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THE PRICE OF LOVE
A Tale
by
ARNOLD BENNETT
1914
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. MONEY IN THE HOUSE
II. LOUIS' DISCOVERY
III. THE FEAST
IV. IN THE NIGHT
V. NEWS OF THE NIGHT
VI. THEORIES OF THE THEFT
VII. THE CINEMA
VIII. END AND BEGINNING
IX. THE MARRIED WOMAN
X. THE CHASM
XI. JULIAN'S DOCUMENT
XII. RUNAWAY HORSES
XIII. DEAD-LOCK
XIV. THE MARKET
XV. THE CHANGED MAN
XVI. THE LETTER
XVII. IN THE MONASTERY
XVIII. MRS. TAMS'S STRANGE BEHAVIOUR
XIX. RACHEL AND MR. HORROCLEAVE
CHAPTER I
MONEY IN THE HOUSE
I
In the evening dimness of old Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room stood the
youthful virgin, Rachel Louisa Fleckring. The prominent fact about
her appearance was that she wore an apron. Not one of those
white, waist-tied aprons, with or without bibs, worn proudly,
uncompromisingly, by a previous generation of unaspiring housewives
and housegirls! But an immense blue pinafore-apron, covering the whole
front of the figure except the head, hands, and toes. Its virtues were
that it fully protected the most fragile frock against all the perils
of the kitchen; and that it could be slipped on or off in one
second, without any manipulation of tapes, pins, or buttons and
buttonholes--for it had no fastenings of any sort and merely yawned
behind. In one second the drudge could be transformed into the elegant
infanta of boudoirs, and _vice versa_. To suit the coquetry of
the age the pinafore was enriched with certain flouncings, which,
however, only intensified its unshapen ugliness.
On a plain, middle-aged woman such a pinafore would have been
intolerable to the sensitive eye. But on Rachel it simply had
a piquant and perverse air, because she was young, with the
incomparable, the unique charm of comely adolescence; it simply
excited the imagination to conceive the exquisite treasures of contour
and tint and texture which it veiled. Do not infer that Rachel was
a coquette. Although comely, she was homely--a "downright" girl,
scorning and hating all manner of pretentiousness. She had a fine best
dress, and when she put it on everybody knew that it was her best; a
stranger would have known. Whereas of a coquette none but her intimate
companions can say whether she is wearing best or second-best on a
given high occasion. Rachel used the pinafore-apron only with her best
dress, and her reason for doing so was the sound, sensible reason that
it was the usual and proper thing to do.
She opened a drawer of the new Sheraton sideboard, and took from it
a metal tube that imitated brass, about a foot long and an inch
in diameter, covered with black lettering. This tube, when she
had removed its top, showed a number of thin wax tapers in various
colours. She chose one, lit it neatly at the red fire, and then,
standing on a footstool in the middle of the room, stretched all her
body and limbs upward in order to reach the gas. If the tap had been
half an inch higher or herself half an inch shorter, she would have
had to stand on a chair instead of a footstool; and the chair would
have had to be brought out of the kitchen and carried back again. But
Heaven had watched over this detail. The gas-fitting consisted of a
flexible pipe, resembling a thick black cord, and swinging at the
end of it a specimen of that wonderful and blessed contrivance, the
inverted incandescent mantle within a porcelain globe: the whole
recently adopted by Mrs. Maldon as the dangerous final word of modern
invention. It was safer to ignite the gas from the orifice at the
top of the globe; but even so there was always a mild disconcerting
explosion, followed by a few moments' uncertainty as to whether or not
the gas had "lighted properly."
When the deed was accomplished and the room suddenly bright with soft
illumination, Mrs. Maldon murmured--
"That's better!"
She was sitting in her arm-chair by the glitteringly set table, which,
instead of being in the centre of the floor under the gas, had a place
near the bow-window--advantageous in the murky daytime of the Five
Towns, and inconvenient at night. The table might well have been
shifted at night to a better position in regard to the gas. But it
never was. Somehow for Mrs. Maldon the carpet was solid concrete, and
the legs of the table immovably embedded therein.
Rachel, gentle-footed, kicked the footstool away to its lair under the
table, and simultaneously extinguished the taper, which she dropped
with a scarce audible click into a vase on the mantelpiece. Then she
put the cover on the tube with another faintest click, restored the
tube to its drawer with a rather louder click, and finally, with a
click still louder, pushed the drawer home. All these slight sounds
were familiar to Mrs. Maldon; they were part of her regular night
life, part of an unconsciously loved ritual, and they contributed in
their degree to her placid happiness.
"Now the blinds, my dear!" said she.
The exhortation was ill-considered, and Rachel controlled a gesture of
amicable impatience. For she had not paused after closing the drawer;
she was already on her way across the room to the window when Mrs.
Maldon said, "Now the blinds, my dear!" The fact was that Mrs. Maldon
measured the time between the lighting of gas and the drawing down of
blinds by tenths of a second--such was her fear lest in that sinister
interval the whole prying town might magically gather in the street
outside and peer into the secrets of her inculpable existence.
II
When the blinds and curtains had been arranged for privacy, Mrs.
Maldon sighed securely and picked up her crocheting. Rachel rested her
hands on the table, which was laid for a supper for four, and asked in
a firm, frank voice whether there was anything else.
"Because, if not," Rachel added, "I'll just take off my pinafore and
wash my hands."
Mrs. Maldon looked up benevolently and nodded in quick agreement.
It was such apparently trifling gestures, eager and generous, that
endeared the old lady to Rachel, giving her the priceless sensation
of being esteemed and beloved. Her gaze lingered on her aged employer
with affection and with profound respect. Mrs. Maldon made a striking,
tall, slim figure, sitting erect in tight black, with the right side
of her long, prominent nose in the full gaslight and the other heavily
shadowed. Her hair was absolutely black at over seventy; her eyes were
black and glowing, and she could read and do coarse crocheting
without spectacles. All her skin, especially round about the eyes, was
yellowish brown and very deeply wrinkled indeed; a decrepit, senile
skin, which seemed to contradict the youth of her pose and her glance.
The cast of her features was benign. She had passed through desolating
and violent experiences, and then through a long, long period of
withdrawn tranquillity; and from end to end of her life she had
consistently thought the best of all men, refusing to recognize evil
and assuming the existence of good. Every one of the millions of her
kind thoughts had helped to mould the expression of her countenance.
The expression was definite now, fixed, intensely characteristic after
so many decades, and wherever it was seen it gave pleasure and by
its enchantment created goodness and goodwill--even out of their
opposites. Such was the life-work of Mrs. Maldon.
Her eyes embraced the whole room. They did not, as the phrase is,
"beam" approval; for the act of beaming involves a sort of ecstasy,
and Mrs. Maldon was too dignified for ecstasy. But they displayed a
mild and proud contentment as she said--
"I'm sure it's all very nice."
It was. The table crowded with porcelain, crystal, silver, and
flowers, and every object upon it casting a familiar curved shadow on
the whiteness of the damask toward the window! The fresh crimson and
blues of the everlasting Turkey carpet (Turkey carpet being the _ne
plus ultra_ of carpetry in the Five Towns, when that carpet was
bought, just as sealskin was the _ne plus ultra_ of all furs)!
The silken-polished sideboard, strange to the company, but worthy
of it, and exhibiting a due sense of its high destiny! The sombre
bookcase and corner cupboard, darkly glittering! The Chesterfield
sofa, broad, accepting, acquiescent! The flashing brass fender
and copper scuttle! The comfortably reddish walls, with their
pictures--like limpets on the face of precipices! The new-whitened
ceiling! In the midst the incandescent lamp that hung like the moon
in heaven!... And then the young, sturdy girl, standing over the
old woman and breathing out the very breath of life, vitalizing
everything, rejuvenating the old woman!
Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room had a considerable renown among her
acquaintance, not only for its peculiar charm, which combined and
reconciled the tastes of two very different generations, but also for
its radiant cleanness. There are many clean houses in the Five Towns,
using the adjective in the relative sense in which the Five Towns is
forced by chimneys to use it. But Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room (save for
the white window-curtains, which had to accept the common grey fate of
white window-curtains in the district) was clean in the country-side
sense, almost in the Dutch sense. The challenge of its cleanness
gleamed on every polished surface, victorious in the unending battle
against the horrible contagion of foul industries. Mrs. Maldon's
friends would assert that the state of that sitting-room "passed"
them, or "fair passed" them, and she would receive their ever-amazed
compliments with modesty. But behind her benevolent depreciation she
would be blandly saying to herself: "Yes, I'm scarcely surprised it
passes you--seeing the way you housewives let things go on here."
The word "here" would be faintly emphasized in her mind, as no native
would have emphasized it.
Rachel shared the general estimate of the sitting-room. She
appreciated its charm, and admitted to herself that her first vision
of it, rather less than a month before, had indeed given her a new and
startling ideal of cleanliness. On that occasion it had been evident,
from Mrs. Maldon's physical exhaustion, that the housemistress had
made an enormous personal effort to _dazzle_ and inspire her new
"lady companion," which effort, though detected and perhaps scorned by
Rachel, had nevertheless succeeded in its aim. With a certain presence
of mind Rachel had feigned to remark nothing miraculous in the
condition of the room. Appropriating the new ideal instantly, she
had on the first morning of her service "turned out" the room before
breakfast, well knowing that it must have been turned out on the
previous day. Dumbfounded for a few moments, Mrs. Maldon had at length
said, in her sweet and cordial benevolence, "I'm glad to see we think
alike about cleanliness." And Rachel had replied with an air at once
deferential, sweet, and yet casual, "Oh, of course, Mrs. Maldon!" Then
they measured one another in a silent exchange. Mrs. Maldon was aware
that she had by chance discovered a pearl--yes, a treasure beyond
pearls. And Rachel, too, divined the high value of her employer, and
felt within the stirrings of a passionate loyalty to her.
III
And yet, during the three weeks and a half of their joint existence,
Rachel's estimate of Mrs. Maldon had undergone certain subtle
modifications.
At first, somewhat overawed, Rachel had seen in her employer the Mrs.
Maldon of the town's legend, which legend had travelled to Rachel
as far as Knype, whence she sprang. That is to say, one of the
great ladies of Bursley, ranking in the popular regard with
Mrs. Clayton-Vernon, the leader of society, Mrs. Sutton, the
philanthropist, and Mrs. Hamps, the powerful religious bully. She had
been impressed by her height (Rachel herself being no lamp-post), her
carriage, her superlative dignity, her benevolence of thought, and
above all by her aristocratic Southern accent. After eight-and-forty
years of the Five Towns, Mrs. Maldon had still kept most of that
Southern accent--so intimidating to the rough, broad talkers of the
district, who take revenge by mocking it among themselves, but for
whom it will always possess the thrilling prestige of high life.
And then day by day Rachel had discovered that great ladies are, after
all, human creatures, strangely resembling other human creatures. And
Mrs. Maldon slowly became for her an old woman of seventy-two,
with unquestionably wondrous hair, but failing in strength and in
faculties; and it grew merely pathetic to Rachel that Mrs. Maldon
should force herself always to sit straight upright. As for Mrs.
Maldon's charitableness, Rachel could not deny that she refused to
think evil, and yet it was plain that at bottom Mrs. Maldon was not
much deceived about people: in which apparent inconsistency there hid
a slight disturbing suggestion of falseness that mysteriously fretted
the downright Rachel.
Again, beneath Mrs. Maldon's modesty concerning the merits of her
sitting-room Rachael soon fancied that she could detect traces of an
ingenuous and possibly senile "house-pride," which did more than fret
the lady companion; it faintly offended her. That one should be proud
of a possession or of an achievement was admissible, but that one
should fail to conceal the pride absolutely was to Rachel, with her
Five Towns character, a sign of weakness, a sign of the soft South.
Lastly, Mrs. Maldon had, it transpired, her "ways"; for example, in
the matter of blinds and in the matter of tapers. She would actually
insist on the gas being lighted with a taper; a paper spill, which was
just as good and better, seemed to ruffle her benign placidity: and
she was funnily economical with matches. Rachel had never seen a taper
before, and could not conceive where the old lady managed to buy the
things.
In short, with admiration almost undiminished, and with a rapidly
growing love and loyalty, Rachel had arrived at the point of feeling
glad that she, a mature, capable, sagacious, and strong woman, was
there to watch over the last years of the waning and somewhat peculiar
old lady.
Mrs. Maldon did not see the situation from quite the same angle. She
did not, for example, consider herself to be in the least peculiar,
but, on the contrary, a very normal woman. She had always used tapers;
she could remember the period when every one used tapers. In her
view tapers were far more genteel and less dangerous than the untidy,
flaring spill, which she abhorred as a vulgarity. As for matches,
frankly it would not have occurred to her to waste a match when fire
was available. In the matter of her sharp insistence on drawn blinds
at night, domestic privacy seemed to be one of the fundamental
decencies of life--simply that! And as for house-pride, she considered
that she locked away her fervent feeling for her parlour in a manner
marvellous and complete.
No one could or ever would guess the depth of her attachment to that
sitting-room, nor the extent to which it engrossed her emotional life.
And yet she had only occupied the house for fourteen years out of the
forty-five years of her widowhood, and the furniture had at intervals
been renewed (for Mrs. Maldon would on no account permit herself to
be old-fashioned). Indeed, she had had five different sitting-rooms in
five different houses since her husband's death. No matter. They were
all the same sitting-room, all rendered identical by the mysterious
force of her dreamy meditations on the past. And, moreover, sundry
important articles had remained constant to preserve unbroken the
chain that linked her to her youth. The table which Rachel had so
nicely laid was the table at which Mrs. Maldon had taken her first
meal as mistress of a house. Her husband had carved mutton at it, and
grumbled about the consistency of toast; her children had spilt jam on
its cloth. And when on Sunday nights she wound up the bracket-clock on
the mantelpiece, she could see and hear a handsome young man in a long
frock-coat and a large shirt-front and a very thin black tie winding
it up too--her husband--on Sunday nights. And she could simultaneously
see another handsome young man winding it up--her son.
Her pictures were admired.
"Your son painted this water-colour, did he not, Mrs. Maldon?"
"Yes, my son Athelstan."
"How gifted he must have been!"
"Yes, the best judges say he showed very remarkable promise. It's
fading, I fear. I ought to cover it up, but somehow I can't fancy
covering it up--"
The hand that had so remarkably promised had lain mouldering for a
quarter of a century. Mrs. Maldon sometimes saw it, fleshless, on a
cage-like skeleton in the dark grave. The next moment she would see
herself tending its chilblains.
And if she was not peculiar, neither was she waning. No!
Seventy-two--but not truly old! How could she be truly old when she
could see, hear, walk a mile without stopping, eat anything whatever,
and dress herself unaided? And that hair of hers! Often she was still
a young wife, or a young widow. She was not preparing for death; she
had prepared for death in the seventies. She expected to live on
in calm satisfaction through indefinite decades. She savoured life
pleasantly, for its daily security was impregnable. She had forgotten
grief.
When she looked up at Rachel and benevolently nodded to her, she saw
a girl of line character, absolutely trustworthy, very devoted, very
industrious, very capable, intelligent, cheerful--in fact, a splendid
girl, a girl to be enthusiastic about! But such a mere girl! A girl
with so much to learn! So pathetically young and inexperienced
and positive and sure of herself! The looseness of her limbs, the
unconscious abrupt freedom of her gestures, the waviness of her auburn
hair, the candour of her glance, the warmth of her indignation against
injustice and dishonesty, the capricious and sensitive flowings of
blood to her smooth cheeks, the ridiculous wise compressings of
her lips, the rise and fall of her rich and innocent bosom--these
phenomena touched Mrs. Maldon and occasionally made her want to cry.
Thought she: "_I_ was never so young as that at twenty-two! At
twenty-two I had had Mary!" The possibility that in spite of having
had Mary (who would now have been fifty, but for death) she had as a
fact been approximately as young as that at twenty-two did not ever
present itself to the waning and peculiar old lady. She was glad that
she, a mature and profoundly experienced woman, in full possession
of all her faculties, was there to watch over the development of the
lovable, affectionate, and impulsive child.
IV
"Oh! Here's the paper, Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel, as, turning away to
leave the room, she caught sight of the extra special edition of
the _Signal_, which lay a pale green on the dark green of the
Chesterfield.
Mrs. Maldon answered placidly--
"When did you bring it in? I never heard the boy come. But my
hearing's not quite what it used to be, that's true. Open it for me,
my dear. I can't stretch my arms as I used to."
She was one of the few women in the Five Towns who deigned to read
a newspaper regularly, and one of the still fewer who would lead the
miscellaneous conversation of drawing-rooms away from domestic chatter
and discussions of individualities, to political and municipal topics
and even toward general ideas. She seldom did more than mention a
topic and then express a hope for the best, or explain that this
phenomenon was "such a pity," or that phenomenon "such a good thing,"
or that about another phenomenon "one really didn't know what to
think." But these remarks sufficed to class her apart among her sex as
"a very up-to-date old lady, with a broad outlook upon the world,"
and to inspire sundry other ladies with a fearful respect for her
masculine intellect and judgment. She was aware of her superiority,
and had a certain kind disdain for the increasing number of women
who took in a daily picture-paper, and who, having dawdled over its
illustrations after breakfast, spoke of what they had seen in the
"newspaper." She would not allow that a picture-paper was a newspaper.
Rachel stood in the empty space under the gas. Her arms were stretched
out and slightly upward as she held the _Signal_ wide open and
glanced at the newspaper, frowning. The light fell full on her coppery
hair. Her balanced body, though masked in front by the perpendicular
fall of the apron as she bent somewhat forward, was nevertheless the
image of potential vivacity and energy; it seemed almost to vibrate
with its own consciousness of physical pride.
Left alone, Rachel would never have opened a newspaper, at any rate
for the news. Until she knew Mrs. Maldon she had never seen a woman
read a newspaper for aught except the advertisements relating to
situations, houses, and pleasures. But, much more than she imagined,
she was greatly under the influence of Mrs. Maldon. Mrs. Maldon made
a nightly solemnity of the newspaper, and Rachel naturally soon
persuaded herself that it was a fine and a superior thing to read the
newspaper--a proof of unusual intelligence. Moreover, just as she
felt bound to show Mrs. Maldon that her notion of cleanliness was as
advanced as anybody's, so she felt bound to indicate, by an appearance
of casualness, that for her to read the paper was the most customary
thing in the world. Of course she read the paper! And that she should
calmly look at it herself before handing it to her mistress proved
that she had already established a very secure position in the house.
She said, her eyes following the lines, and her feet moving in the
direction of Mrs. Maldon--"Those burglaries are still going on ...
Hillport now!"
"Oh, dear, dear!" murmured Mrs. Maldon, as Rachel spread the newspaper
lightly over the tea-tray and its contents. "Oh, dear, dear! I do
hope the police will catch some one soon. I'm sure they're doing their
best, but really--!"
Rachel bent with confident intimacy over the old lady's shoulder, and
they read the burglary column together, Rachel interrupting herself
for an instant to pick up Mrs. Maldon's ball of black wool which had
slipped to the floor. The _Signal_ reporter had omitted none of
the classic _cliches_ proper to the subject, and such words
and phrases as "jemmy," "effected an entrance," "the servant, now
thoroughly alarmed," "stealthy footsteps," "escaped with their booty,"
seriously disquieted both of the women--caused a sudden sensation of
sinking in the region of the heart. Yet neither would put the secret
fear into speech, for each by instinct felt that a fear once uttered
is strengthened and made more real. Living solitary and unprotected
by male sinews, in a house which, though it did not stand alone, was
somewhat withdrawn from the town, they knew themselves the ideal prey
of conventional burglars with masks, dark lanterns, revolvers, and
jemmies. They were grouped together like some symbolic sculpture, and
with all their fortitude and common sense they still in unconscious
attitude expressed the helpless and resigned fatalism of their sex
before certain menaces of bodily danger, the thrilled, expectant
submission of women in a city about to be sacked.
Nothing could save them if the peril entered the house. But they would
not say aloud: "Suppose they came _here_! How terrible!" They
would not even whisper the slightest apprehension. They just briefly
discussed the matter with a fine air of indifferent aloofness,
remaining calm while the brick walls and the social system which
defended that bright and delicate parlour from the dark, savage
universe without seemed to crack and shiver.
Mrs. Maldon, suddenly noticing that one blind was half an inch
short of the bottom of the window, rose nervously and pulled it down
farther.
"Why didn't you ask me to do that?" said Rachel, thinking what a
fidgety person the old lady was.
Mrs. Maldon replied--"It's all right, my dear. Did you fasten the
window on the upstairs landing?"
"As if burglars would try to get in by an upstairs window--and on
the street!" thought Rachel, pityingly impatient. "However, it's her
house, and I'm paid to do what I'm told," she added to herself, very
sensibly. Then she said, aloud, in a soothing tone--
"No, I didn't. But I will do it."
She moved towards the door, and at the same moment a knock on the
front door sent a vibration through the whole house. Nearly all
knocks on the front door shook the house; and further, burglars do
not generally knock as a preliminary to effecting an entrance.
Nevertheless, both women started--and were ashamed of starting.
"Surely he's rather early!" said Mrs. Maldon with an exaggerated
tranquillity.
And Rachel, with a similar lack of conviction in her calm gait, went
audaciously forth into the dark lobby.
V
On the glass panels of the front door the street lamp threw a faint,
distorted shadow of a bowler hat, two rather protruding ears, and
a pair of long, outspreading whiskers whose ends merged into broad
shoulders. Any one familiar with the streets of Bursley would have
instantly divined that Councillor Thomas Batchgrew stood between the
gas-lamp and the front door. And even Rachel, whose acquaintance
with Bursley was still slight, at once recognized the outlines of the
figure. She had seen Councillor Batchgrew one day conversing with Mrs.
Maldon in Moorthorne Road, and she knew that he bore to Mrs. Maldon
the vague but imposing relation of "trustee."
There are many--indeed perhaps too many--remarkable men in the Five
Towns. Thomas Batchgrew was one of them. He had begun life as a small
plumber in Bursley market-place, living behind and above the shop, and
begetting a considerable family, which exercised itself in the back
yard among empty and full turpentine-cans. The original premises
survived, as a branch establishment, and Batchgrew's latest-married
grandson condescended to reside on the first floor, and to keep a
motor-car and a tri-car in the back yard, now roofed over (in a manner
not strictly conforming to the building by-laws of the borough).
All Batchgrew's sons and daughters were married, and several of his
grandchildren also. And all his children, and more than one of the
grandchildren, kept motor-cars. Not a month passed but some Batchgrew,
or some Batchgrew's husband or child, bought a motor-car, or sold one,
or exchanged a small one for a larger one, or had an accident, or
was gloriously fined in some distant part of the country for illegal
driving. Nearly all of them had spacious detached houses, with gardens
and gardeners, and patent slow-combustion grates, and porcelain
bathrooms comprising every appliance for luxurious splashing. And,
with the exception of one son who had been assisted to Valparaiso in
order that he might there seek death in the tankard without outraging
the family, they were all teetotallers--because the old man, "old
Jack," was a teetotaller. The family pyramid was based firm on the
old man. The numerous relatives held closely together like an alien
oligarchical caste in a conquered country. If they ever did quarrel,
it must have been in private.
The principal seat of business--electrical apparatus, heating
apparatus, and decorating and plumbing on a grandiose scale--in
Hanbridge, had over its immense windows the sign: "John Batchgrew
& Sons." The sign might well have read: "John Batchgrew & Sons,
Daughters, Daughters-in-law, Sons-in-law, Grandchildren, and
Great-grandchildren." The Batchgrew partners were always tendering
for, and often winning, some big contract or other for heating
and lighting and embellishing a public building or a mansion or a
manufactory. (They by no means confined their activities to the Five
Towns, having an address in London--and another in Valparaiso.) And
small private customers were ever complaining of the inaccuracy
of their accounts for small jobs. People who, in the age of Queen
Victoria's earlier widowhood, had sent for Batchgrew to repair a burst
spout, still by force of habit sent for Batchgrew to repair a burst
spout, and still had to "call at Batchgrew's" about mistakes in the
bills, which mistakes, after much argument and asseveration, were
occasionally put right. In spite of their prodigious expenditures, and
of a certain failure on the part of the public to understand "where
all the money came from," the financial soundness of the Batchgrews
was never questioned. In discussing the Batchgrews no bank-manager and
no lawyer had ever by an intonation or a movement of the eyelid hinted
that earthquakes had occurred before in the history of the world and
might occur again.
And yet old Batchgrew--admittedly the cleverest of the lot,
save possibly the Valparaiso soaker--could not be said to attend
assiduously to business. He scarcely averaged two hours a day on
the premises at Hanbridge. Indeed the staff there had a sense of
the unusual, inciting to unusual energy and devotion, when word went
round: "Guv'nor's in the office with Mr. John." The Councillor was
always extremely busy with something other than his main enterprise.
It was now reported, for example, that he was clearing vast sums out
of picture-palaces in Wigan and Warrington. Also he was a religionist,
being Chairman of the local Church of England Village Mission Fund.
And he was a politician, powerful in municipal affairs. And he was a
reformer, who believed that by abolishing beer he could abolish the
poverty of the poor--and acted accordingly. And lastly he liked to
enjoy himself.
Everybody knew by sight his flying white whiskers and protruding ears.
And he himself was well aware of the steady advertising value of
those whiskers--of always being recognizable half a mile off. He met
everybody unflinchingly, for he felt that he was invulnerable at all
points and sure of a magnificent obituary. He was invariably treated
with marked deference and respect. But he was not an honest man. He
knew it. All his family knew it. In business everybody knew it except
a few nincompoops. Scarcely any one trusted him. The peculiar fashion
in which, when he was not present, people "old Jacked" him--this alone
was enough to condemn a man of his years. Lastly, everybody knew that
most of the Batchgrew family was of a piece with its head.
VI
Now Rachel had formed a prejudice against old Batchgrew. She had
formed it, immutably, in a single second of time. One glance at him
in the street--and she had tried and condemned him, according to
the summary justice of youth. She was in that stage of plenary and
unhesitating wisdom when one not only can, but one must, divide the
whole human race sharply into two categories, the sheep and the goats;
and she had sentenced old Batchgrew to a place on the extreme left.
It happened that she knew nothing against him. But she did not require
evidence. She simply did "not like _that man_"--(she italicized
the end of the phrase bitingly to herself)--and there was no appeal
against the verdict. Angels could not have successfully interceded
for him in the courts of her mind. He never guessed, in his aged
self-sufficiency, that his case was hopeless with Rachel, nor even
that the child had dared to have any opinion about him at all.
She was about to slip off the pinafore-apron and drop it on to the
oak chest that stood in the lobby. But she thought with defiance: "Why
should I take my pinafore off for him? I won't. He shan't see my nice
frock. Let him see my pinafore. I am an independent woman, earning my
own living, and why should I be ashamed of my pinafore? My pinafore is
good enough for him!" She also thought: "Let him wait!" and went off
into the kitchen to get the modern appliance of the match for lighting
the gas in the lobby. When she had lighted the gas she opened the
front door with audacious but nervous deliberation, and the famous
character impatiently walked straight in. He wore prominent loose
black kid gloves and a thin black overcoat.
Looking coolly at her, he said--
"So you're the new lady companion, young miss! Well, I've heard rare
accounts on ye--rare accounts on ye! Missis is in, I reckon?"
His voice was extremely low, rich, and heavy. It descended on the
silence like a thick lubricating oil that only reluctantly abandons
the curves in which it falls.
And Rachel answered, faintly, tremulously--"Yes."
No longer was she the independent woman, censorious and scornful, but
a silly, timid little thing. Though she condemned herself savagely for
school-girlishness, she could do nothing to arrest the swift change in
her. The fact was, she was abashed, partly by the legendary importance
of the renowned Batchgrew, but more by his physical presence. His
mere presence was always disturbing; for when he supervened into
an environment he had always the air of an animal on a voyage of
profitable discovery. His nose was an adventurous, sniffing nose, a
true nose, which exercised the original and proper functions of a nose
noisily. His limbs were restless, his boots like hoofs. His eyes were
as restless as his limbs, and seemed ever to be seeking for something
upon which they could definitely alight, and not finding it. He
performed eructations with the disarming naturalness of a baby. He was
tall but not stout, and yet he filled the lobby; he was the sole fact
in the lobby, and it was as though Rachel had to crush herself against
the wall in order to make room for him.
His glance at Rachel now became inquisitive, calculating, It seemed to
be saying: "One day I may be able to make use of this piece of goods."
But there was a certain careless good-humour in it, too. What he saw
was a naive young maid, with agreeable features, and a fine, fresh
complexion, and rather reddish hair. (He did not approve of the
colour of the hair.) He found pleasure in regarding her, and in the
perception that he had abashed her. Yes, he liked to see her timid and
downcast before him. He was an old man, but like most old men--such as
statesmen--who have lived constantly at the full pressure of following
their noses, he was also a young man. He creaked, but he was not
gravely impaired.
"Is it Mr. Batchgrew?" Rachel softly murmured the unnecessary
question, with one hand on the knob ready to open the sitting-room
door.
He had flopped his stiff, flat-topped felt hat on the oak chest, and
was taking off his overcoat. He paused and, lifting his chin--and his
incredible white whiskers with it--gazed at Rachel almost steadily for
a couple of seconds.
"It is," he said, as it were challengingly--"it is, young miss."
Then he finished removing his overcoat and thrust it roughly down on
the hat.
Rachel blushed as she modestly turned the knob and pushed the door so
that he might pass in front of her.
"Here's Mr. Batchgrew, Mrs. Maldon," she announced, feebly
endeavouring to raise and clear her voice.
"Bless us!" The astonished exclamation of Mrs. Maldon was heard.
And Councillor Batchgrew, with his crimson shiny face, and the
vermilion rims round his unsteady eyes, and his elephant ears, and
the absurd streaming of his white whiskers, and his multitudinous
noisiness, and his black kid gloves, strode half theatrically past
her, sniffing.
To Rachel he was an object odious, almost obscene. In truth, she
had little mercy on old men in general, who as a class struck her as
fussy, ridiculous, and repulsive. And beyond all the old men she had
ever seen, she disliked Councillor Batchgrew. And about Councillor
Batchgrew what she most detested was, perhaps strangely, his loose,
wrinkled black kid gloves. They were ordinary, harmless black kid
gloves, but she counted them against him as a supreme offence.
"Conceited, self-conscious, horrid old brute!" she thought, discreetly
drawing the door to, and then going into the kitchen. "He's interested
in nothing and nobody but himself." She felt protective towards Mrs.
Maldon, that simpleton who apparently could not see through a John
Batchgrew!... So Mrs. Maldon had been giving him good accounts of the
new lady companion, had she!
VII
"Well, Lizzie Maldon," said Councillor Batchgrew as he crossed the
sitting-room, "how d'ye find yourself?... Sings!" he went on, taking
Mrs. Maldon's hand with a certain negligence and at the same time
fixing an unfriendly eye on the gas.
Mrs. Maldon had risen to welcome him with the punctilious warmth due
to an old gentleman, a trustee, and a notability. She told him as
to her own health and inquired about his. But he ignored her smooth
utterances, in the ardour of following his nose.
"Sings worse than ever! Very unhealthy too! Haven't I told ye and told
ye? You ought to let me put electricity in for you. It isn't as if it
wasn't your own house.... Pay ye! Pay ye over and over again!"
He sat down in a chair by the table, drew off his loose black gloves,
and after letting them hover irresolutely over the encumbered table,
deposited them for safety in the china slop-basin.
"I dare say you're quite right," said Mrs. Maldon with grave urbanity.
"But really gas suits me very well. And you know the gas-manager
complains so much about the competition of electricity. Truly it does
seem unfair, doesn't it, as they both belong to the town! If I gave
up gas for electricity I don't think I could look the poor man in the
face at church. And all these changes cost money! How is dear Enid?"
Mr. Batchgrew had now stretched out his legs and crossed one over the
other; and he was twisting his thumbs on his diaphragm.
"Enid? Oh! Enid! Well, I did hear she's able to nurse the child
at last." He spoke of his grand-daughter-in-law as of one among a
multiplicity of women about whose condition vague rumours reached him
at intervals.
Mrs. Maldon breathed fervently--"I'm so thankful! What a blessing
that is, isn't it?"
"As for costing money, Elizabeth," Mr. Batchgrew proceeded, "you'll
be all right now for money." He paused, sat up straight with puffings,
and leaned sideways against the table. Then he said, half fiercely--
"I've settled up th' Brougham Street mortgage."
"You don't say so!" Mrs. Maldon was startled.
"I do!"
"When?"
"To-day."
"Well--"
"That's what I stepped in for."
Mrs. Maldon feebly murmured, with obvious emotion--
"You can't imagine what a relief it is to me!" Tears shone in her
dark, mild eyes.
"Look ye!" exclaimed the trustee curtly.
He drew from his breast pocket a bank envelope of linen, and then,
glancing at the table, pushed cups and saucers abruptly away to make a
clear space on the white cloth. The newspaper slipped rustling to the
floor on the side near the window. Already his gloves were abominable
in the slop-basin, and now with a single gesture he had destroyed the
symmetry of the set table. Mrs. Maldon with surpassing patience smiled
sweetly, and assured herself that Mr. Batchgrew could not help it. He
was a coarse male creature at large in a room highly feminized. It was
his habit thus to pass through orderly interiors, distributing havoc,
like a rough soldier. You might almost hear a sword clanking in the
scabbard.
"Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty," he began in his heavily
rolling voice to count out one by one a bundle of notes which he had
taken from the envelope. He generously licked his thick, curved-back
thumb for the separating of the notes, and made each note sharply
click, in the manner of a bank cashier, to prove to himself that it
was not two notes stuck together. "... Five-seventy, five-eighty,
five-ninety, six hundred. These are all tens. Now the fives: Five,
ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five." He counted up to three hundred and
sixty-five. "That's nine-sixty-five altogether. The odd sixty-five's
arrear of interest. I'm investing nine hundred again to-morrow, and
th' interest on th' new investment is to start from th' first o' this
month. So instead of being out o'pocket, you'll be in pocket, missis."
The notes lay in two irregular filmy heaps on the table.
Having carefully returned the empty envelope to his pocket, Mr.
Batchgrew sat back, triumphant, and his eye met the delighted yet
disturbed eye of Mrs. Maldon, and then wavered and dodged.
Mr. Batchgrew with all his romantic qualities, lacked any perception
of the noble and beautiful in life, and it could be positively
asserted that his estimate of Mrs. Maldon was chiefly disdainful. But
of Mrs. Maldon's secret opinion about John Batchgrew nothing could be
affirmed with certainty. Nobody knew it or ever would know it. I doubt
whether Mrs. Maldon had whispered it even to herself. In youth he
had been the very intimate friend of her husband. Which fact would
scarcely tally with Mrs. Maldon's memory of her husband as the most
upright and perspicacious of men--unless on the assumption that John
Batchgrew's real characteristics had not properly revealed themselves
until after his crony's death; this assumption was perhaps admissible.
Mrs. Maldon invariably spoke of John Batchgrew with respect and
admiration. She probably had perfect confidence in him as a trustee,
and such confidence was justified, for the Councillor knew as well
as anybody in what fields rectitude was a remunerative virtue, and in
what fields it was not.
Indeed, as a trustee his sense of honour and of duty was so nice that
in order to save his ward from loss in connection with a depreciating
mortgage security, he had invented, as a Town Councillor, the
"Improvement" known as the "Brougham Street Scheme." If this was not
said outright, it was hinted. At any rate, the idea was fairly current
that had not Councillor Batchgrew been interested in Brougham Street
property, the Brougham Street Scheme, involving the compulsory
purchase of some of that property at the handsome price naturally
expected from the munificence of corporations, would never have come
into being.
Mrs. Maldon knew of the existence of the idea, which had been
obscurely referred to by a licensed victualler (inimically prejudiced
against the teetotaller in Mr. Batchgrew) at a Council meeting
reported in the _Signal_. And it was precisely this knowledge
which had imparted to her glance the peculiar disturbed quality that
had caused Mr. Batchgrew to waver and dodge.
The occasion demanded the exercise of unflinching common sense, and
Mrs. Maldon was equal to it. She very wisely decided that she ought
not to concern herself, and could not concern herself, with an aspect
of the matter which concerned her trustee alone. And therefore she
gave her heart entirely up to an intense gladness at the integral
recovery of the mortgage money.
For despite her faith in the efficiency of her trustee, Mrs. Maldon
would worry about finance; she would yield to an exquisitely painful
dread lest "anything should happen"--happen, that is, to prevent her
from dying in the comfortable and dignified state in which she had
lived. Her income was not large--a little under three hundred pounds
a year--but with care it sufficed for her own wants, and for gifts,
subscriptions, and an occasional carriage. There would have been a
small margin but for the constant rise in prices. As it was, there was
no permanent margin. And to have cut off a single annual subscription,
or lessened a single customary gift, would have mortally wounded her
pride. The gradual declension of property values in Brougham Street
had been a danger that each year grew more menacing. The moment had
long ago come when the whole rents of the mortgaged cottages would not
cover her interest. The promise of the Corporation Improvement Scheme
had only partially reassured her; it seemed too good to be true. She
could not believe without seeing. She now saw, suddenly, blindingly.
And her relief, beneath that stately deportment of hers, was pathetic
in its simple intensity. It would have moved John Batchgrew, had he
been in any degree susceptible to the thrill of pathos.
"I doubt if I've seen so much money all at once before," said Mrs.
Maldon, smiling weakly.
"Happen not!" said Mr. Batchgrew, proud, with insincere casualness,
and he added in exactly the same tone: "I'm leaving it with ye
to-night."
Mrs. Maldon was aghast, but she feigned sprightliness as she
exclaimed--
"You're not leaving all this money here to-night?"
"I am," said the trustee. "That's what I came for. Evans's were three
hours late in completing, and the bank was closed. I have but just got
it. I'm not going home." (He lived eight miles off, near Axe.) "I've
got to go to a Church meeting at Red Cow, and I'm sleeping there.
John's Ernest is calling here for me presently. I don't fancy driving
over them moors with near a thousand pun in my pocket--and colliers
out on strike--not at my age, missis! If you don't know what Red Cow
is, I reckon I do. It's your money. Put it in a drawer and say nowt,
and I'll fetch it to-morrow. What'll happen to it, think ye, seeing
as it hasn't got legs?" He spoke with the authority of a trustee. And
Mrs. Maldon felt that her reputation for sensible equanimity was worth
preserving. So she said bravely--
"I suppose it will be all right."
"Of course!" snapped the trustee patronizingly.
"But I must tell Rachel."
"Rachel? Rachel? Oh! _Her_! Why tell any one?" Mr. Batchgrew
sniffed very actively.
"Oh! I shouldn't be easy if I didn't tell Rachel," insisted Mrs.
Maldon with firmness.
Before the trustee could protest anew she had rung the bell.
VIII
It was another and an apronless Rachel that entered the room, a Rachel
transformed, magnificent in light green frock with elaborate lacy
ruchings and ornamentations, and the waist at the new fashionable
height. Her ruddy face and hands were fresh from water, her hair very
glossy and very neat: she was in high array. This festival attire
Mrs. Maldon now fully beheld for the first time. It, indeed, honoured
herself, for she had ordained a festive evening: but at the same
time she was surprised and troubled by it. As for Mr. Batchgrew, he
entirely ignored the vision. Stretched out in one long inclined plane
from the back of his chair down to the brass fender, he contemplated
the fire, while picking his teeth with a certain impatience, and still
sniffing actively. The girl resented this disregard. But, though she
remained hostile to the grotesque old man with his fussy noises,
the mantle of Mrs. Maldon's moral protection was now over Councillor
Batchgrew, and Rachel's mistrustful scorn of him had lost some of its
pleasing force.
"Rachel--"
Mrs. Maldon gave a hesitating cough.
"Yes, Mrs. Maldon?" said Rachel questioningly deferential, and smiling
faintly into Mrs. Maldon's apprehensive eyes. Against the background
of the aged pair she seemed dramatically young, lithe, living, and
wistful. She was nervous, but she thought with strong superiority:
"What are those old folks planning together? Why do they ring for me?"
At length Mrs. Maldon proceeded--"I think I ought to tell you, dear,
Mr. Batchgrew is obliged to leave this money in my charge to-night."
"What money?" asked Rachel.
Mr. Batchgrew put in sharply, drawing up his legs--"This!... Here,
young miss! Step this way, if ye please. I'll count it. Ten, twenty,
thirty--" With new lickings and clickings he counted the notes
all over again. "There!" When he had finished his pride had become
positively naive.
"Oh, my word!" murmured Rachel, awed and astounded.
"It is rather a lot, isn't it?" said Mrs. Maldon, with a timid laugh.
At once fascinated and repelled, the two women looked at the money as
at a magic. It represented to Mrs. Maldon a future free from financial
embarrassment; it represented to Rachel more than she could earn in
half a century at her wage of eighteen pounds a year, an unimaginable
source of endless gratifications; and yet the mere fact that it was
to stay in the house all night changed it for them into something dire
and formidable, so that it inspired both of them--the ancient dame and
the young girl--with naught but a mystic dread. Mr. Batchgrew eyed the
affrighted creatures with satisfaction, appearing to take a perverse
pleasure in thus imposing upon them the horrid incubus.
"I was only thinking of burglars;" said Mrs. Maldon apologetically.
"There've been so many burglaries lately--" She ceased, uncertain of
her voice. The forced lightness of her tone was almost tragic.
"There won't be any more," said Mr. Batchgrew condescendingly.
"Why?" demanded Mrs. Maldon with an eager smile of hope. "Have they
caught them, then? Has Superintendent Snow--"
"They have their hands on them. To-morrow there'll be some arrests,"
Mr. Batchgrew answered, exuding authority. For he was not merely a
Town Councillor, he was brother-in-law to the Superintendent of the
Borough Police. "Caught 'em long ago if th' county police had been a
bit more reliable!"
"Oh!" Mrs. Maldon breathed happily. "I knew it couldn't be Mr. Snow's
fault. I felt sure of that. I'm so glad."
And Rachel also was conscious of gladness. In fact, it suddenly seemed
plain to both women that no burglar, certain of arrest on the morrow,
would dare to invade the house of a lady whose trustee had married
the sister of the Superintendent of Police. The house was invisibly
protected.
"And we mustn't forget we shall have a man sleeping here to-night,"
said Rachel confidently.
"Of course! Of course! I was quite overlooking that!" exclaimed Mrs.
Maldon.
Mr. Batchgrew threw a curt and suspicious question--"What man?"
"My nephew Julian--I should say my grand-nephew." Mrs. Maldon's proud
tone rebuked the strange tone of Mr. Batchgrew. "It is his birthday.
He and Louis are having supper with me. And Julian is staying the
night."
"Well, if you take my advice, missis, ye'll say nowt to nobody. Lock
the brass up in a drawer in that wardrobe of yours, and keep a still
tongue in your head."
"Perhaps you're right," Mrs. Maldon agreed--"as a matter of general
principle, I mean. And it might make Julian uneasy."
"Take it and lock it up," Mr. Batchgrew repeated.
"I don't know about my wardrobe--" Mrs. Maldon began.
"Anywhere!" Mr. Batchgrew stopped her.
"Only," said Rachel with careful gentleness, "please don't forget
where you _have_ put it."
But her precaution of manner was futile. Twice within a minute she had
employed the word "forget." Twice was too often. Mrs. Maldon's memory
was most capriciously uncertain. Its lapses astonished sometimes even
herself. And naturally she was sensitive on the point. She nourished
the fiction, and she expected others to nourish it, that her memory
was quite equal to younger memories. Indeed, she would admit every
symptom of old age save an unreliable memory.
Composing a dignified smile, she said with reproving blandness--
"I am not in the habit of forgetting where I put valuables, Rachel."
And her prominently veined fingers, clasping the notes as a
preliminary to hiding them away, seemed in their nervous primness to
be saying to Rachael: "I have deep confidence in you, and I think that
to-night I have shown it. But oblige me by not presuming. I am Mrs.
Maldon and you are Rachel. After all, I have not yet known you for a
month."
IX
A very loud rasping noise, like a vicious menace, sounded from the
street, shivering instantaneously the delicate placidity of Mrs.
Maldon's home. Mrs. Maldon gave a start.
"That'll be John's Ernest with the car," said Mr. Batchgrew, amused;
and he began to get up from the chair. As soon as he was on his feet
his nose grew active again. "You've nothing to be afraid of, missis,"
he added in a tone roughly reassuring and good-natured.
"Oh no! Of course not!" concurred Mrs. Maldon, further enforcing
intrepidity on herself. "Of course not! I only just mentioned burglars
because they're so much in the paper." And she stooped to pick up the
_Signal_ and folded it carefully, as if to prove that her mind
was utterly collected.
Councillor Batchgrew, leaning over the table, peered into various
vessels in search of his gloves. At length he took them finickingly
from the white slop-basin as though fishing them out of a puddle. He
began to put them on, and then, half-way through the process, abruptly
shook hands with Mrs. Maldon.
"Then you'll call in the morning?" she asked.
"Aye! Ye may count on me. I'll relieve ye on [of] it afore ten
o'clock. It'll be on my way to Hanbridge, ye see."
Mrs. Maldon ceremoniously accompanied her trustee as far as the
sitting-room door, where she recommended him to the careful attention
of Rachel. No woman in the Five Towns could take leave of a guest
with more impressive dignity than old Mrs. Maldon, whose fine Southern
accent always gave a finish to her farewells. In the lobby Mr.
Batchgrew kept Rachel waiting with his overcoat in her outstretched
hands while he completed the business of his gloves. As, close behind
him, she coaxed his stiff arms into the overcoat, she suddenly
felt that after all he was nothing but a decrepit survival; and his
offensiveness seemed somehow to have been increased--perhaps by the
singular episode of the gloves and the slop-basin. She opened the
front door, and without a word to her he departed down the steps.
Two lamps like lighthouses glared fiercely along the roadway, dulling
the municipal gas and giving to each loose stone on the macadam a
long shadow. In the gloom behind the lamps the low form of an open
automobile showed, and a dim, cloaked figure beside it. A boyish voice
said with playful bullying sharpness, above the growling, irregular
pulsation of the engine--"Here, grandad, you've got to put this on."
"Have I?" demanded uncertainly the thick, heavy voice of the old man.
"Yes, you have--on the top of your other coat. If I don't look after
you I shall get myself into a row!... Here, let me put your fist in
the armhole. It's your blooming glove that stops it.... There! Now, up
with you, grandad!... All right! I've got you. I sha'n't drop you."
A door snapped to; then another. The car shot violently forward,
with shrieks and a huge buzzing noise, and leaped up the slope of the
street. Rachel, still in the porch, could see Mr. Batchgrew's head
wagging rather helplessly from side to side, just above the red speck
of the tail-lamp. Then the whole vision was swiftly blotted out, and
the warning shrieks of the invisible car grew fainter on the way to
Red Cow. It pleased Rachel to think of the old man being casually
bullied and shaken by John's Ernest.
