Man and Maid
by E. Nesbit · English · Gutenberg #33028 · 347,944 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Man and Maid
Author: E. Nesbit
Release date: June 30, 2010 [eBook #33028]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAN AND MAID ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Rachael Schultz and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
MAN AND MAID
BY
E. NESBIT
[Illustration: Publisher's Logo]
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
ADELPHI TERRACE
MCMVI
[_All rights reserved._]
TO
ADA BREAKELL
MY DEAREST AND OLDEST FRIEND
MAN AND MAID
By the same Author.
_Illustrated. Crown 8vo. Cloth, 6s._
The Treasure Seekers.
Five Children and It.
Nine Unlikely Tales for Children.
The Would-be-Goods.
New Treasure Seekers.
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE HAUNTED INHERITANCE 1
II. THE POWER OF DARKNESS 32
III. THE STRANGER WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN OBSERVED 60
IV. RACK AND THUMBSCREW 84
V. THE MILLIONAIRESS 103
VI. THE HERMIT OF "THE YEWS" 134
VII. THE AUNT AND THE EDITOR 158
VIII. MISS MOUSE 178
IX. THE OLD WIFE 201
X. THE HOUSE OF SILENCE 224
XI. THE GIRL AT THE TOBACCONIST'S 245
XII. WHILE IT IS YET DAY 268
XIII. ALCIBIADES 287
MAN AND MAID
I
THE HAUNTED INHERITANCE
The most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me was my going back
to town on that day. I am a reasonable being; I do not do such things. I
was on a bicycling tour with another man. We were far from the mean
cares of an unremunerative profession; we were men not fettered by any
given address, any pledged date, any preconcerted route. I went to bed
weary and cheerful, fell asleep a mere animal--a tired dog after a day's
hunting--and awoke at four in the morning that creature of nerves and
fancies which is my other self, and which has driven me to all the
follies I have ever kept company with. But even that second self of
mine, whining beast and traitor as it is, has never played me such a
trick as it played then. Indeed, something in the result of that day's
rash act sets me wondering whether after all it could have been I, or
even my other self, who moved in the adventure; whether it was not
rather some power outside both of us ... but this is a speculation as
idle in me as uninteresting to you, and so enough of it.
From four to seven I lay awake, the prey of a growing detestation of
bicycling tours, friends, scenery, physical exertion, holidays. By seven
o'clock I felt that I would rather perish than spend another day in the
society of the other man--an excellent fellow, by the way, and the best
of company.
At half-past seven the post came. I saw the postman through my window as
I shaved. I went down to get my letters--there were none, naturally.
At breakfast I said: "Edmundson, my dear fellow, I am extremely sorry;
but my letters this morning compel me to return to town at once."
"But I thought," said Edmundson--then he stopped, and I saw that he had
perceived in time that this was no moment for reminding me that, having
left no address, I could have had no letters.
He looked sympathetic, and gave me what there was left of the bacon. I
suppose he thought that it was a love affair or some such folly. I let
him think so; after all, no love affair but would have seemed wise
compared with the blank idiocy of this sudden determination to cut short
a delightful holiday and go back to those dusty, stuffy rooms in Gray's
Inn.
After that first and almost pardonable lapse, Edmundson behaved
beautifully. I caught the 9.17 train, and by half-past eleven I was
climbing my dirty staircase.
I let myself in and waded through a heap of envelopes and wrappered
circulars that had drifted in through the letter-box, as dead leaves
drift into the areas of houses in squares. All the windows were shut.
Dust lay thick on everything. My laundress had evidently chosen this as
a good time for her holiday. I wondered idly where she spent it. And now
the close, musty smell of the rooms caught at my senses, and I
remembered with a positive pang the sweet scent of the earth and the
dead leaves in that wood through which, at this very moment, the
sensible and fortunate Edmundson would be riding.
The thought of dead leaves reminded me of the heap of correspondence. I
glanced through it. Only one of all those letters interested me in the
least. It was from my mother:--
"ELLIOT'S BAY, NORFOLK,
_17th August_.
"DEAR LAWRENCE,--I have wonderful news for you. Your
great-uncle Sefton has died, and left you half his immense
property. The other half is left to your second cousin Selwyn.
You must come home at once. There are heaps of letters here for
you, but I dare not send them on, as goodness only knows where
you may be. I do wish you would remember to leave an address. I
send this to your rooms, in case you have had the forethought
to instruct your charwoman to send your letters on to you. It
is a most handsome fortune, and I am too happy about your
accession to it to scold you as you deserve, but I hope this
will be a lesson to you to leave an address when next you go
away. Come home at once.--Your loving Mother,
"MARGARET SEFTON.
"_P.S._--It is the maddest will; everything divided evenly
between you two except the house and estate. The will says you
and your cousin Selwyn are to meet there on the 1st September
following his death, in presence of the family, and decide
which of you is to have the house. If you can't agree, it's to
be presented to the county for a lunatic asylum. I should think
so! He was always so eccentric. The one who doesn't have the
house, etc., gets L20,000 extra. Of course you will choose
_that_.
"_P.P.S._--Be sure to bring your under-shirts with you--the air
here is very keen of an evening."
I opened both the windows and lit a pipe. Sefton Manor, that gorgeous
old place,--I knew its picture in Hasted, cradle of our race, and so
on--and a big fortune. I hoped my cousin Selwyn would want the L20,000
more than he wanted the house. If he didn't--well, perhaps my fortune
might be large enough to increase that L20,000 to a sum that he _would_
want.
And then, suddenly, I became aware that this was the 31st of August, and
that to-morrow was the day on which I was to meet my cousin Selwyn and
"the family," and come to a decision about the house. I had never, to my
knowledge, heard of my cousin Selwyn. We were a family rich in
collateral branches. I hoped he would be a reasonable young man. Also,
I had never seen Sefton Manor House, except in a print. It occurred to
me that I would rather see the house before I saw the cousin.
I caught the next train to Sefton.
"It's but a mile by the field way," said the railway porter. "You take
the stile--the first on the left--and follow the path till you come to
the wood. Then skirt along the left of it, cater across the meadow at
the end, and you'll see the place right below you in the vale."
"It's a fine old place, I hear," said I.
"All to pieces, though," said he. "I shouldn't wonder if it cost a
couple o' hundred to put it to rights. Water coming through the roof and
all."
"But surely the owner----"
"Oh, he never lived there; not since his son was taken. He lived in the
lodge; it's on the brow of the hill looking down on the Manor House."
"Is the house empty?"
"As empty as a rotten nutshell, except for the old sticks o' furniture.
Any one who likes," added the porter, "can lie there o' nights. But it
wouldn't be me!"
"Do you mean there's a ghost?" I hope I kept any note of undue elation
out of my voice.
"I don't hold with ghosts," said the porter firmly, "but my aunt was in
service at the lodge, and there's no doubt but _something_ walks there."
"Come," I said, "this is very interesting. Can't you leave the station,
and come across to where beer is?"
"I don't mind if I do," said he. "That is so far as your standing a drop
goes. But I can't leave the station, so if you pour my beer you must
pour it dry, sir, as the saying is."
So I gave the man a shilling, and he told me about the ghost at Sefton
Manor House. Indeed, about the ghosts, for there were, it seemed, two; a
lady in white, and a gentleman in a slouch hat and black riding cloak.
"They do say," said my porter, "as how one of the young ladies once on a
time was wishful to elope, and started so to do--not getting further
than the hall door; her father, thinking it to be burglars, fired out of
the window, and the happy pair fell on the doorstep, corpses."
"Is it true, do you think?"
The porter did not know. At any rate there was a tablet in the church
to Maria Sefton and George Ballard--"and something about in their death
them not being divided."
I took the stile, I skirted the wood, I "catered" across the meadow--and
so I came out on a chalky ridge held in a net of pine roots, where dog
violets grew. Below stretched the green park, dotted with trees. The
lodge, stuccoed but solid, lay below me. Smoke came from its chimneys.
Lower still lay the Manor House--red brick with grey lichened mullions,
a house in a thousand, Elizabethan--and from its twisted beautiful
chimneys no smoke arose. I hurried across the short turf towards the
Manor House.
I had no difficulty in getting into the great garden. The bricks of the
wall were everywhere displaced or crumbling. The ivy had forced the
coping stones away; each red buttress offered a dozen spots for
foothold. I climbed the wall and found myself in a garden--oh! but such
a garden. There are not half a dozen such in England--ancient box
hedges, rosaries, fountains, yew tree avenues, bowers of clematis (now
feathery in its seeding time), great trees, grey-grown marble
balustrades and steps, terraces, green lawns, one green lawn, in
especial, girt round with a sweet briar hedge, and in the middle of
this lawn a sundial. All this was mine, or, to be more exact, might be
mine, should my cousin Selwyn prove to be a person of sense. How I
prayed that he might not be a person of taste! That he might be a person
who liked yachts or racehorses or diamonds, or motor-cars, or anything
that money can buy, not a person who liked beautiful Elizabethan houses,
and gardens old beyond belief.
The sundial stood on a mass of masonry, too low and wide to be called a
pillar. I mounted the two brick steps and leaned over to read the date
and the motto:
"Tempus fugit manet amor."
The date was 1617, the initials S. S. surmounted it. The face of the
dial was unusually ornate--a wreath of stiffly drawn roses was traced
outside the circle of the numbers. As I leaned there a sudden movement
on the other side of the pedestal compelled my attention. I leaned over
a little further to see what had rustled--a rat--a rabbit? A flash of
pink struck at my eyes. A lady in a pink dress was sitting on the step
at the other side of the sundial.
I suppose some exclamation escaped me--the lady looked up. Her hair was
dark, and her eyes; her face was pink and white, with a few little
gold-coloured freckles on nose and on cheek bones. Her dress was of pink
cotton stuff, thin and soft. She looked like a beautiful pink rose.
Our eyes met.
"I beg your pardon," said I, "I had no idea----" there I stopped and
tried to crawl back to firm ground. Graceful explanations are not best
given by one sprawling on his stomach across a sundial.
By the time I was once more on my feet she too was standing.
"It is a beautiful old place," she said gently, and, as it seemed, with
a kindly wish to relieve my embarrassment. She made a movement as if to
turn away.
"Quite a show place," said I stupidly enough, but I was still a little
embarrassed, and I wanted to say something--anything--to arrest her
departure. You have no idea how pretty she was. She had a straw hat
in her hand, dangling by soft black ribbons. Her hair was all
fluffy-soft--like a child's. "I suppose you have seen the house?" I
asked.
She paused, one foot still on the lower step of the sundial, and her
face seemed to brighten at the touch of some idea as sudden as welcome.
"Well--no," she said. "The fact is--I wanted frightfully to see the
house; in fact, I've come miles and miles on purpose, but there's no one
to let me in."
"The people at the lodge?" I suggested.
"Oh no," she said. "I--the fact is I--I don't want to be shown round. I
want to explore!"
She looked at me critically. Her eyes dwelt on my right hand, which lay
on the sundial. I have always taken reasonable care of my hands, and I
wore a good ring, a sapphire, cut with the Sefton arms: an heirloom, by
the way. Her glance at my hand preluded a longer glance at my face. Then
she shrugged her pretty shoulders.
"Oh well," she said, and it was as if she had said plainly, "I see that
you are a gentleman and a decent fellow. Why should I not look over the
house in your company? Introductions? Bah!"
All this her shrug said without ambiguity as without words.
"Perhaps," I hazarded, "I could get the keys."
"Do you really care very much for old houses?"
"I do," said I; "and you?"
"I care so much that I nearly broke into this one. I should have done it
quite if the windows had been an inch or two lower."
"I am an inch or two higher," said I, standing squarely so as to make
the most of my six-feet beside her five-feet-five or thereabouts.
"Oh--if you only would!" said she.
"Why not?" said I.
She led the way past the marble basin of the fountain, and along the
historic yew avenue, planted, like all old yew avenues, by that
industrious gardener our Eighth Henry. Then across a lawn, through a
winding, grassy, shrubbery path, that ended at a green door in the
garden wall.
"You can lift this latch with a hairpin," said she, and therewith lifted
it.
We walked into a courtyard. Young grass grew green between the grey
flags on which our steps echoed.
"This is the window," said she. "You see there's a pane broken. If you
could get on to the window-sill, you could get your hand in and undo
the hasp, and----"
"And you?"
"Oh, you'll let me in by the kitchen door."
I did it. My conscience called me a burglar--in vain. Was it not my own,
or as good as my own house?
I let her in at the back door. We walked through the big dark kitchen
where the old three-legged pot towered large on the hearth, and the old
spits and firedogs still kept their ancient place. Then through another
kitchen where red rust was making its full meal of a comparatively
modern range.
Then into the great hall, where the old armour and the buff-coats and
round-caps hang on the walls, and where the carved stone staircases run
at each side up to the gallery above.
The long tables in the middle of the hall were scored by the knives of
the many who had eaten meat there--initials and dates were cut into
them. The roof was groined, the windows low-arched.
"Oh, but what a place!" said she; "this must be much older than the rest
of it----"
"Evidently. About 1300, I should say."
"Oh, let us explore the rest," she cried; "it is really a comfort not to
have a guide, but only a person like you who just guesses comfortably at
dates. I should hate to be told _exactly_ when this hall was built."
We explored ball-room and picture gallery, white parlour and library.
Most of the rooms were furnished--all heavily, some magnificently--but
everything was dusty and faded.
It was in the white parlour, a spacious panelled room on the first
floor, that she told me the ghost story, substantially the same as my
porter's tale, only in one respect different.
"And so, just as she was leaving this very room--yes, I'm sure it's this
room, because the woman at the inn pointed out this double window and
told me so--just as the poor lovers were creeping out of the door, the
cruel father came quickly out of some dark place and killed them both.
So now they haunt it."
"It is a terrible thought," said I gravely. "How would you like to live
in a haunted house?"
"I couldn't," she said quickly.
"Nor I; it would be too----" my speech would have ended flippantly, but
for the grave set of her features.
"I wonder who _will_ live here?" she said. "The owner is just dead. They
say it is an awful house, full of ghosts. Of course one is not afraid
now"--the sunlight lay golden and soft on the dusty parquet of the
floor--"but at night, when the wind wails, and the doors creak, and the
things rustle, oh, it must be awful!"
"I hear the house has been left to two people, or rather one is to have
the house, and the other a sum of money," said I. "It's a beautiful
house, full of beautiful things, but I should think at least one of the
heirs would rather have the money."
"Oh yes, I should think so. I wonder whether the heirs know about the
ghost? The lights can be seen from the inn, you know, at twelve o'clock,
and they see the ghost in white at the window."
"Never the black one?"
"Oh yes, I suppose so."
"The ghosts don't appear together?"
"No."
"I suppose," said I, "whoever it is that manages such things knows that
the poor ghosts would like to be together, so it won't let them."
She shivered.
"Come," she said, "we have seen all over the house; let us get back into
the sunshine. Now I will go out, and you shall bolt the door after me,
and then you can come out by the window. Thank you so much for all the
trouble you have taken. It has really been quite an adventure...."
I rather liked that expression, and she hastened to spoil it.
"... Quite an adventure going all over this glorious old place, and
looking at everything one wanted to see, and not just at what the
housekeeper didn't mind one's looking at."
She passed through the door, but when I had closed it and prepared to
lock it, I found that the key was no longer in the lock. I looked on the
floor--I felt in my pockets, and at last, wandering back into the
kitchen, discovered it on the table, where I swear I never put it.
When I had fitted that key into the lock and turned it, and got out of
the window and made that fast, I dropped into the yard. No one shared
its solitude with me. I searched garden and pleasure grounds, but never
a glimpse of pink rewarded my anxious eyes. I found the sundial again,
and stretched myself along the warm brick of the wide step where she had
sat: and called myself a fool.
I had let her go. I did not know her name; I did not know where she
lived; she had been at the inn, but probably only for lunch. I should
never see her again, and certainly in that event I should never see
again such dark, soft eyes, such hair, such a contour of cheek and chin,
such a frank smile--in a word, a girl with whom it would be so
delightfully natural for me to fall in love. For all the time she had
been talking to me of architecture and archaeology, of dates and periods,
of carvings and mouldings, I had been recklessly falling in love with
the idea of falling in love with her. I had cherished and adored this
delightful possibility, and now my chance was over. Even I could not
definitely fall in love after one interview with a girl I was never to
see again! And falling in love is so pleasant! I cursed my lost chance,
and went back to the inn. I talked to the waiter.
"Yes, a lady in pink had lunched there with a party. Had gone on to the
Castle. A party from Tonbridge it was."
Barnhurst Castle is close to Sefton Manor. The inn lays itself out to
entertain persons who come in brakes and carve their names on the walls
of the Castle keep. The inn has a visitors' book. I examined it. Some
twenty feminine names. Any one might be hers. The waiter looked over my
shoulder. I turned the pages.
"Only parties staying in the house in this part of the book," said the
waiter.
My eye caught one name. "Selwyn Sefton," in a clear, round, black
hand-writing.
"Staying here?" I pointed to the name.
"Yes, sir; came to-day, sir."
"Can I have a private sitting-room?"
I had one. I ordered my dinner to be served in it, and I sat down and
considered my course of action. Should I invite my cousin Selwyn to
dinner, ply him with wine, and exact promises? Honour forbade. Should I
seek him out and try to establish friendly relations? To what end?
Then I saw from my window a young man in a light-checked suit, with a
face at once pallid and coarse. He strolled along the gravel path, and
a woman's voice in the garden called "Selwyn."
He disappeared in the direction of the voice. I don't think I ever
disliked a man so much at first sight.
"Brute," said I, "why should he have the house? He'd stucco it all over
as likely as not; perhaps let it! He'd never stand the ghosts,
either----"
Then the inexcusable, daring idea of my life came to me, striking me
rigid--a blow from my other self. It must have been a minute or two
before my muscles relaxed and my arms fell at my sides.
"I'll do it," I said.
I dined. I told the people of the house not to sit up for me. I was
going to see friends in the neighbourhood, and might stay the night with
them. I took my Inverness cape with me on my arm and my soft felt hat in
my pocket. I wore a light suit and a straw hat.
Before I started I leaned cautiously from my window. The lamp at the bow
window next to mine showed me the pallid young man, smoking a fat,
reeking cigar. I hoped he would continue to sit there smoking. His
window looked the right way; and if he didn't see what I wanted him to
see some one else in the inn would. The landlady had assured me that I
should disturb no one if I came in at half-past twelve.
"We hardly keep country hours here, sir," she said, "on account of so
much excursionist business."
I bought candles in the village, and, as I went down across the park in
the soft darkness, I turned again and again to be sure that the light
and the pallid young man were still at that window. It was now past
eleven.
I got into the house and lighted a candle, and crept through the dark
kitchens, whose windows, I knew, did not look towards the inn. When I
came to the hall I blew out my candle. I dared not show light
prematurely, and in the unhaunted part of the house.
I gave myself a nasty knock against one of the long tables, but it
helped me to get my bearings, and presently I laid my hand on the stone
balustrade of the great staircase. You would hardly believe me if I were
to tell you truly of my sensations as I began to go up these stairs. I
am not a coward--at least, I had never thought so till then--but the
absolute darkness unnerved me. I had to go slowly, or I should have lost
my head and blundered up the stairs three at a time, so strong was the
feeling of something--something uncanny--just behind me.
I set my teeth. I reached the top of the stairs, felt along the walls,
and after a false start, which landed me in the great picture gallery, I
found the white parlour, entered it, closed the door, and felt my way to
a little room without a window, which we had decided must have been a
powdering-room.
Here I ventured to re-light my candle.
The white parlour, I remembered, was fully furnished. Returning to it I
struck one match, and by its flash determined the way to the
mantelpiece.
Then I closed the powdering-room door behind me. I felt my way to the
mantelpiece and took down the two brass twenty-lighted candelabra. I
placed these on a table a yard or two from the window, and in them set
up my candles. It is astonishingly difficult in the dark to do anything,
even a thing so simple as the setting up of a candle.
Then I went back into my little room, put on the Inverness cape and the
slouch hat, and looked at my watch. Eleven-thirty. I must wait. I sat
down and waited. I thought how rich I was--the thought fell flat; I
wanted this house. I thought of my beautiful pink lady; but I put that
thought aside; I had an inward consciousness that my conduct, more
heroic than enough in one sense, would seem mean and crafty in her eyes.
Only ten minutes had passed. I could not wait till twelve. The chill of
the night and of the damp, unused house, and, perhaps, some less
material influence, made me shiver.
I opened the door, crept on hands and knees to the table, and, carefully
keeping myself below the level of the window, I reached up a trembling
arm, and lighted, one by one, my forty candles. The room was a blaze of
light. My courage came back to me with the retreat of the darkness. I
was far too excited to know what a fool I was making of myself. I rose
boldly, and struck an attitude over against the window, where the
candle-light shone upon as well as behind me. My Inverness was flung
jauntily over my shoulder, my soft, black felt twisted and slouched over
my eyes.
