear into speech, for each by instinct felt that a fear once uttered
is strengthened and made more real. Living solitary and unprotected
by male sinews, in a house which, though it did not stand alone, was
somewhat withdrawn from the town, they knew themselves the ideal prey
of conventional burglars with masks, dark lanterns, revolvers, and
jemmies. They were grouped together like some symbolic sculpture, and
with all their fortitude and common sense they still in unconscious
attitude expressed the helpless and resigned fatalism of their sex
before certain menaces of bodily danger, the thrilled, expectant
submission of women in a city about to be sacked.

Nothing could save them if the peril entered the house. But they would
not say aloud: "Suppose they came _here_! How terrible!" They
would not even whisper the slightest apprehension. They just briefly
discussed the matter with a fine air of indifferent aloofness,
remaining calm while the brick walls and the social system which
defended that bright and delicate parlour from the dark, savage
universe without seemed to crack and shiver.

Mrs. Maldon, suddenly noticing that one blind was half an inch
short of the bottom of the window, rose nervously and pulled it down
farther.

"Why didn't you ask me to do that?" said Rachel, thinking what a
fidgety person the old lady was.

Mrs. Maldon replied--"It's all right, my dear. Did you fasten the
window on the upstairs landing?"

"As if burglars would try to get in by an upstairs window--and on
the street!" thought Rachel, pityingly impatient. "However, it's her
house, and I'm paid to do what I'm told," she added to herself, very
sensibly. Then she said, aloud, in a soothing tone--

"No, I didn't. But I will do it."

She moved towards the door, and at the same moment a knock on the
front door sent a vibration through the whole house. Nearly all
knocks on the front door shook the house; and further, burglars do
not generally knock as a preliminary to effecting an entrance.
Nevertheless, both women started--and were ashamed of starting.

"Surely he's rather early!" said Mrs. Maldon with an exaggerated
tranquillity.

And Rachel, with a similar lack of conviction in her calm gait, went
audaciously forth into the dark lobby.



V

On the glass panels of the front door the street lamp threw a faint,
distorted shadow of a bowler hat, two rather protruding ears, and
a pair of long, outspreading whiskers whose ends merged into broad
shoulders. Any one familiar with the streets of Bursley would have
instantly divined that Councillor Thomas Batchgrew stood between the
gas-lamp and the front door. And even Rachel, whose acquaintance
with Bursley was still slight, at once recognized the outlines of the
figure. She had seen Councillor Batchgrew one day conversing with Mrs.
Maldon in Moorthorne Road, and she knew that he bore to Mrs. Maldon
the vague but imposing relation of "trustee."

There are many--indeed perhaps too many--remarkable men in the Five
Towns. Thomas Batchgrew was one of them. He had begun life as a small
plumber in Bursley market-place, living behind and above the shop, and
begetting a considerable family, which exercised itself in the back
yard among empty and full turpentine-cans. The original premises
survived, as a branch establishment, and Batchgrew's latest-married
grandson condescended to reside on the first floor, and to keep a
motor-car and a tri-car in the back yard, now roofed over (in a manner
not strictly conforming to the building by-laws of the borough).
All Batchgrew's sons and daughters were married, and several of his
grandchildren also. And all his children, and more than one of the
grandchildren, kept motor-cars. Not a month passed but some Batchgrew,
or some Batchgrew's husband or child, bought a motor-car, or sold one,
or exchanged a small one for a larger one, or had an accident, or
was gloriously fined in some distant part of the country for illegal
driving. Nearly all of them had spacious detached houses, with gardens
and gardeners, and patent slow-combustion grates, and porcelain
bathrooms comprising every appliance for luxurious splashing. And,
with the exception of one son who had been assisted to Valparaiso in
order that he might there seek death in the tankard without outraging
the family, they were all teetotallers--because the old man, "old
Jack," was a teetotaller. The family pyramid was based firm on the
old man. The numerous relatives held closely together like an alien
oligarchical caste in a conquered country. If they ever did quarrel,
it must have been in private.

The principal seat of business--electrical apparatus, heating
apparatus, and decorating and plumbing on a grandiose scale--in
Hanbridge, had over its immense windows the sign: "John Batchgrew
& Sons." The sign might well have read: "John Batchgrew & Sons,
Daughters, Daughters-in-law, Sons-in-law, Grandchildren, and
Great-grandchildren." The Batchgrew partners were always tendering
for, and often winning, some big contract or other for heating
and lighting and embellishing a public building or a mansion or a
manufactory. (They by no means confined their activities to the Five
Towns, having an address in London--and another in Valparaiso.) And
small private customers were ever complaining of the inaccuracy
of their accounts for small jobs. People who, in the age of Queen
Victoria's earlier widowhood, had sent for Batchgrew to repair a burst
spout, still by force of habit sent for Batchgrew to repair a burst
spout, and still had to "call at Batchgrew's" about mistakes in the
bills, which mistakes, after much argument and asseveration, were
occasionally put right. In spite of their prodigious expenditures, and
of a certain failure on the part of the public to understand "where
all the money came from," the financial soundness of the Batchgrews
was never questioned. In discussing the Batchgrews no bank-manager and
no lawyer had ever by an intonation or a movement of the eyelid hinted
that earthquakes had occurred before in the history of the world and
might occur again.

And yet old Batchgrew--admittedly the cleverest of the lot,
save possibly the Valparaiso soaker--could not be said to attend
assiduously to business. He scarcely averaged two hours a day on
the premises at Hanbridge. Indeed the staff there had a sense of
the unusual, inciting to unusual energy and devotion, when word went
round: "Guv'nor's in the office with Mr. John." The Councillor was
always extremely busy with something other than his main enterprise.
It was now reported, for example, that he was clearing vast sums out
of picture-palaces in Wigan and Warrington. Also he was a religionist,
being Chairman of the local Church of England Village Mission Fund.
And he was a politician, powerful in municipal affairs. And he was a
reformer, who believed that by abolishing beer he could abolish the
poverty of the poor--and acted accordingly. And lastly he liked to
enjoy himself.

Everybody knew by sight his flying white whiskers and protruding ears.
And he himself was well aware of the steady advertising value of
those whiskers--of always being recognizable half a mile off. He met
everybody unflinchingly, for he felt that he was invulnerable at all
points and sure of a magnificent obituary. He was invariably treated
with marked deference and respect. But he was not an honest man. He
knew it. All his family knew it. In business everybody knew it except
a few nincompoops. Scarcely any one trusted him. The peculiar fashion
in which, when he was not present, people "old Jacked" him--this alone
was enough to condemn a man of his years. Lastly, everybody knew that
most of the Batchgrew family was of a piece with its head.



VI


Now Rachel had formed a prejudice against old Batchgrew. She had
formed it, immutably, in a single second of time. One glance at him
in the street--and she had tried and condemned him, according to
the summary justice of youth. She was in that stage of plenary and
unhesitating wisdom when one not only can, but one must, divide the
whole human race sharply into two categories, the sheep and the goats;
and she had sentenced old Batchgrew to a place on the extreme left.
It happened that she knew nothing against him. But she did not require
evidence. She simply did "not like _that man_"--(she italicized
the end of the phrase bitingly to herself)--and there was no appeal
against the verdict. Angels could not have successfully interceded
for him in the courts of her mind. He never guessed, in his aged
self-sufficiency, that his case was hopeless with Rachel, nor even
that the child had dared to have any opinion about him at all.

She was about to slip off the pinafore-apron and drop it on to the
oak chest that stood in the lobby. But she thought with defiance: "Why
should I take my pinafore off for him? I won't. He shan't see my nice
frock. Let him see my pinafore. I am an independent woman, earning my
own living, and why should I be ashamed of my pinafore? My pinafore is
good enough for him!" She also thought: "Let him wait!" and went off
into the kitchen to get the modern appliance of the match for lighting
the gas in the lobby. When she had lighted the gas she opened the
front door with audacious but nervous deliberation, and the famous
character impatiently walked straight in. He wore prominent loose
black kid gloves and a thin black overcoat.

Looking coolly at her, he said--

"So you're the new lady companion, young miss! Well, I've heard rare
accounts on ye--rare accounts on ye! Missis is in, I reckon?"

His voice was extremely low, rich, and heavy. It descended on the
silence like a thick lubricating oil that only reluctantly abandons
the curves in which it falls.

And Rachel answered, faintly, tremulously--"Yes."

No longer was she the independent woman, censorious and scornful, but
a silly, timid little thing. Though she condemned herself savagely for
school-girlishness, she could do nothing to arrest the swift change in
her. The fact was, she was abashed, partly by the legendary importance
of the renowned Batchgrew, but more by his physical presence. His
mere presence was always disturbing; for when he supervened into
an environment he had always the air of an animal on a voyage of
profitable discovery. His nose was an adventurous, sniffing nose, a
true nose, which exercised the original and proper functions of a nose
noisily. His limbs were restless, his boots like hoofs. His eyes were
as restless as his limbs, and seemed ever to be seeking for something
upon which they could definitely alight, and not finding it. He
performed eructations with the disarming naturalness of a baby. He was
tall but not stout, and yet he filled the lobby; he was the sole fact
in the lobby, and it was as though Rachel had to crush herself against
the wall in order to make room for him.

His glance at Rachel now became inquisitive, calculating, It seemed to
be saying: "One day I may be able to make use of this piece of goods."
But there was a certain careless good-humour in it, too. What he saw
was a naïve young maid, with agreeable features, and a fine, fresh
complexion, and rather reddish hair. (He did not approve of the
colour of the hair.) He found pleasure in regarding her, and in the
perception that he had abashed her. Yes, he liked to see her timid and
downcast before him. He was an old man, but like most old men--such as
statesmen--who have lived constantly at the full pressure of following
their noses, he was also a young man. He creaked, but he was not
gravely impaired.

"Is it Mr. Batchgrew?" Rachel softly murmured the unnecessary
question, with one hand on the knob ready to open the sitting-room
door.

He had flopped his stiff, flat-topped felt hat on the oak chest, and
was taking off his overcoat. He paused and, lifting his chin--and his
incredible white whiskers with it--gazed at Rachel almost steadily for
a couple of seconds.

"It is," he said, as it were challengingly--"it is, young miss."

Then he finished removing his overcoat and thrust it roughly down on
the hat.

Rachel blushed as she modestly turned the knob and pushed the door so
that he might pass in front of her.

"Here's Mr. Batchgrew, Mrs. Maldon," she announced, feebly
endeavouring to raise and clear her voice.

"Bless us!" The astonished exclamation of Mrs. Maldon was heard.

And Councillor Batchgrew, with his crimson shiny face, and the
vermilion rims round his unsteady eyes, and his elephant ears, and
the absurd streaming of his white whiskers, and his multitudinous
noisiness, and his black kid gloves, strode half theatrically past
her, sniffing.

To Rachel he was an object odious, almost obscene. In truth, she
had little mercy on old men in general, who as a class struck her as
fussy, ridiculous, and repulsive. And beyond all the old men she had
ever seen, she disliked Councillor Batchgrew. And about Councillor
Batchgrew what she most detested was, perhaps strangely, his loose,
wrinkled black kid gloves. They were ordinary, harmless black kid
gloves, but she counted them against him as a supreme offence.

"Conceited, self-conscious, horrid old brute!" she thought, discreetly
drawing the door to, and then going into the kitchen. "He's interested
in nothing and nobody but himself." She felt protective towards Mrs.
Maldon, that simpleton who apparently could not see through a John
Batchgrew!... So Mrs. Maldon had been giving him good accounts of the
new lady companion, had she!



VII

"Well, Lizzie Maldon," said Councillor Batchgrew as he crossed the
sitting-room, "how d'ye find yourself?... Sings!" he went on, taking
Mrs. Maldon's hand with a certain negligence and at the same time
fixing an unfriendly eye on the gas.

Mrs. Maldon had risen to welcome him with the punctilious warmth due
to an old gentleman, a trustee, and a notability. She told him as
to her own health and inquired about his. But he ignored her smooth
utterances, in the ardour of following his nose.

"Sings worse than ever! Very unhealthy too! Haven't I told ye and told
ye? You ought to let me put electricity in for you. It isn't as if it
wasn't your own house.... Pay ye! Pay ye over and over again!"

He sat down in a chair by the table, drew off his loose black gloves,
and after letting them hover irresolutely over the encumbered table,
deposited them for safety in the china slop-basin.

"I dare say you're quite right," said Mrs. Maldon with grave urbanity.
"But really gas suits me very well. And you know the gas-manager
complains so much about the competition of electricity. Truly it does
seem unfair, doesn't it, as they both belong to the town! If I gave
up gas for electricity I don't think I could look the poor man in the
face at church. And all these changes cost money! How is dear Enid?"

Mr. Batchgrew had now stretched out his legs and crossed one over the
other; and he was twisting his thumbs on his diaphragm.

"Enid? Oh! Enid! Well, I did hear she's able to nurse the child
at last." He spoke of his grand-daughter-in-law as of one among a
multiplicity of women about whose condition vague rumours reached him
at intervals.

Mrs. Maldon breathed fervently--"I'm so thankful! What a blessing
that is, isn't it?"

"As for costing money, Elizabeth," Mr. Batchgrew proceeded, "you'll
be all right now for money." He paused, sat up straight with puffings,
and leaned sideways against the table. Then he said, half fiercely--
"I've settled up th' Brougham Street mortgage."

"You don't say so!" Mrs. Maldon was startled.

"I do!"

"When?"

"To-day."

"Well--"

"That's what I stepped in for."

Mrs. Maldon feebly murmured, with obvious emotion--

"You can't imagine what a relief it is to me!" Tears shone in her
dark, mild eyes.

"Look ye!" exclaimed the trustee curtly.

He drew from his breast pocket a bank envelope of linen, and then,
glancing at the table, pushed cups and saucers abruptly away to make a
clear space on the white cloth. The newspaper slipped rustling to the
floor on the side near the window. Already his gloves were abominable
in the slop-basin, and now with a single gesture he had destroyed the
symmetry of the set table. Mrs. Maldon with surpassing patience smiled
sweetly, and assured herself that Mr. Batchgrew could not help it. He
was a coarse male creature at large in a room highly feminized. It was
his habit thus to pass through orderly interiors, distributing havoc,
like a rough soldier. You might almost hear a sword clanking in the
scabbard.

"Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty," he began in his heavily
rolling voice to count out one by one a bundle of notes which he had
taken from the envelope. He generously licked his thick, curved-back
thumb for the separating of the notes, and made each note sharply
click, in the manner of a bank cashier, to prove to himself that it
was not two notes stuck together. "... Five-seventy, five-eighty,
five-ninety, six hundred. These are all tens. Now the fives: Five,
ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five." He counted up to three hundred and
sixty-five. "That's nine-sixty-five altogether. The odd sixty-five's
arrear of interest. I'm investing nine hundred again to-morrow, and
th' interest on th' new investment is to start from th' first o' this
month. So instead of being out o'pocket, you'll be in pocket, missis."

The notes lay in two irregular filmy heaps on the table.

Having carefully returned the empty envelope to his pocket, Mr.
Batchgrew sat back, triumphant, and his eye met the delighted yet
disturbed eye of Mrs. Maldon, and then wavered and dodged.

Mr. Batchgrew with all his romantic qualities, lacked any perception
of the noble and beautiful in life, and it could be positively
asserted that his estimate of Mrs. Maldon was chiefly disdainful. But
of Mrs. Maldon's secret opinion about John Batchgrew nothing could be
affirmed with certainty. Nobody knew it or ever would know it. I doubt
whether Mrs. Maldon had whispered it even to herself. In youth he
had been the very intimate friend of her husband. Which fact would
scarcely tally with Mrs. Maldon's memory of her husband as the most
upright and perspicacious of men--unless on the assumption that John
Batchgrew's real characteristics had not properly revealed themselves
until after his crony's death; this assumption was perhaps admissible.
Mrs. Maldon invariably spoke of John Batchgrew with respect and
admiration. She probably had perfect confidence in him as a trustee,
and such confidence was justified, for the Councillor knew as well
as anybody in what fields rectitude was a remunerative virtue, and in
what fields it was not.

Indeed, as a trustee his sense of honour and of duty was so nice that
in order to save his ward from loss in connection with a depreciating
mortgage security, he had invented, as a Town Councillor, the
"Improvement" known as the "Brougham Street Scheme." If this was not
said outright, it was hinted. At any rate, the idea was fairly current
that had not Councillor Batchgrew been interested in Brougham Street
property, the Brougham Street Scheme, involving the compulsory
purchase of some of that property at the handsome price naturally
expected from the munificence of corporations, would never have come
into being.

Mrs. Maldon knew of the existence of the idea, which had been
obscurely referred to by a licensed victualler (inimically prejudiced
against the teetotaller in Mr. Batchgrew) at a Council meeting
reported in the _Signal_. And it was precisely this knowledge
which had imparted to her glance the peculiar disturbed quality that
had caused Mr. Batchgrew to waver and dodge.

The occasion demanded the exercise of unflinching common sense, and
Mrs. Maldon was equal to it. She very wisely decided that she ought
not to concern herself, and could not concern herself, with an aspect
of the matter which concerned her trustee alone. And therefore she
gave her heart entirely up to an intense gladness at the integral
recovery of the mortgage money.

For despite her faith in the efficiency of her trustee, Mrs. Maldon
would worry about finance; she would yield to an exquisitely painful
dread lest "anything should happen"--happen, that is, to prevent her
from dying in the comfortable and dignified state in which she had
lived. Her income was not large--a little under three hundred pounds
a year--but with care it sufficed for her own wants, and for gifts,
subscriptions, and an occasional carriage. There would have been a
small margin but for the constant rise in prices. As it was, there was
no permanent margin. And to have cut off a single annual subscription,
or lessened a single customary gift, would have mortally wounded her
pride. The gradual declension of property values in Brougham Street
had been a danger that each year grew more menacing. The moment had
long ago come when the whole rents of the mortgaged cottages would not
cover her interest. The promise of the Corporation Improvement Scheme
had only partially reassured her; it seemed too good to be true. She
could not believe without seeing. She now saw, suddenly, blindingly.
And her relief, beneath that stately deportment of hers, was pathetic
in its simple intensity. It would have moved John Batchgrew, had he
been in any degree susceptible to the thrill of pathos.

"I doubt if I've seen so much money all at once before," said Mrs.
Maldon, smiling weakly.

"Happen not!" said Mr. Batchgrew, proud, with insincere casualness,
and he added in exactly the same tone: "I'm leaving it with ye
to-night."

Mrs. Maldon was aghast, but she feigned sprightliness as she
exclaimed--

"You're not leaving all this money here to-night?"

"I am," said the trustee. "That's what I came for. Evans's were three
hours late in completing, and the bank was closed. I have but just got
it. I'm not going home." (He lived eight miles off, near Axe.) "I've
got to go to a Church meeting at Red Cow, and I'm sleeping there.
John's Ernest is calling here for me presently. I don't fancy driving
over them moors with near a thousand pun in my pocket--and colliers
out on strike--not at my age, missis! If you don't know what Red Cow
is, I reckon I do. It's your money. Put it in a drawer and say nowt,
and I'll fetch it to-morrow. What'll happen to it, think ye, seeing
as it hasn't got legs?" He spoke with the authority of a trustee. And
Mrs. Maldon felt that her reputation for sensible equanimity was worth
preserving. So she said bravely--

"I suppose it will be all right."