She leaned forward and gazed down the street, not up it. When she
turned into the house Mrs. Maldon was descending the stairs, which,
being in a line with the lobby, ended opposite the front door. Judging
by the fixity of the old lady's features, Rachel decided that she was
not yet quite pardoned for the slight she had put upon the memory of
her employer. So she smiled pleasantly.
"Don't close the front door, dear," said Mrs. Maldon stiffly. "There's
some one there."
Rachel looked round. She had actually, in sheer absent-mindedness
or negligence or deafness, been shutting the door in the face of the
telegraph-boy!
"Oh, dear! I do hope--!" Mrs. Maldon muttered as she hastily tugged at
the envelope.
Having read the message, she passed it on to Rachel, and at the
same time forgivingly responded to her smile. The excitement of the
telegram had sufficed to dissipate Mrs. Maldon's trifling resentment.
Rachel read--
"Train hour late. Julian."
The telegraph boy was dismissed: "No answer, thank you."
X
During the next half-hour excitement within the dwelling gradually
increased. It grew out of nothing--out of Mrs. Maldon's admirable calm
in receiving the message of the telegram--until it affected like an
atmospheric disturbance the ground floor--the sitting-room where
Mrs. Maldon was spending nervous force in the effort to preserve an
absolutely tranquil mind, the kitchen where Rachel was "putting back"
the supper, the lobby towards which Rachel's eye and Mrs. Maiden's
ear were strained to catch any sign of an arrival, and the unlighted,
unused room behind the sitting-room which seemed to absorb and even
intensify the changing moods of the house.
The fact was that Mrs. Maldon, in her relief at finding that Julian
was not killed or maimed for life in a railway accident, had begun by
treating a delay of one hour in all her arrangements for the evening
as a trifle. But she had soon felt that, though a trifle, it was
really very upsetting and annoying. It gave birth to irrational yet
real forebodings as to the non-success of her little party. It
meant that the little party had "started badly." And then her other
grand-nephew, Louis Fores, did not arrive. He had been invited for
supper at seven, and should have appeared at five minutes to seven
at the latest. But at five minutes to seven he had not come; nor at
seven, nor at five minutes past--he who had barely a quarter of a
mile to walk! There was surely a fate against the party! And Rachel
strangely persisted in not leaving the kitchen! Even after Mrs. Maldon
had heard her fumbling for an interminable time with the difficult
window on the first-floor landing, she went back to the kitchen
instead of presenting herself to her expectant mistress.
At last Rachel entered the sitting-room, faintly humming an air. Mrs.
Maldon thought that she looked self-conscious. But Mrs. Maldon also
was self-conscious, and somehow could not bring her lips to utter
the name of Louis Fores to Rachel. For the old lady had divined a
connection of cause and effect between Louis Fores and the apparition
of Rachel's superlative frock. And she did not like the connection; it
troubled her, and offended the extreme nicety of her social code.
There was a constrained silence, which was broken by the lobby clock
striking the first quarter after seven. This harsh announcement on the
part of the inhuman clock seemed to render the situation intolerable.
Fifteen minutes past seven, and Louis not come, and not a word of
comment thereon! Mrs. Maldon had to admit privately that she was in a
high state of agitation.
Then Rachel, bending delicately to sweep the hearth with the
brass-handled brush proper to it, remarked with an obvious affectation
of nonchalance--
"Your other guest's late too."
If Mrs. Maldon had not been able to speak his name, neither could
Rachel! Mrs. Maldon read with painful certainty all the girl's
symptoms.
"Yes, indeed!" said Mrs. Maldon.
"It's like as if what must be!" Rachel murmured, employing a local
phrase which Mrs. Maldon had ever contemned as meaningless and
ungrammatical.
"Fortunately it doesn't matter, as Julian is late too," said Mrs.
Maldon insincerely, for it was mattering very much. "But still--I
wonder--"
Rachel broke out upon her hesitation in a very startling manner--
"I'll just see if he's coming."
And she abruptly quitted the room, almost slamming the door.
Mrs. Maldon was dumbfounded. Scared and attentive, she listened in a
maze for the sound of the front door. She heard it open. But was it
possible that she heard also the creak of the gate? She sprang to the
bow window with surprising activity, and pulled aside a blind, one
inch.... There was Rachel tripping hatless and in her best frock
down the street! Inconceivable vision, affecting Mrs. Maldon with
palpitation! A girl so excellent, so lovable, so trustworthy, to be
guilty of the wanton caprice of a minx! Supposing Louis were to see
her, to catch her in the brazen act of looking for him! Mrs. Maldon
was grieved; and her gentle sorrow for Rachel's incalculable lapse was
so dignified, affectionate, and jealous for the good repute of human
nature that it mysteriously ennobled instead of degrading the young
creature.
XI
Going down Bycars Lane amid the soft wandering airs of the September
night, Rachel had the delicious and exciting sensation of being
unyoked, of being at liberty for a space to obey the strong, free
common sense of youth instead of conforming to the outworn and
tiresome code of another age. Mrs. Maldon's was certainly a house that
put a strain on the nerves. It did not occur to Rachel that she was
doing aught but a very natural and proper thing. The non-appearance
of Louis Fores was causing disquiet, and her simple aim was to shorten
the period of anxiety. Nor did it occur to her that she was impulsive.
Something had to be done, and she had done something. Not much longer
could she have borne the suspense. All that day she had lived forward
towards supper-time, when Louis Fores would appear. Over and over
again she had lived right through the moment of opening the front door
for him at a little before seven o'clock. The moments between
seven o'clock and a quarter past had been a crescendo of torment,
intolerable at last. His lateness was inexplicable, and he was so
close to that not to look for him would have been ridiculous.
She was apprehensive, and yet she was obscurely happy in her fears.
The large, inviting, dangerous universe was about her--she had escaped
from the confining shelter of the house. And the night was about
her. It was not necessary for her to wear three coats, like the gross
Batchgrew, in order to protect herself from the night! She could go
forth into it with no precaution. She was young. Her vigorous and
confident body might challenge perils.
When she had proceeded a hundred yards she stopped and turned to look
back at the cluster of houses collectively called Bycars.
The distinctive bow-window of Mrs. Maldon's shone yellow. Within the
sacred room was still the old lady, sitting expectant, and trying to
interest herself in the paper. Strange thought!
Bycars Lane led in a north-easterly direction over the broad hill
whose ridge separates the lane from the moorlands honeycombed with
coal and iron mines. Above the ridge showed the fire and vapour of
the first mining villages, on the way to Red Cow, proof that not all
colliers were yet on strike. And above that pyrotechny hung the
moon. The municipal park, of which Bycars Lane was the north-western
boundary, lay in mysterious and forbidden groves behind its spiked
red wall and locked gates, and beyond it a bright tram-car was leaping
down from lamp to lamp of Moorthorne Road towards the town. Between
the masses of the ragged hedge on the north side of the lane there was
the thin gleam of Bycars Pool, lost in a vague, unoccupied region of
shawdrucks and dirty pasture--the rendezvous of skaters when the frost
held, Louis Fores had told her, and she had heard from another source
that he skated divinely. She could believe it, too.
She resumed her way more slowly. She had only stopped because, though
burned with the desire to see him, she yet had an instinct to postpone
the encounter. She was almost minded to return. But she went on. The
town was really very near. The illuminated clock of the Town Hall
had dominion over it; the golden shimmer above the roofs to the left
indicated the electrical splendour of the new Cinema in Moorthorne
Road next to the new Primitive Methodist Chapel. He had told her about
that, too. In two minutes, in less than two minutes, she was among
houses again, and approaching the corner of Friendly Street. He would
come from the Moorthorne Road end of Friendly Street. She would peep
round the corner of Friendly Street to see if he was coming....
But before she reached the corner, her escapade suddenly presented
itself to her as childish madness, silly, inexcusable; and she thought
self-reproachfully, "How impulsive I am!" and sharply turned back
towards Mrs. Maldon's house, which seemed to be about ten miles off.
A moment later she heard hurried footfalls behind her on the narrow
brick pavement, and, after one furtive glance over her shoulder, she
quickened her pace. Louis Fores in all his elegance was pursuing her!
Nothing had happened to him. He was not ill; he was merely a little
late! After all, she would sit by his side at the supper-table! She
had a spasm of shame that was excruciating. But at the same time she
was wildly glad. And already this inebriating illusion of an ingenuous
girl concerning a common male was helping to shape monstrous events.
CHAPTER II
LOUIS' DISCOVERY
I
Louis Fores was late at his grand-aunt's because he had by a certain
preoccupation, during a period of about an hour, been rendered
oblivious of the passage of time. The real origin of the affair went
back nearly sixty years, to an indecorous episode in the history of
the Maldon family.
At that date--before Mrs. Maldon had even met Austin Maldon, her
future husband--Austin's elder brother Athelstan, who was well
established as an earthenware broker in London, had a conjugal
misfortune, which reached its climax in the Matrimonial Court, and
left the injured and stately Athelstan with an incomplete household,
a spoiled home, and the sole care of two children, a boy and a girl.
These children were, almost of necessity, clumsily brought up. The
girl married the half-brother of a Lieutenant-General Fores, and Louis
Fores was their son. The boy married an American girl, and had issue,
Julian Maldon and some daughters.
At the age of eighteen, Louis Fores, amiable, personable, and an
orphan, was looking for a career. He had lived in the London suburb of
Barnes, and under the influence of a father whose career had chiefly
been to be the stepbrother of Lieutenant-General Fores. He was in
full possession of the conventionally snobbish ideals of the suburb,
reinforced by more than a tincture of the stupendous and unsurpassed
snobbishness of the British Army. He had no money, and therefore the
liberal professions and the higher division of the Civil Service were
closed to him. He had the choice of two activities: he might tout for
wine, motor-cars, or mineral-waters on commission (like his father),
or he might enter a bank; his friends were agreed that nothing else
was conceivable. He chose the living grave. It is not easy to enter
the living grave, but, august influences aiding, he entered it with
_eclat_ at a salary of seventy pounds a year, and it closed
over him. He would have been secure till his second death had he not
defiled the bier. The day of judgment occurred, the grave opened, and
he was thrown out with ignominy, but ignominy unpublished. The august
influences, by simple cash, and for their own sakes, had saved him
from exposure and a jury.
In order to get rid of him his protectors spoke well of him,
emphasizing his many good qualities, and he was deported to the Five
Towns (properly enough, since his grandfather had come thence)
and there joined the staff of Batchgrew & Sons, thanks to the kind
intervention of Mrs. Maldon. At the end of a year John Batchgrew told
him to go, and told Mrs. Maldon that her grand-nephew had a fault.
Mrs. Maldon was very sorry. At this juncture Louis Fores, without
intending to do so, would certainly have turned Mrs. Maldon's last
years into a tragedy, had he not in the very nick of time inherited
about a thousand pounds. He was rehabilitated. He "had money" now. He
had a fortune; he had ten thousand pounds; he had any sum you like,
according to the caprice of rumour. He lived on his means for a
little time, frequenting the Municipal School of Art at the Wedgwood
Institution at Bursley, and then old Batchgrew had casually suggested
to Mrs. Maldon that there ought to be an opening for him with Jim
Horrocleave, who was understood to be succeeding with his patent
special processes for earthenware manufacture. Mr. Horrocleave, a man
with a chin, would not accept him for a partner, having no desire to
share profits with anybody; but on the faith of his artistic tendency
and Mrs. Maldon's correct yet highly misleading catalogue of his
virtues, he took him at a salary, in return for which Louis was to be
the confidential employee who could and would do anything, including
design.
And now Louis was the step-nephew of a Lieutenant-General, a man
of private means and of talent, and a trusted employee with a fine
wage--all under one skin! He shone in Bursley, and no wonder! He was
very active at Horrocleave's. He not only designed shapes for vases,
and talked intimately with Jim Horrocleave about fresh projects, but
he controlled the petty cash. The expenditure of petty cash grew, as
was natural in a growing business. Mr. Horrocleave soon got accustomed
to that, and apparently gave it no thought, signing cheques instantly
upon request. But on the very day of Mrs. Maldon's party, after
signing a cheque and before handing it to Louis, he had somewhat
lengthily consulted his private cash-book, and, as he handed over
the cheque, had said: "Let's have a squint at the petty-cash book
to-morrow morning, Louis." He said it gruffly, but he was a gruff man.
He left early. He might have meant anything or nothing. Louis could
not decide which; or rather, from five o'clock to seven he had come to
alternating decisions every five minutes.
II
It was just about at the time when Louis ought to have been removing
his paper cuff-shields in order to start for Mrs. Maldon's that he
discovered the full extent of his debt to the petty-cash box. He
sat alone at a rough and dirty desk in the inner room of the works
"office," surrounded by dust-covered sample vases and other vessels of
all shapes, sizes, and tints--specimens of Horrocleave's "Art Lustre
Ware," a melancholy array of ingenious ugliness that nevertheless
filled with pride its creators. He looked through a dirt-obscured
window and with unseeing gaze surveyed a muddy, littered quadrangle
whose twilight was reddened by gleams from the engine-house. In this
yard lay flat a sign that had been blown down from the facade of the
manufactory six months before: "Horrocleave. Art Lustre Ware."
Within the room was another sign, itself fashioned in lustre-ware:
"Horrocleave. Art Lustre Ware." And the envelopes and paper and
bill-heads on the desk all bore the same legend: "Horrocleave. Art
Lustre Ware."
He owed seventy-three pounds to the petty-cash box, and he was
startled and shocked. He was startled because for weeks past he had
refrained from adding up the columns of the cash-book--partly from
idleness and partly from a desire to remain in ignorance of his own
doings. He had hoped for the best. He had faintly hoped that the
deficit would not exceed ten pounds, or twelve; he had been prepared
for a deficit of twenty-five, or even thirty. But seventy-three really
shocked. Nay, it staggered. It meant that in addition to his salary,
some thirty shillings a week had been mysteriously trickling through
the incurable hole in his pocket. Not to mention other debts! He well
knew that to Shillitoe alone (his admirable tailor) he owed eighteen
pounds.
It may be asked how a young bachelor, with private means and a
fine salary, living in a district where prices are low and social
conventions not costly, could have come to such a pass. The answer is
that Louis had no private means, and that his salary was not fine. The
thousand pounds had gradually vanished, as a thousand pounds will, in
the refinements of material existence and in the pursuit of happiness.
His bank-account had long been in abeyance. His salary was three
pounds a week. Many a member of the liberal professions--many a
solicitor, for example--brings up a family on three pounds a week in
the provinces. But for a Lieutenant-General's nephew, who had once had
a thousand pounds in one lump, three pounds a week was inadequate. As
a fact, Louis conceived himself "Art Director" of Horrocleave's, and
sincerely thought that as such he was ill-paid. Herein was one of his
private excuses for eccentricity with the petty cash. It may also be
asked what Louis had to show for his superb expenditure. The answer
is, nothing.
With the seventy-three pounds desolatingly clear in his mind, he
quitted his desk in order to reconnoitre the outer and larger portion
of the counting-house. He went as far as the archway, and saw black
smoke being blown downwards from heaven into Friendly Street. A
policeman was placidly regarding the smoke as he strolled by. And
Louis, though absolutely sure that the officer would not carry out his
plain duty of summoning Horrocleave's for committing a smoke-nuisance,
did not care for the spectacle of the policeman. He returned to the
inner office, and locked the door. The "staff" and the "hands" had all
gone, save one or two piece-workers in the painting-shop across the
yard.
The night watchman, fresh from bed, was moving fussily about the yard.
He nodded with respect to Louis through the grimy window. Louis lit
the gas, and spread a newspaper in front of the window by way of
blind. And then he began a series of acts on the petty-cash book. The
office clock indicated twenty past six. He knew that time was short,
but he had a natural gift for the invention and execution of these
acts, and he calculated that under half an hour would suffice
for them. But when he next looked at the clock, the acts being
accomplished, one hour had elapsed; it had seemed to him more like a
quarter of an hour. Yet as blotting-paper cannot safely be employed in
such delicate calligraphic feats as those of Louis', even an hour was
not excessive for what he had done. An operator clumsier, less cool,
less cursory, more cautious than himself might well have spent half a
night over the job. He locked up the book, washed his hands and face
with remarkable celerity in a filthy lavatory basin, brushed his hair,
removed his cuff-shields, changed his coat, and fled at speed, leaving
the key of the office with the watchman.
III
"I suppose the old lady was getting anxious?" said he brightly (but
in a low tone so that the old lady should not hear), as he shook hands
with Rachel in the lobby. He had recognized her in front of him up the
lane--had, in fact, nearly overtaken her; and she was standing at the
open door when he mounted the steps. She had had just time to prove
to Mrs. Maldon, by a "He's coming" thrown through the sitting-room
doorway, that she had not waited for Louis Fores and walked up with
him.
"Yes," Rachel replied in the same tone, most deceitfully leaving him
under the false impression that it was the old lady's anxiety that had
sent her out. She had, then, emerged scathless in reputation from the
indiscreet adventure!
The house was animated by the arrival of Louis; at once it seemed to
live more keenly when he had crossed the threshold. And Louis found
pleasure in the house--in the welcoming aspect of its interior, in
Rachel's evident excited gladness at seeing him, in her honest and
agreeable features, and in her sheer girlishness. A few minutes
earlier he had been in the sordid and dreadful office. Now he was in
another and a cleaner, prettier world. He yielded instantly and fully
to its invitation, for he had the singular faculty of being able to
cast off care like a garment. He felt sympathetic towards women, and
eager to employ for their contentment all the charm which he knew
he possessed. He gave himself, generously, in every gesture and
intonation.
"Office, auntie, office!" he exclaimed, elegantly entering the
parlour. "Sack-cloth! Ashes! Hallo! where's Julian? Is he late too?"
When he had received the news about Julian Maldon he asked to see
the telegram, and searched out its place of origin, and drew forth
a pocket time-table, and remarked in a wise way that he hoped Julian
would "make the connection" at Derby. Lastly he predicted the precise
minute at which Julian "ought" to be knocking at the front door. And
both women felt their ignorant, puzzled inferiority in these recondite
matters of travel, and the comfort of having an omniscient male in the
house.
Then slightly drawing up his dark blue trousers with an accustomed
movement, he carefully sat down on the Chesterfield, and stroked
his soft black moustache (which was estimably long for a fellow of
twenty-three) and patted his black hair.
"Rachel, you didn't fasten that landing window, after all!" said Mrs.
Maldon, looking over Louis' head at the lady companion, who hesitated
modestly near the door. "I've tried, but I couldn't."
"Neither could I, Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel. "I was thinking perhaps
Mr. Fores wouldn't mind--"
She did not explain that her failure to fasten the window had been
more or less deliberate, since, while actually tugging at the window,
she had been visited by the sudden delicious thought: "How nice it
would be to ask Louis Fores to do this hard thing for me!"
And now she had asked him.
"Certainly!" Louis jumped to his feet, and off he went upstairs.
Most probably, if the sudden delicious thought had not skipped into
Rachel's brain, he would never have made that critical ascent to the
first floor.
A gas-jet burned low on the landing.
"Let's have a little light on the subject," he cheerfully muttered to
himself, as he turned on the gas to the full.
Then in the noisy blaze of yellow and blue light he went to the window
and with a single fierce wrench he succeeded in pulling the catch into
position. He was proud of his strength. It pleased him to think of the
weakness of women; it pleased him to anticipate the impressed thanks
of the weak women for this exertion of his power on their behalf.
"Have you managed it so soon?" his aunt would exclaim, and he would
answer in a carefully offhand way, "Of course. Why not?"
He was about to descend, but he remembered that he must not leave the
gas at full. With his hand on the tap, he glanced perfunctorily around
the little landing. The door of Mrs. Maldon's bedroom was in front of
him, at right angles to the window. By the door, which was ajar,
stood a cane-seated chair. Underneath the chair he perceived a whitish
package or roll that seemed to be out of place there on the floor. He
stooped and picked it up. And as the paper rustled peculiarly in his
hand, he could feel his heart give a swift bound. He opened the roll.
It consisted of nothing whatever but bank-notes. He listened intently,
with ear cocked and rigid limbs, and he could just catch the soothing
murmur of women's voices in the parlour beneath the reverberating,
solemn pulse of the lobby clock.
IV
Louis Fores had been intoxicated into a condition of poesy. He was
deliciously incapable of any precise thinking; he could not formulate
any theory to account for the startling phenomenon of a roll of
bank-notes loose under a chair on a first-floor landing of his
great-aunt's house; he could not even estimate the value of the
roll--he felt only that it was indefinitely prodigious. But he had the
most sensitive appreciation of the exquisite beauty of those pieces of
paper. They were not merely beautiful because they stood for delight
and indulgence, raising lovely visions of hosiers' and jewellers'
shops and the night interiors of clubs and restaurants--raising one
clear vision of himself clasping a watch-bracelet on the soft arm of
Rachel who had so excitingly smiled upon him a moment ago. They were
beautiful in themselves; the aspect and very texture of them were
beautiful--surpassing pictures and fine scenery. They were the most
poetic things in the world. They transfigured the narrow, gaslit
first-floor landing of his great-aunt's house into a secret and
unearthly grove of bliss. He was drunk with quivering emotion.
And then, as he gazed at the divine characters printed in sable on the
rustling whiteness, he was aware of a stab of ugly, coarse pain. Up to
the instant of beholding those bank-notes he had been convinced that
his operations upon the petty-cash book would be entirely successful
and that the immediate future of Horrocleave's was assured of
tranquillity; he had been blandly certain that Horrocleave held no
horrid suspicion against him, and that even if Horrocleave's pate
did conceal a dark thought, it would be conjured at once away by the
superficial reasonableness of the falsified accounts. But now his mind
was terribly and inexplicably changed, and it seemed to him impossible
to gull the acute and mighty Horrocleave. Failure, exposure, disgrace,
ruin, seemed inevitable--and also intolerable. It was astonishing
that he should have deceived himself into an absurd security. The
bank-notes, by some magic virtue which they possessed, had opened
his eyes to the truth. And they presented themselves as absolutely
indispensable to him. They had sprung from naught, they belonged
to nobody, they existed without a creative cause in the material
world--and they were indispensable to him! Could it be conceived that
he should lose his high and brilliant position in the town, that two
policemen should hustle him into the black van, that the gates of
a prison should clang behind him? It could not be conceived. It was
monstrously inconceivable.... The bank-notes ... he saw them wavy, as
through a layer of hot air.
A heavy knock on the front door below shook him and the floor and the
walls. He heard the hurried feet of Rachel, the opening of the door,
and Julian's harsh, hoarse voice. Julian, then, was not quite an hour
late, after all. The stir in the lobby seemed to be enormous, and very
close to him; Mrs. Maldon had come forth from the parlour to greet
Julian on his birthday.... Louis stuck the bank-notes into the side
pocket of his coat. And as it were automatically his mood underwent a
change, violent and complete. "I'll teach the old lady to drop notes
all over the place," he said to himself. "I'll just teach her!" And
he pictured his triumph as a wise male when, during the course of the
feast, his great-aunt should stumble on her loss and yield to senile
feminine agitation, and he should remark superiorly, with elaborate
calm: "Here is your precious money, auntie. A good thing it was I and
not burglars who discovered it. Let this be a lesson to you!... Where
was it? It was on the landing carpet, if you please! That's where it
was!" And the nice old creature's pathetic relief!
As he went jauntily downstairs there remained nothing of his mood of
intoxication except a still thumping heart.
CHAPTER III
THE FEAST
I
The dramatic moment of the birthday feast came nearly at the end of
the meal when Mrs. Maldon, having in mysterious silence disappeared
for a space to the room behind, returned with due pomp bearing a
parcel in her dignified hands. During her brief absence Louis, Rachel,
and Julian--hero of the night--had sat mute and somewhat constrained
round the debris of the birthday pudding. The constraint was no doubt
due partly to Julian's characteristic and notorious grim temper, and
partly to mere anticipation of a solemn event.
Julian Maldon in particular was self-conscious. He hated intensely
to be self-conscious, and his feeling towards every witness of his
self-consciousness partook always of the homicidal. Were it not
that civilization has the means to protect itself, Julian might have
murdered defenceless aged ladies and innocent young girls for the
simple offence of having seen him blush.
He was a perfect specimen of a throw-back to original ancestry. He had
been born in London, of an American mother, and had spent the greater
part of his life in London. Yet London and his mother seemed to
count for absolutely nothing at all in his composition. At the age of
seventeen his soul, quitting the exile of London, had come to the
Five Towns with a sigh of relief as if at the assuagement of a long
nostalgia, and had dropped into the district as into a socket. In
three months he was more indigenous than a native. Any experienced
observer who now chanced at a week-end to see him board the Manchester
express at Euston would have been able to predict from his appearance
that he would leave the train at Knype. He was an undersized man, with
a combative and suspicious face. He regarded the world with crafty
pugnacity from beneath frowning eyebrows. His expression said: "Woe
betide the being who tries to get the better of me!" His expression
said: "Keep off!" His expression said: "I am that I am. Take me
or leave me, but preferably leave me. I loathe fuss, pretence,
flourishes--any and every form of damned nonsense."
He had an excellent heart, but his attitude towards it was the
attitude of his great-grandmother towards her front parlour--he used
it as little as possible, and kept it locked up like a shame. In
brief, he was more than a bit of a boor. And boorishness being his
chief fault, he was quite naturally proud of it, counted it for
the finest of all qualities, and scorned every manifestation of its
opposite. To prove his inward sincerity he deemed it right to flout
any form of external grace--such as politeness, neatness, elegance,
compliments, small-talk, smooth words, and all ceremonial whatever. He
would have died in torment sooner than kiss. He was averse even from
shaking hands, and when he did shake hands he produced a carpenter's
vice, crushed flesh and bone together, and flung the intruding pulp
away. His hat was so heavy on his head that only by an exhausting
and supreme effort could he raise it to a woman, and after the odious
accident he would feel as humiliated as a fox-terrier after a bath. By
the kind hazard of fate he had never once encountered his great-aunt
in the street. He was superb in enmity--a true hero. He would quarrel
with a fellow and say, curtly, "I'll never speak to you again"; and
he never would speak to that fellow again. Were the last trump to blow
and all the British Isles to be submerged save the summit of Snowdon,
and he and that fellow to find themselves alone and safe together on
the peak, he could still be relied upon never to speak to that fellow
again. Thus would he prove that he was a man of his word and that
there was no nonsense about him.
Strange though it may appear to the thoughtless, he was not
disliked--much less ostracised. Codes differ. He conformed to one
which suited the instincts of some thirty thousand other adult
males in the Five Towns. Two strapping girls in the warehouse of
his manufactory at Knype quarrelled over him in secret as the Prince
Charming of those parts. Yet he had never addressed them except to
inform them that if they didn't mind their p's and q's he would have
them flung off the "bank" [manufactory]. Rachel herself had not yet
begun to be prejudiced against him.
This monster of irascible cruelty regarded himself as a middle-aged
person. But he was only twenty-five that day, and he did not look
more, either, despite a stiff, strong moustache. He too, like Louis
and Rachel, had the gestures of youth--the unconsidered, lithe
movements of limb, the wistful, unteachable pride of his age, the
touching self-confidence. Old Mrs. Maldon was indeed old among them.
II
She sat down in all her benevolent stateliness and with a slightly
irritating deliberation undid the parcel, displaying a flattish
leather case about seven inches by four, which she handed formally to
Julian Maldon, saying as she did so--
"From your old auntie, my dear boy, with her loving wishes. You have
now lived just a quarter of a century."
And as Julian, awkwardly grinning, fumbled with the spring-catch of
the case, she was aware of having accomplished a great and noble act
of surrender. She hoped the best from it. In particular, she hoped
that she had saved the honour of her party and put it at last on a
secure footing of urbane convivial success. For that a party of hers
should fail in giving pleasure to every member of it was a menace to
her legitimate pride. And so far fate had not been propitious. The
money in the house had been, and was, on her mind. Then the lateness
of the guests had disturbed her. And then Julian had aggrieved her by
a piece of obstinacy very like himself. Arriving straight from a train
journey, he had wanted to wash. But he would not go to the specially
prepared bedroom, where a perfect apparatus awaited him. No, he must
needs take off his jacket in the back room and roll up his sleeves and
stamp into the scullery and there splash and rub like a stableman, and
wipe himself on the common rough roller-towel. He said he preferred
the "sink." (Offensive word! He would not even say "slop-stone," which
was the proper word. He said "sink," and again "sink.")
And then, when the meal finally did begin Mrs. Maldon's serviette
and silver serviette-ring had vanished. Impossible to find them! Mr.
Batchgrew had of course horribly disarranged the table, and in the
upset the serviette and ring might have fallen unnoticed into the
darkness beneath the table. But no search could discover them. Had
the serviette and ring ever been on the table at all? Had Rachael
perchance forgotten them? Rachael was certain that she had put them
on the table. She remembered casting away a soiled serviette and
replacing it with a clean one in accordance with Mrs. Maldon's command
for the high occasion. She produced the soiled serviette in proof.
Moreover, the ring was not in the serviette drawer of the sideboard.
Renewed search was equally sterile.... At one moment Mrs. Maldon
thought that she herself had seen the serviette and ring on the
table early in the evening; but at the next she thought she had not.
Conceivably Mr. Batchgrew had taken them in mistake. Yes, assuredly,
he had taken them in mistake--somehow! And yet it was inconceivable
that he had taken a serviette and ring in mistake. In mistake for
what? No!...
Mystery! Excessively disconcerting for an old lady! In the end Rachel
provided another clean serviette, and the meal commenced. But Mrs.
Maldon had not been able to "settle down" in an instant. The wise,
pitying creatures in their twenties considered that it was absurd for
her to worry herself about such a trifle. But was it a trifle? It was
rather a denial of natural laws, a sinister miracle. Serviette-rings
cannot walk, nor fly, nor be annihilated. And further, she had used
that serviette-ring for more than twenty years. However, the hostess
in her soon triumphed over the foolish old lady, and taken the head of
the board with aplomb.
And indeed aplomb had been required. For the guests behaved
strangely--unless it was that the hostess was in a nervous mood for
fancying trouble! Julian Maldon was fidgety and preoccupied. And Louis
himself--usually a model guest--was also fidgety and preoccupied. As
for Rachel, the poor girl had only too obviously lost her head about
Louis. Mrs. Maldon had never seen anything like it, never!
III
Julian, having opened the case, disclosed twin brier pipes,
silver-mounted, with alternative stems of various lengths and diverse
mouthpieces--all reposing on soft couches of fawn-tinted stuff, with
a crimson, silk-lined lid to serve them for canopy. A rich and costly
array! Everybody was impressed, even startled. For not merely was the
gift extremely handsome--it was more than a gift; it symbolized the
end of an epoch in those lives. Mrs. Maldon had been no friend of
tobacco. She had lukewarmly permitted cigarettes, which Louis smoked,
smoking naught else. But cigars she had discouraged, and pipes she
simply would not have! Now, Julian smoked nothing but a pipe. Hence
in his great-aunt's parlour he had not smoked; in effect he had been
forbidden to smoke there. The theory that a pipe was vulgar had been
stiffly maintained in that sacred parlour. In the light of these facts
did not Mrs. Maldon's gift indeed shine as a great and noble act
of surrender? Was it not more than a gift, and entitled to stagger
beholders? Was it not a sublime proof that the earth revolves and the
world moves?
Mrs. Maldon was as susceptible as any one to the drama of the moment,
perhaps more than any one. She thrilled and became happy as Julian
in silence minutely examined the pipes. She had taken expert advice
before purchasing, and she was tranquil as to the ability of the pipes
to withstand criticism. They bore the magic triple initials of the
first firm of brier-pipe makers in the world--initials as famous and
as welcome on the plains of Hindustan as in the Home Counties or the
frozen zone. She gazed round the table with increasing satisfaction.
Louis, who was awkwardly fixed with regard to the light, the shadow
of his bust falling always across his plate, had borne that real
annoyance with the most charming good-humour. He was a delight to the
eye; he had excellent qualities, especially social qualities. Rachel
sat opposite to the hostess--an admirable girl in most ways,
a splendid companion, and a sound cook. The meal had been
irreproachable, and in the phrase of the _Signal_ "ample justice
had been done" to it. Julian was on the hostess's left, with his
back to the window and to the draught. A good boy, a sterling boy, if
peculiar! And there they were all close together, intimate, familiar,
mutually respecting; and the perfect parlour was round about them: a
domestic organism, honest, dignified, worthy, more than comfortable.
And she, Elizabeth Maldon, in her old age, was the head of it, and the
fount of good things.
"Thank ye!" ejaculated Julian, with a queer look askance at his
benefactor. "Thank ye, aunt!"
It was all he could get out of his throat, and it was all that was
expected of him. He hated to give thanks--and he hated to be thanked.
The grandeur of the present flattered him. Nevertheless he regarded it
as essentially absurd in its pretentiousness. The pipes were A1, but
could a man carry about a huge contraption like that? All a man needed
was an A1 pipe, which, if he had any sense, he would carry loose in
his pocket with his pouch--and be hanged to morocco cases and silk
linings!
"Stoke up, my hearties!" said Louis, drawing forth a gun-metal
cigarette-case, which was chained to his person by a kind of cable.
Undoubtedly the case of pipes represented for Julian a triumph over
Louis, or, at least, justice against Louis. For obvious reasons Julian
had not quarrelled with a rich and affectionate great-aunt because she
had accorded to Louis the privilege of smoking in her parlour what he
preferred to smoke, while refusing a similar privilege to himself. But
he had resented the distinction. And his joy in the spectacular turn
of the wheel was vast. For that very reason he hid it with much care.
Why should he bubble over with gratitude for having been at last
treated fairly? It would be pitiful to do so. Leaving the case open
upon the table, he pulled a pouch and an old pipe from his pocket, and
began to fill the pipe. It was inexcusable, but it was like him--he
had to do it.
"But aren't you going to try one of the new ones?" asked Mrs. Maldon,
amiably but uncertainly.
"No," said he, with cold nonchalance. Upon nobody in the world had
the sweet magic of Mrs. Maldon's demeanour less influence than upon
himself. "Not now. I want to enjoy my smoke, and the first smoke out
of a new pipe is never any good."
It was very true, but far more wanton than true. Mrs. Maldon in her
ignorance could not appreciate the truth, but she could appreciate its
wantonness. She was wounded--silly, touchy old thing! She was wounded,
and she hid the wound.
Rachel flushed with ire against the boor.
"By the way," Mrs. Maldon remarked in a light, indifferent tone,
just as though the glory of the moment had not been suddenly rent and
shrivelled. "I didn't see your portmanteau in the back room just now,
Julian. Has any one carried it upstairs? I didn't hear any one go
upstairs."
"I didn't bring one, aunt," said Julian.
"Not bring--"
"I was forgetting to tell ye. I can't sleep here to-night. I'm off to
South Africa to-morrow, and I've got a lot of things to fix up at my
digs to-night." He lit the old pipe from a match which Louis passed to
him.
"To South Africa?" murmured Mrs. Maldon, aghast. And she repeated,
"South Africa?" To her it was an incredible distance. It was not
a place--it was something on the map. Perhaps she had never
imaginatively realized that actual people did in fact go to South
Africa. "But this is the first I have heard of this!" she said.
Julian's extraordinary secretiveness always disturbed her.
"I only got the telegram about my berth this morning," said Julian,
rather sullenly on the defensive.
"Is it business?" Mrs. Maldon asked.
"You may depend it isn't pleasure, aunt," he answered, and shut his
lips tight on the pipe.
After a pause Mrs. Maldon tried again.
"Where do you sail from?"
Julian answered--
"Southampton."
There was another pause. Louis and Rachel exchanged a glance of
sympathetic dismay at the situation.
Mrs. Maldon then smiled with plaintive courage.
"Of course if you can't sleep here, you can't," said she benignly. "I
can see that. But we were quite counting on having a man in the house
to-night--with all these burglars about--weren't we, Rachel?" Her
grimace became, by an effort, semi-humorous.
Rachel diplomatically echoed the tone of Mrs. Maldon, but more
brightly, with a more frankly humorous smile--
"We were, indeed!"
But her smile was a masterpiece of duplicity, somewhat strange in a
girl so downright; for beneath it burned hotly her anger against the
brute Julian.
"Well, there it is!" Julian gruffly and callously summed up the
situation, staring at the inside of his teacup.
"Propitious moment for getting a monopoly of door-knobs at the Cape, I
suppose?" said Louis quizzically. His cousin manufactured, among other
articles, white and jet door-knobs.
"No need for you to be so desperately funny!" snapped Julian, who
detested Louis' brand of facetiousness. It was the word "propitious"
that somehow annoyed him--it had a sarcastic flavour, and it was
"Louis all over."
"No offence, old man!" Louis magnanimously soothed him. "On the
contrary, many happy returns of the day." In social intercourse
the younger cousin's good-humour and suavity were practically
indestructible.
But Julian still scowled.
Rachel, to make a tactful diversion, rose and began to collect plates.
The meal was at an end, and for Mrs. Maldon it had closed in ignominy.
From her quarter of the table she pushed crockery towards Rachel with
a gesture of disillusion; the courage to smile had been but momentary.
She felt old--older than she had ever felt before. The young
generation presented themselves to her as almost completely enigmatic.
She admitted that they were foreign to her, that she could not
comprehend them at all. Each of the three at her table was entirely
free and independent--each could and did act according to his or her
whim, and none could say them nay. Such freedom seemed unreal. They
were children playing at life, and playing dangerously. Hundreds of
times, in conversation with her coevals, she had cheerfully protested
against the banal complaint that the world had changed of late years.
But now she felt grievously that the world was different--that it
had indeed deteriorated since her young days. She was fatigued by the
modes of thought of these youngsters, as a nurse or mother is fatigued
by too long a spell of the shrillness and the _naivete_ of a
family of infants. She wanted repose.... Was it conceivable that when,
with incontestable large-mindedness, she had given a case of pipes to
Julian, he should first put a slight on her gift and then, brusquely
leaving her in the lurch, announce his departure for South Africa,
with as much calm as though South Africa were in the next street?...
And the other two were guilty in other ways, perhaps more subtly, of
treason against forlorn old age.
And then Louis, in taking the slop-basin from her trembling
fingers, to pass it to Rachel, gave her one of his adorable, candid,
persuasive, sympathetic smiles. And lo! she was enheartened once more.
And she remembered that dignity and kindliness had been the watchwords
of her whole life, and that it would be shameful to relinquish the
struggle for an ideal at the very threshold of the grave. She began to
find excuses for Julian. The dear lad must have many business worries.
He was very young to be at the head of a manufacturing concern. He had
a remarkable brain--worthy of the family. Allowances must be made for
him. She must not be selfish.... And assuredly that serviette and ring
would reappear on the morrow.
"I'll take that out," said Louis, indicating the tray which Rachel
had drawn from concealment under the Chesterfield, and which was
now loaded. Mrs. Maldon employed an old and valued charwoman in the
mornings. Rachel accomplished all the rest of the housework herself,
including cookery, and she accomplished it with the stylistic
smartness of a self-respecting lady-help.
"Oh no!" said she. "I can carry it quite easily, thanks."
Louis insisted masculinely--
"I'll take that tray out."
And he took it out, holding his head back as he marched, so that the
smoke of the cigarette between his lips should not obscure his eyes.
Rachel followed with some oddments. Behold those two away together in
the seclusion of the kitchen; and Mrs. Maldon and Julian alone in the
parlour!
"Very fine!" muttered Julian, fingering the magnificent case of pipes.
Now that there were fewer spectators, his tongue was looser, and he
could relent.
"I'm so glad you like it," Mrs. Maldon responded eagerly.
The world was brighter to her, and she accepted Julian's amiability as
Heaven's reward for her renewal of courage.
IV
"Auntie-" began Louis, with a certain formality.
"Yes?"
Mrs. Maldon had turned her chair a little towards the fire. The two
visitants to the kitchen had reappeared. Rachel with a sickle-shaped
tool was sedulously brushing the crumbs from the damask into a silver
tray. Louis had taken the poker to mend the fire.
He said, nonchalantly--
"If you'd care for me to stay the night here instead of Julian, I
will."
"Well--" Mrs. Maldon was unprepared for this apparently quite natural
and kindly suggestion. It perturbed, even frightened her by its
implications. Had it been planned in the kitchen between those two?
She wanted to accept it; and yet another instinct in her prompted her
to decline it absolutely and at once. She saw Rachel flushing as the
girl industriously continued her task without looking up. To Mrs.
Maldon it seemed that those two, under the impulsion of Fate, were
rushing towards each other at a speed far greater than she had
suspected.
Julian stirred on his chair, under the sharp irritation caused
by Louis' proposal. He despised Louis as a boy of no ambition--a
butterfly being who had got no farther than the adolescent
will-to-live, the desire for self-indulgence, whereas he, Julian, was
profoundly conscious of the will-to-dominate, the hunger for influence
and power. And also he was jealous of Louis on various counts.
Louis had come to the Five Towns years after Julian, and had almost
immediately cut a figure therein; Julian had never cut a figure.
Julian had been the sole resident great-nephew of a benevolent aunt,
and Louis had arrived and usurped at least half the advantages of the
relationship, if not more; Louis lived several miles nearer to his
aunt. Julian it was who, through his acquaintance with Rachel's father
and her masterful sinister brother, had brought her into touch with
Mrs. Maldon. Rachel was Julian's creation, so far as his aunt was
concerned. Julian had no dislike for Rachel; he had even been thinking
of her favourably. But Louis had, as it were, appropriated her ...
From the steely conning-tower of his brows Julian had caught their
private glances at the table. And Louis was now carrying trays for
her, and hobnobbing with her in the kitchen! Lastly, because Julian
could not pass the night in the house, Louis, the interloper, had the
effrontery to offer to fill his place--on some preposterous excuse
about burglars! And the fellow was so polite and so persuasive, with
his finicking eloquence. By virtue of a strange faculty not uncommon
in human nature Julian loathed Louis' good manners and appearance--and
acutely envied them.
He burst out with scarcely controlled savagery--
"A lot of good you'd be with burglars!"
The women were outraged by his really shocking rudeness. Rachel bit
her lip and began to fold up the cloth. Mrs. Maldon's head slightly
trembled. Louis alone maintained a perfect equanimity. It was as if he
were invulnerable.
"You never know!" he smiled amiably, and shrugged his shoulders. Then
he finished his operation on the fire.
"I'm sure it's very kind and thoughtful of you, Louis," said Mrs.
Maldon, driven to acceptance by Julian's monstrous behaviour.
"Moreover," Louis urbanely continued, smoothing down his trousers
with a long perpendicular caress as he usually did after any
bending--"moreover, there's always my revolver."
He gave a short laugh.
"Revolver!" exclaimed Mrs. Maldon, intimidated by the mere name. Then
she smiled, in an effort to reassure herself. "Louis, you are a tease.
You really shouldn't tease me."
"I'm not," said Louis, with that careful air of false blank
casualness which he would invariably employ for his more breath-taking
announcements. "I always carry a loaded revolver."
The fearful word "loaded" sank into the heart of the old woman, and
thrilled her. It was a fact that for some weeks past Louis had been
carrying a revolver. At intervals the craze for firearms seizes the
fashionable youth of a provincial town, like the craze for marbles
at school, and then dies away. In the present instance it had been
originated by the misadventure of a dandy with an out-of-work artisan
on the fringe of Hanbridge. Nothing could be more correct than for
a man of spirit and fashion thus to arm himself in order to cow the
lower orders and so cope with the threatened social revolution.
"You _don't_, Louis!" Mrs. Maldon deprecated.
"I'll show you," said Louis, feeling in his hip pocket.
"_Please_!" protested Mrs. Maldon, and Rachel covered her face
with her hands and drew back from Louis' sinister gesture. "Please
don't _show_ it to us!" Mrs. Maiden's tone was one of imploring
entreaty. For an instant she was just like a sentimentalist who
resents and is afraid of hearing the truth. She obscurely thought that
if she resolutely refused to see the revolver it would somehow cease
to exist. With a loaded revolver in the house the situation seemed
more dangerous and more complicated than ever. There was something
absolutely terrifying in the conjuncture of a loaded revolver and a
secret hoard of bank-notes.
"All right! All right!" Louis relented.
Julian cut across the scene with a gruff and final--
"I must clear out of this!"
He rose.
"Must you?" said his aunt.
She did not unduly urge him to delay, for the strain of family life
was exhausting her.
"I must catch the 9.48," said Julian, looking at the clock and at his
watch.
Herein was yet another example of the morbid reticence which so pained
Mrs. Maldon. He must have long before determined to catch the 9.48;
yet he had said nothing about it till the last moment! He had said
nothing even about South Africa until the news was forced from him. It
had been arranged that he should come direct to Bursley station from
his commercial journey in Yorkshire and Derbyshire, pass the night at
his aunt's house, which was conveniently near the station, and proceed
refreshed to business on the morrow. A neat arrangement, well suiting
the fact of his birthday! And now he had broken it in silence, without
a warning, with the baldest possible explanation! His aunt, despite
her real interest in him, could never extract from him a clear account
of his doings and his movements. And this South African excursion was
the last and worst illustration of his wilful cruel harshness to her.
Nevertheless, the extreme and unimaginable remoteness of South Africa
seemed to demand a special high formality in bidding him adieu, and
she rendered it. If he would not permit her to superintend his packing
(he had never even let her come to his rooms!), she could at least
superintend the putting on of his overcoat. And she did. And instead
of quitting him as usual at the door of the parlour, she insisted on
going to the front door and opening it herself. She was on her mettle.
She was majestic and magnificent. By refusing to see his ill-breeding
she actually did terminate its existence. She stood at the open front
door with the three young ones about her, and by the force of her
ideal the front door became the portal of an embassy and Julian's
departure a ceremony of state. He had to shake hands all round. She
raised her cheek, and he had to kiss. She said, "God bless you!" and
he had to say, "Thank you."
As he was descending the outer steps, the pipe-case clipped under his
arm, Louis threw at him--
"I say, old man!"
"What?" He turned round with sharp defiance beneath the light of the
street-lamp.
"How are you going to get to London to-morrow morning in time for the
boat-train at Waterloo, if you're staying at Knype to-night."
Louis travelled little, but it was his foible to be learned in
boat-trains and "connections."
"A friend o' mine's motoring me to Stafford at five to-morrow morning,
if you want to know. I shall catch the Scotch express. Anything else?"
"Oh!" muttered Louis, checked.
Julian clanked the gate and vanished up the street, Mrs. Maldon
waving.
"What friend? What motor?" reflected Mrs. Maldon sadly. "He is
incorrigible with his secretiveness."
"Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel anxiously, "you look pale. Is it being in
this draught?" She shut the door.
Mrs. Maldon sighed and moved away. She hesitated at the parlour door
and then said--
"I must go upstairs a moment."