There I stood for the world, and particularly for my cousin Selwyn, to
see, the very image of the ghost that haunted that chamber. And from my
window I could see the light in that other window, and indistinctly the
lounging figure there. Oh, my cousin Selwyn, I wished many things to
your address in that moment! For it was only a moment that I had to feel
brave and daring in. Then I heard, deep down in the house, a sound, very
slight, very faint. Then came silence. I drew a deep breath. The silence
endured. And I stood by my lighted window.
After a very long time, as it seemed, I heard a board crack, and then a
soft rustling sound that drew near and seemed to pause outside the very
door of my parlour.
Again I held my breath, and now I thought of the most horrible story Poe
ever wrote--"The Fall of the House of Usher"--and I fancied I saw the
handle of that door move. I fixed my eyes on it. The fancy passed: and
returned.
Then again there was silence. And then the door opened with a soft,
silent suddenness, and I saw in the doorway a figure in trailing white.
Its eyes blazed in a death-white face. It made two ghostly, gliding
steps forward, and my heart stood still. I had not thought it possible
for a man to experience so sharp a pang of sheer terror. I had
masqueraded as one of the ghosts in this accursed house. Well, the other
ghost--the real one--had come to meet me. I do not like to dwell on that
moment. The only thing which it pleases me to remember is that I did not
scream or go mad. I think I stood on the verge of both.
The ghost, I say, took two steps forward; then it threw up its arms, the
lighted taper it carried fell on the floor, and it reeled back against
the door with its arms across its face.
The fall of the candle woke me as from a nightmare. It fell solidly, and
rolled away under the table.
I perceived that my ghost was human. I cried incoherently: "Don't, for
Heaven's sake--it's all right."
The ghost dropped its hands and turned agonised eyes on me. I tore off
my cloak and hat.
"I--didn't--scream," she said, and with that I sprang forward and caught
her in my arms--my poor, pink lady--white now as a white rose.
I carried her into the powdering-room, and left one candle with her,
extinguishing the others hastily, for now I saw what in my extravagant
folly had escaped me before, that my ghost exhibition might bring the
whole village down on the house. I tore down the long corridor and
double locked the doors leading from it to the staircase, then back to
the powdering-room and the prone white rose. How, in the madness of that
night's folly, I had thought to bring a brandy-flask passes my
understanding. But I had done it. Now I rubbed her hands with the
spirit. I rubbed her temples, I tried to force it between her lips, and
at last she sighed and opened her eyes.
"Oh--thank God--thank God!" I cried, for indeed I had almost feared that
my mad trick had killed her. "Are you better? oh, poor little lady, are
you better?"
She moved her head a little on my arm.
Again she sighed, and her eyes closed. I gave her more brandy. She took
it, choked, raised herself against my shoulder.
"I'm all right now," she said faintly. "It served me right. How silly it
all is!" Then she began to laugh, and then she began to cry.
It was at this moment that we heard voices on the terrace below. She
clutched at my arm in a frenzy of terror, the bright tears glistening on
her cheeks.
"Oh! not any more, not any more," she cried. "I can't bear it."
"Hush," I said, taking her hands strongly in mine. "I've played the
fool; so have you. We must play the man now. The people in the village
have seen the lights--that's all. They think we're burglars. They can't
get in. Keep quiet, and they'll go away."
But when they did go away they left the local constable on guard. He
kept guard like a man till daylight began to creep over the hill, and
then he crawled into the hayloft and fell asleep, small blame to him.
But through those long hours I sat beside her and held her hand. At
first she clung to me as a frightened child clings, and her tears were
the prettiest, saddest things to see. As we grew calmer we talked.
"I did it to frighten my cousin," I owned. "I meant to have told you
to-day, I mean yesterday, only you went away. I am Lawrence Sefton, and
the place is to go either to me or to my cousin Selwyn. And I wanted to
frighten him off it. But you, why did you----?"
Even then I couldn't see. She looked at me.
"I don't know how I ever could have thought I was brave enough to do it,
but I did want the house so, and I wanted to frighten you----"
"To frighten _me_. Why?"
"Because I am your cousin Selwyn," she said, hiding her face in her
hands.
"And you knew me?" I asked.
"By your ring," she said. "I saw your father wear it when I was a little
girl. Can't we get back to the inn now?"
"Not unless you want every one to know how silly we have been."
"I wish you'd forgive me," she said when we had talked awhile, and she
had even laughed at the description of the pallid young man on whom I
had bestowed, in my mind, her name.
"The wrong is mutual," I said; "we will exchange forgivenesses."
"Oh, but it isn't," she said eagerly. "Because I knew it was you, and
you didn't know it was me: you wouldn't have tried to frighten _me_."
"You know I wouldn't." My voice was tenderer than I meant it to be.
She was silent.
"And who is to have the house?" she said.
"Why you, of course."
"I never will."
"Why?"
"Oh, because!"
"Can't we put off the decision?" I asked.
"Impossible. We must decide to-morrow--to-day I mean."
"Well, when we meet to-morrow--I mean to-day--with lawyers and chaperones
and mothers and relations, give me one word alone with you."
"Yes," she answered, with docility.
* * * * *
"Do you know," she said presently, "I can never respect myself again? To
undertake a thing like that, and then be so horribly frightened. Oh! I
thought you really _were_ the other ghost."
"I will tell you a secret," said I. "I thought _you_ were, and I was
much more frightened than you."
"Oh well," she said, leaning against my shoulder as a tired child might
have done, "if you were frightened too, Cousin Lawrence, I don't mind so
very, very much."
It was soon afterwards that, cautiously looking out of the parlour
window for the twentieth time, I had the happiness of seeing the local
policeman disappear into the stable rubbing his eyes.
We got out of the window on the other side of the house, and went back
to the inn across the dewy park. The French window of the sitting-room
which had let her out let us both in. No one was stirring, so no one
save she and I were any the wiser as to that night's work.
* * * * *
It was like a garden party next day, when lawyers and executors and
aunts and relations met on the terrace in front of Sefton Manor House.
Her eyes were downcast. She followed her Aunt demurely over the house
and the grounds.
"Your decision," said my great-uncle's solicitor, "has to be given
within the hour."
"My cousin and I will announce it within that time," I said and I at
once gave her my arm.
Arrived at the sundial we stopped.
"This is my proposal," I said: "we will say that we decide that the
house is yours--we will spend the L20,000 in restoring it and the
grounds. By the time that's done we can decide who is to have it."
"But how?"
"Oh, we'll draw lots, or toss a halfpenny, or anything you like."
"I'd rather decide now," she said; "_you_ take it."
"No, _you_ shall."
"I'd rather you had it. I--I don't feel so greedy as I did yesterday,"
she said.
"Neither do I. Or at any rate not in the same way."
"Do--do take the house," she said very earnestly.
Then I said: "My cousin Selwyn, unless you take the house, I shall make
you an offer of marriage."
"_Oh!_" she breathed.
"And when you have declined it, on the very proper ground of our too
slight acquaintance, I will take my turn at declining. I will decline
the house. Then, if you are obdurate, it will become an asylum. Don't be
obdurate. Pretend to take the house and----"
She looked at me rather piteously.
"Very well," she said, "I will pretend to take the house, and when it is
restored----"
"We'll spin the penny."
So before the waiting relations the house was adjudged to my cousin
Selwyn. When the restoration was complete I met Selwyn at the sundial.
We had met there often in the course of the restoration, in which
business we both took an extravagant interest.
"Now," I said, "we'll spin the penny. Heads you take the house, tails it
comes to me."
I spun the coin--it fell on the brick steps of the sundial, and stuck
upright there, wedged between two bricks. She laughed; I laughed.
"It's not _my_ house," I said.
"It's not _my_ house," said she.
"Dear," said I, and we were neither of us laughing then, "can't it be
_our_ house?"
And, thank God, our house it is.
II
THE POWER OF DARKNESS
It was an enthusiastic send-off. Half the students from her Atelier were
there, and twice as many more from other studios. She had been the belle
of the Artists' Quarter in Montparnasse for three golden months. Now she
was off to the Riviera to meet her people, and every one she knew was at
the Gare de Lyons to catch the pretty last glimpse of her. And, as had
been more than once said late of an evening, "to see her was to love
her." She was one of those agitating blondes, with the naturally rippled
hair, the rounded rose-leaf cheeks, the large violet-blue eyes that look
all things and mean Heaven alone knows how little. She held her court
like a queen, leaning out of the carriage window and receiving bouquets,
books, journals, long last words, and last longing looks. All eyes were
on her, and her eyes were for all--and her smile. For all but one, that
is. Not a single glance went Edward's way, and Edward, tall, lean,
gaunt, with big eyes, straight nose, and mouth somewhat too small, too
beautiful, seemed to grow thinner and paler before one's eyes. One pair
of eyes at least saw the miracle worked, the paling of what had seemed
absolute pallor, the revelation of the bones of a face that seemed
already covered but by the thinnest possible veil of flesh.
And the man whose eyes saw this rejoiced, for he loved her, like the
rest, or not like the rest; and he had had Edward's face before him for
the last month, in that secret shrine where we set the loved and the
hated, the shrine that is lighted by a million lamps kindled at the
soul's flame, the shrine that leaps into dazzling glow when the candles
are out and one lies alone on hot pillows to outface the night and the
light as best one may.
"Oh, good-bye, good-bye, all of you," said Rose. "I shall miss you--oh,
you don't know how I shall miss you all!"
She gathered the glances of her friends and her worshippers on her own
glance, as one gathers jewels on a silken string. The eyes of Edward
alone seemed to escape her.
"Em voiture, messieurs et dames."
Folk drew back from the train. There was a whistle. And then at the very
last little moment of all, as the train pulled itself together for the
start, her eyes met Edward's eyes. And the other man saw the meeting,
and he knew--which was more than Edward did.
So, when the light of life having been borne away in the retreating
train, the broken-hearted group dispersed, the other man, whose name by
the way was Vincent, linked his arm in Edward's and asked cheerily:
"Whither away, sweet nymph?"
"I'm off home," said Edward. "The 7.20 to Calais."
"Sick of Paris?"
"One has to see one's people sometimes, don't you know, hang it all!"
was Edward's way of expressing the longing that tore him for the old
house among the brown woods of Kent.
"No attraction here now, eh?"
"The chief attraction has gone, certainly," Edward made himself say.
"But there are as good fish in the sea----?"
"Fishing isn't my trade," said Edward.
"The beautiful Rose!----" said Vincent.
Edward raised hurriedly the only shield he could find. It happened to be
the truth as he saw it.
"Oh," he said, "of course, we're all in love with her--and all
hopelessly."
Vincent perceived that this was truth, as Edward saw it.
"What are you going to do till your train goes?" he asked.
"I don't know. Cafe, I suppose, and a vilely early dinner."
"Let's look in at the Musee Grevin," said Vincent.
The two were friends. They had been school-fellows, and this is a link
that survives many a strain too strong to be resisted by more intimate
and vital bonds. And they were fellow-students, though that counts for
little or much--as you take it. Besides, Vincent knew something about
Edward that no one else of their age and standing even guessed. He knew
that Edward was afraid of the dark, and why. He had found it out that
Christmas that the two had spent at an English country house. The house
was full: there was a dance. There were to be theatricals. Early in the
new year the hostess meant to "move house" to an old convent, built in
Tudor times, a beautiful place with terraces and clipped yew trees,
castellated battlements, a moat, swans, and a ghost story.
"You boys," she said, "must put up with a shake-down in the new house. I
hope the ghost won't worry you. She's a nun with a bunch of keys and no
eyes. Comes and breathes softly on the back of your neck when you're
shaving. Then you see her in the glass, and, as often as not, you cut
your throat." She laughed. So did Edward and Vincent, and the other
young men; there were seven or eight of them.
But that night, when sparse candles had lighted "the boys" to their
rooms, when the last pipe had been smoked, the last good-night said,
there came a fumbling with the handle of Vincent's door. Edward entered
an unwieldy figure clasping pillows, trailing blankets.
"What the deuce?" queried Vincent in natural amazement.
"I'll turn in here on the floor, if you don't mind," said Edward. "I
know it's beastly rot, but I can't stand it. The room they've put me
into, it's an attic as big as a barn--and there's a great door at the
end, eight feet high--raw oak it is--and it leads into a sort of
horror-hole--bare beams and rafters, and black as Hell. I know I'm an
abject duffer, but there it is--I can't face it."
Vincent was sympathetic, though he had never known a night-terror that
could not be exorcised by pipe, book, and candle.
"I know, old chap. There's no reasoning about these things," said he,
and so on.
"You can't despise me more than I despise myself," Edward said. "I feel
a crawling hound. But it is so. I had a scare when I was a kid, and it
seems to have left a sort of brand on me. I'm branded 'coward,' old man,
and the feel of it's not nice."
Again Vincent was sympathetic, and the poor little tale came out. How
Edward, eight years old, and greedy as became his little years, had
sneaked down, night-clad, to pick among the outcomings of a
dinner-party, and how, in the hall, dark with the light of an "artistic"
coloured glass lantern, a white figure had suddenly faced him--leaned
towards him it seemed, pointed lead-white hands at his heart. That next
day, finding him weak from his fainting fit, had shown the horror to be
but a statue, a new purchase of his father's, had mattered not one
whit.
Edward had shared Vincent's room, and Vincent, alone of all men, shared
Edward's secret.
And now, in Paris, Rose speeding away towards Cannes, Vincent said:
"Let's look in at the Musee Grevin."
The Musee Grevin is a wax-work show. Your mind, at the word, flies
instantly to the excellent exhibition founded by the worthy Madame
Tussaud, and you think you know what wax-works mean. But you are wrong.
The exhibition of Madame Tussaud--in these days, at any rate--is the
work of _bourgeois_ for a _bourgeois_ class. The Musee Grevin contains
the work of artists for a nation of artists. Wax, modelled and retouched
till it seems as near life as death is: this is what one sees at the
Musee Grevin.
"Let's look in at the Musee Grevin," said Vincent. He remembered the
pleasant thrill the Musee had given him, and wondered what sort of a
thrill it would give his friend.
"I hate museums," said Edward.
"This isn't a museum," Vincent said, and truly; "it's just wax-works."
"All right," said Edward indifferently. And they went. They reached the
doors of the Musee in the grey-brown dusk of a February evening.
One walks along a bare, narrow corridor, much like the entrance to the
stalls of the Standard Theatre, and such daylight as there may be fades
away behind one, and one finds oneself in a square hall, heavily
decorated, and displaying with its electric lights Loie Fuller in her
accordion-pleated skirts, and one or two other figures not designed to
quicken the pulse.
"It's very like Madame Tussaud's," said Edward.
"Yes," Vincent said; "isn't it?"
Then they passed through an arch, and behold, a long room with waxen
groups life-like behind glass--the _coulisses_ of the Opera, Kitchener
at Fashoda--this last with a desert background lit by something
convincingly like desert sunlight.
"By Jove!" said Edward, "that's jolly good."
"Yes," said Vincent again; "isn't it?"
Edward's interest grew. The things were so convincing, so very nearly
alive. Given the right angle, their glass eyes met one's own, and
seemed to exchange with one meaning glances.
Vincent led the way to an arched door labelled: "Gallerie de la
Revolution."
There one saw, almost in the living, suffering body, poor Marie
Antoinette in prison in the Temple, her little son on his couch of rags,
the rats eating from his platter, the brutal Simon calling to him from
the grated window; one almost heard the words, "Ho la, little Capet--are
you asleep?"
One saw Marat bleeding in his bath--the brave Charlotte eyeing him--the
very tiles of the bath-room, the glass of the windows with, outside, the
very sunlight, as it seemed, of 1793 on that "yellow July evening, the
thirteenth of the month."
The spectators did not move in a public place among wax-work figures.
They peeped through open doors into rooms where history seemed to be
re-lived. The rooms were lighted each by its own sun, or lamp, or
candle. The spectators walked among shadows that might have oppressed a
nervous person.
"Fine, eh?" said Vincent.
"Yes," said Edward; "it's wonderful."
A turn of a corner brought them to a room. Marie Antoinette fainting,
supported by her ladies; poor fat Louis by the window looking literally
sick.
"What's the matter with them all?" said Edward.
"Look at the window," said Vincent.
There was a window to the room. Outside was sunshine--the sunshine of
1792--and, gleaming in it, blonde hair flowing, red mouth half open,
what seemed the just-severed head of a beautiful woman. It was raised on
a pike, so that it seemed to be looking in at the window.
"I say!" said Edward, and the head on the pike seemed to sway before his
eyes.
"Madame de Lamballe. Good thing, isn't it?" said Vincent.
"It's altogether too much of a good thing," said Edward. "Look
here--I've had enough of this."
"Oh, you must just see the Catacombs," said Vincent; "nothing bloody,
you know. Only Early Christians being married and baptized, and all
that."
He led the way, down some clumsy steps to the cellars which the genius
of a great artist has transformed into the exact semblance of the old
Catacombs at Rome. The same rough hewing of rock, the same sacred
tokens engraved strongly and simply; and among the arches of these
subterranean burrowings the life of the Early Christians, their
sacraments, their joys, their sorrows--all expressed in groups of
wax-work as like life as Death is.
"But this is very fine, you know," said Edward, getting his breath again
after Madame de Lamballe, and his imagination loved the thought of the
noble sufferings and refrainings of these first lovers of the Crucified
Christ.
"Yes," said Vincent for the third time; "isn't it?"
They passed the baptism and the burying and the marriage. The tableaux
were sufficiently lighted, but little light strayed to the narrow
passage where the two men walked, and the darkness seemed to press,
tangible as a bodily presence, against Edward's shoulder. He glanced
backward.
"Come," he said, "I've had enough."
"Come on, then," said Vincent.
They turned the corner--and a blaze of Italian sunlight struck at their
eyes with positive dazzlement. There lay the Coliseum--tier on tier of
eager faces under the blue sky of Italy. They were level with the
arena. In the arena were crosses; from them drooped bleeding figures. On
the sand beasts prowled, bodies lay. They saw it all through bars. They
seemed to be in the place where the chosen victims waited their turn,
waited for the lions and the crosses, the palm and the crown. Close by
Edward was a group--an old man, a woman--children. He could have touched
them with his hand. The woman and the man stared in an agony of terror
straight in the eyes of a snarling tiger, ten feet long, that stood up
on its hind feet and clawed through the bars at them. The youngest
child, only, unconscious of the horror, laughed in the very face of it.
Roman soldiers, unmoved in military vigilance, guarded the group of
martyrs. In a low cage to the left more wild beasts cringed and seemed
to growl, unfed. Within the grating on the wide circle of yellow sand
lions and tigers drank the blood of Christians. Close against the bars a
great lion sucked the chest of a corpse on whose blood-stained face the
horror of the death-agony was printed plain.
"Good God!" said Edward. Vincent took his arm suddenly, and he started
with what was almost a shriek.
"What a nervous chap you are!" said Vincent complacently, as they
regained the street where the lights were, and the sound of voices and
the movement of live human beings--all that warms and awakens nerves
almost paralysed by the life in death of waxen immobility.
"I don't know," said Edward. "Let's have a vermouth, shall we? There's
something uncanny about those wax things. They're like life--but they're
much more like death. Suppose they moved? I don't feel at all sure that
they don't move, when the lights are all out, and there's no one there."
He laughed. "I suppose you were never frightened, Vincent?"
"Yes, I was once," said Vincent, sipping his absinthe. "Three other men
and I were taking turns by twos to watch a dead man. It was a fancy of
his mother's. Our time was up, and the other watch hadn't come. So my
chap--the one who was watching with me, I mean--went to fetch them. I
didn't think I should mind. But it was just like you say."
"How?"
"Why, I kept thinking: suppose it should move--it was so like life. And
if it did move, of course it would have been because it _was_ alive,
and I ought to have been glad, because the man was my friend. But all
the same, if it had moved I should have gone mad."
"Yes," said Edward; "that's just exactly it."
Vincent called for a second absinthe.
"But a dead body's different to wax-works," he said. "I can't understand
any one being frightened of _them_."
"Oh, can't you?" The contempt in the other's tone stung him. "I bet you
wouldn't spend a night alone in that place."
"I bet you five pounds I do!"
"Done!" said Edward briskly. "At least, I would if you'd got five
pounds."
"But I have. I'm simply rolling. I've sold my Dejanira, didn't you know?
I shall win your money, though, anyway. But _you_ couldn't do it, old
man. I suppose you'll never outgrow that childish scare."
"You might shut up about that," said Edward shortly.
"Oh, it's nothing to be ashamed of; some women are afraid of mice or
spiders. I say, does Rose know you're a coward?"
"Vincent!"
"No offence, old boy. One may as well call a spade a spade. Of course,
you've got tons of moral courage, and all that. But you _are_ afraid of
the dark--and wax-works!"
"Are you trying to quarrel with me?"
"Heaven in its mercy forbid; but I bet _you_ wouldn't spend a night in
the Musee Grevin and keep your senses."
"What's the stake?"
"Anything you like."
"Make it, that if I do, you'll never speak to Rose again--and what's
more, that you'll never speak to me," said Edward, white-hot, knocking
down a chair as he rose.
"Done!" said Vincent; "but you'll never do it. Keep your hair on.
Besides, you're off home."
"I shall be back in ten days. I'll do it then," said Edward, and was off
before the other could answer.