"Of course!" snapped the trustee patronizingly.

"But I must tell Rachel."

"Rachel? Rachel? Oh! _Her_! Why tell any one?" Mr. Batchgrew
sniffed very actively.

"Oh! I shouldn't be easy if I didn't tell Rachel," insisted Mrs.
Maldon with firmness.

Before the trustee could protest anew she had rung the bell.



VIII

It was another and an apronless Rachel that entered the room, a Rachel
transformed, magnificent in light green frock with elaborate lacy
ruchings and ornamentations, and the waist at the new fashionable
height. Her ruddy face and hands were fresh from water, her hair very
glossy and very neat: she was in high array. This festival attire
Mrs. Maldon now fully beheld for the first time. It, indeed, honoured
herself, for she had ordained a festive evening: but at the same
time she was surprised and troubled by it. As for Mr. Batchgrew, he
entirely ignored the vision. Stretched out in one long inclined plane
from the back of his chair down to the brass fender, he contemplated
the fire, while picking his teeth with a certain impatience, and still
sniffing actively. The girl resented this disregard. But, though she
remained hostile to the grotesque old man with his fussy noises,
the mantle of Mrs. Maldon's moral protection was now over Councillor
Batchgrew, and Rachel's mistrustful scorn of him had lost some of its
pleasing force.

"Rachel--"

Mrs. Maldon gave a hesitating cough.

"Yes, Mrs. Maldon?" said Rachel questioningly deferential, and smiling
faintly into Mrs. Maldon's apprehensive eyes. Against the background
of the aged pair she seemed dramatically young, lithe, living, and
wistful. She was nervous, but she thought with strong superiority:
"What are those old folks planning together? Why do they ring for me?"

At length Mrs. Maldon proceeded--"I think I ought to tell you, dear,
Mr. Batchgrew is obliged to leave this money in my charge to-night."

"What money?" asked Rachel.

Mr. Batchgrew put in sharply, drawing up his legs--"This!... Here,
young miss! Step this way, if ye please. I'll count it. Ten, twenty,
thirty--" With new lickings and clickings he counted the notes
all over again. "There!" When he had finished his pride had become
positively naïve.

"Oh, my word!" murmured Rachel, awed and astounded.

"It is rather a lot, isn't it?" said Mrs. Maldon, with a timid laugh.

At once fascinated and repelled, the two women looked at the money as
at a magic. It represented to Mrs. Maldon a future free from financial
embarrassment; it represented to Rachel more than she could earn in
half a century at her wage of eighteen pounds a year, an unimaginable
source of endless gratifications; and yet the mere fact that it was
to stay in the house all night changed it for them into something dire
and formidable, so that it inspired both of them--the ancient dame and
the young girl--with naught but a mystic dread. Mr. Batchgrew eyed the
affrighted creatures with satisfaction, appearing to take a perverse
pleasure in thus imposing upon them the horrid incubus.

"I was only thinking of burglars;" said Mrs. Maldon apologetically.
"There've been so many burglaries lately--" She ceased, uncertain of
her voice. The forced lightness of her tone was almost tragic.

"There won't be any more," said Mr. Batchgrew condescendingly.


"Why?" demanded Mrs. Maldon with an eager smile of hope. "Have they
caught them, then? Has Superintendent Snow--"

"They have their hands on them. To-morrow there'll be some arrests,"
Mr. Batchgrew answered, exuding authority. For he was not merely a
Town Councillor, he was brother-in-law to the Superintendent of the
Borough Police. "Caught 'em long ago if th' county police had been a
bit more reliable!"

"Oh!" Mrs. Maldon breathed happily. "I knew it couldn't be Mr. Snow's
fault. I felt sure of that. I'm so glad."

And Rachel also was conscious of gladness. In fact, it suddenly seemed
plain to both women that no burglar, certain of arrest on the morrow,
would dare to invade the house of a lady whose trustee had married
the sister of the Superintendent of Police. The house was invisibly
protected.

"And we mustn't forget we shall have a man sleeping here to-night,"
said Rachel confidently.

"Of course! Of course! I was quite overlooking that!" exclaimed Mrs.
Maldon.

Mr. Batchgrew threw a curt and suspicious question--"What man?"

"My nephew Julian--I should say my grand-nephew." Mrs. Maldon's proud
tone rebuked the strange tone of Mr. Batchgrew. "It is his birthday.
He and Louis are having supper with me. And Julian is staying the
night."

"Well, if you take my advice, missis, ye'll say nowt to nobody. Lock
the brass up in a drawer in that wardrobe of yours, and keep a still
tongue in your head."

"Perhaps you're right," Mrs. Maldon agreed--"as a matter of general
principle, I mean. And it might make Julian uneasy."

"Take it and lock it up," Mr. Batchgrew repeated.

"I don't know about my wardrobe--" Mrs. Maldon began.

"Anywhere!" Mr. Batchgrew stopped her.

"Only," said Rachel with careful gentleness, "please don't forget
where you _have_ put it."

But her precaution of manner was futile. Twice within a minute she had
employed the word "forget." Twice was too often. Mrs. Maldon's memory
was most capriciously uncertain. Its lapses astonished sometimes even
herself. And naturally she was sensitive on the point. She nourished
the fiction, and she expected others to nourish it, that her memory
was quite equal to younger memories. Indeed, she would admit every
symptom of old age save an unreliable memory.

Composing a dignified smile, she said with reproving blandness--

"I am not in the habit of forgetting where I put valuables, Rachel."

And her prominently veined fingers, clasping the notes as a
preliminary to hiding them away, seemed in their nervous primness to
be saying to Rachael: "I have deep confidence in you, and I think that
to-night I have shown it. But oblige me by not presuming. I am Mrs.
Maldon and you are Rachel. After all, I have not yet known you for a
month."



IX

A very loud rasping noise, like a vicious menace, sounded from the
street, shivering instantaneously the delicate placidity of Mrs.
Maldon's home. Mrs. Maldon gave a start.

"That'll be John's Ernest with the car," said Mr. Batchgrew, amused;
and he began to get up from the chair. As soon as he was on his feet
his nose grew active again. "You've nothing to be afraid of, missis,"
he added in a tone roughly reassuring and good-natured.

"Oh no! Of course not!" concurred Mrs. Maldon, further enforcing
intrepidity on herself. "Of course not! I only just mentioned burglars
because they're so much in the paper." And she stooped to pick up the
_Signal_ and folded it carefully, as if to prove that her mind
was utterly collected.

Councillor Batchgrew, leaning over the table, peered into various
vessels in search of his gloves. At length he took them finickingly
from the white slop-basin as though fishing them out of a puddle. He
began to put them on, and then, half-way through the process, abruptly
shook hands with Mrs. Maldon.

"Then you'll call in the morning?" she asked.

"Aye! Ye may count on me. I'll relieve ye on [of] it afore ten
o'clock. It'll be on my way to Hanbridge, ye see."

Mrs. Maldon ceremoniously accompanied her trustee as far as the
sitting-room door, where she recommended him to the careful attention
of Rachel. No woman in the Five Towns could take leave of a guest
with more impressive dignity than old Mrs. Maldon, whose fine Southern
accent always gave a finish to her farewells. In the lobby Mr.
Batchgrew kept Rachel waiting with his overcoat in her outstretched
hands while he completed the business of his gloves. As, close behind
him, she coaxed his stiff arms into the overcoat, she suddenly
felt that after all he was nothing but a decrepit survival; and his
offensiveness seemed somehow to have been increased--perhaps by the
singular episode of the gloves and the slop-basin. She opened the
front door, and without a word to her he departed down the steps.

Two lamps like lighthouses glared fiercely along the roadway, dulling
the municipal gas and giving to each loose stone on the macadam a
long shadow. In the gloom behind the lamps the low form of an open
automobile showed, and a dim, cloaked figure beside it. A boyish voice
said with playful bullying sharpness, above the growling, irregular
pulsation of the engine--"Here, grandad, you've got to put this on."

"Have I?" demanded uncertainly the thick, heavy voice of the old man.

"Yes, you have--on the top of your other coat. If I don't look after
you I shall get myself into a row!... Here, let me put your fist in
the armhole. It's your blooming glove that stops it.... There! Now, up
with you, grandad!... All right! I've got you. I sha'n't drop you."

A door snapped to; then another. The car shot violently forward,
with shrieks and a huge buzzing noise, and leaped up the slope of the
street. Rachel, still in the porch, could see Mr. Batchgrew's head
wagging rather helplessly from side to side, just above the red speck
of the tail-lamp. Then the whole vision was swiftly blotted out, and
the warning shrieks of the invisible car grew fainter on the way to
Red Cow. It pleased Rachel to think of the old man being casually
bullied and shaken by John's Ernest.

She leaned forward and gazed down the street, not up it. When she
turned into the house Mrs. Maldon was descending the stairs, which,
being in a line with the lobby, ended opposite the front door. Judging
by the fixity of the old lady's features, Rachel decided that she was
not yet quite pardoned for the slight she had put upon the memory of
her employer. So she smiled pleasantly.

"Don't close the front door, dear," said Mrs. Maldon stiffly. "There's
some one there."

Rachel looked round. She had actually, in sheer absent-mindedness
or negligence or deafness, been shutting the door in the face of the
telegraph-boy!

"Oh, dear! I do hope--!" Mrs. Maldon muttered as she hastily tugged at
the envelope.

Having read the message, she passed it on to Rachel, and at the
same time forgivingly responded to her smile. The excitement of the
telegram had sufficed to dissipate Mrs. Maldon's trifling resentment.

Rachel read--

"Train hour late. Julian."

The telegraph boy was dismissed: "No answer, thank you."



X

During the next half-hour excitement within the dwelling gradually
increased. It grew out of nothing--out of Mrs. Maldon's admirable calm
in receiving the message of the telegram--until it affected like an
atmospheric disturbance the ground floor--the sitting-room where
Mrs. Maldon was spending nervous force in the effort to preserve an
absolutely tranquil mind, the kitchen where Rachel was "putting back"
the supper, the lobby towards which Rachel's eye and Mrs. Maiden's
ear were strained to catch any sign of an arrival, and the unlighted,
unused room behind the sitting-room which seemed to absorb and even
intensify the changing moods of the house.

The fact was that Mrs. Maldon, in her relief at finding that Julian
was not killed or maimed for life in a railway accident, had begun by
treating a delay of one hour in all her arrangements for the evening
as a trifle. But she had soon felt that, though a trifle, it was
really very upsetting and annoying. It gave birth to irrational yet
real forebodings as to the non-success of her little party. It
meant that the little party had "started badly." And then her other
grand-nephew, Louis Fores, did not arrive. He had been invited for
supper at seven, and should have appeared at five minutes to seven
at the latest. But at five minutes to seven he had not come; nor at
seven, nor at five minutes past--he who had barely a quarter of a
mile to walk! There was surely a fate against the party! And Rachel
strangely persisted in not leaving the kitchen! Even after Mrs. Maldon
had heard her fumbling for an interminable time with the difficult
window on the first-floor landing, she went back to the kitchen
instead of presenting herself to her expectant mistress.

At last Rachel entered the sitting-room, faintly humming an air. Mrs.
Maldon thought that she looked self-conscious. But Mrs. Maldon also
was self-conscious, and somehow could not bring her lips to utter
the name of Louis Fores to Rachel. For the old lady had divined a
connection of cause and effect between Louis Fores and the apparition
of Rachel's superlative frock. And she did not like the connection; it
troubled her, and offended the extreme nicety of her social code.

There was a constrained silence, which was broken by the lobby clock
striking the first quarter after seven. This harsh announcement on the
part of the inhuman clock seemed to render the situation intolerable.
Fifteen minutes past seven, and Louis not come, and not a word of
comment thereon! Mrs. Maldon had to admit privately that she was in a
high state of agitation.

Then Rachel, bending delicately to sweep the hearth with the
brass-handled brush proper to it, remarked with an obvious affectation
of nonchalance--

"Your other guest's late too."

If Mrs. Maldon had not been able to speak his name, neither could
Rachel! Mrs. Maldon read with painful certainty all the girl's
symptoms.

"Yes, indeed!" said Mrs. Maldon.

"It's like as if what must be!" Rachel murmured, employing a local
phrase which Mrs. Maldon had ever contemned as meaningless and
ungrammatical.

"Fortunately it doesn't matter, as Julian is late too," said Mrs.
Maldon insincerely, for it was mattering very much. "But still--I
wonder--"

Rachel broke out upon her hesitation in a very startling manner--

"I'll just see if he's coming."

And she abruptly quitted the room, almost slamming the door.

Mrs. Maldon was dumbfounded. Scared and attentive, she listened in a
maze for the sound of the front door. She heard it open. But was it
possible that she heard also the creak of the gate? She sprang to the
bow window with surprising activity, and pulled aside a blind, one
inch.... There was Rachel tripping hatless and in her best frock
down the street! Inconceivable vision, affecting Mrs. Maldon with
palpitation! A girl so excellent, so lovable, so trustworthy, to be
guilty of the wanton caprice of a minx! Supposing Louis were to see
her, to catch her in the brazen act of looking for him! Mrs. Maldon
was grieved; and her gentle sorrow for Rachel's incalculable lapse was
so dignified, affectionate, and jealous for the good repute of human
nature that it mysteriously ennobled instead of degrading the young
creature.



XI

Going down Bycars Lane amid the soft wandering airs of the September
night, Rachel had the delicious and exciting sensation of being
unyoked, of being at liberty for a space to obey the strong, free
common sense of youth instead of conforming to the outworn and
tiresome code of another age. Mrs. Maldon's was certainly a house that
put a strain on the nerves. It did not occur to Rachel that she was
doing aught but a very natural and proper thing. The non-appearance
of Louis Fores was causing disquiet, and her simple aim was to shorten
the period of anxiety. Nor did it occur to her that she was impulsive.
Something had to be done, and she had done something. Not much longer
could she have borne the suspense. All that day she had lived forward
towards supper-time, when Louis Fores would appear. Over and over
again she had lived right through the moment of opening the front door
for him at a little before seven o'clock. The moments between
seven o'clock and a quarter past had been a crescendo of torment,
intolerable at last. His lateness was inexplicable, and he was so
close to that not to look for him would have been ridiculous.

She was apprehensive, and yet she was obscurely happy in her fears.
The large, inviting, dangerous universe was about her--she had escaped
from the confining shelter of the house. And the night was about
her. It was not necessary for her to wear three coats, like the gross
Batchgrew, in order to protect herself from the night! She could go
forth into it with no precaution. She was young. Her vigorous and
confident body might challenge perils.

When she had proceeded a hundred yards she stopped and turned to look
back at the cluster of houses collectively called Bycars.

The distinctive bow-window of Mrs. Maldon's shone yellow. Within the
sacred room was still the old lady, sitting expectant, and trying to
interest herself in the paper. Strange thought!

Bycars Lane led in a north-easterly direction over the broad hill
whose ridge separates the lane from the moorlands honeycombed with
coal and iron mines. Above the ridge showed the fire and vapour of
the first mining villages, on the way to Red Cow, proof that not all
colliers were yet on strike. And above that pyrotechny hung the
moon. The municipal park, of which Bycars Lane was the north-western
boundary, lay in mysterious and forbidden groves behind its spiked
red wall and locked gates, and beyond it a bright tram-car was leaping
down from lamp to lamp of Moorthorne Road towards the town. Between
the masses of the ragged hedge on the north side of the lane there was
the thin gleam of Bycars Pool, lost in a vague, unoccupied region of
shawdrucks and dirty pasture--the rendezvous of skaters when the frost
held, Louis Fores had told her, and she had heard from another source
that he skated divinely. She could believe it, too.

She resumed her way more slowly. She had only stopped because, though
burned with the desire to see him, she yet had an instinct to postpone
the encounter. She was almost minded to return. But she went on. The
town was really very near. The illuminated clock of the Town Hall
had dominion over it; the golden shimmer above the roofs to the left
indicated the electrical splendour of the new Cinema in Moorthorne
Road next to the new Primitive Methodist Chapel. He had told her about
that, too. In two minutes, in less than two minutes, she was among
houses again, and approaching the corner of Friendly Street. He would
come from the Moorthorne Road end of Friendly Street. She would peep
round the corner of Friendly Street to see if he was coming....

But before she reached the corner, her escapade suddenly presented
itself to her as childish madness, silly, inexcusable; and she thought
self-reproachfully, "How impulsive I am!" and sharply turned back
towards Mrs. Maldon's house, which seemed to be about ten miles off.

A moment later she heard hurried footfalls behind her on the narrow
brick pavement, and, after one furtive glance over her shoulder, she
quickened her pace. Louis Fores in all his elegance was pursuing her!
Nothing had happened to him. He was not ill; he was merely a little
late! After all, she would sit by his side at the supper-table! She
had a spasm of shame that was excruciating. But at the same time she
was wildly glad. And already this inebriating illusion of an ingenuous
girl concerning a common male was helping to shape monstrous events.




CHAPTER II

LOUIS' DISCOVERY


I

Louis Fores was late at his grand-aunt's because he had by a certain
preoccupation, during a period of about an hour, been rendered
oblivious of the passage of time. The real origin of the affair went
back nearly sixty years, to an indecorous episode in the history of
the Maldon family.

At that date--before Mrs. Maldon had even met Austin Maldon, her
future husband--Austin's elder brother Athelstan, who was well
established as an earthenware broker in London, had a conjugal
misfortune, which reached its climax in the Matrimonial Court, and
left the injured and stately Athelstan with an incomplete household,
a spoiled home, and the sole care of two children, a boy and a girl.
These children were, almost of necessity, clumsily brought up. The
girl married the half-brother of a Lieutenant-General Fores, and Louis
Fores was their son. The boy married an American girl, and had issue,
Julian Maldon and some daughters.

At the age of eighteen, Louis Fores, amiable, personable, and an
orphan, was looking for a career. He had lived in the London suburb of
Barnes, and under the influence of a father whose career had chiefly
been to be the stepbrother of Lieutenant-General Fores. He was in
full possession of the conventionally snobbish ideals of the suburb,
reinforced by more than a tincture of the stupendous and unsurpassed
snobbishness of the British Army. He had no money, and therefore the
liberal professions and the higher division of the Civil Service were
closed to him. He had the choice of two activities: he might tout for
wine, motor-cars, or mineral-waters on commission (like his father),
or he might enter a bank; his friends were agreed that nothing else
was conceivable. He chose the living grave. It is not easy to enter
the living grave, but, august influences aiding, he entered it with
_éclat_ at a salary of seventy pounds a year, and it closed
over him. He would have been secure till his second death had he not
defiled the bier. The day of judgment occurred, the grave opened, and
he was thrown out with ignominy, but ignominy unpublished. The august
influences, by simple cash, and for their own sakes, had saved him
from exposure and a jury.