CHAPTER IV
IN THE NIGHT
I
Louis stood hesitant and slightly impatient in the parlour, alone. A
dark blue cloth now covered the table, and in the centre of it was
a large copper jar containing an evergreen plant. Of the feast no
material trace remained except a few crumbs on the floor. But the room
was still pervaded by the emotional effluence of the perturbed souls
who had just gone; and Louis felt it, though without understanding.
Throughout the evening he had of course been preoccupied by the
consciousness of having in his pocket bank-notes to a value unknown.
Several times he had sought for a suitable opportunity to disclose his
exciting secret. But he had found none. In practice he could not say
to his aunt, before Julian and Rachel: "Auntie, I picked up a lot of
bank-notes on the landing. You really ought to be more careful!" He
could not even in any way refer to them. The dignity of Mrs. Maldon
had intimidated him. He had decided, after Julian's announcement
of departure, that he would hand them over to her, simply and
undramatically and with no triumphant air, as soon as he and she
should for a moment be alone together. Then Mrs. Maldon vanished
upstairs. And she had not returned. Rachel also had vanished. And he
was waiting.
He desired to examine the notes, to let his eyes luxuriously rest upon
them, but he dared not take them from his pocket lest one or other of
the silent-footed women might surprise him by a sudden entrance. He
fingered them as they lay in their covert, and the mere feel of them,
raised exquisite images in his mind; and at the same time the whole
room and every object in the room was transformed into a secret
witness which spied upon him, disquieted him, and warned him. But
the fact that the notes were intact, that nothing irremediable had
occurred, reassured him and gave him strength, so that he could defy
the suspicions of those senseless surrounding objects.
Within the room there was no sound but the faint regular hiss of the
gas and an occasional falling together of coal in the weakening fire.
Overhead, from his aunt's bedroom, vague movements were perceptible.
Then these ceased, absolutely. The tension, increasing, grew too much
for him, and with a curt gesture, and a self-conscious expression
between a smile and a frown, he left the parlour and stood to listen
in the lobby. Not for several seconds did he notice the heavy ticking
of the clock, close to his ear, nor the chill draught that came under
the front door. He gazed up into the obscurity at the top of the
stairs. The red glow of the kitchen fire, in the distance to the right
of the stairs, caught his attention at intervals. He was obsessed,
almost overpowered, by the mysteriousness of the first floor. What had
happened? What was happening? And suddenly an explanation swept into
his brain--the obvious explanation. His aunt had missed the bank-notes
and was probably at that very instant working herself into an anguish.
What ought he to do? Should he run up and knock at her door? He was
spared a decision by the semi-miraculous appearance of Rachel at the
top of the stairs. She started.
"Oh! How you frightened me!" she exclaimed in a low voice.
He answered weakly, charmingly--
"Did I?"
"Will you please come and speak to Mrs. Maldon? She wants you."
"In her room?"
Rachel nodded and disappeared before he could ask another question.
With heart beating he ascended the stairs by twos. Through the
half-open door of the faintly lit room which he himself would occupy
he could hear Rachel active. And then he was at the closed door of his
aunt's room. "I must be jolly careful how I do it!" he thought as he
knocked.
II
He was surprised, and impressed, to see Mrs. Maldon in bed. She lay
on her back, with her striking head raised high on several pillows.
Nothing else of her was visible; the purple eider-down covered the
whole bed without a crease.
"Hello, auntie!" he greeted her, instinctively modifying his voice to
the soft gentleness proper to the ordered and solemn chamber.
Mrs. Maldon, moving her head, looked at him in silence. He tiptoed to
the foot of the bed and leaned on it gracefully. And as in the parlour
his shadow had fallen on the table, so now, with the gas just
behind him, it fell on the bed. The room was chilly and had a slight
pharmaceutical odour.
Mrs. Maldon said, with a weak effort--
"I was feeling faint, and Rachel thought I'd better get straight to
bed. I'm an old woman, Louis."
"She hasn't missed them!" he thought in a flash, and said, aloud--
"Nothing of the sort, auntie."
He was aware of the dim reflection of himself in the mirror of the
immense Victorian mahogany wardrobe to his left.
Mrs. Maldon again hesitated before speaking.
"You aren't ill, are you, auntie?" he said in a cheerful, friendly
whisper. He was touched by the poignant pathos of her great age and
her debility. It rent his heart to think that she had no prospect but
the grave.
She murmured, ignoring his question--
"I just wanted to tell you that you needn't go down home for your
night things--unless you specially want to, that is. I have all that's
necessary here, and I've given orders to Rachel."
"Certainly, auntie. I won't leave the house. That's all right."
No, she assuredly had not missed the notes! He was strangely uplifted.
He felt almost joyous in his relief. Could he tell her now as she lay
in her bed? Impossible! He would tell her in the morning. It would be
cruel to disturb her now with such a revelation of her own negligence.
He vibrated with sympathy for her, and he was proud to think that she
appreciated the affectionate, comprehending, subdued intimacy of his
attitude towards her as he leaned gracefully on the foot of the bed,
and that she admired him. He did not know, or rather he absolutely did
not realize, that she was acquainted with aught against his good fame.
He forgot his sins with the insouciance of an animal.
"Don't stay up too late," said Mrs. Maldon, as it were dismissing him.
"A long night will do you no harm for once in a way." She smiled. "I
know you'll see that everything's locked up."
He nodded soothingly, and stood upright.
"You might turn the gas down, rather low."
He tripped to the gas-bracket and put the room in obscurity. The
light of the street lamp irradiated the pale green blinds of the two
windows.
"That do?"
"Nicely, thank you! Good-night, my dear. No, I'm not ill. But you know
I have these little attacks. And then bed's the best place for me."
Her voice seemed to expire.
He crept across the wide carpet and departed with the skill of a
trained nurse, and inaudibly closed the door.
From the landing the whole of the rest of the house seemed to offer
itself to him in the night as an enigmatic and alluring field of
adventure ... Should he drop the notes under the chair on the landing,
where he had found them?... He could not! He could not!... He moved to
the head of the stairs, past the open door of the spare bedroom,
which was now dark. He stopped at the head of the stairs, and then
descended. The kitchen was lighted.
"Are you there?" he asked.
"Yes," replied Rachel.
"May I come?"
"Why, of course!" Her voice trembled.
He went towards the other young creature in the house. The old one lay
above, in a different world remote and foreign. He and Rachel had the
ground floor and all its nocturnal enchantment to themselves.
III
Mechanically, as he went into the kitchen, he drew his cigarette-case
from his pocket. It was the proper gesture of a man in any minor
crisis. He was not a frequenter of kitchens, and this visit, even more
than the brief first one, seemed to him to be adventurous.
Mrs. Maldon's kitchen--or rather Rachel's--was small, warm (though the
fire was nearly out), and agreeable to the eye. On the left wall was a
deal dresser full of crockery, and on the right, under the low window,
a narrow deal table. In front, opposite the door, gleamed the range,
and on either side of the range were cupboards with oak-grained
doors. There was a bright steel fender before the range, and then
a hearth-rug on which stood an oak rocking-chair. The floor was a
friendly chequer of red and black tiles. On the high mantelpiece were
canisters and an alarm-clock and utensils; sundry other utensils hung
on the walls, among the coloured images of sweet girls and Norse-like
men offered by grocers and butchers under the guise of almanacs; and
cupboard doors ajar dimly disclosed other utensils still, so that the
kitchen had the effect of a novel, comfortable kind of workshop; which
effect was helped by the clothes-drier that hung on pulley-ropes from
the ceiling, next to the gas-pendant and to a stalactite of onions.
The uncurtained window, instead of showing black, gave on another
interior, whitewashed, and well illuminated by the kitchen gas. This
other interior had, under a previous tenant of the property, been
a lean-to greenhouse, but Mrs. Maldon esteeming a scullery before a
greenhouse, it had been modified into a scullery. There it was that
Julian Maldon had preferred to make his toilet. One had to pass
through the scullery in order to get from the kitchen into the yard.
And the light of day had to pass through the imperfectly transparent
glass roof of the scullery in order to reach the window of the unused
room behind the parlour; and herein lay the reason why that room was
unused, it being seldom much brighter than a crypt.
At the table stood Rachel, in her immense pinafore-apron, busy with
knives and forks and spoons, and an enamel basin from which steam rose
gently. Louis looked upon Rachel, and for the first time in his life
liked an apron! It struck him as an exceedingly piquant addition to
the young woman's garments. It suited her; it set off the tints of her
notable hair; and it suited the kitchen. Without delaying her work,
Rachel made the protector of the house very welcome. Obviously she
was in a high state of agitation. For an instant Louis feared that the
agitation was due to anxiety on account of Mrs. Maldon.
"Nothing serious up with the old lady, is there?" he asked, pinching
the cigarette to regularize the tobacco in it.
"Oh, _no_!"
The exclamation in its absolute sincerity dissipated every trace of
his apprehension. He felt gay, calmly happy, and yet excited too. He
was sure, then, that Rachel's agitation was a pleasurable agitation.
It was caused solely by his entrance into the kitchen, by the
compliment he was paying to her kitchen! Her eyes glittered; her face
shone; her little movements were electric; she was intensely conscious
of herself--all because he had come into her kitchen! She could not
conceal--perhaps she did not wish to conceal--the joy that his near
presence inspired. Louis had had few adventures, very few, and this
experience was exquisite and wondrous to him. It roused, not the
fatuous coxcomb, nor the Lothario, but that in him which was honest
and high-spirited. A touch of the male's vanity, not surprising, was
to be excused.
"Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel, "had an idea that it was _me_ who
suggested your staying all night instead of your cousin." She raised
her chin, and peered at nothing through the window as she rubbed away
at a spoon.
"But when?" Louis demanded, moving towards the fire. It appeared to
him that the conversation had taken a most interesting turn.
"When?... When you brought the tray in here for me, I suppose."
"And I suppose you explained to her that I had the idea all out of my
own little head?"
"I told her that I should never have dreamed of asking such a thing!"
The susceptible and proud young creature indicated that the suggestion
was one of Mrs. Maldon's rare social errors, and that Mrs. Maldon had
had a narrow escape of being snubbed for it by the woman of the world
now washing silver. "I'm no more afraid of burglars than you are,"
Rachel added. "I should just like to catch a burglar here--that I
should!"
Louis indulgently doubted the reality of this courage. He had been
too hastily concluding that what Rachel resented was an insinuation of
undue interest in himself, whereas she now made it seem that she was
objecting merely to any reflection upon her valour: which was much
less exciting to him. Still, he thought that both causes might have
contributed to her delightful indignation.
"Why was she so keen about having one of us to sleep here to-night?"
Louis inquired.
"Well, I don't know that she was," answered Rachel. "If you hadn't
said anything--"
"Oh, but do you know what she said to me upstairs?"
"No."
"She didn't want me even to go back to my digs for my things.
Evidently she doesn't care for the house to be left even for half an
hour."
"Well, of course old people are apt to get nervous, you
know--especially when they're not well."
"Funny, isn't it?"
There was perfect unanimity between them as to the irrational
singularity and sad weakness of aged persons.
Louis remarked--
"She said you would make everything right for me upstairs."
"I have done--I hope," said Rachel.
"Thanks awfully!"
One part of the table was covered with newspaper. Suddenly Rachel
tore a strip off the newspaper, folded the strip into a spill, and,
lighting it at the gas, tendered it to Louis' unlit cigarette.
The climax of the movement was so quick and unexpected as almost to
astound Louis. For he had been standing behind her, and she had not
turned her head before making the spill. Perhaps there was a faint
reflection of himself in the window. Or perhaps she had eyes in her
hair. Beyond doubt she was a strange, rare, angelic girl. The gesture
with which she modestly offered the spill was angelic; it was divine;
it was one of those phenomena which persist in a man's memory for
decades. At the very instant of its happening he knew that he should
never forget it.
The man of fashion blushed as he inhaled the first smoke created by
her fire.
Rachel dropped the heavenly emblem, all burning, into the ash-bin of
the range, and resumed her work.
Louis coughed. "Any law against sitting down?" he asked.
"You're very welcome," she replied primly.
"I didn't know I might smoke," he said.
She made no answer at first, but just as Louis had ceased to expect an
answer, she said--
"I should think if you can smoke in the sitting-room you can smoke in
the kitchen--shouldn't you?"
"I should," said he.
There was silence, but silence not disagreeable. Louis, lolling in
the chair, and slightly rocking it, watched Rachel at her task. She
completely immersed spoons and forks in the warm water, and then
rubbed them with a brush like a large nail-brush, giving particular
attention to the inside edges of the prongs of the forks; and then she
laid them all wet on a thick cloth to the right of the basin. But of
the knives she immersed only the blades, and took the most meticulous
care that no drop of water should reach the handles.
"I never knew knives and forks and things were washed like that,"
observed Louis.
"They generally aren't," said Rachel. "But they ought to be. I leave
all the other washing-up for the charwoman in the morning, but I
wouldn't trust these to her." (The charwoman had been washing up
cutlery since before Rachel was born.) "They're all alike," said
Rachel.
Louis acquiesced sagely in this broad generalization as to charwomen.
"Why don't you wash the handles of the knives?" he queried.
"It makes them come loose."
"Really?"
"Do you mean to say you didn't know that water, especially warm water
with soda in it, loosens the handles?" She showed astonishment, but
her gaze never left the table in front of her.
"Not me!"
"Well, I should have thought that everybody knew that. Some people use
a jug, and fill it up with water just high enough to cover the blades,
and stick the knives in to soak. But I don't hold with that because
of the steam, you see. Steam's nearly as bad as water for the handles.
And then some people drop the knives wholesale into a basin just for a
second, to wash the handles. But I don't hold with that, either. What
I say is that you can get the handles clean with the cloth you wipe
them dry with. That's what I say."
"And so there's soda in the water?"
"A little."
"Well, I never knew that either! It's quite a business, it seems to
me."
Without doubt Louis' notions upon domestic work were being modified
with extreme rapidity. In the suburb from which he sprang domestic
work--and in particular washing up--had been regarded as base, foul,
humiliating, unmentionable--as toil that any slut might perform
anyhow. It would have been inconceivable to him that he should admire
a girl in the very act of washing up. Young ladies, even in exclusive
suburban families, were sometimes forced by circumstances to wash
up--of that he was aware--but they washed up in secret and in shame,
and it was proper for all parties to pretend that they never had
washed up. And here was Rachel converting the horrid process into
a dignified and impressive ritual. She made it as fine as fine
needlework--so exact, so dainty, so proud were the motions of her
fingers and her forearms. Obviously washing up was an art, and the
delicate operation could not be scamped nor hurried ...
The triple pile of articles on the cloth grew slowly, but it grew; and
then Rachel, having taken a fresh white cloth from a hook, began to
wipe, and her wiping was an art. She seemed to recognize each fork as
a separate individuality, and to attend to it as to a little animal.
Whatever her view of charwomen, never would she have said of forks
that they were all alike.
Louis felt in his hip pocket for his reserve cigarette-case.
And Rachel immediately said, with her back to him--
"Have you really got a revolver, or were you teasing--just now in the
parlour?"
It was then that he perceived a small unframed mirror, hung at the
height of her face on the broad, central, perpendicular bar of the
old-fashioned window-frame. Through this mirror the chit--so he named
her in his mind at the instant--had been surveying him!
"Yes," he said, producing the second cigarette-case, "I was only
teasing." He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the previous one.
"Well," she said, "you did frighten Mrs. Maldon. I was so sorry for
her."
"And what about you? Weren't you frightened?"
"Oh no! I wasn't frightened. I guessed, somehow, you were only
teasing."
"Well, I just wasn't teasing, then!" said Louis, triumphantly yet with
benevolence. And he drew a revolver from his pocket.
She turned her head now, and glanced neutrally at the incontestable
revolver for a second. But she made no remark whatever, unless the
pouting of her tightly shut lips and a mysterious smile amounted to a
remark.
Louis adopted an indifferent tone--
"Strange that the old lady should be so nervous just to-night--isn't
it?--seeing these burglars have been knocking about for over a
fortnight. Is this the first time she's got excited about it?"
"Yes, I think it is," said Rachel faintly, as it were submissively,
with no sign of irritation against him.
With their air of worldliness and mature wisdom they twittered on like
a couple of sparrows--inconsequently, capriciously; and nothing that
they said had the slightest originality, weight, or importance. But
they both thought that their conversation was full of significance;
which it was, though they could not explain it to themselves. What
they happened to say did not matter in the least. If they had recited
the Koran to each other the inexplicable significance of their words
would have been the same.
Rachel faced him again, leaning her hands behind her on the table, and
said with the most enchanting, persuasive friendliness--
"I wasn't frightened--truly! I don't know why I looked as though I
was."
"You mean about the revolver--in the sitting-room?" He jumped nimbly
back after her to the revolver question.
"Yes. Because I'm quite used to revolvers, you know. My brother had
one. Only his was a Colt--one of those long things."
"Your brother, eh?"
"Yes. Did you know him?"
"I can't say I did," Louis replied, with some constraint.
Rachel said with generous enthusiasm--
"He's a wonderful shot, my brother is!"
Louis was curiously touched by the warmth of her reference to her
brother. In the daily long monotonous column of advertisements headed
succinctly "Money" in the _Staffordshire Signal_, there once
used to appear the following invitation: "WE NEVER REFUSE a loan to
a responsible applicant. No fussy inquiries. Distance no objection.
Reasonable terms. Strictest privacy. L3 to L10,000. Apply personally
or by letter. Lovelace Curzon, 7 Colclough Street, Knype." Upon a day
Louis had chosen that advertisement from among its rivals, and had
written to Lovelace Curzon. But on the very next day he had come
into his thousand pounds, and so had lost the advantage of business
relations with Lovelace Curzon. Lovelace Curzon, as he had learnt
later, was Reuben Fleckring, Rachel's father. Or, more accurately,
Lovelace Curzon was Reuben Fleckring, junior, Rachel's brother, a
young man in a million. Reuben, senior, had been for many years an
entirely mediocre and ambitionless clerk in a large works where
Julian Maldon had learnt potting, when Reuben, junior (whom he blindly
adored), had dragged him out of clerkship, and set him up as
the nominal registered head of a money-lending firm. An amazing
occurrence! At that time Reuben, junior, was a minor, scarcely
eighteen. Yet his turn for finance had been such that he had
already amassed reserves, and--without a drop of Jewish blood in his
veins--possessed confidence enough to compete in their own field with
the acutest Hebrews of the district. Reuben, senior, was the youth's
tool.
In a few years Lovelace Curzon had made a mighty and terrible
reputation in the world where expenditures exceed incomes. And
then the subterranean news of the day--not reported in the
_Signal_--was that something serious had happened to Lovelace
Curzon. And the two Fleckrings went to America, the father, as usual,
hypnotized by the son. And they left no wrack behind save Rachel.
It was at this period--only a few months previous to the opening of
the present narrative--that the district had first heard aught of the
womenfolk of the Fleckrings. An aunt--Reuben, senior's, sister, it
appeared--had died several years earlier, since when Rachel had alone
kept house for her brother and her father. According to rumour
the three had lived in the simplicity of relative poverty, utterly
unvisited except by clients. No good smell of money had ever escaped
from the small front room which was employed as an office into the
domestic portion of the house. It was alleged that Rachel had existed
in perfect ignorance of all details of the business. It was also
alleged that when the sudden crisis arrived, her brother had told her
that she would not be taken to America, and that, briefly, she must
shift for herself in the world. It was alleged further that he had
given her forty-five pounds. (Why forty-five pounds and not fifty,
none knew.) The whole affair had begun and finished--and the house was
sold up--in four days. Public opinion in the street and in Knype blew
violently against the two Reubens, but as they were on the Atlantic
it did not affect them. Rachel, with scarcely an acquaintance in the
world in which she was to shift for herself, found that she had a
streetful of friends! It transpired that everybody had always divined
that she was a girl of admirable efficient qualities. She behaved as
though her brother and father had behaved in quite a usual and proper
manner. Assistance in the enterprise of shifting for herself she
welcomed, but not sympathy. The devotion of the Fleckring women began
to form a legend. People said that Rachel's aunt had been another such
creature as Rachel.
Hence the effect on Louis, who, through his aunt and his cousin,
was acquainted with the main facts and surmises, of Rachel's glowing
reference to the vanished Reuben.
"Where did your brother practise?" he asked.
"In the cellar."
"Of course it's easier with a long barrel."
"Is it?" she said incredulously. "You should see my brother's
score-card the first time he shot at that new miniature rifle-range in
Hanbridge!"
"Why? Is it anything special?"
"Well, you should see it. Five bulls, all cutting into each other."
"I should have liked to see that."
"I've got it upstairs in my trunk," said she proudly. "I dare say I'll
show you it some time."
"I wish you would," he urged.
Such loyalty moved him deeply. Louis had had no sisters, and his
youthful suburban experience of other people's sisters had not
fostered any belief that loyalty was an outstanding quality of
sisters. Like very numerous young men of the day, he had passed an
unfavourable judgment upon young women. He had found them greedy for
diversion, amazingly ruthless in their determination to exact the
utmost possible expensiveness of pleasure in return for their casual
society, hard, cruelly clever in conversation, efficient in certain
directions, but hating any sustained effort, and either socially or
artistically or politically snobbish. Snobs all! Money-worshippers
all!... Well, nearly all! It mattered not whether you were one of the
dandies or one of the hatless or Fletcherite corps that lolled on foot
or on bicycles, or shot on motor-cycles, through the prim streets of
the suburb--the young women would not remain in dalliance with you
for the mere sake of your beautiful eyes. Because they were girls
they would take all that you had and more, and give you nothing but
insolence or condescension in exchange. Such was Louis' judgment, and
scores of times he had confirmed it in private saloon-lounge talk
with his compeers. It had not, however, rendered the society of these
unconscionable and cold female creatures distasteful to him. Not a
bit! He had even sought it and been ready to pay for that society in
the correct manner--even to imperturbably beggaring himself of his
final sixpence in order to do the honours of the latest cinema. Only,
he had a sense of human superiority. It certainly did not occur to
him that in the victimized young men there might exist faults which
complemented those of the parasitic young women.
And now he contrasted these young women with Rachel! And he fell
into a dreamy mood of delight in her.... Her gesture in lighting his
cigarette! Marvellous! Tear-compelling!... Flippancy dropped away from
him.... She liked him. With the most alluring innocence, she did not
conceal that she liked him. He remembered that the last time he called
at his aunt's he had remarked something strange, something disturbing,
in Rachel's candid demeanour towards himself. He had made an
impression on her! He had given her the lightning-stroke! No shadow of
a doubt as to his own worthiness crossed his mind.
What did cross his mind was that she was not quite of his own class.
In the suburb, where "sets" are divided one from another by unscalable
barriers, she could not have aspired to him. But in the kitchen, now
become the most beautiful and agreeable and romantic interior that he
had ever seen--in the kitchen he could somehow perceive with absolute
clearness that the snobbery of caste was silly, negligible, laughable,
contemptible. Yes, he could perceive all that! Life in the kitchen
seemed ideal--life with that loyalty and that candour and that charm
and that lovely seriousness! Moreover, he could teach her. She had
already blossomed--in a fortnight. She was blossoming. She would
blossom further.
Odd that, when he had threatened to pull out a revolver, she, so
accustomed to revolvers, should have taken a girlish alarm! That queer
detail of her behaviour was extraordinarily seductive. But far beyond
everything else it was the grand loyalty of her nature that drew him.
He wanted to sink into it as into a bed of down. He really needed
it. Enveloped in that loving loyalty of a creature who gave all and
demanded nothing, he felt that he could truly be his best self, that
he could work marvels. His eyes were moist with righteous ardour.
The cutlery reposed in a green-lined basket. She had doffed the apron
and hung it behind the scullery door. With all the delicious curves of
her figure newly revealed, she was reaching the alarm-clock down from
the mantelpiece, and then she was winding it up. The ratchet of the
wheel clacked, and the hurried ticking was loud. In the grate of the
range burned one spot of gloomy red.
"Your bedtime, I suppose?" he murmured, rising elegantly.
She smiled. She said--
"Shall you lock up, or shall I?"
"Oh! I think I know all the tricks," he replied, and thought, "She's a
pretty direct sort of girl, anyway!"
IV
About an hour later he went up to his room. It was a fact that
everything had been made right for him. The gas burned low. He raised
it, and it shone directly upon the washstand, which glittered with
the ivory glaze of large earthenware, and the whiteness of towels that
displayed all the creases of their folding. There was a new cake of
soap in the ample soap-dish, and a new tooth-brush in a sheath of
transparent paper lay on the marble. "Rather complete this!" he
reflected. The nail-brush--an article in which he specialized--was
worn, but it was worn evenly and had cost good money. The water-bottle
dazzled him; its polished clarity was truly crystalline. He could
not remember ever having seen a toilet array so shining with strict
cleanness. Indeed, it was probable that he had never set eyes on an
absolutely clean water-bottle before; the qualities associated with
water-bottles in his memory were semi-opacity and spottiness.
The dressing-table matched the washstand. A carriage clock in leather
had been placed on the mantelpiece. In front of the mantelpiece was an
old embroidered fire-screen. Peeping between the screen and the grate,
he saw that a fire had been scientifically laid, ready for lighting;
but some bits of paper and oddments on the top of the coal showed that
it was not freshly laid. The grate had a hob at one side, and on
this was a small, bright tin kettle. The bed was clearly a good bed,
resilient, softly garnished. On it was stretched a long, striped
garment of flannel, with old-fashioned pearl buttons at neck and
sleeves. An honest garment, quite surely unshrinkable! No doubt in the
sixties, long before the mind of man had leaped to the fine perverse
conception of the decorated pyjama, this garment had enjoyed the
fullest correctness. Now, after perhaps forty years in the cupboards
of Mrs. Maldon, it seemed to recall the more excellent attributes of
an already forgotten past, and to rebuke what was degenerate in the
present.
Louis, ranging over his experiences in the disorderly and mean
pretentiousness of the suburban home, and in the discomfort of
various lodgings, appreciated the grave, comfortable benignity of that
bedroom. Its appeal to his senses was so strong that it became for
him almost luxurious. The bedroom at his latest lodgings was full
of boot-trees and trouser-stretchers and coat-holders, but it was a
paltry thing and a grimy. He saw the daily and hourly advantages of
marriage with a loving, simple woman whose house was her pride. He had
a longing for solidities, certitudes, and righteousness.
Musing delectably, he drew aside the crimson curtain from the window
and beheld the same prospect that Rachel had beheld on her walk
towards Friendly Street--the obscurity of the park, the chain of lamps
down the slope of Moorthorne Road, and the distant fires of industry
still farther beyond, towards Toft End. He had hated the foul, sordid,
ragged prospects and vistas of the Five Towns when he came new to them
from London, and he had continued to hate them. They desolated him.
But to-night he thought of them sympathetically. It was as if he was
divining in them for the first time a recondite charm. He remembered
what an old citizen named Dain had said one evening at the
Conservative Club: "People may say what they choose about Bursley.
I've just returned from London and I tell thee I was glad to get back.
I _like_ Bursley." A grotesque saying, he had thought, then.
Yet now he positively felt himself capable of sharing the sentiment.
Rachel in the kitchen, and the kitchen in town, and the town amid
those scarred and smoking hillocks!... Invisible phenomena! Mysterious
harmonies! The influence of the night solaced and uplifted him and
bestowed on him new faculties of perception.
At length, deciding, after characteristic procrastination, that
he must really go to bed, he wound up his watch and put it on the
dressing-table. His pockets had to be emptied and his clothes hung or
folded. His fingers touched the notes in the left-hand outside pocket
of his coat. Not for one instant had the problem of the bank-notes
been absent from his mind. Throughout the conversation with Rachel,
throughout the interval between her retirement and his own, throughout
his meditations in the bedroom, he had not once escaped from the
obsession of the bank-notes and their problem. He knew now how the
problem must be solved. There was, after all, only one solution, and
it was extremely simple. He must put the notes back where he had found
them, underneath the chair on the landing. If advisable, he might
rediscover them in the morning and surrender them immediately. But
they must not remain in his room during the night. He must not examine
them--he must not look at them.
He approached the door quickly, lest he might never reach the door.
But he was somehow forced to halt at the wardrobe, to see if it
had coat-holders. It had one coat-holder.... His hand was on the
door-knob. He turned it with every species of precaution--and it
complained loudly in the still night. The door opened with a terrible
explosive noise of protest. He gazed into the darkness of the landing,
and presently, by the light from the bedroom, could distinguish the
vague boundaries of it. The chair, invisible, was on the left. He
opened the door wider to the nocturnal riddle of the house. His hand
clasped the notes in his pocket. No sound! He listened for the ticking
of the lobby clock and could not catch it. He listened more intently.
It was impossible that he should not hear the ticking of the lobby
clock. Was he dreaming? Was he under some delusion? Then it occurred
to him that the lobby clock must have run down or otherwise stopped.
Clocks did stop.... And then his heart bounded and his flesh crept. He
had heard footsteps somewhere below. Or were the footsteps merely in
his imagination?
Alone in the parlour, after Rachel had gone to bed, he had spent some
time in gazing at the _Signal_; for there had been absolutely
nothing else to do, and he could not have thought of sleep at such an
early hour. It is true that, with his intense preoccupations, he had
for the most part gazed uncomprehendingly at the _Signal_. The
tale of the latest burglaries, however, had by virtue of its intrinsic
interest reached his brain through his eyes, and had impressed him,
despite preoccupations. And now, as he stood in the gloom at the door
of his bedroom and waited feverishly for the sound of more footsteps,
it was inevitable that visions of burglars should disturb him.
The probability of burglars visiting any particular house in the
town was infinitely slight--his common sense told him that. But
supposing--just supposing that they actually had chosen his aunt's
abode for their prey!... Conceivably they had learnt that Mrs. Maldon
was to have a large sum of money under her roof. Conceivably a complex
plan had been carefully laid. Conceivably one of the great burglaries
of criminal history might be in progress. It was not impossible. No
wonder that, with bank-notes loose all over the place, his shockingly
negligent auntie should have special qualms concerning burglars on
that night of all nights! Fortunate indeed that he carried a revolver,
that the revolver was loaded, and that he had some skill to use it! A
dramatic surprise--his gun and the man behind it--for burglars who had
no doubt counted on having to deal with a mere couple of women! He
had but to remove his shoes and creep down the stairs. He felt at the
revolver in his pocket. Often had he pictured himself in the act of
calmly triumphing over burglars or other villains.
Then, with no further hesitation, he silently closed the door--on the
inside!... How could there be burglars in the house? The suspicion was
folly. What he had heard could be naught but the nocturnal cracking
and yielding of an old building at night. Was it not notorious that
the night was full of noises? And even if burglars had entered!...
Better, safer, to ignore them! They could not make off with a great
deal, for the main item of prey happened to be in his own pocket.
Let them search for the treasure! If they had the effrontery to come
searching in his bedroom, he would give them a reception! Let them
try! He looked at the revolver, holding it beneath the gas. Could he
aim it at a human being?...
Or--another explanation--possibly Rachel, having forgotten something
or having need of something, had gone downstairs for it. He had not
thought of that. But what more natural? Sudden toothache--a desire for
laudanum--a visit to a store cupboard: such was the classic order of
events.
He listened, secure within the four walls of his bedroom. He smiled.
He could have fancied that he heard an electric bell ring ever so
faintly at a distance--in the next house, in the next world.
He laughed to himself.
Then at length he moved again towards the door; and he paused in front
of it. There were no burglars! The notion of burglars was idiotic! He
must put the notes back under the chair. His whole salvation depended
upon his putting the notes back under the chair on the landing!...
An affair of two seconds!... With due caution he opened the door. And
simultaneously, at the very selfsame instant, he most distinctly heard
the click of the latch of his aunt's bedroom door, next his own! Now,
in a horrible quandary, trembling and perspiring, he felt completely
nonplussed. He pushed his own door to, but without quite closing it,
for fear of a noise; and edged away from it towards the fireplace.
Had his aunt wakened up, and felt a misgiving about the notes, and
found that they were not where they ought to be?
No further sound came though the crack of his door. In the dwelling
absolute silence seemed to be established. He stood thus for an
indefinite period in front of the fireplace, the brain's action
apparently suspended, until his agitation was somewhat composed. And
then, because he had no clear plan in his head, he put his hand into
the pocket containing the notes and drew them out. And immediately he
was aware of a pleasant feeling of relief, as one who, after battling
against a delicious and shameful habit, yields and is glad. The beauty
of the notes was eternal; no use could stale it. Their intoxicating
effect on him was just as powerful now as before supper. And now, as
then, the mere sight of them filled him with a passionate conviction
that without them he would be ruined. His tricks to destroy the
suspicions of Horrocleave could not possibly be successful. Within
twenty-four hours he might be in prison if he could not forthwith
command a certain sum of money. And even possessing the money, he
would still have an extremely difficult part to play. It would be
necessary for him to arrive early at the works, to change notes for
gold in the safe, to erase many of his pencilled false additions,
to devise a postponement of his crucial scene with Horrocleave, and
lastly to invent a plausible explanation of the piling up of a cash
reserve.
If he had not been optimistic and an incurable procrastinator and a
believer in luck at the last moment, he would have seen that nothing
but a miracle could save him if Horrocleave were indeed suspicious.
Happily for his peace of mind, he was incapable of looking a fact
in the face. Against all reason he insisted to himself that with the
notes he might reach salvation. He did not trouble even to estimate
the chances of the notes being traced by their numbers. Such is the
magic force of a weak character.
But he powerfully desired not to steal the notes, or any of them.
The image of Rachel rose between him and his temptation. Her honesty,
candour, loyalty, had revealed to him the beauty of the ways of
righteousness. He had been born again in her glance. He swore he would
do nothing unworthy of the ideal she had unconsciously set up in him.
He admitted that it was supremely essential for him to restore the
notes to the spot whence he had removed them.... And yet--if he did
so, and was lost? What then? For one second he saw himself in the
dock at the police-court in the town hall. Awful hallucination! If it
became reality, what use, then, his obedience to the new ideal? Better
to accomplish this one act of treason to the ideal in order to be able
for ever afterwards to obey it and to look Rachel in the eyes! Was
it not so? He wanted advice, he wanted to be confirmed in his own
opportunism, as a starving beggar may want food.
And in the midst of all this torture of his vacillations, he was
staggered and overwhelmed by the sudden noise of Mrs. Maldon's door
brusquely opening, and of an instant loud, firm knock on his own door.
The silence of the night was shattered as by an earthquake.
Almost mechanically he crushed the notes in his left hand--crushed
them into a ball; and the knuckles of that hand turned white with the
muscular tension.
"Are you up?" a voice demanded. It was Rachel's voice.
"Ye-es," he answered, and held his left hand over the screen in front
of the fireplace.
"May I come in?"
And with the word she came in. She was summarily dressed, and very
pale, and her hair, more notable than ever, was down. As she entered
he opened his hand and let the ball of notes drop into the littered
grate.
V
"Anything the matter?" he asked, moving away from the region of the
hearth-rug.
She glanced at him with a kind of mild indulgence, as if to say:
"Surely you don't suppose I should be wandering about in the night
like this if nothing was the matter!"
She replied, speaking quickly and eagerly--"I'm so glad you aren't in
bed. I want you to go and fetch the doctor--at once."
"Auntie ill?"
She gave him another glance like the first, as if to say: "_I'm_
not ill, and _you_ aren't. And Mrs. Maldon is the only other
person in the house--"
"I'll go instantly," he added in haste. "Which doctor?"
"Yardley in Park Road. It's near the corner of Axe Street. You'll know
it by the yellow gate--even if his lamp isn't lighted."
"I thought old Hawley up at Hillport was auntie's doctor."
"I believe he is, but you couldn't get up to Hillport in less than
half an hour, could you?"
"Not so serious as all that, is it?"
"Well, you never know. Best to be on the safe side. It's not quite
like one of her usual attacks. She's been upset. She actually went
downstairs."
"I thought I heard somebody. Did you hear her, then?"
"No, she rang for me afterwards. There's a little electric bell over
my bed, from her room."
"And I heard that too," said Louis.
"Will you ask Dr. Yardley to come at once?"
"I'm off," said he. "What a good thing I wasn't in bed!"
"What a good thing you're here at all!" Rachel murmured, suddenly
smiling.
He was waiting anxiously for her to leave the room again. But instead
of leaving it she came to the fireplace and looked behind the screen.
He trembled.
"Oh! That kettle _is_ there! I thought it must be!" And picked it
up.
Then, with the kettle in one hand, she went to a large cupboard let
into the wall opposite the door, and opened it.
"You know Park Road, I suppose?" she turned to him.
"Yes, yes, I'm off!"
He was obliged to go, surrendering the room to her. As he descended
the stairs he heard her come out of the room. She was following him
downstairs. "Don't bang the door," she whispered. "I'll come and shut
it after you."
The next moment he had undone the door and was down the front steps
and in the solitude of Bycars Lane. He ran up the street, full of the
one desire to accomplish his errand and be back again in the spare
bedroom alone. The notes were utterly safe where they lay, and
yet--astounding events might happen. Was it not a unique coincidence
that on this very night and no other his aunt should fall ill, and
that as a result Rachel should take him unawares at the worst moment
of his dilemma? And further, could it be the actual fact, as he had
been wildly guessing only a few minutes earlier, that his aunt had at
last missed the notes? Could it be that it was this discovery which
had upset her and brought on an attack?... An attack of what?
He swerved at the double into Park Road, which was a silent desert
watched over by forlorn gaslamps. He saw the yellow gate. The yellow
gate clanked after him. He searched in the deep shadow of the porch
for the button of the night bell, and had to strike a match in order
to find it. He rang; waited and waited, rang again; waited; rang a
third time, keeping his finger hard on the button. Then arose and
expired a flickering light in the hall of the house.
"That'll do! That'll do! You needn't wear the bell out." He could hear
the irritated accents through the glazed front door.
A dim figure in a dressing-gown opened.
"Are you Dr. Yardley?" Louis gasped between rapid breaths.
"What is it?" The question was savage.
With his extraordinary instinctive amiability Louis smiled naturally
and persuasively.
"You're wanted at Mrs. Maldon's, Bycars. Awfully sorry to disturb
you."
"Oh!" said the dressing-gown in a changed, interested tone. "Mrs.
Maldon's! Right. I'll follow you."
"You'll come at once?" Louis urged.
"I shall come at once."
The door was curtly closed.
"So that's how you call a doctor in the middle of the night!" thought
Louis, and ran off. He had scarcely deciphered the man's face.
The return, being chiefly downhill, was less exhausting. As he
approached his aunt's house he saw that there was a light on the
ground floor as well as in the front bedroom. The door opened as he
swung the gate. The lobby gas had been lighted. Rachel was waiting for
him. Her hair was tied up now. The girl looked wise, absurdly so.
It was as though she was engaged in the act of being equal to the
terrible occasion.
"He's coming," said Louis.
"You've been frightfully quick!" said she, as if triumphantly. She
appeared to glory in the crisis.
He passed within as she held the door. He was frantic to rush upstairs
to the fireplace in his room; but he had to seem deliberate.
"And what next?" he inquired.
"Well, nothing. It'll be best for you to sit in your bedroom for
a bit. That's the only place where there's a fire--and it's rather
chilly at this time of night."
"A fire?" he repeated, incredulous and yet awe-struck.
"I knew you wouldn't mind," said she. "It just happened there wasn't
two drops of methylated spirits left in the house, and as there was
a fire laid in your room, I put a match to it. I must have hot water
ready, you see. And Mrs. Maldon only has one of those old-fashioned
gas-stoves in her bedroom--"
"I see," he agreed.
They mounted the steps together. The grate in his room was a mass of
pleasant flames, in the midst of which gleamed the bright kettle.
"How is she now?" He asked in a trance. And he felt as though it was
another man in his own body who was asking.
"Oh! It's not very serious, I hope," said Rachel, kneeling to coax the
fire with a short, wiry poker. "Only you never know. I'm just going
in again.... She seems to lose all her vitality--that's what's apt to
frighten you."
The girl looked wise--absurdly, deliciously wise. The spectacle of her
engaged in the high act of being equal to the occasion was exquisite.
But Louis had no eye for it.
CHAPTER V
NEWS OF THE NIGHT
I
The next morning, Mrs. Tarns, the charwoman whom Rachel had expressly
included in the dogma that all charwomen are alike, was cleaning the
entranceway to Mrs. Maldon's house. She had washed and stoned the
steep, uneven flight of steps leading up to the front door, and the
flat space between them and the gate; and now, before finishing the
step down to the footpath, she was wiping the grimy ledges of the
green iron gate itself.
Mrs. Tarns was a woman of nearly sixty, stout and--in
appearance--untidy and dirty. The wet wind played with grey wisps of
her hair, and with her coarse brown apron, beneath which her skirt was
pinned up. Human eye so seldom saw her without a coarse brown apron
that, apronless, she would have almost seemed (like Eve) to be
unattired. It and a pail were the insignia of her vocation.
She was accomplished and conscientious; she could be trusted; despite
appearances, her habits were cleanly. She was also a woman of immense
experience. In addition to being one of the finest exponents of the
art of step-stoning and general housework that the Five Towns could
show, she had numerous other talents. She was thoroughly accustomed
to the supreme spectacles of birth and death, and could assist
thereat with dignity and skill. She could turn away the wrath of
rent-collectors, rate-collectors, school-inspectors, and magistrates.
She was an adept in enticing an inebriated husband to leave a
public-house. She could feed four children for a day on sevenpence,
and rise calmly to her feet after having been knocked down by one
stroke of a fist. She could go without food, sleep, and love, and yet
thrive. She could give when she had nothing, and keep her heart sweet
amid every contagion. Lastly, she could coax extra sixpences out of
a pawnbroker. She had never had a holiday, and almost never failed in
her duty. Her one social fault was a tendency to talk at great length
about babies, corpses, and the qualities of rival soaps. All her
children were married. Her husband had gone in a box to a justice
whose anger Mrs. Tam's simple tongue might not soothe. She lived
alone. Six half-days a week she worked about the house of Mrs.
Maldon from eight to one o'clock, for a shilling per half-day and her
breakfast. But if she chose to stay for it she could have dinner--and
a good one--on condition that she washed up afterwards. She often
stayed. After over forty years of incessant and manifold expert labour
she was happy and content in this rich reward.
A long automobile came slipping with noiseless stealth down the hill,
and halted opposite the gate, in silence, for the engine had been
stopped higher up. Mrs. Tams, intimidated by the august phenomenon,
ceased to rub, and in alarm watched the great Thomas Batchgrew
struggle unsuccessfully with the handle of the door that imprisoned
him. Mrs. Tams was a born serf, and her nature was such that she
wanted to apologize to Thomas Batchgrew for the naughtiness of the
door. For her there was something monstrous in a personage like Thomas
Batchgrew being balked in a desire, even for a moment, by a perverse
door-catch. Not that she really respected Thomas Batchgrew! She
did not, but he was a member of the sacred governing class. The
chauffeur--not John's Ernest, but a professional--flashed round the
front of the car and opened the door with obsequious haste. For Thomas
Batchgrew had to be appeased. Already a delay of twenty minutes--due
to a defective tire and to the inexcusable absence of the spanner with
which the spare wheel was manipulated--had aroused his just anger.
Mrs. Tarns pulled the gate towards herself and, crushed behind it,
curtsied to Thomas Batchgrew. This curtsy, the most servile of all
Western salutations, and now nearly unknown in Five Towns, consisted
in a momentary shortening of the stature by six inches, and in nothing
else. Mrs. Tams had acquired it in her native village of Sneyd, where
an earl held fast to that which was good, and she had never been able
to quite lose it. It did far more than the celerity of the chauffeur
to appease Thomas Batchgrew.
Snorting and self-conscious, and with his white whiskers flying behind
him, he stepped in his two overcoats across the narrow, muddy pavement
and on to Mrs. Tarn's virgin stonework, and with two haughty black
footmarks he instantly ruined it. The tragedy produced no effect on
Mrs. Tams. And indeed nobody in the Five Towns would have been moved
by it. For the social convention as to porticoes enjoined, not that
they should remain clean, but simply that they should show evidence
of having been clean at some moment early in each day. It mattered not
how dirty they were in general, provided that the religious and futile
rite of stoning had been demonstrably performed during the morning.
Mrs. Tams adroitly moved her bucket, aside, though there was plenty
of room for feet even larger than those of Thomas Batchgrew, and then
waited to be spoken to. She was not spoken to. Mr. Batchgrew, after
hesitating and clearing his throat, proceeded up the steps, defiling
them. As he did so Mrs. Tams screwed together all her features and
clenched her hands as if in agony, and stared horribly at the open
front door, which was blowing to. It seemed that she was trying to
arrest the front door by sheer force of muscular contraction. She did
not succeed. Gently the door closed, with a firm click of its latch,
in face of Mr. Batchgrew.
"Nay, nay!" muttered Mrs. Tarns, desolated.
And Mr. Batchgrew, once more justly angered, raised his hand to the
heavy knocker.
"Dunna' knock, mester! Dunna' knock!" Mrs. Tarns implored in a
whisper. "Missis is asleep. Miss Rachel's been up aw night wi' her,
seemingly, and now her's gone off in a doze like, and Miss Rachel's
resting, too, on th' squab i' th' parlor. Doctor was fetched."
Apparently charging Mrs. Tarns with responsibility for the illness,
Mr. Batchgrew demanded severely--
"What was it?"
"One o' them attacks as her has," said Mrs. Tarns with a meekness that
admitted she could offer no defence, "only wuss!"
"Hurry round to th' back door and let me in."
"I doubt back door's bolted on th' inside," said Mrs. Tarns with deep
humility.
"This is ridiculous," said Mr. Batchgrew, truly. "Am I to stand here
all day?" And raised his hand to the knocker.
Mrs. Tarns with swiftness darted up the steps and inserted a large,
fat, wet hand between the raised knocker and its bed. It was
the sublime gesture of a martyr, and her large brown eyes gazed
submissively, yet firmly, at Mr. Batchgrew with the look of a martyr.
She had nothing to gain by the defiance of a great man, but she could
not permit her honoured employer to be wakened. She was accustomed to
emergencies, and to desperate deeds therein, and she did not fail
now in promptly taking the right course, regardless of consequences.
Somewhat younger than Mr. Batchgrew in years, she was older in
experience and in wisdom. She could do a thousand things well; Mr.
Batchgrew could do nothing well. At that very moment she conquered,
and he was beaten. Yet her brown eyes and even the sturdy uplifted arm
cringed to him, and asked in abasement to be forgiven for the impiety
committed. From her other hand a cloth dripped foul water on to the
topmost step.
And then the door yielded. Thomas Batchgrew and Mrs. Tarns both
abandoned the knocker. Rachel, pale as a lily, stern, with dilated
eyes, stood before them. And Mr. Batchgrew realized, as he looked
at her against the dark, hushed background of the stairs, that Mrs.
Maldon was indeed ill. Mrs. Tams respectfully retired down the steps.