Then Vincent, left alone, sat still, and over his third absinthe
remembered how, before she had known Edward, Rose had smiled on him;
more than on the others, he had thought. He thought of her wide, lovely
eyes, her wild-rose cheeks, the scented curves of her hair, and then and
there the devil entered into him.
In ten days Edward would undoubtedly try to win his wager. He would try
to spend the night in the Musee Grevin. Perhaps something could be
arranged before that. If one knew the place thoroughly! A little scare
would serve Edward right for being the man to whom that last glance of
Rose's had been given.
Vincent dined lightly, but with conscientious care--and as he dined, he
thought. Something might be done by tying a string to one of the
figures, and making it move, when Edward was going through that
impossible night among the effigies that are so like life--so like
death. Something that was not the devil said: "You may frighten him out
of his wits." And the devil answered: "Nonsense! do him good. He
oughtn't to be such a schoolgirl."
Anyway, the five pounds might as well be won to-night as any other
night. He would take a great coat, sleep sound in the place of horrors,
and the people who opened it in the morning to sweep and dust would bear
witness that he had passed the night there. He thought he might trust to
the French love of a sporting wager to keep him from any bother with the
authorities.
So he went in among the crowd, and looked about among the wax-works for
a place to hide in. He was not in the least afraid of these lifeless
images. He had always been able to control his nervous tremors. He was
not even afraid of being frightened, which, by the way, is the worst
fear of all. As one looks at the room of the poor little Dauphin, one
sees a door to the left. It opens out of the room on to blackness. There
were few people in the gallery. Vincent watched, and in a moment when he
was alone he stepped over the barrier and through this door. A narrow
passage ran round behind the wall of the room. Here he hid, and when the
gallery was deserted he looked out across the body of little Capet to
the gaolers at the window. There was a soldier at the window, too.
Vincent amused himself with the fancy that this soldier might walk round
the passage at the back of the room and tap him on the shoulder in the
darkness. Only the head and shoulders of the soldier and the gaoler
showed, so, of course, they could not walk, even if they were something
that was not wax-work.
Presently he himself went along the passage and round to the window
where they were. He found that they had legs. They were full-sized
figures dressed completely in the costume of the period.
"Thorough the beggars are, even the parts that don't show--artists, upon
my word," said Vincent, and went back to his doorway, thinking of the
hidden carving behind the capitols of Gothic cathedrals.
But the idea of the soldier who might come behind him in the dark stuck
in his mind. Though still a few visitors strolled through the gallery,
the closing hour was near. He supposed it would be quite dark then. And
now he had allowed himself to be amused by the thought of something that
should creep up behind him in the dark, he might possibly be nervous in
that passage round which, if wax-works could move, the soldier might
have come.
"By Jove!" he said, "one might easily frighten oneself by just fancying
things. Suppose there were a back way from Marat's bath-room, and
instead of the soldier Marat came out of his bath, with his wet towels
stained with blood, and dabbed them against your neck."
When next the gallery was empty he crept out. Not because he was
nervous, he told himself, but because one might be, and because the
passage was draughty, and he meant to sleep.
He went down the steps into the Catacombs, and here he spoke the truth
to himself.
"Hang it all!" he said, "I _was_ nervous. That fool Edward must have
infected me. Mesmeric influences, or something."
"Chuck it and go home," said Commonsense.
"I'm damned if I do!" said Vincent.
There were a good many people in the Catacombs at the moment--live
people. He sucked confidence from their nearness, and went up and down
looking for a hiding-place.
Through rock-hewn arches he saw a burial scene--a corpse on a bier
surrounded by mourners; a great pillar cut off half the still, lying
figure. It was all still and unemotional as a Sunday School oleograph.
He waited till no one was near, then slipped quickly through the
mourning group and hid behind the pillar. Surprising--heartening too--to
find a plain rushed chair there, doubtless set for the resting of tired
officials. He sat down in it, comforted his hand with the commonplace
lines of its rungs and back. A shrouded waxen figure just behind him to
the left of his pillar worried him a little, but the corpse left him
unmoved as itself. A far better place this than that draughty passage
where the soldier with legs kept intruding on the darkness that is
always behind one.
Custodians went along the passages issuing orders. A stillness fell.
Then suddenly all the lights went out.
"That's all right," said Vincent, and composed himself to sleep.
But he seemed to have forgotten what sleep was like. He firmly fixed his
thoughts on pleasant things--the sale of his picture, dances with Rose,
merry evenings with Edward and the others. But the thoughts rushed by
him like motes in sunbeams--he could not hold a single one of them, and
presently it seemed that he had thought of every pleasant thing that had
ever happened to him, and that now, if he thought at all, he must think
of the things one wants most to forget. And there would be time in this
long night to think much of many things. But now he found that he could
no longer think.
The draped effigy just behind him worried him again. He had been trying,
at the back of his mind, behind the other thoughts, to strangle the
thought of it. But it was there--very close to him. Suppose it put out
its hand, its wax hand, and touched him. But it was of wax: it could not
move. No, of course not. But suppose it _did_?
He laughed aloud, a short, dry laugh that echoed through the vaults. The
cheering effect of laughter has been over-estimated, perhaps. Anyhow, he
did not laugh again.
The silence was intense, but it was a silence thick with rustlings and
breathings, and movements that his ear, strained to the uttermost, could
just not hear. Suppose, as Edward had said, when all the lights were
out, these things did move. A corpse was a thing that had moved--given a
certain condition--Life. What if there were a condition, given which
these things could move? What if such conditions were present now? What
if all of them--Napoleon, yellow-white from his death sleep--the beasts
from the Amphitheatre, gore dribbling from their jaws--that soldier with
the legs--all were drawing near to him in this full silence? Those
death masks of Robespierre and Mirabeau, they might float down through
the darkness till they touched his face. That head of Madame de Lamballe
on the pike might be thrust at him from behind the pillar. The silence
throbbed with sounds that could not quite be heard.
"You fool," he said to himself, "your dinner has disagreed with you,
with a vengeance. Don't be an ass. The whole lot are only a set of big
dolls."
He felt for his matches, and lighted a cigarette. The gleam of the match
fell on the face of the corpse in front of him. The light was brief, and
it seemed, somehow, impossible to look, by that light, in every corner
where one would have wished to look. The match burnt his fingers as it
went out; and there were only three more matches in the box.
It was dark again, and the image left on the darkness was that of the
corpse in front of him. He thought of his dead friend. When the
cigarette was smoked out, he thought of him more and more, till it
seemed that what lay on the bier was not wax. His hand reached forward,
and drew back more than once. But at last he made it touch the bier,
and through the blackness travel up along a lean, rigid arm to the wax
face that lay there so still. The touch was not reassuring. Just so, and
not otherwise, had his dead friend's face felt, to the last touch of his
lips: cold, firm, waxen. People always said the dead were "waxen." How
true that was! He had never thought of it before. He thought of it now.
He sat still, so still that every muscle ached, because if you wish to
hear the sounds that infest silence, you must be very still indeed. He
thought of Edward, and of the string he had meant to tie to one of the
figures.
"That wouldn't be needed," he told himself. And his ears ached with
listening--listening for the sound that, it seemed, _must_ break at last
from that crowded silence.
He never knew how long he sat there. To move, to go up, to batter at the
door and clamour to be let out--that one could have done if one had had
a lantern, or even a full matchbox. But in the dark, not knowing the
turnings, to feel one's way among these things that were so like life
and yet were not alive--to touch, perhaps, these faces that were not
dead, and yet felt like death. His heart beat heavily in his throat at
the thought.
No, he must sit still till morning. He had been hypnotised into this
state, he told himself, by Edward, no doubt; it was not natural to him.
Then suddenly the silence was shattered. In the dark something moved.
And, after those sounds that the silence teemed with, the noise seemed
to him thunder-loud. Yet it was only a very, very little sound, just the
rustling of drapery, as though something had turned in its sleep. And
there was a sigh--not far off.
Vincent's muscles and tendons tightened like fine-drawn wire. He
listened. There was nothing more: only the silence, the thick silence.
The sound had seemed to come from a part of the vault where, long ago,
when there was light, he had seen a grave being dug for the body of a
young girl martyr.
"I will get up and go out," said Vincent. "I have three matches. I am
off my head. I shall really be nervous presently if I don't look out."
He got up and struck a match, refused his eyes the sight of the corpse
whose waxen face he had felt in the blackness, and made his way through
the crowd of figures. By the match's flicker they seemed to make way for
him, to turn their heads to look after him. The match lasted till he got
to a turn of the rock-hewn passage. His next match showed him the burial
scene: the little, thin body of the martyr, palm in hand, lying on the
rock floor in patient waiting, the grave-digger, the mourners. Some
standing, some kneeling, one crouched on the ground.
This was where that sound had come from, that rustle, that sigh. He had
thought he was going away from it: instead, he had come straight to the
spot where, if anywhere, his nerves might be expected to play him false.
"Bah!" he said, and he said it aloud, "the silly things are only wax.
Who's afraid?" His voice sounded loud in the silence that lives with the
wax people. "They're only wax," he said again, and touched with his
foot, contemptuously, the crouching figure in the mantle.
And, as he touched it, it raised its head and looked vacantly at him,
and its eyes were mobile and alive. He staggered back against another
figure, and dropped the match. In the new darkness he heard the
crouching figure move towards him. Then the darkness fitted in round him
very closely.
* * * * *
"What was it exactly that sent poor Vincent mad: you've never told me?"
Rose asked the question. She and Edward were looking out over the pines
and tamarisks, across the blue Mediterranean. They were very happy,
because it was their honeymoon.
He told her about the Musee Grevin and the wager, but he did not state
the terms of it.
"But why did he think you would be afraid?"
He told her why.
"And then what happened?"
"Why, I suppose he thought there was no time like the present--for his
five pounds, you know--and he hid among the wax-works. And I missed my
train, and _I_ thought there was no time like the present. In fact,
dear, I thought if I waited I should have time to make certain of
funking it, so I hid there, too. And I put on my big black capuchon, and
sat down right in one of the wax-work groups--they couldn't see me from
the passage where you walk. And after they put the lights out I simply
went to sleep; and I woke up--and there was a light, and I heard some
one say: 'They're only wax,' and it was Vincent. He thought I was one of
the wax people, till I looked at him; and I expect he thought I was one
of them even then, poor chap. And his match went out, and while I was
trying to find my railway reading-lamp that I'd got near me, he began to
scream, and the night watchman came running. And now he thinks every one
in the asylum is made of wax, and he screams if they come near him. They
have to put his food beside him while he's asleep. It's horrible. I
can't help feeling as if it were my fault, somehow."
"Of course it's not," said Rose. "Poor Vincent! Do you know I never
_really_ liked him." There was a pause. Then she said: "But how was it
_you_ weren't frightened?"
"I was," he said, "horribly frightened. I--I--it sounds idiotic, but I
thought I should go mad at first--I did really: and yet I _had_ to go
through with it. And then I got among the figures of the people in the
Catacombs, the people who died for--for things, don't you know, died in
such horrible ways. And there they were, so calm--and believing it was
all all right. And I thought about what they'd gone through. It sounds
awful rot I know, dear--but I expect I was sleepy. Those wax people,
they sort of seemed as if they were alive, and were telling me there
wasn't anything to be frightened about. I felt as if I were one of them,
and they were all my friends, and they'd wake me if anything went wrong,
so I just went to sleep."
"I think I understand," she said. But she didn't.
"And the odd thing is," he went on, "I've never been afraid of the dark
since. Perhaps his calling me a coward had something to do with it."
"I don't think so," said she. And she was right. But she would never
have understood how, nor why.
III
THE STRANGER WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN OBSERVED
"There he goes--isn't he simply detestable!" She spoke suddenly, after a
silence longer than was usual to her; she was tired, and her voice was a
note or two above its habitual key. She blushed, a deep pink blush of
intense annoyance, as the young man passed down the long platform among
the crowd of city men and typewriting girls, patiently waiting for the
belated train to allow them to go home from work.
"Oh, do you think he heard? Oh, Molly--I believe he did!"
"Nonsense!" said Molly briskly, "of course he didn't. And I must say I
don't think he's so bad. If he didn't look so sulky he wouldn't be
_half_ bad, really. If his eyebrows weren't tied up into knots, I
believe he'd look quite too frightfully sweet for anything."
"He's exactly like that Polish model we had last week. Oh, Molly, he's
coming back again."
Again he passed the two girls. His expression was certainly not amiable.
"How long have you known him?" Molly asked.
"I _don't_ know him. I tell you I only see him on the platform at Mill
Vale. He and I seem to be the only people--the only decent
people--who've found out the new station. He goes up by the 9.1 every
day, and so do I. And the train's always late, so we have the platform
and the booking office to ourselves. And there we sit, or stand, or
walk, morning after morning like two stuck pigs in a trough of silence."
"Don't jumble your metaphors, though you very nearly carried it off with
the trough, I own. Stuck pigs don't walk--in troughs, or anywhere else."
"Well, you know what I mean----"
"But what do you want the wretched man to do? He can't speak to you: it
wouldn't be proper----"
"Proper--why not? We're human beings, not wild beasts. At least, I'm a
human being."
"And he's a beast--I see."
"I wish I were a man," said Nina. "There he is again. His nose goes up
another half inch every time he passes me. What's he got to be so
superior about? If I were a man I'd certainly pass the time of day with
a fellow-creature if I were condemned to spend from ten to forty minutes
with it six days out of the seven."
"I expect he's afraid you'd want to marry him. My brother Cecil says men
are always horribly frightened about that."
"Your brother Cecil!" said Nina scornfully. "Yes; that's just the sort
of thing anybody's brother Cecil _would_ say. He simply looks down on me
because I go third. He only goes second himself, too. Here's the
train----"
The two Art students climbed into their third-class carriage, and their
talk, leaving Nina's fellow-traveller, washed like a babbling brook
about the feet of great rocks, busied itself with the old Italian
Masters, painting as a mission, and the aims of Art--presently running
through flatter country and lapping round perspective, foreshortening,
tones, values high lights and the preposterous lisp of the anatomy
lecturer.
Arrived at Mill Vale the Slade students jumped from their carriage to
meet a wind that swept grey curtains of rain across the bleak length of
the platform.
"And we haven't so much as a rib of an umbrella between us," sighed
Molly, putting her white handkerchief over the "best" hat which
signalised her Saturday to Monday with her friend. "You're right: that
man is a pig. There he goes with an umbrella big enough for all three of
us. Oh, it's too bad! He's putting it down--he's running. He runs rather
well. He's exactly like the cast of the Discobolus in the Antique Room."
"Only his manners have not that repose that stamps the cast. Come
on--don't stand staring after him like that. We'd better run, too."
"He'll think we're running after him. Oh, bother----"
A moment of indecision, and Nina had turned her skirt over her head, and
the two ran home to the little rooms where Nina lived--in the house of
an old servant. Nina had no world of relations--she was alone. In the
world of Art she had many friends, and in the world of Art she meant to
make her mark. For the present she was content to make the tea, and then
to set feet on the fender for a cosy evening.
"Did you see him coming out of church?" Nina asked next day. "He looked
sulkier than ever."
"I can't think why you bother about him," said the other girl. "He's not
really interesting. What do you call him?"
"Nothing."
"Why, everything has a name, even a pudding. _I_ made a name for him at
once. It is 'the stranger who might have been observed----'"
They laughed. After the early dinner they went for a walk. None of your
strolls, but a good steady eight miles. Coming home, they met the
stranger: and then they talked about him again. For, fair reader, I
cannot conceal from you that there are many girls who do think and talk
about young men, even when they have not been introduced to them. Not
really nice girls like yourself, fair reader--but ordinary, commonplace
girls who have not your delicate natures, and who really do sometimes
experience a fleeting sensation of interest even in the people whose
names they don't know.
Next morning they saw him at the station. The 9.1 took the bit in its
teeth, and instead of being, as usual, the 9.30 something, became merely
the 9.23. So for some twenty odd minutes the stranger not only might
have been, but was, observed by four bright and critical eyes. I don't
mean that my girls stared, of course. Perhaps you do not know that there
are ways of observing strangers other than by the stare direct. He
looked sulkier than ever: but he also had eyes. Yet he, too, was far
from staring, so far that the indignant Nina broke out in a distracted
whisper: "There! you see! I'm not important enough for him even to
perceive my existence. I'm always expecting him to walk on me. I wonder
whether he'd apologise when he found I wasn't the station door-mat?"
The stranger shrugged his shoulders all to himself in his second-class
carriage when the train had started.
"'Simply detestable!' But how one talks prose without knowing it, all
along the line! How can I ever have come enough into her line of vision
to be distinguished by an epithet! And why this one? Detestable!"
The epithet, however distinguishing, seemed somehow to lack charm.
At Cannon Street Station the stranger looked sulkier than Nina had ever
seen him. She said so, adding: "Than I've ever seen him? Oh--I'm
wandering. He looks sulkier than I've ever seen any one--sulkier than
I've ever dreamed possible. Pig----"
Through the week, painting at the school and black and white work in the
evenings filled Nina's mind to the exclusion even of strangers who
might, in more leisured moments, seem worthy of observation. She was
aware of the sulky one on platforms, of course, but talking about him to
Molly was more amusing somehow than merely thinking of him. When it came
to thinking, the real, the earnest things of life--the Sketch Club, the
chance of the Melville Nettleship Prize, the intricate hideousness of
bones and muscles--took the field and kept it, against strangers and
acquaintances alike.
Saturday, turning this week's scribbled page to the fair, clear page of
next week, brought the stranger back to her thoughts, and to eyes now
not obscured by close realities.
He passed her on the platform, with a dozen bunches of violets in his
hands.
Outside, on the railway bridge, the red and green lamps glowed dully
through deep floods of yellow fog. The platform was crowded, the train
late. When at last it steamed slowly in, the crowd surged towards it.
The third-class carriages were filled in the moment. Nina hurried along
the platform peering into the second-class carriages. Full also.
Then the guard opened the way for her into the blue-cloth Paradise of a
first-class carriage; and, just as the train gave the shudder of disgust
which heralds its shame-faced reluctant departure, the door opened
again, and the guard pushed in another traveller--the "stranger who
might----" of course. The door banged, the train moved off with an air
of brisk determination. A hundred yards from the platform it stopped
dead.
There were no other travellers in that carriage. When the train had
stood still for ten minutes or so, the stranger got up and put his head
out of the window. At that instant the train decided to move again. It
did it suddenly, and, exhausted by the effort, stopped after half a
dozen yards' progress with so powerful a turn of the brake that the
stranger was flung sideways against Nina, and his elbow nearly knocked
her hat off.
He raised his own apologetically--but he did not speak even then.
"The wretch!" said Nina hotly; "he might at least have begged my
pardon."
The stranger sat down again, and began to read the _Spectator_. Nina had
no papers. The train moved on an inch or two, and the reddening yellow
of the fog seemed like a Charity blanket pressed against each window.
Three of the bunches of violets shook and vibrated and slipped, the
train moved again and they fell on the floor of the carriage. Nina
watched their trembling in an agony of irritation induced by the fog,
the delay, and the persistent silence of her companion. When the flowers
fell, she spoke.
"You've dropped your flowers," she said. Again a bow, a silent bow, and
the flowers were picked up.
"Oh, I'm desperate!" Nina said inwardly. "He must be mad--or dumb--or
have a vow of silence--I wonder which?"
The train had not yet reached the next station, though it had left the
last nearly an hour before.
"Which is it? Mad, dumb, or a monk? I _will_ find out. Well, it's his
own fault; he shouldn't be so aggravating. I'm going to speak to him.
I've made up my mind."
In the interval between decision and action the train in a sudden brief
access of nervous energy got itself through a station, and paused a
furlong down the line exhausted by the effort.
The stranger had put down his _Spectator_ and was gazing gloomily out at
the fog.
Nina drew a deep breath, and said--at least she nearly said: "What a
dreadful fog!"
But she stopped. That seemed a dull beginning. If she said that he would
think she was commonplace, and she had that sustaining inward
consciousness, mercifully vouchsafed even to the dullest of us, of being
really rather nice, and not commonplace at all. But what should she say?
If she said anything about the colour of the fog and Turner or Whistler,
it might be telling, but it would be of the shop shoppy. If she began
about books--the _Spectator_ suggested this--she would stand as a prig
confessed. If she spoke of politics she would be an ignorant impostor
soon exposed. If----But Nina took out her watch and resolved: "When the
little hand gets to the quarter I _will_ speak. Whatever I say, I'll
say something."
And when the big hand did get to the quarter Nina did speak.
"Why shouldn't we talk?" she said.
He looked at her; and he seemed to be struggling silently with some
emotion too deep for words.
"It's so silly to sit here like mutes," Nina went on hurriedly--a little
frightened, now she had begun, but more than a little determined not to
be frightened. "If we were at a dance we shouldn't know any more of each
other than we do now--and you'd have to talk then. Why shouldn't we
now?"
Then the stranger spoke, and at the first sentence Nina understood
exactly what reason had decided the stranger that they should not talk.
Yet now they did. If this were a work of fiction I shouldn't dare to
pretend that the train took more than two hours to get to Mill Vale. But
in a plain record of fact one must speak the truth. The train took
exactly two hours and fifty minutes to cover the eleven miles between
London and Mill Vale. After that first question and reply Nina and the
stranger talked the whole way.