In order to get rid of him his protectors spoke well of him,
emphasizing his many good qualities, and he was deported to the Five
Towns (properly enough, since his grandfather had come thence)
and there joined the staff of Batchgrew & Sons, thanks to the kind
intervention of Mrs. Maldon. At the end of a year John Batchgrew told
him to go, and told Mrs. Maldon that her grand-nephew had a fault.
Mrs. Maldon was very sorry. At this juncture Louis Fores, without
intending to do so, would certainly have turned Mrs. Maldon's last
years into a tragedy, had he not in the very nick of time inherited
about a thousand pounds. He was rehabilitated. He "had money" now. He
had a fortune; he had ten thousand pounds; he had any sum you like,
according to the caprice of rumour. He lived on his means for a
little time, frequenting the Municipal School of Art at the Wedgwood
Institution at Bursley, and then old Batchgrew had casually suggested
to Mrs. Maldon that there ought to be an opening for him with Jim
Horrocleave, who was understood to be succeeding with his patent
special processes for earthenware manufacture. Mr. Horrocleave, a man
with a chin, would not accept him for a partner, having no desire to
share profits with anybody; but on the faith of his artistic tendency
and Mrs. Maldon's correct yet highly misleading catalogue of his
virtues, he took him at a salary, in return for which Louis was to be
the confidential employee who could and would do anything, including
design.

And now Louis was the step-nephew of a Lieutenant-General, a man
of private means and of talent, and a trusted employee with a fine
wage--all under one skin! He shone in Bursley, and no wonder! He was
very active at Horrocleave's. He not only designed shapes for vases,
and talked intimately with Jim Horrocleave about fresh projects, but
he controlled the petty cash. The expenditure of petty cash grew, as
was natural in a growing business. Mr. Horrocleave soon got accustomed
to that, and apparently gave it no thought, signing cheques instantly
upon request. But on the very day of Mrs. Maldon's party, after
signing a cheque and before handing it to Louis, he had somewhat
lengthily consulted his private cash-book, and, as he handed over
the cheque, had said: "Let's have a squint at the petty-cash book
to-morrow morning, Louis." He said it gruffly, but he was a gruff man.
He left early. He might have meant anything or nothing. Louis could
not decide which; or rather, from five o'clock to seven he had come to
alternating decisions every five minutes.



II

It was just about at the time when Louis ought to have been removing
his paper cuff-shields in order to start for Mrs. Maldon's that he
discovered the full extent of his debt to the petty-cash box. He
sat alone at a rough and dirty desk in the inner room of the works
"office," surrounded by dust-covered sample vases and other vessels of
all shapes, sizes, and tints--specimens of Horrocleave's "Art Lustre
Ware," a melancholy array of ingenious ugliness that nevertheless
filled with pride its creators. He looked through a dirt-obscured
window and with unseeing gaze surveyed a muddy, littered quadrangle
whose twilight was reddened by gleams from the engine-house. In this
yard lay flat a sign that had been blown down from the façade of the
manufactory six months before: "Horrocleave. Art Lustre Ware."
Within the room was another sign, itself fashioned in lustre-ware:
"Horrocleave. Art Lustre Ware." And the envelopes and paper and
bill-heads on the desk all bore the same legend: "Horrocleave. Art
Lustre Ware."

He owed seventy-three pounds to the petty-cash box, and he was
startled and shocked. He was startled because for weeks past he had
refrained from adding up the columns of the cash-book--partly from
idleness and partly from a desire to remain in ignorance of his own
doings. He had hoped for the best. He had faintly hoped that the
deficit would not exceed ten pounds, or twelve; he had been prepared
for a deficit of twenty-five, or even thirty. But seventy-three really
shocked. Nay, it staggered. It meant that in addition to his salary,
some thirty shillings a week had been mysteriously trickling through
the incurable hole in his pocket. Not to mention other debts! He well
knew that to Shillitoe alone (his admirable tailor) he owed eighteen
pounds.

It may be asked how a young bachelor, with private means and a
fine salary, living in a district where prices are low and social
conventions not costly, could have come to such a pass. The answer is
that Louis had no private means, and that his salary was not fine. The
thousand pounds had gradually vanished, as a thousand pounds will, in
the refinements of material existence and in the pursuit of happiness.
His bank-account had long been in abeyance. His salary was three
pounds a week. Many a member of the liberal professions--many a
solicitor, for example--brings up a family on three pounds a week in
the provinces. But for a Lieutenant-General's nephew, who had once had
a thousand pounds in one lump, three pounds a week was inadequate. As
a fact, Louis conceived himself "Art Director" of Horrocleave's, and
sincerely thought that as such he was ill-paid. Herein was one of his
private excuses for eccentricity with the petty cash. It may also be
asked what Louis had to show for his superb expenditure. The answer
is, nothing.

With the seventy-three pounds desolatingly clear in his mind, he
quitted his desk in order to reconnoitre the outer and larger portion
of the counting-house. He went as far as the archway, and saw black
smoke being blown downwards from heaven into Friendly Street. A
policeman was placidly regarding the smoke as he strolled by. And
Louis, though absolutely sure that the officer would not carry out his
plain duty of summoning Horrocleave's for committing a smoke-nuisance,
did not care for the spectacle of the policeman. He returned to the
inner office, and locked the door. The "staff" and the "hands" had all
gone, save one or two piece-workers in the painting-shop across the
yard.

The night watchman, fresh from bed, was moving fussily about the yard.
He nodded with respect to Louis through the grimy window. Louis lit
the gas, and spread a newspaper in front of the window by way of
blind. And then he began a series of acts on the petty-cash book. The
office clock indicated twenty past six. He knew that time was short,
but he had a natural gift for the invention and execution of these
acts, and he calculated that under half an hour would suffice
for them. But when he next looked at the clock, the acts being
accomplished, one hour had elapsed; it had seemed to him more like a
quarter of an hour. Yet as blotting-paper cannot safely be employed in
such delicate calligraphic feats as those of Louis', even an hour was
not excessive for what he had done. An operator clumsier, less cool,
less cursory, more cautious than himself might well have spent half a
night over the job. He locked up the book, washed his hands and face
with remarkable celerity in a filthy lavatory basin, brushed his hair,
removed his cuff-shields, changed his coat, and fled at speed, leaving
the key of the office with the watchman.



III

"I suppose the old lady was getting anxious?" said he brightly (but
in a low tone so that the old lady should not hear), as he shook hands
with Rachel in the lobby. He had recognized her in front of him up the
lane--had, in fact, nearly overtaken her; and she was standing at the
open door when he mounted the steps. She had had just time to prove
to Mrs. Maldon, by a "He's coming" thrown through the sitting-room
doorway, that she had not waited for Louis Fores and walked up with
him.

"Yes," Rachel replied in the same tone, most deceitfully leaving him
under the false impression that it was the old lady's anxiety that had
sent her out. She had, then, emerged scathless in reputation from the
indiscreet adventure!

The house was animated by the arrival of Louis; at once it seemed to
live more keenly when he had crossed the threshold. And Louis found
pleasure in the house--in the welcoming aspect of its interior, in
Rachel's evident excited gladness at seeing him, in her honest and
agreeable features, and in her sheer girlishness. A few minutes
earlier he had been in the sordid and dreadful office. Now he was in
another and a cleaner, prettier world. He yielded instantly and fully
to its invitation, for he had the singular faculty of being able to
cast off care like a garment. He felt sympathetic towards women, and
eager to employ for their contentment all the charm which he knew
he possessed. He gave himself, generously, in every gesture and
intonation.

"Office, auntie, office!" he exclaimed, elegantly entering the
parlour. "Sack-cloth! Ashes! Hallo! where's Julian? Is he late too?"

When he had received the news about Julian Maldon he asked to see
the telegram, and searched out its place of origin, and drew forth
a pocket time-table, and remarked in a wise way that he hoped Julian
would "make the connection" at Derby. Lastly he predicted the precise
minute at which Julian "ought" to be knocking at the front door. And
both women felt their ignorant, puzzled inferiority in these recondite
matters of travel, and the comfort of having an omniscient male in the
house.

Then slightly drawing up his dark blue trousers with an accustomed
movement, he carefully sat down on the Chesterfield, and stroked
his soft black moustache (which was estimably long for a fellow of
twenty-three) and patted his black hair.

"Rachel, you didn't fasten that landing window, after all!" said Mrs.
Maldon, looking over Louis' head at the lady companion, who hesitated
modestly near the door. "I've tried, but I couldn't."

"Neither could I, Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel. "I was thinking perhaps
Mr. Fores wouldn't mind--"

She did not explain that her failure to fasten the window had been
more or less deliberate, since, while actually tugging at the window,
she had been visited by the sudden delicious thought: "How nice it
would be to ask Louis Fores to do this hard thing for me!"

And now she had asked him.

"Certainly!" Louis jumped to his feet, and off he went upstairs.
Most probably, if the sudden delicious thought had not skipped into
Rachel's brain, he would never have made that critical ascent to the
first floor.

A gas-jet burned low on the landing.

"Let's have a little light on the subject," he cheerfully muttered to
himself, as he turned on the gas to the full.

Then in the noisy blaze of yellow and blue light he went to the window
and with a single fierce wrench he succeeded in pulling the catch into
position. He was proud of his strength. It pleased him to think of the
weakness of women; it pleased him to anticipate the impressed thanks
of the weak women for this exertion of his power on their behalf.
"Have you managed it so soon?" his aunt would exclaim, and he would
answer in a carefully offhand way, "Of course. Why not?"

He was about to descend, but he remembered that he must not leave the
gas at full. With his hand on the tap, he glanced perfunctorily around
the little landing. The door of Mrs. Maldon's bedroom was in front of
him, at right angles to the window. By the door, which was ajar,
stood a cane-seated chair. Underneath the chair he perceived a whitish
package or roll that seemed to be out of place there on the floor. He
stooped and picked it up. And as the paper rustled peculiarly in his
hand, he could feel his heart give a swift bound. He opened the roll.
It consisted of nothing whatever but bank-notes. He listened intently,
with ear cocked and rigid limbs, and he could just catch the soothing
murmur of women's voices in the parlour beneath the reverberating,
solemn pulse of the lobby clock.



IV

Louis Fores had been intoxicated into a condition of poesy. He was
deliciously incapable of any precise thinking; he could not formulate
any theory to account for the startling phenomenon of a roll of
bank-notes loose under a chair on a first-floor landing of his
great-aunt's house; he could not even estimate the value of the
roll--he felt only that it was indefinitely prodigious. But he had the
most sensitive appreciation of the exquisite beauty of those pieces of
paper. They were not merely beautiful because they stood for delight
and indulgence, raising lovely visions of hosiers' and jewellers'
shops and the night interiors of clubs and restaurants--raising one
clear vision of himself clasping a watch-bracelet on the soft arm of
Rachel who had so excitingly smiled upon him a moment ago. They were
beautiful in themselves; the aspect and very texture of them were
beautiful--surpassing pictures and fine scenery. They were the most
poetic things in the world. They transfigured the narrow, gaslit
first-floor landing of his great-aunt's house into a secret and
unearthly grove of bliss. He was drunk with quivering emotion.

And then, as he gazed at the divine characters printed in sable on the
rustling whiteness, he was aware of a stab of ugly, coarse pain. Up to
the instant of beholding those bank-notes he had been convinced that
his operations upon the petty-cash book would be entirely successful
and that the immediate future of Horrocleave's was assured of
tranquillity; he had been blandly certain that Horrocleave held no
horrid suspicion against him, and that even if Horrocleave's pate
did conceal a dark thought, it would be conjured at once away by the
superficial reasonableness of the falsified accounts. But now his mind
was terribly and inexplicably changed, and it seemed to him impossible
to gull the acute and mighty Horrocleave. Failure, exposure, disgrace,
ruin, seemed inevitable--and also intolerable. It was astonishing
that he should have deceived himself into an absurd security. The
bank-notes, by some magic virtue which they possessed, had opened
his eyes to the truth. And they presented themselves as absolutely
indispensable to him. They had sprung from naught, they belonged
to nobody, they existed without a creative cause in the material
world--and they were indispensable to him! Could it be conceived that
he should lose his high and brilliant position in the town, that two
policemen should hustle him into the black van, that the gates of
a prison should clang behind him? It could not be conceived. It was
monstrously inconceivable.... The bank-notes ... he saw them wavy, as
through a layer of hot air.

A heavy knock on the front door below shook him and the floor and the
walls. He heard the hurried feet of Rachel, the opening of the door,
and Julian's harsh, hoarse voice. Julian, then, was not quite an hour
late, after all. The stir in the lobby seemed to be enormous, and very
close to him; Mrs. Maldon had come forth from the parlour to greet
Julian on his birthday.... Louis stuck the bank-notes into the side
pocket of his coat. And as it were automatically his mood underwent a
change, violent and complete. "I'll teach the old lady to drop notes
all over the place," he said to himself. "I'll just teach her!" And
he pictured his triumph as a wise male when, during the course of the
feast, his great-aunt should stumble on her loss and yield to senile
feminine agitation, and he should remark superiorly, with elaborate
calm: "Here is your precious money, auntie. A good thing it was I and
not burglars who discovered it. Let this be a lesson to you!... Where
was it? It was on the landing carpet, if you please! That's where it
was!" And the nice old creature's pathetic relief!

As he went jauntily downstairs there remained nothing of his mood of
intoxication except a still thumping heart.




CHAPTER III

THE FEAST


I

The dramatic moment of the birthday feast came nearly at the end of
the meal when Mrs. Maldon, having in mysterious silence disappeared
for a space to the room behind, returned with due pomp bearing a
parcel in her dignified hands. During her brief absence Louis, Rachel,
and Julian--hero of the night--had sat mute and somewhat constrained
round the debris of the birthday pudding. The constraint was no doubt
due partly to Julian's characteristic and notorious grim temper, and
partly to mere anticipation of a solemn event.

Julian Maldon in particular was self-conscious. He hated intensely
to be self-conscious, and his feeling towards every witness of his
self-consciousness partook always of the homicidal. Were it not
that civilization has the means to protect itself, Julian might have
murdered defenceless aged ladies and innocent young girls for the
simple offence of having seen him blush.

He was a perfect specimen of a throw-back to original ancestry. He had
been born in London, of an American mother, and had spent the greater
part of his life in London. Yet London and his mother seemed to
count for absolutely nothing at all in his composition. At the age of
seventeen his soul, quitting the exile of London, had come to the
Five Towns with a sigh of relief as if at the assuagement of a long
nostalgia, and had dropped into the district as into a socket. In
three months he was more indigenous than a native. Any experienced
observer who now chanced at a week-end to see him board the Manchester
express at Euston would have been able to predict from his appearance
that he would leave the train at Knype. He was an undersized man, with
a combative and suspicious face. He regarded the world with crafty
pugnacity from beneath frowning eyebrows. His expression said: "Woe
betide the being who tries to get the better of me!" His expression
said: "Keep off!" His expression said: "I am that I am. Take me
or leave me, but preferably leave me. I loathe fuss, pretence,
flourishes--any and every form of damned nonsense."

He had an excellent heart, but his attitude towards it was the
attitude of his great-grandmother towards her front parlour--he used
it as little as possible, and kept it locked up like a shame. In
brief, he was more than a bit of a boor. And boorishness being his
chief fault, he was quite naturally proud of it, counted it for
the finest of all qualities, and scorned every manifestation of its
opposite. To prove his inward sincerity he deemed it right to flout
any form of external grace--such as politeness, neatness, elegance,
compliments, small-talk, smooth words, and all ceremonial whatever. He
would have died in torment sooner than kiss. He was averse even from
shaking hands, and when he did shake hands he produced a carpenter's
vice, crushed flesh and bone together, and flung the intruding pulp
away. His hat was so heavy on his head that only by an exhausting
and supreme effort could he raise it to a woman, and after the odious
accident he would feel as humiliated as a fox-terrier after a bath. By
the kind hazard of fate he had never once encountered his great-aunt
in the street. He was superb in enmity--a true hero. He would quarrel
with a fellow and say, curtly, "I'll never speak to you again"; and
he never would speak to that fellow again. Were the last trump to blow
and all the British Isles to be submerged save the summit of Snowdon,
and he and that fellow to find themselves alone and safe together on
the peak, he could still be relied upon never to speak to that fellow
again. Thus would he prove that he was a man of his word and that
there was no nonsense about him.

Strange though it may appear to the thoughtless, he was not
disliked--much less ostracised. Codes differ. He conformed to one
which suited the instincts of some thirty thousand other adult
males in the Five Towns. Two strapping girls in the warehouse of
his manufactory at Knype quarrelled over him in secret as the Prince
Charming of those parts. Yet he had never addressed them except to
inform them that if they didn't mind their p's and q's he would have
them flung off the "bank" [manufactory]. Rachel herself had not yet
begun to be prejudiced against him.

This monster of irascible cruelty regarded himself as a middle-aged
person. But he was only twenty-five that day, and he did not look
more, either, despite a stiff, strong moustache. He too, like Louis
and Rachel, had the gestures of youth--the unconsidered, lithe
movements of limb, the wistful, unteachable pride of his age, the
touching self-confidence. Old Mrs. Maldon was indeed old among them.



II

She sat down in all her benevolent stateliness and with a slightly
irritating deliberation undid the parcel, displaying a flattish
leather case about seven inches by four, which she handed formally to
Julian Maldon, saying as she did so--

"From your old auntie, my dear boy, with her loving wishes. You have
now lived just a quarter of a century."

And as Julian, awkwardly grinning, fumbled with the spring-catch of
the case, she was aware of having accomplished a great and noble act
of surrender. She hoped the best from it. In particular, she hoped
that she had saved the honour of her party and put it at last on a
secure footing of urbane convivial success. For that a party of hers
should fail in giving pleasure to every member of it was a menace to
her legitimate pride. And so far fate had not been propitious. The
money in the house had been, and was, on her mind. Then the lateness
of the guests had disturbed her. And then Julian had aggrieved her by
a piece of obstinacy very like himself. Arriving straight from a train
journey, he had wanted to wash. But he would not go to the specially
prepared bedroom, where a perfect apparatus awaited him. No, he must
needs take off his jacket in the back room and roll up his sleeves and
stamp into the scullery and there splash and rub like a stableman, and
wipe himself on the common rough roller-towel. He said he preferred
the "sink." (Offensive word! He would not even say "slop-stone," which
was the proper word. He said "sink," and again "sink.")

And then, when the meal finally did begin Mrs. Maldon's serviette
and silver serviette-ring had vanished. Impossible to find them! Mr.
Batchgrew had of course horribly disarranged the table, and in the
upset the serviette and ring might have fallen unnoticed into the
darkness beneath the table. But no search could discover them. Had
the serviette and ring ever been on the table at all? Had Rachael
perchance forgotten them? Rachael was certain that she had put them
on the table. She remembered casting away a soiled serviette and
replacing it with a clean one in accordance with Mrs. Maldon's command
for the high occasion. She produced the soiled serviette in proof.
Moreover, the ring was not in the serviette drawer of the sideboard.
Renewed search was equally sterile.... At one moment Mrs. Maldon
thought that she herself had seen the serviette and ring on the
table early in the evening; but at the next she thought she had not.
Conceivably Mr. Batchgrew had taken them in mistake. Yes, assuredly,
he had taken them in mistake--somehow! And yet it was inconceivable
that he had taken a serviette and ring in mistake. In mistake for
what? No!...