A mightier than she, the young, naive, ignorant girl, to whom she
could have taught everything save possibly the art of washing cutlery,
had relieved her of responsibility.
"You can't see her," said Rachel in a low tone, trembling.
"But--but--" Thomas Batchgrew spluttered, ineffectively. "D'you know
I'm her trustee, miss? Let me come in."
Rachel would not take her hand off the inner knob.
There was the thin, far-off sound of an electric bell, breaking the
silence of the house. It was the bell in Rachel's bedroom, rung from
Mrs. Maldon's bedroom. And at this mysterious signal from the invalid,
this faint proof that the hidden sufferer had consciousness and
volition, Rachel started and Thomas Batchgrew started.
"Her bell!" Rachel exclaimed, and fled upstairs.
In the large bedroom Mrs. Maldon lay apparently at ease.
"Did they waken you?" cried Rachel, distressed.
"Who is there, dear?" Mrs. Maldon asked, in a voice that had almost
recovered from the weakness of the night, Rachel was astounded.
"Mr. Batchgrew."
"I must see him," said the old lady.
"But--"
"I must see him at once," Mrs. Maldon repeated. "At once. Kindly bring
him up." And she added, in a curiously even and resigned tone, "I've
lost all that money!"
II
"Nay," said Mrs. Maldon to Thomas Batchgrew, "I'm not going to die
just yet."
Her voice was cheerful, even a little brisk, and she spoke with a
benign smile in the tranquil accents of absolute conviction. But she
did not move her head; she waited to look at Thomas Batchgrew until
he came within her field of vision at the foot of the bed. This
quiescence had a disconcerting effect, contradicting her voice.
She was lying on her back, in the posture customary to her, the arms
being stretched down by the sides under the bed-quilt. Her features
were drawn slightly askew; the skin was shiny; the eyes stared as
though Mrs. Maldon had been a hysterical subject. It was evident that
she had passed through a tremendous physical crisis. Nevertheless,
Rachel was still astounded at the change for the better in her,
wrought by sleep and the force of her obstinate vitality.
The contrast between the scene which Thomas Batchgrew now saw and
the scene which had met Rachel in the night was so violent as to seem
nearly incredible. Not a sign of the catastrophe remained, except in
Mrs. Maldon's face, and in some invalid gear on the dressing-table,
for Rachel had gradually got the room into order. She had even closed
and locked the wardrobe.
On answering Mrs. Maldon's summons in the night, Rachel had found the
central door of the wardrobe swinging and the sacred big drawer at the
bottom of that division only half shut, and Mrs. Maldon in a peignoir
lying near it on the floor, making queer inhuman noises, not moans,
but a kind of anxious, inarticulate entreaty, and shaking her head
constantly to the left--never to the right. Mrs. Maldon had recognized
Rachel, and had seemed to implore with agonized intensity her
powerful assistance in some nameless and hopeless tragic dilemma. The
sight--especially of the destruction of the old woman's dignity--was
dreadful to such an extent that Rachel did not realize its effect on
herself until several hours afterwards. At the moment she called on
the immense reserves of her self-confidence to meet the situation--and
she met it, assisting her pride with the curious pretence,
characteristic of the Five Towns race, that the emergency was
insufficient to alarm in the slightest degree a person of sagacity and
sang-froid.
She had restored Mrs. Maldon to her bed and to some of her dignity.
But the horrid symptoms were not thereby abated. The inhuman
noises and the distressing, incomprehensible appeal had continued.
Immediately Rachel's back was turned Mrs. Maldon had fallen out of
bed. This happened three times, so that clearly the sufferer was
falling out of bed under the urgency of some half-conscious purpose.
Rachel had soothed her. And once she had managed to say with some
clearness the words, "I've been downstairs." But when Rachel went back
to the room from dispatching Louis for the doctor, she was again on
the floor. Louis' absence from the house had lasted an intolerable
age, but the doctor had followed closely on the messenger, and already
the symptoms had become a little less acute. The doctor had diagnosed
with rapidity. Supervening upon her ordinary cardiac attack after
supper, Mrs. Maldon had had, in the night, an embolus in one artery
of the brain. The way in which the doctor announced the fact showed to
Rachel that nothing could easily have been more serious. And yet
the mere naming of the affliction eased her, although she had no
conception of what an embolus might be. Dr. Yardley had remained until
four o'clock, when Mrs. Maldon, surprisingly convalescent, dropped off
to sleep. He remarked that she might recover.
At eight o'clock he had come back. Mrs. Maldon was awake, but had
apparently no proper recollection of the events of the night, which
even to Rachel had begun to seem unreal, like a waning hallucination.
The doctor gave orders, with optimism, and left, sufficiently
reassured to allow himself to yawn. At a quarter past eight Louis had
departed to his own affairs, on Rachel's direct suggestion. And when
Mrs. Tams had been informed of the case so full of disturbing enigmas,
while Rachel and she drank tea together in the kitchen, the daily
domestic movement of the house was partly resumed, from vanity,
because Rachel could not bear to sit idle nor to admit to herself that
she had been scared to a standstill.
And now Mrs. Maldon, in full possession of her faculties, faced Thomas
Batchgrew for the interview which she had insisted on having. And
Rachel waited with an uncanny apprehension, her ears full of the
mysterious and frightful phrase, "I've lost all that money."
III
Mrs. Maldon, after a few words had passed as to her illness, used
exactly the same phrase again--"I've lost all that money!"
Mr. Batchgrew snorted, and glanced at Rachel for an explanation.
"Yes. It's all gone," proceeded Mrs. Maldon with calm resignation.
"But I'm too old to worry. Please listen to me. We lost my serviette
and ring last evening at supper. Couldn't find it anywhere. And in
the night it suddenly occurred to me where it was. I've remembered
everything now, almost, and I'm quite sure. You know you first told
me to put the money in my wardrobe. Now before you said that, I had
thought of putting it on the top of the cupboard to the right of the
fireplace in the back room downstairs. I thought that would be a good
place for it in case burglars _did_ come. No burglar would ever
think of looking there."
"God bless me!" Mr. Batchgrew muttered, scornfully protesting.
"It couldn't possibly be seen, you see. However, I thought I ought to
respect your wish, and so I decided I'd put part of it on the top of
the cupboard, and part of it underneath a lot of linen at the bottom
of the drawer in my wardrobe. That would satisfy both of us."
"Would it!" exclaimed Mr. Batchgrew, without any restraint upon his
heavy, rolling voice.
"Well, I must have picked up the serviette and ring with the
bank-notes, you see. I fear I'm absent-minded like that sometimes. I
know I went out of the sitting-room with both hands full. I know both
hands were occupied, because I remember when I went into the back room
I didn't turn the gas up, and I pushed a chair up to the cupboard with
my knee, for me to stand on. I'm certain I put some of the notes
on the top of the cupboard. Then I came upstairs. The window on the
landing was rattling, and I put the other part of the money on the
chair while I tried to fasten the window. However, I couldn't fasten
it. So I left it. And then I thought I picked up the money again off
the chair and came in here and hid it at the bottom of the drawer and
locked the wardrobe."
"You thought!" said Thomas Batchgrew, gazing at the aged weakling as
at an insane criminal. "Was this just after I left?"
Mrs. Maldon nodded apologetically.
"When I woke up the first time in the night, it struck me like
a flash: Had I taken the serviette and ring up with the notes? I
_am_ liable to do that sort of thing. I'm an old woman--it's
no use denying it." She looked plaintively at Rachel, and her voice
trembled. "I got up. I was bound to get up, and I turned the gas on,
and there the serviette and ring were at the bottom of the drawer, but
no money! I took everything out of the drawer, piece by piece, and put
it back again. I simply cannot tell you how I felt! I went out to
the landing with a match. There was no money there. And then I went
downstairs in the dark. I never knew it to be so dark, in spite of the
street-lamp. I knocked against the clock. I nearly knocked it over.
I managed to light the gas in the back room. I made sure that I must
have left _all_ the notes on the top of the cupboard instead of
only part of them. But there was nothing there at all. Nothing! Then
I looked all over the sitting-room floor with a candle. When I got
upstairs again I didn't know what I was doing. I knew I was going to
be ill, and I just managed to ring the bell for dear Rachel, and
the next thing I remember was I was in bed here, and Rachel putting
something hot to my feet--the dear child!"
Her eyes glistened with tears. And Rachel too, as she pictured
the enfeebled and despairing incarnation of dignity colliding with
grandfather's clocks in the night and climbing on chairs and groping
over carpets, had difficulty not to cry, and a lump rose in her
throat. She was so moved by compassion that she did not at first feel
the full shock of the awful disappearance of the money.
Mr. Batchgrew, for the second time that morning unequal to a
situation, turned foolishly to the wardrobe, clearing his throat and
snorting.
"It's on one of the sliding trays," said Mrs. Maldon.
"What's on one of the sliding trays?"
"The serviette."
Rachel, who was nearest, opened the wardrobe and immediately
discovered the missing serviette and ring, which had the appearance of
a direct dramatic proof of Mrs. Maldon's story.
Mr. Batchgrew exclaimed, indignant--
"I never heard such a rigmarole in all my born days." And then,
angrily to Rachel, "Go down and look on th' top o' th' cupboard,
thee!"
Rachel hesitated.
"I'm quite resigned," said Mrs. Maldon placidly. "It's a punishment on
me for hardening my heart to Julian last night. It's a punishment for
my pride."
"Now, then!" Mr. Batchgrew glared bullyingly at Rachel, who vanished.
In a few moments she returned.
"There's nothing at all on the top of the cupboard."
"But th' money must be somewhere," said Mr. Batchgrew savagely. "Nine
hundred and sixty-five pun. And I've arranged to lend out that money
again, at once! What am I to say to th' mortgagor? Am I to tell him as
I've lost it?... No! I never!"
Mrs. Maldon murmured--
"Nay, nay! It's no use looking at me. I thought I should never get
over it in the night. But I'm quite resigned now."
Rachel, standing near the door, could observe both Mrs. Maldon and
Thomas Batchgrew, and was regarded by neither of them. And while,
in the convulsive commotion of her feelings, her sympathy for and
admiration of Mrs. Maldon became poignant, she was thrilled by the
most intense scorn and disgust for Thomas Batchgrew. The chief reason
for her abhorrence was the old man's insensibility to the angelic
submission, the touching fragility, the heavenly meekness and
tranquillity, of Mrs. Maldon as she lay there helpless, victimized by
a paralytic affliction. (Rachel wanted to forget utterly the souvenir
of Mrs. Maldon's paroxysm in the night, because it slurred the
unmatched dignity of the aged creature.) Another reason was the mere
fact that Mr. Batchgrew had insisted on leaving the money in the
house. Who but Mr. Batchgrew would have had the notion of saddling
poor old Mrs. Maldon with the custody of a vast sum of money? It was a
shame; it was positively cruel! Rachel was indignantly convinced that
he alone ought to be made responsible for the money. And lastly, she
loathed and condemned him for the reason that he was so obviously
unequal to the situation. He could not handle it. He was found out. He
was disproved, He did not know what to do. He could only mouth, strut,
bully, and make rude noises. He could not even keep decently around
him the cloak of self-importance. He stood revealed to Mrs. Maldon and
Rachel as he had sometimes stood revealed to his dead wife and to his
elder children and to some of his confidential, faithful employees.
He was an offence in the delicacy of the bedroom. If the rancour of
Rachel's judgment had been fierce enough to strike him to the floor,
assuredly his years would not have saved him! And yet Mrs. Maldon
gazed at him with submissive and apologetic gentleness! Foolish saint!
Fancy _her_ (thought Rachel) hardening her heart to Julian!
Rachel longed to stiffen her with some backing of her own harsh common
sense. And her affection for Mrs. Maldon grew passionate and half
maternal.
IV
Thomas Batchgrew was saying--
"It beats me how anybody in their senses could pick up a serviette and
put it way for a pile o' bank-notes." He scowled. "However, I'll go
and see Snow. I'll see what Snow says. I'll get him to come up with
one of his best men--Dickson, perhaps."
"Thomas Batchgrew!" cried Mrs. Maldon with sudden disturbing febrile
excitement. "You'll do no such thing. I'll have no police prying into
this affair. If you do that I shall just die right off."
And her manner grew so imperious that Mr. Batchgrew was intimidated.
"But--but--"
"I'd sooner lose all the money!" said Mrs. Maldon, almost wildly.
She blushed. And Rachel also felt herself to be blushing, and was
not sure whether she knew why she was blushing. An atmosphere of
constraint and shame seemed to permeate the room.
Mr. Batchgrew growled--
"The money must be in the house. The truth is, Elizabeth, ye don't
know no more than that bedpost where ye put it."
And Rachel agreed eagerly--
"Of course it _must_ be in the house! I shall set to and turn
everything out. Everything!"
"Ye'd better!" said Thomas Batchgrew.
"That will be the best thing, dear--perhaps," said Mrs. Maldon,
indifferent, and now plainly fatigued.
Every one seemed determined to be convinced that the money was in the
house, and to employ this conviction as a defence against horrible dim
suspicions that had inexplicably emerged from the corners of the room
and were creeping about like menaces.
"Where else should it be?" muttered Batchgrew, sarcastically, after a
pause, as if to say, "Anybody who fancies the money isn't in the house
is an utter fool."
Mrs. Maldon had closed her eyes.
There was a faint knock at the door. Rachel turned instinctively to
prevent a possible intruder from entering and catching sight of
those dim suspicions before they could be driven back into their dark
corners. Then she remembered that she had asked Mrs. Tams to bring up
some Revalenta Arabica food for Mrs. Maldon as soon as it should be
ready. And she sedately opened the door. Mrs. Tams, with her usual
serf-like diffidence, remained invisible, except for the hand holding
forth the cup. But her soft voice, charged with sensational news, was
heard--
"Mrs. Grocott's boy next door but one has just been round to th' back
to tell me as there was a burglary down the Lane last night."
As Rachel carried the food across to the bed, she could not help
saying, though with feigned deference, to Mr. Batchgrew--
"You told us last night that there wouldn't _be_ any more
burglaries, Mr. Batchgrew."
The burning tightness round the top of her head, due to fatigue and
lack of sleep, seemed somehow to brace her audacity, and to make her
careless of consequences.
The trustee and celebrity, though momentarily confounded, was
recovering himself now. He determined to crush the pert creature whose
glance had several times incommoded him. He said severely--
"What's a burglary down the Lane got to with us and this here money?"
"Us and the money!" Rachel repeated evenly. "Nothing, only when I came
downstairs in the night the greenhouse door was open." (The scullery
was still often called the greenhouse.) "And I'd locked it myself!"
A troubling silence followed, broken by Mr. Batchgrew's uneasy grunts
as he turned away to the window, and by the clink of the spoon as
Rachel helped Mrs. Maldon to take the food.
At length Mr. Batchgrew asked, staring through the window--
"Did ye notice the dust on top o' that cupboard? Was it disturbed?"
Hesitating an instant, Rachel answered firmly, without turning her
head--
"I did ... It was ... Of course."
Mrs. Maldon made no sign of interest.
Mr. Batchgrew's boots creaked to and fro in the room.
"And what's Julian got to say for himself?" he asked, not addressing
either woman in particular.
"Julian wasn't here. He didn't stay the night. Louis stayed instead,"
answered Mrs. Maldon, faintly, without opening her eyes.
"What? What? What's this?"
"Tell him, dear, how it was," said Mrs. Maldon, still more faintly.
Rachel obeyed, in agitated, uneven tones.
CHAPTER VI
THEORIES OF THE THEFT
I
The inspiring and agreeable image of Rachel floated above vast
contending forces of ideas in the mind of Louis Fores as he bent
over his petty-cash book amid the dust of the vile inner office at
Horrocleave's; and their altercation was sharpened by the fact that
Louis had not had enough sleep. He had had a great deal more sleep
than Rachel, but he had not had what he was in the habit of calling
his "whack" of it. Although never in a hurry to go to bed, he
appreciated as well as any doctor the importance of sleep in the
economy of the human frame, and his weekly average of repose was high;
he was an expert sleeper.
He thirsted after righteousness, and the petty-cash book was permeated
through and through with unrighteousness; and it was his handiwork. Of
course, under the unconscious influence of Rachel, seen in her kitchen
and seen also in various other striking aspects during the exciting
night, he might have bravely exposed the iniquity of the petty-cash
book to Jim Horrocleave, and cleared his conscience, and then gone and
confessed to Rachel, and thus prepared the way for the inner peace and
a new life. He would have suffered--there was indeed a possibility of
very severe suffering--but he would have been a free man--yes, free
even if in prison, and he would have followed the fine tradition of
rectitude, exhorting the respect and admiration of all true souls,
etc. He had read authentic records of similar deeds. What stopped him
from carrying out the programme of honesty was his powerful worldly
common sense. Despite what he had read, and despite the inspiring
image of Rachel, his common sense soon convinced him that confession
would be an error of judgment and quite unremunerative for, at any
rate, very many years. Hence he abandoned regretfully the notion of
confession, as a beautifully impossible dream. But righteousness was
not thereby entirely denied to him; his thirst for it could still be
assuaged by the device of an oath to repay secretly to Horrocleave
every penny that he had stolen from Horrocleave, which oath he
took--and felt better and worthier of Rachel.
He might, perhaps, have inclined more effectually towards confession
had not the petty-cash book appeared to him in the morning light as an
admirably convincing piece of work. It had the most innocent air,
and was markedly superior to his recollection of it. On many pages he
himself could scarcely detect his own traces. He began to feel that he
could rely pretty strongly on the cleverness of the petty-cash book.
Only four blank pages remained in it. A few days more and it would be
filled up, finished, labelled with a gummed white label showing
its number and the dates of its first and last entries, shelved and
forgotten. A pity that Horrocleave's suspicions had not been delayed
for another month or so, for then the book might have been mislaid,
lost, or even consumed in a conflagration! But never mind! A certain
amount of ill luck fell to every man, and he would trust to his
excellent handicraft in the petty-cash book. It was his only hope in
the world, now that the mysterious and heavenly bank-notes were gone.
His attitude towards the bank-notes was, quite naturally, illogical
and self-contradictory. While the bank-notes were in his pocket he had
in the end seen three things with clearness. First, the wickedness of
appropriating them. Second, the danger of appropriating them--having
regard to the prevalent habit of keeping the numbers of bank-notes.
Third, the wild madness of attempting to utilize them in order to
replace the stolen petty cash, for by no ingenuity could the presence
of a hoard of over seventy pounds in the petty-cash box have been
explained. He had perfectly grasped all that; and yet, the notes
having vanished, he felt forlorn, alone, as one who has lost his best
friend--a prop and firm succour in a universe of quicksands.
In the matter of the burning of the notes his conscience did not
accuse him. On the contrary, he emerged blameless from the episode. It
was not he who first had so carelessly left the notes lying about. He
had not searched for them, he had not purloined them. They had been
positively thrust upon him. His intention in assuming charge of them
for a brief space was to teach some negligent person a lesson. During
the evening Fate had given him no opportunity to produce them. And
when in the night, with honesty unimpeachable, he had decided to
restore them to the landing, Fate had intervened once more. At
each step of the affair he had acted for the best in difficult
circumstances. Persons so ill-advised as to drop bank-notes under
chairs must accept all the consequences of their act. Who could have
foreseen that while he was engaged on the philanthropic errand of
fetching a doctor for an aged lady Rachel would light a fire under
the notes?... No, not merely was he without sin in the matter of the
bank-notes, he was rather an ill-used person, a martyr deserving of
sympathy. And, further, he did not regret the notes; he was glad they
were gone. They could no longer tempt him now, and their disappearance
would remain a mystery for ever. So far as they were concerned, he
could look his aunt or anybody else in the face without a tremor. The
mere destruction of the immense, undetermined sum of money did not
seriously ruffle him. As an ex-bank clerk he was aware that though an
individual would lose, the State, through the Bank of England,
would correspondingly gain, and thus for the nonce he had the large
sensation of a patriot.
II
Axon, the factotum of the counting-house, came in from the outer
office, with a mien composed of mirth and apprehension in about equal
parts. If Axon happened to be a subject of a conversation and there
was any uncertainty as to which Axon out of a thousand Axons he
might be, the introducer of the subject would always say, "You
know--sandy-haired fellow." This described him--hair, beard,
moustache. Sandy-haired men have no age until they are fifty-five, and
Axon was not fifty-five. He was a pigeon-flyer by choice, and a clerk
in order that he might be a pigeon-flyer. His fault was that, with
no moral right whatever to do so, he would treat Louis Fores as a
business equal in the office and as a social equal in the street.
He sprang upon Louis now as one grinning valet might spring upon
another, enormous with news, and whispered--
"I say, guv'nor's put his foot through them steps from painting-shop
and sprained his ankle. Look out for ructions, eh? Thank the Lord it's
a half-day!" and then whipped back to his own room.
On any ordinary Saturday morning Louis by a fine frigidity would
have tried to show to the obtuse Axon that he resented such demeanour
towards himself on the part of an Axon, assuming as it did that the
art-director of the works was one of the servile crew that scuttled
about in terror if the ferocious Horrocleave happened to sneeze. But
to-day the mere sudden information that Horrocleave was on the works
gave him an unpleasant start and seriously impaired his presence of
mind. He had not been aware of Horrocleave's arrival. He had been
expecting to hear Horrocleave's step and voice, and the rustle of
him hanging up his mackintosh outside (Horrocleave always wore a
mackintosh instead of an overcoat), and all the general introductory
sounds of his advent, before he finally came into the inner room. But,
now, for aught Louis knew, Horrocleave might already have been in the
inner room, before Louis. He was upset. The enemy was not attacking
him in the proper and usual way.
And the next instant, ere he could collect and reorganize his forces,
he was paralysed by the footfall of Horrocleave, limping, and the bang
of a door.
And Louis thought--
"He's in the outer office. He's only got to take his mackintosh off,
and then I shall see his head coming through this door, and perhaps
he'll ask me for the petty-cash book right off."
But Horrocleave did not even pause to remove his mackintosh. In
defiance of immemorial habit, being himself considerably excited and
confused, he stalked straight in, half hopping, and sat down in his
frowsy chair at his frowsy desk, with his cap at the back of his head.
He was a spare man, of medium height, with a thin, shrewd face and a
constant look of hard, fierce determination.
And there was Louis staring like a fool at the open page of the
petty-cash book, incriminating himself every instant.
"Hello!" said Louis, without looking round. "What's up?"
"What's up?" Horrocleave scowled. "What d'ye mean?"
"I thought you were limping just the least bit in the world," said
Louis, whose tact was instinctive and indestructible.
"Oh, _that_!" said Horrocleave, as though nothing was farther
from his mind than the peculiarity of his gait that morning. He bit
his lip.
"Slipped over something?" Louis suggested.
"Aye!" said Horrocleave, somewhat less ominously, and began to open
his letters.
Louis saw that he had done well to feign ignorance of the sprain and
to assume that Horrocleave had slipped, whereas in fact Horrocleave
had put his foot through a piece of rotten wood. Everybody in the
works, upon pain of death, would have to pretend that the employer had
merely slipped, and that the consequences were negligible. Horrocleave
had already nearly eaten an old man alive for the sin of asking
whether he had hurt himself!
And he had not hurt himself because two days previously he had
ferociously stopped the odd-man of the works from wasting his time in
mending just that identical stair, and had asserted that the stair was
in excellent condition. Horrocleave, though Napoleonic by disposition,
had a provincial mind, even a Five Towns mind. He regarded as sheer
loss any expenditure on repairs or renewals or the processes of
cleansing. His theory was that everything would "do" indefinitely. He
passed much of his time in making things "do." His confidence in the
theory that things could indeed be made to "do" was usually justified,
but the steps from the painting-shop--a gimcrack ladder with
hand-rail, attached somehow externally to a wall--had at length
betrayed it. That the accident had happened to himself, and not to a
lad balancing a plankful of art-lustre ware on one shoulder, was sheer
luck. And now the odd-man, with the surreptitious air of one engaged
in a nefarious act, was putting a new tread on the stairs. Thus
devoutly are the Napoleonic served!
Horrocleave seemed to weary of his correspondence.
"By the by," he said in a strange tone, "let's have a look at that
petty-cash book."
Louis rose, and with all his charm, with all the elegance of a man
intended by Nature for wealth and fashion instead of a slave on a foul
pot-bank, gave up the book. It was like giving up hope to the last
vestige, like giving up the ghost. He saw with horrible clearness that
he had been deceiving himself, that Horrocleave's ruthless eye could
not fail to discern at the first glance all his neat dodges, such as
additions of ten to the shillings, and even to the pounds here and
there, and ingenious errors in carrying forward totals from the bottom
of one page to the top of the next. He began to speculate whether
Horrocleave would be content merely to fling him out of the office, or
whether he would prosecute. Prosecution seemed much more in accordance
with the Napoleonic temperament, and yet Louis could not, then,
conceive himself the victim of a prosecution.... Anybody else, but not
Louis Fores!
Horrocleave, his elbow on the table, leaned his head on his hand and
began to examine the book. Suddenly he looked up at Louis, who could
not move and could not cease from agreeably smiling.
Said Horrocleave in a still more peculiar tone--
"Just ask Axon whether he means to go fetch wages to-day or to-morrow.
Has he forgotten it's Saturday morning?"
Louis shot away into the outer office, where Axon was just putting on
his hat to go to the bank.
Alone in the outer office Louis wondered. The whole of his vitality
was absorbed in the single function of wondering. Then through the
thin slit of the half-open door between the top and the middle hinges,
he beheld Horrocleave bending in judgment over the book. And he
gazed at the vision in the fascination of horror. In a few moments
Horrocleave leaned back, and Louis saw that his face had turned paler.
It went almost white. Horrocleave was breathing strangely, his arms
dropped downward, his body slipped to one side, his cap fell off, his
eyes shut, his mouth opened, his head sank loosely over the back
of the chair like the head of a corpse. He had fainted. The
thought passed through Louis' mind that stupefaction at the complex
unrighteousness of the petty-cash records had caused Horrocleave to
lose consciousness. Then the true explanation occurred to him. It was
the pain in his ankle that had overcome the heroic sufferer. Louis
had desired to go to his aid, but he could not budge from his post.
Presently the colour began slowly to return to Horrocleave's cheek;
his eyes opened; he looked round sleepily and then wildly; and then he
rubbed his eyes and yawned. He remained quiescent for several minutes,
while a railway lorry thundered through the archway and the hoofs of
the great horse crunched on shawds in the yard. Then he called, in a
subdued voice--
"Louis! Where the devil are ye?"
Louis re-entered the room, and as he did so Horrocleave shut the
petty-cash book with an abrupt gesture.
"Here, take it!" said he, pushing the book away.
"Is it all right?" Louis asked.
Horrocleave nodded. "Well, I've checked about forty additions." And he
smiled sardonically.
"I think you might do it a bit oftener," said Louis, and then went on:
"I say, don't you think it might be a good thing if you took your boot
off. You never know, when you've slipped, whether it won't swell--I
mean the ankle."
"Bosh!" exclaimed Horrocleave, with precipitation, but after an
instant added thoughtfully: "Well, I dun'no'. Wouldn't do any harm,
would it? I say--get me some water, will you? I don't know how it is,
but I'm as thirsty as a dog."
The heroic martyr to the affirmation that he had not hurt himself had
handsomely saved his honour. He could afford to relax a little now the
rigour of consistency in conduct. With twinges and yawns he permitted
Louis to help him with the boot and to put an art-lustre cup to his
lips.
Louis was in the highest spirits. He had seen the gates of the
Inferno, and was now snatched up to Paradise. He knew that Horrocleave
had never more than half suspected him, and that the terrible
Horrocleave pride would prevent Horrocleave from asking for the
book again. Henceforth, saved by a miracle, he could live in utter
rectitude; he could respond freely to the inspiring influence of
Rachel, and he would do so. He smiled at his previous fears, and was
convinced, by no means for the first time, that a Providence watched
over him because of his good intentions and his nice disposition--that
nothing really serious could ever occur to Louis Fores. He reflected
happily that in a few days he would begin a new petty-cash book--and
he envisaged it as a symbol of his new life. The future smiled. He
made sure that his aunt Maldon was dying, and though he liked her very
much and would regret her demise, he could not be expected to be blind
to the fact that a proportion of her riches would devolve on himself.
Indeed, in unluckily causing a loss of money to his aunt Maldon he had
in reality only been robbing himself. So that there was no need for
any kind of remorse. When the works closed for the week-end, he
walked almost serenely up to Bycars for news--news less of his aunt's
condition than of the discovery that a certain roll of bank-notes had
been mislaid.
III
The front door was open when Louis arrived at Mrs. Maldon's house, and
he walked in. Anybody might have walked in. There was nothing unusual
in this; it was not a sign that the mistress of the house was ill in
bed and its guardianship therefore disorganized. The front doors of
Bursley--even the most select--were constantly ajar and the fresh wind
from off the pot-bank was constantly blowing through those exposed
halls and up those staircases. For the demon of public inquisitiveness
is understood in the Five Towns to be a nocturnal demon. The fear
of it begins only at dusk. A woman who in the evening protects her
parlour like her honour, will, while the sun is above the horizon,
show the sacred secrets of the kitchen itself to any one who chooses
to stand on the front step.
Louis put his hat and stick on the oak chest, and with a careless,
elegant gesture brushed back his dark hair. The door of the parlour
was slightly ajar. He pushed it gently open, and peeped round it with
a pleasant arch expression, on the chance of there being some one
within.
Rachel was lying on the Chesterfield. Her left cheek, resting on her
left hand, was embedded in the large cushion. A large coil of her
tawny hair, displaced, had spread loosely over the dark green of the
sofa. The left foot hung limp over the edge of the sofa; the jutting
angle of the right knee divided sharply the drapery of her petticoat
into two systems, and her right shoe with its steel buckle pressed
against the yielding back of the Chesterfield. The right arm lay
lissom like a snake across her breast. All her muscles were lax,
and every full curve of her body tended downward in response to the
negligent pose. Her eyes were shut, her face flushed; and her chest
heaved with the slow regularity of her deep, unconscious breathing.
Louis as he gazed was enchanted. This was not Miss Fleckring, the
companion and household help of Mrs. Maldon, but a nymph, a fay, the
universal symbol of his highest desire.... He would have been happy to
kiss the glinting steel buckle, so feminine, so provocative, so coy.
The tight rounded line of the waist, every bend of the fingers, the
fall of the eye-lashes--all were exquisite and precious to him after
the harsh, unsatisfying, desolating masculinity of Horrocleave's.
This was the divine reward of Horrocleave's, the sole reason of
Horrocleave's. Horrocleave's only existed in order that this might
exist and be maintained amid cushions and the softness of calm and
sequestered interiors, waiting for ever in acquiescence for the
arrival of manful doers from Horrocleave's. The magnificent pride of
male youth animated Louis. He had not a care in the world. Even
his long-unpaid tailor's bill was magically abolished. He was an
embodiment of exulting hope and fine aspirations.
Rachel stirred, dimly aware of the invasion. And Louis, actuated by
the most delicate regard for her sensitive modesty, vanished back for
a moment into the hall, until she should have fitted herself for his
beholding.
Mrs. Tams had come from somewhere into the hall. She was munching a
square of bread and cold bacon, and she curtsied, exclaiming--
"It's never Mester Fores! That's twice her's been woke up this day!"
"Who's there?" Rachel called out, and her voice had the breaking,
bewildered softness of a woman's in the dark, emerging from a dream.
"Sorry! Sorry!" said Louis, behind the door.
"It's all right," she reassured him.
He returned to the room. She was sitting upright on the sofa, her arms
a little extended and the tips of her fingers touching the sofa. The
coil of her hair had been arranged. The romance of the exciting night
still clung to her, for Louis; but what chiefly seduced him was the
mingling in her mien of soft confusion and candid, sturdy honesty and
dependableness. He felt that here was not only a ravishing charm, but
a source of moral strength from which he could draw inexhaustibly that
which he had had a slight suspicion he lacked. He felt that here was
joy and salvation united, and it seemed too good to be true. Strange
that when she greeted him at the door-step on the previous evening, he
had imagined that she was revealing herself to him for the first
time; and again later, in the kitchen, he had imagined that she was
revealing herself to him for the first time; and again, still later,
in the sudden crisis at his bedroom door, he had imagined that she was
revealing herself to him for the first time. For now he perceived that
he had never really seen her before; and he was astounded and awed.
"Auntie still on the up-grade?" he inquired, using all his own charm.
He guessed, of course, that Mrs. Maldon must be still better, and he
was very glad, although, if she recovered, it would be she and not
himself that he had deprived of bank-notes.
"Oh yes, she's better," said Rachel, not moving from the sofa; "but
have you heard what's happened?"
In spite of himself he trembled, awaiting the disclosure. "Now for the
bank-notes!" he reflected, bracing his nerves. He shook his head.
She told him what had happened; she told him at length, quickening
her speech as she proceeded. And for a few moments it was as if he
was being engulfed by an enormous wave, and would drown. But the next
instant he recollected that he was on dry land, safe, high beyond the
reach of any catastrophe. His position was utterly secure. The past
was past; the leaf was turned. He had but to forget, and he was
confident of his ability to forget. The compartments of his mind were
innumerable, and as separate as the dungeons of a mediaeval prison.
"Isn't it awful?" she murmured.
"Well, it is rather awful!"
"Nine hundred and sixty-five pounds! Fancy it!"
The wave approached him again as she named the sum. Nevertheless,
he never once outwardly blenched. As he had definitely put away
unrighteousness, so his face showed no sign of guilt. Like many
ingenuous-minded persons, he had in a high degree the faculty of
appearing innocent--except when he really was innocent.
"If you ask me," said Rachel, "she never took any of the notes
upstairs at all; she left them all somewhere downstairs and only took
the serviette upstairs."
"Yes," he agreed thoughtfully, wondering whether on the other hand,
Mrs. Maldon had not taken all the notes upstairs, and left none of
them downstairs. Was it possible that in that small roll, in that
crushed ball that he had dropped into the grate, there was nearly a
thousand pounds--the equivalent of an income of a pound a week
for ever and ever?... Never mind! The incident, so far as he was
concerned, was closed. The dogma of his future life would be that the
bank-notes had never existed.
"And I've looked _ev_'rywhere!" Rachel insisted with strong
emphasis.
Louis remarked, thoughtfully, as though a new aspect of the affair was
presenting itself to him--
"It's really rather serious, you know!"
"I should just say it was--as much money as that!"
"I mean," said Louis, "for everybody. That is to say, Julian and me.
We're involved."
"How can you be involved? You didn't even know it was in the house."
"No. But the old lady might have dropped it. I might have picked it
up. Julian might have picked it up. Who's to prove--"
She cut in coldly--
"Please don't talk like that!"
He smiled with momentary constraint. He said to himself--
"It won't do to talk to this kind of girl like that. She won't stand
it.... Why, she wouldn't even _dream_ of suspicion falling on
herself--wouldn't dream of it."
After a silence he began--
"Well--" and made a gesture to imply that the enigma baffled him.
"I give it up!" breathed Rachel intimately. "I fairly give it up!"
"And of course that was the cause of her attack?" he said suddenly, as
if the idea had just occurred to him.
Rachel nodded--"Evidently."
"Well," said he, "I'll look in again during the afternoon. I must
be getting along for my grub." He was hoping that he had not
unintentionally brought about his aunt's death.
"Not had your dinner!" she cried. "Why! It's after half-past two!"
"Oh, well, you know ... Saturday...."
"I shall get you a bit of dinner here," she said. "And then perhaps
Mrs. Maldon will be waking up. Yes," she repeated, positively, "I
shall get you a bit of dinner here, myself. Mrs. Maldon would not be
at all pleased if I didn't."
"I'm frightfully hungry," he admitted.
And he was.
When she had left the parlour he perceived evidences here and there
that she had been hunting up hill and down dale for the notes; and he
went into the back room with an earnest, examining air, as though
he might find part of the missing hoard, after all, in some niche
overlooked by Rachel. He would have preferred to think that Mrs.
Maldon had not taken the whole of the money upstairs, but reflection
did much to convince him that she had. It was infinitely regrettable
that he had not counted his treasure-trove under the chair.
IV
The service of his meal, which had the charm of a picnic, was
interrupted by the arrival of the doctor, whose report on the invalid,
however, was so favourable that Louis could quite dismiss the possibly
homicidal aspect of his dealings with the bank-notes. The shock of the
complete disappearance of the vast sum had perhaps brought Mrs.
Maldon to the brink of death, but she had edged safely away again,
in accordance with her own calm prophecy that very morning. When the
doctor had gone, and the patient was indulged in her desire to be
left alone for sleep, Louis very slowly and luxuriously finished his
repast, with Rachel sitting opposite to him, in Mrs. Maldon's place,
at the dining-table. He lit a cigarette and, gracefully leaning
his elbows on the table, gazed at her through the beautiful grey
smoke-veil, which was like the clouds of Paradise.
What thrilled Louis was the obvious fact that he fascinated her. She
was transformed under his glance. How her eyes shone! How her cheek
flushed and paled! What passionate vitality found vent in her little
gestures! But in the midst of this transformation her honesty,
her loyalty, her exquisite ingenuousness, her superb dependability
remained. She was no light creature, no flirt nor seeker after dubious
sensations. He felt that at last he was appreciated by one whose
appreciation was tremendously worth having. He was confirmed in that
private opinion of himself that no mistakes hitherto made in his
career had been able to destroy. He felt happy and confident as never
before.
Luck, of course; but luck deserved! He could marry this unique
creature and be idolized and cherished for the rest of his life. In
an instant, from being a scorner of conjugal domesticity, he became
a scorner of the bachelor's existence, with its immeasurable secret
ennui hidden beneath the jaunty cloak of a specious freedom--freedom
to be bored, freedom to fret, and long and envy, freedom to eat ashes
and masticate dust! He would marry her. Yes, he was saved, because he
was loved. And he meant to be worthy of his regenerate destiny. All
the best part of his character came to the surface and showed in his
face. But he did not ask his heart whether he was or was not in love
with Rachel. The point did not present itself. He certainly never
doubted that he was seeing her with a quite normal vision.
Their talk went through and through the enormous topic of the night
and day, arriving at no conclusion whatever, except that there was no
conclusion--not even a theory of a conclusion. (And the Louis who now
discussed the case was an innocent, reborn Louis, quite unconnected
with the Louis of the previous evening; he knew no more of the
inwardness of the affair than Rachel did. Of such singular feats of
doubling the personality is the self-deceiving mind capable.) After
a time it became implicit in the tone of their conversation that
the mysterious disappearance in a small, ordinary house of even so
colossal a sum as nine hundred and sixty-five pounds did not mean
the end of the world. That is to say, they grew accustomed to the
situation. Louis, indeed, permitted himself to suggest, as a man of
the large, still-existing world, that Rachel should guard against
over-estimating the importance of the sum. True, as he had several
times reflected, it did represent an income of about a pound a
week! But, after all, what was a pound a week, viewed in a proper
perspective?...
Louis somehow glided from the enormous topic to the topic of the
newest cinema--Rachel had never seen a cinema, except a very primitive
one, years earlier--and old Batchgrew was mentioned, he being
notoriously a cinema magnate. "I cannot stand that man," said Rachel
with a candour that showed to what intimacy their talk had developed.
Louis was delighted by the explosion, and they both fell violently
upon Thomas Batchgrew and found intense pleasure in destroying him.
And Louis was saying to himself, enthusiastically, "How well she
understands human nature!"
So that when old Batchgrew, without any warning or preliminary sound,
stalked pompously into the room their young confusion was excessive.
They felt themselves suddenly in the presence of not merely a personal
adversary, but of an enemy of youth and of love and of joy--of a being
mysterious and malevolent who neither would nor could comprehend them.
And they were at once resentful and intimidated.
During the morning Councillor Batchgrew had provided
himself--doubtless by purchase, since he had not been home--with a
dandiacal spotted white waistcoat in honour of the warm and sunny
weather. This waistcoat by its sprightly unsuitability to his
aged uncouthness, somehow intensified the sinister quality of his
appearance.
"Found it?" he demanded tersely.
Rachel, strangely at a loss, hesitated and glanced at Louis as if for
succour.
"No, I haven't, Mr. Batchgrew," she said. "I haven't, I'm sure. And
I've turned over every possible thing likely or unlikely."
Mr. Batchgrew growled--
"From th' look of ye I made sure that th' money had turned up all
right--ye were that comfortable and cosy! Who'd guess as nigh on a
thousand pound's missing out of this house since last night!"
The heavy voice rolled over them brutally. Louis attempted to
withstand Mr. Batchgrew's glare, but failed. He was sure of the
absolute impregnability of his own position; but the clear memory
of at least one humiliating and disastrous interview with Thomas
Batchgrew in the past robbed Louis' eye of its composure. The
circumstances under which he had left the councillor's employ some
years ago were historic and unforgettable.
"I came in back way instead of front way," said Thomas Batchgrew,
"because I thought I'd have a look at that scullery door. Kitchen's
empty."
"What about the scullery door?" Louis lightly demanded.
Rachel murmured--
"I forgot to tell you; it was open when I came down in the middle of
the night." And then she added: "Wide open."
"Upon my soul!" said Louis slowly, with marked constraint. "I really
forget whether I looked at that door before I went to bed. I know I
looked at all the others."
"I'd looked at it, anyway," said Rachel defiantly, gazing at the
table.
"And when you found it open, miss," pursued Thomas Batchgrew, "what
did ye do?"
"I shut it and locked it."
"Where was the key?"
"In the door."
"Lock in order?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, how could it have been opened from the outside? There
isn't a mark on the door, outside _or_ in."
"As far as that goes, Mr. Batchgrew," said Rachel, "only last week the
key fell out of the lock on the inside and slid down the brick floor
to the outside--you know there's a slope. And I had to go out of the
house by the front and the lamplighter climbed over the back gate for
me and let me into the yard so that I could get the key again. That
might have happened last night. Some one might have shaken the key
out, and pulled it under the door with a bit of wire or something."
"That won't do," Thomas Batchgrew stopped her. "You said the key was
in the door on the inside."
"Well, when they'd once opened the door from the outside, couldn't
they have put the key on the inside again?"
"They? Who?"
"Burglars."
Thomas Batchgrew repeated sarcastically--
"Burglars! Burglars!" and snorted.
"Well, Mr. Batchgrew, either burglars must have been at work," said
Louis, who was fascinated by Rachel's surprising news and equally
surprising theory--"either burglars must have been at work," he
repeated impressively, "_or_--the money is still in the house.
That's evident."
"Is it?" snarled Batchgrew. "Look here, miss, and you, young Fores, I
didn't make much o' this this morning, because I thought th' money 'ud
happen be found. But seeing as it isn't, and _as_ we're talking
about it, what time was the rumpus last night?"
"What time?" Rachel muttered. "What time was it, Mr. Fores?"
"I dun'no'," said Louis. "Perhaps the doctor would know."
"Oh!" said Rachel, "Mrs. Tams said the hall clock had stopped; that
must have been when Mrs. Maldon knocked up against it."
She went to the parlour door and opened it, displaying the hall clock,
which showed twenty-five minutes past twelve. Louis had crept up
behind Mr. Batchgrew, who in his inapposite white waistcoat stood
between the two lovers, stertorous with vague anathema.
"So that was the time," said he. "And th' burglars must ha' been and
gone afore that. A likely thing burglars coming at twelve o'clock
at night, isn't it? And I'll tell ye summat else. Them burglars was
copped last night at Knype at eleven o'clock when th' pubs closed, if
ye want to know--the whole gang of three on 'em."
"Then what about that burglary last night down the Lane?" Rachel asked
sharply.
"Oh!" exclaimed Louis. "Was there a burglary down the Lane last night?
I didn't know that."
"No, there wasn't," said Batchgrew ruthlessly. "That burglary was a
practical joke, and it's all over the town. Denry Machin had a hand in
that affair, and by now I dare say he wishes he hadn't."
"Still, Mr. Batchgrew," Louis argued superiorly, with the philosophic
impartiality of a man well accustomed to the calm unravelling of
crime, "there may be other burglars in the land beside just those
three." He would not willingly allow the theory of burglars to
crumble. Its attractiveness increased every moment.
"There may and there mayn't, young Fores," said Thomas Batchgrew. "Did
_you_ hear anything of 'em?"
"No, I didn't," Louis replied restively.
"And yet you ought to have been listening out for 'em."
"Why ought I to have been listening out for them?"
"Knowing there was all that money in th' house."
"Mr. Fores didn't know," said Rachel.
Louis felt himself unjustly smirched.
"It's scarcely an hour ago," said he, "that I heard about this money
for the first time." And he felt as innocent and aggrieved as he
looked.
Mr. Batchgrew smacked his lips loudly.
"Then," he announced, "I'm going down to th' police-station, to put it
i' Snow's hands."
Rachel straightened herself.
"But surely not without telling Mrs. Maldon?"
Mr. Batchgrew fingered his immense whiskers.
"Is she better?" he inquired threateningly. This was his first sign of
interest in Mrs. Maldon's condition.
"Oh, yes; much. She's going on very well. The doctor's just been."
"Is she asleep?"
"She's resting. She may be asleep."
"Did ye tell her ye hadn't found her money?"
"Yes."
"What did she say?"
"She didn't say anything."
"It might be municipal money, for all she seems to care!" remarked
Thomas Batchgrew, with a short, bitter grin. "Well, I'll be moving to
th' police-station. I've never come across aught like this before, and
I'm going to get to the bottom of it."
Rachel slipped out of the door into the hall.
"Please wait a moment, Mr. Batchgrew," she whispered timidly.
"What for?"
"Till I've told Mrs. Maldon."
"But if her's asleep?"
"I must waken her. I couldn't think of letting you go to the
police-station without letting her know--after what she said this
morning."
Rachel waited. Mr. Batchgrew glanced aside.
"Here! Come here!" said Mr. Batchgrew in a different tone. The fact
was that, put to the proof, he dared not, for all his autocratic
habit, openly disobey the injunction of the benignant, indifferent,
helpless Mrs. Maldon. "Come here!" he repeated coarsely. Rachel
obeyed, shamefaced despite herself. Batchgrew shut the door. "Now,"
he said grimly, "what's your secret? Out with it. I know you and her's
got a secret. What is it?"
Rachel sat down on the sofa, hid her face in her hands, and startled
both men by a sob. She wept with violence. And then through her tears,
and half looking up, she cried out passionately: "It's all your fault.
Why did you leave the money in the house at all? You know you'd no
right to do it, Mr. Batchgrew!"
The councillor was shaken out of his dignity by the incredible
impudence of this indictment from a chit like Rachel. Similar
experiences, however, had happened to him before; for, though as a
rule people most curiously conspired with him to keep up the fiction
that he was sacred, at rare intervals somebody's self-control would
break down, and bitter, inconvenient home truths would resound in
the ear of Thomas Batchgrew. But he would recover himself in a few
moments, and usually some diversion would occur to save him--he was
nearly always lucky. A diversion occurred now, of the least expected
kind. The cajoling tones of Mrs. Tams were heard on the staircase.