He walked with her to the door of her lodging, and she offered him her
hand without that moment of hesitation which would have been natural to
any heroine, because she had debated the question of that handshake all
the way from the station, and made up her mind just as they reached the
church, a stone's throw from her home. When the door closed on her he
went slowly back to the churchyard to lay his violets on a grave. Nina
saw them there next day when she came out of church. She saw him too,
and gave him a bow and a very small smile, and turned away quickly. The
bow meant: "You see I'm not going to speak to you. You mustn't think I
want to be always talking to you." The smile meant: "But you mustn't
think I'm cross. I'm not--only----"
In the hot, stuffy "life-room" at the Slade next day Molly teased with
ill-judged bread-crumbs an arm hopelessly ill drawn, and chattered
softly to Nina, who in the Saturday solitude had drawn her easel behind
her friend's "donkey." "It's all very well here when you first come in,
but when once you _are_ warm, oh dear, how warm you are! Why do models
want such boiling rooms? Why can't they be soaked in alum or myrrh or
something to harden their silly skins so that they won't mind a breath
of decent air? And I believe the model's deformed--she certainly is from
where I am. Oh, look at my arm! I ask you a little--look at the beastly
thing. Foreshortened like this it looks like a fillet of veal with a
pound of sausages tied on to it for a hand. Oh, my own and only
Nina--save the sinking ship!"
"It ought to go more like _that_," Nina said with indicative brush, "and
don't keep on rubbing out so fiercely. You'll get paralysed with
bread--it's a disease, you know. I heard Tonks telling you so only the
other day----"
"It's rather a good phrase: I wonder where he got it? He was rather nice
that day," said Molly. "Oh, this arm! It's no good--I believe the
model's moved--I tell you I _must_." More bread. Nina re-absorbed in her
canvas. "Yours is coming well. What's the matter with you to-day? You're
very mousy. Has the 'stranger who might' been scowling more than usual?
Or have you got a headache? I'm sure this atmosphere's enough to make
you. Did you see him this morning? Have you fainted at his feet yet?
Has he relented in the matter of umbrellas? I'm sure he can't have
passed the whole week without some act of grumpiness."
Nina leaned back and looked through half-shut eyes at the model's
beautiful form and stupid face.
"I went down in the same carriage with him on Thursday," she said
slowly.
"You did? Did he rush into the third class, where angels like himself
ought to fear to tread?"
"There was a fog. Thirds all full, and seconds too. The guard bundled us
both in, and the train started--and it took three or four hours to get
down."
"Any one else in the carriage?"
"Not so much as a mouse."
"What _did_ you do?"
"Do? What could I do? We sat in opposite corners as far as we could get
from each other, exchanging occasional glances of mutual detestation for
about an hour and a half. He knocked me down and walked on me once, and
took his hat off very politely and beg-pardoningly, but he never said a
word. He didn't even say he thought I was the door-mat. And then some
cabbages of his fell off the seat."
"Sure they weren't thistles?"
"Vegetables of some sort. And I said: 'You've dropped your----whatever
they were.' And he just bowed again in a thank-you-very-much-but-I'm-
sure-I-don't-know-what-business-it-is-of-yours sort of way. Do leave
that bread alone."
Molly, lost in the interest of the recital, was crumbling the bread as
though the floor of the life-room were the natural haunt of doves and
sparrows.
"Well?" she said.
"Well?" said Nina.
"Why ever didn't you ask him to put the window up, or down, or
something? I would have--just to hear if he has a voice."
"It wouldn't have been any good. He'd just have bowed again, and I'd had
enough bows to last a long time. No: I just said straight out that we
were a couple of idiots to sit there gaping at each other with our
tongues out, and why on earth shouldn't we talk?"
"You never did!"
"Or words to that effect, anyhow. And then he said----"
A long pause.
"What?"
"He told me why he never spoke to strangers."
"What a slap in the face! You poor----"
"Oh, he didn't say it like _that_, you silly idiot. And it was quite a
good reason."
"What was it?"
No answer.
"Tell me exactly what he said."
"He said, 'I--I--I----' At any rate, I'm satisfied, and I rather wish we
hadn't called him pigs and beasts, and things like that."
"Well?"
"That's all."
"Aren't you going to tell me the reason? Oh, very well--you leave it to
my guessing? Of course it's quite evident he's hopelessly in love with
you, and never ventured to speak for fear of betraying his passion. But,
encouraged by your advances----"
"Molly, go on with that arm, and don't be a vulgar little donkey."
Molly obeyed. Presently: "Cross-patch," she said.
"I'm not," said Nina, "but I want to work, and I like you best when
you're not vulgar."
"You're very rude."
"No: only candid."
Molly's wounded pride, besieged by her curiosity, held out for five
minutes. Then: "Did you talk to him much?"
"Heaps."
"All the way down?"
No answer.
"Is he nice?"
Silence.
"Is he clever?"
"I want to work."
"Well, what I want to know is, and then I'll let you alone--what did you
talk about? Tell me that, and I won't ask another question."
"We talked," said Nina deliberately, taking a clean brush, "we talked
about your brother Cecil. No, I shan't tell you what we said, or why we
talked about him, or anything. You've had your one question, now shut
up."
"Nina," said Molly calmly, "if I didn't like you so much I should hate
you."
"That certainty about the other has always been the foundation of our
mutual regard," said Nina calmly.
Then they laughed, and began to work in earnest.
The next time Molly mentioned the "stranger who might have been
observed" Nina laughed, and said: "The subject is forbidden; it makes
you vulgar."
"And you disagreeable."
"Then it's best to avoid it. Best for you and best for me."
"But do you ever see him now?"
"On occasion. He still travels by the 9.1, and I still have the use of
my eyes."
"Does he ever talk to you like he did that Thursday?"
"No--never. And I'm not going to talk about him to you, so it's no good.
Your turn to choose a subject. You won't? Then it becomes my turn. What
a long winter this is! We seem to have taken years to get from November
to February!"
The time went more quickly between February and May. It was when the
country was wearing its full dress of green and the hawthorn pearls were
opening into baby-roses in the hedgerows that it was Nina's fortune to
be put, by the zealous indiscretion of a mistaken porter, into an
express train for Beechwood--the wrong station--the wrong line.
The "stranger who might have been observed," on this occasion was not
observed, but observer. He saw and recognised the porter's error,
hesitated a moment, and then leaped into a carriage just behind hers. So
that when, after a swift journey made eventful by agonised recognition
of the fleeting faces of various stations where she might have changed
and caught her own train, Nina reached Beechwood, the stranger's hand
was ready to open the door for her.
"There's no train for ages," he said in tones deliberate, almost
hesitating. "Shall we walk home? It's only six miles."
"But you--aren't you going somewhere here?"
"No--I--I--I saw the porter put you in--and I thought--at least--anyway
you will walk, won't you?"
They walked. When they reached Beechwood Common, he said: "Won't you
take my arm?" And she took it. Her hands were ungloved; the other hand
was full of silver may and bluebells. The sun shot level shafts of gold
between the birch trees across the furze and heather.
"How beautiful it is!" she said.
"We've known each other three months," said he.
"But I've seen you every day, and we've talked for hours and hours in
those everlasting trains," she said, as if in excuse.
"I've seen you every day for longer than that; the first time was on the
3rd of October."
"Fancy remembering that!"
"I have a good memory."
A silence.
Nina broke it, to say again: "How pretty!" She knew she had said it
before, or something like it, but she could think of nothing else--and
she wanted to say something.
He put his hand over hers as it lay on his arm. She looked up at him
quickly.
"Well?" he said, stopping to look down into her eyes and tightening his
clasp on her hand. "Are you sorry you came to Beechwood?"
"No----"
"Then be glad. My dear, I wish you could ever be as glad as I am."
Then they walked on, still with his hand on hers.
* * * * *
Nina and Molly sat on a locker swinging their feet and eating their
lunch in the Slade corridor next day. Nina was humming softly under her
breath.
"What are you so happy for all of a sudden?" Molly asked. "Your
sketch-club things are the worst I've ever seen, and the Professor was
down on you like a hundred of bricks this morning."
"I'm not happy," said Nina, turning away what seemed to Molly a new
face.
"What is it, then?"
"Nothing. Oh yes--by the way, I'm going to be married."
"Not _really_?"
"Check this unflattering display of incredulity--I am."
"Really and truly? And you never told me a thing. I hate slyness and
secretiveness. Nina, who is it? Do I know him?"
Nina named a name.
"Never even heard of him. But where did you meet him? It really is
rather deceitful of you."
"I always meant to tell you, only there was nothing to tell till
yesterday except----"
"Except everything," said Molly. "Well, tell me now."
Nina jumped up and shook the bath-bun crumbs off her green muslin
pinafore.
"Promise not to be horrid, and I will."
"I won't--I promise I won't."
"Then it's--it's him--the 'stranger who might'--you know. And I really
should have told you, though there wasn't anything to tell, only--don't
laugh."
"I'm not. Can't you see I'm not? Only what?"
"Well, when I spoke to him that day in the train, I said, 'Why shouldn't
we talk?' And he said, 'I--I--I--be--be--be--because I stammer so.' And
he _did_. You never heard anything like it. It was awful. He took hours
to get out those few words, and I didn't know where to look. And I felt
such a brute because of the things we'd said about him, that I had no
sense left; and I told him straight out how I'd wondered he never even
said he wondered how late the train was when we were waiting for the
9.1, and I was glad it was stammering and not disagreeableness. And then
I said I wasn't glad he stammered, but so sorry; and he was awfully nice
about it, and I told him about that man who cured your brother Cecil of
stammering, and he went to him at once: and he's almost all right now."
"Good gracious!" said Molly. "Are you sure--but why didn't he get cured
long ago?"
"He had a mother: she stammered frightfully--after the shock of his
father's death, or something, and he got into the way of it from her.
And--anyway he didn't. I think it was so as not to hurt his mother's
feelings, or something. I don't quite understand. And he said it didn't
seem to matter when she was dead. And he's an artist. He sells his
pictures too, and he teaches. He has a studio in Chelsea."
"It all sounds a little thin; but if you're pleased, I'm sure I am."
"I am," said Nina.
"But what did he say when he asked you?"
"He didn't ask me," said Nina.
"But surely he said he'd loved you since the first moment he saw you?"
Nina had to admit it.
"Then you see I wasn't such a vulgar little donkey after all."
"Yes, you were. You hadn't any business even to _think_ such things,
much less say them. Why, even _I_ didn't dare to think it for--oh--for
ever so long. But I'll forgive it--and if it's good it shall be a pretty
little bridesmaid, it shall."
"When is it to be?" asked Molly, still adrift in a sea of wonder.
"Oh, quite soon, he says. He says we're only wasting time by waiting.
You see we're both alone."
But Molly, looking wistfully at her friend's transfigured face,
perceived sadly that it was she who was alone, not they.
And the thought of the red-haired Pierrot with whom she had danced nine
times at the Students' Fancy Dress dance, an indiscretion hitherto her
dearest memory, now offered no solid consolation.
Nina went away, singing softly under her breath. Molly sighed and
followed slowly.
IV
RACK AND THUMBSCREW
Her eyelids were red and swollen, her brown hair, flattened out of its
pretty curves, clung closely to her head. Ink stained her hands, and
there was even a bluish smear of it on her wrist. A tray with tea-things
stood among the litter of manuscript on her table. The tea-pot had only
cold tea-leaves in it; the bread and butter was untouched.
She put down the pen, and went to the window. The rose-tint of the
sunset was reflected on the bank of mist and smoke beyond the river.
Above, where the sky was pale and clear, a star or two twinkled
contentedly.
She stamped her foot.
Already the beautiful garments of the evening mist, with veiled lights
in the folds of it, was embroidered sparsely with the early litten lamps
of impatient workers, and as she gazed, the embroidery was enriched by
more and more yellow and white and orange--the string of jewels along
the embankment, the face of the church clock.
She turned from the window to the room, and lighted her own lamp, for
the room was now deeply dusk. It was a large, low, pleasant room. It had
always seemed pleasant to her through the five years in which she had
worked, and played, and laughed, and cried there. Now she wondered why
she had not always hated it.
The stairs creaked. The knocker spoke. She caught her head in both
hands.
"My God!" she said, "this is too much!"
Yet she went to the door.
"Oh--it's only you," she said, and, with no other greeting, walked back
into the room, and sat down at the table.
The newcomer was left to close the outer door, and to follow at her own
pleasure. The newcomer was another girl, younger, prettier, smarter. She
turned her head sidewise, like a little bird, and looked at her friend
with very bright eyes. Then she looked round the room.
"My dear Jane," she said, "whatever have you been doing to yourself?"
"Nothing," said her dear Jane very sulkily.
"Oh, if genius burns--your stairs are devilish--but if you'd rather I
went away----"
"No, don't go, Milly. I'm perfectly mad." She jumped up and waved her
outstretched arms over the mass of papers on the table. "Look at all
this--three days' work--rot--abject rot! I wish I was dead. I was
wondering just now whether it would hurt much if one leaned too far out
of the window--and---- No, I didn't do it--as you see."
"What's the matter?" asked the other prosaically.
"Nothing. That's just it. I'm perfectly well--at least I was--only now
I'm all trembly with drink." She pointed to the tea-cups. "It's the
chance of my life, and I can't take it. I can't work: my brain's like
batter. And everything depends on my idiot brain--it has done for these
five years. That's what's so awful. It all depends on me--and I'm going
all to pieces."
"I told you so!" rejoined the other. "You would stay in town all the
summer and autumn, slaving away. I knew you'd break down, and now you've
done it."
"I've slaved for five years, and I've never broken down before."
"Well, you have now. Go away at once. Take a holiday. You'll work like
Shakespeare and Michelangelo after it."
"But I _can't_--that's just it. It's those stories for the _Monthly
Multitude_; I'm doing a series. I'm behind _now_: and if I don't get it
done this week, they'll stop the series. It's what I've been working for
all these years. It's the best chance I've ever had, and it's come
_now_, when I can't do it. Your father's a doctor: isn't there any
medicine you can take to make your head more like a head and less like a
suet pudding?"
"Look here," said Milly, "I really came in to ask you to come away with
us at Whitsuntide; but you ought to go away _now_. Just go to our
cottage at Lymchurch. There's a dear old girl in the village--Mrs
Beale--she'll look after you. It's a glorious place for work. Father did
reams down there. You'll do your stuff there right enough. This is only
Monday. Go to-morrow."
"Did he? I will. Oh yes, I will. I'll go to-night, if there's a train."
"No, you don't, my dear lunatic. You are now going to wash your face
and do your hair, and take me out to dinner--a real eighteenpenny dinner
at Roches. I'll stand treat."
It was after dinner, as the two girls waited for Milly's omnibus, that
the word of the evening was spoken.
"I do hope you'll have a good quiet time," Milly said; "and it really is
a good place for work. Poor Edgar did a lot of work there last year.
There's a cabinet with a secret drawer that he said inspired him with
mysterious tales, and---- There's my 'bus."
"Why do you say _poor_ Edgar?" Jane asked, smiling lightly.
"Oh, hadn't you heard? Awfully sad thing. He sailed from New York a
fortnight ago. No news of the ship. His mother's in mourning. I saw her
yesterday. Quite broken down. Good-bye. _Do_ take care of yourself, and
get well and jolly."
Jane stood long staring after the swaying bulk of the omnibus, then she
drew a deep breath and went home.
Edgar was dead. What a brute Milly was! But, of course, Edgar was
nothing to Milly--nothing but a pleasant friend. How slowly people
walked in the streets! Jane walked quickly--so quickly that more than
one jostled foot-passenger stopped to stare after her.
She had known that he was coming home--and when. She had not owned to
herself that the constant intrusion of that thought, "He is here--in
London," the wonder as to when and how she should see him again, had
counted for very much in these last days of fierce effort and resented
defeat.
She got back to her rooms. She remembers letting herself in with her
key. She remembers that some time during the night she destroyed all
those futile beginnings of stories. Also, that she found herself saying
over and over again, and very loud: "There are the boys--you know there
are the boys." Because, when you have two little brothers to keep, you
must not allow yourself to forget it.
But for the rest she remembers little distinctly. Only she is sure that
she did not cry, and that she did not sleep.
In the morning she found her rooms very tidy and her box packed. She had
put in the boys' portraits, because one must always remember the boys.
She got a cab and she caught a train, and she reached the seaside
cottage. Its little windows blinked firelit welcome to her, as she
blundered almost blindly out of the station fly and up the narrow path
edged with sea-shells.
Milly had telegraphed. Mrs Beale was there, tremulous, kindly,
effective; with armchairs wheeled to the April fire--cups of tea, timid,
gentle solicitude.
"My word, Miss, but you do look done up," said she. "The kettle's just
on the boil, and I'll wet you a cup o' tea this instant minute, and I've
a perfect picture of a chick a-roastin' ready for your bit o' dinner."
Jane leaned back in the cushioned chair and looked round the quiet,
pleasant little room. For the moment it seemed good to have a new place
to be unhappy in.
But afterwards, when Mrs Beale had gone and she was alone in the house,
there was time to think--all the time there had ever been since the
world began--all the time that there would ever be till the world ended.
Of that night, too, Jane cannot remember everything; but she knows that
she did not sleep, and that her eyes were dry: very dry and burning, as
though they had been licked into place between their lids by a tongue
of flame. It was a long night: a spacious night, with room in it for
more memories of Edgar than she had known herself mistress of.
Edgar, truculent schoolboy; Edgar at Oxford, superior to the point of
the intolerable; Edgar journalist, novelist, war correspondent--always
friend; Edgar going to America to lecture, and make the fortune that--he
said--would make all things possible. He had said that on the last
evening, when a lot of them--boys and girls, journalists, musicians, art
students--had gone to see him off at Euston. He had said it at the
instant of farewell, and had looked a question. Had she said "Yes"--or
only thought it? She had often wondered that, even when her brain was
clear.
Then--she pushed away the next thought with both hands, and drove
herself back to the day when the schoolboy next door whom she had
admired and hated, saved her pet kitten from the butcher's dog--an
heroic episode with blood in it and tears. Edgar's voice, the touch of
his hand, the swing of his waltz-step--the way his eyes smiled before
his mouth did. How bright his eyes were--and his hands were very strong.
He was strong every way: he would fight for his life--even with the
sea. Great, smooth, dark waves seemed rushing upon her in the quiet
room; she could hear the sound of them on the beach. Why had she come
near the sea? It was the same sea that---- She pushed the waves away with
both hands. The church clock struck two.
"You mustn't go mad, you know," she told herself very gently and
reasonably, "because of the boys."
Her hands had got clenched somehow, her whole body was rigid. She
relaxed the tense muscles deliberately, made up the fire, swept up the
hearth.
The new flame her touch inspired flickered a red reflection on the face
of the cabinet--the cabinet with the secret drawer that had "inspired
Edgar with mysterious tales."
Jane went to it, and patted it, and stroked it, and coaxed it to tell
her its secret. But it would not.
"If it would only inspire _me_," she said, "if I could only get an idea
for the story, I could do it now--this minute. Lots of people work best
at night. My brain's really quite clear again now, or else I shouldn't
be able to remember all these silly little things. No, no," she cried to
a memory of a young man kissing a glove, a little creeping memory that
came to sting. She trampled on it.
Next day Jane walked four miles to see a doctor and get a sleeping
draught.
"You see," she explained very earnestly, "I have some work to finish,
and if I don't sleep I can't. And I must do it. I can't tell you how
important it is."
The doctor gave her something in a bottle when he had asked a few
questions, and she went back to the cottage to go on bearing what was
left of the interminable, intolerable day.
That was the day when she set out the fair white writing paper, and the
rosy blotting-paper, and the black ink and the black fountain pen, and
sat and looked at them for hours and hours. She prayed for help--but no
help came.
"I'm probably praying to the wrong people," she said, when through the
dusk the square of paper showed vague as a tombstone in twilit
grass--"the wrong people--No, there are no tombstones in the sea--the
wrong people. If St Anthony helps you to find things, and the other
saints help you to be good, perhaps the dead people who used to write
themselves are the ones to help one to write!"
Jane is ashamed to be quite sure that she remembers praying to Dante and
Shakespeare, and at last to Christina Rossetti, because she was a woman
and loved her brothers.
But no help came. The old woman fussed in and out with wood for the
fire--candles--food. Very kindly, it appears, but Jane wished she
wouldn't. Jane thinks she must have eaten some of the food, or the old
woman would not have left her as she did.
Jane took the draught, and went to bed.
* * * * *
When Mrs Beale came into the sitting-room next morning, a neat pile of
manuscript lay on the table, and when she took a cup of tea to Jane's
bedside, Jane was sleeping so placidly that the old woman had not the
heart to disturb her, and set the tea down on a chair by the pillow to
turn white and cold.
When Jane came into the sitting-room, she stood long looking at the
manuscript. At last she picked it up, and, still standing, read it
through. When she had finished, she stood a long time with it in her
hand. At last she shrugged her shoulders and sat down. She wrote to
Milly.