Mystery! Excessively disconcerting for an old lady! In the end Rachel
provided another clean serviette, and the meal commenced. But Mrs.
Maldon had not been able to "settle down" in an instant. The wise,
pitying creatures in their twenties considered that it was absurd for
her to worry herself about such a trifle. But was it a trifle? It was
rather a denial of natural laws, a sinister miracle. Serviette-rings
cannot walk, nor fly, nor be annihilated. And further, she had used
that serviette-ring for more than twenty years. However, the hostess
in her soon triumphed over the foolish old lady, and taken the head of
the board with aplomb.

And indeed aplomb had been required. For the guests behaved
strangely--unless it was that the hostess was in a nervous mood for
fancying trouble! Julian Maldon was fidgety and preoccupied. And Louis
himself--usually a model guest--was also fidgety and preoccupied. As
for Rachel, the poor girl had only too obviously lost her head about
Louis. Mrs. Maldon had never seen anything like it, never!



III

Julian, having opened the case, disclosed twin brier pipes,
silver-mounted, with alternative stems of various lengths and diverse
mouthpieces--all reposing on soft couches of fawn-tinted stuff, with
a crimson, silk-lined lid to serve them for canopy. A rich and costly
array! Everybody was impressed, even startled. For not merely was the
gift extremely handsome--it was more than a gift; it symbolized the
end of an epoch in those lives. Mrs. Maldon had been no friend of
tobacco. She had lukewarmly permitted cigarettes, which Louis smoked,
smoking naught else. But cigars she had discouraged, and pipes she
simply would not have! Now, Julian smoked nothing but a pipe. Hence
in his great-aunt's parlour he had not smoked; in effect he had been
forbidden to smoke there. The theory that a pipe was vulgar had been
stiffly maintained in that sacred parlour. In the light of these facts
did not Mrs. Maldon's gift indeed shine as a great and noble act
of surrender? Was it not more than a gift, and entitled to stagger
beholders? Was it not a sublime proof that the earth revolves and the
world moves?

Mrs. Maldon was as susceptible as any one to the drama of the moment,
perhaps more than any one. She thrilled and became happy as Julian
in silence minutely examined the pipes. She had taken expert advice
before purchasing, and she was tranquil as to the ability of the pipes
to withstand criticism. They bore the magic triple initials of the
first firm of brier-pipe makers in the world--initials as famous and
as welcome on the plains of Hindustan as in the Home Counties or the
frozen zone. She gazed round the table with increasing satisfaction.
Louis, who was awkwardly fixed with regard to the light, the shadow
of his bust falling always across his plate, had borne that real
annoyance with the most charming good-humour. He was a delight to the
eye; he had excellent qualities, especially social qualities. Rachel
sat opposite to the hostess--an admirable girl in most ways,
a splendid companion, and a sound cook. The meal had been
irreproachable, and in the phrase of the _Signal_ "ample justice
had been done" to it. Julian was on the hostess's left, with his
back to the window and to the draught. A good boy, a sterling boy, if
peculiar! And there they were all close together, intimate, familiar,
mutually respecting; and the perfect parlour was round about them: a
domestic organism, honest, dignified, worthy, more than comfortable.
And she, Elizabeth Maldon, in her old age, was the head of it, and the
fount of good things.

"Thank ye!" ejaculated Julian, with a queer look askance at his
benefactor. "Thank ye, aunt!"

It was all he could get out of his throat, and it was all that was
expected of him. He hated to give thanks--and he hated to be thanked.
The grandeur of the present flattered him. Nevertheless he regarded it
as essentially absurd in its pretentiousness. The pipes were A1, but
could a man carry about a huge contraption like that? All a man needed
was an A1 pipe, which, if he had any sense, he would carry loose in
his pocket with his pouch--and be hanged to morocco cases and silk
linings!

"Stoke up, my hearties!" said Louis, drawing forth a gun-metal
cigarette-case, which was chained to his person by a kind of cable.

Undoubtedly the case of pipes represented for Julian a triumph over
Louis, or, at least, justice against Louis. For obvious reasons Julian
had not quarrelled with a rich and affectionate great-aunt because she
had accorded to Louis the privilege of smoking in her parlour what he
preferred to smoke, while refusing a similar privilege to himself. But
he had resented the distinction. And his joy in the spectacular turn
of the wheel was vast. For that very reason he hid it with much care.
Why should he bubble over with gratitude for having been at last
treated fairly? It would be pitiful to do so. Leaving the case open
upon the table, he pulled a pouch and an old pipe from his pocket, and
began to fill the pipe. It was inexcusable, but it was like him--he
had to do it.

"But aren't you going to try one of the new ones?" asked Mrs. Maldon,
amiably but uncertainly.

"No," said he, with cold nonchalance. Upon nobody in the world had
the sweet magic of Mrs. Maldon's demeanour less influence than upon
himself. "Not now. I want to enjoy my smoke, and the first smoke out
of a new pipe is never any good."

It was very true, but far more wanton than true. Mrs. Maldon in her
ignorance could not appreciate the truth, but she could appreciate its
wantonness. She was wounded--silly, touchy old thing! She was wounded,
and she hid the wound.

Rachel flushed with ire against the boor.

"By the way," Mrs. Maldon remarked in a light, indifferent tone,
just as though the glory of the moment had not been suddenly rent and
shrivelled. "I didn't see your portmanteau in the back room just now,
Julian. Has any one carried it upstairs? I didn't hear any one go
upstairs."

"I didn't bring one, aunt," said Julian.

"Not bring--"

"I was forgetting to tell ye. I can't sleep here to-night. I'm off to
South Africa to-morrow, and I've got a lot of things to fix up at my
digs to-night." He lit the old pipe from a match which Louis passed to
him.

"To South Africa?" murmured Mrs. Maldon, aghast. And she repeated,
"South Africa?" To her it was an incredible distance. It was not
a place--it was something on the map. Perhaps she had never
imaginatively realized that actual people did in fact go to South
Africa. "But this is the first I have heard of this!" she said.
Julian's extraordinary secretiveness always disturbed her.

"I only got the telegram about my berth this morning," said Julian,
rather sullenly on the defensive.

"Is it business?" Mrs. Maldon asked.

"You may depend it isn't pleasure, aunt," he answered, and shut his
lips tight on the pipe.

After a pause Mrs. Maldon tried again.

"Where do you sail from?"

Julian answered--

"Southampton."

There was another pause. Louis and Rachel exchanged a glance of
sympathetic dismay at the situation.

Mrs. Maldon then smiled with plaintive courage.

"Of course if you can't sleep here, you can't," said she benignly. "I
can see that. But we were quite counting on having a man in the house
to-night--with all these burglars about--weren't we, Rachel?" Her
grimace became, by an effort, semi-humorous.

Rachel diplomatically echoed the tone of Mrs. Maldon, but more
brightly, with a more frankly humorous smile--

"We were, indeed!"

But her smile was a masterpiece of duplicity, somewhat strange in a
girl so downright; for beneath it burned hotly her anger against the
brute Julian.

"Well, there it is!" Julian gruffly and callously summed up the
situation, staring at the inside of his teacup.

"Propitious moment for getting a monopoly of door-knobs at the Cape, I
suppose?" said Louis quizzically. His cousin manufactured, among other
articles, white and jet door-knobs.

"No need for you to be so desperately funny!" snapped Julian, who
detested Louis' brand of facetiousness. It was the word "propitious"
that somehow annoyed him--it had a sarcastic flavour, and it was
"Louis all over."

"No offence, old man!" Louis magnanimously soothed him. "On the
contrary, many happy returns of the day." In social intercourse
the younger cousin's good-humour and suavity were practically
indestructible.

But Julian still scowled.

Rachel, to make a tactful diversion, rose and began to collect plates.
The meal was at an end, and for Mrs. Maldon it had closed in ignominy.
From her quarter of the table she pushed crockery towards Rachel with
a gesture of disillusion; the courage to smile had been but momentary.
She felt old--older than she had ever felt before. The young
generation presented themselves to her as almost completely enigmatic.
She admitted that they were foreign to her, that she could not
comprehend them at all. Each of the three at her table was entirely
free and independent--each could and did act according to his or her
whim, and none could say them nay. Such freedom seemed unreal. They
were children playing at life, and playing dangerously. Hundreds of
times, in conversation with her coevals, she had cheerfully protested
against the banal complaint that the world had changed of late years.
But now she felt grievously that the world was different--that it
had indeed deteriorated since her young days. She was fatigued by the
modes of thought of these youngsters, as a nurse or mother is fatigued
by too long a spell of the shrillness and the _naïveté_ of a
family of infants. She wanted repose.... Was it conceivable that when,
with incontestable large-mindedness, she had given a case of pipes to
Julian, he should first put a slight on her gift and then, brusquely
leaving her in the lurch, announce his departure for South Africa,
with as much calm as though South Africa were in the next street?...
And the other two were guilty in other ways, perhaps more subtly, of
treason against forlorn old age.

And then Louis, in taking the slop-basin from her trembling
fingers, to pass it to Rachel, gave her one of his adorable, candid,
persuasive, sympathetic smiles. And lo! she was enheartened once more.
And she remembered that dignity and kindliness had been the watchwords
of her whole life, and that it would be shameful to relinquish the
struggle for an ideal at the very threshold of the grave. She began to
find excuses for Julian. The dear lad must have many business worries.
He was very young to be at the head of a manufacturing concern. He had
a remarkable brain--worthy of the family. Allowances must be made for
him. She must not be selfish.... And assuredly that serviette and ring
would reappear on the morrow.

"I'll take that out," said Louis, indicating the tray which Rachel
had drawn from concealment under the Chesterfield, and which was
now loaded. Mrs. Maldon employed an old and valued charwoman in the
mornings. Rachel accomplished all the rest of the housework herself,
including cookery, and she accomplished it with the stylistic
smartness of a self-respecting lady-help.

"Oh no!" said she. "I can carry it quite easily, thanks."

Louis insisted masculinely--

"I'll take that tray out."

And he took it out, holding his head back as he marched, so that the
smoke of the cigarette between his lips should not obscure his eyes.
Rachel followed with some oddments. Behold those two away together in
the seclusion of the kitchen; and Mrs. Maldon and Julian alone in the
parlour!

"Very fine!" muttered Julian, fingering the magnificent case of pipes.
Now that there were fewer spectators, his tongue was looser, and he
could relent.

"I'm so glad you like it," Mrs. Maldon responded eagerly.

The world was brighter to her, and she accepted Julian's amiability as
Heaven's reward for her renewal of courage.



IV

"Auntie-" began Louis, with a certain formality.

"Yes?"

Mrs. Maldon had turned her chair a little towards the fire. The two
visitants to the kitchen had reappeared. Rachel with a sickle-shaped
tool was sedulously brushing the crumbs from the damask into a silver
tray. Louis had taken the poker to mend the fire.

He said, nonchalantly--

"If you'd care for me to stay the night here instead of Julian, I
will."

"Well--" Mrs. Maldon was unprepared for this apparently quite natural
and kindly suggestion. It perturbed, even frightened her by its
implications. Had it been planned in the kitchen between those two?
She wanted to accept it; and yet another instinct in her prompted her
to decline it absolutely and at once. She saw Rachel flushing as the
girl industriously continued her task without looking up. To Mrs.
Maldon it seemed that those two, under the impulsion of Fate, were
rushing towards each other at a speed far greater than she had
suspected.

Julian stirred on his chair, under the sharp irritation caused
by Louis' proposal. He despised Louis as a boy of no ambition--a
butterfly being who had got no farther than the adolescent
will-to-live, the desire for self-indulgence, whereas he, Julian, was
profoundly conscious of the will-to-dominate, the hunger for influence
and power. And also he was jealous of Louis on various counts.
Louis had come to the Five Towns years after Julian, and had almost
immediately cut a figure therein; Julian had never cut a figure.
Julian had been the sole resident great-nephew of a benevolent aunt,
and Louis had arrived and usurped at least half the advantages of the
relationship, if not more; Louis lived several miles nearer to his
aunt. Julian it was who, through his acquaintance with Rachel's father
and her masterful sinister brother, had brought her into touch with
Mrs. Maldon. Rachel was Julian's creation, so far as his aunt was
concerned. Julian had no dislike for Rachel; he had even been thinking
of her favourably. But Louis had, as it were, appropriated her ...
From the steely conning-tower of his brows Julian had caught their
private glances at the table. And Louis was now carrying trays for
her, and hobnobbing with her in the kitchen! Lastly, because Julian
could not pass the night in the house, Louis, the interloper, had the
effrontery to offer to fill his place--on some preposterous excuse
about burglars! And the fellow was so polite and so persuasive, with
his finicking eloquence. By virtue of a strange faculty not uncommon
in human nature Julian loathed Louis' good manners and appearance--and
acutely envied them.

He burst out with scarcely controlled savagery--

"A lot of good you'd be with burglars!"

The women were outraged by his really shocking rudeness. Rachel bit
her lip and began to fold up the cloth. Mrs. Maldon's head slightly
trembled. Louis alone maintained a perfect equanimity. It was as if he
were invulnerable.

"You never know!" he smiled amiably, and shrugged his shoulders. Then
he finished his operation on the fire.

"I'm sure it's very kind and thoughtful of you, Louis," said Mrs.
Maldon, driven to acceptance by Julian's monstrous behaviour.

"Moreover," Louis urbanely continued, smoothing down his trousers
with a long perpendicular caress as he usually did after any
bending--"moreover, there's always my revolver."

He gave a short laugh.

"Revolver!" exclaimed Mrs. Maldon, intimidated by the mere name. Then
she smiled, in an effort to reassure herself. "Louis, you are a tease.
You really shouldn't tease me."

"I'm not," said Louis, with that careful air of false blank
casualness which he would invariably employ for his more breath-taking
announcements. "I always carry a loaded revolver."

The fearful word "loaded" sank into the heart of the old woman, and
thrilled her. It was a fact that for some weeks past Louis had been
carrying a revolver. At intervals the craze for firearms seizes the
fashionable youth of a provincial town, like the craze for marbles
at school, and then dies away. In the present instance it had been
originated by the misadventure of a dandy with an out-of-work artisan
on the fringe of Hanbridge. Nothing could be more correct than for
a man of spirit and fashion thus to arm himself in order to cow the
lower orders and so cope with the threatened social revolution.

"You _don't_, Louis!" Mrs. Maldon deprecated.

"I'll show you," said Louis, feeling in his hip pocket.

"_Please_!" protested Mrs. Maldon, and Rachel covered her face
with her hands and drew back from Louis' sinister gesture. "Please
don't _show_ it to us!" Mrs. Maiden's tone was one of imploring
entreaty. For an instant she was just like a sentimentalist who
resents and is afraid of hearing the truth. She obscurely thought that
if she resolutely refused to see the revolver it would somehow cease
to exist. With a loaded revolver in the house the situation seemed
more dangerous and more complicated than ever. There was something
absolutely terrifying in the conjuncture of a loaded revolver and a
secret hoard of bank-notes.

"All right! All right!" Louis relented.

Julian cut across the scene with a gruff and final--

"I must clear out of this!"

He rose.

"Must you?" said his aunt.

She did not unduly urge him to delay, for the strain of family life
was exhausting her.

"I must catch the 9.48," said Julian, looking at the clock and at his
watch.

Herein was yet another example of the morbid reticence which so pained
Mrs. Maldon. He must have long before determined to catch the 9.48;
yet he had said nothing about it till the last moment! He had said
nothing even about South Africa until the news was forced from him. It
had been arranged that he should come direct to Bursley station from
his commercial journey in Yorkshire and Derbyshire, pass the night at
his aunt's house, which was conveniently near the station, and proceed
refreshed to business on the morrow. A neat arrangement, well suiting
the fact of his birthday! And now he had broken it in silence, without
a warning, with the baldest possible explanation! His aunt, despite
her real interest in him, could never extract from him a clear account
of his doings and his movements. And this South African excursion was
the last and worst illustration of his wilful cruel harshness to her.

Nevertheless, the extreme and unimaginable remoteness of South Africa
seemed to demand a special high formality in bidding him adieu, and
she rendered it. If he would not permit her to superintend his packing
(he had never even let her come to his rooms!), she could at least
superintend the putting on of his overcoat. And she did. And instead
of quitting him as usual at the door of the parlour, she insisted on
going to the front door and opening it herself. She was on her mettle.
She was majestic and magnificent. By refusing to see his ill-breeding
she actually did terminate its existence. She stood at the open front
door with the three young ones about her, and by the force of her
ideal the front door became the portal of an embassy and Julian's
departure a ceremony of state. He had to shake hands all round. She
raised her cheek, and he had to kiss. She said, "God bless you!" and
he had to say, "Thank you."

As he was descending the outer steps, the pipe-case clipped under his
arm, Louis threw at him--

"I say, old man!"

"What?" He turned round with sharp defiance beneath the light of the
street-lamp.

"How are you going to get to London to-morrow morning in time for the
boat-train at Waterloo, if you're staying at Knype to-night."

Louis travelled little, but it was his foible to be learned in
boat-trains and "connections."

"A friend o' mine's motoring me to Stafford at five to-morrow morning,
if you want to know. I shall catch the Scotch express. Anything else?"

"Oh!" muttered Louis, checked.

Julian clanked the gate and vanished up the street, Mrs. Maldon
waving.

"What friend? What motor?" reflected Mrs. Maldon sadly. "He is
incorrigible with his secretiveness."

"Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel anxiously, "you look pale. Is it being in
this draught?" She shut the door.

Mrs. Maldon sighed and moved away. She hesitated at the parlour door
and then said--

"I must go upstairs a moment."




CHAPTER IV

IN THE NIGHT


I

Louis stood hesitant and slightly impatient in the parlour, alone. A
dark blue cloth now covered the table, and in the centre of it was
a large copper jar containing an evergreen plant. Of the feast no
material trace remained except a few crumbs on the floor. But the room
was still pervaded by the emotional effluence of the perturbed souls
who had just gone; and Louis felt it, though without understanding.

Throughout the evening he had of course been preoccupied by the
consciousness of having in his pocket bank-notes to a value unknown.
Several times he had sought for a suitable opportunity to disclose his
exciting secret. But he had found none. In practice he could not say
to his aunt, before Julian and Rachel: "Auntie, I picked up a lot of
bank-notes on the landing. You really ought to be more careful!" He
could not even in any way refer to them. The dignity of Mrs. Maldon
had intimidated him. He had decided, after Julian's announcement
of departure, that he would hand them over to her, simply and
undramatically and with no triumphant air, as soon as he and she
should for a moment be alone together. Then Mrs. Maldon vanished
upstairs. And she had not returned. Rachel also had vanished. And he
was waiting.