"Nay, ma'am! Nay, ma'am! This'll never do. Must I go on my bended
knees to ye?"
And then the firm but soft voice of Mrs. Maldon--
"I must speak to Mr. Batchgrew. I must have Mr. Batchgrew here at
once. Didn't you hear me call and call to you?"
"That I didn't, ma'am! I was beating the feather bed in the back
bedroom. Nay, not a step lower do you go, ma'am, not if I lose me job
for it."
Thomas Batchgrew and Louis were already out in the hall. Half-way down
the stairs stood Mrs. Maldon, supporting herself by the banisters and
being supported by Mrs. Tams. She was wearing her pink peignoir with
white frills at the neck and wrists. Her black hair was loose on her
shoulders like the hair of a young girl. Her pallid and heavily seamed
features with the deep shining eyes trembled gently, as if in response
to a distant vibration. She gazed upon the two silent men with
an expression that united benignancy with profound inquietude and
sadness. All her past life was in her face, inspiring it with strength
and sorrow.
"Mr. Batchgrew," she said. "I've heard your voice for a long time. I
want to speak to you."
And then she turned, yielded to the solicitous alarm of Mrs. Tams,
climbed feebly up the stairs, and vanished round the corner at the
top. And Mrs. Tams, putting her frowsy head for an instant over the
hand-rail, stopped to adjure Mr. Batchgrew--
"Eh, mester; ye'd better stop where ye are awhile."
From the parlour came the faint sobbing of Rachel.
The two men had not a word to say. Mr. Batchgrew grunted, vacillating.
It seemed as if the majestic apparition of Mrs. Maldon had rebuked
everything that was derogatory and undignified in her trustee, and
that both he and Louis were apologizing to the empty hall for being
common, base creatures. Each of them--and especially Louis--had
the sense of being awakened to events of formidable grandeur whose
imminence neither had suspected. Still assuring himself that his
position was absolutely safe, Louis nevertheless was aware of a
sinking in the stomach. He could rebut any accusation. "And yet ...!"
murmured his craven conscience. What could be the enigma between Mrs.
Maldon and Rachel? He was now trying to convince himself that Mrs.
Maldon had in fact divided the money into two parts, of which he had
handled only one, and that the impressive mystery had to do with the
other part of the treasure, which he had neither seen nor touched.
How, then, could he personally be threatened? "And yet!..." said his
conscience again.
In about a minute Mrs. Tarns reappeared at the head of the stairs.
"Her _will_ have ye, mester!" said she to the councillor.
Thomas Batchgrew mounted after her.
Louis made a noise with his tongue as if starting a horse, and
returned to the parlour.
Rachel, still on the sofa, showed her wet face.
"I've got no secret," she said passionately. "And I'm sure Mrs. Maldon
hasn't. What's he driving at?"
The natural freedom of her gestures and vehement accent was enchanting
to Louis.
She jumped from the Chesterfield and ran away upstairs, flying.
He followed to the lobby, and saw her dash into her own room and
feverishly shut the door, which was in full view at the top of
the stairs. And Louis thought he had never lived in any moment so
exquisite and so alarming as that moment.
He was now alone on the ground floor. He caught no sound from above.
"Well, I'd better get out of this," he said to himself. "Anyhow, I'm
all right!... What a girl! Terrific!" And, lighting a fresh cigarette,
he left the house.
V
"And now what's amiss?" Thomas Batchgrew demanded, alone with Mrs.
Maldon in the tranquillity of the bedroom.
Mrs. Maldon lay once more in bed; the bedclothes covered her without
a crease, and from the neat fold-back of the white sheet her wrinkled
ivory face and curving black hair emerged so still and calm that her
recent flight to the stairs seemed unreal, impossible. The impression
her mien gave was that she never had moved and never would move from
the bed. Thomas Batchgrew's blusterous voice frankly showed acute
irritation. He was angry because nine hundred and sixty-five pounds
had monstrously vanished, because the chance of a good investment was
lost, because Mrs. Maldon tied his hands, because Rachel had forgotten
her respect and his dignity in addressing him; but more because he
felt too old to impose himself by sheer rough-riding, individual
force on the other actors in the drama, and still more because he, and
nobody else, had left the nine hundred and sixty-five pounds in the
house. What an orgy of denunciation he would have plunged into had
some other person insisted on leaving the money in the house with a
similar result!
Mrs. Maldon looked up at him with a glance of compassion. She was
filled with pity for him because he had arrived at old age without
dignity and without any sense of what was fine in life; he was not
even susceptible to the chastening influences of a sick-room. She
knew, indeed, that he hated and despised sickness in others, and
that when ill himself he became a moaning mass of cowardice and
vituperation. And in her heart she invented the most wonderful excuses
for him, and transformed him into a martyr of destiny who had suffered
both through ancestry and through environment. Was it his fault that
he was thus tragically defective? So that by the magic power of her
benevolence he became dignified in spite of himself.
She said--
"Mr. Batchgrew, I want you to oblige me by not discussing my affairs
with any one but me."
At that moment the front door closed firmly below, and the bedroom
vibrated.
"Is that Louis going?" she asked.
Batchgrew went to the window and looked downward, lowering the pupils
as far as possible so as to see the pavement.
"It's Louis going," he replied.
Mrs. Maldon sighed relief.
Mr. Batchgrew said no more.
"What were you talking about downstairs to those two?" Mrs. Maldon
went on carefully.
"What d'ye suppose we were talking about?" retorted Batchgrew,
still at the window. Then he turned towards her and proceeded in an
outburst: "If you want to know, missis, I was asking that young wench
what the secret was between you and her."
"The secret? Between Rachel and me?"
"Aye! Ye both know what's happened to them notes, and ye've made it up
between ye to say nowt!"
Mrs. Maldon answered gravely--
"You are quite mistaken. I know nothing, and I'm sure Rachel doesn't.
And we have made nothing up between us. How can you imagine such
things?"
"Why don't ye have the police told?"
"I cannot do with the police in my house."
Mr. Batchgrew approached the bed almost threateningly.
"I'll tell you why ye won't have the police told. Because ye know
Louis Fores has taken your money. It's as plain as a pikestaff. Ye put
it on the chair on the landing here, and ye left it there, and he came
along and pocketed it." Mrs. Maldon essayed to protest, but he cut her
short. "Did he or did he not come upstairs after ye'd been upstairs
yourself?"
As Mrs. Maldon hesitated, Thomas Batchgrew began to feel younger and
more impressive.
"Yes, he did," said Mrs. Maldon at length. "But only because I asked
him to come up--to fasten the window."
"What window?"
"The landing window."
Mr. Batchgrew, startled and delighted by this unexpected confirmation
of his theory, exploded--
"Ha!... And how soon was that after ye'd been upstairs with the
notes?"
"It was just afterwards."
"Ha!... I don't mind telling ye I've been suspecting that young man
ever since this morning. I only learnt just now as he was in th' house
all night. That made me think for a moment as he'd done it after ye'd
all gone to bed. And for aught I know he may have. But done it some
time he has, and you know it as well as I do, Elizabeth."
Mrs. Maldon maintained her serenity.
"We may be unjust to him. I should never forgive myself if I was. He
has a very good side to him, has Louis!"
"I've never seen it," said Mr. Batchgrew, still growing in authority.
"He began as a thief and he'll end as a thief, if it's no worse."
"Began as a thief?" Mrs. Maldon protested.
"Well, what d'ye suppose he left the bank for?"
"I never knew quite why he left the bank. I always understood there
was some unpleasantness."
"If ye didn't know, it was because ye didn't want to know. Ye never do
want to know these things. 'Unpleasantness!' There's only one sort of
unpleasantness with the clerks in a bank!... _I_ know, anyhow,
because I took the trouble to find out for myself, when I had that
bother with him in my own office. And a nice affair that was, too!"
"But you told me at the time that his books were all right with you.
Only you preferred not to keep him." Mrs. Maiden's voice was now
plaintive.
Thomas Batchgrew came close to the bed and leaned on the foot of it.
"There's some things as you won't hear, Elizabeth. His books were all
right, but he'd made 'em all right. I got hold of him afore he'd done
more than he could undo--that's all. There's one trifle as I might
ha' told ye if ye hadn't such a way of shutting folks up sometimes,
missis. I'll tell ye now. Louis Fores went down on his knees to me in
my office. On his knees, and all blubbing. What about that?"
Mrs. Maldon replied--
"You must have been glad ever since that you did give the poor boy
another chance."
"There's nothing I've regretted more," said Thomas Batchgrew, with a
grimness that became him. "I heard last week he's keeping books and
handling cash for Horrocleave nowadays. I know how that'll end! I'd
warn Horrocleave, but it's no business o' mine, especially as ye made
me help ye to put him into Horrocleave's.... There's half a dozen
people in this town and in Hanbridge that can add up Louis Fores, and
have added him up! And now he's robbed ye in yer own house. But it
makes no matter. He's safe enough!" He sardonically snorted. "He's
safe enough. We canna' even stop the notes without telling the police,
and ye won't have the police told. Oh, no! He's managed to get on th'
right side o' you. However, he'll only finish in one way, that chap
will, whether you and me's here to see it or not."
Mr. Batchgrew had grown really impressive, and he knew it.
"Don't let us be hard," pleaded Mrs. Maldon. And then, in a firmer,
prouder voice: "There will be no scandal in my family, Mr. Batchgrew,
as long as I live."
Mr. Batchgrew's answer was superb in its unconscious ferocity--
"That depends how long ye live."
His meaningless eyes rested on her with frosty impartiality, as he
reflected--
"I wonder how long she'll last."
He felt strong; he felt immortal. Exactly like Mrs. Maldon, he was
convinced that he was old only by the misleading arithmetic of years,
that he was not really old, and that there was a subtle and vital
difference between all other people of his age and himself. As for
Mrs. Maldon, he regarded her as a mere poor relic of an organism.
"At our age," Mrs. Maldon began, and paused as if collecting her
thoughts.
"At our age! At our age!" he repeated, sharply deprecating the phrase.
"At our age," said Mrs. Maldon, with slow insistence, "we ought not to
be hard on others. We ought to be thinking of our own sins."
But, although Mrs. Maldon was perhaps the one person on earth whom he
both respected and feared, Thomas Batchgrew listened to her injunction
only with rough disdain. He was incapable of thinking of his own sins.
While in health, he was nearly as unaware of sin as an animal.
Nevertheless, he turned uneasily in the silence of the pale room, so
full of the shy and prim refinement of Mrs. Maldon's individuality.
He could talk morals to others in the grand manner, and with positive
enjoyment, but to be sermonized himself secretly exasperated him
because it constrained him and made him self-conscious. Invariably,
when thus attacked, he would execute a flank movement.
He said bluntly--
"And I suppose ye'll let him marry this Rachel girl if he's a mind
to!"
Slowly a deep flush covered Mrs. Maldon's face.
"What makes you say that?" she questioned, with rising agitation.
"I have but just seen 'em together."
Mrs. Maldon moved nervously in the bed.
"I should never forgive myself if I stood by and let Louis marry
Rachel," she said, and there was a sudden desperate urgency in her
voice.
"Isn't she good enough for a nephew o' yours?"
"She's good enough for any man," said Mrs. Maldon quietly.
"Then it's him as isna' good enough! And yet, if he's got such a good
side to him as ye say--" Mr. Batchgrew snorted.
"He's not suited to her--not at all."
"Now, missis," said Mr. Batchgrew in triumph, "at last we're getting
down to your real opinion of young Fores."
"I feel I'm responsible for Rachel, and--What ought I to do about it?"
"Do? What can a body do when a respectable young woman wi' red hair
takes a fancy to a youth? Nowt, Elizabeth. That young woman'll marry
Louis Fores, and ye can take it from me."
"But why do you say a thing like that? I only began to notice anything
myself last night."
"She's lost her head over him, that's all. I caught 'em just now....
As thick as thieves in your parlour!"
"But I'm by no means sure that he's smitten with her."
"What does it matter whether he is or not? She's lost her head over
him, and she'll have him. It doesn't want a telescope to see as far as
that."
"Well, then, I shall speak to her--I shall speak to her to-morrow
morning, after she's had a good night's rest, when I feel stronger."
"Ay! Ye may! And what shalt say?"
"I shall warn her. I think I shall know how to do it," said Mrs.
Maldon, with a certain air of confidence amid her trouble. "I wouldn't
run the risk of a tragedy for worlds."
"It's no _risk_ of a tragedy, as ye call it," said Thomas
Batchgrew, very pleased with his own situation in the argument. "It's
a certainty. She'll believe him afore she believes you, whatever ye
say. You mark me. It's a certainty."
After elaborate preparations of his handkerchief, he blew his nose
loudly, because blowing his nose loudly affected him in an agreeable
manner.
A few minutes later he left, saying the car would be waiting for him
at the back of the Town Hall. And Mrs. Maldon lay alone until Mrs.
Tams came in with a tray.
"An' I hope that's enough company for one day!" said Mrs. Tarns. "Now,
sup it up, do!"
CHAPTER VII
THE CINEMA
I
That evening Rachel sat alone in the parlour, reclining on
the Chesterfield over the _Signal_. She had picked up the
_Signal_ in order to read about captured burglars, but the paper
contained not one word on the subject, or on any other subject except
football. The football season had commenced in splendour, and it
happened to be the football edition of the _Signal_ that the
paper-boy had foisted upon Mrs. Maldon's house. Despite repeated and
positive assurances from Mrs. Maldon that she wanted the late edition
and not the football edition on Saturday nights, the football edition
was usually delivered, because the paper-boy could not conceive that
any customer could sincerely not want the football edition. Rachel was
glancing in a torpid condition at the advertisements of the millinery
and trimming shops.
She would have been more wakeful could she have divined the blow
which she had escaped a couple of hours before. Between five and six
o'clock, when she was upstairs in the large bedroom, Mrs. Maldon
had said to her, "Rachel--" and stopped. "Yes, Mrs. Maldon," she had
replied. And Mrs. Maldon had said, "Nothing." Mrs. Maldon had desired
to say, but in words carefully chosen: "Rachel, I've never told you
that Louis Fores began life as a bank clerk, and was dismissed
for stealing money. And even since then his conduct has not been
blameless." Mrs. Maldon had stopped because she could not find the
form of words which would permit her to impart to her paid companion
this information about her grand-nephew. Mrs. Maldon, when the moment
for utterance came, had discovered that she simply could not do it,
and all her conscientious regard for Rachel and all her sense of duty
were not enough to make her do it. So that Rachel, unsuspectingly, had
been spared a tremendous emotional crisis. By this time she had grown
nearly accustomed to the fact of the disappearance of the money. She
had completely recovered from the hysteria caused by old Batchgrew's
attack, and was, indeed, in the supervening calm, very much ashamed of
it.
She meant to doze, having firmly declined the suggestion of Mrs. Tams
that she should go to bed at seven o'clock, and she was just dropping
the paper when a tap on the window startled her. She looked in alarm
at the window, where the position of one of the blinds proved the
correctness of Mrs. Maldon's secret theory that if Mrs. Maldon did
not keep a personal watch on the blinds they would never be drawn
properly. Eight inches of black pane showed, and behind that dark
transparency something vague and pale. She knew it must be the hand of
Louis Fores that had tapped, and she could feel her heart beating.
She flew on tiptoe to the front door, and cautiously opened it. At
the same moment Louis sprang from the narrow space between the street
railings and the bow window on to the steps. He raised his hat with
the utmost grace.
"I saw your head over the arm of the Chesterfield," he said in a
cheerful, natural low voice. "So I tapped on the glass. I thought if
I knocked at the door I might waken the old lady. How are things
to-night?"
In those few words he perfectly explained his manner of announcing
himself, endowing it with the highest propriety. Rachel's misgivings
were soothed in an instant. Her chief emotion was an ecstatic
pride--because he had come, because he could not keep away, because
she had known that he would come, that he must come. And in fact was
it not his duty to come? Quietly he came into the hall, quietly she
closed the door, and when they were shut up together in the parlour
they both spoke in hushed voices, lest the invalid should be
disturbed. And was not this, too, highly proper?
She gave him the news of the house and said that Mrs. Tams was taking
duty in the sick-room till four o'clock in the morning, and herself
thenceforward, but that the invalid gave no apparent cause for
apprehension.
"Old Batch been again?" asked Louis, with a complete absence of any
constraint.
She shook her head.
"You'll find that money yet--somewhere, when you're least expecting
it," said he, almost gaily.
"I'm sure we shall," she agreed with conviction.
"And how are _you_?" His tone became anxious and particular.
She blushed deeply, for the outbreak of which she had been guilty and
which he had witnessed, then smiled diffidently.
"Oh, I'm all right."
"You look as if you wanted some fresh air--if you'll excuse me saying
so."
"I haven't been out to-day, of course," she said.
"Don't you think a walk--just a breath--would do you good!"
Without allowing herself to reflect, she answered--
"Well, I ought to have gone out long ago to get some food for
to-morrow, as it's Sunday. Everything's been so neglected to-day. If
the doctor happened to order a cutlet or anything for Mrs. Maldon,
I don't know what I should do. Truly I ought to have thought of it
earlier."
She seemed to be blaming herself for neglectfulness, and thus the
enterprise of going out had the look of an act of duty. Her sensations
bewildered her.
"Perhaps I could walk down with you and carry parcels. It's a good
thing it's Saturday night, or the shops might have been closed."
She made no answer to this, but stood up, breathing quickly.
"I'll just speak to Mrs. Tams."
Creeping upstairs, she silently pushed open the door of Mrs. Maldon's
bedroom. The invalid was asleep. Mrs. Tams, her hands crossed in her
comfortable lap, and her mouth widely open, was also asleep. But Mrs.
Tams was used to waking with the ease of a dog. Rachel beckoned her to
the door. Without a sound the fat woman crossed the room.
"I'm just going out to buy a few things we want," said Rachel in her
ear, adding no word as to Louis Fores.
Mrs. Tams nodded.
Rachel went to her bedroom, turned up the gas, straightened her hair,
and put on her black hat, and her blue jacket trimmed with a nameless
fur, and picked up some gloves and her purse. Before descending she
gazed at herself for many seconds in the small, slanting glass. Coming
downstairs, she took the marketing reticule from its hook in the
kitchen passage. Then she went back to the parlour and stood in the
doorway, speechless, putting on her gloves rapidly.
"Ready?"
She nodded.
"Shall I?" Louis questioned, indicating the gas.
She nodded again, and, stretching to his full height, he managed
to turn the gas down without employing a footstool as Rachel was
compelled to do.
"Wait a moment," she whispered in the hall, when he had opened the
front door. These were the first words she had been able to utter. She
went to the kitchen for a latch-key. Inserting this latch-key in the
keyhole on the outside, and letting Louis pass in front of her, she
closed the front door with very careful precautions against noise, and
withdrew the key.
"I'll take charge of that if you like," said Louis, noticing that she
was hesitating where to bestow it.
She gave it up to him with a violent thrill. She was intensely happy
and intensely fearful. She was only going out to do some shopping;
but the door was shut behind her, and at her side was this magic,
mysterious being, and the nocturnal universe lay around. Only
twenty-four hours earlier she had shut the door behind her and gone
forth to find Louis. And now, having found him, he and she were going
forth together like close friends. So much had happened in twenty-four
hours that the previous night seemed to be months away.
II
Instead of turning down Friendly Street, they kept straight along the
lane till, becoming suddenly urban, it led them across tram-lines
and Turnhill Road, and so through a gulf or inlet of the market-place
behind the Shambles, the Police Office, and the Town Hall, into the
market-place itself, which in these latter years was recovering a
little of the commercial prestige snatched from it half a century
earlier by St. Luke's Square. Rats now marauded in the empty shops of
St. Luke's Square, while the market-place glittered with custom, and
the electric decoy of its facades lit up strangely the lower walls of
the black and monstrous Town Hall.
Innumerable organized activities were going forward at that moment in
the serried buildings of the endless confused streets that stretched
up hill and down dale from one end of the Five Towns to the
other--theatres, Empire music-halls, Hippodrome music-halls,
picture-palaces in dozens, concerts, singsongs, spiritualistic
propaganda, democratic propaganda, skating-rinks, Wild West
exhibitions, Dutch auctions, and the private seances in dubious
quarters of "psychologists," "clair-voyants," "scientific palmists,"
and other rascals who sold a foreknowledge of the future for
eighteenpence or even a shilling. Viewed under certain aspects, it
seemed indeed that the Five Towns, in the week-end desertion of its
sordid factories, was reaching out after the higher life, the subtler
life, the more elegant life of greater communities; but the little
crowds and the little shops of Bursley market-place were nevertheless
a proof that a tolerable number of people were still mainly interested
in the primitive elemental enterprise of keeping stomachs filled and
skins warm, and had no thought beyond it. In Bursley market-place the
week's labour was being translated into food and drink and clothing by
experts who could distinguish infallibly between elevenpence-halfpenny
and a shilling. Rachel was such an expert. She forced her thoughts
down to the familiar, sane, safe subject of shopping, though to-night
her errands were of the simplest description, requiring no brains. But
she could not hold her thoughts. A voice was continually whispering to
her--not Louis Fores' voice, but a voice within herself, that she had
never clearly heard before. Alternatively she scorned it and trembled
at it.
She stopped in front of the huge window of Wason's Provision Emporium.
"Is this the first house of call?" asked Louis airily, swinging the
reticule and his stick together.
"Well--" she hesitated. "Mrs. Tams told me they were selling Singapore
pineapple at sevenpence-halfpenny. Mas. Maldon fancies pineapple. I've
known her fancy a bit of pineapple when she wouldn't touch anything
else.... Yes, there it is!"
In fact, the whole of the upper half of Wason's window was yellow
with tins of preserved pineapple. And great tickets said: "Delicious
chunks, 7 1/2d. per large tin. Chunks, 6 1/2d. per large tin."
Customers in ones and twos kept entering and leaving the shop. Rachel
moved on towards the door, which was at the corner of the Cock yard,
and looked within. The long double counters were being assailed by
a surging multitude who fought for the attention of prestidigitatory
salesmen.
"Hm!" murmured Rachel. "That may be all very well for Mrs. Tams...."
A moment later she said--
"It's always like that with Wason's shops for the first week or two!"
And her faintly sarcastic tone of a shrewd housewife immediately set
Wason in his place--Wason with his two hundred and sixty-five shops,
and his racing-cars, and his visits to kings and princes. Wason had
emporia all over the kingdom, and in particular at Knype, Hanbridge,
and Longshaw. And now he had penetrated to Bursley, sleepiest of
the Five. His method was to storm a place by means of electricity,
full-page advertisements in news-papers, the power of his mere name,
and a leading line or so. At Bursley his leading line was apparently
"Singapore delicious chunks at 7-1/2d. per large tin." Rachel knew
Wason; she had known him at Knype. And she was well aware that his
speciality was second-rate. She despised him. She despised that
multitude of simpletons who, full of the ancient illusion that
somewhere something can regularly be had for nothing, imagined
that Wason's bacon and cheese were cheap because he sold preserved
pineapple at a penny less than anybody else in the town. And she
despised the roaring, vulgar success of advertising and electricity.
She had in her some tincture of the old nineteenth century, which
loved the decency of small, quiet things. And in the prim sanity of
her judgment upon Wason she forgot for a few instants that she was in
a dream, and that the streets and the whole town appeared strange and
troubling to her, and that she scarcely knew what she was doing, and
that the most seductive and enchanting of created men was at her side
and very content to be at her side. And also the voice within her was
hushed.
She said--
"I don't see the fun of having the clothes torn off my back to save a
penny. I think I shall go to Malkin's. I'll get some cocoa there, too.
Mrs. Tams simply lives for cocoa."
And Louis archly answered--
"I've always wondered what Mrs. Tams reminds me of. Now I know. She's
exactly like a cocoa-tin dented in the middle."
She laughed with pleasure, not because she considered the remark in
the least witty, but because it was so characteristic of Louis Fores.
She wished humbly that she could say things just like that, and with
caution she glanced up at him.
They went into Ted Malkin's sober shop, where there was a nice handful
of customers, in despite of Wason only five doors away. And no sooner
had Rachel got inside than she was in the dream again, and the voice
resumed its monotonous phrase, and she blushed. The swift change took
her by surprise and frightened her. She was not in Bursley, but in
some forbidden city without a name, pursuing some adventure at
once shameful and delicious. A distinct fear seized her. Her
self-consciousness was intense.
And there was young Ted Malkin in his starched white shirt-sleeves
and white apron and black waistcoat and tie, among his cheeses and
flitches, every one of which he had personally selected and judged,
weighing a piece of cheddar in his honourable copper-and-brass scales.
He was attending to two little girls. He nodded with calm benevolence
to Rachel and then to Louis Fores. It is true that he lifted his
eyebrows--a habit of his--at sight of Fores, but he did so in a quite
simple, friendly, and justifiable manner, with no insinuations.
"In one moment, Miss Fleckring," said he.
And as he rapidly tied up the parcel of cheese and snapped off the
stout string with a skilled jerk of the hand, he demanded calmly--
"How's Mrs. Maldon to-night?"
"Much better," said Rachel, "thank you."
And Louis Fores joined easily in--
"You may say, very much better."
"That's rare good news! Rare good news!" said Malkin. "I heard you had
an anxious night of it.... Go across and pay at the other counter, my
dears." Then he called out loudly--"One and seven, please."
The little girls tripped importantly away.
"Yes, indeed," Rachel agreed. The tale of the illness, then, was
spread over the town! She was glad, and her self-consciousness somehow
decreased. She now fully understood the wisdom of Mrs. Maldon in
refusing to let the police be informed of the disappearance of the
money. What a fever in the shops of Bursley--even in the quiet shop of
Ted Malkin--if the full story got abroad!
"And what is it to be to-night, Miss Fleckring? These aren't quite
your hours, are they? But I suppose you've been very upset."
"Oh," said Rachel, "I only want a large tin of Singapore Delicious
Chunks, please."
But if she had announced her intention of spending a thousand pounds
in Ted Malkin's shop she would not have better pleased him. He
beamed. He desired the whole shop to hear that order, for it was the
vindication of honest, modest trading--of his father's methods and his
own. His father, himself, and about a couple of other tradesmen had
steadily fought the fight of the market-place against St. Luke's
Square in the day of its glory, and more recently against the
powerfully magnetic large shops at Hanbridge, and they had not been
defeated. As for Ted Malkin, he was now beyond doubt the "best"
provision-dealer and grocer in the town, and had drawn ahead even of
"Holl's" (as it was still called), the one good historic shop left in
Luke's Square. The onslaught of Wason had alarmed him, though he
had pretended to ignore it. But he was delectably reassured by
this heavenly incident of the representative of one of his most
distinguished customers coming into the shop and deliberately choosing
to buy preserved pineapple from him at 8-1/2d. when it could be got
thirty yards away for 7 1/2d. Rachel read his thoughts plainly.
She knew well enough that she had done rather a fine thing, and her
demeanour showed it. Ted Malkin enveloped the tin in suitable paper.
"Sure there's nothing else?"
"Not at this counter."
He gave her the tin, smiled, and as he turned to the next waiting
customer, called out--
"Singapore Delicious, eight and a half pence."
It was rather a poor affair, that tin--a declension from the great
days of Mrs. Maldon's married life, when she spent freely, knowing
naught of her husband's income except that it was large and elastic.
In those days she would buy a real pineapple, entire, once every three
weeks or so, costing five, six, seven, or eight shillings--gorgeous
and spectacular fruit. Now she might have pineapple every day if she
chose, but it was not quite the same pineapple. She affected to like
it, she did like it, but the difference between the old pineapple and
the new was the saddening difference, for Mrs. Maldon's secret heart,
between the great days and the paltry, facile convenience of the
twentieth century.
It was to his aunt, who presided over the opposite side of the shop,
including the cash-desk, that Ted Malkin proclaimed in a loud voice
the amounts of purchases on his own side. Miss Malkin was a virgin of
fifty-eight years' standing, with definite and unchangeable ideas on
every subject on earth or in heaven except her own age. As Rachel,
followed by Louis Fores, crossed the shop, Miss Malkin looked at them
and closed her lips, and lowered her eyelids, and the upper part of
her body seemed to curve slightly, with the sinuosity of a serpent--a
strange, significant movement, sometimes ill described as "bridling."
The total effect was as though Miss Malkin had suddenly clicked the
shutters down on all the windows of her soul and was spying at Rachel
and Louis Fores through a tiny concealed orifice in the region of her
eye. It was nothing to Miss Malkin that Rachel on that night of all
nights had come in to buy Singapore Delicious Chunks at 8-1/2d. It
was nothing to her that Mrs. Maldon had had "an attack." Miss Malkin
merely saw Rachel and Fores gadding about the town together of a
Saturday night while Mrs. Maldon was ill in bed. And she regarded
Ted's benevolence as the benevolence of a simpleton. Between Miss
Malkin's taciturnity and the voice within her Rachel had a terrible
three minutes. She was "sneaped"; which fortunately made her red hair
angry, so that she could keep some of her dignity. Louis Fores seemed
to be quite unconscious that a fearful scene was enacting between Miss
Malkin and Rachel, and he blandly insisted on taking the pineapple-tin
and the cocoa-tin and slipping them into the reticule, as though he
had been shopping with Rachel all his life and there was a perfect
understanding between them. The moral effect was very bad. Rachel
blushed again.
When she emerged from the shop she had the illusion of being
breathless, and in the midst of a terrific adventure the end of which
none could foresee. She was furious against Miss Malkin and against
herself. Yet she indignantly justified herself. Was not Louis Fores
Mrs. Maiden's nephew, and were not he and she doing the best thing
they could together under the difficult circumstances of the old
lady's illness? If she was not to co-operate with the old lady's sole
relative in Bursley, with whom was she to co-operate? In vain such
justifications!... She murderously hated Miss Malkin. She said to
herself, without meaning it, that no power should induce her ever to
enter the shop again.
And she thought: "I can't possibly go into another shop to-night--I
can't possibly do it! And yet I must. Why am I such a silly baby?"
As they walked slowly along the pavement she was in the wild dream
anew, and Louis Fores was her only hope and reliance. She clung to
him, though not with her arm. She seemed to know him very intimately,
and still he was more enigmatic to her than ever he had been.
As for Louis, beneath his tranquil mien of a man of experience and
infinite tact, he was undergoing the most extraordinary and delightful
sensations, keener even than those which had thrilled him in Rachel's
kitchen on the previous evening. The social snob in him had somehow
suddenly expired, and he felt intensely the strange charm of going
shopping of a Saturday night with a young woman, and making a
little purchase here and a little purchase there, and thinking about
halfpennies. And in his fancy he built a small house to which he
and Rachel would shortly return, and all the brilliant diversions of
bachelordom seemed tame and tedious compared to the wondrous existence
of this small house.
"Now I have to go to Heath's the butcher's," said Rachel, determined
at all costs to be a woman and not a silly baby. After that plain
announcement her cowardice would have no chance to invent an excuse
for not going into another shop.
But she added--
"And that'll be all."
"I know Master Bob Heath. Known him a long time," said Louis Fores,
with amusement in his voice, as though to imply that he could relate
strange and titillating matters about Heath if he chose, and indeed
that he was a mine of secret lore concerning the citizens.
The fact was that he had travelled once to Woore races with the
talkative Heath, and that Heath had introduced him to his brother
Stanny Heath, a local book-maker of some reputation, from whom Louis
had won five pounds ten during the felicitous day. Ever afterwards Bob
Heath had effusively saluted Louis on every possible occasion, and had
indeed once stopped him in the street and said: "My brother treated
you all right, didn't he? Stanny's a true sport." And Louis had to
be effusive also. It would never do to be cold to a man from whose
brother you had won--and received--five pounds ten on a racecourse.
So that when Louis followed Rachel into Heath's shop at the top
of Duck Bank the fat and happy Heath gave him a greeting in which
astonishment and warm regard were mingled. The shop was empty of
customers, and also it contained little meat, for Heath's was not
exactly a Saturday-night trade. Bob Heath, clothed from head to foot
in slightly blood-stained white, stood behind one hacked counter, and
Mrs. Heath, similarly attired, and rather stouter, stood behind the
other; and each possessed a long steel which hung from an ample loose
girdle.
Heath, a man of forty, had a salute somewhat military in gesture,
though conceived in a softer, more accommodating spirit. He raised his
chubby hand to his forehead, but all the muscles of it were lax and
the fingers loosely curved; at the same time he drew back his left
foot and kicked up the heel a few inches. Louis amiably responded.
Rachel went direct to Mrs. Heath, a woman of forty-five. She had never
before seen Heath in the shop.
"Doing much with the gees lately, Mr. Fores?" Heath inquired in a
cheerful, discreet tone.
"Not me!"
"Well, I can't say I've had much luck myself, sir."
The conversation was begun in proper form. Through it Louis could hear
Rachel buying a cutlet, and then another cutlet, from Mrs. Heath, and
protesting that five-pence was a good price and all she desired to pay
even for the finest cutlet in the shop. And then Rachel asked about
sweetbreads. Heath's voice grew more and more confidential and at
length, after a brief pause, he whispered--
"Ye're not married, are ye, sir? Excuse the liberty."
It was a whisper, but one of those terrible, miscalculated whispers
that can be heard for miles around, like the call of the cuckoo.
Plainly Heath was not aware of the identity of Rachel Fleckring. And
in his world, which was by no means the world of his shop and his
wife, it was incredible that a man should run round shopping with a
woman on a Saturday night unless he was a husband on unescapable duty.
Louis shook his head.
Mrs. Heath called out in severe accents which were a reproof and a
warning: "Got a sweetbread, Robert? It's for Mrs. Maldon."
The clumsy fool understood that he had blundered.
He had no sweetbread--not even for Mrs. Maldon. The cutlets were
wrapped in newspaper, and Louis rather self-consciously opened the maw
of the reticule for them.
"No offence, I hope, sir," said Heath as the pair left the shop,
thus aggravating his blunder. Louis and Rachel crossed Duck Bank in
constrained silence. Rachel was scarlet. The new cinema next to the
new Congregational chapel blazed in front of them.
"Wouldn't care to look in here, I suppose, would you?" Louis
imperturbably suggested.
Rachel did not reply.
"Only for a quarter of an hour or so," said Louis.
Rachel did not venture to glance up at him. She was so agitated that
she could scarcely speak.
"I don't think so," she muttered.
"Why not?" he exquisitely pleaded. "It will do you good."
She raised her head and saw the expression of his face, so charming,
so provocative, so persuasive. The voice within her was insistent, but
she would not listen to it. Nobody had ever looked at her as Louis
was looking at her then. The streets, the town faded. She thought:
"Whatever happens, I cannot withstand that face." She was feverishly
happy, and at the same time ravaged by both pain and fear. She became
a fatalist. And she abandoned the pretence that she was not the slave
of that face. Her eyes grew candidly acquiescent, as if she were
murmuring to him, "I am defenceless against you."
III
It was not surprising that Rachel, who never in her life had beheld
at close quarters any of the phenomena of luxury, should blink her
ingenuous eyes at the blinding splendour of the antechambers of the
Imperial Cinema de Luxe. Eyes less ingenuous than hers had blinked
before that prodigious dazzlement. Even Louis, a man of vast
experience and sublime imperturbability, visiting the Imperial on its
opening night, had allowed the significant words to escape him, "Well,
I'm blest!"--proof enough of the triumph of the Imperial!
The Imperial had set out to be the most gorgeous cinema in the Five
Towns; and it simply was. Its advertisements read: "There is always
room at the top." There was. Over the ceiling of its foyer enormous
crimson peonies expanded like tropic blooms, and the heart of each
peony was a sixteen-candle-power electric lamp. No other two cinemas
in the Five Towns, it was reported, consumed together as much current
as the Imperial de Luxe; and nobody could deny that the degree of
excellence of a cinema is finally settled by its consumption of
electricity.
Rachel now understood better the symbolic meaning of the glare in
the sky caused at night by the determination of the Imperial to make
itself known. She had been brought up to believe that, gas being
dear, no opportunity should be lost of turning a jet down, and that
electricity was so dear as to be inconceivable in any house not
inhabited by crass spendthrift folly. She now saw electricity
scattered about as though it were as cheap as salt. She saw written in
electric fire across the inner entrance the beautiful sentiment, "Our
aim is to please YOU." The "you" had two lines of fire under it.
She saw, also, the polite nod of the official, dressed not less
glitteringly than an Admiral of the Fleet in full uniform, whose sole
duty in life was to welcome and reassure the visitor. All this in
Bursley, which even by Knype was deemed an out-of-the-world spot and
home of sordid decay! In Hanbridge she would have been less surprised
to discover such marvels, because the flaunting modernity of Hanbridge
was notorious. And her astonishment would have been milder had she had
been in the habit of going out at night. Like all those who never went
out at night, she had quite failed to keep pace with the advancing
stride of the Five Towns on the great road of civilization.
More impressive still than the extreme radiance about her was the
easy and superb gesture of Louis as, swinging the reticule containing
pineapple, cocoa, and cutlets, he slid his hand into his pocket
and drew therefrom a coin and smacked it on the wooden ledge of the
ticket-window--gesture of a man to whom money was naught provided
he got the best of everything. "Two!" he repeated, with slight
impatience, bending down so as to see the young woman in white who sat
in another world behind gilt bars. He was paying for Rachel! Exquisite
experience for the daughter and sister of Fleckrings! Experience
unique in her career! And it seemed so right and yet so wondrous,
that he should pay for her!... He picked up the change, and without
a glance at them dropped the coins into his pocket. It was a glorious
thing to be a man! But was it not even more glorious to be a girl
and the object of his princely care?... They passed a heavy draped
curtain, on which was a large card, "Tea-Room," and there seemed to be
celestial social possibilities behind that curtain, though indeed it
bore another and smaller card: "Closed after six o'clock"--the result
of excessive caution on the part of a kill-joy Town Council. A boy in
the likeness of a midshipman took halves of the curving tickets and
dropped them into a tin box, and then next Rachel was in a sudden
black darkness, studded here and there with minute glowing rubies that
revealed the legend: "Exit. Exit. Exit."
Row after row of dim, pale, intent faces became gradually visible,
stretching far back-into complete obscurity; thousands, tens
of thousands of faces, it seemed--for the Imperial de Luxe was
demonstrating that Saturday night its claim to be "the fashionable
rage of Bursley." Then mysterious laughter rippled in the gloom, and
loud guffaws shot up out of the rippling. Rachel saw nothing whatever
to originate this mirth until an attendant in black with a tiny
white apron loomed upon them out of the darkness, and, beckoning them
forward, bent down, and indicated two empty places at the end of a
row, and the great white scintillating screen of the cinema came into
view. Instead of being at the extremity it was at the beginning of the
auditorium. And as Rachel took her seat she saw on the screen--which
was scarcely a dozen feet away--a man kneeling at the end of a
canal-lock, and sucking up the water of the canal through a hose-pipe;
and this astoundingly thirsty man drank with such rapidity that the
water, with huge boats floating on it, subsided at the rate of about a
foot a second, and the drinker waxed enormously in girth. The laughter
grew uproarious. Rachel herself gave a quick, uncontrolled, joyous
laugh, and it was as if the laugh had been drawn out of her violently
unawares. Louis Fores also laughed very heartily.
"Cute idea, that!" he whispered.
When the film was cut off Rachel wanted to take back her laugh. She
felt a little ashamed of having laughed at anything so silly.
"How absurd!" she murmured, trying to be serious.
Nevertheless she was in bliss. She surrendered herself to the joy
of life, as to a new sensation. She was intoxicated, ravished,
bewildered, and quite careless. Perhaps for the first time in her
adult existence she lived without reserve or preoccupation completely
in and for the moment. Moreover the hearty laughter of Louis Fores
helped to restore her dignity. If the spectacle was good enough for
him, with all his knowledge of the world, to laugh at, she need not
blush for its effect on herself. And in another ten seconds, when the
swollen man, staggering along a wide thoroughfare, was run down by
an automobile and squashed flat, while streams of water inundated the
roadway, she burst again into free laughter, and then looked round at
Louis, who at the same instant looked round at her, and they exchanged
an intimate smiling glance. It seemed to Rachel that they were alone
and solitary in the crowded interior, and that they shared exactly the
same tastes and emotions and comprehended one another profoundly and
utterly; her confidence in him, at that instant, was absolute, and
enchanting to her. Half a minute later the emaciated man was in a
room and being ecstatically kissed by a most beautiful and sweetly
shameless girl in a striped shirtwaist; it was a very small room, and
the furniture was close upon the couple, giving the scene an air of
delightful privacy. And then the scene was blotted out and gay music
rose lilting from some unseen cave in front of the screen.
Rachel was rapturously happy. Gazing along the dim rows, she descried
many young couples, without recognizing anybody at all, and most
of these couples were absorbed in each other, and some of the girls
seemed so elegant and alluring in the dusk of the theatre, and some
of the men so fine in their manliness! And the ruby-studded gloom
protected them all, including Rachel and Louis, from the audience at
large.
The screen glowed again. And as it did so Louis gave a start.
"By Jove!" he said, "I've left my stick somewhere. It must have been
at Heath's. Yes, it was. I put it on the counter while I opened this
net thing. Don't you remember? You were taking some money out of your
purse." Louis had a very distinct vision of his Rachel's agreeably
gloved fingers primly unfastening the purse and choosing a shilling
from it.
"How annoying!" murmured Rachel feelingly.
"I wouldn't lose that stick for a five-pound note." (He had a
marvellous way of saying "five-pound note.") "Would you mind very much
if I just slip over and get it, before he shuts? It's only across the
road, you know."
There was something in the politeness of the phrase "mind _very
much_" that was irresistible to Rachel. It caused her to
imagine splendid drawing-rooms far beyond her modest level, and the
superlative deportment therein of the well-born.
"Not at all!" she replied, with her best affability. "But will they
let you come in again without paying?"
"Oh, I'll risk that," he whispered, smiling superiorly.
Then he went, leaving the reticule, and she was alone.
She rearranged the reticule on the seat by her side. The reticule
being already perfectly secure, there was no need for her to touch
it, but some nervous movement was necessary to her. Yet she was less
self-conscious than she had been with Louis at her elbow. She felt,
however, a very slight sense of peril--of the unreality of the plush
fauteuil on which she sat, and those rows of vaguely discerned faces
on her right; and the reality of distant phenomena such as Mrs. Maldon
in bed. Notwithstanding her strange and ecstatic experiences with
Louis Fores that night in the dark, romantic town, the problem of the
lost money remained, or ought to have remained, as disturbing as ever.
To ignore it was not to destroy it. She sat rather tight in her place,
increasing her primness, and trying to show by her carriage that she
was an adult in full control of all her wise faculties. She set her
lips to judge the film with the cold impartiality of middle age, but
they persisted in being the fresh, responsive, mobile lips of a young
girl. They were saying noiselessly: "He will be back in a moment.
And he will find me sitting here just as he left me. When I hear him
coming I shan't turn my head to look. It will be better not."
The film showed a forest with a wooden house in the middle of it. Out
of this house came a most adorable young woman, who leaped on to a
glossy horse and galloped at a terrific rate, plunging down ravines,
and then trotting fast over the crests of clearings. She came to a man
who was boiling a kettle over a camp-fire, and slipped lithely from
the horse, and the man, with a start of surprise, seized her pretty
waist and kissed her passionately, in the midst of the immense
forest whose every leaf was moving. And she returned his kiss without
restraint. For they were betrothed. And Rachel imagined the free
life of distant forests, where love was, and where slim girls rode
mettlesome horses more easily than the girls of the Five Towns
rode bicycles. She could not even ride a bicycle, had never had the
opportunity to learn. The vision of emotional pleasures that in
her narrow existence she had not dreamed of filled her with mild,
delightful sorrow. She could conceive nothing more heavenly than to
embrace one's true love in the recesses of a forest.... Then came
crouching Indians.... And then she heard Louis Fores behind her. She
had not meant to turn round, but when a hand was put heavily on her
shoulder she turned quickly, resenting the contact.
"I should like a word with ye, if ye can spare a minute, young miss,"
whispered a voice as heavy as the hand. It was old Thomas Batchgrew's
face and whiskers that she was looking up at in the gloom.
As if fascinated, she followed in terror those flaunting whiskers up
the slope of the narrow isle to the back of the auditorium. Thomas
Batchgrew seemed to be quite at home in the theatre; he wore no hat
and there was a pen behind his ear. Never would she have set foot
inside the Imperial de Luxe had she guessed that Thomas Batchgrew was
concerned in it. She thought she had heard once, somewhere, that he
had to do with cinemas in other parts of the country, but it would
not have occurred to her to connect him with a picture-palace so near
home. She was not alone in her ignorance of the councillor's share in
the Imperial. Practically nobody had heard of it until that night, for
Batchgrew had come into the new enterprise by the back door of a loan
to its promoters, who were richer in ideas than in capital; and now,
the harvest being ripe, he was arranging, by methods not unfamiliar to
capitalists, to reap where he had not sown.
Shame and fear overcame Rachel. The crystal dream was shivered
to dust. Awful apprehension, the expectancy of frightful events,
succeeded to it. She perceived that since the very moment of quitting
the house the dread of some disaster had been pursuing her; only she
had refused to see it--she had found oblivion from it in the new and
agitatingly sweet sensations which Louis Fores had procured for her.
But now the real was definitely sifted out from the illusory. And
nothing but her own daily existence, as she had always lived it, was
real. The rest was a snare. There were no forests, no passionate
love, no flying steeds, no splendid adorers--for her. She was Rachel
Fleckring and none else.
Councillor Batchgrew turned to the left, and through a small hole in
the painted wall Rachel saw a bright beam shooting out in the shape of
a cone--forests, and the unreal denizens of forests shimmering across
the entire auditorium to impinge on the screen! And she heard the
steady rattle of a revolving machine. Then Batchgrew beckoned her into
a very small, queerly shaped room furnished with a table and a chair
and a single electric lamp that hung by a cord from a rough hook in
the ceiling. A boy stood near the door holding three tin boxes one
above another in his arms, and keeping the top one in position with
his chin. These boxes were similar to that in which Louis' tickets had
been dropped.
"Did you want your boxes, sir?" asked the boy.
"Put 'em down," Thomas Batchgrew growled.
The boy deposited them in haste on the table and hurried out.
"How is Mrs. Maldon?" demanded Mr. Batchgrew with curtness, after he
had snorted and sniffed. He remained standing near to Rachel.
"Oh, she's very much better," said Rachel eagerly. "She was asleep
when I left."
"Have ye left her by herself?" Mr. Batchgrew continued his inquiry.
His voice was as offensive as thick dark glue.
"Of course not! Mrs. Tams is sitting up with her." Rachel meant her
tone to be a dignified reproof to Thomas Batchgrew for daring
to assume even the possibility of her having left Mrs. Maldon to
solitude. But she did not succeed, because she could not manage her
tone. She desired intensely to be the self-possessed, mature woman,
sure of her position and of her sagacity; but she could be nothing
save the absurd, guilty, stammering, blushing little girl, shifting
her feet and looking everywhere except boldly into Thomas Batchgrew's
horrid eyes.