"Here is the story. I don't know how I've done it, but here it
is. Do read it--because I really am a little mad, and if it's
any good, send it in at once to the _Monthly Multitude_. I
slept all last night. I shall soon be well now. Everything is
so delightful, and the air is splendid. A thousand thanks for
sending me here. I am enjoying the rest and change
immensely.--Your grateful
"JANE."
She read it through. Her smile at the last phrase was not pretty to see.
When the long envelope was posted, Jane went down to the quiet shore and
gazed out over the sunlit sands to the opal line of the far receding
tide.
The story was written. There was an end to the conflict of agonies, so
now the fiercer agony had the field to itself.
"I suppose I shall learn to bear it presently," she told herself. "I
wish I had not forgotten how to cry. I am sure I ought to cry. But the
story is done, anyway. I daresay I shall remember how to cry before the
next story has to be done."
There were two more nights and one whole day. The nights had islands of
sleep in them--hot, misty islands in a river of slow, crawling, sluggish
hours. The day was light and breezy and sunny, with a blue sky
cloud-flecked. The day was worse than the nights, because in the day she
remembered all the time who she was, and where.
It was on the last day of the week. She was sitting rigid in the little
porch, her eyes tracing again and again with conscious intentness the
twisted pattern of the budding honeysuckle stalks. A rattle of wheels
suddenly checked came to her, and she untwisted her stiff fingers and
went down the path to meet Milly--a pale Milly, with red spots in her
cheeks and fierce, frowning brows--a Milly who drew back from the
offered kiss and spoke in tones that neither had heard before.
"Come inside. I want to speak to you."
The new disaster thus plainly heralded moved Jane not at all. There was
no room in her soul for any more pain. In the little dining-room,
conscientiously "quaint" with its spotted crockery dogs and corner
cupboard shining with willow pattern tea-cups, Milly shut the door and
turned on her friend.
"Now," she said, "I came down to see you, because there are some things
I couldn't write--even to you. You can go back to the station in the
cab, I've told the man to wait. And I hope I shall never see your face
again."
"What do you mean?" Jane asked the question mechanically, and not at all
because she did not know the answer.
"You know what I mean," the other answered, still with white fury. "I've
found you out. You thought you were safe, and Edgar was dead, and no one
would know. But as it happens _I_ knew; and so shall everybody else."
Jane moistened dry lips, and said: "Knew what?" and held on by the
table.
"You didn't think he'd told _me_ about it, did you?" Milly flashed--"but
he did."
"I think you must tell _me_ what you mean," Jane said, and shifted her
hold from table to armchair.
"Oh, certainly." Milly tossed her head, and Jane's fingers tightened on
the chair-back. "Yes, I don't wonder you look ill--I suppose you were
sorry when you'd done it. But it's no use being sorry; you should have
thought of all that before."
"Tell me," said Jane, low.
"I'll tell you fast enough. You shall see I do know. Well, then, that
story you sent me--you just copied it from a story of Edgar's that was
in the old cabinet. He wrote it when he was here; and he said it wasn't
good, and I said it was, and then he said he'd leave it in the secret
drawer, and see how it looked when he came back. And you found it. And
you thought you were very clever, I daresay, and that Edgar was dead,
and no one would know. But I knew, and----"
"Yes," Jane interrupted, "you said that before. So you think I found
Edgar's manuscript? If I did it I must have done it in my sleep. I used
to walk in my sleep when I was a child. You believe me, Milly, don't
you?"
"No," said Milly, "I don't."
"Then I'll say nothing more," said Jane with bitter dignity. "I will go
at once, and I will try to forgive your cruelty. _I_ would never have
doubted _your_ word--never. I am very ill--look at me. I had a sleeping
draught, and I suppose it upset me: such things have happened. You've
known me eight or nine years: have you ever known me do a dishonourable
thing, or tell a lie? The dishonour is in yourself, to believe such
things of me."
Jane had drawn herself up, and stood, tall and haggard, her dark eyes
glowing in their deep sockets. The other woman was daunted. She
hesitated, stammered half a word, and was silent.
"Good-bye," said Jane; "and I hope to God no one will ever be such a
brute to you as you have been to me." She turned, but before she reached
the door Milly had caught her by the arm.
"No, don't, don't!" she cried. "I _do_ believe you, I do! You poor
darling! You must have done it in your sleep. Oh, forgive me, Jane dear.
I'll never tell a soul, and Edgar----"
"Ah," said Jane, turning mournful eyes on her, "Edgar would have
believed in me."
And at that Milly understood--in part, at least--and held out her arms.
"Oh, you poor dear! and I never even guessed! Oh, forgive me!" and she
cried over Jane and kissed her many times. "Oh, my dear!" she said, as
Jane yielded herself to the arms and her face to the kisses, "I've got
something to tell you. You must be brave."
"No--no more," Jane said shrilly; "I can't bear any more. I don't want
to know how it happened, or anything. He's dead--that's enough."
"But----" Milly clung sobbing to her, sobbing with sympathy and
agitation.
Jane pushed her back, held her at arm's length and looked at her with
eyes that were still dry.
"You're a good little thing, after all," she said. "Yes--now I'll tell
you. You were quite right. It was a lie--but half of it was true--the
half I told you--but I wanted you to believe the other half too. I did
walk in my sleep, and I must have opened that cabinet and taken Edgar's
story out, because I found myself standing there with it in my hands.
And he was dead, and---- Oh, Milly. I knew he was dead, of course, and
yet he was there--I give you my word he was there, and I heard him say
'Take it, take it, take it!' quite plainly, like I'm speaking to you
now. And I took it; and I copied it out--it took me nearly all
night--and then I sent it to you. And I'd never have told you the truth
as long as you didn't believe me--never--never. But now you do believe
me I won't lie to you. There! Let me go. I think I was mad then, and I
know I am now. Tell every one. I don't care."
But Milly threw her arms round her again. The love interest had
overpowered the moral sense. What did the silly story, or the theft, or
the lie matter--what were they, compared with the love-secret she had
surprised?
"My darling Jane," she said, holding her friend closely and still
weeping lavishly, "don't worry about the story: I quite understand.
Let's forget it. You've got quite enough trouble to bear without that.
But there's one thing, it's just as well I found out before the story
was published. Because Edgar isn't dead. His ship has been towed in:
he's at home."
Jane laughed.
"Don't cry, dear," said Milly; "I'll help you to bear it. Only--oh dear,
how awful it is for you!--he's going to be married."
Jane laughed again; and then she thinks the great, green waves really
did rise up all round the quaint dining-room--rise mountains high, and,
falling, cover her.
* * * * *
Jane was ill so long that Milly had to tell Edgar about the story after
all, and they sent it in, and it was published in Jane's name. So the
little brothers were all right. And he wrote the next story for her too,
and they corrected the proofs together.
Jane has always thought it a pity that Milly had not troubled to ask the
name of the girl whom Edgar intended to marry, because the name proved,
on enquiry, to be Jane.
V
THE MILLIONAIRESS
I
It is a dismal thing to be in London in August. The streets are up for
one thing, and your cab can never steer a straight course for the place
you want to go to. And the trees are brown in the parks, and every one
you know is away, so that there would be nowhere to go in your cab, even
if you had the money to pay for it, and you could go there without
extravagance.
Stephen Guillemot sat over his uncomfortable breakfast-table in the
rooms he shared with his friend, and cursed his luck. His friend was
away by the sea, and he was here in the dirty and sordid blackness of
his Temple chambers. But he had no money for a holiday; and when
Dornington had begged him to accept a loan, he had sworn at Dornington,
and Dornington had gone off not at all pleased. And now Dornington was
by the sea, and he was here. The flies buzzed in the panes and round the
sticky marmalade jar; the sun poured in at the open window. There was no
work to do. Stephen was a solicitor by trade; but, in fact and perforce,
an idler. No business came to him. All day long the steps of clients
sounded on the dirty, old wooden staircase--clients for Robinson on the
second, for Jones on the fourth, but none for Guillemot on the third.
Even now steps were coming, though it was only ten o'clock. The young
man glanced at the marmalade jar, at the crooked cloth stained with tea,
which his laundress had spread for his breakfast.
"Suppose it is a client----" He broke off with a laugh. He had never
been able to cure himself of that old hope that some day the feet of a
client--a wealthy client--would pause at his door, but the feet had
always gone by--as these would do. The steps did indeed pass his door,
paused, came back, and--oh wonder! it was _his_ knocker that awoke the
Temple echoes.
He glanced at the table. It was hopeless. He shrugged his shoulders.
"I daresay it's only a bill," he said, and went to see.
The newcomer was impatient, for even as Guillemot opened the door, the
knocker was in act to fall again.
"Is Mr Guillemot---- Oh, Stephen, I should have known you anywhere!"
A radiant vision in a white linen gown--a very smart tailor-made-looking
linen gown--and a big white hat was standing in his doorway, shaking him
warmly by the hand.
"Won't you ask me in?" asked the vision, smiling in his bewildered face.
He drew back mechanically, and closed the door after him as she went in.
Then he followed her into the room that served him for office and
living-room, and stood looking at her helplessly.
"You don't know me a bit," she said; "it's a shame to tease you. I'll
take off my hat and veil; you will know me then. It's these fine
feathers!"
And take them off she did--in front of the fly-spotted glass on the
mantel-piece; then she turned a bright face on him, a pretty mobile
face, crowned with bright brown hair. And still he stood abashed.
"I never thought you would have forgotten the friend of childhood's
hour," she began again. "I see I must tell you in cold blood."
"Why, it's Rosamund!" he cried suddenly. "Do forgive me! I never, never
dreamed---- My dear Rosamund, you aren't really changed a bit it's
only--your hair being done up and----"
"And the fine feathers," said she, holding out a fold of her dress.
"They are very pretty feathers, aren't they?"
"Very," said he. And then suddenly a silence of embarrassment fell
between them.
The girl broke it with a laugh that was not quite spontaneous.
"How funny it all is!" she said. "I went to New York with my uncle when
dear papa died--and then I went to Girton, and now poor uncle's dead,
and----" Her eye fell on the tablecloth. "I'm going to clear away this
horrid breakfast of yours," she said.
"Oh, please!" he pleaded, taking the marmalade jar up in his helpless
hands. She took the jar from him.
"Yes, I am," she said firmly; "and you can just sit down and try to
remember who I am."
He obediently withdrew to the window-seat and watched her as she took
away the ugly crockery and the uglier food to hide them in his little
kitchen; and as he watched her he remembered many things. The lonely
childhood in a country rectory--the long, dull days with no playfellows;
then the arrival of the new doctor and his little daughter Rosamund
Rainham--and almost at the same time, it seemed, the invalid lady with
the little boy who lodged at the Post Office. Then there were
playfellows, dear playfellows, to cheer and teach him--poor Stephen, he
hardly knew what play or laughter meant. Then the invalid lady died, and
Stephen's father awoke from his dreams amid his old books, as he had a
way of doing now and then, enquired into the circumstances of the boy,
Andrew Dornington, and, finding him friendless and homeless, took him
into his home to be Stephen's little brother and friend. Then the long
happy time when the three children were always together: walking,
boating, birdsnesting, reading, playing and quarrelling; the storm of
tears from Rosamund when the boys went to College; the shock of surprise
and the fleeting sadness with which Stephen heard that the doctor was
dead and that Rosamund had gone to America to her mother's brother. Then
the fulness of living, the old days almost forgotten, or only remembered
as a pleasant dream. Stephen had never thought to see Rosamund
again--had certainly never longed very ardently to see her; at any rate,
since the year of her going. And now--here she was, grown to womanhood
and charm, clearing away his breakfast things! He could hear the tap
running, and knew that she must be washing her hands at the sink, using
the horrid bit of yellow soap with tea-leaves embedded in it. Now she
was drying her hands on the dingy towel behind the kitchen door. No; she
came in drying her pink fingers on her handkerchief.
"What a horrid old charwoman you must have!" she said; "everything is
six inches deep in dust--and all your crockery is smeary."
"I am sorry it's not nicer," he said. "Oh, but it's good to see you
again! What times we used to have! Do you remember when we burned your
dolls on the 5th of November?"
"I should think I did. And do you remember when I painted your new
tool-chest and the handles of your saws and gimlets and things with pale
green enamel? I thought you would be so pleased."
She had taken her place, as she spoke, in the depths of the one
comfortable chair, and he answered from his window-seat; and in a moment
the two were launched on a flood of reminiscences, and the flight of
time was not one of the things they remembered. The hour and the
quarters sounded, and they talked on. But the insistence of noon, boomed
by the Law Courts' clock, brought Miss Rainham to her feet.
"Twelve!" she cried. "How time goes! And I've never told you what I came
for. Look here. I'm frightfully rich; I only heard it last week. My
uncle never seemed very well off. We lived very simply, and I used to do
the washing-up and the dusting and things; and now he's died and left me
all his money. I don't know where he kept it all. The people on the
floor above here wrote me about it. I was going to see them, and I saw
your name; and I simply couldn't pass it. Look here, Stephen--are you
very busy?"
"Not too busy to do anything you want. I'm glad you've had luck. What
can I do for you?"
"Will you really do anything I want? Promise."
"Of course I promise." He looked at her and wondered if she knew how
hard it would be to him to refuse her anything: for Mr Guillemot had
been fancy free, and this gracious vision, re-risen from old times, had
turned his head a little.
"Good! You must be my solicitor."
"But I can't. Jones----"
"Bother Jones!" she said. "I shan't go near him. I won't be worried by
Jones. What is the use of having a fortune--and it's a big fortune, I
can tell you--if I mayn't even choose my own solicitor? Look here,
Stephen--really--I have no relations and no friends in England--no man
friends, I mean--and you won't charge me more than you ought, but you
will charge me enough. Oh, I feel like Mr Boffin--and you are Mortimer
Lightwood, and Andrew is Eugene. Do you call him Dora still?"
It was the first question she had asked about the boy who had shared all
their youth with them.
"Oh, Dornington is all right. He'd be awfully sick if you called him
Dora nowadays. He's got on a little--not much. He goes in for
journalism. He's at Lymchurch just now; he lives here with me
generally."
"Yes--I know; I saw his name on the door." And Stephen did not wonder
till later why she had not mentioned that name earlier in the interview.
"Here, give me paper and pens, the best there is time to procure. Now
tell me what to say to Jones. I want to tell him that I loathe his very
name; that I know I could never bear the sight of him; and that you are
going to look after everything for me."
He resisted--she pleaded; and at last the letter was written, not quite
in those terms, and Stephen at her request reluctantly instructed her as
to the method of giving a Power of Attorney.
"You must arrange everything," she said; "I won't be bothered. Now I
must go. Jones is human, after all. He knew I should want money, and he
sent me quite a lot. And I am going away for a holiday--just to see what
it feels like to be rich."
"You're not going about alone, I hope," said Stephen. And then, for the
first time, he remembered that beautiful young ladies are not allowed to
clear away tea-things in the Temple, without a chaperon--even for their
solicitors.
"No; Constance Grant is with me. You don't know her. I got to know her
at Girton. She's a dear."
"Look here," he said, awkwardly standing behind her as she pinned her
hat and veil in front of his glass, "when you come back I'll come to see
you. But you mustn't come here again; it's--it's not customary." She
smiled at his reflection in the glass.
"Oh, I forgot your stiff English notions! So absurd! Not going to see
one's old friend _and_ one's _solicitor_! However, I won't come where
I'm not wanted----"
"You know----" he began reproachfully; but she interrupted.
"Oh yes, it's all right. Now remember that all my affairs are in your
hands, and when I come back you will have to tell me exactly what I am
worth--between eight and fourteen hundred thousand pounds, they say; but
_that's_ nonsense, isn't it? Good-bye."
And with a last switch of white skirts against the dirty wainscot, and a
last wave of a white-gloved hand, she disappeared down the staircase.
Stephen drew a long breath. "It can't be fourteen hundred thousand," he
said slowly; "but I wish to goodness it wasn't four-pence."
II
The tide was low, the long lines of the sandbanks shone yellow in the
sun--yellower for the pools of blue water left between them. Far off,
where the low white streak marked the edge of the still retreating sea,
little figures moved slowly along, pushing the shrimping-nets through
the shallow water.
On one of the smooth wave-worn groins a girl sat sketching the village;
her pink gown and red Japanese umbrella made a bright spot on the gold
of the sand.
Further along the beach, under the end of the grass-grown sea-wall, a
young man and woman basked in the August sun. Her sunshade was white,
and so were her gown and the hat that lay beside her. Since her
accession to fortune Rosamund Rainham had worn nothing but white.
"It is the prettiest wear in the world," she had told Constance Grant;
"and when you're poor, it's the most impossible. But now I can have a
clean gown every day, and a clean conscience as well."
"I'm not sure about the conscience," Constance had answered with her
demure smile. "Think of the millions of poor people."
"Oh, bother!" Miss Rainham had laughed, not heartlessly, but happily.
"Thank Heaven, I've enough to be happy myself and make heaps of other
people happy too. And the first step is that no one's to know I'm rich,
so remember that we are two high-school teachers on a holiday."
"I loathe play-acting," Constance had said, but she had submitted, and
now she sat sketching, and Rosamund in her white gown watched the
seagulls and shrimpers from under the sea-wall of Lymchurch.
"And so your holiday's over in three days," she was saying to the young
man beside her; "it's been a good time, hasn't it?"
He did not answer; he was piling up the pebbles in a heap, and always at
a certain point the heap collapsed.
"What are you thinking of? Poems again?"
"I had a verse running in my head," he said apologetically; "it has
nothing to do with anything."
"Write it down at once," she said imperiously, and he obediently
scribbled in his notebook, while she took up the work of building the
stone heap--it grew higher under her light fingers.
"Read it!" she said, when the scribbling of the pencil stopped, and he
read:
"Now the vexed clouds, wind-driven, spread wings of white,
Long leaning wings across the sea and land;
The waves creep back, bequeathing to our sight
The treasure-house of their deserted sand;
And where the nearer waves curl white and low,
Knee-deep in swirling brine the slow-foot shrimpers go.
Pale breadth of sand where clamorous gulls confer
Marked with broad arrows by their planted feet,
White rippled pools where late deep waters were,
And ever the white waves marshalled in retreat,
And the grey wind in sole supremacy
O'er opal and amber cold of darkening sky and sea."
"Opal and amber cold," she repeated; "it's not like that now. It's
sapphire and gold and diamonds."
"Yes," he said; "but that was how it was last week----"
"Before I came----"
"Yes, before you came;" his tone put a new meaning into her words.
"I'm glad I brought good weather," she said cheerfully, and the little
stone heap rattled itself down under her hand.
"You brought the light of the world," he said, and caught her hand and
held it. There was a silence. A fisherman passing along the sea-wall
gave them good-day. "What made you come to Lymchurch?" he said
presently, and his hand lay lightly on hers. She hesitated, and looked
down at her hand and his.
"I knew you were here," she said. His eyes met hers. "I always meant to
see you again some day. And you knew me at once. That was so nice of
you."
"You have not changed," he said; "your face has not changed, only you
are older, and----"
"I'm twenty-two; you needn't reproach me with it. Yours is the same to a
month."
He moved on his elbow a little nearer to her.
"Has it ever occurred to you," he asked, looking out to sea, "that you
and I were made for each other?"
"No; never."
He looked out to sea still, and his face clouded heavily.
"Ah--no--don't look like that, dear; it never occurred to me--I think I
must have always known it somehow, only----"
"Only what?--do you really?--only what?" A silence. Then, "Only what?"
he asked again.
"Only I was so afraid it would never occur to _you_!"
There was no one on the wide, bare sands save the discreet artist--their
faces were very near.
"We shall be very, very poor, I'm afraid," he said presently.
"I can go on teaching."
"No"--his voice was decided--"my wife shan't work--at least not anywhere
but in our home. You won't mind playing at love in a cottage for a bit,
will you? I shall get on now I've something to work for. Oh, my dear,
thank God I've enough for the cottage! When will you marry me? We've
nothing to wait for, no relations to consult, no settlements to draw up.
All that's mine is thine, lassie."
"And all that's mine--Oh! Stephen!"
For, with a scattering of shingle, a man dropped from the sea-wall two
yards from them.
The situation admitted of no disguise, for Miss Rainham's head was on Mr
Dornington's shoulder. They sprang up.
"Why, Stephen!" echoed Andrew, "this--this is good of you! You remember
Rosamund? We have just found out that----" But Rosamund had turned, and
was walking quickly away over the sand.
Stephen filled a pipe and lighted it before he said: "You've made good
use of your time, old man. I congratulate you." His tone was cold.
"There is no reason why I should not make good use of my time,"
Dornington answered, and his tone had caught the chill of the other's.
"None whatever. You have secured the prize, and I congratulate you.
Whether it's fair to the girl is another question."
In moments of agitation a man instinctively feels for his pipe. It was
now Dornington's turn to fill and light.
"Of course it's your own affair," said Guillemot, chafing at the
silence, "but I think you might have given the heiress a chance.
However, it's each for himself, I suppose, and----"
"Heiress?"
"Yes, the heiress--the Millionairess, if you prefer it. I've been
looking into her affairs: it _is_ just about a million."
"Rather cheap chaff, isn't it?"