He desired to examine the notes, to let his eyes luxuriously rest upon
them, but he dared not take them from his pocket lest one or other of
the silent-footed women might surprise him by a sudden entrance. He
fingered them as they lay in their covert, and the mere feel of them,
raised exquisite images in his mind; and at the same time the whole
room and every object in the room was transformed into a secret
witness which spied upon him, disquieted him, and warned him. But
the fact that the notes were intact, that nothing irremediable had
occurred, reassured him and gave him strength, so that he could defy
the suspicions of those senseless surrounding objects.

Within the room there was no sound but the faint regular hiss of the
gas and an occasional falling together of coal in the weakening fire.
Overhead, from his aunt's bedroom, vague movements were perceptible.
Then these ceased, absolutely. The tension, increasing, grew too much
for him, and with a curt gesture, and a self-conscious expression
between a smile and a frown, he left the parlour and stood to listen
in the lobby. Not for several seconds did he notice the heavy ticking
of the clock, close to his ear, nor the chill draught that came under
the front door. He gazed up into the obscurity at the top of the
stairs. The red glow of the kitchen fire, in the distance to the right
of the stairs, caught his attention at intervals. He was obsessed,
almost overpowered, by the mysteriousness of the first floor. What had
happened? What was happening? And suddenly an explanation swept into
his brain--the obvious explanation. His aunt had missed the bank-notes
and was probably at that very instant working herself into an anguish.
What ought he to do? Should he run up and knock at her door? He was
spared a decision by the semi-miraculous appearance of Rachel at the
top of the stairs. She started.

"Oh! How you frightened me!" she exclaimed in a low voice.

He answered weakly, charmingly--

"Did I?"

"Will you please come and speak to Mrs. Maldon? She wants you."

"In her room?"

Rachel nodded and disappeared before he could ask another question.
With heart beating he ascended the stairs by twos. Through the
half-open door of the faintly lit room which he himself would occupy
he could hear Rachel active. And then he was at the closed door of his
aunt's room. "I must be jolly careful how I do it!" he thought as he
knocked.



II

He was surprised, and impressed, to see Mrs. Maldon in bed. She lay
on her back, with her striking head raised high on several pillows.
Nothing else of her was visible; the purple eider-down covered the
whole bed without a crease.

"Hello, auntie!" he greeted her, instinctively modifying his voice to
the soft gentleness proper to the ordered and solemn chamber.

Mrs. Maldon, moving her head, looked at him in silence. He tiptoed to
the foot of the bed and leaned on it gracefully. And as in the parlour
his shadow had fallen on the table, so now, with the gas just
behind him, it fell on the bed. The room was chilly and had a slight
pharmaceutical odour.

Mrs. Maldon said, with a weak effort--

"I was feeling faint, and Rachel thought I'd better get straight to
bed. I'm an old woman, Louis."

"She hasn't missed them!" he thought in a flash, and said, aloud--

"Nothing of the sort, auntie."

He was aware of the dim reflection of himself in the mirror of the
immense Victorian mahogany wardrobe to his left.

Mrs. Maldon again hesitated before speaking.

"You aren't ill, are you, auntie?" he said in a cheerful, friendly
whisper. He was touched by the poignant pathos of her great age and
her debility. It rent his heart to think that she had no prospect but
the grave.

She murmured, ignoring his question--

"I just wanted to tell you that you needn't go down home for your
night things--unless you specially want to, that is. I have all that's
necessary here, and I've given orders to Rachel."

"Certainly, auntie. I won't leave the house. That's all right."

No, she assuredly had not missed the notes! He was strangely uplifted.
He felt almost joyous in his relief. Could he tell her now as she lay
in her bed? Impossible! He would tell her in the morning. It would be
cruel to disturb her now with such a revelation of her own negligence.
He vibrated with sympathy for her, and he was proud to think that she
appreciated the affectionate, comprehending, subdued intimacy of his
attitude towards her as he leaned gracefully on the foot of the bed,
and that she admired him. He did not know, or rather he absolutely did
not realize, that she was acquainted with aught against his good fame.
He forgot his sins with the insouciance of an animal.

"Don't stay up too late," said Mrs. Maldon, as it were dismissing him.
"A long night will do you no harm for once in a way." She smiled. "I
know you'll see that everything's locked up."

He nodded soothingly, and stood upright.

"You might turn the gas down, rather low."

He tripped to the gas-bracket and put the room in obscurity. The
light of the street lamp irradiated the pale green blinds of the two
windows.

"That do?"

"Nicely, thank you! Good-night, my dear. No, I'm not ill. But you know
I have these little attacks. And then bed's the best place for me."
Her voice seemed to expire.

He crept across the wide carpet and departed with the skill of a
trained nurse, and inaudibly closed the door.

From the landing the whole of the rest of the house seemed to offer
itself to him in the night as an enigmatic and alluring field of
adventure ... Should he drop the notes under the chair on the landing,
where he had found them?... He could not! He could not!... He moved to
the head of the stairs, past the open door of the spare bedroom,
which was now dark. He stopped at the head of the stairs, and then
descended. The kitchen was lighted.

"Are you there?" he asked.

"Yes," replied Rachel.

"May I come?"

"Why, of course!" Her voice trembled.

He went towards the other young creature in the house. The old one lay
above, in a different world remote and foreign. He and Rachel had the
ground floor and all its nocturnal enchantment to themselves.



III

Mechanically, as he went into the kitchen, he drew his cigarette-case
from his pocket. It was the proper gesture of a man in any minor
crisis. He was not a frequenter of kitchens, and this visit, even more
than the brief first one, seemed to him to be adventurous.

Mrs. Maldon's kitchen--or rather Rachel's--was small, warm (though the
fire was nearly out), and agreeable to the eye. On the left wall was a
deal dresser full of crockery, and on the right, under the low window,
a narrow deal table. In front, opposite the door, gleamed the range,
and on either side of the range were cupboards with oak-grained
doors. There was a bright steel fender before the range, and then
a hearth-rug on which stood an oak rocking-chair. The floor was a
friendly chequer of red and black tiles. On the high mantelpiece were
canisters and an alarm-clock and utensils; sundry other utensils hung
on the walls, among the coloured images of sweet girls and Norse-like
men offered by grocers and butchers under the guise of almanacs; and
cupboard doors ajar dimly disclosed other utensils still, so that the
kitchen had the effect of a novel, comfortable kind of workshop; which
effect was helped by the clothes-drier that hung on pulley-ropes from
the ceiling, next to the gas-pendant and to a stalactite of onions.

The uncurtained window, instead of showing black, gave on another
interior, whitewashed, and well illuminated by the kitchen gas. This
other interior had, under a previous tenant of the property, been
a lean-to greenhouse, but Mrs. Maldon esteeming a scullery before a
greenhouse, it had been modified into a scullery. There it was that
Julian Maldon had preferred to make his toilet. One had to pass
through the scullery in order to get from the kitchen into the yard.
And the light of day had to pass through the imperfectly transparent
glass roof of the scullery in order to reach the window of the unused
room behind the parlour; and herein lay the reason why that room was
unused, it being seldom much brighter than a crypt.

At the table stood Rachel, in her immense pinafore-apron, busy with
knives and forks and spoons, and an enamel basin from which steam rose
gently. Louis looked upon Rachel, and for the first time in his life
liked an apron! It struck him as an exceedingly piquant addition to
the young woman's garments. It suited her; it set off the tints of her
notable hair; and it suited the kitchen. Without delaying her work,
Rachel made the protector of the house very welcome. Obviously she
was in a high state of agitation. For an instant Louis feared that the
agitation was due to anxiety on account of Mrs. Maldon.

"Nothing serious up with the old lady, is there?" he asked, pinching
the cigarette to regularize the tobacco in it.

"Oh, _no_!"

The exclamation in its absolute sincerity dissipated every trace of
his apprehension. He felt gay, calmly happy, and yet excited too. He
was sure, then, that Rachel's agitation was a pleasurable agitation.
It was caused solely by his entrance into the kitchen, by the
compliment he was paying to her kitchen! Her eyes glittered; her face
shone; her little movements were electric; she was intensely conscious
of herself--all because he had come into her kitchen! She could not
conceal--perhaps she did not wish to conceal--the joy that his near
presence inspired. Louis had had few adventures, very few, and this
experience was exquisite and wondrous to him. It roused, not the
fatuous coxcomb, nor the Lothario, but that in him which was honest
and high-spirited. A touch of the male's vanity, not surprising, was
to be excused.

"Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel, "had an idea that it was _me_ who
suggested your staying all night instead of your cousin." She raised
her chin, and peered at nothing through the window as she rubbed away
at a spoon.

"But when?" Louis demanded, moving towards the fire. It appeared to
him that the conversation had taken a most interesting turn.

"When?... When you brought the tray in here for me, I suppose."

"And I suppose you explained to her that I had the idea all out of my
own little head?"

"I told her that I should never have dreamed of asking such a thing!"
The susceptible and proud young creature indicated that the suggestion
was one of Mrs. Maldon's rare social errors, and that Mrs. Maldon had
had a narrow escape of being snubbed for it by the woman of the world
now washing silver. "I'm no more afraid of burglars than you are,"
Rachel added. "I should just like to catch a burglar here--that I
should!"

Louis indulgently doubted the reality of this courage. He had been
too hastily concluding that what Rachel resented was an insinuation of
undue interest in himself, whereas she now made it seem that she was
objecting merely to any reflection upon her valour: which was much
less exciting to him. Still, he thought that both causes might have
contributed to her delightful indignation.

"Why was she so keen about having one of us to sleep here to-night?"
Louis inquired.

"Well, I don't know that she was," answered Rachel. "If you hadn't
said anything--"

"Oh, but do you know what she said to me upstairs?"

"No."

"She didn't want me even to go back to my digs for my things.
Evidently she doesn't care for the house to be left even for half an
hour."

"Well, of course old people are apt to get nervous, you
know--especially when they're not well."

"Funny, isn't it?"

There was perfect unanimity between them as to the irrational
singularity and sad weakness of aged persons.

Louis remarked--

"She said you would make everything right for me upstairs."

"I have done--I hope," said Rachel.

"Thanks awfully!"

One part of the table was covered with newspaper. Suddenly Rachel
tore a strip off the newspaper, folded the strip into a spill, and,
lighting it at the gas, tendered it to Louis' unlit cigarette.

The climax of the movement was so quick and unexpected as almost to
astound Louis. For he had been standing behind her, and she had not
turned her head before making the spill. Perhaps there was a faint
reflection of himself in the window. Or perhaps she had eyes in her
hair. Beyond doubt she was a strange, rare, angelic girl. The gesture
with which she modestly offered the spill was angelic; it was divine;
it was one of those phenomena which persist in a man's memory for
decades. At the very instant of its happening he knew that he should
never forget it.

The man of fashion blushed as he inhaled the first smoke created by
her fire.

Rachel dropped the heavenly emblem, all burning, into the ash-bin of
the range, and resumed her work.

Louis coughed. "Any law against sitting down?" he asked.

"You're very welcome," she replied primly.

"I didn't know I might smoke," he said.

She made no answer at first, but just as Louis had ceased to expect an
answer, she said--

"I should think if you can smoke in the sitting-room you can smoke in
the kitchen--shouldn't you?"

"I should," said he.

There was silence, but silence not disagreeable. Louis, lolling in
the chair, and slightly rocking it, watched Rachel at her task. She
completely immersed spoons and forks in the warm water, and then
rubbed them with a brush like a large nail-brush, giving particular
attention to the inside edges of the prongs of the forks; and then she
laid them all wet on a thick cloth to the right of the basin. But of
the knives she immersed only the blades, and took the most meticulous
care that no drop of water should reach the handles.

"I never knew knives and forks and things were washed like that,"
observed Louis.

"They generally aren't," said Rachel. "But they ought to be. I leave
all the other washing-up for the charwoman in the morning, but I
wouldn't trust these to her." (The charwoman had been washing up
cutlery since before Rachel was born.) "They're all alike," said
Rachel.

Louis acquiesced sagely in this broad generalization as to charwomen.

"Why don't you wash the handles of the knives?" he queried.

"It makes them come loose."

"Really?"

"Do you mean to say you didn't know that water, especially warm water
with soda in it, loosens the handles?" She showed astonishment, but
her gaze never left the table in front of her.

"Not me!"

"Well, I should have thought that everybody knew that. Some people use
a jug, and fill it up with water just high enough to cover the blades,
and stick the knives in to soak. But I don't hold with that because
of the steam, you see. Steam's nearly as bad as water for the handles.
And then some people drop the knives wholesale into a basin just for a
second, to wash the handles. But I don't hold with that, either. What
I say is that you can get the handles clean with the cloth you wipe
them dry with. That's what I say."

"And so there's soda in the water?"

"A little."

"Well, I never knew that either! It's quite a business, it seems to
me."

Without doubt Louis' notions upon domestic work were being modified
with extreme rapidity. In the suburb from which he sprang domestic
work--and in particular washing up--had been regarded as base, foul,
humiliating, unmentionable--as toil that any slut might perform
anyhow. It would have been inconceivable to him that he should admire
a girl in the very act of washing up. Young ladies, even in exclusive
suburban families, were sometimes forced by circumstances to wash
up--of that he was aware--but they washed up in secret and in shame,
and it was proper for all parties to pretend that they never had
washed up. And here was Rachel converting the horrid process into
a dignified and impressive ritual. She made it as fine as fine
needlework--so exact, so dainty, so proud were the motions of her
fingers and her forearms. Obviously washing up was an art, and the
delicate operation could not be scamped nor hurried ...

The triple pile of articles on the cloth grew slowly, but it grew; and
then Rachel, having taken a fresh white cloth from a hook, began to
wipe, and her wiping was an art. She seemed to recognize each fork as
a separate individuality, and to attend to it as to a little animal.
Whatever her view of charwomen, never would she have said of forks
that they were all alike.

Louis felt in his hip pocket for his reserve cigarette-case.

And Rachel immediately said, with her back to him--

"Have you really got a revolver, or were you teasing--just now in the
parlour?"

It was then that he perceived a small unframed mirror, hung at the
height of her face on the broad, central, perpendicular bar of the
old-fashioned window-frame. Through this mirror the chit--so he named
her in his mind at the instant--had been surveying him!

"Yes," he said, producing the second cigarette-case, "I was only
teasing." He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the previous one.

"Well," she said, "you did frighten Mrs. Maldon. I was so sorry for
her."

"And what about you? Weren't you frightened?"

"Oh no! I wasn't frightened. I guessed, somehow, you were only
teasing."

"Well, I just wasn't teasing, then!" said Louis, triumphantly yet with
benevolence. And he drew a revolver from his pocket.

She turned her head now, and glanced neutrally at the incontestable
revolver for a second. But she made no remark whatever, unless the
pouting of her tightly shut lips and a mysterious smile amounted to a
remark.

Louis adopted an indifferent tone--

"Strange that the old lady should be so nervous just to-night--isn't
it?--seeing these burglars have been knocking about for over a
fortnight. Is this the first time she's got excited about it?"

"Yes, I think it is," said Rachel faintly, as it were submissively,
with no sign of irritation against him.

With their air of worldliness and mature wisdom they twittered on like
a couple of sparrows--inconsequently, capriciously; and nothing that
they said had the slightest originality, weight, or importance. But
they both thought that their conversation was full of significance;
which it was, though they could not explain it to themselves. What
they happened to say did not matter in the least. If they had recited
the Koran to each other the inexplicable significance of their words
would have been the same.

Rachel faced him again, leaning her hands behind her on the table, and
said with the most enchanting, persuasive friendliness--

"I wasn't frightened--truly! I don't know why I looked as though I
was."

"You mean about the revolver--in the sitting-room?" He jumped nimbly
back after her to the revolver question.

"Yes. Because I'm quite used to revolvers, you know. My brother had
one. Only his was a Colt--one of those long things."

"Your brother, eh?"

"Yes. Did you know him?"

"I can't say I did," Louis replied, with some constraint.

Rachel said with generous enthusiasm--

"He's a wonderful shot, my brother is!"

Louis was curiously touched by the warmth of her reference to her
brother. In the daily long monotonous column of advertisements headed
succinctly "Money" in the _Staffordshire Signal_, there once
used to appear the following invitation: "WE NEVER REFUSE a loan to
a responsible applicant. No fussy inquiries. Distance no objection.
Reasonable terms. Strictest privacy. £3 to £10,000. Apply personally
or by letter. Lovelace Curzon, 7 Colclough Street, Knype." Upon a day
Louis had chosen that advertisement from among its rivals, and had
written to Lovelace Curzon. But on the very next day he had come
into his thousand pounds, and so had lost the advantage of business
relations with Lovelace Curzon. Lovelace Curzon, as he had learnt
later, was Reuben Fleckring, Rachel's father. Or, more accurately,
Lovelace Curzon was Reuben Fleckring, junior, Rachel's brother, a
young man in a million. Reuben, senior, had been for many years an
entirely mediocre and ambitionless clerk in a large works where
Julian Maldon had learnt potting, when Reuben, junior (whom he blindly
adored), had dragged him out of clerkship, and set him up as
the nominal registered head of a money-lending firm. An amazing
occurrence! At that time Reuben, junior, was a minor, scarcely
eighteen. Yet his turn for finance had been such that he had
already amassed reserves, and--without a drop of Jewish blood in his
veins--possessed confidence enough to compete in their own field with
the acutest Hebrews of the district. Reuben, senior, was the youth's
tool.

In a few years Lovelace Curzon had made a mighty and terrible
reputation in the world where expenditures exceed incomes. And
then the subterranean news of the day--not reported in the
_Signal_--was that something serious had happened to Lovelace
Curzon. And the two Fleckrings went to America, the father, as usual,
hypnotized by the son. And they left no wrack behind save Rachel.

It was at this period--only a few months previous to the opening of
the present narrative--that the district had first heard aught of the
womenfolk of the Fleckrings. An aunt--Reuben, senior's, sister, it
appeared--had died several years earlier, since when Rachel had alone
kept house for her brother and her father. According to rumour
the three had lived in the simplicity of relative poverty, utterly
unvisited except by clients. No good smell of money had ever escaped
from the small front room which was employed as an office into the
domestic portion of the house. It was alleged that Rachel had existed
in perfect ignorance of all details of the business. It was also
alleged that when the sudden crisis arrived, her brother had told her
that she would not be taken to America, and that, briefly, she must
shift for herself in the world. It was alleged further that he had
given her forty-five pounds. (Why forty-five pounds and not fifty,
none knew.) The whole affair had begun and finished--and the house was
sold up--in four days. Public opinion in the street and in Knype blew
violently against the two Reubens, but as they were on the Atlantic
it did not affect them. Rachel, with scarcely an acquaintance in the
world in which she was to shift for herself, found that she had a
streetful of friends! It transpired that everybody had always divined
that she was a girl of admirable efficient qualities. She behaved as
though her brother and father had behaved in quite a usual and proper
manner. Assistance in the enterprise of shifting for herself she
welcomed, but not sympathy. The devotion of the Fleckring women began
to form a legend. People said that Rachel's aunt had been another such
creature as Rachel.