"So it's Mrs. Tams as is sitting with her!"
Rachel could not help explaining--
"I had to come down town to do some shopping for Sunday. Somebody had
to come. Mr. Fores had called in to ask after Mrs. Maldon, and so he
walked down with me." Every word she said appeared intolerably foolish
to her as she uttered it.
"And then he brought ye in here!" Batchgrew grimly completed the tale.
"We came in here for ten minutes or so, as I'd finished my shopping
so quickly. Mr. Fores has just run across to the butcher's to get
something that was forgotten."
Mr. Batchgrew coughed loosely and loudly. And beyond the cough, beyond
the confines of the ugly little room which imprisoned her so close to
old Batchgrew and his grotesque whiskers, Rachel could hear the harsh,
quick laughter of the audience, and then faint music--far off.
"If young Fores was here," said Mr. Batchgrew brutally, "I should tell
him straight as he might do better than to go gallivanting about the
town until that there money's found."
He turned towards his boxes.
"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Batchgrew," said Rachel, tapping her
foot and trying to be very dignified.
"And I'll tell ye another thing, young miss," Batchgrew went on.
"Every minute as ye spend with young Fores ye'll regret. He's a bad
lot, and ye may as well know it first as last. Ye ought to thank me
for telling of ye, but ye won't."
"I really don't know what you mean, Mr. Batchgrew!" She could not
invent another phrase.
"Ye know what I mean right enough, young miss!... If ye only came in
for ten minutes yer time's up."
Rachel moved to leave.
"Hold on!" Batchgrew stopped her. There was a change in his voice.
"Look at me!" he commanded, but with the definite order was mingled
some trace of cajolery.
She obeyed, quivering, her cheeks the colour of a tomato. In spite of
all preoccupations, she distinctly noticed--and not without a curious
tremor--that his features had taken on a boyish look. In the almost
senile face she could see ambushed the face of the youth that Thomas
Batchgrew had been perhaps half a century before.
"Ye're a fine wench," said he, with a note of careless but genuine
admiration. "I'll not deny it. Don't ye go and throw yerself away.
Keep out o' mischief."
Forgetting all but the last phrase, Rachel marched out of the room,
unspeakably humiliated, wounded beyond any expression of her own. The
cowardly, odious brute! The horrible ancient! What right had he?...
What had she done that was wrong, that would not bear the fullest
inquiry. The shopping was an absolute necessity. She was obliged to
come out. Mrs. Maldon was better, and quietly sleeping. Mrs. Tarns was
the most faithful and capable old person that was ever born. Hence she
was justified in leaving the invalid. Louis Fores had offered to go
with her. How could she refuse the offer? What reason could there be
for refusing it? As for the cinema, who could object to the cinema?
Certainly not Thomas Batchgrew! There was no hurry. And was she not an
independent woman, earning her own living? Who on earth had the right
to dictate to her? She was not a slave. Even a servant had an evening
out once a week. She was sinless....
And yet while she was thus ardently defending herself she knew well
that she had sinned against the supreme social law--the law of "the
look of things." It was true that chance had worked against her. But
common sense would have rendered chance powerless by giving it no
opportunity to be malevolent. She was furious with Rachel Fleckring.
That Rachel Fleckring, of all mortal girls, should have exposed
herself to so dreadful, so unforgettable a humiliation was mortifying
in the very highest degree. Her lips trembled. She was about to burst
into a sob. But at this moment the rattle of the revolving machine
behind the hole ceased, the theatre blazed from end to end with sudden
light, the music resumed, and a number of variegated advertisements
were weakly thrown on the screen. She set herself doggedly to walk
back down the slope of the aisle, not daring to look ahead for Louis.
She felt that every eye was fixed on her with base curiosity.... When,
after the endless ordeal of the aisle, she reached her place, Louis
was not there. And though she was glad, she took offence at his
delay. Gathering up the reticule with a nervous sweep of the hand, she
departed from the theatre, her eyes full of tears. And amid all the
wild confusion in her brain one little thought flashed clear and was
gone: the wastefulness of paying for a whole night's entertainment and
then only getting ten minutes of it!
IV
She met Louis Fores high up Bycars Lane, about a hundred yards below
Mrs. Maldon's house. She saw some one come out of the gate of the
house, and heard the gate clang in the distance. For a moment
she could not surely identify the figure, but as soon as Louis,
approaching, and carrying his stick, grew unmistakable even in the
darkness, all her agitation, which had been subsiding under the
influence of physical exercise, rose again to its original fever.
"Ah!" said Louis, greeting her with a most deferential salute. "There
you are. I was really beginning to wonder. I opened the front door,
but there was no light and no sound, so I shut it again and came back.
What happened to you?"
His ingenuous and delightful face, so confident, good-natured, and
respectful, had exactly the same effect on her as before. At the sight
of it Thomas Batchgrew's vague accusation against Louis was dismissed
utterly as the rancorous malice of an evil old man. For the rest, she
had never given it any real credit, having an immense trust in her own
judgment. But she had no intention of letting Louis go free. As she
had been put in the wrong, so must he be put in the wrong. This
seemed to her only just. Besides, was he not wholly to blame? Also she
remembered with strange clearness the admiration in the mien of the
hated Batchgrew, and the memory gave her confidence.
She said, with an effort after chilly detachment--
"I couldn't wait in the cinema alone for ever."
He was perturbed.
"But I assure you," he said nicely, "I was as quick as ever I could
be. Heath had put my stick in his back parlour to keep it safe for me,
and it was quite a business finding it again. Why didn't you wait?...
I say, I hope you weren't vexed at my leaving you."
"Of course I wasn't vexed," she answered, with heat. "Didn't I tell
you I didn't mind? But if you want to know, old Batchgrew came along
while you were gone and insulted me."
"Insulted you? How? What was he doing there?"
"How should I know what he was doing there? Better ask him questions
like that! All I can tell you is that he came to me and called me into
a room at the back--and--and--told me I'd no business to be there, nor
you either, while Mrs. Maldon was ill in bed."
"Silly old fool! I hope you didn't take any notice of him."
"Yes, that's all very fine, that is! It's easy for you to talk like
that. But--but--well, I suppose there's nothing more to be said!" She
moved to one side; her anger was rising. She knew that it was rising.
She was determined that it should rise. She did not care. She rather
enjoyed the excitement. She smarted under her recent experience; she
was deeply miserable; and yet, at the same time, standing there close
to Louis in the rustling night, she was exultant as she certainly had
never been exultant before.
She walked forward grimly. Louis turned and followed her.
"I'm most frightfully sorry," he said.
She replied fiercely--
"It isn't as if I didn't wait. I waited in the porch I don't know how
long. Then of course I came home, as there was no sign of you."
"When I went back you weren't there; it must have been while you were
with old Batch; so I naturally didn't stay. I just came straight up
here. I was afraid you were vexed because I'd left you alone."
"Well, and if I was!" said Rachel, splendidly contradicting herself.
"It's not a very nice thing for a girl to be left alone like
that--_and all on account of a stick_!" There was a break in her
voice.
Arrived at the gate, she pushed it open.
"Good-night," she snapped. "Please don't come in."
And within the gate she deliberately stared at him with an unforgiving
gaze. The impartial lamp-post lighted the scene.
"Good-night," she repeated harshly. She was saying to herself: "He
really does take it in the most beautiful way. I could do anything I
liked with him."
"Good-night," said Louis, with strict punctilio.
When she got to the top of the steps she remembered that Louis had the
latch-key. He was gone. She gave a wet sob and impulsively ran down
the steps and opened the gate. Louis returned. She tried to speak and
could not.
"I beg your pardon," said Louis. "Of course you want the key."
He handed her the key with a gesture that disconcertingly melted the
rigour of all her limbs. She snatched at it, and plunged for the gate
just as the tears rolled down her cheeks in a shower. The noise of the
gate covered a fresh sob. She did not look back. Amid all her quite
real distress she was proud and happy--proud because she was old
enough and independent enough and audacious enough to quarrel with
her lover, and happy because she had suddenly discovered life. And the
soft darkness and the wind, and the faint sky reflections of distant
furnace fires, and the sense of the road winding upward, and the very
sense of the black mass of the house in front of her (dimly lighted at
the upper floor) all made part of her mysterious happiness.
CHAPTER VIII
END AND BEGINNING
I
"Mrs. Tams!" said Mrs. Maldon, in a low, alarmed, and urgent voice.
The gas was turned down in the bedroom, and Mrs. Maldon, looking from
her bed across the chamber, could only just distinguish the stout,
vague form of the charwoman asleep in an arm-chair. The light from
the street lamp was strong enough to throw faint shadows of the
window-frames on the blinds. The sleeper did not stir.
Mrs. Maldon summoned again, more loudly--
"Mrs. Tams!"
And Mrs. Tams, starting out of another world, replied with
deprecation--
"Hey, hey!" as if saying: "I am here. I am fully awake and observant.
Please remain calm."
Mrs. Maldon said agitatedly--
"I've just heard the front door open. I'm sure whoever it was was
trying not to make a noise. There! Can't you hear anything?"
"That I canna'!" said Mrs. Tams.
"No!" Mrs. Maldon protested, as Mrs. Tams approached the gas to raise
it. "Don't touch the gas. If anybody's got in let them think we're
asleep."
The mystery of the vanished money and the fear of assassins seemed
suddenly to oppress the very air of the room. Mrs. Maldon was leaning
on one elbow in her bed.
Mrs. Tams said to her in a whisper--
"I mun go see."
"Please don't!" Mrs. Maldon entreated.
"I mun go see," said Mrs. Tams.
She was afraid, but she conceived that she ought to examine the house,
and no fear could have stopped her from going forth into the zone of
danger.
The next moment she gave a short laugh, and said in her ordinary
tone--
"Bless us! I shall be forgetting the nose on my face next. It's Miss
Rachel coming in, of course."
"Miss Rachel coming in!" repeated Mrs. Maldon. "Has she been out? I
was not aware. She said nothing--"
"Her came up a bit since, and said her had to do some shopping."
"Shopping! At this time of night!" murmured Mrs. Maldon.
Said Mrs. Tams laconically--
"To-morrow's Sunday--and pray God ye'll fancy a bite o' summat tasty."
While the two old women, equalized in rank by the fact of Mrs.
Maldon's illness, by the sudden alarm, and by the darkness of the
room, were thus conversing, sounds came from the pavement through
the slightly open windows--voices, and the squeak of the gate roughly
pushed open.
"That's Miss Rachel now," said Mrs. Tams.
"Then who was it came in before?" Mrs. Maldon demanded.
There was the tread of rapid feet on the stone steps, and then the
gate squeaked again.
Mrs. Tams went to the window and pulled aside the blind.
"Aye!" she announced simply. "It's Miss Rachel and Mr. Fores."
Mrs. Maldon caught her breath.
"You didn't tell me she was out with Mr. Fores," said Mrs. Maldon,
stiffly but weakly.
"It's first I knew of it," Mrs. Tams replied, still spying over the
pavement. "He's given her th' key. There! He's gone."
Mrs. Maldon muttered--
"The key? What key?"
"Th' latch-key belike."
"I must speak to Miss Rachel," breathed Mrs. Maldon in a voice of
extreme and painful apprehension.
The front door closing sent a vibration through the bedroom. Mrs.
Tarns hesitated an instant, and then raised the gas. Mrs. Maldon lay
with shut eyes on her left side and gave no sign of consciousness.
Light footsteps could be heard on the stairs.
"I'll go see," said Mrs. Tams.
In the heart of the aged woman exanimate on the bed, and in the heart
of the aging woman whose stout, coarse arm was still raised to the
gas-tap, were the same sentiments of wonder, envy, and pity, aroused
by the enigmatic actions of a younger generation going its perilous,
instinctive ways to keep the race alive.
Mrs. Tarns lighted a benzolene hand-lamp at the gas, and silently left
the bedroom. She still somewhat feared an unlawful invader, but the
arrival of Rachel had reassured her. Preceded by the waving
little flame, she passed Rachel's door, which was closed, and went
downstairs. Every mysterious room on the ground floor was in order and
empty. No sign of an invasion. Through the window of the kitchen she
saw the fresh cutlets under a wire cover in the scullery; and on the
kitchen table were the tin of pineapple and the tin of cocoa, with the
reticule near by. All doors that ought to be fastened were fastened.
She remounted the stairs and blew out the lamp on the threshold of the
mistress's bedroom. And as she did so she could hear Rachel winding
up her alarm-clock in quick jerks, and the light shone bright like a
silver rod under Rachel's door.
"Her's gone reet to bed," said Mrs. Tams softly, by the bedside of
Mrs. Maldon. "Ye've no cause for to worrit yerself. I've looked over
th' house."
Mrs. Maldon was fast asleep.
Mrs. Tams lowered the gas and resumed her chair, and the street lamp
once more threw the shadows of the window-frames on the blinds.
II
The next day Mrs. Tams, who had been appointed to sleep in the spare
room, had to exist under the blight of Rachel's chill disapproval
because she had not slept in the spare room--nor in any bed at all.
The arrangement had been that Mrs. Tams should retire at 4 a.m.,
Rachel taking her place with Mrs. Maldon. Mrs. Tams had not retired at
4 a.m. because Rachel had not taken her place.
As a fact, Rachel had been wakened by a bang of the front door,
at 10.30 a.m. only. Her first glance at the alarm-clock on her
dressing-table was incredulous. And she refused absolutely to believe
that the hour was so late. Yet the alarm-clock was giving its usual
sturdy, noisy tick, and the sun was high. Then she refused to believe
that the alarm had gone off, and in order to remain firm in her belief
she refrained from any testing of the mechanism, which might--indeed,
would--have proved that the alarm had in fact gone off. It became
with her an article of dogma that on that particular morning, of all
mornings, the very reliable alarm-clock had failed in its duty. The
truth was that she had lain awake till nearly three o'clock, turning
from side to side and thinking bitterly upon the imperfections of
human nature, and had then fallen into a deep, invigorating sleep from
which perhaps half a dozen alarm-clocks might not have roused her.
She arose full of health and anger, and in a few minutes she was out
of the bedroom, for she had not fully undressed; like many women, when
there was watching to be done, she loved to keep her armour on and to
feel the exciting strain of the unusual in every movement. She fell
on Mrs. Tams as Mrs. Tams was coming upstairs after letting out the
doctor and refreshing herself with cocoa in the kitchen. A careless
observer might have thought from their respective attitudes that it
was Mrs. Tarns, and not Rachel, who had overslept herself. Rachel
divided the blame between the alarm-clock and Mrs. Tams for not
wakening her; indeed, she seemed to consider herself the victim of
a conspiracy between Mrs. Tams and the alarm-clock. She explicitly
blamed Mrs. Tams for allowing the doctor to come and go without her
knowledge. Even the doctor did not get off scot-free, for he ought to
have asked for Rachel and insisted on seeing her.
She examined Mrs. Tams about the invalid's health as a lawyer examines
a hostile witness. And when Mrs. Tams said that the invalid had slept,
and was sleeping, stertorously in an unaccountable manner, and hinted
that the doctor was not undisturbed by the new symptom and meant to
call again later on, Rachel's tight-lipped mien indicated that this
might not have occurred if only Mrs. Tams had fulfilled her obvious
duty of wakening Rachel. Though she was hungry, she scornfully
repulsed the suggestion of breakfast. Mrs. Tams, thoroughly accustomed
to such behaviour in the mighty, accepted it as she accepted the
weather. But if she had had to live through the night again--after
all, a quite tolerable night--she would still not have wakened Rachel
at 4 a.m.
Rachel softened as the day passed. She ate a good dinner at one
o'clock, with Mrs. Tams in the kitchen, one or the other mounting at
short intervals to see if Mrs. Maldon had stirred. Then she changed
into her second-best frock, in anticipation of the doctor's Sunday
afternoon visit, strictly commanded Mrs. Tams (but with relenting
kindness in her voice) to go and lie down, and established herself
neatly in the sick-room.
Though her breathing had become noiseless again, Mrs. Maldon still
slept. She had wakened only once since the previous night. She lay
calm and dignified in slumber--an old and devastated woman, with that
disconcerting resemblance to a corpse shown by all aged people
asleep, but yet with little sign of positive illness save the slight
distortion of her features caused by the original attack. Rachel sat
idle, prim, in vague reflection, at intervals smoothing her petticoat,
or giving a faint cough, or gazing at the mild blue September sky. She
might have been reading a book, but she was not by choice a reader.
She had the rare capacity of merely existing. Her thoughts flitted to
and fro, now resting on Mrs. Maldon with solemnity, now on Mrs. Tams
with amused benevolence, now on old Batchgrew with lofty disgust, and
now on Louis Fores with unquiet curiosity and delicious apprehension.
She gave a little shudder of fright and instantly controlled it--Mrs.
Maldon, instead of being asleep, was looking at her. She rose and went
to the bedside and stood over the sick woman, by the pillow, benignly,
asking with her eyes what desire of the sufferer's she might fulfil.
And Mrs. Maldon looked up at her with another benignity. And they both
smiled.
"You've slept very well," said Rachel softly.
Mrs. Maldon, continuing to smile, gave a scarcely perceptible
affirmative movement of the head.
"Will you have some of your Revalenta? I've only got to warm it, here.
Everything's ready."
"Nothing, thank you, dear," said Mrs. Maldon, in a firm,
matter-of-fact voice.
The doctor had left word that food was not to be forced on her.
"Do you feel better?"
Mrs. Maldon answered, in a peculiar tone--
"My dear, I shall never feel any better than I do now."
"Oh, you mustn't talk like that!" said Rachel in gay protest.
"I want to talk to you, Rachel," said Mrs. Maldon, once more
reassuringly matter-of-fact. "Sit down there."
Rachel obediently perched herself on the bed, and bent her head. And
her face, which was now much closer to Mrs. Maldon's, expressed
the gravity which Mrs. Maldon would wish, and also the affectionate
condescension of youth towards age, and of health towards infirmity.
And as almost unconsciously she exulted in her own youth, and
strength, delicate little poniards of tragic grief for Mrs. Maldon's
helpless and withered senility seemed to stab through that personal
pride. The shiny, veined right hand of the old woman emerged from
under the bedclothes and closed with hot, fragile grasp on Rachel's
hand.
Within the impeccable orderliness of the bedroom was silence;
and beyond was the vast Sunday afternoon silence of the district,
producing the sensation of surcease, re-creating the impressive
illusion of religion even out of the brutish irreligion that was
bewailed from pulpits to empty pews in all the temples of all the Five
Towns. Only the smoke waving slowly through the clean-washed sky from
a few high chimneys over miles of deserted manufactories made a link
between Saturday and Monday.
"I've something I want to say to you," said Mrs. Maldon, in that
deceptive matter-of-fact voice. "I wanted to tell you yesterday
afternoon, but I couldn't. And then again last night, but I went off
to sleep."
"Yes?" murmured Rachel, duped by Mrs. Maldon's manner into perfect
security. She was thinking: "What's the poor old thing got into her
head now? Is it something fresh about the money?"
"It's about yourself," said Mrs. Maldon.
Rachel exclaimed impulsively--
"What about me?"
She could feel a faint vibration in Mrs. Maldon's hand.
"I want you not to see so much of Louis."
Rachel was shocked and insulted. She straightened her spine and threw
back her head sharply. But she dared not by force withdraw her hand
from Mrs. Maldon's. Moreover, Mrs. Maldon's clasp tightened almost
convulsively.
"I suppose Mr. Batchgrew's been up here telling tales while I was
asleep," Rachel expostulated, hotly and her demeanour was at once
pouting, sulky, and righteously offended.
Mrs. Maldon was puzzled.
"This morning, do you mean, dear?" she asked.
Tears stood in Rachel's eyes. She could not speak, but she nodded her
head. And then another sentence burst from her full breast: "And you
told Mrs. Tams she wasn't to tell me Mr. Batchgrew'd called!"
"I've not seen or heard anything of Mr. Batchgrew," said Mrs. Maldon.
"But I did hear you and Louis talking outside last night."
The information startled Rachel.
"Well, and what if you did, Mrs. Maldon?" she defended herself. Her
foot tapped on the floor. She was obliged to defend herself, and
with care. Mrs. Maldon's tranquillity, self-control, immense age and
experience, superior deportment, extreme weakness, and the respect
which she inspired, compelled the girl to intrench warily, instead
of carrying off the scene in one stormy outburst of resentment as
theoretically she might have done.
Mrs. Maldon said, cajolingly, flatteringly--
"My dear, do be your sensible self and listen to me."
It then occurred to Rachel that during the last day or so (the period
seemed infinitely longer) she had been losing, not her common
sense, but her immediate command of that faculty, of which she was,
privately, very proud. And she braced her being, reaching up towards
her own conception of herself, towards the old invulnerable Rachel
Louisa Fleckring. At any cost she must keep her reputation for common
sense with Mrs. Maldon.
And so she set a watch on her gestures, and moderated her voice,
secretly yielding to the benevolence of the old lady, and said, in
the tone of a wise and kind woman of the world and an incarnation of
profound sagacity--
"What do I see of Mr. Fores, Mrs. Maldon? I see nothing of Mr. Fores,
or hardly. I'm your lady help, and he's your nephew--at least, he's
your great-nephew, and it's your house he comes to. I can't help being
in the house, can I? If you're thinking about last night, well, Mr.
Fores called to see how you were getting on, and I was just going out
to do some shopping. He walked down with me. I suppose I needn't tell
you I didn't ask him to walk down with me. He asked me. I couldn't
hardly say no, could I? And there were some parcels and he walked back
with me."
She felt so wise and so clever and the narrative seemed so entirely
natural, proper, and inevitable that she was tempted to continue--
"And supposing we _did_ go into a cinematograph for a minute or
two--what then?"
But she had no courage for the confession. As a wise woman she
perceived the advisability of letting well alone. Moreover, she hated
confessions, remorse, and gnashing of teeth.
And Mrs. Maldon regarded her worldly and mature air, with its touch of
polite condescension, as both comic and tragic, and thought sadly
of all the girl would have to go through before the air of mature
worldliness which she was now affecting could become natural to her.
"My dear," said Mrs. Maldon, "I have perfect confidence in you." It
was not quite true, because Rachel's protest as to Mr. Batchgrew,
seeming to point to strange concealed incidents, had most certainly
impaired the perfection of Mrs. Maiden's confidence in Rachel.
Rachel considered that she ought to pursue her advantage, and in a
voice light and yet firm, good-natured and yet restive, she said--
"I really don't think anybody has the right to talk to me about Mr.
Fores.... No, truly I don't."
"You mustn't misunderstand me, Rachel," Mrs. Maldon replied, and her
other hand crept out, and stroked Rachel's captive hand. "I am only
saying to you what it is my duty to say to you--or to any other young
woman that comes to live in my house. You're a young woman, and Louis
is a young man. I'm making no complaint. But it's my duty to warn you
against my nephew."
"But, Mrs. Maldon, I didn't know either him or you a month ago!"
Mrs. Maldon, ignoring the interruption, proceeded quietly--
"My nephew is not to be trusted."
Her aged face slowly flushed as in that single brief sentence she
overthrew the grand principle of a lifetime. She who never spoke ill
of anybody had spoken ill of one of her own family.
"But--" Rachel stopped. She was frightened by the appearance of the
flush on those devastated yellow cheeks, and by a quiver in the feeble
voice and in the clasping hand. She could divine the ordeal which Mrs.
Maldon had set herself and through which she had passed. Mrs. Maldon
carried conviction, and in so doing she inspired awe. And on the
top of all Rachel felt profoundly and exquisitely flattered by the
immolation of Mrs. Maiden's pride.
"The money--it has something to do with that!" thought Rachel.
"My nephew is not to be trusted," said Mrs. Maldon again. "I know
all his good points. But the woman who married him would suffer
horribly--horribly!"
"I'm so sorry you've had to say this," said Rachel, very kindly. "But
I assure you that there's nothing at all, nothing whatever, between
Mr. Fores and me." And in that instant she genuinely believed that
there was not. She accepted Mrs. Maldon's estimate of Louis. And
further, and perhaps illogically, she had the feeling of having
escaped from a fatal danger. She expected Mrs. Maldon to agree eagerly
that there was nothing between herself and Louis, and to reiterate
her perfect confidence. But, instead, Mrs. Maldon, apparently treating
Rachel's assurance as negligible, continued with an added solemnity--
"I shall only live a little while longer--a very little while." The
contrast between this and her buoyant announcement on the previous
day that she was not going to die just yet was highly disturbing,
but Rachel could not protest or even speak. "A very little while!"
repeated Mrs. Maldon reflectively. "I've not known you long--as you
say--Rachel. But I've never seen a girl I liked more, if you don't
mind me telling you. I've never seen a girl I thought better of. And I
don't think I could die in peace if I thought Louis was going to
cause you any trouble after I'm gone. No, I couldn't die in peace if I
thought that."
And Rachel, intimately moved, thought: "She has saved me from
something dreadful!" (Without trying to realize precisely from what.)
"How splendid she is!"
And she cast out from her mind all the multitudinous images of Louis
Fores that were there. And, full of affection, and flattered pride and
gratitude and childlike admiration, she bent down and rewarded the old
woman who had so confided in her with a priceless girlish kiss. And
she had the sensation of beginning a new life.
III
And yet, a few moments later, when Mrs. Maldon faintly murmured, "Some
one at the front door," Rachel grew at once uneasy, and the new life
seemed an illusion--either too fine to be true or too leaden to be
desired; and she was swaying amid uncertainties. Perhaps Louis was at
the front door. He had not yet called; but surely he was bound to call
some time during the day! Of the dozen different Rachels in Rachel,
one adventurously hoped that he would come, and another feared that he
would come; one ruled him sharply out of the catalogue of right-minded
persons, and another was ready passionately to defend him.
"I think not," said Rachel.
"Yes, dear; I heard some one," Mrs. Maldon insisted.
Mrs. Maldon, long practised in reconstructing the life of the street
from trifling hints of sound heard in bed, was not mistaken. Rachel,
opening the door of the bedroom, caught the last tinkling of the
front-door bell below. On the other side of the front door somebody
was standing--Louis Fores, or another!
"It may be the doctor," she said brightly, as she left the bedroom.
The coward in her wanted it to be the doctor. But, descending the
stairs, she could see plainly through the glass that Louis himself was
at the front door. The Rachel that feared was instantly uppermost in
her. She was conscious of dread. From the breathless sinking within
her bosom the stairs might have been the deck of a steamer pitching in
a heavy sea.
She thought--
"Here is the Louis to whom I am indifferent. There is nothing between
us, really. But shall I have strength to open the door to him?"
She opened the door, with the feeling that the act was tremendous and
irrevocable.
The street, in the Sabbatic sunshine, was as calm as at midnight.
Louis Fores, stiff and constrained, stood strangely against the
background of it. The unusualness of his demeanour, which was plain to
the merest glance, increased Rachel's agitation. It appeared to Rachel
that the two of them faced each other like wary enemies. She tried to
examine his face in the light of Mrs. Maldon's warning, as though it
were the face of a stranger; but without much success.
"Is auntie well enough for me to see her?" asked Louis, without
greeting or preliminary of any sort. His voice was imperfectly under
control.
Rachel replied curtly--
"I dare say she is."
To herself she said--
"Of course if he's going to sulk about last night--well, he must sulk.
Really and truly he got much less than he deserved. He had no business
at all to have suggested me going to the cinematograph with him. The
longer he sulks the better I shall be pleased."
And in fact she was relieved at his sullenness. She tossed her proud
head, but with primness. And she fervently credited to the full Mrs.
Maldon's solemn insinuations against the disturber.
Louis hesitated a second, then stepped in. Rachel marched
processionally upstairs, and with the detachment of a footman
announced to Mrs. Maldon that Mr. Fores waited below. "Oh, please
bring him up," said Mrs. Maldon, with a mild and casual benevolence
that surprised the girl; for Rachel, in the righteous ferocity of
her years, vaguely thought that an adverse moral verdict ought to be
swiftly followed by something in the nature of annihilation.
"Will you please come up," she invited Louis, from the head of the
stairs, adding privately--"I can be as stiff as you can--and stiffer.
How mistaken I was in you!"
She preceded him into the bedroom, and then with ostentatious
formality left aunt and nephew together. Nobody should ever say any
more that she encouraged the attentions of Louis Fores.
"What is the matter, dear?" Mrs. Maldon inquired from her bed,
perceiving the signs of emotion on Louis' face.
"Has Mr. Batchgrew been here yet?" Louis demanded.
"No. Is he coming?"
"Yes, he's just been to my digs. Came in his car. Auntie, do you know
that he's accusing me of stealing your money--and--and--all sorts of
things! I don't want to hide anything from you. It's true I was with
Rachel at the cinematograph last night, but--"
Mrs. Maldon raised her enfeebled, shaking hand.
"Louis!" she entreated. His troubled, ingenuous face seemed to torture
her.
"I know it's a shame to bother you, auntie. But what was I to do? He's
coming up here. I only want to tell you I've not got your money. I've
not stolen it. I'm absolutely innocent--absolutely. And I'll swear it
on anything you like." His voice almost broke under the strain of its
own earnestness. His plaintive eyes invoked justice and protection.
Who could have doubted that he was sincere in this passionate, wistful
protestation of innocence?
"Louis!" Mrs. Maldon entreated again, committing herself to naught,
taking no side, but finding shelter beneath the enigmatic, appealing
repetition of his name. It was the final triumph of age over crude
youth. "Louis!"
IV
Rachel stood expectant and watchful in the kitchen. She was now filled
with dread. She wanted to go up and waken Mrs. Tams, but was too
proud. The thought had come into her mind: "His coming like this has
something to do with the money. Perhaps he wasn't sulking with me
after all. Perhaps ..." But what it was that she dreaded she could
not have defined. And then she caught the sound of an approaching
automobile. The car threw its shadow across the glazed front door,
which she commanded from the kitchen, and stopped. And the front-door
bell rang uncannily over her head. She opened the door to Councillor
Batchgrew, whose breathing was irregular and rapid.
"Has Louis Fores been here?" Batchgrew asked.
"He's upstairs now with Mrs. Maldon."
Without warning, Thomas Batchgrew strode into the house and straight
upstairs. His long whiskers sailed round the turn of the stairs and
disappeared. Rachel was somewhat discomfited, and very resentful.
But her dread was not thereby diminished. "They'll kill the old lady
between them if they don't take care," she thought.
The next instant Louis appeared at the head of the stairs. With
astounding celerity Rachel slipped into the parlour. She could not
bear to encounter him in the lobby--it was too narrow. She heard Louis
come down the stairs, saw him take his hat from the oak chest and
heard him open the front gate. In the lobby he had looked neither
to right nor left. "How do, Ernest!" she heard him greet the amateur
chauffeur-in-chief of the Batchgrew family. His footfalls on the
pavement died away into the general silence of the street. Overhead
she could hear old Batchgrew walking to and fro. Without reflection
she went upstairs and hovered near the door of Mrs. Maldon's bedroom.
She said to herself that she was not eavesdropping. She listened,
while pretending not to listen, but there was no sign of conversation
within the room. And then she very distinctly heard old Batchgrew
exclaim--
"And they go gallivanting off together to the cinema!"
Upon which ensued another silence.
Rachel flushed with shame, fury, and apprehension. She hated
Batchgrew, and Louis, and all gross masculine invaders.
The mysterious silence within the room persisted. And then old
Batchgrew violently opened the door and glared at Rachel. He showed no
surprise at seeing her there on the landing.
"Ye'd better keep an eye on missis," he said gruffly. "She's gone to
sleep seemingly."
And with no other word he departed.
Before the car had given its warning hoot Rachel was at Mrs. Maldon's
side. The old lady lay in all tranquillity on her left arm. She was
indeed asleep, or she was in a stupor, and the peculiar stertorous
noise of her breathing had recommenced.
Rachel's vague dread vanished as she gazed at the worn features, and
gave place to a new and definite fright.
"They have killed her!" she muttered.
And she ran into the next room and called Mrs. Tams.
"Who's below?" asked Mrs. Tarns, as, wide awake, she came out on to
the landing.
"Nobody," said Rachel. "They've gone."
But the doctor was below. Mr. Batchgrew had left the front door open.
"What a good thing!" cried Rachel.
In the bedroom Dr. Yardley, speaking with normal loudness, just as
though Mrs. Maldon had not been present, said to Rachel--
"I expected this this morning. There's nothing to be done. If you
try to give her food she'll only get it into the lung. It's very
improbable that she'll regain consciousness."
"But are you sure, doctor?" Rachel asked.
The doctor answered grimly--
"No, I'm not--I'm never sure. She _may_ recover."
"She's been rather disturbed this afternoon."
The doctor lifted his shoulders.
"That's got nothing to do with it," said he. "As I told you, she's
had an embolus in one artery of the brain. It lessened at first for
a bit--they do sometimes--and now it's enlarging, that's all. Nothing
external could affect it either way."
"But how long--?" asked Rachel, recoiling.
V
Her chief sensation that evening was that she was alone, for Mrs.
Tams was not a companion, but a slave. She was alone with a grave and
strange responsibility, which she could not evade. Indeed, events had
occurred in such a manner as to make her responsibility seem
natural and inevitable, to give it the sanction of the most correct
convention. Between 4.30 and 6 in the afternoon four separate calls of
inquiry had been made at the house, thus demonstrating Mrs. Maldon's
status in the town. One lady had left a fine bunch of grapes. To all
these visitors Rachel had said the same things, namely, that Mrs.
Maldon had been better on the Saturday, but was worse; that the case
was very serious; that the doctor had been twice that day and was
coming again, that Councillor Batchgrew was fully informed and had
seen the patient; that Mr. Louis Fores, Mrs. Maldon's only near
relative in England, was constantly in and out; that she herself had
the assistance of Mrs. Tams, who was thoroughly capable, and that
while she was much obliged for offers of help, she could think of no
way of utilizing them.
So that when the door closed on the last of the callers, Rachel, who
a month earlier had never even seen Mrs. Maldon, was left in sole
rightful charge of the dying-bed. And there was no escape for her.
She could not telegraph--the day being Sunday. Moreover, except Thomas
Batchgrew, there was nobody to whom she might telegraph. And she did
not want Mr. Batchgrew. Though Mr. Batchgrew certainly had not guessed
the relapse, she felt no desire whatever to let him have news.
She hated his blundering intrusions; and in spite of the doctor's
statements she would insist to herself that he and Louis between them
had somehow brought about the change in Mrs. Maldon. Of course she
might fetch Louis. She did not know his exact address, but he could
be discovered. At any rate, Mrs. Tams might be sent for him. But she
could not bring herself to make any advance towards Louis.
At a little after six o'clock, when the rare chapel-goers had ceased
to pass, and the still rarer church-goers were beginning to respond
to distant bells, Mrs. Tams informed her that tea was ready for her in
the parlour, and she descended and took tea, utterly alone. Mrs. Tams
had lighted the fire, and had moved the table comfortably towards the
fire--act of astounding initiative and courage, in itself a dramatic
proof that Mrs. Maldon no longer reigned at Bycars. Tea finished,
Rachel returned to the sick-room, where there was nothing whatever
to do except watch the minutes recede. She thought of her father and
brother in America.
Then Mrs. Tams, who had been clearing away the tea-things, came into
the bedroom and said--
"Here's Mr. Fores, miss."
Rachel started.
"Mr. Fores! What does he want?" she asked querulously.
Mrs. Tams preserved her blandness.
"He asked for you, miss."
"Didn't he ask how Mrs. Maldon is?"
"No, miss."
"Well, I don't want to see him. You might run down and tell him what
the doctor said, Mrs. Tams." She tried to make her voice casually
persuasive.
"Shall I, miss?" said Miss Tams doubtfully, and turned to the door.
Rachel was again full of fear and resentment. Louis had committed the
infamy of luring her into the cinematograph. It was through him that
she had "got herself talked about." Mrs. Maldon's last words had
been a warning against him. He and Mr. Batchgrew had desecrated the
sick-room with their mysterious visitations. And now Louis was come
again. From what catastrophes had not Mrs. Maldon's warning saved her!
"Here! I'll go," said Rachel, in a sudden resolve.
"I'm glad on it," said Mrs. Tams simply.
In the parlour Louis stood in front of the fire. Although the blinds
were drawn, the gas had not been lighted; but the fire and the
powerful street lamp together sufficed to give clearness to every
object in the room. The table had been restored to its proper
situation. The gift of grapes ornamented the sideboard.
"Good-evening," said Rachel sullenly, as if pouting. She avoided
looking at Louis, and sat down on the Chesterfield.
Louis broke forth in a cascade of words--
"I say, I'm most awfully sorry. I hadn't the faintest notion this
afternoon she was any worse--not the faintest. Otherwise I shouldn't
have dreamt--I met the doctor just now in Moorthorne Road, and he told
me."
"What did he tell you?" asked Rachel, still with averted head, picking
at her frock.
"Well, he gave me to understand there's very little hope, and nothing
to be done. If I'd had the faintest notion--"
"You needn't worry about that," said Rachel. "Your coming made no
difference. The doctor said so." And she asked herself why she should
go out of her way to reassure Louis. It would serve him right to think
that his brusque visit, with Mr. Batchgrew's, was the origin of the
relapse.
"Is there any change?" Louis asked.
Rachel shook her head "No," she said. "We just have to sit and watch."
"Doctor's coming in again to-night, isn't he?"
Rachel nodded.
"It seems it's an embolus."
Rachel nodded once more. She had still no conception of what an
embolus was; but she naturally assumed that Louis could define an
embolus with exactitude.
"I say," said Louis, and his voice was suddenly charged with magical
qualities of persuasion, entreaty, and sincerity--"I say, you might
look at me."
She flushed, but she looked up at him. She might have sat straight and
remarked: "Mr. Fores, what do you mean by talking to me like that?"
But she raised her eyes and her crimson cheeks for one timid instant,
and dropped them. His voice had overcome her. With a single phrase,
with a mere inflection, he had changed the key of the interview. And
the glance at him had exposed her to the appeal of his face, more
powerful than ten thousand logical arguments and warnings. His
face proved that he was a sympathetic, wistful, worried
fellow-creature--and miraculously, uniquely handsome. His face in the
twilight was the most romantic face that Rachel had ever seen. His
gestures had a celestial charm.
He said--
"I know I ought to apologize for the way I came in this afternoon. I
do. But if you knew what cause I had ...! Would you believe that old
Batch had come to my place, and practically accused me of stealing the
old lady's money--_stealing_ it!"
"Never!" Rachel murmured.
"Yes, he did. The fact is, he knew jolly well he'd no business to
have left it in the house that night, so he wanted to get out of it by
making _me_ suffer. You know he's always been down on me. Well,
I came straight up here and I told auntie. Of course I couldn't make a
fuss, with her ill in bed. So I simply told her I hadn't got her money
and I hadn't stolen it, and I left it at that. I thought the less said
the better. But I had to say that much. I wonder what Julian would
have said if he'd been accused. I just wonder!" He repeated the word,
queerly evocative: "Julian!"
"What did Mrs. Maldon say?" Rachel asked.
"Well, she didn't say much. She believed me, naturally. And then old
Batch came. I wasn't going to have a regular scene with him up there,
so I left. I thought that was the only dignified thing to do. I wanted
to tell you, and I've told you. Don't you think it's a shame?"
Rachel answered passionately--
"I do."
She answered thus because she had a tremendous desire to answer thus.
To herself she said: "Do I?... Yes, I do." Louis' eyes drew sympathy
out of her. It seemed to her to be of the highest importance that
those appealing eyes should not appeal in vain.
"Item, he made a fearful fuss about you and me being at the cinema
last night."
"I should like to know what it's got to do with him!" said Rachel,
almost savagely. The word "item" puzzled her. Not understanding it,
she thought she had misheard.
"That's what I thought, too," said Louis, and added, very gravely:
"At the same time I'm really awfully sorry. Perhaps I oughtn't to
have asked you. It was my fault. But old Batch would make the worst of
anything."
Rachel replied with feverish conviction--
"Mr. Batchgrew ought to be ashamed. You weren't to blame, and I won't
hear of it!"
Louis started forward with a sudden movement of the left arm.
"You're magnificent," he said, with emotion.
Rachel trembled, and shut her eyes. She heard his voice again, closer
to her, repeating with even greater emotion: "You're magnificent."
Tears were in her eyes. Through them she looked at him. And his form
was so graceful, his face so nice, so exquisitely kind and lovable and
loving, that her admiration became intense, even to the point of
pain. She thought of Batchgrew, not with hate, but with pity. He was
a monster, but he could not help it. He alone was responsible for all
slanders against Louis. He alone had put Mrs. Maldon against Louis.
Louis was obviously the most innocent of beings. Mrs. Maiden's
warning, "The woman who married him would suffer horribly," was
manifestly absurd. "Suffer horribly"--what a stinging phrase, like a
needle broken in a wound! She felt tired and weak, above all tired of
loneliness.
His hand was on hers. She trembled anew. She was not Rachel, but
some new embodiment of surrender and acquiescence. And the change was
delicious, fearful.... She thought: "I could die for him." She forgot
that a few minutes before she had been steeling herself against him.
She wanted him to kiss her, and waited an eternity. And when he had
kissed her, and she was in a maze of rapture, a tiny idea shaped
itself clearly in her mind for an instant: "This is wrong. But I don't
care. He is mine"--and then melted like a cloud in a burning sky. And
a sense of the miraculousness of destiny overcame her. In two days had
happened enough for two years. It was staggering to think that only
two days earlier she had been dreaming of him as of a star. Could
so much, indeed, happen in two days? She imagined blissfully, in her
ignorance of human experience, that her case was without precedent.
Nay, her case appalled her in the rapidity of its development! And was
thereby the more thrilling! She thought again: "Yes, I could die
for him--and I would!" He was still the star, but--such was the
miracle--she clasped him.
They heard Mrs. Tams knocking at the door. Nothing would ever cure the
charwoman's habit of knocking before entering. Rachel arose from the
sofa as out of a bush of blossoms. And in the artless, honest glance
of her virginity and her simplicity, her eyes seemed to say to Mrs.
Tams: "Behold the phoenix among men! He is to be my husband." Her
pride in the strange, wondrous, incredible state of being affianced
was tremendous, to the tragic point.
"Can ye hear, begging yer pardon?" said Mrs. Tams, pointing through
the open door and upward. "Her's just begun to breathe o' that'n [like
that]."
The loud, stertorous sound of Mrs. Maldon unconsciously drawing the
final breaths of life filled the whole house. Louis and Rachel glanced
at each other, scared, shamed, even horrified, to discover that the
vast pendulum of the universe was still solemnly ticking through their
ecstasy.
"I'm coming," said Rachel.
CHAPTER IX
THE MARRIED WOMAN
I
Wonderful things happen. If anybody had foretold to Mrs. Tams that in
her fifty-eighth year she would accede to the honourable order of the
starched white cap, Mrs. Tams could not have credited the prophecy.
But there she stood, in the lobby of the house at Bycars, frocked
in black, with the strings of a plain but fine white apron stretched
round her stoutness, and the cap crowning her grey hair. It was Louis
who had insisted on the cap, which Rachel had thought unnecessary
and even snobbish, and which Mrs. Tams had nervously deprecated.
Not without pleasure, however, had both women yielded to his indeed
unanswerable argument: "You can't possibly have a servant opening the
door without a cap. It's unthinkable."
Thus in her latter years of grandmotherhood had Mrs. Tams cast off
the sackcloth of the charwoman and become a glorious domestic servant,
with a room of her own in the house, and no responsibilities beyond
the house, and no right to leave the house save once a week, when she
visited younger generations, who still took from her and gave nothing
back. She owed the advancement to Rachel, who, quite unused to
engaging servants, and alarmed by harrowing stories of the futility
of registry offices and advertisements, had seen in Mrs. Tams the
comfortable solution of a fearful problem. Louis would have preferred
a younger, slimmer, nattier, fluffier creature than Mrs. Tams, but was
ready to be convinced that such as he wanted lived only in his fancy.
Moreover, he liked Mrs. Tams, and would occasionally flatter her by a
smack on the shoulder.
So in the April dusk Mrs. Tams stood in the windy lobby, and was full
of vanity and the pride of life. She gazed forth in disdain at
the little crowd of inquisitive idlers and infants that remained
obstinately on the pavement hoping against hope that the afternoon's
marvellous series of social phenomena was not over. She scorned the
slatternly, stupid little crowd for its lack of manners. Yet she ought
to have known, and she did know as well as any one, that though in
Bursley itself people will pretend out of politeness that nothing
unusual is afoot when something unusual most obviously _is_
afoot, in the small suburbs of Bursley, such as Bycars, no human
or divine power can prevent the populace from loosing its starved
curiosity openly upon no matter what spectacle that may differ from
the ordinary. Alas! Mrs. Tams in the past had often behaved even as
the simple members of that crowd. Nevertheless, all ceremonies being
over, she shut the front door with haughtiness, feeling glad that she
was not as others are. And further, she was swollen and consequential
because, without counting persons named Batchgrew, two visitors had
come in a motor, and because at one supreme moment no less than two
motors (including a Batchgrew motor) had been waiting together at
the curb in front of her cleaned steps. Who could have foreseen this
arrant snobbishness in the excellent child of nature, Mrs. Tams?
A far worse example of spiritual iniquity sat lolling on the
Chesterfield in the parlour. Ignorance and simplicity and a menial
imitativeness might be an excuse for Mrs. Tams; but not for Rachel,
the mistress, the omniscient, the all-powerful, the giver of good,
who could make and unmake with a nod. Rachel sitting gorgeous on the
Chesterfield amid an enormous twilit welter and litter of disarranged
chairs and tables; empty teapots, cups, jugs, and glasses; dishes of
fragmentary remains of cake and chocolate; plates smeared with roseate
ham, sticky teaspoons, loaded ash-trays, and a large general crumby
mess--Rachel, the downright, the contemner of silly social prejudices
and all nonsense, was actually puffed up because she had a servant in
a cap and because automobiles had deposited elegant girls at her door
and whirled them off again. And she would have denied it and yet was
not ashamed.
The sole extenuation of Rachel's base worldliness was that during the
previous six months she had almost continuously had the sensations of
a person crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and that now, on this very
day, she had leaped to firm ground and was accordingly exultant. After
Mrs. Maldon's death she had felt somehow guilty of disloyalty; she
passionately regretted having had no opportunity to assure the old
lady that her suspicions about Louis were wrong and cruel, and
to prove to her in some mysterious way the deep rightness of the
betrothal. She blushed only for the moment of her betrothal. She had
solemnly bound Louis to keep the betrothal secret until Christmas. She
had laid upon both of them a self-denying ordinance as to meeting.