"It's a very lucky thing for you," said Stephen savagely. "Perhaps I
ought not to grudge it to you. But I must say, Dornington--I see we look
at the thing differently--but I must say, I shouldn't have cared to grab
at such luck myself."
Dornington had thrust his hands into his pockets, and stood looking at
his friend.
"I see," he said slowly. "And her fortune is really so much? I didn't
think it had been so much as that. Yes. Well, Guillemot, it's no good
making a row about it; I don't want to quarrel with my best friend. Go
along to my place, will you? Or stay: come and let me introduce you to
Miss Grant, and you can walk up with her; she'll show you where I live.
I'm going for a bit of a walk."
Five minutes later Stephen, in response to Rosamund's beckoning hand at
the window, was following Miss Grant up the narrow flagged path leading
to the cottage which Rosamund had taken. And ten minutes later Andrew
Dornington was striding along the road to the station with a Gladstone
bag in his hands.
Stephen lunched at the cottage. The girls served the lunch themselves;
they had no hired service in the little cottage. Rosamund exerted
herself to talk gaily.
As the meal ended, a fair-haired child stood in the door that opened
straight from the street into the sitting-room, after the primitive
fashion of Lymchurch.
"'E gave me a letter for you," said the child, and Rosamund took it,
giving in exchange some fruit from the pretty disordered table.
"Excuse me," she said, with the rose in her cheeks because she saw the
hand-writing was the hand-writing she had seen in many pencilled verses.
She read the letter, frowned, read it again. "Constance, you might get
the coffee."
Constance went out. Then the girl turned on her guest.
"This is _your_ doing," she said with a concentrated fury that brought
him to his feet facing her. "Why did you come and meddle! You've told
him I was rich--the very thing I didn't mean him to know till--till he
couldn't help himself. You've spoilt everything! And now he's gone--and
he'll never come back. Oh, I hope you will suffer for this some day.
You will, if there's any justice in the world!"
He looked as though he suffered for it even now, but when he spoke his
voice was equable.
"I am extremely sorry," he said, "but after all, there's very little
harm done. You should have warned me that you meant to play a comedy,
and I would have taken any part you assigned me. However, you've
succeeded. He evidently 'loves you for yourself alone.' Write and tell
him to come back: he'll come."
"How little you know him," she said, "after all these years! Even I know
him better than that. That was why I pretended not to be rich. Directly
I knew about the money I made up my mind to find him and try if I could
make him care. I know it sounds horrid; I don't mind, it's true. And I
had done it; and then you came. Oh, I hope I shall never see you again!
I will never speak to you again! No, I don't mean that----" She hid her
face in her hands.
"Rosamund, try to forgive me. I didn't know, I couldn't know. I will
bring him back to you--I swear it! Only trust me."
"You can't," she said; "it's all over."
"Let me tell you something. If you hadn't had this money--but if you
hadn't had this money I should never have seen you. But I have thought
of nothing but you ever since that day you came to the Temple. I don't
tell you this to annoy you, only to show you that I would do anything in
the world to prevent you from being unhappy. Forgive me, dear! Oh,
forgive me!"
"It's no good," she said; but she gave him her hand. When Constance
Grant came back with the coffee, she found Mr Guillemot alone looking
out of the window at the sunflowers and the hollyhocks.
"What is the matter?" she asked.
"I've made a fool of myself," he said, forgetting, as he looked at her
kind eyes, that three hours ago she was only a name to him.
"Could I do anything?"
"You're her friend," he said. "Miss Grant, I'm going down to the sea, if
you could come down with me and let me talk--but I've no right to bother
you."
"I'll come," said Constance. "I'll come by-and-by when I've cleared
lunch away. It's no bother. As you say, I'm her friend."
III
Rosamund stayed on at the little house behind the sea-wall, and she
wrote letters, long and many, which accumulated on the mantel-piece of
the rooms in the Temple. Andrew found them there when he returned to
town in the middle of October. The room was cheerless, tenantless,
fireless. He lit the gas and looked through his letters. He did not dare
to open those which came from her. There were bills, invitation cards, a
returned manuscript or two, a cheque for a magazine article, and a
letter in Stephen's hand-writing. It was dated a fortnight earlier.
"DEAR OLD CHAP," it ran, "I'm off to my father's. I can't bear
it. I can't face you or any one. I wish to God I'd never told
you anything about Rosamund Rainham's money. There isn't any
money: it was all in the Crystal Oil Co. No one had the least
idea that it wasn't good, but I feel as if I ought to have
known. There's a beggarly hundred or so in consols: that's the
end of her million. It wasn't really my fault, of course. She
doesn't blame me.--Yours,
"STEPHEN GUILLEMOT."
Then he opened her letters--read them all--in the order of the dates on
the postmarks, for even in love Andrew was an orderly man--read them
with eyes that pricked and smarted. There were four or five of them.
First, the frank pleading of affection, then the coldness of hurt pride
and love; then, doubts, wonderings. Was he ill? Was he away? Would he
not at least answer? Passionate longing, tender anxiety breathed in
every word. Then came the last letter of all, written a fortnight ago:
"DEAR ANDREW,--I want you to understand that all is over
between us. I know you wished it, and now I see you are right.
I could never have been anything to you but your loving friend,
"ROSAMUND."
He read it through twice; it was a greater shock to him than Stephen's
letter had been. Then he understood. The Millionairess might stoop to
woo a poor lover whose pride had fought with and conquered his love:
the girl with only a "beggarly hundred in consols" had her pride too.
The early October dusk filled the room. Andrew caught up the bag he had
brought with him, slammed the door, and blundered down the stairs. He
caught a passing hansom in Fleet Street and the last train to Lymchurch.
A furious south-wester was waiting for him there. He could hardly stand
against it--it blew and tore and buffeted him, almost prevailing against
him as he staggered down the road from the station. The night was inky
black, but he knew his Lymchurch every inch, and he fought it manfully,
though every now and then he was fain to cling to a gateway or a post,
and hold on till the gust had passed. Thus, breathless and dishevelled,
his tie under his left ear, his hat battered in, his hair in crisp
disorder, he reached at last the haven of the little porch of the house
under the sea-wall.
Rosamund herself opened the door; her eyes showed him two things--her
love and her pride. Which would be the stronger? He remembered how the
question had been answered in his own case, and he shivered as she took
his hand and led him into the warm, lamp-lighted room. The curtains
were drawn; the hearth swept; a tabby cat purred on the rug; a book lay
open on the table: all breathed of the sober comfort of home. She sat
down on the other side of the hearth and looked at him. Neither spoke.
It was an awkward moment.
Rosamund broke the silence.
"It is very friendly of you to come and see me," she said. "It is very
lonely for me now. Constance has gone back to London."
"She has gone back to her teaching?"
"Yes; I wanted her to stay, but----"
"I've heard from Stephen. He is very wretched; he seems to think it is
his fault."
"Poor, dear boy!" She spoke musingly. "Of course it wasn't his fault. It
all seems like a dream, to have been so rich for a little while, and to
have done nothing with it except," she added with a laugh and a glance
at her fur-trimmed dress, "to buy a most extravagant number of white
dresses. How awfully tired you look, Andrew! Go and have a wash--the
spare room's the first door at the top of the stairs--and I'll get you
some supper."
When he came down again, she had laid a cloth on the table and was
setting out silver and glass.
"Another relic of my brief prosperity," she said, touching the forks and
spoons. "I'm glad I don't have to eat with nickel-plated things."
She talked gaily as they ate. The home atmosphere of the room touched
Dornington. Rosamund herself, in her white gown, had never appeared so
fair and desirable. And but for his own mad pride he might have been
here now, sharing her pretty little home life with her--not as her
guest, but as her husband. He flushed crimson. Blushing was an old trick
of his--one of those that had earned him his feminine nickname of Dora,
and in the confusion his blushing brought him, he spoke.
"Rosamund, can you ever forgive me?"
"I forgive you from my heart," she said, "if I have anything to
forgive."
But in her tone was the resentment of a woman who does not forgive. Yet
he had been right. He had sacrificed himself; and if he had chosen to
suffer? But what about the blue lines under her dear eyes, the hollows
in her dear face?
"You have been unhappy," he said.
"Well," she laughed, "I wasn't exactly pleased to lose my fortune."
"Dear," he said desperately, "won't you try to forgive me? It seemed
right. How could I sacrifice you to a penniless----"
"I'd enough for both--or thought I had," she said obstinately.
"Ah, but don't you see----"
"I see that you cared more for not being thought mercenary by Stephen
than----"
"Forgive me!" he pleaded; "take me back."
"Oh no"--she tossed her bright head--"Stephen might think me mercenary;
I couldn't bear _that_. You see you are richer than I am now. How much
did you tell me you made a year by your writing? How can I sacrifice you
to a penniless----"
"Rosamund, do you mean it?"
"I do mean it. And, besides----"
"What?"
"I don't love you any more." The bright head drooped and turned away.
"I have killed your love. I don't wonder. Forgive me for bothering you.
Good-bye!"
"What are you going to do?" she asked suddenly.
"Oh, don't be afraid, nothing desperate. Only work hard and try to
forgive you."
"Forgive _me_? You have nothing to forgive."
"No, nothing--if you had left off loving me? Have you? Is it true?"
"Good-bye!" she said. "You are staying at the 'Ship'?"
"Yes."
"Don't let's part in anger. I shall be on the sea-wall in the morning.
Let's part friends, then."
In the morning Andrew went into the fresh air. The trees, still gold in
calmer homes, stood almost leafless in wild, windy Lymchurch. He stood
in the sunlight, and in spite of himself some sort of gladness came to
him through the crisp October air. Then the _ping_ of a bicycle bell
sounded close behind him, and there was Stephen.
They shook hands, and Stephen's eyebrows went up.
"Is it all right?" he asked. "I knew you'd come here when I came home
last night and found you'd had my letter."
"No; it's not all right. She won't have me."
"Why?"
"Pride or revenge, or something. Don't let's talk about it."
"All right. I want some breakfast; we left town by the 7.20. I'm
starving."
"Who are 'we'?"
"Miss Grant and I. I thought Rosamund would be wanting a _chaperon_ or a
bridesmaid, or something, so I brought her and her bicycle."
"Always thoughtful," said Andrew, with something like a laugh.
Presently, strolling along the sea-wall they met the two girls. Rosamund
looked radiant. Where was the pale, hollow-eyed darling of last night?
The wind that ruffled her brown hair had blown roses into her cheeks.
"Do you forgive me?" whispered Stephen when they met.
"That depends," she answered.
They all walked on together, and presently Stephen and Constance fell
behind.
Then Rosamund spoke.
"You really think I ought to crush my pride, and--and----"
Hope laughed in Andrew's face--laughed and fled--for he looked in the
face of Miss Rainham, and there was no sign of yielding in it.
"Yes," he said almost sullenly.
"That is as much as to say that you were wrong."
"I--perhaps I was wrong. What does it matter?"
"It matters greatly. Suppose I had my money now would you run away from
me?"
"I--I suppose I should act as I did before."
"Then you don't care for me any more than you did?"
"I love you a thousand times more," he cried, turning angry, haggard
eyes to her. "Yes, I believe I was wrong. Nothing would send me from you
now but yourself----"
She clapped her hands.
"Then stay," she said, "for it's a farce, and my money is as safe as
houses."
He scowled at her.
"It's all a trick? You've played with me? Good-bye, and God forgive
you!"
He turned to go, but Constance, coming up from behind them, caught his
arm.
"Don't be such an idiot," she said. "_She_ had nothing to do with it.
She thought her money was gone. You don't suppose _she_ would have
played such a trick even to win _your_ valuable affections. You don't
deserve your luck, Mr Dornington."
Rosamund was looking at him with wet eyes, and her lips trembled.
"Constance only told me this morning," she said. "She and Stephen
planned it, to get you--to make me--to--to----"
"And then she nearly spoilt it all by being as silly as you were.
Whatever does it matter which of you has the money?"
"Nothing," said Rosamund valiantly; "I see that plainly. Don't you,
Andrew?"
"I see nothing but you, Rosamund," he said, and they turned and walked
along the sea-wall, hand in hand, like two children.
"That's all right," said Stephen; "but, by Jove, I've had enough of
playing Providence and managing other people's affairs."
"She was very sweet about it," said Constance, walking on.
"Well she may be; she has her heart's desire. But it was not easy. What
a blessing she is so unbusiness-like! I couldn't have done it but for
you."
"I am very glad to have been of some service," said Constance demurely.
"I couldn't have got on without you. I can't get on without you ever
again."
"But that's nonsense," said Miss Grant.
"You won't make me, Constance? There's no confounded money to come
between _us_."
He caught at the hand that swung by her side.
"But you said you loved _her_, and that was why----"
"Ah, but that was a thousand years ago. And it was nonsense, even then,
Constance."
And so two others went along the sea-wall in the October sunshine,
happily, like children, hand in hand.
VI
THE HERMIT OF "THE YEWS"
Maurice Brent knew a great deal about the Greek anthology, and very
little about women. No one but himself had any idea how much he knew of
the one, and no one had less idea than himself how little he knew of the
other. So that when, a stranger and a pilgrim hopelessly astray amid a
smart house-party, he began to fall in love with Camilla, it seemed to
be no one's business to tell him, what everybody else knew, that Camilla
had contracted the habit of becoming engaged at least once a year. Of
course this always happened in the country, because it was there that
Camilla was most bored. No other eligible young man happened to be free
at the moment: Camilla never engaged herself to ineligibles. The habit
of years is not easily broken: Camilla became engaged to Maurice, and,
for the six months of the engagement, he lived in Paradise. A fool's
Paradise, if you like, but Paradise all the same.
About Easter time Camilla told him, very nicely and kindly, that she had
mistaken her own heart--she hoped he would not let it make him very
unhappy. She would always wish him the best of good fortune, and
doubtless he would find it in the affection of some other girl much
nicer and more worthy of him than his sincere friend Camilla. Camilla
was right--no one could have been less worthy of him than she: but after
all it was Camilla he thought that he loved, Camilla he felt that he
wanted, not any other girl at all, no matter how nice or how worthy.
He took it very quietly: sent her a note so cold and unconcerned that
Camilla was quite upset, and cried most of the evening, and got up next
day with swollen eyelids and a very bad temper. She was not so sure of
her power as she had been--and the loss of such a certainty is never
pleasant.
He, meanwhile, advertised for a furnished house, and found one--by
letter, which seemed to be the very thing he wanted. "Handsomely and
conveniently furnished five miles from a railway station--a well-built
house standing in its own grounds of five acres--garden, orchard
pasture, magnificent view." Being as unversed in the ways of house
agents as in those of women, he took it on trust, paid a quarter's rent,
and went down to take possession. He had instructed the local house
agent to find a woman who would come in for a few hours daily to "do for
him."
"I'll have no silly women living in the house," said he.
It was on an inclement June evening that the station fly set him down in
front of his new house. The drive had been long and dreary, and seemed
to Maurice more like seventy miles than seven. Now he let down the
carriage window and thrust his head into the rain to see his new house.
It was a stucco villa, with iron railings in the worst possible taste.
It had an air at once new and worn out; no one seemed ever to have lived
in it, and yet everything about it was broken and shabby. The door stuck
a little at first with the damp, and when at last it opened and Maurice
went over his house, he found it furnished mainly with oil-cloth and
three-legged tables, and photographs in Oxford frames--like a seaside
lodging-house. The house was clean, however, and the woman in
attendance was clean, but the atmosphere of the place was that of a
vault. He looked out through the streaming panes at the magnificent view
so dwelt upon in the house agents' letters. The house stood almost at
the edge of a disused chalk quarry; far below stretched a flat plain,
dotted here and there with limekilns and smoky, tall chimneys. The five
acres looked very bare and thistly, and the rain was dripping heavily
from a shivering, half-dead cypress on to a draggled, long-haired grass
plot. Mr Brent shivered too, and ordered a fire.
When the woman had gone, he sat long by the fire in one of those cane
and wood chairs that fold up--who wants a chair to fold up?--so common
in lodging-houses. Unless you sit quite straight in these chairs you
tumble out of them. He gazed at the fire, and thought, and dreamed. His
dreams were, naturally, of Camilla; his thoughts were of his work.
"I've taken the house for three years," said he. "Well, one place is as
good as another to be wretched in. But one room I must furnish--for you
can't work on oil-cloth."
So next day he walked to Rochester and bought some old bureaux, and
chairs, and book-cases, a few Persian rugs and some brass things,
unpacked his books and settled down to the hermit's life to which he had
vowed himself. The woman came every morning from her cottage a mile
away, and left at noon. He got his meals himself--always chops, or
steaks, or eggs--and presently began to grow accustomed to the place.
When the sun shone it was not so bad. He could make no way against the
thorns and thistles on his five acres, and they quickly grew into a very
wilderness. But a wilderness is pleasant to wander in; and a few flowers
had survived long neglect, and here and there put out red, or white, or
yellow buds. And he worked away at his book about Greek poetry.
He almost believed that he was contented; he had never cared for people
so much as for books, and now he saw no people, and his books began to
crowd his shelves. No one passed by "The Yews"--so called, he imagined,
in extravagant compliment to the decaying cypress--for it stood by a
grass-grown by-way that had once connected two main roads, each a couple
of miles distant. These were now joined by a better road down in the
valley, and no one came past Maurice's window save the milk, the bread,
the butcher, and the postman.
Summer turned brown and dry and became autumn, autumn turned wet and
chilly and grew into winter, and all the winds of heaven blew cold and
damp through the cracks of the ill-built house.
Maurice was glad when the spring came; he had taken the house for three
years, and he was a careful man, and also, in his way, a determined. Yet
it was good to look out once more on something green, and to see
sunshine and a warm sky; it was near Easter now. In all these ten months
nothing whatever had happened to him. He had never been beyond his five
acres--and no one had been to see him. He had no relations, and friends
soon forget; besides, after all, friends, unlike relations, cannot go
where they are not invited.
It was on the Saturday before Easter that the quarryside fell in.
Maurice was working in his study when he heard a sudden crack and a
slow, splitting sound, and then a long, loud, rumbling noise, like
thunder, that echoed and re-echoed from the hills on each side. And,
looking from his window, he saw the cloud of white dust rise high above
the edge of the old quarry, and seem to drift off to join the
cotton-wool clouds in the blue sky.
"I suppose it's all safe enough here," he said, and went back to his
manuscripts. But he could not work. At last something had happened; he
found himself shaken and excited. He laid down the pen. "I wonder if any
one was hurt?" he said; "the road runs just below, of course. I wonder
whether there'll be any more of it--I wonder?" A wire jerked, the
cracked bell sounded harshly through the silence of the house. He sprang
to his feet. "Who on earth----" he said. "The house isn't safe after
all, perhaps, and they've come to tell me."
As he went along the worn oil-cloth of the hall he saw through the
comfortless white-spotted glass of his front door the outline of a
woman's hat.
He opened the door--it stuck as usual--but he got it open. There stood a
girl holding a bicycle.
"Oh!" she said, without looking at him, "I'm so sorry to trouble you--my
bicycle's run down--and I'm afraid it's a puncture, and could you let me
have some water, to find the hole--and if I might sit down a minute."
Her voice grew lower and lower.
He opened the door wide and put out his hand for the bicycle. She took
two steps past him, rather unsteadily, and sat down on the stairs--there
were no chairs: the furniture of the hall was all oil-cloth and hat
pegs.
He saw now that she was very pale; her face looked greenish behind her
veil's white meshes.
He propped the machine against the door, as she leaned her head back
against the ugly marbled paper of the staircase wall.
"I'm afraid you're ill," he said gently. But the girl made no answer.
Her head slipped along the varnished wall and rested on the stair two
steps above where she sat. Her hat was crooked and twisted; even a
student of Greek could see that she had fainted.
"Oh Lord!" said he.
He got her hat and veil off--he never knew how, and he wondered
afterwards at his own cleverness, for there were many pins, long and
short; he fetched the cushion from his armchair and put it under her
head; he took off her gloves and rubbed her hands and her forehead with
vinegar, but her complexion remained green, and she lay, all in a heap,
at the foot of his staircase.
Then he remembered that fainting people should be laid flat and not
allowed to lie about in heaps at the foot of stairs, so he very gently
and gingerly picked the girl up in his arms and carried her into his
sitting-room. Here he laid her on the ground--he had no sofa--and sat
beside her on the floor, patiently fanning her with a copy of the
_Athenaeum_, and watching the pinched, pallid face for some sign of
returning life. It came at last, in a flutter of the eyelids, a
long-drawn, gasping breath. The Greek scholar rushed for whisky--brandy
he esteemed as a mere adjunct of channel boats--lifted her head and held
the glass to her lips. The blood had come back to her face in a rush of
carnation; she drank--choked--drank--he laid her head down and her eyes
opened. They were large, clear grey eyes--very bewildered-looking just
now--but they and the clear red tint in cheeks and lips transformed the
face.
"Good gracious," said he, "she's pretty! Pretty? she's beautiful!"
She was. That such beauty should so easily have hidden itself behind a
green-tinted mask, with sunken eyelid, seemed a miracle to the
ingenuous bookworm.