Hence the effect on Louis, who, through his aunt and his cousin,
was acquainted with the main facts and surmises, of Rachel's glowing
reference to the vanished Reuben.

"Where did your brother practise?" he asked.

"In the cellar."

"Of course it's easier with a long barrel."

"Is it?" she said incredulously. "You should see my brother's
score-card the first time he shot at that new miniature rifle-range in
Hanbridge!"

"Why? Is it anything special?"

"Well, you should see it. Five bulls, all cutting into each other."

"I should have liked to see that."

"I've got it upstairs in my trunk," said she proudly. "I dare say I'll
show you it some time."

"I wish you would," he urged.

Such loyalty moved him deeply. Louis had had no sisters, and his
youthful suburban experience of other people's sisters had not
fostered any belief that loyalty was an outstanding quality of
sisters. Like very numerous young men of the day, he had passed an
unfavourable judgment upon young women. He had found them greedy for
diversion, amazingly ruthless in their determination to exact the
utmost possible expensiveness of pleasure in return for their casual
society, hard, cruelly clever in conversation, efficient in certain
directions, but hating any sustained effort, and either socially or
artistically or politically snobbish. Snobs all! Money-worshippers
all!... Well, nearly all! It mattered not whether you were one of the
dandies or one of the hatless or Fletcherite corps that lolled on foot
or on bicycles, or shot on motor-cycles, through the prim streets of
the suburb--the young women would not remain in dalliance with you
for the mere sake of your beautiful eyes. Because they were girls
they would take all that you had and more, and give you nothing but
insolence or condescension in exchange. Such was Louis' judgment, and
scores of times he had confirmed it in private saloon-lounge talk
with his compeers. It had not, however, rendered the society of these
unconscionable and cold female creatures distasteful to him. Not a
bit! He had even sought it and been ready to pay for that society in
the correct manner--even to imperturbably beggaring himself of his
final sixpence in order to do the honours of the latest cinema. Only,
he had a sense of human superiority. It certainly did not occur to
him that in the victimized young men there might exist faults which
complemented those of the parasitic young women.

And now he contrasted these young women with Rachel! And he fell
into a dreamy mood of delight in her.... Her gesture in lighting his
cigarette! Marvellous! Tear-compelling!... Flippancy dropped away from
him.... She liked him. With the most alluring innocence, she did not
conceal that she liked him. He remembered that the last time he called
at his aunt's he had remarked something strange, something disturbing,
in Rachel's candid demeanour towards himself. He had made an
impression on her! He had given her the lightning-stroke! No shadow of
a doubt as to his own worthiness crossed his mind.

What did cross his mind was that she was not quite of his own class.
In the suburb, where "sets" are divided one from another by unscalable
barriers, she could not have aspired to him. But in the kitchen, now
become the most beautiful and agreeable and romantic interior that he
had ever seen--in the kitchen he could somehow perceive with absolute
clearness that the snobbery of caste was silly, negligible, laughable,
contemptible. Yes, he could perceive all that! Life in the kitchen
seemed ideal--life with that loyalty and that candour and that charm
and that lovely seriousness! Moreover, he could teach her. She had
already blossomed--in a fortnight. She was blossoming. She would
blossom further.

Odd that, when he had threatened to pull out a revolver, she, so
accustomed to revolvers, should have taken a girlish alarm! That queer
detail of her behaviour was extraordinarily seductive. But far beyond
everything else it was the grand loyalty of her nature that drew him.
He wanted to sink into it as into a bed of down. He really needed
it. Enveloped in that loving loyalty of a creature who gave all and
demanded nothing, he felt that he could truly be his best self, that
he could work marvels. His eyes were moist with righteous ardour.

The cutlery reposed in a green-lined basket. She had doffed the apron
and hung it behind the scullery door. With all the delicious curves of
her figure newly revealed, she was reaching the alarm-clock down from
the mantelpiece, and then she was winding it up. The ratchet of the
wheel clacked, and the hurried ticking was loud. In the grate of the
range burned one spot of gloomy red.

"Your bedtime, I suppose?" he murmured, rising elegantly.

She smiled. She said--

"Shall you lock up, or shall I?"

"Oh! I think I know all the tricks," he replied, and thought, "She's a
pretty direct sort of girl, anyway!"



IV

About an hour later he went up to his room. It was a fact that
everything had been made right for him. The gas burned low. He raised
it, and it shone directly upon the washstand, which glittered with
the ivory glaze of large earthenware, and the whiteness of towels that
displayed all the creases of their folding. There was a new cake of
soap in the ample soap-dish, and a new tooth-brush in a sheath of
transparent paper lay on the marble. "Rather complete this!" he
reflected. The nail-brush--an article in which he specialized--was
worn, but it was worn evenly and had cost good money. The water-bottle
dazzled him; its polished clarity was truly crystalline. He could
not remember ever having seen a toilet array so shining with strict
cleanness. Indeed, it was probable that he had never set eyes on an
absolutely clean water-bottle before; the qualities associated with
water-bottles in his memory were semi-opacity and spottiness.

The dressing-table matched the washstand. A carriage clock in leather
had been placed on the mantelpiece. In front of the mantelpiece was an
old embroidered fire-screen. Peeping between the screen and the grate,
he saw that a fire had been scientifically laid, ready for lighting;
but some bits of paper and oddments on the top of the coal showed that
it was not freshly laid. The grate had a hob at one side, and on
this was a small, bright tin kettle. The bed was clearly a good bed,
resilient, softly garnished. On it was stretched a long, striped
garment of flannel, with old-fashioned pearl buttons at neck and
sleeves. An honest garment, quite surely unshrinkable! No doubt in the
sixties, long before the mind of man had leaped to the fine perverse
conception of the decorated pyjama, this garment had enjoyed the
fullest correctness. Now, after perhaps forty years in the cupboards
of Mrs. Maldon, it seemed to recall the more excellent attributes of
an already forgotten past, and to rebuke what was degenerate in the
present.

Louis, ranging over his experiences in the disorderly and mean
pretentiousness of the suburban home, and in the discomfort of
various lodgings, appreciated the grave, comfortable benignity of that
bedroom. Its appeal to his senses was so strong that it became for
him almost luxurious. The bedroom at his latest lodgings was full
of boot-trees and trouser-stretchers and coat-holders, but it was a
paltry thing and a grimy. He saw the daily and hourly advantages of
marriage with a loving, simple woman whose house was her pride. He had
a longing for solidities, certitudes, and righteousness.

Musing delectably, he drew aside the crimson curtain from the window
and beheld the same prospect that Rachel had beheld on her walk
towards Friendly Street--the obscurity of the park, the chain of lamps
down the slope of Moorthorne Road, and the distant fires of industry
still farther beyond, towards Toft End. He had hated the foul, sordid,
ragged prospects and vistas of the Five Towns when he came new to them
from London, and he had continued to hate them. They desolated him.
But to-night he thought of them sympathetically. It was as if he was
divining in them for the first time a recondite charm. He remembered
what an old citizen named Dain had said one evening at the
Conservative Club: "People may say what they choose about Bursley.
I've just returned from London and I tell thee I was glad to get back.
I _like_ Bursley." A grotesque saying, he had thought, then.
Yet now he positively felt himself capable of sharing the sentiment.
Rachel in the kitchen, and the kitchen in town, and the town amid
those scarred and smoking hillocks!... Invisible phenomena! Mysterious
harmonies! The influence of the night solaced and uplifted him and
bestowed on him new faculties of perception.

At length, deciding, after characteristic procrastination, that
he must really go to bed, he wound up his watch and put it on the
dressing-table. His pockets had to be emptied and his clothes hung or
folded. His fingers touched the notes in the left-hand outside pocket
of his coat. Not for one instant had the problem of the bank-notes
been absent from his mind. Throughout the conversation with Rachel,
throughout the interval between her retirement and his own, throughout
his meditations in the bedroom, he had not once escaped from the
obsession of the bank-notes and their problem. He knew now how the
problem must be solved. There was, after all, only one solution, and
it was extremely simple. He must put the notes back where he had found
them, underneath the chair on the landing. If advisable, he might
rediscover them in the morning and surrender them immediately. But
they must not remain in his room during the night. He must not examine
them--he must not look at them.

He approached the door quickly, lest he might never reach the door.
But he was somehow forced to halt at the wardrobe, to see if it
had coat-holders. It had one coat-holder.... His hand was on the
door-knob. He turned it with every species of precaution--and it
complained loudly in the still night. The door opened with a terrible
explosive noise of protest. He gazed into the darkness of the landing,
and presently, by the light from the bedroom, could distinguish the
vague boundaries of it. The chair, invisible, was on the left. He
opened the door wider to the nocturnal riddle of the house. His hand
clasped the notes in his pocket. No sound! He listened for the ticking
of the lobby clock and could not catch it. He listened more intently.
It was impossible that he should not hear the ticking of the lobby
clock. Was he dreaming? Was he under some delusion? Then it occurred
to him that the lobby clock must have run down or otherwise stopped.
Clocks did stop.... And then his heart bounded and his flesh crept. He
had heard footsteps somewhere below. Or were the footsteps merely in
his imagination?

Alone in the parlour, after Rachel had gone to bed, he had spent some
time in gazing at the _Signal_; for there had been absolutely
nothing else to do, and he could not have thought of sleep at such an
early hour. It is true that, with his intense preoccupations, he had
for the most part gazed uncomprehendingly at the _Signal_. The
tale of the latest burglaries, however, had by virtue of its intrinsic
interest reached his brain through his eyes, and had impressed him,
despite preoccupations. And now, as he stood in the gloom at the door
of his bedroom and waited feverishly for the sound of more footsteps,
it was inevitable that visions of burglars should disturb him.

The probability of burglars visiting any particular house in the
town was infinitely slight--his common sense told him that. But
supposing--just supposing that they actually had chosen his aunt's
abode for their prey!... Conceivably they had learnt that Mrs. Maldon
was to have a large sum of money under her roof. Conceivably a complex
plan had been carefully laid. Conceivably one of the great burglaries
of criminal history might be in progress. It was not impossible. No
wonder that, with bank-notes loose all over the place, his shockingly
negligent auntie should have special qualms concerning burglars on
that night of all nights! Fortunate indeed that he carried a revolver,
that the revolver was loaded, and that he had some skill to use it! A
dramatic surprise--his gun and the man behind it--for burglars who had
no doubt counted on having to deal with a mere couple of women! He
had but to remove his shoes and creep down the stairs. He felt at the
revolver in his pocket. Often had he pictured himself in the act of
calmly triumphing over burglars or other villains.

Then, with no further hesitation, he silently closed the door--on the
inside!... How could there be burglars in the house? The suspicion was
folly. What he had heard could be naught but the nocturnal cracking
and yielding of an old building at night. Was it not notorious that
the night was full of noises? And even if burglars had entered!...
Better, safer, to ignore them! They could not make off with a great
deal, for the main item of prey happened to be in his own pocket.
Let them search for the treasure! If they had the effrontery to come
searching in his bedroom, he would give them a reception! Let them
try! He looked at the revolver, holding it beneath the gas. Could he
aim it at a human being?...

Or--another explanation--possibly Rachel, having forgotten something
or having need of something, had gone downstairs for it. He had not
thought of that. But what more natural? Sudden toothache--a desire for
laudanum--a visit to a store cupboard: such was the classic order of
events.

He listened, secure within the four walls of his bedroom. He smiled.
He could have fancied that he heard an electric bell ring ever so
faintly at a distance--in the next house, in the next world.

He laughed to himself.

Then at length he moved again towards the door; and he paused in front
of it. There were no burglars! The notion of burglars was idiotic! He
must put the notes back under the chair. His whole salvation depended
upon his putting the notes back under the chair on the landing!...
An affair of two seconds!... With due caution he opened the door. And
simultaneously, at the very selfsame instant, he most distinctly heard
the click of the latch of his aunt's bedroom door, next his own! Now,
in a horrible quandary, trembling and perspiring, he felt completely
nonplussed. He pushed his own door to, but without quite closing it,
for fear of a noise; and edged away from it towards the fireplace.

Had his aunt wakened up, and felt a misgiving about the notes, and
found that they were not where they ought to be?

No further sound came though the crack of his door. In the dwelling
absolute silence seemed to be established. He stood thus for an
indefinite period in front of the fireplace, the brain's action
apparently suspended, until his agitation was somewhat composed. And
then, because he had no clear plan in his head, he put his hand into
the pocket containing the notes and drew them out. And immediately he
was aware of a pleasant feeling of relief, as one who, after battling
against a delicious and shameful habit, yields and is glad. The beauty
of the notes was eternal; no use could stale it. Their intoxicating
effect on him was just as powerful now as before supper. And now, as
then, the mere sight of them filled him with a passionate conviction
that without them he would be ruined. His tricks to destroy the
suspicions of Horrocleave could not possibly be successful. Within
twenty-four hours he might be in prison if he could not forthwith
command a certain sum of money. And even possessing the money, he
would still have an extremely difficult part to play. It would be
necessary for him to arrive early at the works, to change notes for
gold in the safe, to erase many of his pencilled false additions,
to devise a postponement of his crucial scene with Horrocleave, and
lastly to invent a plausible explanation of the piling up of a cash
reserve.

If he had not been optimistic and an incurable procrastinator and a
believer in luck at the last moment, he would have seen that nothing
but a miracle could save him if Horrocleave were indeed suspicious.
Happily for his peace of mind, he was incapable of looking a fact
in the face. Against all reason he insisted to himself that with the
notes he might reach salvation. He did not trouble even to estimate
the chances of the notes being traced by their numbers. Such is the
magic force of a weak character.

But he powerfully desired not to steal the notes, or any of them.
The image of Rachel rose between him and his temptation. Her honesty,
candour, loyalty, had revealed to him the beauty of the ways of
righteousness. He had been born again in her glance. He swore he would
do nothing unworthy of the ideal she had unconsciously set up in him.
He admitted that it was supremely essential for him to restore the
notes to the spot whence he had removed them.... And yet--if he did
so, and was lost? What then? For one second he saw himself in the
dock at the police-court in the town hall. Awful hallucination! If it
became reality, what use, then, his obedience to the new ideal? Better
to accomplish this one act of treason to the ideal in order to be able
for ever afterwards to obey it and to look Rachel in the eyes! Was
it not so? He wanted advice, he wanted to be confirmed in his own
opportunism, as a starving beggar may want food.

And in the midst of all this torture of his vacillations, he was
staggered and overwhelmed by the sudden noise of Mrs. Maldon's door
brusquely opening, and of an instant loud, firm knock on his own door.
The silence of the night was shattered as by an earthquake.

Almost mechanically he crushed the notes in his left hand--crushed
them into a ball; and the knuckles of that hand turned white with the
muscular tension.

"Are you up?" a voice demanded. It was Rachel's voice.

"Ye-es," he answered, and held his left hand over the screen in front
of the fireplace.

"May I come in?"

And with the word she came in. She was summarily dressed, and very
pale, and her hair, more notable than ever, was down. As she entered
he opened his hand and let the ball of notes drop into the littered
grate.



V

"Anything the matter?" he asked, moving away from the region of the
hearth-rug.

She glanced at him with a kind of mild indulgence, as if to say:
"Surely you don't suppose I should be wandering about in the night
like this if nothing was the matter!"

She replied, speaking quickly and eagerly--"I'm so glad you aren't in
bed. I want you to go and fetch the doctor--at once."

"Auntie ill?"

She gave him another glance like the first, as if to say: "_I'm_
not ill, and _you_ aren't. And Mrs. Maldon is the only other
person in the house--"

"I'll go instantly," he added in haste. "Which doctor?"

"Yardley in Park Road. It's near the corner of Axe Street. You'll know
it by the yellow gate--even if his lamp isn't lighted."

"I thought old Hawley up at Hillport was auntie's doctor."

"I believe he is, but you couldn't get up to Hillport in less than
half an hour, could you?"

"Not so serious as all that, is it?"

"Well, you never know. Best to be on the safe side. It's not quite
like one of her usual attacks. She's been upset. She actually went
downstairs."

"I thought I heard somebody. Did you hear her, then?"

"No, she rang for me afterwards. There's a little electric bell over
my bed, from her room."

"And I heard that too," said Louis.

"Will you ask Dr. Yardley to come at once?"

"I'm off," said he. "What a good thing I wasn't in bed!"

"What a good thing you're here at all!" Rachel murmured, suddenly
smiling.

He was waiting anxiously for her to leave the room again. But instead
of leaving it she came to the fireplace and looked behind the screen.
He trembled.

"Oh! That kettle _is_ there! I thought it must be!" And picked it
up.

Then, with the kettle in one hand, she went to a large cupboard let
into the wall opposite the door, and opened it.

"You know Park Road, I suppose?" she turned to him.

"Yes, yes, I'm off!"

He was obliged to go, surrendering the room to her. As he descended
the stairs he heard her come out of the room. She was following him
downstairs. "Don't bang the door," she whispered. "I'll come and shut
it after you."

The next moment he had undone the door and was down the front steps
and in the solitude of Bycars Lane. He ran up the street, full of the
one desire to accomplish his errand and be back again in the spare
bedroom alone. The notes were utterly safe where they lay, and
yet--astounding events might happen. Was it not a unique coincidence
that on this very night and no other his aunt should fall ill, and
that as a result Rachel should take him unawares at the worst moment
of his dilemma? And further, could it be the actual fact, as he had
been wildly guessing only a few minutes earlier, that his aunt had at
last missed the notes? Could it be that it was this discovery which
had upset her and brought on an attack?... An attack of what?

He swerved at the double into Park Road, which was a silent desert
watched over by forlorn gaslamps. He saw the yellow gate. The yellow
gate clanked after him. He searched in the deep shadow of the porch
for the button of the night bell, and had to strike a match in order
to find it. He rang; waited and waited, rang again; waited; rang a
third time, keeping his finger hard on the button. Then arose and
expired a flickering light in the hall of the house.

"That'll do! That'll do! You needn't wear the bell out." He could hear
the irritated accents through the glazed front door.

A dim figure in a dressing-gown opened.

"Are you Dr. Yardley?" Louis gasped between rapid breaths.

"What is it?" The question was savage.

With his extraordinary instinctive amiability Louis smiled naturally
and persuasively.

"You're wanted at Mrs. Maldon's, Bycars. Awfully sorry to disturb
you."

"Oh!" said the dressing-gown in a changed, interested tone. "Mrs.
Maldon's! Right. I'll follow you."

"You'll come at once?" Louis urged.

"I shall come at once."

The door was curtly closed.

"So that's how you call a doctor in the middle of the night!" thought
Louis, and ran off. He had scarcely deciphered the man's face.

The return, being chiefly downhill, was less exhausting. As he
approached his aunt's house he saw that there was a light on the
ground floor as well as in the front bedroom. The door opened as he
swung the gate. The lobby gas had been lighted. Rachel was waiting for
him. Her hair was tied up now. The girl looked wise, absurdly so.
It was as though she was engaged in the act of being equal to the
terrible occasion.

"He's coming," said Louis.

"You've been frightfully quick!" said she, as if triumphantly. She
appeared to glory in the crisis.