The funeral over, she was without a home. She wished to find another
situation; Louis would not hear of it. She contemplated a visit to her
father and brother in America. In response to a letter, her brother
sent her the exact amount of the steerage fare, and, ready to accept
it, she was astounded at Louis' fury against her brother and at the
accent with which he had spit out the word "steerage." Her brother
and father had gone steerage. However, she gave way to Louis, chiefly
because she could not bear to leave him even for a couple of months.
She was lodging at Knype, at a total normal expense of ten shillings
a week. She possessed over fifty pounds--enough to keep her for six
months and to purchase a trousseau, and not one penny would she deign
to receive from her affianced.
The disclosure of Mrs. Maldon's will increased the delicacy of her
situation. Mrs. Maldon had left the whole of her property in equal
shares to Louis and Julian absolutely. There were others who by blood
had an equal claim upon her with these two, but the rest had been
mere names to her, and she had characteristically risen above the
conventionalism of heredity. Mr. Batchgrew, the executor, was able
to announce that in spite of losses the heirs would get over three
thousand five hundred pounds apiece. Hence it followed that Rachel
would be marrying for money as well as for position! She trembled
when the engagement was at length announced. And when Louis, after
consultation with Mr. Batchgrew, pointed out that it would be
advantageous not merely to the estate as a whole, but to himself and
to her, if he took over the house at Bycars and its contents at
a valuation and made it their married home, she at first declined
utterly. The scheme seemed sacrilegious to her. How could she dare to
be happy in that house where Mrs. Maldon had died, in that house which
was so intimately Mrs. Maldon's? But the manifold excellences of the
scheme, appealing strongly to her common sense, overcame her scruples.
The dead are dead; the living must live, and the living must not be
morbid; it would be absurd to turn into a pious monument every
house which death has emptied; Mrs. Maldon, had she known all the
circumstances, would have been only too pleased, etc., etc. The affair
was settled, and grew into public knowledge.
Rachel had to emerge upon the world as an engaged girl. Left to
herself she would have shunned all formalities; but Louis, bred up
in Barnes, knew what was due to society. Naught was omitted. Louis'
persuasiveness could not be withstood. Withal, he was so right. And
though Rachel in one part of her mind had a contempt for "fuss," in
another she liked it and was half ashamed of liking it. Further, her
common sense, of which she was still proud, told her that the delicacy
of her situation demanded "fuss," and would be much assuaged thereby.
And finally, the whole thing, being miraculous, romantic, and
incredible, had the quality of a dream through which she lived in a
dazed nonchalance. Could it be true that she had resided with Mrs.
Maldon only for a month? Could it be true that her courtship had
lasted only two days--or at most, three? Never, she thought, had a
sensible, quiet girl ridden such a whirlwind before in the entire
history of the world. Could Louis be as foolishly fond of her as
he seemed? Was she truly to be married? "I shan't have a single
wedding-present," she had said. Then wedding-presents began to come.
"Are we married?" she had said, when they were married and in the
conventional clothes in the conventional vehicle. After that she soon
did realize that the wondrous and the unutterable had happened to her
too. And she swung over to the other extreme: instead of doubting the
reality of her own experiences, she was convinced that her experiences
were more real than those of any other created girl, and hence she
felt a slight condescension towards all the rest. "I am a married
woman," she reflected at intervals, with intense momentary pride.
And her fits of confusion in public would end in recurrences of this
strange, proud feeling.
Then she had to face the return to Bursley, and, later, the At Home
which Louis propounded as a matter of course, and which she knew to be
inevitable. The house was her toy, and Mrs. Tams was her toy. But
the glee of playing with toys had been overshadowed for days by the
delicious dread of the At Home. "It will be the first caller that will
kill me," she had said. "But will anybody really come?" And the first
caller had called. And, finding herself still alive, she had become
radiant, and often during the afternoon had forgotten to be clumsy.
The success of the At Home was prodigious, startling. Now and then
when the room was full, and people without chairs perched on the end
of the Chesterfield, she had whispered to her secret heart in a tiny,
tiny voice: "These are my guests. They all treat me with special
deference. I am the hostess. _I am Mrs. Fores_." The Batchgrew
clan was well represented, no doubt by order from authority, Mrs.
Yardley came, in surprising stylishness. Visitors arrived from Knype.
Miss Malkin came and atoned for her historic glance in the shop. But
the dazzlers were sundry male friends of Louis, with Kensingtonian
accents, strange phrases, and assurance in the handling of teacups and
the choosing of cake.... One by one and two by two they had departed,
and at last Rachel, with a mind as it were breathless from rapid
flittings to and fro, was seated alone on the sofa.
She was richly dressed in a dark blue taffeta dress that gave
brilliance to her tawny hair. Perhaps she was over-richly dressed,
for, like many girls who as a rule are not very interested in clothes,
she was too interested in them at times, and inexperienced taste was
apt to mislead her into an unfitness. Also her figure was too stiff
and sturdy to favour elegance. But on this occasion the general
effect of her was notably picturesque, and her face and hair, and the
expression of her pose, atoned in their charm for the shortcomings
and the luxuriance of the frock. She was no more the Rachel that
Mrs. Maldon had known and that Louis had first kissed. Her glance had
altered, and her gestures. She would ask herself, could it be true
that she was a married woman? But her glance and gestures announced
it true at every instant. A new languor and a new confidence had
transformed the girl. Her body had been modified and her soul at
once chastened and fired. Fresh in her memory was endless matter for
meditation. And on the sofa, in a negligent attitude of repose,
with shameless eyes gazing far into the caverns of the fire, and an
unreadable faint smile on her face, she meditated. And she was the
most seductive, tantalizing, self-contradictory object for study in
the whole of Bursley. She had never been so interesting as in this
brief period, and she might never be so interesting again.
Mrs. Tams entered. With her voice Mrs. Tams said, "Shall I begin to
clear all these things away, _mam_?" But with her self-conscious
eyes Mrs. Tams said to the self-conscious eyes of Rachel, "What a
staggering world we live in, don't we?"
II
Rachel sprang from the Chesterfield, smoothed down her frock, shook
her hair, and then ran upstairs to the large front bedroom, where
Louis, to whom the house was just as much a toy as to Rachel, was
about to knock a nail into a wall. Out of breath, she stood close
to him very happily. The At Home was over. She was now definitely
received as a married woman in a town full of married women and girls
waiting to be married women. She had passed successfully through a
trying and exhausting experience; the nervous tension was slackened.
And therefore it might be expected that she would have a sense of
reaction, the vague melancholy which is produced when that which has
long been seen before is suddenly seen behind. But it was not so
in the smallest degree. Every moment of her existence equally was
thrilling and happy. One piquant joy was succeeded immediately by
another as piquant. To Rachel it was not in essence more exciting to
officiate at an At Home than to watch Louis drive a nail into a wall.
The man winked at her in the dusk; she winked back, and put her hand
intimately on his shoulder. She thought, "I am safe with him now in
the house." The feeling of solitude with him, of being barricaded
against the world and at the mercy of Louis alone, was exquisite to
her. Then Louis raised himself on his toes, and raised his left arm
with the nail as high as he could, and stuck the point of the nail
against a pencil-mark on the wall. Then he raised the right hand with
the hammer; but the mark was just too high to be efficiently reached
by both hands simultaneously. Louis might have stood on a chair. This
simple device, however, was too simple for them.
Rachel said--
"Shall I stand on a chair and hold the nail for you?" Louis murmured--
"Brainy little thing! Never at a loss!"
She skipped on to a chair and held the nail. Towering thus above him,
she looked down on her husband and thought: "This man is mine alone,
and he is all mine." And in Rachel's fancy the thought itself seemed
to caress Louis from head to foot.
"Supposing I catch you one?" said Louis, as he prepared to strike.
"I don't care," said Rachel.
And the fact was that really she would have liked him to hit her
finger instead of the nail--not too hard, but still smartly. She would
have taken pleasure in the pain: such was the perversity of the young
wife. But Louis hit the nail infallibly every time.
He took up a picture which had been lying against the wall in a dark
corner, and thrust the twisting wire of it over the nail.
Rachel, when in the deepening darkness she had peered into the frame,
exclaimed, pouting--
"Oh, darling, you aren't going to hang that here, are you? It's so
old-fashioned. You said it was old-fashioned yourself. I did want that
thing that came this morning to be put somewhere here. Why can't
you stick this in the spare room?... Unless, of course, you
_prefer_...." She was being deferential to the art-expert in him,
as well as to the husband.
"Not in the least!" said Louis, acquiescent, and unhooked the picture.
Taste changes. The rejected of Rachel was a water-colour by the late
Athelstan Maldon, adored by Mrs. Maldon. Already it had been degraded
from the parlour to the bedroom, and now it was to be pushed away
like a shame into obscurity. It was a view of the celebrated Vale of
Llangollen, finicking, tight, and hard in manner, but with a certain
sentiment and modest skill. The way in which the initials "A.M."
had been hidden amid the foreground foliage in the left-hand corner
disclosed enough of the painter's quiet and proud temperament to
show that he "took after" his mother. Yet a few more years, and the
careless observer would miss those initials altogether and would
be contemptuously inquiring, "Who did this old daub, I wonder?" And
nobody would know who did the old daub, or that the old daub for
thirty years had been an altar for undying affection, and also a
distinguished specimen--admired by a whole generation of townsfolk--of
the art of water-colour.
And the fate of Athelstan's sketch was symptomatic. Mrs. Maiden's
house had been considered perfect, up to the time of her death. Rachel
had at first been even intimidated by it; Louis had sincerely
praised it. And indeed its perfection was an axiom of drawing-room
conversation. But as soon as Louis and Rachel began to look on the
house with the eye of inhabitants, the axiom fell to a dogma, and the
dogma was exploded. The dreadful truth came out that Mrs. Maldon had
shown a strange indifference to certain aspects of convenience, and
that, in short, she must have been a peculiar old lady with ideas
of her own. Louis proved unanswerably that in the hitherto faultless
parlour the furniture was ill arranged, and suddenly the sideboard and
the Chesterfield had changed places, and all concerned had marvelled
that Mrs. Maldon had for so long kept the Chesterfield where so
obviously the sideboard ought to have been, and the sideboard where so
obviously the Chesterfield ought to have been.
And still graver matters had come to light. The house had an attic
floor, which was unused and the scene of no activity except spring
cleaning. A previous owner, infected by the virus of modernity, had
put a bath into one of the attics. Now Mrs. Maldon, as experiments
disclosed, had actually had the water cut off from the bath. Eyebrows
were lifted at the revelation of this caprice. The restoration of
the supply of water and the installing of a geyser were the only
expenditures which thrifty Rachel had sanctioned in the way of
rejuvenating the house. Rachel had decided that the house must, at any
rate for the present, be "made to do." That such a decision should be
necessary astonished Rachel; and Mrs. Maldon would have been more
than astonished to learn that the lady help, by fortitude and
determination, was making her perfect house "do." As regards the
household inventory, Rachel had been obliged to admit exceptions to
her rule of endurance. Perhaps her main reason for agreeing to live in
the house had been that there would be no linen to buy. But truly
Mrs. Maldon's notion of what constituted a sufficiency of--for
example--towels, was quite too inadequate. Louis protested that he
could comfortably use all Mrs. Maldon's towels in half a day. More
towels had to be obtained. There were other shortages, but some of
them were set right by means of veiled indications to prospective
givers of gifts.
"You mean that 'Garden of the Hesperides' affair for up here, do you?"
said Louis.
Rachel gazed round the bedchamber. A memory of what it had been shot
painfully through her mind. For the room was profoundly changed
in character. Two narrow bedsteads given by Thomas Batchgrew, and
described by Mrs. Tarns, in a moment of daring, as "flighty," had
taken the place of Mrs. Maldon's bedstead, which was now in the spare
room, the spare-room bedstead having been allotted to Mrs. Tams,
and Rachel's old bedstead sold. Bright crocheted and embroidered
wedding-presents enlivened the pale tones of the room. The wardrobe,
washstand, dressing-table, chairs, carpet, and ottoman remained.
But there were razors on the washstand and boot-trees under it; the
wardrobe had been emptied, and filled on strange principles with
strange raiment; and the Maldon family Bible, instead of being on the
ottoman, was in the ottoman--so as to be out of the dust.
"Perhaps we may as well keep that here, after all," said Rachel,
indicating Athelsan's water-colour. Her voice was soft. She remembered
that the name of Mrs. Maldon, only a little while since a major
notability of Bursley and the very mirror of virtuous renown, had
been mentioned but once, and even then apologetically, during the
afternoon.
Louis asked, sharply--
"Why, if you don't care for it? _I_ don't."
"Well--" said Rachel. "As you like, then, dearest."
Louis walked out of the room with the water-colour, and in a moment
returned with a photogravure of Lord Leighton's "The Garden of the
Hesperides," in a coquettish gold frame--a gift newly arrived from
Louis' connections in the United States. The marmoreal and academic
work seemed wonderfully warm and original in that room at Bycars.
Rachel really admired it, and admired herself for admiring it. But
when Louis had hung it and flicked it into exact perpendicularity, and
they had both exclaimed upon its brilliant effect even in the dusk,
Rachel saw it also with the eyes of Mrs. Maldon, and wondered what
Mrs. Maldon would have thought of it opposite her bed, and knew what
Mrs. Maldon would have thought of it.
And then, the job being done and the progress of civilization assured,
Louis murmured in a new appealing voice--
"I say, Louise!"
"Louise" was perhaps his most happy invention, and the best proof
that Louis was Louis. Upon hearing that her full Christian names
were Rachel Louisa, he had instantly said--"I shall call you Louise."
Rachel was ravished, Louisa is a vulgar name--at least it is vulgar
in the Five Towns, where every second general servant bears it. But
Louise was full of romance, distinction, and beauty. And it was the
perfect complement to Louis. Louis and Louise--ideal coincidence!
"But nobody except me is to call you Louise," he had added. And thus
completed her bliss.
"What?" she encouraged him amorously.
"Suppose we go to Llandudno on Saturday for the week-end?"
His tone was gay, gentle, innocent, persuasive. Yet the words stabbed
her and her head swam.
"But why?" she asked, controlling her utterance.
"Oh, well! Be rather a lark, wouldn't it?" It was when he talked in
this strain that the inconvenient voice of sagacity within her would
question for one agonizing instant whether she was more secure as the
proud, splendid wife of Louis Fores than she had been as a mere lady
help. And the same insistent voice would repeat the warnings which she
had had from Mrs. Maldon and from Thomas Batchgrew, and would remind
her of what she herself had said to herself when Louis first kissed
her--"This is wrong. But I don't care. He is mine."
Upon hearing of his inheritance from Mrs. Maldon, Louis was for
throwing up immediately his situation at Horrocleave's. Rachel had
dissuaded him from such irresponsible madness. She had prevented him
from running into a hundred expenses during their engagement and in
connection with the house. And he had in the end enthusiastically
praised her common sense. But that very morning at the midday meal he
had surprised her by announcing that on account of the reception he
should not go to the works at all in the afternoon, though he had
omitted to warn Horrocleave. Ultimately she had managed, by guile, to
dispatch him to the works for two hours. And now in the evening he
was alarming her afresh. Why go to Llandudno? What point was there in
rushing off to Llandudno, and scattering in three days more money than
they could save in three weeks? He frightened her ingrained prudence,
and her alarm was only increased by his obvious failure to realize the
terrible defect in himself. (For to her it was terrible.) The joyous
scheme of an excursion to Llandudno had suddenly crossed his mind,
exciting the appetite for pleasure. Hence the appetite must be
immediately indulged!... Rachel had been brought up otherwise. And as
a direct result of Louis' irresponsible suggestion she had a vision of
the house with county-court bailiffs lodged in the kitchen.... She had
only to say--"Yes, let's go," and they would be off on the absurd and
wicked expedition.
"I'd really rather not," she said, smiling, but serious.
"All serene. But, anyhow, next week's Easter, and we shall have to go
somewhere then, you know."
She put her hands on his shoulders and looked close at him, knowing
that she must use her power and that the heavy dusk would help her.
"Why?" she asked again. "I'd much sooner stay here at Easter. Truly I
would!... With you!"
The episode ended with an embrace. She had won.
"Very well! Very well!" said Louis. "Easter in the coal-cellar if you
like. I'm on for anything."
"But don't you _see_, dearest?" she said.
And he imitated her emphasis, full of teasing good humour--
"Yes, I _see_, dearest."
She breathed relief, and asked--
"Are you going to give me my bicycle lesson?"
III
Louis had borrowed a bicycle for Rachel to ruin while learning to
ride. He said that a friend had lent it to him--a man in Hanbridge
whose mother had given up riding on account of stoutness--but who
exactly this friend was Rachel knew not, Louis' information being
characteristically sketchy and incomplete; and with his air of candour
and good humour he had a strange way of warding off questions; so that
already Rachel had grown used to a phrase which she would utter only
in her mind, "I don't like to ask him--"
It pleased Louis to ride this bicycle out of the back yard, down
the sloping entry, and then steer it through another narrow gateway,
across the pavement, and let it solemnly bump, first with the front
wheel and then with the back wheel, from the pavement into the road.
During this feat he stood on the pedals. He turned the machine up
Bycars Lane, and steadily climbed the steep at Rachel's walking pace.
And Rachel, hurrying by his side, watched in the obscurity the play of
his ankles as he put into practice the principles of pedalling which
he had preached. He was a graceful rider; every movement was natural
and elegant. Rachel considered him to be the most graceful cyclist
that ever was. She was fascinated by the revolutions of his feet.
She felt ecstatically happy. The episode of his caprice for the
seaside was absolutely forgotten; after all, she asked for nothing
more than possession of him, and she had that, though indeed it seemed
too marvellous to be true. The bicycle lesson was her hour of magic;
and more so on this night than on previous nights.
"I must change my dress," she had said. "I can't go in this one."
"Quick, then!"
His impatience could not wait. He had helped her. He undid hooks, and
fastened others.... The rich blue frock lay across the bed and looked
lovely on the ivory-coloured counterpane. It seemed indeed to be a
part of that in her which was Louise. Then she was in a short skirt
which she had devised herself, and he was pushing her out of the room,
his hand on her back. And she had feigned reluctance, resisting his
pressure, while laughing with gleeful eagerness to be gone. No delay
had been allowed. As they passed through the kitchen, not one instant
for parley with Mrs. Tams as to the domestic organization of the
evening! He was still pushing her.... Thus she had had to confide her
precious house and its innumerable treasures to Mrs. Tams. And in this
surrender to Louis' whim there was a fearful joy.
When Louis turned at last into Park Road, and stepped from between the
wheels, she exclaimed, a little breathless from quick walking level
with him up the hill--
"I can't bear to see you ride so well. Oh!" She crunched her teeth
with a loving, cruel gesture. "I should like to hurt you frightfully!"
"What for?"
"Because I shall never, never be able to ride as well as you do!"
He winked.
"Here! Take hold."
"I'm not ready! I'm not ready!" she cried.
But he loosed the machine, and she was obliged to seize it as it fell.
That was his teasing.
Park Road had been the scene of the lesson for three nights. It was
level, and it was unfrequented. "And the doctor's handy in case
you break your neck," Louis had said. Dr. Yardley's red lamp shone
amicably among yellow lights, and its ray with theirs was lost in the
mysterious obscurities of the closed park. Not only was it socially
advisable for Rachel to study the perverse nature of the bicycle at
night--for not to know how to ride the bicycle was as shameful as not
to know how to read and write--but she preferred the night for the
romantic feeling of being alone with Louis, in the dark and above the
glow of the town. She loved the sharp night wind on her cheek, and
the faint clandestine rustling of the low evergreens within the park
palisade, and the invisible and almost tangible soft sky, revealed
round the horizon by gleams of fire. She had longed to ride the
bicycle as some girls long to follow the hunt or to steer an
automobile or a yacht. And now her ambition was being attained amid
all circumstances of bliss.
And yet she would shrink from beginning the lesson.
"The lamp! You've forgotten to light the lamp!" she said.
"Get on," said he.
"But suppose a policeman comes?"
"Suppose you get on and start! Do you think I don't know you?
Policemen are my affair. Besides, all nice policemen are in bed....
Don't be afraid. It isn't alive. I've got hold of the thing. Sit well
down. No! There are only two pedals. You seem to think there are about
nineteen. Right! No, no, _no_! Don't--do not--cling to those
blooming handle-bars as if you were in a storm at sea. Be a nice
little cat in front of the fire--all your muscles loose. Now! Are you
ready?"
"Yes," she murmured, with teeth set and dilated eyes staring ahead at
the hideous dangers of Park Road.
He impelled. The pedals went round. The machine slid terribly forward.
And in a moment Louis said, mischievously--
"I told you you'd have to go alone to-night. There you are!"
His footsteps ceased.
"Louis!" she cried, sharply and yet sadly upbraiding his unspeakable
treason. Her fingers gripped convulsively the handle-bars. She was
moving alone. It was inconceivably awful and delightful. She was on
the back of a wild pony in the forest. The miracle of equilibrium was
being accomplished. The impossible was done, and at the first attempt.
She thought very clearly how wondrous was life, and how perfectly
happy fate had made her. And then she was lying in a tangle amid
dozens of complex wheels, chains, and bars.
"Hurt?" shouted Louis, as he ran up.
She laughed and said "No," and sat up stiffly, full of secret dolours.
Yet he knew and she knew that the accidents of the previous two nights
had covered her limbs with blue discolorations, and that the latest
fall was more severe than any previous one. Her courage enchanted
Louis and filled him with a sense of security. She was not graceful in
these exercises. Her ankles were thick and clumsy. Not merely had she
no natural aptitude for physical feats--apparently she was not lissom,
nor elegant in motion. But what courage! What calm, bright endurance!
What stoicism! Most girls would have reproached him for betraying them
to destruction, would have pouted, complained, demanded petting and
apologies. But not she! She was like a man. And when he helped her
to pick herself up he noticed that after all she was both lissom and
agile, and exquisitely, disturbingly girlish in her short dusty skirt;
and that she did trust him and depend on him. And he realized that he
was safe for life with her. She was created for him.
Work was resumed.
"Now don't let go of me till I tell you," she enjoined lightly.
"I won't," he answered. And it seemed to him that his loyalty to her
expanded and filled all his soul.
Later, as she approached the other end of Park Road, near Moorthorne
Road, a tram-car hurled itself suddenly down Moorthorne Road and
overthrew her. It is true that the tram-car was never less than twenty
yards away from her. But even at twenty yards it could overthrow.
Rachel sat dazed in the road, and her voice was uncertain as she
told Louis to examine the bicycle. One of the pedals was bent, and
prevented the back wheel from making a complete revolution.
"It's nothing," said Louis. "I'll have it right in the morning."
"Who's that?" Rachel, who had risen, gasping, turned to him excitedly
as he was bending over the bicycle. Conscious that somebody had been
standing at the corner of the street, he glanced up. A figure was
moving quickly down Moorthorne Road in the direction of the station.
"I dun'no," said he.
"It's not Julian, is it?"
In a peculiar tone Louis replied--
"Looks like him, doesn't it?" And then impulsively he yelled "Hi!"
The figure kept on its way.
"Seeing that the inimitable Julian's still in South Africa, it can't
very well be him. And, anyhow, I'm not going to run after him."
"No, of course it can't," Rachel assented.
Presently the returning procession was re-formed. Louis pushed the
bicycle on its front wheel, and Rachel tried to help him to support
the weight of the suspended part. He had attempted in vain to take the
pedal off the crank.
"It's perhaps a good thing you fell just then," said Louis. "Because
old Batch is coming in to-night, and we'd better not be late."
"But you never told me!"
"Didn't I? I forgot," he said blandly.
"Oh, Louis!... He's not coming for supper, I hope?"
"My child, if there's a chance of a free meal, old Batch will be on
the spot."
The unaccustomed housewife foretold her approaching shame, and
proclaimed Louis to be the author of it. She began to quicken her
steps.
"You certainly ought to have let me know sooner, dearest," she said
seriously. "You really are terrible."
Hard knocks had not hurt her. But she was hurt now. And Louis'
smile was very constrained. Her grave manner of saying "dearest" had
disquieted him.
CHAPTER X
THE CHASM
I
It is true that Rachel held Councillor Thomas Batchgrew in hatred,
that she had never pardoned him for the insult which he had put upon
her in the Imperial Cinema de Luxe; and that, indeed, she could never
pardon him for simply being Thomas Batchgrew. Nevertheless, there was
that evening in her heart a little softening towards him. The fact
was that the councillor had been flattering her. She would have denied
warmly that she was susceptible to flattery; even if authoritatively
informed that no human being whatever is unsusceptible to flattery,
she would still have protested that she at any rate was, for, like
numerous young and inexperienced women, she had persuaded herself that
she was the one exception to various otherwise universal rules.
It remained that Thomas Batchgrew had been flattering her. On arrival
he had greeted her with that tinge of deference which from an old man
never fails to thrill a girl. Rachel's pride as a young married woman
was tigerishly alert and hungry that evening. Thomas Batchgrew, little
by little, tamed and fed it very judiciously at intervals, until at
length it seemed to purr content around him like a cat. The phenomenon
was remarkable, and the more so in that Rachel was convinced that,
whereas she was as critical and inimical as ever, old Batchgrew had
slightly improved. He behaved "heartily," and everybody appreciates
such behaviour in the Five Towns. He was by nature far too insensitive
to notice that the married lovers were treating each other with
that finished courtesy which is the symptom of a tiff or of a
misunderstanding. And the married lovers, noticing that he noticed
nothing, were soon encouraged to make peace; and by means of certain
tones and gestures peace was declared in the very presence of the
unperceiving old brute, which was peculiarly delightful to the
contracting parties.
Rachel had less difficulty with the supper than she feared, whereby
also her good-humour was fostered. With half a cold leg of mutton,
some cheeses, and the magnificent fancy remains of an At Home tea,
arrayed with the d'oyleys and embroidered cloths which brides always
richly receive in the Five Towns, a most handsome and impressive
supper can be concocted. Rachel was astonished at the splendour of her
own table. Mr. Batchgrew treated this supper with unsurpassable tact.
The adjectives he applied to it were short and emphatic and spoken
with a full mouth. He ate the supper; he kept on eating it; he passed
his plate with alacrity; he refused naught. And as the meal neared its
end he emitted those natural inarticulate noises from his throat which
in Persia are a sign of high breeding. Useless for Rachel in her heart
to call him a glutton--his attitude towards her supper was impeccable.
And now the solid part of the supper was over. One extremity of the
Chesterfield had been drawn closer to the fire--an operation easily
possible in its new advantageous position--and Louis as master of the
house had mended the fire after his own method, and Rachel sat upright
(somewhat in the manner of Mrs. Maldon) in the arm-chair opposite Mr.
Batchgrew, extended half-reclining on the Chesterfield. And Mrs. Tams
entered with coffee.
"You'll have coffee, Mr. Batchgrew?" said the hostess.
"Nay, missis! I canna' sleep after it."
Secretly enchanted by the sweet word "missis," Rachel was nevertheless
piqued by this refusal.
"Oh, but you must have some of Louise's coffee," said Louis, standing
negligently in front of the fire.
Already, though under a month old as a husband, Louis, following the
eternal example of good husbands, had acquired the sure belief that
his wife could achieve a higher degree of excellence in certain
affairs than any other wife in the world. He had selected coffee as
Rachel's speciality.
"Louise's?" repeated old Batchgrew, puzzled, in his heavy voice.
Rachel flushed and smiled.
"He calls me Louise, you know," said she.
"Calls you Louise, does he?" Batchgrew muttered indifferently. But he
took a cup of coffee, stirred part of its contents into the saucer
and on to the Chesterfield, and began to sup the remainder with a
prodigious splutter of ingurgitation.
"And you must have a cigarette, too," Louis carelessly insisted. And
Mr. Batchgrew agreed, though it was notorious that he only smoked once
in a blue moon, because all tobacco was apt to be too strong for him.
"You can clear away," Rachel whispered, in the frigid tones of one
accustomed to command cohorts of servants in the luxury of historic
castles.
"Yes, ma'am," Mrs. Tams whispered back nervously, proud as a
major-domo, though with less than a major-domo's aplomb.
No pride, however, could have outclassed Rachel's. She had had a full
day, and the evening was the crown of the day, because in the evening
she was entertaining privately for the first time. She was the one
lady of the party; for these two men she represented woman, and they
were her men. They depended on her for their physical well-being, and
not in vain. She was the hostess; hers to command; hers the complex
responsibility of the house. She had begun supper with painful
timidity, but the timidity had now nearly vanished in the flush
of social success. Critical as only a young wife can be, she was
excellently well satisfied with Louis' performance in the role of
host. She grew more than ever sure that there was only one Louis. See
him manipulate a cigarette--it was the perfection of worldliness and
agreeable, sensuous grace! See him hold a match to Mr. Batchgrew's
cigarette!
Now Mr. Batchgrew smoked a cigarette clumsily. He seemed not to be
able to decide whether a cigarette was something to smoke or something
to eat. Mr. Batchgrew was more ungainly than ever, stretched in his
characteristic attitude at an angle of forty-five degrees; his long
whiskers were more absurdly than ever like two tails of a wire-haired
white dog; his voice more coarsely than ever rolled about the room
like undignified thunder. He was an old, old man, and a sinister. It
was precisely his age that caressed Rachel's pride. That any man so
old should have come to her house for supper, should be treating her
as an equal and with the directness of allusion in conversation due to
a married woman but improper to a young girl--this was very sweet to
Rachel. The subdued stir made by Mrs. Tams in clearing the table was
for Rachel a delicious background to the scene. The one flaw in it
was her short skirt, which she had not had time to change. Louis
had protested that it was entirely in order, and indeed admirably
coquettish, but Rachel would have preferred a long train of soft
drapery disposed with art round the front of her chair.
"What you want here is electricity," said Thomas Batchgrew, gazing
at the incandescent gas; he could never miss a chance, and was never
discouraged in the pursuit of his own advantage.
"You think so?" murmured Louis genially.
"I could put ye in summat as 'u'd----"
Rachel broke in a clear, calm decision--
"I don't think we shall have any electricity just yet."
The gesture of the economical wife in her was so final that old
Batchgrew raised his eyebrows with a grin at Louis, and Louis
humorously drew down the corners of his mouth in response. It was as
if they had both said, in awe--
"She has spoken!"
And Rachel, still further flattered and happy, was obliged to smile.
When Mrs. Tams had made her last tiptoe journey from the room and
closed the door with due silent respect upon those great ones, the
expression of Thomas Batchgrew's face changed somewhat; he looked
round, as though for spies, and then drew a packet of papers from his
pocket. And the expression of the other two faces changed also. For
the true purpose of the executor's visit was now to be made formally
manifest.
"Now about this statement of account--_re_ Elizabeth Maldon,
deceased," he growled deeply.
"By the way," Louis interrupted him. "Is Julian back?"
"Julian back? Not as I know of," said Mr. Batchgrew aggressively.
"Why?"
"We thought we saw him walking down Moorthorne Road to-night."
"Yes," said Rachel. "We both thought we saw him."
"Happen he is if he aeroplaned it!" said Batchgrew, and fumbled
nervously with the papers.
"It couldn't have been Julian," said Louis, confidently, to Rachel.
"No, it couldn't," said Rachel.
But neither conjured away the secret uneasiness of the other. And
as for Rachel, she knew that all through the evening she had,
inexplicably, been disturbed by an apprehension that Julian, after
his long and strange sojourn in South Africa, had returned to the
district. Why the possible advent of Julian should disconcert her, she
thought she could not divine. Mr. Batchgrew's demeanour as he answered
Louis' question mysteriously increased her apprehension. At one moment
she said to herself, "Of course it wasn't Julian." At the next, "I'm
quite sure I couldn't be mistaken." At the next, "And supposing it was
Julian--what of it?"
II
When Batchgrew and Louis, sitting side by side on the Chesterfield,
began to turn over documents and peer into columns, and carry the
finger horizontally across sheets of paper in search of figures,
Rachel tactfully withdrew, not from the room, but from the
conversation, it being her proper role to pretend that she did not
and could not understand the complicated details which they were
discussing. She expected some rather dazzling revelation of men's
trained methods at this "business interview" (as Louis had announced
it), for her brother and father had never allowed her the slightest
knowledge of their daily affairs. But she was disappointed. She
thought that both the men were somewhat absurdly and self-consciously
trying to be solemn and learned. Louis beyond doubt was
self-conscious--acting as it were to impress his wife--and Batchgrew's
efforts to be hearty and youthful with the young roused her private
ridicule.
Moreover, nothing fresh emerged from the interview. She had known all
of it before from Louis. Batchgrew was merely repeating and resuming.
And Louis was listening with politeness to recitals with which he was
quite familiar. In words almost identical with those already reported
to her by Louis, Batchgrew insisted on the honesty and efficiency of
the valuer in Hanbridge, a lifelong friend of his own, who had for a
specially low fee put a price on the house at Bycars and its contents
for the purpose of a division between Louis and Julian. And now, as
previously with Louis, Rachel failed to comprehend how the valuer, if
he had been favourably disposed towards Louis, as Batchgrew averred,
could at the same time have behaved honestly towards Julian. But
neither Louis nor Batchgrew seemed to realize the point. They
both apparently flattered themselves with much simplicity upon the
partiality of the lifelong friend and valuer for Louis, without
perceiving the logical deduction that if he was partial he was a
rascal. Further, Thomas Batchgrew "rubbed Rachel the wrong way" by
subtly emphasizing his own marvellous abilities as a trustee and
executor, and by assuring Louis repeatedly that all conceivable books
of account, correspondence, and documents were open for his inspection
at any time. Batchgrew, in Rachel's opinion, might as well have said,
"You naturally suspect me of being a knave, but I can prove to you
that you are wrong."
Finally, they came to the grand total of Louis' inheritance, which
Rachel had known by heart for several days past; yet Batchgrew rolled
it out as a piece of tremendous news, and immediately afterwards
hinted that the sum represented less than the true worth of Louis'
inheritance, and that he, Batchgrew, as well as his lifelong friend
the valuer, had been influenced by a partiality for Louis. For
example, he had contrived to put all the house property, except the
house at Bycars, into Julian's share; which was extremely advantageous
for Louis because the federation of the Five Towns into one borough
had rendered property values the most capricious and least calculable
of all worldly possessions.... And Louis tried to smile knowingly at
the knowing trustee and executor with his amiable partiality for one
legatee as against the other. Louis' share, beyond the Bycars house,
was in the gilt-edged stock of limited companies which sold water and
other necessaries of life to the public on their own terms.
Rachel left the pair for a moment, and returned from upstairs with
a grey jacket of Louis' from which she had to unstitch the black
_crepe_ armlet announcing to the world Louis' grief for his dead
great-aunt; the period of mourning was long over, and it would not
have been quite nice for Louis to continue announcing his grief.
As she came back into the room she heard the word "debentures,"
and that single word changed her mood instantly from bland feminine
toleration to porcupinish defensiveness. She did not, as a fact, know
what debentures were. She could not for a fortune have defined
the difference between a debenture and a share. She only knew that
debentures were connected with "limited companies"--not waterworks
companies, which she classed with the Bank of England--but just any
limited companies, which were in her mind a bottomless pit for the
savings of the foolish. She had an idea that a debenture was, if
anything, more fatal than a share. She was, of course, quite wrong,
according to general principles; but, unfortunately, women, as all men
sooner or later learn, have a disconcerting habit of being right
in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. In a single moment, without
justification, she had in her heart declared war on all debentures.
And as soon as she gathered that Thomas Batchgrew was suggesting to
Louis the exchange of waterworks stock for seven per cent. debentures
in the United Midland Cinemas Corporation, Limited, she became more
than ever convinced that her instinct about debentures was but too
correct. She sat down primly, and detached the armlet, and removed all
the bits of black cotton from the sleeve, and never raised her head
nor offered a remark, but she was furious--furious to protect her
husband against sharks and against himself.
The conduct and demeanour of Thomas Batchgrew were now explained.
His visit, his flattery, his heartiness, his youthfulness, all had a
motive. He had safeguarded Louis' interests under the will in order
to rob him afterwards as a cinematograph speculator. The thing was
as clear as daylight. And yet Louis did not seem to see it. Louis
listened to Batchgrew's ingenious arguments with naive interest and
was obviously impressed. When Batchgrew called him "a business man as
smart as they make 'em," and then proved that the money so invested
would be as safe as in a stocking, Louis agreed with a great air of
acumen that certainly it would. When Batchgrew pointed out that, under
the proposed new investment, Louis would be receiving in income thirty
or thirty-five shillings for every pound under the old investments,
Louis' eye glistened--positively glistened! Rachel trembled. She saw
her husband beggared, and there was nothing that frightened her more
than the prospect of Louis without a reserve of private income. She
did not argue the position--she simply knew that Louis without sure
resources behind him would be a very dangerous and uncertain Louis,
perhaps a tragic Louis. She frankly admitted this to herself. And old
Batchgrew went on talking and inveigling until Rachel was ready to
believe that the device of debentures had been originally invented by
Thomas Batchgrew himself with felonious intent.
An automobile hooted in the street.
"Well, ye'll think it over," said Thomas Batchgrew.
"Oh I _will_!" said Louis eagerly.
And Rachel asked herself, almost shaking--"Is it possible that he is
such a simpleton?"
"Only I must know by Tuesday," said Thomas Batchgrew. "I thought I'd
give ye th' chance, but I can't keep it open later than Tuesday."
"Thanks, awfully," said Louis. "I'm very much obliged for the offer.
I'll let you know--before Tuesday."
Rachel frowned as she folded up the jacket. If, however, the two men
could have seen into her mind they would have perceived symptoms of
danger more agitating than one little frown.
"Of course," said Thomas Batchgrew easily, with a short laugh, in the
lobby, "if it hadna been for _her_ making away with that nine
hundred and sixty-odd pound, you'd ha' had a round sum o' thousands to
invest. I've been thinking o'er that matter, and all I can see for it
is as her must ha' thrown th' money into th' fire in mistake for th'
envelope, or with th' envelope. That's all as I can see for it."
Louis flushed slightly as he slapped his thigh.
"Never thought of that!" he cried. "It very probably _was_ that.
Strange it never occurred to me!"
Rachel said nothing. She had extreme difficulty in keeping control of
herself while old Batchgrew, with numerous senile precautions, took
his slow departure. She forgot that she was a hostess and a woman of
the world.
III
"Hello! What's that?" Rachel asked, in a self-conscious voice, when
they were in the parlour again.
Louis had almost surreptitiously taken an envelope from his pocket,
and was extracting a paper from it.
On finding themselves alone they had not followed their usual
custom of bursting into comment, favourable or unfavourable, on the
departed--a practice due more to a desire to rouse and enjoy each
other's individualities than to a genuine interest in the third
person. Nor had they impulsively or deliberately kissed, as they
were liable to do after release from a spell of worldliness. On the
contrary, both were still constrained, as if the third person was
still with them. The fact was that there were two other persons in
the room, darkly discerned by Louis and Rachel--namely, a different,
inimical Rachel and a different, inimical Louis. All four, the seen
and the half-seen, walked stealthily, like rival beasts in the edge of
the jungle.
"Oh!" said Louis with an air of nonchalance. "It came by the last post
while old Batch was here, and I just shoved it into my pocket."
The arrivals of the post were always interesting to them, for during
the weeks after marriage letters are apt to be more numerous than
usual, and to contain delicate and enchanting surprises. Both of
them were always strictly ceremonious in the handling of each other's
letters, and yet both deprecated this ceremoniousness in the beloved.
Louis urged Rachel to open his letters without scruple, and Rachel
did the same to Louis. But both--Louis by chivalry and Rachel by
pride--were prevented from acting on the invitation. The envelope in
Louis' hand did not contain a letter, but only a circular. The fact
that the flap of the envelope was unsealed and the stamp a
mere halfpenny ought rightly to have deprived the packet of all
significance as a subject of curiosity. Nevertheless, the different,
inimical Rachel, probably out of sheer perversity, went up to Louis
and looked over his shoulder as he read the communication, which was a
printed circular, somewhat yellowed, with blanks neatly filled in, and
the whole neatly signed by a churchwarden, informing Louis that his
application for sittings at St. Luke's Church (commonly called the Old
Church) had been granted. It is to be noted that, though applications
for sittings in the Old Church were not overwhelmingly frequent, and
might indeed very easily have been coped with by means of autograph
replies, the authorities had a sufficient sense of dignity always to
circularize the applicants.
This document, harmless enough, and surely a proof of laudable
aspirations in Louis, gravely displeased the different, inimical
Rachel, and was used by her for bellicose purposes.
"So that's it, is it?" she said ominously.
"But wasn't it understood that we were to go to the Old Church?" said
the other Louis, full of ingenious innocence.
"Oh! Was it?"
"Didn't I mention it?"
"I don't remember."
"I'm sure I did."
The truth was that Louis had once casually remarked that he supposed
they would attend the Old Church. Rachel would have joyously attended
any church or any chapel with him. At Knype she had irregularly
attended the Bethesda Chapel--sometimes (in the evenings) with her
father, oftener alone, never with her brother. During her brief
employment with Mrs. Maldon she had been only once to a place of
worship, the new chapel in Moorthorne Road, which was the nearest to
Bycars and had therefore been favoured by Mrs. Maldon when her
limbs were stiff. In the abstract she approved of religious rites.
Theologically her ignorance was such that she could not have
distinguished between the tenets of church and the tenets of chapel,
and this ignorance she shared with the large majority of the serious
inhabitants of the Five Towns. Why, then, should she have "pulled a
face" (as the saying down there is) at the Old Parish Church?
One reason, which would have applied equally to church or chapel, was
that she was disconcerted and even alarmed by Louis' manifest tendency
to settle down into utter correctness. Louis had hitherto been a
devotee of joy--never as a bachelor had he done aught to increase the
labour of churchwardens--and it was somehow as a devotee of joy that
Rachel had married him. Rachel had been settled down all her life, and
naturally desired and expected that an unsettling process should now
occur in her career. It seemed to her that in mere decency Louis
might have allowed at any rate a year or two to pass before occupying
himself so stringently with her eternal welfare. She belonged to the
middle class (intermediate between the industrial and the aristocratic
employing) which is responsible for the Five Towns' reputation for
joylessness, the class which sticks its chin out and gets things done
(however queer the things done may be), the class which keeps the
district together and maintains its solidity, the class which is
ashamed of nothing but idleness, frank enjoyment, and the caprice of
the moment. (Its idiomatic phrase for expressing the experience of
gladness, "I sang 'O be joyful,'" alone demonstrates its unwillingness
to rejoice.) She had espoused the hedonistic class (always secretly
envied by the other), and Louis' behaviour as a member of that class
had already begun to disappoint her. Was it fair of him to say in his
conduct: "The fun is over. We must be strictly conventional now"? His
costly caprices for Llandudno and the pleasures of idleness were quite
beside the point.
Another reason for her objection to Louis' overtures to the Old Church
was that they increased her suspicion of his snobbishness. No person
nourished from infancy in chapel can bring himself to believe that
the chief motive of church-goers is not the snobbish motive of social
propriety. And dissenters are so convinced that, if chapel means
salvation in the next world, church means salvation in this, that to
this day, regardless of the feelings of their pastors, they will go
to church once in their lives--to get married. At any rate, Rachel was
positively sure that no anxiety about his own soul or about hers had
led Louis to join the Old Church.
"Have you been confirmed?" she asked.
"Yes, of course," Louis replied politely.
She did not like that "of course."
"Shall I have to be?"
"I don't know."
"Well," said she, "I can tell you one thing--I shan't be."
IV
Rachel went on--
"You aren't really going to throw your money away on those debenture
things of Mr. Batchgrew's, are you?"
Louis now knew the worst, and he had been suspecting it. Rachel's tone
fully displayed her sentiments, and completed the disclosure that "the
little thing" was angry and aggressive. (In his mind Louis regarded
her at moments, as "the little thing.") But his own politeness was
so profoundly rooted that practically no phenomenon of rudeness could
overthrow it.
"No," he said, "I'm not going to 'throw my money away' on them."
"That's all right, then," she said, affecting not to perceive his
drift. "I thought you were."
"But I propose to put my money into them, subject to anything you, as
a financial expert, may have to say."
Nervously she had gone to the window and was pretending to straighten
a blind.
"I don't think you need to make fun of me," she said. "You think I
don't notice when you make fun of me. But I do--always."
"Look here, young 'un," Louis suddenly began to cajole, very
winningly.
"I'm about as old as you are," said she, "and perhaps in some ways a
bit older. And I must say I really wonder at you being ready to help
Mr. Batchgrew after the way he insulted me in the cinema."
"Insulted you in the cinema!" Louis cried, genuinely startled, and
then somewhat hurt because Rachel argued like a woman instead of like
a man. In reflecting upon the excellences of Rachel he had often
said to himself that her unique charm consisted in the fact that she
combined the attractiveness of woman with the powerful commonsense of
man. In common with a whole enthusiastic army of young husbands he had
been convinced that his wife was the one female creature on earth to
whom you could talk as you would to a male. "Oh!" he murmured.
"Have you forgotten it, then?" she asked coldly. To herself she was
saying: "Why am I behaving like this? After all, he's done no harm
yet." But she had set out, and she must continue, driven by the
terrible fear of what he might do. She stared at the blind. Through a
slit of window at one side of it she could see the lamp-post and the
iron kerb of the pavement.
"But that's all over long ago," he protested amiably. "Just look how
friendly you were with him yourself over supper! Besides--"
"Besides what? I wasn't friendly. I was only polite. I had to be.
Nobody's called Mr. Batchgrew worse names than you have. But you
forget. Only I don't forget. There's lots of things I don't forget,
although I don't make a song about them. I shan't forget in a hurry
how you let go of my bike without telling me and I fell all over the
road. I know I'm lots more black and blue even than I was."
If Rachel would but have argued according to his rules of debate,
Louis was confident that he could have conducted the affair to a
proper issue. But she would not. What could he say? In a flash he
saw a vista of, say, forty years of conjugal argument with a woman
incapable of reason, and trembled. Then he looked again, and saw
the lines of Rachel's figure in her delightful short skirt and was
reassured. But still he did not know what to say. Rachel spared
him further cogitation on that particular aspect of the question
by turning round and exclaiming, passionately, with a break in her
voice--
"Can't you see that he'll swindle you out of the money?"
It seemed to her that the security of their whole future depended on
her firmness and strong sagacity at that moment. She felt herself to
be very wise and also, happily, very vigorous. But at the same time
she was afflicted by a kind of despair at the thought that Louis had
indeed been, and still was, ready to commit the disastrous folly of
confiding money to Thomas Batchgrew for investment. And as Louis had
had a flashing vision of the future, so did Rachel now have such a
vision. But hers was more terrible than his. Louis foresaw merely
vexation. Rachel foresaw ruin doubtfully staved off by eternal
vigilance on her part and by nothing else--an instant's sleepiness,
and they might be in the gutter and she the wife of a ne'er-do-well.