"You're better now," said he with feverish banality. "Give me your
hands--so--now can--yes, that's right--here, this chair is the only
comfortable one----"
She sank into the chair, and waved away the more whisky which he eagerly
proffered. He stood looking at her with respectful solicitude.
After a few moments she stretched her arms like a sleepy child, yawned,
and then suddenly broke into laughter. It had a strange sound. No one
had laughed in that house since the wet night when Mr Brent took
possession of it, and he had never been able to bring himself to believe
that any one had ever laughed there before.
Then he remembered having heard that women have hysterical fits as well
as fainting fits, and he said eagerly: "Oh don't! It's all right--you
were faint--the heat or something----"
"Did I faint?" she asked with interest. "I never fainted before.
But--oh--yes--I remember. It was rather horrible. The quarry tumbled
down almost on me, and I just stopped short--in time--and I came round
by this road because the other's stopped up, and I was so glad when I
saw the house. Thank you so much; it must have been an awful bother. I
think I had better start soon----"
"No, you don't; you're not fit to ride alone yet," said he to himself.
Aloud he said: "You said something about a puncture--when you are better
I'll mend it. And, look here--have you had any lunch?"
"No," said she.
"Then--if you'll allow me." He left the room, and presently returned
with the tray set for his own lunch; then he fetched from the larder
everything he could lay hands on: half a cold chicken, some cold meat
pudding, a pot of jam, bottled beer. He set these confusedly on the
table. "Now," he said, "come and try to eat."
"It's very good of you to bother," she said, a little surprise in her
tone, for she had expected "lunch" to be a set formal meal at which some
discreet female relative would preside. "But aren't you--don't you--do
you live alone, then?"
"Yes, a woman comes in in the mornings. I'm sorry she's gone: she could
have arranged a better lunch for you."
"Better? why, it's lovely!" said she, accepting the situation with frank
amusement, and she gave a touch or two to the table to set everything in
its place.
Then they lunched together. He would have served her standing, as one
serves a queen--but she laughed again, and he took the place opposite
her. During lunch they talked.
After lunch they mended the punctured tyre, and talked all the while;
then it was past three o'clock.
"You won't go yet," he said then, daring greatly for what seemed to him
a great stake. "Let me make you some tea--I can, I assure you--and let
us see if the tyre holds up----"
"Oh, the tyre is all right, thanks to your cleverness----"
"Well, then," said he desperately, "take pity on a poor hermit! I give
you my word, I have been here ten months and three days, and I have not
in that time spoken a single word to any human being except my
bedmaker."
"But if you want to talk to people why did you begin being a hermit?"
"I thought I didn't, then."
"Well--now you know better, why don't you come back and talk to people
in the ordinary way?"
This was the first and last sign she gave that the circumstances in
which she found herself with him were anything but ordinary.
"I have a book to finish," said he. "Would you like to have tea in the
wilderness or in here?" He wisely took her consent for granted this
time, and his wisdom was justified.
They had tea in the garden. The wilderness blossomed like a rose, to
Maurice's thinking. In his mind he was saying over and over again: "How
bored I must have been all this time! How bored I must have been!"
It seemed to him that his mind was opening, like a flower, and for the
first time. He had never talked so well, and he knew it--all the seeds
of thought, sown in those long, lonely hours, bore fruit now. She
listened, she replied, she argued and debated.
"Beautiful--and sensible," said Maurice to himself. "What a wonderful
woman!" There was, besides, an alertness of mind, a quick brightness of
manner that charmed him. Camilla had been languid and dreamy.
Suddenly she rose to her feet.
"I must go," she said, "but I have enjoyed myself so much. You are an
ideal host: thank you a thousand times. Perhaps we shall meet again some
day, if you return to the world. Do you know, we've been talking and
wrangling for hours and hours and never even thought of wondering what
each other's names are--I think we've paid each other a very magnificent
compliment, don't you?"
He smiled and said: "My name is Maurice Brent."
"Mine is Diana Redmayne. If it sounds like somebody in the _Family
Herald_, I can't help it." He had wheeled the bicycle into the road, and
she had put on hat and gloves and stood ready to mount before she said:
"If you come back to the world I shall almost certainly meet you. We
seem to know the same people; I've heard your name many times."
"From whom?" said he.
"Among others," said she, with her foot on the pedal, "from my cousin
Camilla. Good-bye."
And he was left to stare down the road after the swift flying figure.
Then he went back into the lonely little house, and about half-past
twelve that night he realised that he had done no work that day, and
that those hours which had not been spent talking to Diana Redmayne, had
been spent in thinking about her.
"It's not because she's pretty and clever," he said; "and it's not even
because she's a woman. It's because she's the only intelligent human
being I've spoken to for nearly a year."
So day after day he went on thinking about her.
It was three weeks later that the bell again creaked and jangled, and
again through the spotted glass he saw a woman's hat. To his infinite
disgust and surprise, his heart began to beat violently.
"I grow nervous, living all alone," he said. "Confound this door! how it
does stick--I must have it planed."
He got the door opened, and found himself face to face with--Camilla.
He stepped back, and bowed gravely.
She looked more beautiful than ever--and he looked at her, and wondered
how he could ever have thought her even passably pretty.
"Won't you ask me in?" she said timidly.
"No," said he, "I am all alone."
"I know," she said. "I have only just heard you're living here all
alone, and I came to say--Maurice--I'm sorry. I didn't know you cared so
much, or----"
"Don't," he said, stopping the confession as a good batsman stops a
cricket ball. "Believe me, I've not made myself a hermit because of--all
that. I had a book to write--that was all. And--and it's very kind of
you to come and look me up, and I wish I could ask you to come in,
but---- And it's nice of you to take an interest in an old friend--you
said you would, didn't you, in the letter--and--I've taken the advice
you gave me."
"You mean you've fallen in love with some one else."
"You remember what you said in your letter."
"Some one nicer and worthier, I said," returned Camilla blankly, "but I
never thought---- And is she?"
"Of course she seems so to me," said he, smiling at her to express
friendly feeling.
"Then--good-bye--I wish you the best of good fortune."
"You said that in your letter, too," said he. "Good-bye."
"Who is she?"
"I mustn't tell even you that, until I have told her," he smiled again.
"Then good-bye," said Camilla shortly; "forgive me for troubling you so
unnecessarily."
He found himself standing by his door--and Camilla on her bicycle sped
down the road, choking with tears of anger and mortification and deep
disappointment. Because she knew now that she loved him as much as it
was in her to love any one, and because she, who had humbled so many,
had now at last humbled herself--and to no purpose.
Maurice Brent left his door open and wandered down across his five
acres, filled with amazement. Camilla herself had not been more deeply
astonished at the words he had spoken than he had been. A moment before
he had not even thought that he was in love, much less contemplated any
confession of it: and now seemingly without his will he stood committed
to this statement. Was it true, or had he only said it to defend himself
against those advances of hers in which he merely saw a new trap? He had
said it in defence--yes--but it was true, for all that; this was the
wonderful part of it. And so he walked in the wilderness, lost in
wonder; and as he walked he noted the bicycles that passed his
door--along his unfrequented road, by ones and twos and threes--for this
was a Saturday, and the lower road was still lying cold and hidden under
its load of chalk, and none might pass that way. This road was hot and
dusty, and folk went along it continually. He strolled to his ugly iron
gate and looked over, idly. Perhaps, some day, she would come that way
again--she would surely stop--especially if he were at the gate--and
perhaps stay and talk a little. As if in mocking answer to the new-born
thought came a flash of blue along the road; Diana Redmayne rode by at
full speed--bowed coldly--and then at ten yards' distance turned and
waved a white-gloved hand, with a charming smile. Maurice swore softly,
and went indoors to think.
His work went but slowly on that day--and in the days that followed. On
the next Friday he went over to Rochester, and in the dusk of the
evening he walked along the road, about a mile from "The Yews," and
then, going slowly, he cast handfuls of something dark from his hand,
and kicked the white dust over it as it lay.
"I feel like the enemy sowing tares," said he.
Then he went home, full of anxious anticipation. The next day was hot
and bright. He took his armchair into the nightmare of a verandah, and
sat there reading; only above the top of the book his eyes could follow
the curve of the white road. This made it more difficult to follow the
text. Presently the bicyclists began to go past, by ones and twos and
threes; but a certain percentage was wheeling its machines--others
stopped within sight to blow up their tyres. One man sat down under the
hedge thirty yards away, and took his machine to pieces; presently he
strolled up and asked for water. Brent gave it, in a tin basin,
grudgingly, and without opening the gate.
"I overdid it," he said, "a quarter of a pound would have been enough;
yet I don't know--perhaps it's well to be on the safe side. Yet three
pounds was perhaps excessive."
Late in the afternoon a pink figure wheeling a bicycle came slowly down
the road. He sat still, and tried to read. In a moment he should hear
the click of the gate: then he would spring up and be very much
astonished. But the gate did not click, and when next he raised his eyes
the pink blouse had gone by, and was almost past the end of the five
acres. Then he did spring up--and ran.
"Miss Redmayne, can't I help you? What is it? Have you had a spill?" he
said as he overtook her.
"Puncture," said she laconically.
"You're very unfortunate. Mayn't I help you to mend it?"
"I'll mend it as soon as I get to a shady place."
"Come into the wilderness. See--here's the side gate. I'll fetch some
water in a moment."
She looked at him doubtfully, and then consented. She refused tea, but
she stayed and talked till long after the bicycle was mended.
On the following Saturday he walked along the road, and back, and along,
and again the place was alive with angry cyclists dealing, each after
his fashion, with a punctured tyre. He came upon Miss Redmayne sitting
by the ditch mending hers. That was the time when he sat on the roadside
and told her all about himself--reserving only those points where his
life had touched Camilla's.
The week after he walked the road again, and this time he overtook Miss
Redmayne, who was resolutely wheeling her bicycle back in the way by
which she had come.
"Let me wheel it for you," he said. "Whither bound?"
"I'm going back to Rochester," she said. "I generally ride over to see
my aunts at Felsenden on Saturdays, but I fear I must give it up, or go
by train; this road isn't safe."
"Not safe?" he said with an agitation which could not escape her notice.
"Not safe," she repeated. "Mr Brent, there is a very malicious person in
this part of the country--a perfectly dreadful person."
"What do you mean?" he managed to ask.
"These three Saturdays I have come along this road; each time I have had
a puncture. And each time I have found embedded in my tyre the evidence
of some one's malice. This is one piece of evidence." She held out her
ungloved hand. On its pink palm lay a good sized tin-tack. "Once might
be accident; twice a coincidence; three times is too much. The road's
impossible."
"Do you think some one did it on purpose?"
"I know it," she said calmly.
Then he grew desperate.
"Try to forgive me," he said. "I was so lonely, and I wanted so
much----"
She turned wide eyes on him.
"You!" she cried, and began to laugh.
Her laughter was very pretty, he thought.
"Then you didn't know it was me?" said the Greek student.
"You!" she said again. "And has it amused you--to see all these poor
people in difficulties, and to know that you've spoilt their poor little
holiday for them--and three times, too."
"I never thought about _them_," he said; "it was you I wanted to see.
Try to forgive me; you don't know how much I wanted you." Something in
his voice kept her silent. "And don't laugh," he went on. "I feel as if
I wanted nothing in the world but you. Let me come to see you--let me
try to make you care too."
"You're talking nonsense," she said, for he stopped on a note that
demanded an answer. "Why, you told Camilla----"
"Yes--but you--but I meant _you_. I thought I cared about her once--but
I never cared really with all my heart and soul for any one but you."
She looked at him calmly and earnestly.
"I'm going to forget all this," she said; "but I like you very much, and
if you want to come and see me, you may. I will introduce you to my
aunts at Felsenden as--as a friend of Camilla's. And I will be friends
with you; but nothing else ever. Do you care to know my aunts?"
Maurice had inspirations of sense sometimes. One came to him now, and he
said: "I care very much."
"Then help me to mend my bicycle, and you can call there to-morrow. It's
'The Grange'--you can't miss it. No, not another word of nonsense,
please, or we can't possibly be friends."
* * * * *
He helped her to mend the bicycle, and they talked of the beauty of
spring and of modern poetry.
* * * * *
It was at "The Grange," Felsenden, that Maurice next saw Miss
Redmayne--and it was from "The Grange," Felsenden, that, in September,
he married her.
"And why did you say you would never, never be anything but a friend?"
he asked her on the day when that marriage was arranged. "Oh! you nearly
made me believe you! Why did you say it?"
"One must say something!" she answered. "Besides, you'd never have
respected me if I'd said 'yes' at once."
"Could you have said it? Did you like me then?"
She looked at him, and her look was an answer. He stooped and gravely
kissed her.
"And you really cared, even then? I wish you had been braver," he said a
little sadly.
"Ah, but," she said, "I didn't know you then--you must try to forgive
me, dear. Think how much there was at stake! Suppose I had lost you!"
VII
THE AUNT AND THE EDITOR
Aunt Kate was the great comfort of Kitty's existence. Always kindly,
helpful, sympathetic, no girlish trouble was too slight, no girlish
question too difficult for her tender heart--her delicate insight. How
different from grim Aunt Eliza, with whom it was Kitty's fate to live.
Aunt Eliza was severe, methodical, energetic. In household matters she
spared neither herself nor her niece. Kitty could darn and mend and bake
and dust and sweep in a way which might have turned the parents of the
bluest Girtonian green with envy. She had read a great deal, too--the
really solid works that are such a nuisance to get through, and that
leave a mark on one's mind like the track of a steamroller. That was
Aunt Eliza's doing. Kitty ought to have been grateful--but she wasn't.
She didn't want to be improved with solid books. She wanted to write
books herself. She did write little tales when her aunt was out on
business, which was often, and she dreamed of the day when she should
write beautiful books, poems, romances. These Aunt Eliza classed roughly
as "stuff and nonsense"; and one day, when she found Kitty reading the
_Girls' Very Own Friend_, she tore that harmless little weekly across
and across and flung it into the fire. Then she faced Kitty with flushed
face and angry eyes.
"If I ever catch you bringing such rubbish into the house again,
I'll--I'll stop your music lessons."
This was a horrible threat. Kitty went twice a week to the Guildhall
School of Music. She had no musical talent whatever, but the journey to
London and back was her one glimpse of the world's tide that flowed
outside the neat, gloomy, ordered house at Streatham. Therefore Kitty
was careful that Aunt Eliza should not again "catch her bringing such
rubbish into the house." But she went on reading the paper all the same,
just as she went on writing her little stories. And presently she got
one of her little stories typewritten, and sent it to the _Girls' Very
Own Friend_. It was a silly little story--the heroine was _svelte_, I
am sorry to say, and had red-gold hair and a soft, _trainante_
voice--and the hero was a "frank-looking young Englishman, with a
bronzed face and honest blue eyes." The plot was that with which I
firmly believe every career of fiction begins--the girl who throws over
her lover because he has jilted her friend. Then she finds out that it
was not her lover, but his brother or cousin. We have all written this
story in our time, and Kitty wrote it much worse than many, but not
nearly so badly as most of us.
And the _Girls' Very Own Friend_ accepted the story and printed it, and
in its columns notified to "George Thompson" that the price, a whole
guinea, was lying idle at the office till he should send his address.
For, of course, Kitty had taken a man's name for her pen-name, and
almost equally, of course, had called herself "George." George Sand
began it, and it is a fashion which young authors seem quite unable to
keep themselves from following.
Kitty longed to tell some one of her success--to ask admiration and
advice; but Aunt Eliza was more severe and less approachable than usual
that week. She was busy writing letters. She had always a sheaf of
dull-looking letters to answer, so Kitty could only tell Mary in the
kitchen under vows of secrecy, and Mary in the kitchen only said: "Well,
to be sure, Miss, it's beautiful! I suppose you wrote the story down out
of some book?"
Therefore Kitty felt that it was vain to apply to her for intellectual
sympathy.
"I will write to Aunt Kate," said she, "_she_ will understand. Oh, how I
wish I could see her! She must be a dear, soft, pussy, cuddly sort of
person. Why shouldn't I go and see her? I will."
And on this desperate resolve she acted.
Now I find it quite impossible any longer to conceal from the
intelligent reader that the reason why Kitty had never seen Aunt Kate
was that "Aunt Kate" was merely the screen which sheltered from a vulgar
publicity the gifted person who wrote the "Answers to Correspondents"
for the _Girls' Very Own Friend_.
In fear and trembling, and a disguised handwriting; with a feigned name
and a quickly-beating heart, Kitty, months before, had written to this
mysterious and gracious being. In the following week's number had
appeared these memorable lines:
"_Sweet Nancy._--So pleased, dear, with your little letter.
Write to me quite freely. I love to help my girls."
So Kitty wrote quite freely, and as honestly as any girl of eighteen
ever writes: her hopes and fears, her household troubles, her literary
ambitions. And in the columns of the _Girls' Very Own Friend_ Aunt Kate
replied with all the tender grace and delightful warmth that
characterised her utterances.
The idea of calling on Aunt Kate occurred to Kitty as she was "putting
on her things" to go to the Guildhall. She instantly threw the plain
"everyday" hat from her, and pulled her best hat from its tissue-paper
nest in the black bandbox. She put on her best blouse--the
cream-coloured one with the browny lace on it, and her best brown silk
skirt. She recklessly added her best brown shoes and gloves, and the
lace pussy-boa. (I don't know what the milliner's name for the thing is.
It goes round the neck, and hangs its soft and fluffy ends down nearly
to one's knees.) Then she looked at herself in the glass, gave a few
last touches to her hair and veil, and nodded to herself.
"You'll do, my dear," said Kitty.
Aunt Eliza was providentially absent at Bath nursing a sick friend, and
the black-bugled duenna, hastily imported from Tunbridge Wells, could
not be expected to know which was Kitty's best frock, and which the
gloves that ought only to have been worn at church.
When Kitty's music lesson was over, she stood for a moment on the steps
of the Guildhall School, looking down towards the river. Then she
shrugged her pretty shoulders.
"I don't care. I'm going to," she said, and turned resolutely towards
Tudor Street. Kitty had been to a high school: therefore she was not
obviously shy. She asked her way frankly and easily of carman, or clerk,
or errand-boy; and though, at the door of the dingy office in a little
court off Fleet Street, her heart beat thickly as she read the
blue-enamelled words, _Girls' Very Own Friend_, her manner as she walked
into the office betrayed no nervousness, and, indeed, struck the
grinning idle office boy as that of "a bloomin' duchess."
"I want to see----" she began; and then suddenly the awkwardness of her
position struck her. She did not know Aunt Kate's surname. Abruptly to
ask this grinning lout for "Aunt Kate" seemed absolutely indecorous. "I
want to see the editor," she ended.
She waited in the grimy office while the boy disappeared through an
inner door, marked in dingy white letters with the magic words,
"Editor--Private." A low buzz of voices came to her through the door.
She looked at the pigeon-holes where heaps of back numbers of the
_Girls' Very Own_ lay in a dusty retirement. She looked at the insurance
company's tasteless almanack that hung all awry on the wall, and still
the buzz went on. Then suddenly some one laughed inside, and the laugh
did not please Kitty. The next moment the boy returned, grinning more
repulsively than ever, and said: "Walk this way."
She walked that way, past the boy; the door fell to behind her, and she
found herself in a cloud of tobacco smoke, compressed into a small
room--a very dusty, untidy room--in which stood three young men. Their
faces were grave and serious, but Kate could not forget that one of
them had laughed, and laughed _like that_. Her chin went up about a
quarter of an inch further.
"I am sorry to have disturbed you," she said severely. "I wanted to
see--to see the lady who signs herself Aunt Kate."
There was a moment of silence which seemed almost breathless. Two of the
young men exchanged a glance, but though Kitty perceived it to be
significant, she could not interpret its meaning. Then one of the three
turned to gaze out of the window at the blackened glass roof of the
printing office below. Kitty felt certain he was concealing a smile; and
the second hurriedly arranged a bundle of papers beside him.
The third young man spoke, and Kitty liked the gentle drawl, the
peculiar enunciation. The poor girl, in her Streatham seclusion, had
never before heard the "Oxford voice."
"I am very sorry," he said, "but 'Aunt Kate' is not here to-day.
Perhaps--is there anything I could do?"
"No, thank you," said Kitty, wishing herself miles away; the tobacco
smoke choked her, the backs of the two other men seemed an outrage. She
turned away with a haughty bow, and went down the grimy stairs full of
fury. She could have slapped herself. How could she have been such a
fool as to come there? There were feet coming down the stair behind
her--she quickened her pace. The feet came more quickly. She stopped on
the landing and turned with an odd feeling of being at bay. It was the
fair-haired young man with the Oxford voice.
"I am so very sorry," he said gently, "but I did not know. I did not
expect to see--I mean, I did not know who you were. And we had all been
smoking--I am so sorry," he said again, rather lamely.
"It doesn't matter," said Kitty, more shyly than she had ever spoken in
her life. She liked his eyes and his voice as much as she loathed the
expressive backs of his two companions.
"If you could come again: perhaps Aunt Kate will be here on Thursday. I
know she will be sorry to miss you," the young man went on.
"I think I won't call again, thank you," said Kitty. "I--I'll write,
thank you; it is all right. I oughtn't to have come. Good-bye."