He passed within as she held the door. He was frantic to rush upstairs
to the fireplace in his room; but he had to seem deliberate.

"And what next?" he inquired.

"Well, nothing. It'll be best for you to sit in your bedroom for
a bit. That's the only place where there's a fire--and it's rather
chilly at this time of night."

"A fire?" he repeated, incredulous and yet awe-struck.

"I knew you wouldn't mind," said she. "It just happened there wasn't
two drops of methylated spirits left in the house, and as there was
a fire laid in your room, I put a match to it. I must have hot water
ready, you see. And Mrs. Maldon only has one of those old-fashioned
gas-stoves in her bedroom--"

"I see," he agreed.

They mounted the steps together. The grate in his room was a mass of
pleasant flames, in the midst of which gleamed the bright kettle.

"How is she now?" He asked in a trance. And he felt as though it was
another man in his own body who was asking.

"Oh! It's not very serious, I hope," said Rachel, kneeling to coax the
fire with a short, wiry poker. "Only you never know. I'm just going
in again.... She seems to lose all her vitality--that's what's apt to
frighten you."

The girl looked wise--absurdly, deliciously wise. The spectacle of her
engaged in the high act of being equal to the occasion was exquisite.
But Louis had no eye for it.




CHAPTER V

NEWS OF THE NIGHT


I

The next morning, Mrs. Tarns, the charwoman whom Rachel had expressly
included in the dogma that all charwomen are alike, was cleaning the
entranceway to Mrs. Maldon's house. She had washed and stoned the
steep, uneven flight of steps leading up to the front door, and the
flat space between them and the gate; and now, before finishing the
step down to the footpath, she was wiping the grimy ledges of the
green iron gate itself.

Mrs. Tarns was a woman of nearly sixty, stout and--in
appearance--untidy and dirty. The wet wind played with grey wisps of
her hair, and with her coarse brown apron, beneath which her skirt was
pinned up. Human eye so seldom saw her without a coarse brown apron
that, apronless, she would have almost seemed (like Eve) to be
unattired. It and a pail were the insignia of her vocation.

She was accomplished and conscientious; she could be trusted; despite
appearances, her habits were cleanly. She was also a woman of immense
experience. In addition to being one of the finest exponents of the
art of step-stoning and general housework that the Five Towns could
show, she had numerous other talents. She was thoroughly accustomed
to the supreme spectacles of birth and death, and could assist
thereat with dignity and skill. She could turn away the wrath of
rent-collectors, rate-collectors, school-inspectors, and magistrates.
She was an adept in enticing an inebriated husband to leave a
public-house. She could feed four children for a day on sevenpence,
and rise calmly to her feet after having been knocked down by one
stroke of a fist. She could go without food, sleep, and love, and yet
thrive. She could give when she had nothing, and keep her heart sweet
amid every contagion. Lastly, she could coax extra sixpences out of
a pawnbroker. She had never had a holiday, and almost never failed in
her duty. Her one social fault was a tendency to talk at great length
about babies, corpses, and the qualities of rival soaps. All her
children were married. Her husband had gone in a box to a justice
whose anger Mrs. Tam's simple tongue might not soothe. She lived
alone. Six half-days a week she worked about the house of Mrs.
Maldon from eight to one o'clock, for a shilling per half-day and her
breakfast. But if she chose to stay for it she could have dinner--and
a good one--on condition that she washed up afterwards. She often
stayed. After over forty years of incessant and manifold expert labour
she was happy and content in this rich reward.

A long automobile came slipping with noiseless stealth down the hill,
and halted opposite the gate, in silence, for the engine had been
stopped higher up. Mrs. Tams, intimidated by the august phenomenon,
ceased to rub, and in alarm watched the great Thomas Batchgrew
struggle unsuccessfully with the handle of the door that imprisoned
him. Mrs. Tams was a born serf, and her nature was such that she
wanted to apologize to Thomas Batchgrew for the naughtiness of the
door. For her there was something monstrous in a personage like Thomas
Batchgrew being balked in a desire, even for a moment, by a perverse
door-catch. Not that she really respected Thomas Batchgrew! She
did not, but he was a member of the sacred governing class. The
chauffeur--not John's Ernest, but a professional--flashed round the
front of the car and opened the door with obsequious haste. For Thomas
Batchgrew had to be appeased. Already a delay of twenty minutes--due
to a defective tire and to the inexcusable absence of the spanner with
which the spare wheel was manipulated--had aroused his just anger.

Mrs. Tarns pulled the gate towards herself and, crushed behind it,
curtsied to Thomas Batchgrew. This curtsy, the most servile of all
Western salutations, and now nearly unknown in Five Towns, consisted
in a momentary shortening of the stature by six inches, and in nothing
else. Mrs. Tams had acquired it in her native village of Sneyd, where
an earl held fast to that which was good, and she had never been able
to quite lose it. It did far more than the celerity of the chauffeur
to appease Thomas Batchgrew.

Snorting and self-conscious, and with his white whiskers flying behind
him, he stepped in his two overcoats across the narrow, muddy pavement
and on to Mrs. Tarn's virgin stonework, and with two haughty black
footmarks he instantly ruined it. The tragedy produced no effect on
Mrs. Tams. And indeed nobody in the Five Towns would have been moved
by it. For the social convention as to porticoes enjoined, not that
they should remain clean, but simply that they should show evidence
of having been clean at some moment early in each day. It mattered not
how dirty they were in general, provided that the religious and futile
rite of stoning had been demonstrably performed during the morning.

Mrs. Tams adroitly moved her bucket, aside, though there was plenty
of room for feet even larger than those of Thomas Batchgrew, and then
waited to be spoken to. She was not spoken to. Mr. Batchgrew, after
hesitating and clearing his throat, proceeded up the steps, defiling
them. As he did so Mrs. Tams screwed together all her features and
clenched her hands as if in agony, and stared horribly at the open
front door, which was blowing to. It seemed that she was trying to
arrest the front door by sheer force of muscular contraction. She did
not succeed. Gently the door closed, with a firm click of its latch,
in face of Mr. Batchgrew.

"Nay, nay!" muttered Mrs. Tarns, desolated.

And Mr. Batchgrew, once more justly angered, raised his hand to the
heavy knocker.

"Dunna' knock, mester! Dunna' knock!" Mrs. Tarns implored in a
whisper. "Missis is asleep. Miss Rachel's been up aw night wi' her,
seemingly, and now her's gone off in a doze like, and Miss Rachel's
resting, too, on th' squab i' th' parlor. Doctor was fetched."

Apparently charging Mrs. Tarns with responsibility for the illness,
Mr. Batchgrew demanded severely--

"What was it?"

"One o' them attacks as her has," said Mrs. Tarns with a meekness that
admitted she could offer no defence, "only wuss!"

"Hurry round to th' back door and let me in."

"I doubt back door's bolted on th' inside," said Mrs. Tarns with deep
humility.

"This is ridiculous," said Mr. Batchgrew, truly. "Am I to stand here
all day?" And raised his hand to the knocker.

Mrs. Tarns with swiftness darted up the steps and inserted a large,
fat, wet hand between the raised knocker and its bed. It was
the sublime gesture of a martyr, and her large brown eyes gazed
submissively, yet firmly, at Mr. Batchgrew with the look of a martyr.
She had nothing to gain by the defiance of a great man, but she could
not permit her honoured employer to be wakened. She was accustomed to
emergencies, and to desperate deeds therein, and she did not fail
now in promptly taking the right course, regardless of consequences.
Somewhat younger than Mr. Batchgrew in years, she was older in
experience and in wisdom. She could do a thousand things well; Mr.
Batchgrew could do nothing well. At that very moment she conquered,
and he was beaten. Yet her brown eyes and even the sturdy uplifted arm
cringed to him, and asked in abasement to be forgiven for the impiety
committed. From her other hand a cloth dripped foul water on to the
topmost step.

And then the door yielded. Thomas Batchgrew and Mrs. Tarns both
abandoned the knocker. Rachel, pale as a lily, stern, with dilated
eyes, stood before them. And Mr. Batchgrew realized, as he looked
at her against the dark, hushed background of the stairs, that Mrs.
Maldon was indeed ill. Mrs. Tams respectfully retired down the steps.
A mightier than she, the young, naïve, ignorant girl, to whom she
could have taught everything save possibly the art of washing cutlery,
had relieved her of responsibility.

"You can't see her," said Rachel in a low tone, trembling.

"But--but--" Thomas Batchgrew spluttered, ineffectively. "D'you know
I'm her trustee, miss? Let me come in."

Rachel would not take her hand off the inner knob.

There was the thin, far-off sound of an electric bell, breaking the
silence of the house. It was the bell in Rachel's bedroom, rung from
Mrs. Maldon's bedroom. And at this mysterious signal from the invalid,
this faint proof that the hidden sufferer had consciousness and
volition, Rachel started and Thomas Batchgrew started.

"Her bell!" Rachel exclaimed, and fled upstairs.

In the large bedroom Mrs. Maldon lay apparently at ease.

"Did they waken you?" cried Rachel, distressed.

"Who is there, dear?" Mrs. Maldon asked, in a voice that had almost
recovered from the weakness of the night, Rachel was astounded.

"Mr. Batchgrew."

"I must see him," said the old lady.

"But--"

"I must see him at once," Mrs. Maldon repeated. "At once. Kindly bring
him up." And she added, in a curiously even and resigned tone, "I've
lost all that money!"



II

"Nay," said Mrs. Maldon to Thomas Batchgrew, "I'm not going to die
just yet."

Her voice was cheerful, even a little brisk, and she spoke with a
benign smile in the tranquil accents of absolute conviction. But she
did not move her head; she waited to look at Thomas Batchgrew until
he came within her field of vision at the foot of the bed. This
quiescence had a disconcerting effect, contradicting her voice.

She was lying on her back, in the posture customary to her, the arms
being stretched down by the sides under the bed-quilt. Her features
were drawn slightly askew; the skin was shiny; the eyes stared as
though Mrs. Maldon had been a hysterical subject. It was evident that
she had passed through a tremendous physical crisis. Nevertheless,
Rachel was still astounded at the change for the better in her,
wrought by sleep and the force of her obstinate vitality.

The contrast between the scene which Thomas Batchgrew now saw and
the scene which had met Rachel in the night was so violent as to seem
nearly incredible. Not a sign of the catastrophe remained, except in
Mrs. Maldon's face, and in some invalid gear on the dressing-table,
for Rachel had gradually got the room into order. She had even closed
and locked the wardrobe.

On answering Mrs. Maldon's summons in the night, Rachel had found the
central door of the wardrobe swinging and the sacred big drawer at the
bottom of that division only half shut, and Mrs. Maldon in a peignoir
lying near it on the floor, making queer inhuman noises, not moans,
but a kind of anxious, inarticulate entreaty, and shaking her head
constantly to the left--never to the right. Mrs. Maldon had recognized
Rachel, and had seemed to implore with agonized intensity her
powerful assistance in some nameless and hopeless tragic dilemma. The
sight--especially of the destruction of the old woman's dignity--was
dreadful to such an extent that Rachel did not realize its effect on
herself until several hours afterwards. At the moment she called on
the immense reserves of her self-confidence to meet the situation--and
she met it, assisting her pride with the curious pretence,
characteristic of the Five Towns race, that the emergency was
insufficient to alarm in the slightest degree a person of sagacity and
sang-froid.

She had restored Mrs. Maldon to her bed and to some of her dignity.
But the horrid symptoms were not thereby abated. The inhuman
noises and the distressing, incomprehensible appeal had continued.
Immediately Rachel's back was turned Mrs. Maldon had fallen out of
bed. This happened three times, so that clearly the sufferer was
falling out of bed under the urgency of some half-conscious purpose.
Rachel had soothed her. And once she had managed to say with some
clearness the words, "I've been downstairs." But when Rachel went back
to the room from dispatching Louis for the doctor, she was again on
the floor. Louis' absence from the house had lasted an intolerable
age, but the doctor had followed closely on the messenger, and already
the symptoms had become a little less acute. The doctor had diagnosed
with rapidity. Supervening upon her ordinary cardiac attack after
supper, Mrs. Maldon had had, in the night, an embolus in one artery
of the brain. The way in which the doctor announced the fact showed to
Rachel that nothing could easily have been more serious. And yet
the mere naming of the affliction eased her, although she had no
conception of what an embolus might be. Dr. Yardley had remained until
four o'clock, when Mrs. Maldon, surprisingly convalescent, dropped off
to sleep. He remarked that she might recover.

At eight o'clock he had come back. Mrs. Maldon was awake, but had
apparently no proper recollection of the events of the night, which
even to Rachel had begun to seem unreal, like a waning hallucination.
The doctor gave orders, with optimism, and left, sufficiently
reassured to allow himself to yawn. At a quarter past eight Louis had
departed to his own affairs, on Rachel's direct suggestion. And when
Mrs. Tams had been informed of the case so full of disturbing enigmas,
while Rachel and she drank tea together in the kitchen, the daily
domestic movement of the house was partly resumed, from vanity,
because Rachel could not bear to sit idle nor to admit to herself that
she had been scared to a standstill.

And now Mrs. Maldon, in full possession of her faculties, faced Thomas
Batchgrew for the interview which she had insisted on having. And
Rachel waited with an uncanny apprehension, her ears full of the
mysterious and frightful phrase, "I've lost all that money."



III

Mrs. Maldon, after a few words had passed as to her illness, used
exactly the same phrase again--"I've lost all that money!"

Mr. Batchgrew snorted, and glanced at Rachel for an explanation.

"Yes. It's all gone," proceeded Mrs. Maldon with calm resignation.
"But I'm too old to worry. Please listen to me. We lost my serviette
and ring last evening at supper. Couldn't find it anywhere. And in
the night it suddenly occurred to me where it was. I've remembered
everything now, almost, and I'm quite sure. You know you first told
me to put the money in my wardrobe. Now before you said that, I had
thought of putting it on the top of the cupboard to the right of the
fireplace in the back room downstairs. I thought that would be a good
place for it in case burglars _did_ come. No burglar would ever
think of looking there."

"God bless me!" Mr. Batchgrew muttered, scornfully protesting.

"It couldn't possibly be seen, you see. However, I thought I ought to
respect your wish, and so I decided I'd put part of it on the top of
the cupboard, and part of it underneath a lot of linen at the bottom
of the drawer in my wardrobe. That would satisfy both of us."

"Would it!" exclaimed Mr. Batchgrew, without any restraint upon his
heavy, rolling voice.

"Well, I must have picked up the serviette and ring with the
bank-notes, you see. I fear I'm absent-minded like that sometimes. I
know I went out of the sitting-room with both hands full. I know both
hands were occupied, because I remember when I went into the back room
I didn't turn the gas up, and I pushed a chair up to the cupboard with
my knee, for me to stand on. I'm certain I put some of the notes
on the top of the cupboard. Then I came upstairs. The window on the
landing was rattling, and I put the other part of the money on the
chair while I tried to fasten the window. However, I couldn't fasten
it. So I left it. And then I thought I picked up the money again off
the chair and came in here and hid it at the bottom of the drawer and
locked the wardrobe."

"You thought!" said Thomas Batchgrew, gazing at the aged weakling as
at an insane criminal. "Was this just after I left?"

Mrs. Maldon nodded apologetically.

"When I woke up the first time in the night, it struck me like
a flash: Had I taken the serviette and ring up with the notes? I
_am_ liable to do that sort of thing. I'm an old woman--it's
no use denying it." She looked plaintively at Rachel, and her voice
trembled. "I got up. I was bound to get up, and I turned the gas on,
and there the serviette and ring were at the bottom of the drawer, but
no money! I took everything out of the drawer, piece by piece, and put
it back again. I simply cannot tell you how I felt! I went out to
the landing with a match. There was no money there. And then I went
downstairs in the dark. I never knew it to be so dark, in spite of the
street-lamp. I knocked against the clock. I nearly knocked it over.
I managed to light the gas in the back room. I made sure that I must
have left _all_ the notes on the top of the cupboard instead of
only part of them. But there was nothing there at all. Nothing! Then
I looked all over the sitting-room floor with a candle. When I got
upstairs again I didn't know what I was doing. I knew I was going to
be ill, and I just managed to ring the bell for dear Rachel, and
the next thing I remember was I was in bed here, and Rachel putting
something hot to my feet--the dear child!"

Her eyes glistened with tears. And Rachel too, as she pictured
the enfeebled and despairing incarnation of dignity colliding with
grandfather's clocks in the night and climbing on chairs and groping
over carpets, had difficulty not to cry, and a lump rose in her
throat. She was so moved by compassion that she did not at first feel
the full shock of the awful disappearance of the money.

Mr. Batchgrew, for the second time that morning unequal to a
situation, turned foolishly to the wardrobe, clearing his throat and
snorting.

"It's on one of the sliding trays," said Mrs. Maldon.

"What's on one of the sliding trays?"

"The serviette."

Rachel, who was nearest, opened the wardrobe and immediately
discovered the missing serviette and ring, which had the appearance of
a direct dramatic proof of Mrs. Maldon's story.

Mr. Batchgrew exclaimed, indignant--

"I never heard such a rigmarole in all my born days." And then,
angrily to Rachel, "Go down and look on th' top o' th' cupboard,
thee!"

Rachel hesitated.

"I'm quite resigned," said Mrs. Maldon placidly. "It's a punishment on
me for hardening my heart to Julian last night. It's a punishment for
my pride."

"Now, then!" Mr. Batchgrew glared bullyingly at Rachel, who vanished.

In a few moments she returned.

"There's nothing at all on the top of the cupboard."

"But th' money must be somewhere," said Mr. Batchgrew savagely. "Nine
hundred and sixty-five pun. And I've arranged to lend out that money
again, at once! What am I to say to th' mortgagor? Am I to tell him as
I've lost it?... No! I never!"

Mrs. Maldon murmured--

"Nay, nay! It's no use looking at me. I thought I should never get
over it in the night. But I'm quite resigned now."

Rachel, standing near the door, could observe both Mrs. Maldon and
Thomas Batchgrew, and was regarded by neither of them. And while,
in the convulsive commotion of her feelings, her sympathy for and
admiration of Mrs. Maldon became poignant, she was thrilled by the
most intense scorn and disgust for Thomas Batchgrew. The chief reason
for her abhorrence was the old man's insensibility to the angelic
submission, the touching fragility, the heavenly meekness and
tranquillity, of Mrs. Maldon as she lay there helpless, victimized by
a paralytic affliction. (Rachel wanted to forget utterly the souvenir
of Mrs. Maldon's paroxysm in the night, because it slurred the
unmatched dignity of the aged creature.) Another reason was the mere
fact that Mr. Batchgrew had insisted on leaving the money in the
house. Who but Mr. Batchgrew would have had the notion of saddling
poor old Mrs. Maldon with the custody of a vast sum of money? It was a
shame; it was positively cruel! Rachel was indignantly convinced that
he alone ought to be made responsible for the money. And lastly, she
loathed and condemned him for the reason that he was so obviously
unequal to the situation. He could not handle it. He was found out. He
was disproved, He did not know what to do. He could only mouth, strut,
bully, and make rude noises. He could not even keep decently around
him the cloak of self-importance. He stood revealed to Mrs. Maldon and
Rachel as he had sometimes stood revealed to his dead wife and to his
elder children and to some of his confidential, faithful employees.
He was an offence in the delicacy of the bedroom. If the rancour of
Rachel's judgment had been fierce enough to strike him to the floor,
assuredly his years would not have saved him! And yet Mrs. Maldon
gazed at him with submissive and apologetic gentleness! Foolish saint!
Fancy _her_ (thought Rachel) hardening her heart to Julian!
Rachel longed to stiffen her with some backing of her own harsh common
sense. And her affection for Mrs. Maldon grew passionate and half
maternal.