There was nothing for it but to stand back and let her pass. The editor
went back slowly to his room. His friends had relighted their pipes.
"Appeased the outraged goddess?" asked one of them.
"Good old Aunt Kate!" said the other.
"Shut up, Sellars!" said the editor, frowning.
"Now, which of your correspondents is it?" pondered Sellars, ruffling
the bundle of papers in his hand. "Is it 'Wild Woodbine,' who wants to
know what will make her hands white? Chilcott, did you see her hands? Oh
no, of course--_bien chaussee, bien gantee_. All brown, too. Is it
'Sylph'?--no; she wants a pattern for a Zouave. What is a Zouave, if you
please, Mr Editor?"
"Dry up!" said the editor, but Sellars was busy with the papers.
"Eureka! I know her. She's 'Nut-brown Maid'--here's the letter--wants to
know if she may talk to 'a young gentleman she has not been properly
introduced to'--spells it 'interoduced,' too----"
The editor snatched the papers out of the other's hands.
"Now clear out," said he; "I'm busy."
"Am I dreaming?" said Sellars pensively; "or is this the editor who
invited us to collaborate with him in his 'Answers to Correspondents'?"
"I am the editor who will kick you down the entire five flights if he is
driven to it. You won't drive him, will you?"
The two laughed, but they took up their hats and went; Sellars put his
head round the door for a last word.
"What price love at first sight?" said he, and the office ruler dented
the door as he disappeared round it. The editor, left alone, sat down in
his chair and looked helplessly round him.
"Well!" he said musingly, "well, well, well, well!" Then after a long
silence he took up his pen and began the "Answers to Correspondents."
"_Dieu-donnee._--Your hair is a very nice colour. I should not
advise Aureoline.
"_Shy Fairy._--By all means consult your mother. Heliotrope
would suit your complexion, if it is, as you say, of a
brilliant fairness.
"_Contadina._--No, I should not advise scarlet velvet with the
pale blue. Try myrtle green."
Presently he threw down the pen. "I suppose I shall never see her
again," he said, and he actually sighed.
But he did see her again. For on her way home poor Kitty's imagination
suddenly spread its wings and alighted accurately on the truth; she
formed a sufficiently vivid picture of what had happened in the office
after she left. She _knew_ that those other young men--"the pigs," she
called them to herself--had speculated as to whether she was "Little
One," who wanted to make her hair curl, and to know whether short waists
would be worn; or "Moss Rose," who was anxious about her complexion, and
the proper way to treat a jibbing sweetheart. So that very night she
wrote a note to Aunt Kate, but she did not sign it "Sweet Nancy" in the
old manner, and she did not disguise her hand. She signed it George
Thompson, in inverted commas, and she said that she would call on
Thursday.
And on Thursday she called. And was shown into the editor's room at
once.
The editor rose to greet her.
"Aunt Kate is not here," said he hurriedly; "but if you can spare a few
moments I should like to talk to you about business; I did not know the
other day that you were the author of that charming story 'Evelyn's
Error.'"
The room was clear of tobacco smoke--the editor was alone--some red
roses lay on the table. Kitty caught herself wondering for whom he had
bought them. The chair he offered her was carefully dusted. She took
it--and he began to talk about her story; criticising, praising,
blaming, and that so skilfully that criticism seemed a subtle flattery,
and the very blame conveyed a compliment. Then he asked for more
stories. And a new heaven and a new earth seemed to unroll before the
girl's eyes. If she could only write--and succeed--and----
"Will you come again?" he said at last. "Aunt Kate----"
"Oh," she said, with eyes shining softly, "it doesn't matter about Aunt
Kate now! I shall be so busy trying to write stories."
"The fact is----" said the editor slowly, racking his brains for a
reason that should bring her to the office again--"the fact is--_I_ am
Aunt Kate."
Kitty sprang to her feet. Her face flamed scarlet. She stood silent a
moment. Then: "_You?_" she cried. "Oh, it's _not_ fair--it's mean--it's
shameful! Oh--how could you! And girls write to _you_--and they think
it's a woman--and they tell you about their troubles. It's horrible!
It's underhand--it's abominable! I hate you for it. Every one ought to
know. I shall write to the papers."
"Please, please," said the editor hurriedly and humbly--"it's not my
fault. It _is_ a lady who does it generally, but she had to go away--and
I couldn't get any one else to do it. And I didn't see--till after you'd
been the other day--that it wasn't fair. And I was going to ask if _you_
would do it--the correspondence, I mean--just for this week. I wish you
would!"
"Could I?" she said doubtfully.
"Of course you could! And if you'd bring the copy on Monday--about two
columns, you know--we could go through it together and----"
"Well, I'll try," said Kitty abruptly, reaching out for the sheaf of
letters which he was gathering together.
And now who was happier than Kitty, seated behind her locked bedroom
door advising "Dieu-donnee" and "Shy Fairy" and "Contadina" out of the
unfathomable depths of her girlish inexperience. Her advice looked
wonderfully practical, though, in print, she thought, as with a thrill
of pride and joy she corrected the first proofs. And she wrote stories,
too, and they, too, were printed. It was indeed a bright and beautiful
world. Aunt Eliza stayed away for five glorious weeks. Kitty, with an
enthralling sense of reckless wickedness, gave up her useless music
lessons, and in going three times a week to the office experienced a
glowing consciousness of the joy and dignity of honest toil.
The editor, by the way, during these five weeks fell in love with Kitty,
exactly as he had known he would do when first he saw her grey eyes.
Kitty had never been so happy in all her life. The child honestly
believed hers to be the happiness that comes from congenial work. And
her editor was so clever and so kind! No one ever smoked in the office
now, and there were always roses. And Kitty took them home with her, so
that now there was no need to wonder for whom he had bought them.
Then came the inevitable hour. He met her one day with a clouded face
and a letter in his hand.
"It's all over," he said; "the real original old Aunt Kate is coming
back. She's the dearest old thing, so kind and jolly--but--but--but--
whatever shall we do?"
"I can still write stories, I suppose," said Kitty, but she realised
with a gasp that congenial toil would not be quite, quite the same
without congenial companionship.
"Yes," said he, picking up the bunch of red roses, "but--here are your
flowers--don't you know yet that I can't possibly do without you? In a
few months I'm to have the editorship of a new weekly, a much better
berth than this. If only you would----"
"Write the correspondence?" said Kitty, brightening; "of course I will.
I don't know what I should do without----"
"I wish," he interrupted, "that I could think it was _me_ you couldn't
do without." Her pretty eyes met his over the red roses, and he caught
her hands with the flowers in them. "Is it? Oh, say you can't do without
me either. Say it, say it!"
"I--I--don't want to do without you," said Kitty at last. He was holding
her hands fast, and she was trying, not very earnestly, perhaps, to pull
them away. The pair made a pretty picture.
"Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!" he said softly, and then the door opened, and
suddenly, without the least warning, a middle-aged lady became a
spectator of the little tableau. The newcomer wore a mantle with beads
on it, a black bonnet wherein nodded a violet flower--and beads and
flower and bonnet were absolutely familiar to each of the astonished
ones now standing consciously with the breadth of the office between
them. For in that middle-aged lady the editor recognised Aunt Kate, the
pleasant, sensible, companionable woman who for years had written those
sympathetic "Answers to Correspondents" in the _Girls' Very Own Friend_.
And at the same moment Kitty recognised, beyond all possibility of
doubt, Aunt Eliza--her own grim, harsh, uncongenial Aunt Eliza.
Kitty cowered--in her frightened soul she cowered. But her little figure
drew itself up, and the point of her chin rose a quarter of an inch.
"Aunt Eliza," she said firmly, "I know you will----"
"_Your Aunt Eliza_, Kitty?" cried the editor.
"'Kitty'?" said the aunt.
And now the situation hung all too nicely balanced on the extreme edge
of the absolutely impossible. Would this middle-aged lady--an aunt
beyond doubt--an aunt who so long had played a double _role_, assume,
now that one _role_ must be chosen, the part of Aunt Eliza the Terrible
or of Aunt Kate the Kind? The aunt was dumb. Kitty was dumb. But the
editor had his wits about him, and Kate, though shaken, was not
absolutely paralysed.
"It's almost too good to be true," he said, "that _my_ Aunt Kate is
really _your_ Aunt Eliza. Aunt Kate, Kitty and I have just decided that
we can't do without each other. I am so glad that you are the first to
wish us joy."
At his words all the "Kate" in the aunt rose triumphant, trampling down
the "Eliza."
"My dear boy," she said--and she said it in a voice which Kitty had
never heard before--the sound of that voice drew Kitty like a magnet.
She did the only possible thing--she put her arms timidly round her
aunt's neck and whispered: "Oh, don't be Aunt Eliza any more, be Aunt
Kate!"
It was Aunt Kate's arms undoubtedly that went round the girl. Certainly
not Aunt Eliza's.
"I will take a walk down Fleet Street," said the editor discreetly.
Then there were explanations in the office.
"But why," said Kitty, when all the questions had been asked and
answered, "why were you Aunt Eliza to me, and Aunt Kate to him?"
"My dear, one must spoil somebody, and I was determined not to spoil
_you_; I wanted to save you. All my life was ruined because I was a
spoiled child--and because I tried to write. I had such dreams, such
ambitions--just like yours, you silly child! But then I was never
clever--perhaps you may be--and it all ended in my losing my lover. He
married a nice, quiet, domestic girl, and I never made name or fame at
all--I never got anything taken but fashion articles--and 'Answers to
Correspondents.' Now, that's the whole tale. Don't mention it again."
"But you did love me, even when----"
"Of course I did," said Aunt Kate in the testy tones of Aunt Eliza; "or
why should I have bothered at all about whether you were going to be
happy or not? Now, Kitty, you're not to expect me to gush. I've
forgotten how to be sentimental except on paper."
"I don't want to be sentimental," said Kitty, a little injured, "neither
does----"
Here the editor came in.
"You don't want to be sentimental either," Kitty went on; "do you--Mr
Editor?"
The editor looked a little doubtful.
"I want to be happy, at any rate," said he, "and I mean to be."
"And he can't be happy unless you smile on him. Smile on him, Auntie!"
cried a new, radiant Kitty, to whom aunts no longer presented any
terrors. "Say 'Bless you, my children!' Auntie--do!"
"Get along with your nonsense!" said Aunt Eliza. Or was it Aunt Kate?
VIII
MISS MOUSE
They were poor, not with the desperate poverty that has to look on both
sides of a penny, but with the decent bearable poverty that must look at
a shilling with attention, and with respect at half-a-crown. There was
money for the necessities of life, the mother said, but no money to
waste. This was what she always tried to say when Maisie came in with
rainbow representations of the glories of local "sales" piteous pictures
of beautiful things going almost for nothing--things not absolutely
needed, but which would "come in useful." Maisie's dress was never
allowed those touches of cheap finery which would have made it
characteristic of her. Her clothes were good, and she had to patch and
mend and contrive so much that sometimes it seemed to her as though all
her life was going by in the effort to achieve, by a distasteful
process, a result which she abhorred. For her artistic sense was too
weak to show her how the bright, soft freshness of her tints gained by
contrast with the dull greys and browns and drabs that were her mother's
choice--good wearing colours, from which the pink and white of her face
rose triumphantly, like a beautiful flower out of a rough calyx.
The house was like Maisie, in that it never seemed to have anything
new--none of those bright, picturesque cushions and screens and
Japaneseries which she adored through the plate-glass windows of the big
local draper. The curtains were of old damask, faded but rich; the
furniture was mahogany, old and solid; the carpets were Turkey and
Aubusson--patched and darned this last, but still beautiful. Maisie knew
all about old oak--she had read her _Home Hints_ and her _Gentlewoman's
Guide_--but she had no idea that mahogany could be fashionable. None of
the photographs of the drawing-rooms of celebrities in her favourite
papers were anything like the little sitting-room where her mother sat
knitting by the hearth, surrounded by the relics of a house that had
been handsome in the 'sixties, when it was her girlhood's home. Maisie
hated it all: the chairs covered in Berlin-wool needlework, the dark,
polished surfaces of the tables and bureaux, the tinkling lustres of
Bohemian glass, the shining brass trivet on which the toast kept itself
warm, the crude colours of the tea-service, the smell of eau-de-Cologne
mingling with the faint scent of beeswax and cedar-wood. She would have
liked to change the old water-colours in their rubbed gilt frames for
dark-mounted autotypes. How should she know that those hideous pigs were
Morlands, and that the cow picture was a David Cox. She would have liked
Japanese blue transfers instead of the gold-and-white china--old
Bristol, by the way, but Maisie knew nothing of Bristol. The regular,
sober orderliness of the house chafed and fretted her; the recurrent
duties, all dull; the few guests who came to tea. Decent poverty cannot
give dinner parties or dances. She visited her school friends, and when
she came home again it seemed to her sometimes as though the atmosphere
of the place would choke her.
"I want to go out and earn my own living," she said to her cousin Edward
one Sunday afternoon when her mother was resting and he and she were
roasting chestnuts on the bars of the dining-room fire. "I'm simply
useless here."
Edward was a second cousin. To him the little house was the ideal home,
just as Maisie was--well, not, perhaps, the ideal girl, but the only
girl in the world, which comes to much the same thing. But he never told
her so: he dared not risk losing the cousin's place and missing for ever
the lover's.
So, in his anxiety lest she should know how much he cared, he scolded
her a good deal. But he took her to picture galleries and to _matinees_,
and softened her life in a hundred ways that she never noticed. He was
only "Poor old Edward," and he knew it.
"How can you?" he said. "Why, what on earth would Aunt do without you?
Here, have this one--it's a beauty."
"I ought to have been taught a trade, like other poor girls," she went
on, waving away the roasted chestnut. "Lots of the girls I was at school
with are earning as much as a pound a week now--typewriting or painting
birthday cards, and some of them are in the Post Office--and I do
nothing but drudge away at home. It's too bad."
Edward would have given a decent sum at that moment to be inspired with
exactly the right thing to say. As it was he looked at her helplessly.
"I don't understand, I'm afraid," said he.
"You never do," she answered crossly. There was a silence in which she
felt the growth of a need to justify herself--to herself as well as to
him. "Why, don't you see," she urged, "it's my plain duty to go out and
earn something. Why, we're as poor as ever we can be--I haven't any
pocket-money hardly--I can't even buy presents for people. I have to
_make_ presents out of odds and ends of old things, instead of buying
them, like other girls."
"I think you make awfully pretty things," he said; "much prettier than
any one can buy."
"You're thinking of that handkerchief-case I gave Aunt Emma at
Christmas. Why, you silly, it was only a bit of one of mother's old
dresses. I do wish you'd talk to mother about it. I might go out as
companion or something."
The word came before the thought, but the thought was brought by the
word and the thought stayed.
That very evening Maisie began to lay siege to her mother's desired
consent.
She put her arguments very neatly, so neatly that it was hard for the
mother to oppose them without being betrayed into an attitude that would
seem grossly selfish.
She sat looking into the fire, thinking of all the little, unceasing
sacrifices that had been her life ever since Maisie had been hers--even
the giving up of that treasured silk, her wedding dress, last Christmas,
because Maisie wanted something pretty to make Christmas presents out
of. She remembered it all; and now this new great sacrifice was called
for. She had given up to Maisie everything but her taste in dress, and
now it seemed that she was desired to give up even Maisie herself. But
the other sacrifices had been for Maisie's good or for her pleasure.
Would this one be for either?
She saw her little girl alone among strangers, snubbed, looked down
upon, a sort of upper servant with none of a servant's privileges; she
nerved herself to what was always to her an almost unbearable effort.
Her heart was beating and her hands trembling as she said: "My dear,
it's quite impossible; I couldn't possibly allow it."
"I must say I don't see why," said Maisie, with tears in her voice.
Her mother dropped the mass of fleecy white wool and the clinking
knitting needles and grasped the arms of her chair intensely. Her eyes
behind the spectacles clouded with tears. It seemed to her that her
child should surely understand the agony it was to her mother to refuse
her anything.
"I could earn money for you--it's not myself I'm thinking about," the
girl went on; the half-lie came out quite without her conscious
volition. "I wish you didn't always think I do everything for selfish
reasons."
"I don't, my dear," said the mother feebly.
"I'm sure it's my duty," Maisie went on, with more tears than ever in
her voice. "I'm eighteen, and I ought to be earning something, instead
of being a burden to you."
The mother looked hopelessly into the fire. She had always tried to
explain things to Maisie; how was it that Maisie never understood?
"I'm sure," said Maisie, echoing her mother's thought, "I always try to
tell you how I think about things, and you never seem to understand. Of
course, I won't go if you wish it, but I _do_ think----"
She left the room in tears, and the mother remained to torment herself
with the eternal questions, What had she done wrong? Why was Maisie not
contented? What could she do to please her? Would nothing please her but
the things that were not for her good--smart clothes, change, novelty?
How could she bear her life if Maisie was not pleased?
She went down to supper shivering with misery and apprehension. What a
meal it would be with Maisie cold and aloof, polite and indifferent! But
Maisie was cheerful, gay almost, and her mother felt a passion of
gratitude to her daughter for not being sulky or unapproachable. Maisie,
however, was only stepping back to jump the better.
The same scene, with intenser variations, was played about twice a week
till the girl got her way, as she always did in the end, except in the
matter of cheap finery. Taste in dress was as vital to the mother as her
religion. Then, through the influence of an old governess of her
mother's, Maisie got her wish. She was to go as companion to an old
lady, the mother of Lady Yalding, and she was to live at Yalding Towers.
Here was splendour--here would be life, incident, opportunity! For her
reading had sometimes strayed from _Home Hints_ to the _Family Herald_,
and she knew exactly what are the chances of romance to a humble
companion in the family of a lady of title.
And now Maisie's mother gave way to her, finally and completely, even on
the question of dress. The old wardrobe was ransacked to find materials
to fit her out with clothes for her new venture. It was a beautiful time
for Maisie. New things, and old things made to look as good as new, or
better. It was like having a trousseau. The mother lavished on her child
every inch of the old lace, every one of the treasured trinkets--even
the little old locket that had been the dead husband's first love-gift.
And Maisie, in the flutter of her excitement and anticipation, was
loving and tender and charming, and the mother had her reward.
Edward opposed a stolid and stony disapproval to all the new enthusiasm.
He said little because he feared to say too much.
"Poor little Maisie!" he said. "You'll soon find out that you didn't
know when you were well off."
"Edward, I hate you," said Maisie, and she thought she did.
But when all the beautiful new clothes were packed and her cab was at
the door, some sense of what she was leaving did come to the girl, and
she flung her arms round her mother in an embrace such as she had never
given in her life.
"I don't want to go," she cried. "Mummy darling, I've been a little
beast about it. I won't go if you say you'd rather not. Shall I send the
cab away? I will if you say so, my own dear old Mummy!"
Maisie's mother was not a very wise woman, but she was not fool enough
to trust this new softness.
"No, no, dearest," she said; "go and try your own way. God bless you, my
darling! You'll miss the train if you stay. God bless you, my darling!"
And Maisie went away crying hard through the new veil with the black
velvet spots on it; as for the mother--but she was elderly, and plain,
and foolishly fond, and her emotions can have but little interest for
the readers of romances.
And now Maisie, for the first time, knew the meaning of home. And before
she had been at Yalding a week she had learned to analyse home and to
give names to its constituents: love, interest, sympathy, liberty--these
were some.
At Yalding Towers Maisie was nothing to any one. No one knew or cared
one single little bit of a straw whether she was unhappy or no. Her time
was filled, and overfilled, by the attentions exacted by an old,
eccentric, and very disagreeable lady. When she put on, for the first
evening, the least pretty of the pretty dresses she had brought with
her, the old lady looked at her with a disapproval almost rising to
repulsion, and said: "I expect you to wear black; and a linen collar and
cuffs."
So another black dress had to be ordered from home, and all the pretty,
dainty things lay creasing themselves with disuse in the ample drawers
and cupboards of her vast, dreary bedroom.
Her employer was exacting and irritable. When on the third day Maisie
broke into tears under the constant flood of nagging, the old lady told
her to go away and not to come back till she could control her temper.
"I'll come back when you send for me, and not before, you hateful old
thing!" said Maisie to herself.
And she sat down in her fireless bedroom and wrote a long letter to her
mother, saying how happy she felt, and how kind every one was, and what
a lovely and altogether desirable place was Yalding Towers. Who shall
say whether pride or love, or both, dictated that letter?
When her employer did send for her, it was to tell her, very sharply,
that one more such exhibition of sullenness would cost her her
situation. So she had to learn to school herself. And she did it. But
the learning was hard, very hard, and in the learning she grew thinner,
and some of the pretty pink in her cheeks faded away.
Lady Yalding, when she swept in, in beautiful dream-dresses, always
spoke to the companion quite kindly and nicely and pleasantly, but there
were none of those invitations to come into the drawing-room after
dinner which the _Family Herald_ had led her to expect. Lady Yalding was
always charming to every one, and Maisie tortured herself with the
thought that it was only because she had no opportunity to explain
herself that Lady Yalding failed to see how very much out of the common
she was. She read Ruskin industriously, and once she left her own book
of Browning selections that Edward had gi
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