IV

Thomas Batchgrew was saying--

"It beats me how anybody in their senses could pick up a serviette and
put it way for a pile o' bank-notes." He scowled. "However, I'll go
and see Snow. I'll see what Snow says. I'll get him to come up with
one of his best men--Dickson, perhaps."

"Thomas Batchgrew!" cried Mrs. Maldon with sudden disturbing febrile
excitement. "You'll do no such thing. I'll have no police prying into
this affair. If you do that I shall just die right off."

And her manner grew so imperious that Mr. Batchgrew was intimidated.

"But--but--"

"I'd sooner lose all the money!" said Mrs. Maldon, almost wildly.

She blushed. And Rachel also felt herself to be blushing, and was
not sure whether she knew why she was blushing. An atmosphere of
constraint and shame seemed to permeate the room.

Mr. Batchgrew growled--

"The money must be in the house. The truth is, Elizabeth, ye don't
know no more than that bedpost where ye put it."

And Rachel agreed eagerly--

"Of course it _must_ be in the house! I shall set to and turn
everything out. Everything!"

"Ye'd better!" said Thomas Batchgrew.

"That will be the best thing, dear--perhaps," said Mrs. Maldon,
indifferent, and now plainly fatigued.

Every one seemed determined to be convinced that the money was in the
house, and to employ this conviction as a defence against horrible dim
suspicions that had inexplicably emerged from the corners of the room
and were creeping about like menaces.

"Where else should it be?" muttered Batchgrew, sarcastically, after a
pause, as if to say, "Anybody who fancies the money isn't in the house
is an utter fool."

Mrs. Maldon had closed her eyes.

There was a faint knock at the door. Rachel turned instinctively to
prevent a possible intruder from entering and catching sight of
those dim suspicions before they could be driven back into their dark
corners. Then she remembered that she had asked Mrs. Tams to bring up
some Revalenta Arabica food for Mrs. Maldon as soon as it should be
ready. And she sedately opened the door. Mrs. Tams, with her usual
serf-like diffidence, remained invisible, except for the hand holding
forth the cup. But her soft voice, charged with sensational news, was
heard--

"Mrs. Grocott's boy next door but one has just been round to th' back
to tell me as there was a burglary down the Lane last night."

As Rachel carried the food across to the bed, she could not help
saying, though with feigned deference, to Mr. Batchgrew--

"You told us last night that there wouldn't _be_ any more
burglaries, Mr. Batchgrew."

The burning tightness round the top of her head, due to fatigue and
lack of sleep, seemed somehow to brace her audacity, and to make her
careless of consequences.

The trustee and celebrity, though momentarily confounded, was
recovering himself now. He determined to crush the pert creature whose
glance had several times incommoded him. He said severely--

"What's a burglary down the Lane got to with us and this here money?"

"Us and the money!" Rachel repeated evenly. "Nothing, only when I came
downstairs in the night the greenhouse door was open." (The scullery
was still often called the greenhouse.) "And I'd locked it myself!"

A troubling silence followed, broken by Mr. Batchgrew's uneasy grunts
as he turned away to the window, and by the clink of the spoon as
Rachel helped Mrs. Maldon to take the food.

At length Mr. Batchgrew asked, staring through the window--

"Did ye notice the dust on top o' that cupboard? Was it disturbed?"

Hesitating an instant, Rachel answered firmly, without turning her
head--

"I did ... It was ... Of course."

Mrs. Maldon made no sign of interest.

Mr. Batchgrew's boots creaked to and fro in the room.

"And what's Julian got to say for himself?" he asked, not addressing
either woman in particular.

"Julian wasn't here. He didn't stay the night. Louis stayed instead,"
answered Mrs. Maldon, faintly, without opening her eyes.

"What? What? What's this?"

"Tell him, dear, how it was," said Mrs. Maldon, still more faintly.

Rachel obeyed, in agitated, uneven tones.




CHAPTER VI

THEORIES OF THE THEFT


I

The inspiring and agreeable image of Rachel floated above vast
contending forces of ideas in the mind of Louis Fores as he bent
over his petty-cash book amid the dust of the vile inner office at
Horrocleave's; and their altercation was sharpened by the fact that
Louis had not had enough sleep. He had had a great deal more sleep
than Rachel, but he had not had what he was in the habit of calling
his "whack" of it. Although never in a hurry to go to bed, he
appreciated as well as any doctor the importance of sleep in the
economy of the human frame, and his weekly average of repose was high;
he was an expert sleeper.

He thirsted after righteousness, and the petty-cash book was permeated
through and through with unrighteousness; and it was his handiwork. Of
course, under the unconscious influence of Rachel, seen in her kitchen
and seen also in various other striking aspects during the exciting
night, he might have bravely exposed the iniquity of the petty-cash
book to Jim Horrocleave, and cleared his conscience, and then gone and
confessed to Rachel, and thus prepared the way for the inner peace and
a new life. He would have suffered--there was indeed a possibility of
very severe suffering--but he would have been a free man--yes, free
even if in prison, and he would have followed the fine tradition of
rectitude, exhorting the respect and admiration of all true souls,
etc. He had read authentic records of similar deeds. What stopped him
from carrying out the programme of honesty was his powerful worldly
common sense. Despite what he had read, and despite the inspiring
image of Rachel, his common sense soon convinced him that confession
would be an error of judgment and quite unremunerative for, at any
rate, very many years. Hence he abandoned regretfully the notion of
confession, as a beautifully impossible dream. But righteousness was
not thereby entirely denied to him; his thirst for it could still be
assuaged by the device of an oath to repay secretly to Horrocleave
every penny that he had stolen from Horrocleave, which oath he
took--and felt better and worthier of Rachel.

He might, perhaps, have inclined more effectually towards confession
had not the petty-cash book appeared to him in the morning light as an
admirably convincing piece of work. It had the most innocent air,
and was markedly superior to his recollection of it. On many pages he
himself could scarcely detect his own traces. He began to feel that he
could rely pretty strongly on the cleverness of the petty-cash book.
Only four blank pages remained in it. A few days more and it would be
filled up, finished, labelled with a gummed white label showing
its number and the dates of its first and last entries, shelved and
forgotten. A pity that Horrocleave's suspicions had not been delayed
for another month or so, for then the book might have been mislaid,
lost, or even consumed in a conflagration! But never mind! A certain
amount of ill luck fell to every man, and he would trust to his
excellent handicraft in the petty-cash book. It was his only hope in
the world, now that the mysterious and heavenly bank-notes were gone.

His attitude towards the bank-notes was, quite naturally, illogical
and self-contradictory. While the bank-notes were in his pocket he had
in the end seen three things with clearness. First, the wickedness of
appropriating them. Second, the danger of appropriating them--having
regard to the prevalent habit of keeping the numbers of bank-notes.
Third, the wild madness of attempting to utilize them in order to
replace the stolen petty cash, for by no ingenuity could the presence
of a hoard of over seventy pounds in the petty-cash box have been
explained. He had perfectly grasped all that; and yet, the notes
having vanished, he felt forlorn, alone, as one who has lost his best
friend--a prop and firm succour in a universe of quicksands.

In the matter of the burning of the notes his conscience did not
accuse him. On the contrary, he emerged blameless from the episode. It
was not he who first had so carelessly left the notes lying about. He
had not searched for them, he had not purloined them. They had been
positively thrust upon him. His intention in assuming charge of them
for a brief space was to teach some negligent person a lesson. During
the evening Fate had given him no opportunity to produce them. And
when in the night, with honesty unimpeachable, he had decided to
restore them to the landing, Fate had intervened once more. At
each step of the affair he had acted for the best in difficult
circumstances. Persons so ill-advised as to drop bank-notes under
chairs must accept all the consequences of their act. Who could have
foreseen that while he was engaged on the philanthropic errand of
fetching a doctor for an aged lady Rachel would light a fire under
the notes?... No, not merely was he without sin in the matter of the
bank-notes, he was rather an ill-used person, a martyr deserving of
sympathy. And, further, he did not regret the notes; he was glad they
were gone. They could no longer tempt him now, and their disappearance
would remain a mystery for ever. So far as they were concerned, he
could look his aunt or anybody else in the face without a tremor. The
mere destruction of the immense, undetermined sum of money did not
seriously ruffle him. As an ex-bank clerk he was aware that though an
individual would lose, the State, through the Bank of England,
would correspondingly gain, and thus for the nonce he had the large
sensation of a patriot.



II

Axon, the factotum of the counting-house, came in from the outer
office, with a mien composed of mirth and apprehension in about equal
parts. If Axon happened to be a subject of a conversation and there
was any uncertainty as to which Axon out of a thousand Axons he
might be, the introducer of the subject would always say, "You
know--sandy-haired fellow." This described him--hair, beard,
moustache. Sandy-haired men have no age until they are fifty-five, and
Axon was not fifty-five. He was a pigeon-flyer by choice, and a clerk
in order that he might be a pigeon-flyer. His fault was that, with
no moral right whatever to do so, he would treat Louis Fores as a
business equal in the office and as a social equal in the street.

He sprang upon Louis now as one grinning valet might spring upon
another, enormous with news, and whispered--

"I say, guv'nor's put his foot through them steps from painting-shop
and sprained his ankle. Look out for ructions, eh? Thank the Lord it's
a half-day!" and then whipped back to his own room.

On any ordinary Saturday morning Louis by a fine frigidity would
have tried to show to the obtuse Axon that he resented such demeanour
towards himself on the part of an Axon, assuming as it did that the
art-director of the works was one of the servile crew that scuttled
about in terror if the ferocious Horrocleave happened to sneeze. But
to-day the mere sudden information that Horrocleave was on the works
gave him an unpleasant start and seriously impaired his presence of
mind. He had not been aware of Horrocleave's arrival. He had been
expecting to hear Horrocleave's step and voice, and the rustle of
him hanging up his mackintosh outside (Horrocleave always wore a
mackintosh instead of an overcoat), and all the general introductory
sounds of his advent, before he finally came into the inner room. But,
now, for aught Louis knew, Horrocleave might already have been in the
inner room, before Louis. He was upset. The enemy was not attacking
him in the proper and usual way.

And the next instant, ere he could collect and reorganize his forces,
he was paralysed by the footfall of Horrocleave, limping, and the bang
of a door.

And Louis thought--

"He's in the outer office. He's only got to take his mackintosh off,
and then I shall see his head coming through this door, and perhaps
he'll ask me for the petty-cash book right off."

But Horrocleave did not even pause to remove his mackintosh. In
defiance of immemorial habit, being himself considerably excited and
confused, he stalked straight in, half hopping, and sat down in his
frowsy chair at his frowsy desk, with his cap at the back of his head.
He was a spare man, of medium height, with a thin, shrewd face and a
constant look of hard, fierce determination.

And there was Louis staring like a fool at the open page of the
petty-cash book, incriminating himself every instant.

"Hello!" said Louis, without looking round. "What's up?"

"What's up?" Horrocleave scowled. "What d'ye mean?"

"I thought you were limping just the least bit in the world," said
Louis, whose tact was instinctive and indestructible.

"Oh, _that_!" said Horrocleave, as though nothing was farther
from his mind than the peculiarity of his gait that morning. He bit
his lip.

"Slipped over something?" Louis suggested.

"Aye!" said Horrocleave, somewhat less ominously, and began to open
his letters.

Louis saw that he had done well to feign ignorance of the sprain and
to assume that Horrocleave had slipped, whereas in fact Horrocleave
had put his foot through a piece of rotten wood. Everybody in the
works, upon pain of death, would have to pretend that the employer had
merely slipped, and that the consequences were negligible. Horrocleave
had already nearly eaten an old man alive for the sin of asking
whether he had hurt himself!

And he had not hurt himself because two days previously he had
ferociously stopped the odd-man of the works from wasting his time in
mending just that identical stair, and had asserted that the stair was
in excellent condition. Horrocleave, though Napoleonic by disposition,
had a provincial mind, even a Five Towns mind. He regarded as sheer
loss any expenditure on repairs or renewals or the processes of
cleansing. His theory was that everything would "do" indefinitely. He
passed much of his time in making things "do." His confidence in the
theory that things could indeed be made to "do" was usually justified,
but the steps from the painting-shop--a gimcrack ladder with
hand-rail, attached somehow externally to a wall--had at length
betrayed it. That the accident had happened to himself, and not to a
lad balancing a plankful of art-lustre ware on one shoulder, was sheer
luck. And now the odd-man, with the surreptitious air of one engaged
in a nefarious act, was putting a new tread on the stairs. Thus
devoutly are the Napoleonic served!

Horrocleave seemed to weary of his correspondence.

"By the by," he said in a strange tone, "let's have a look at that
petty-cash book."

Louis rose, and with all his charm, with all the elegance of a man
intended by Nature for wealth and fashion instead of a slave on a foul
pot-bank, gave up the book. It was like giving up hope to the last
vestige, like giving up the ghost. He saw with horrible clearness that
he had been deceiving himself, that Horrocleave's ruthless eye could
not fail to discern at the first glance all his neat dodges, such as
additions of ten to the shillings, and even to the pounds here and
there, and ingenious errors in carrying forward totals from the bottom
of one page to the top of the next. He began to speculate whether
Horrocleave would be content merely to fling him out of the office, or
whether he would prosecute. Prosecution seemed much more in accordance
with the Napoleonic temperament, and yet Louis could not, then,
conceive himself the victim of a prosecution.... Anybody else, but not
Louis Fores!

Horrocleave, his elbow on the table, leaned his head on his hand and
began to examine the book. Suddenly he looked up at Louis, who could
not move and could not cease from agreeably smiling.

Said Horrocleave in a still more peculiar tone--

"Just ask Axon whether he means to go fetch wages to-day or to-morrow.
Has he forgotten it's Saturday morning?"

Louis shot away into the outer office, where Axon was just putting on
his hat to go to the bank.

Alone in the outer office Louis wondered. The whole of his vitality
was absorbed in the single function of wondering. Then through the
thin slit of the half-open door between the top and the middle hinges,
he beheld Horrocleave bending in judgment over the book. And he
gazed at the vision in the fascination of horror. In a few moments
Horrocleave leaned back, and Louis saw that his face had turned paler.
It went almost white. Horrocleave was breathing strangely, his arms
dropped downward, his body slipped to one side, his cap fell off, his
eyes shut, his mouth opened, his head sank loosely over the back
of the chair like the head of a corpse. He had fainted. The
thought passed through Louis' mind that stupefaction at the complex
unrighteousness of the petty-cash records had caused Horrocleave to
lose consciousness. Then the true explanation occurred to him. It was
the pain in his ankle that had overcome the heroic sufferer. Louis
had desired to go to his aid, but he could not budge from his post.
Presently the colour began slowly to return to Horrocleave's cheek;
his eyes opened; he looked round sleepily and then wildly; and then he
rubbed his eyes and yawned. He remained quiescent for several minutes,
while a railway lorry thundered through the archway and the hoofs of
the great horse crunched on shawds in the yard. Then he called, in a
subdued voice--

"Louis! Where the devil are ye?"

Louis re-entered the room, and as he did so Horrocleave shut the
petty-cash book with an abrupt gesture.

"Here, take it!" said he, pushing the book away.

"Is it all right?" Louis asked.

Horrocleave nodded. "Well, I've checked about forty additions." And he
smiled sardonically.

"I think you might do it a bit oftener," said Louis, and then went on:
"I say, don't you think it might be a good thing if you took your boot
off. You never know, when you've slipped, whether it won't swell--I
mean the ankle."

"Bosh!" exclaimed Horrocleave, with precipitation, but after an
instant added thoughtfully: "Well, I dun'no'. Wouldn't do any harm,
would it? I say--get me some water, will you? I don't know how it is,
but I'm as thirsty as a dog."

The heroic martyr to the affirmation that he had not hurt himself had
handsomely saved his honour. He could afford to relax a little now the
rigour of consistency in conduct. With twinges and yawns he permitted
Louis to help him with the boot and to put an art-lustre cup to his
lips.

Louis was in the highest spirits. He had seen the gates of the
Inferno, and was now snatched up to Paradise. He knew that Horrocleave
had never more than half suspected him, and that the terrible
Horrocleave pride would prevent Horrocleave from asking for the
book again. Henceforth, saved by a miracle, he could live in utter
rectitude; he could respond freely to the inspiring influence of
Rachel, and he would do so. He smiled at his previous fears, and was
convinced, by no means for the first time, that a Providence watched
over him because of his good intentions and his nice disposition--that
nothing really serious could ever occur to Louis Fores. He reflected
happily that in a few days he would begin a new petty-cash book--and
he envisaged it as a symbol of his new life. The future smiled. He
made sure that his aunt Maldon was dying, and though he liked her very
much and would regret her demise, he could not be expected to be blind
to the fact that a proportion of her riches would devolve on himself.
Indeed, in unluckily causing a loss of money to his aunt Maldon he had
in reality only been robbing himself. So that there was no need for
any kind of remorse. When the works closed for the week-end, he
walked almost serenely up to Bycars for news--news less of his aunt's
condition than of the discovery that a certain roll of bank-notes had
been mislaid.



III

The front door was open when Louis arrived at Mrs. Maldon's house, and
he walked in. Anybody might have walked in. There was nothing unusual
in this; it was not a sign that the mistress of the house was ill in
bed and its guardianship therefore disorganized. The front doors of
Bursley--even the most select--were constantly ajar and the fresh wind
from off the pot-bank was constantly blowing through those exposed
halls and up those staircases. For the demon of public inquisitiveness
is understood in the Five Towns to be a nocturnal demon. The fear
of it begins only at dusk. A woman who in the evening protects her
parlour like her honour, will, while the sun is above the horizon,
show the sacred secrets of the kitchen itself to any one who chooses
to stand on the front step.

Louis put his hat and stick on the oak chest, and with a careless,
elegant gesture brushed back his dark hair. The door of the parlour
was slightly ajar. He pushed it gently open, and peeped round it with
a pleasant arch expression, on the chance of there being some one
within.

Rachel was lying on the Chesterfield. Her left cheek, resting on her
left hand, was embedded in the large cushion. A large coil of her
tawny hair, displaced, had spread loosely over the dark green of the
sofa. The left foot hung limp over the edge of the sofa; the jutting
angle of the right knee divided sharply the drapery of her petticoat
into two systems, and her right shoe with its steel buckle pressed
against the yielding back 

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