She perceived that she must be reconciled to a future in which the
strain of intense vigilance could never once be relaxed. Strange that
a creature so young and healthy and in love should be so pessimistic,
but thus it was! She remembered in in spite of herself the warnings
against Louis which she had been compelled to listen to in the
previous year.
"Odd, of course!" said Louis. "But I can't exactly see how he'll
swindle me out of the money! A debenture is a debenture."
"Is it?"
"Do you know what a debenture is, my child?"
"I don't need to know what a debenture is, when Mr. Batchgrew's mixed
up in it."
Louis suppressed a sigh. He first thought of trying to explain to her
just what a debenture was. Then he abandoned the enterprise as too
complicated, and also as futile. Though he should prove to her that
a debenture combined the safety of the Bank of England with the
brilliance of a successful gambling transaction, she would not budge.
He was acquiring valuable and painful knowledge concerning women every
second. He grew sad, not simply with the weight of this new knowledge,
but more because, though he had envisaged certain difficulties of
married existence, he had not envisaged this difficulty. He had not
dreamed that a wife would demand a share, and demand it furiously, in
the control of his business affairs. He had sincerely imagined
that wives listened with much respect and little comprehension when
business was on the carpet, content to murmur soothingly from time to
time, "Just as you think best, dear." Life had unpleasantly astonished
him.
It was on the tip of his tongue to say to Rachel, with steadying
facetiousness--
"You mustn't forget that I know a bit about these things, having spent
years of my young life in a bank."
But a vague instinct told him that to draw attention to his career in
the bank might be unwise--at any rate, in principle.
"Can't you see," Rachel charged again, "that Mr. Batchgrew has only
been flattering you all this time so as to get hold of your money? And
wasn't it just like him to begin again harping on the electricity?>"
"Flattering me?"
"Well, he couldn't bear you before--if you'd only heard the things he
used to say!--and now he simply licks your boots."
"What things did he say?" Louis asked, disturbed.
"Oh, never mind!"
Louis became rather glum and obstinate.
"The money will be perfectly safe," he insisted, "and our income
pretty nearly doubled. I suppose I ought to know more about these
things than you."
"What's the use of income being doubled if you lose the capital?"
Rachel snapped, now taking a horrid, perverse pleasure in the perilous
altercation. "And if it's so safe why is he ready to give you so much
interest?"
The worst of women, Louis reflected, is that in the midst of a silly
argument that you can shatter in ten words they will by a fluke insert
some awkward piece of genuine ratiocination, the answer to which must
necessarily be lengthy and ineffective.
"It's no good arguing," he said pleasantly, and then repeated, "I
ought to know more about these things than you."
Rachel raised her voice in exasperation--
"I don't see it, I don't see it at all. If it hadn't been for me you'd
have thrown up your situation--and a nice state of affairs there would
have been then! And how much money would you have wasted on holidays
and so on and so on if I hadn't stopped you, I should like to know!"
Louis was still more astonished. Indeed, he was rather nettled. His
urbanity was unimpaired, but he permitted himself a slight acidity of
tone as he retorted with gentle malice--
"Well, you can't help the colour of your hair. So I'll keep my nerve."
"I didn't expect to be insulted!" cried Rachel, flushing far redder
than that rich hair of hers, and paced pompously out of the room, her
face working violently. The door was ajar. She passed Mrs. Tams on the
stairs, blindly, with lowered head.
V
In the conjugal bedroom, full of gas-glare and shadows, there were two
old women. One was Mrs. Tams, ministering; the other was Rachel Fores,
once and not long ago the beloved and courted girlish Louise of a
chevalier, now aged by all the sorrow of the world. She lay in bed--in
her bed nearest the fireplace and farthest from the door.
She had undressed herself with every accustomed ceremony, arranging
each article of attire, including the fine frock left on the bed,
carefully in its place, as is meet in a chamber where tidiness depends
on the loyal cooperation of two persons, but through her tears.
She had slipped sobbing into bed. The other bed was empty, and its
emptiness seemed sinister to her. Would it ever be occupied again?
Impossible that it should ever be occupied again! Its rightful
occupant was immeasurably far off, along miles of passages, down
leagues of stairs, separated by impregnable doors, in another
universe, the universe of the ground floor. Of course she might have
sprung up, put on her enchanting dressing-gown, tripped down a few
steps in a moment of time, and peeped in at the parlour door--just
peeped in, in that magic ribboned peignoir, and glanced--and the whole
planet would have been reborn. But she could not. If the salvation of
the human race had depended on it, she could not--partly because she
was a native of the Five Towns, where such things are not done, and no
doubt partly because she was just herself.
She was now more grieved than angry with Louis. He had been wrong; he
was a foolish, unreliable boy--but he was a boy. Whereas she was his
mother, and ought to have known better. Yes, she had become his mother
in the interval. For herself she experienced both pity and anger. What
angered her was her clumsiness. Why had she lost her temper and her
head? She saw clearly how she might have brought him round to her view
with a soft phrase, a peculiar inflection, a tiny appeal, a caress,
a mere dimpling of the cheek. She saw him revolving on her little
finger.... She knew all things now because she was so old. And then
suddenly she was bathing luxuriously in self-pity, and young and
imperious, and violently resentful of the insult which he had put upon
her--an insult which recalled the half-forgotten humiliations of her
school-days, when loutish girls had baptized her with the name of a
vegetable.... And then, again suddenly, she deeply desired that Louis
should come upstairs and bully her.
She attached a superstitious and terrible importance to the tragical
episode in the parlour because it was their first quarrel as husband
and wife. True, she had stormed at him before their engagement, but
even then he had kept intact his respect for her, whereas now, a
husband, he had shamed her. The breach, she knew, could never be
closed. She had only to glance at the empty bed to be sure that it was
eternal. It had been made slowly yet swiftly; and it was complete and
unbridgable ere she had realized its existence. When she contrasted
the idyllic afternoon with the tragedy of the night, she was astounded
by the swiftness of the change. The catastrophe lay, not in the
threatened loss of vast sums of money and consequent ruin--that had
diminished to insignificance!--but in the breach.
And then Mrs. Tams had inserted herself in the bedroom. Mrs. Tams knew
or guessed everything. And she would not pretend that she did not; and
Rachel would not pretend--did not even care to pretend, for Mrs. Tams
was so unimportant that nobody minded her. Mrs. Tams had heard and
seen. She commiserated. She stroked timidly with her gnarled hand the
short, fragile sleeve of the nightgown, whereat Rachel sobbed afresh,
with more plenteous tears, and tried to articulate a word, and could
not till the third attempt. The word was "handkerchief." She was not
weeping in comfort. Mrs. Tams was aware of the right drawer and
drew from it a little white thing--yet not so little, for Rachel was
Rachel!--and shook out its quadrangular folds, and it seemed beautiful
in the gaslight; and Rachel took it and sobbed "Thank you."
Mrs. Tams rose higher than even a general servant; she was the
soubrette, the confidential maid, the very echo of the young and
haughty mistress, leagued with the worshipped creature against the
wickedness and wile of a whole sex. Mrs. Tams had no illusions save
the sublime illusion that her mistress was an angel and a martyr. Mrs.
Tams had been married, and she had seen a daughter married. She was
an authority on first quarrels and could and did tell tales of first
quarrels--tales in which the husband, while admittedly an utterly
callous monster, had at the same time somehow some leaven of decency.
Soon she was launched in the epic recital of the birth and death of
a grandchild; Rachel, being a married women like the rest, could
properly listen to every interesting and recondite detail. Rachel
sobbed and sympathized with the classic tale. And both women, as it
was unrolled, kept well in their minds the vision of the vile man,
mysterious and implacable, alone in the parlour. Occasionally Mrs.
Tams listened for a footstep, ready discreetly to withdraw at the
slightest symptom on the stairs. Once when she did this, Rachel
murmured, weakly, "He won't--" and then lapsed into new weeping. And
after a little time Mrs. Tams departed.
VI
Mrs. Tams had decided to undertake an enterprise involving extreme
gallantry--surpassing the physical. She went downstairs and stood
outside the parlour door, which was not quite shut. Within the
parlour, or throne-room, existed a beautiful and superior being, full
of grace and authority, who belonged to a race quite different from
her own, who was beyond her comprehension, who commanded her and kept
her alive and paid money to her, who accepted her devotion casually
as a right, who treated her as a soft cushion between himself and
the drift and inconvenience of the world, and who occasionally, as a
supreme favour, caught her a smart slap on the back, which flattered
her to excess. She went into the throne-room if she was called
thither, or if she had cleansing or tidying work there; she spoke to
the superior being if he spoke to her. But she had never till then
conceived the breath-taking scheme of entering the throne-room for
a purpose of her own, and addressing the superior being without an
invitation to do so.
Nevertheless, since by long practice she was courageous, she meant to
execute the scheme. And she began by knocking at the door. Although
Rachel had seriously warned her that for a domestic servant to
knock at the parlour door was a grave sin, she simply could not help
knocking. Not to knock seemed to her wantonly sacrilegious. Thus she
knocked, and a voice told her to come in.
There was the superior being, his back to the fire and his legs
apart--formidable!
She curtsied--another sin according to the new code. Then she
discovered that she was inarticulate.
"Well?"
Words burst from her--
"Her's crying her eyes out up yon, mester."
And Mrs. Tams also snivelled.
The superior being frowned and said testily, yet not without a touch
of careless toleration--
"Oh, get away, you silly old fool of a woman!"
Mrs. Tarns got away, not entirely ill-content.
In the lobby she heard an unusual rapping on the glass of the front
door, and sharply opened it to inform the late disturber that there
existed a bell and a knocker for respectable people. A shabby youth
gave her a note for "Louis Fores, Esq.," and said that there was an
answer. So that she was forced to renew the enterprise of entering the
throne-room.
In another couple of minutes Louis was running upstairs. His wife
heard him, and shook in bed from excitement at the crisis which
approached. But she could never have divined the nature of the
phenomenon by which the unbridgable breach was about to be closed.
"Louise!"
"Yes," she whimpered. Then she ventured to spy at his face through
an interstice of the bedclothes, and saw thereon a most queer, white
expression.
"Some one's just brought this. Read it."
He gave her the note, and she deciphered it as well as she could--
DEAR Louis,--If you aren't gone to bed I want to see you
to-night about that missing money of aunt's. I've something I
must tell you and Rachel. I'm at the "Three Tuns."
JULIAN MALDON.
"But what does he mean?" demanded Rachel, roused from her heavy mood
of self-pity.
"I don't know."
"But what can he mean?" she insisted.
"Haven't a notion."
"But he must mean something!"
Louis asked--
"Well, what should _you_ say he means?"
"How very strange!" Rachel murmured, not attempting to answer the
question. "And the 'Three Tuns'! Why does he write from the 'Three
Tuns'? What's he doing at the 'Three Tuns'? Isn't it a very low
public-house? And everybody thought he was still in South Africa!... I
suppose, then, it _must_ have been him that we saw to-night."
"You may bet it was."
"Then why didn't he come straight here? That's what I want to know. He
couldn't have called before we got here, because if he had Mrs. Tams
would have told us."
Louis nodded.
"Didn't you think Mr. Batchgrew looked very _queer_ when you
mentioned Julian to-night?" Rachel continued to express her curiosity
and wonder.
"No. I didn't notice anything particular," Louis replied vaguely.
Throughout the conversation his manner was self-conscious. Rachel
observed it, while feigning the contrary, and in her turn grew uneasy
and even self-conscious also. Further, she had the feeling that Louis
was depending upon her for support, and perhaps for initiative. His
glance, though furtive, had the appealing quality which rendered him
sometimes so exquisitely wistful to her. As he stood over her by the
bed, he made a peculiar compound of the negligent, dominant masculine
and the clinging feminine.
"And why didn't he let anybody know of his return?" Rachel went on.
Louis, veering towards the masculine, clenched the immediate point--
"The question before the meeting is," he smiled demurely, "what answer
am I to send?"
"I suppose you must see him to-night."
"Nothing else for it, is there? Well, I'll scribble him a bit of a
note."
"But I shan't see him, Louis."
"No?"
In an instant Rachel thought to herself: "He doesn't want me to see
him."
Aloud she said: "I should have to dress myself all over again.
Besides, I'm not fit to be seen."
She was referring, without any apparent sort of shame, to the redness
of her eyes.
"Well, I'll see him by myself, then."
Louis turned to leave the bedroom. Whereat Rachel was very
disconcerted and disappointed. Although the startling note from Julian
had alarmed her and excited in her profound apprehensions whose very
nature she would scarcely admit to herself, the main occupation of her
mind was still her own quarrel with Louis. The quarrel was now over,
for they had conversed in quite sincere tones of friendliness, but she
had desired and expected an overt, tangible proof and symbol of peace.
That proof and symbol was a kiss.
Louis was at the door ... he was beyond the door ... she was lost.
"Louis!" she cried.
He put his face in at the door.
"Will you just pass me my hand-mirror. It's on the dressing-table."
Louis was thrilled by this simple request. The hand-mirror had arrived
in the house as a wedding-present. It was backed with tortoise-shell,
and seemingly the one thing that had reconciled Rachel the
downright to the possession of a hand-mirror was the fact that the
tortoise-shell was real tortoise-shell. She had "made out" that a
hand-mirror was too frivolous an object for the dressing-table of
a serious Five Towns woman. She had always referred to it as "the"
hand-mirror--as though disdaining special ownership. She had derided
it once by using it in front of Louis with the mimic foolish graces of
an empty-headed doll. And now she was asking for it because she wanted
it; and she had said "my" hand-mirror!
This revelation of the odalisque in his Rachel enchanted Louis, and
incidentally it also enchanted Rachel. She had employed a desperate
remedy, and the result on both of them filled her with a most
surprising gladness. Louis judged it to be deliciously right that
Rachel should be anxious to know whether her weeping had indeed made
her into an object improper for the beholding of the male eye, and
Rachel to her astonishment shared his opinion. She was "vain," and
they were both well content. In taking it she touched his hand. He
bent and kissed her. Each of them was ravaged by formidable fears for
the future, tremendously disturbed in secret by the mysterious word
from Julian; and yet that kiss stood unique among their kisses, and
in their simplicity they knew not why. And as they kissed they hated
Julian, and the past, and the whole world, for thus coming between
them and deranging their love. They would, had it been possible, have
sold all the future for tranquillity in that moment.
VII
Going downstairs, Louis found Mrs. Tarns standing in the back part of
the lobby between the parlour door and the kitchen; obviously she had
stationed herself there in order to keep watch on the messenger from
the "Three Tuns." As the master of the house approached with dignity
the foot of the stairs, the messenger stirred, and in the classic
manner of messengers fingered uneasily his hat. The fingers were
dirty. The hat was dirty and shabby. It had been somebody else's hat
before coming into the possession of the messenger. The same applied
to his jacket and trousers. The jacket was well cut, but green; the
trousers, with their ragged, muddy edges, yet betrayed a pattern of
distinction. Round his neck the messenger wore a thin muffler, and
on his feet an exhausted pair of tennis-shoes. These noiseless shoes
accentuated and confirmed the stealthy glance of his eyes. Except for
an unshaven chin, and the confidence-destroying quality that lurked
subtly in his aspect, he was not repulsive to look upon. His features
were delicate enough, his restless mouth was even pretty, and
his carriage graceful. He had little of the coarseness of
industrialism--probably because he was not industrial. His age was
about twenty, and he might have sold _Signals_ in the street, or
run illegal errands for street-bookmakers. At any rate, it was certain
that he was not above earning a chance copper from a customer of the
"Three Tuns." His clear destiny was never to inspire respect or trust,
nor to live regularly (save conceivably in prison), nor to do any
honest daily labour. And if he did not know this, he felt it. All his
movements were those of an outcast who both feared and execrated the
organism that was rejecting him.
Louis, elegant, self-possessed, and superior, passed into the parlour
exactly as if the messenger had been invisible. He was separated from
the messenger by an immeasurable social prestige. He was raised to
such an altitude above the messenger that he positively could not see
the messenger with the naked eye. And yet for one fraction of a second
he had the illusion of being so intimately akin to the messenger
that a mere nothing might have pushed him into those vile clothes
and endowed him with that furtive look and that sinister aspect of
a helot. For one infinitesimal instant he was the messenger; and
shuddered. Then the illusion as swiftly faded, and--such being Louis'
happy temperament--was forgotten. He disappeared into the parlour,
took a piece of paper and an envelope from the small writing-table
behind Rachel's chair, and wrote a short note to Julian--a note from
which facetiousness was not absent--inviting him to come at once. He
rang the bell. Mrs. Tams entered, full of felicity because the great
altercation was over and concord established.
"Give this to that chap," said Louis, casually imperative, holding out
the note but scarcely glancing at Mrs. Tams.
"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Tarns with humble eagerness, content to be a
very minor tool in the hidden designs of the exalted.
"And then you can go to bed."
"Oh! It's of no consequence, I'm sure, sir," Mrs. Tams answered.
Louis heard her say importantly and condescendingly to the messenger--
"Here ye are, young man."
She shut the front door as though much relieved to get such a source
of peril and infection out of the respectable house.
Immediately afterwards strange things happened to Louis in the
parlour. He had intended to return at once to his wife in order to
continue the vague, staggered conversation about Julian's thunderbolt.
But he discovered that he could not persuade himself to rejoin Rachel.
A self-consciousness, growing every moment more acute and troublesome,
prevented him from so doing. He was afraid that he could not discuss
the vanished money without blushing, and it happened rarely that he
lost control of his features, which indeed he could as a rule mould
to the expression of a cherub whenever desirable. So he sat down in
a chair, the first chair to hand, any chair, and began to reflect. Of
course he was safe. The greatest saint on earth could not have been
safer than he was from conviction of a crime. He might be suspected,
but nothing could possibly be proved against him. Moreover, despite
his self-consciousness, he felt innocent; he really did feel innocent,
and even ill-used. The money had forced itself upon him in an
inexcusable way; he was convinced that he had never meant to
misappropriate it; assuredly he had received not a halfpenny of
benefit from it. The fault was entirely the old lady's. Yes, he was
innocent and he was safe.
Nevertheless, he did not at all like the resuscitation of the affair.
The affair had been buried. How characteristic of the inconvenient
Julian to rush in from South Africa and dig it up! Everybody concerned
had decided that the old lady on the night of her attack had not been
responsible for her actions. She had annihilated the money--whether by
fire, as Batchgrew had lately suggested, or otherwise, did not matter.
Or, if she had not annihilated the money, she had "done something"
with it--something unknown and unknowable. Such was the acceptable
theory, in which Louis heartily concurred. The loss was his--at least
half the loss was his--and others had no right to complain. But Julian
was without discretion. Within twenty-four hours Julian might well set
the whole district talking.
Louis was dimly aware that the district already had talked, but he was
not aware to what extent it had talked. Neither he nor anybody else
was aware how the secret had escaped out of the house. Mrs. Tarns
would have died rather than breathe a word. Rachel, naturally, had
said naught; nor had Louis. Old Batchgrew had decided that his highest
interest also was to say naught, and he had informed none save Julian.
Julian might have set the secret free in South Africa, but in a highly
distorted form it had been current in certain strata of Five Towns
society long before it could have returned from South Africa. The
rough, commonsense verdict of those select few who had winded the
secret was simply that "there had been some hanky-panky," and that
beyond doubt Louis was "at the bottom of it," but that it had little
importance, as Mrs. Maldon was dead, poor thing. As for Julian, "a
rough customer, though honest as the day," he was reckoned to be
capable of protecting his own interests.
And then, amid all his apprehensions, a new hope sprouted in Louis'
mind. Perhaps Julian was acquainted with some fact that might lead to
the recovery of a part of the money. Had Louis not always held
that the pile of notes which had penetrated into his pocket did
not represent the whole of the nine hundred and sixty-five pounds?
Conceivably it represented about half of the total, in which case a
further sum of, say, two hundred and fifty pounds might be coming to
Louis. Already he was treating this two hundred and fifty pounds as
a windfall, and wondering in what most pleasant ways he could employ
it!... But with what kind of fact could Julian be acquainted?...
Had Julian been dishonest? Louis would have liked to think Julian
dishonest, but he could not. Then what ...?
He heard movements above. And the front gate creaked. As if a spring
had been loosed, he jumped from the chair and ran upstairs--away from
the arriving Julian and towards his wife. Rachel was just getting up.
"Don't trouble," he said. "I'll see him. I'll deal with him. Much
better for you to stay in bed."
He perceived that he did not want Rachel to hear what Julian had to
say until after he had heard it himself.
Rachel hesitated.
"Do you think so?... What have you been doing? I thought you were
coming up again at once."
"I had one or two little things--"
A terrific knock resounded on the front door.
"There he is!" Louis muttered, as it were aghast.
CHAPTER XI
JULIAN'S DOCUMENT
I
Julian Maldon faced Louis in the parlour. Louis had conducted him
there without the assistance of Mrs. Tams, who had been not merely
advised, but commanded, to go to bed. Julian had entered the house
like an exasperated enemy--glum, suspicious, and ferocious. His mien
seemed to say: "You wanted me to come, and I've come. But mind you
don't drive me to extremities." Impossible to guess from his grim
face that he had asked permission to come! Nevertheless he had shaken
Louis' hand with a ferocious sincerity which Louis felt keenly the
next morning. He was the same Julian except that he had grown a brown
beard. He had exactly the same short, thick-set figure, and the same
defiant stare. South Africa had not changed him. No experience could
change him. He would have returned from ten years at the North Pole
or at the Equator, with savages or with uncompromising intellectuals,
just the same Julian. He was one of those beings who are violently
themselves all the time. By some characteristic social clumsiness
he had omitted to remove his overcoat in the lobby. And now, in
the parlour, he could not get it off. As a man seated, engaged in
conversation by a woman standing, forgets to rise at once and then
cannot rise, finding himself glued to the chair, so was Julian with
his overcoat; to take it off he would have had to flay himself alive.
"Won't you take off your overcoat?" Louis suggested.
"No."
With his instinctive politeness Louis turned to improve the fire.
And as he poked among the coals he said, in the way of amiable
conversation--
"How's South Africa?"
"All right," replied Julian, who hated to impart his sensations. If
Julian had witnessed Napoleon's retreat from Moscow he would have come
to the Five Towns and, if questioned--not otherwise--would have said
that it was all right.
Louis, however, suspected that his brevity was due to Julian's
resentment of any inquisitiveness concerning his doings in South
Africa; and he therefore at once abandoned South Africa as a subject
of talk, though he was rather curious to know what, indeed, Julian had
been about in South Africa for six mortal months. Nobody in the Five
Towns knew for certain what Julian had been about in South Africa. It
was understood that he had gone there as a commercial traveller
for his own wares, when his business was in a highly unsatisfactory
condition, and that he had meant to stay for only a month. The
excursion had been deemed somewhat mad, but not more mad than sundry
other deeds of Julian. Then Julian's manager, Foulger, had (it
appeared) received authority to assume responsible charge of the
manufactory until further notice. From that moment the business had
prospered: a result at which nobody was surprised, because Foulger was
notoriously a "good man" who had hitherto been baulked in his ideas by
an obstinate young employer.
In a community of stiff-necked employers, Julian already held a high
place for the quality of being stiff-necked. Jim Horrocleave, for
example, had a queer, murderous manner with customers and with
"hands," but Horrocleave was friendly towards scientific ideas in the
earthenware industry, and had even given half a guinea to the fund for
encouraging technical education in the district. Whereas Julian Maldon
not only terrorized customers and work-people (the latter nevertheless
had a sort of liking for him), but was bitingly scornful of "cranky
chemists," or "Germans," as he called the scientific educated experts.
He was the pure essence of the British manufacturer. He refused to
make what the market wanted, unless the market happened to want what
he wanted to make. He hated to understand the reasons underlying
the processes of manufacture, or to do anything which had not been
regularly done for at least fifty years. And he accepted orders like
insults. The wonder was, not that he did so little business, but that
he did so much. Still, people did respect him. His aunt Maldon, with
her skilled habit of finding good points in mankind, had thought that
he must be remarkably intelligent because he was so rude.
Beyond a vague rumour that Julian had established a general pottery
agency in Cape Town with favourable prospects, no further news of
him had reached England. But of course it was admitted that his
inheritance had definitely saved the business, and also much improved
his situation in the eyes of the community ... And now he had achieved
a reappearance which in mysteriousness excelled even his absence.
"So you see we're installed here," said Louis, when he had finished
with the fire.
"Aye!" muttered Julian dryly, and shut his lips.
Louis tried no more conversational openings. He was afraid. He waited
for Julian's initiative as for an earthquake; for he knew now at the
roots of his soul that the phrasing of the note was misleading, and
that Julian had come to charge him with having misappropriated the sum
of nine hundred and sixty-five pounds. He had, in reality, surmised as
much on first reading the note, but somehow he had managed to put away
the surmise as absurd and incredible.
After a formidable silence Julian said savagely--
"Look here. I've got something to tell you. I've written it all down,
and I thought to send it ye by post. But after I'd written it I said
to myself I'd tell it ye face to face or I'd die for it. And so here I
am."
"Oh!" Louis murmured. He would have liked to be genially facetious,
but his mouth was dried up. He could not ask any questions. He waited.
"Where's missis?" Julian demanded.
Louis started, not instantly comprehending.
"Rachel? She's--she's in bed. She'd gone to bed before you sent
round."
"Well, I'll thank ye to get her up, then!" Julian pronounced. "She's
got to hear this at first hand, not at second." His gaze expressed a
frank distrust of Louis.
"But--"
At this moment Rachel came into the parlour, apparently fully dressed.
Her eyes were red, but her self-control was complete.
Julian glared at Louis as at a trapped liar.
"I thought ye said she was in bed."
"She was," said Louis. He could find nothing to say to his wife.
Rachel nonchalantly held out her hand.
"So you've come," she said.
"Aye!" said Julian gruffly, and served Rachel's hand as he had served
Louis'.
She winced without concealment.
"Was it you we saw going down Moorthorne Road to-night?" she asked.
"It was," said Julian, looking at the carpet.
"Well, why didn't you come in then?"
"I couldn't make up my mind, if you must know."
"Aren't you going to sit down?"
Julian sat down.
Louis reflected that women were astonishing and incalculable, and the
discovery seemed to him original, even profound. Imagine her tackling
Julian in this fashion, with no preliminaries! She might have seen
Julian last only on the previous day! The odalisque had vanished in
this chill and matter-of-fact housewife.
"And why were you at the 'Three Tuns'?" she went on.
Julian replied with extraordinary bitterness--
"I was at the 'Three Tuns' because I was at the 'Three Tuns.'"
"I see you've grown a beard," said Rachel.
"Happen I have," said Julian. "But what I say is, I've got something
to tell you two. I've written it all down and I thought to post it to
ye. But after I'd written it I says to myself, 'I'll tell 'em face to
face or I'll die for it.'"
"Is it about that money?" Rachel inquired.
"Aye!"
"Then Mr. Batchgrew did write and tell you about it. Won't you take
that great, thick overcoat off?"
Julian jumped up as if in fury, pulled off the overcoat with violent
gestures, and threw in on the Chesterfield. Then he sat down again,
and, sticking out his chin, stared inimically at Louis.
Louis' throat was now so tight that he was nervously obliged to make
the motion of swallowing. He could look neither at Rachel nor at
Julian. He was nonplussed. He knew not what to expect nor what
he feared. He could not even be sure that what he feared was an
accusation. "I am safe. I am safe," he tried to repeat to himself,
deeply convinced, nevertheless, against his reason, that he was not
safe. The whole scene, every aspect of it, baffled and inexpressibly
dismayed him.
Julian still stared, with mouth open, threatening. Then he slapped his
knee.
"Nay!" said he. "I shall read it to ye." And he drew some sheets of
foolscap from his pocket. He opened the sheets, and frowned at them,
and coughed. "Nay!" said he. "There's nothing else for it. I must
smoke."
And he produced a charred pipe which might or might not have been
the gift of Mrs. Maldon, filled it, struck a match on his boot,
and turbulently puffed outrageous quantities of smoke. Louis, with
singular courage, lit a cigarette, which gave him a little ease of
demeanour, if not confidence.
II
And then at length Julian began to read--
"'Before I went to South Africa last autumn I found myself in
considerable business difficulties. The causes of said difficulties
were bad trade, unfair competition, and price-cutting at home and
abroad, especially in Germany, and the modern spirit of unrest among
the working-classes making it impossible for an employer to be master
on his own works. I was not insolvent, but I needed capital, the
life-blood of industry. In justice to myself I ought to explain that
my visit to South Africa was very carefully planned and thought out. I
had a good reason to believe that a lot of business in door-furniture
could be done there, and that I could obtain some capital from a
customer in Durban. I point this out merely because trade rivals have
tried to throw ridicule upon me for going out to South Africa when I
did. I must ask you to read carefully'--you see, this was a letter
to you," he interjected--"read carefully all that I say. I will now
proceed."
"'When I came to Aunt Maldon's the night before I left for South
Africa I wanted a wash, and I went into the back room--I mean the room
behind the parlour--and took off my coat preparatory to going into
the scullery to perform my ablutions. While in the back room I noticed
that the picture nearest the cupboard opposite the door was hung very
crooked. When I came back to put my coat on again after washing, my
eye again caught the picture. There was a chair almost beneath it.
I got on the chair and put the picture into an horizontal position.
While I was standing on the chair I could see on the top of the
cupboard, where something white struck my attention. It was behind the
cornice of the cupboard, but I could see it. I took it off the top of
the cupboard and carefully scrutinized it by the gas, which, as you
know, is at the corner of the fireplace, close to the cupboard. It
was a roll consisting of Bank of England notes, to the value of four
hundred and fifty pounds. I counted them at once, while I was standing
on the chair. I then put them in the pocket of my coat which I had
already put on. I wish to point out that if the chair had not been
under the picture I should in all human probability not have attempted
to straighten the picture. Also--'"
"But surely, Julian," Louis interrupted him, in a constrained voice,
"you could have reached the picture without standing on the chair?" He
interrupted solely from a tremendous desire for speech. It would have
been impossible for him to remain silent. He had to speak or perish.
"I couldn't," Julian denied vehemently. "The picture's practically as
high as the top of the cupboard--or was."
"And could _you_ see on to the top of the cupboard from a chair?"
Louis, with a peculiar gaze, was apparently estimating Julian's total
height from the ground when raised on a chair.
Julian dashed down the papers.
"Here! Come and look for yourself!" he exclaimed with furious
pugnacity. "Come and look." He jumped up and moved towards the door.
Rachel and Louis followed him obediently. In the back room it was he
who struck a match and lighted the gas.
"You've shifted the picture!" he cried, as soon as the room was
illuminated.
"Yes, we have," Louis admitted.
"But there's where it was!" Julian almost shouted, pointing. "You
can't deny it! There's the marks. Are they as high as the top of
the cupboard, or aren't they?" Then he dragged along a chair to the
cupboard and stood on it, puffing at his pipe. "Can I see on to the
top of the cupboard or can't I?" he demanded. Obviously he could see
on to the top of the cupboard.
"I didn't think the top was so low," said Louis.
"Well, you shouldn't contradict," Julian chastised him.
"It's just as your great-aunt said," put in Rachel, in a meditative
tone. "I remember she told us she pushed a chair forward with her
knee. I dare say in getting on to the chair she knocked her elbow or
something against the picture, and no doubt she left the chair more or
less where she'd pushed it. That would be it."
"Did she say that to you?" Louis questioned Rachel.
"It doesn't matter much what she said," Julian growled. "That's how
it _was_, anyway. I'm telling you. I'm not here to listen to
theories."
"Well," said Louis amiably, "you put the notes into your pocket. What
then?"
Julian removed his pipe from his mouth.
"What then? I walked off with 'em."
"But you don't mean to tell us you meant--to appropriate them, Julian?
You don't mean that!" Louis spoke reassuringly, good-naturedly, and
with a slight superiority.
"No, I don't. I don't mean I appropriated 'em." Julian's voice rose
defiantly. "I mean I stole them.... I stole them, and what's more,
I meant to steal them. And so there ye are! But come back to the
parlour. I must finish my reading."
He strode away into the parlour, and the other two had no alternative
but to follow him. They followed him like guilty things; for the
manner of his confession was such as apparently to put his hearers,
more than himself, in the wrong. He confessed as one who accuses.
"Sit down," said he, in the parlour.
"But surely," Louis protested, "if you're serious--"
"If I'm serious, man! Do you take me for a bally mountebank? Do you
suppose I'm doing this for fun?"
"Well," said Louis, "if you _are_ serious, you needn't tell us
any more. We know, and that's enough, isn't it?"
Julian replied curtly, "You've got to hear me out."
And picking up his document from the floor, he resumed the perusal.
"'Also, if the gas hadn't been where it is, I should not have noticed
anything on the top of the cupboard. I took the notes because I was
badly in need of money, and also because I was angry at money being
left like that on the tops of cupboards. I had no idea Aunt Maldon was
such a foolish woman.'"
Louis interjected soothingly: "But you only meant to teach the old
lady a lesson and give the notes back."
"I didn't," said Julian, again extremely irritated. "Can't ye
understand plain English? I say I stole the money, and I meant to
steal it. Don't let me have to tell ye that any more. I'll go on: 'The
sight of the notes was too sore a temptation for me, and I yielded
to it. And all the more shame to me, for I had considered myself
an honest man up to that very hour. I never thought about the
consequences to my Aunt Maldon, nor how I was going to get rid of
the notes. I wanted money bad, and I took it. As soon as I'd left the
house I was stricken with remorse. I could not decide what to do. The
fact is I had no time to reflect until I was on the steamer, and
it was then too late. Upon arriving at Cape Town I found the cable
stating that Aunt Maldon was dead. I draw a veil over my state of
mind, which, however, does not concern you. I ought to have returned
to England at once, but I could not. I might have sent to Batchgrew
and told him to take half of four hundred and fifty pounds off my
share of Aunt Maldon's estate and put it into yours. But that would
not have helped my conscience. I had it on my conscience, as it might
have been on my stomach. I tried religion, but it was no good to me.
It was between a prayer-meeting and an experience-meeting at Durban
that I used part of the ill-gotten money. I had not touched it till
then. But two days later I got back the very note that I'd spent.
A prey to remorse, I wandered from town to town, trying to do
business.'"
III
Rachel stood up.
"Julian!"
It was the first time in her life that she had called him by his
Christian name.
"What?"
"Give me that." As he hesitated, she added, "I want it."
He handed her the written confession.
"I simply can't bear to hear you reading it," said Rachel
passionately. "All about a prey to remorse and so on and so on! Why
do you want to confess? Why couldn't you have paid back the money and
have done with it, instead of all this fuss?"
"I must finish it now I've begun," Julian insisted sullenly.
"You'll do no such thing--not in my house."
And, repeating pleasurably the phrase "not in _my_ house," Rachel
stuck the confession into the fire, and feverishly forced it into the
red coals with lunges of the poker. When she turned away from the fire
she was flushing scarlet. Julian stood close by her on the hearth-rug.
"You don't understand," he said, with half-fearful resentment. "I had
to punish myself. I doubt I'm not a religious man, but I had to punish
myself. There's nobody in the world as I should hate confessing to as
much as Louis here, and so I said to myself, I said, 'I'll confess
to Louis.' I've been wandering about all the evening trying to bring
myself to do it.... Well, I've done it."
His voice trembled, and though the vibration in it was almost
imperceptible, it was sufficient to nullify the ridiculousness of
Julian's demeanour as a wearer of sackcloth, and to bring a sudden
lump into Rachel's throat. The comical absurdity of his bellicose
pride because he had accomplished something which he had sworn to
accomplish was extinguished by the absolutely painful sincerity of his
final words, which seemed somehow to damage the reputation of Louis.
Rachel could feel her emotion increasing, but she could not have
defined what her emotion was. She knew not what to do. She was in the
midst of a new and intense experience, which left her helpless. All
she was clearly conscious of was an unrepentant voice in her heart
repeating the phrase: "I don't care! I'm glad I stuck it in the fire!
I don't care! I'm glad I stuck it in the fire." She waited for the
next development. They were all waiting, aware that individual forces
had been loosed, but unable to divine their resultant, and afraid of
that resultant. Rachel glanced furtively at Louis. His face had an
uneasy, stiff smile.
With an aggrieved air Julian knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
"Anyhow," said Louis at length, "this accounts for four hundred and
fifty out of nine sixty-five. What we have to find out now, all of us,
is what happened to the balance."
"I don't care a fig about the balance," said Julian impetuously. "I've
said what I had to say and that's enough for me."
And he did not, in fact, care a fig about the balance. And if the
balance had been five thousand odd instead of five hundred odd, he
still probably would not have cared. Further, he privately considered
that nobody else ought to care about the balance, either, having
regard to the supreme moral importance to himself of the four hundred
and fifty.
"Have you said anything to Mr. Batchgrew?" Louis asked, trying to
adopt a casual tone, and to keep out of his voice the relief and joy
which were gradually taking possession of his soul. The upshot of
Julian's visit was so amazingly different from the apprehension of it
that he could have danced in his glee.
"Not I!" Julian answered ferociously. "The old robber has been writing
me, wanting me to put money into some cinema swindle or other. I gave
him a bit of my mind."
"He was trying the same here," said Rachel. The words popped by
themselves out of her mouth, and she instantly regretted them.
However, Louis seemed to be unconscious of the implied reproach on a
subject presumably still highly delicate.
"But you can tell him, if you've a mind," Julian went on
challengingly.
"We shan't do any such thing," said Rachel, words again popping by
themselves out of her mouth. But this time she put herself right by
adding, "Shall we, Louis?"
"Of course not," Louis agreed very amiably.
Rachel began to feel sympathetic towards the thief. She thought: "How
strange to have some one close to me, and talking quite naturally,
who has stolen such a lot of money and might be in prison for it--a
convict!" Nevertheless, the thief seemed to be remarkably like
ordinary people.
"Oh!" Julian ejaculated. "Well, here's the notes." He drew a lot of
notes from a pocket-book and banged them down on the table. "Four
hundred and fifty. The identical notes. Count 'em." He glared afresh,
and with even increased virulence.
"That's all right," said Louis. "That's all right. Besides, we only
want half of them."
Sundry sheets of the confession, which had not previously caught
fire, suddenly blazed up with a roar in the grate, and all looked
momentarily at the flare.
"You've _got_ to have it all!" said Julian, flushing.
"My dear fellow," Louis repeated, "we shall only take half. The other
half's yours."
"As God sees me," Julian urged, "I'll never take a penny of that
money! Here--"
He snatched up all the notes and dashed wrathfully out of the parlour.
Rachel followed quickly. He went to the back room, where the gas had
been left burning high, sprang on to a chair in front of the cupboard,
and deposited the notes on the top of the cupboard, in the very place
from which he had originally taken them.
"There!" he exclaimed, jumping down from the chair. The symbolism of
the action appeared to tranquillize him.
IV
For a moment Rachel, as a newly constituted housewife to whom every
square foot of furniture surface had its own peculiar importance, was
enraged to see Julian's heavy and dirty boots again on the seat of her
unprotected chair. But the sense of hurt passed like a spasm as her
eyes caught Julian's. They were alone together in the back room and
not far from each other. And in the man's eyes she no longer saw
the savage Julian, but an intensely suffering creature, a creature
martyrized by destiny. She saw the real Julian glancing out in torment
at the world through those eyes. The effect of the vibration in
Julian's voice a few minutes earlier was redoubled. Her emotion nearly
overcame her. She desired very much to succour Julian, and was aware
of a more distinct feeling of impatience against Louis.
She thought Julian had been magnificently heroic, and all his faults
of demeanour were counted to him for excellences. He had been a thief;
but the significance of the word "thief" was indeed completely altered
for her. She had hitherto envisaged thieves as rascals in handcuffs
bandied along the streets by policemen at the head of a procession of
urchins--dreadful rascals! But now a thief was just a young man like
other young men--only he had happened to see some bank-notes lying
about and had put them in his pocket and then had felt very sorry
for what he had done. There was no crime in what he had done ... was
there? She pictured Julian's pilgrimage through South Africa, all
alone. She pictured his existence at Knype, all alone; and his very
ferocity rendered him the more wistful and pathetic in her sight. She
was sure that his mother and sisters had never understood him; and she
did not think it quite proper on their part to have gone permanently
to America, leaving him solitary in England, as they had done. She
perceived that she herself was the one person in the world capable
of understanding Julian, the one person who could look after him,
influence him, keep him straight, civilize him, and impart some charm
to his life. And she was glad that she had the status of a married
woman, because without that she would have been helpless.
Julian sat down, or sank, on to the chair.
"I'm very sorry I spoke like that to you in the other room--I mean
about what you'd written," she said. "I suppose I ought not to have
burnt it."
She spoke in this manner because to apologize to him gave her a
curious pleasure.
"That's nothing," he answered, with the quietness of fatigue. "I dare
say you were right enough. Anyhow, ye'll never see me again."
She exclaimed, kindly protesting--
"Why not, I should like to know?"
"You won't want me here as a visitor, after all this." He faintly
sneered.
"I shall," she insisted.
"Louis won't."
She replied: "You must come and see me. I shall expect you to. I must
tell you," she added confidentially, in a lower tone, "I think you've
been splendid to-night. I'm sure I respect you much more than I did
before--and you can take it how you like!"
"Nay! Nay!" he murmured deprecatingly. All the harshness had melted
out of his voice.
Then he stood up.
"I'd better hook it," he said briefly. "Will you get me my overcoat,
missis."
She comprehended that he wished to avoid speaking to Louis again that
night, and, nodding, went at once to the parlour and brought away the
overcoat.
"He's going," she muttered hastily to Louis, who was standing near the
fire. Leaving the parlour, she drew the door to behind her.
She helped Julian with his overcoat and preceded him to the front
door. She held out her hand to be tortured afresh, and suffered the
grip of the vice with a steady smile.
"Now don't forget," she whispered.
Julian seemed to try to speak and to fail.... He was gone. She
carefully closed and bolted the door.
V
Louis had not followed Julian and Rachel into the back room because
he felt the force of an instinct to be alone with his secret
satisfaction. In those moments it irked him to be observed, and
especially to be observed by Rachel, not to mention Julian. He was
glad for several reasons--on account of his relief, on account of the
windfall of money, and perhaps most of all on account of the discovery
that he was not the only thief in the family. The bizarre coincidence
which had divided the crime about equally between himself and Julian
amused him. His case and Julian's were on a level. Nevertheless, he
somewhat despised Julian, patronized him, condescended to him. He
could not help thinking that Julian was, after all, a greater sinner
than himself. Never again could Julian look him (Louis) in the face as
if nothing had happened. The blundering Julian was marked for life, by
his own violent, unreasonable hand. Julian was a fool.
Rachel entered rather solemnly.
"Has he really gone?" Louis asked. Rachel did not care for her
husband's tone, which was too frivolous for her. She was shocked to
find that Louis had not been profoundly impressed by the events of the
night.
"Yes," she said.
"What's he done with the money?"
"He's left it in the other room." She would not disclose to Louis that
Julian had restored the notes to the top of the cupboard, because she
was afraid that he might treat the symbolic act with levity.
"All of it?"
"Yes. I'll bring it you."
She did so. Louis counted the notes and casually put them in his
breast pocket.
"Oddest chap I ever came across!" he observed, smiling.
"But aren't you sorry for him?" Rachel demanded.
"Yes," said Louis airily. "I shall insist on his taking half,
naturally."
"I'm going to bed," said Rachel. "You'll see all the lights out."
She offered her face and kissed him tepidly.
"What's come over the kid?" Louis asked himself, somewhat
disconcerted, when she had gone.
He remained smoking, purposeless, in the parlour until all sounds had
ceased overhead in the bedroom. Then he extinguished the gas in the
parlour, in the back room, in the kitchen, and finally in the lobby,
and went upstairs by the light of the street lamp. In the bedroom
Rachel lay in bed, her eyes closed. She did not stir at his entrance.
He locked the bank-notes in a drawer of the dressing-table, undressed
with his usual elaborate care, approached Rachel's bed and gazed at
her unresponsive form, turned down the gas to a pinpoint, and got into
bed himself. Not the slightest sound could be heard anywhere, either
in or out of the house, save the faint breathing of Rachel. And after
a few moments Louis no longer heard even that. In the darkness the
mystery of the human being next him began somehow to be disquieting.
He was capable of imagining that he lay in the room with an utter
stranger. Then he fell asleep.
CHAPTER XII
RUNAWAY HORSES
I
Rachel, according to her own impression the next morning, had no sleep
during that night. The striking of the hall clock could not be heard
in the bedroom with the door closed, but it could be felt as a faint,
distinct concussion; and she had thus noted every hour, except four
o'clock, when daylight had come and the street lamp had been put out.
She had deliberately feigned sleep as Louis entered the room, and had
maintained the soft, regular breathing of a sleeper until long after
he was in bed. She did not wish to talk; she could not have talked
with any safety.
Her brain was occupied much by the strange and emotional episode of
Julian's confession, but still more by the situation of her husband in
the affair. Julian's story had precisely corroborated one part of Mrs.
Maldon's account of her actions on the evening when the bank-notes had
disappeared. Little by little that recital of Mrs. Maldon's had been
discredited, and at length cast aside as no more important than the
delirium of a dying creature; it was an inconvenient story, and would
only fit in with the alternative theories that money had wings and
could fly on its own account, or that there had been thieves in
the house. Far easier to assume that Mrs. Maldon in some lapse had
unwittingly done away with the notes! But Mrs. Maldon was now suddenly
reinstated as a witness. And if one part of her evidence was true, why
should not the other part be true? Her story was that she had put the
remainder of the bank-notes on the chair on the landing, and then (she
thought) in the wardrobe. Rachel recalled clearly all that she had
seen and all that she had been told. She remembered once more the
warnings that had been addressed to her. She lived the evening and
the night of the theft over again, many times, monotonously, and with
increasing woe and agitation.
Then with the greenish dawn, that the blinds let into the room, came
some refreshment and new health to the brain, but the trend of
her ideas was not modified. She lay on her side and watched the
unconscious Louis for immense periods, and occasionally tears
filled her eyes. The changes in her existence seemed so swift and so
tremendous as to transcend belief. Was it conceivable that only twelve
hours earlier she had been ecstatically happy? In twelve hours--in six
hours--she had aged twenty years, and she now saw the Rachel of
the reception and of the bicycle lesson as a young girl, touchingly
ingenuous, with no more notion of danger than a baby.
At six o'clock she arose. Already she had formed the habit of arising
before Louis, and had reconciled herself to the fact that Louis had to
be forced out of bed. Happily, his feet once on the floor, he became
immediately manageable. Already she was the conscience and time-keeper
of the house. She could dress herself noiselessly; in a week she had
perfected all her little devices for avoiding noise and saving time.
She finally left the room neat, prim, with lips set to a thousand
responsibilities. She had a peculiar sensation of tight elastic about
her eyes, but she felt no fatigue, and she did not yawn. Mrs. Tams,
who had just descended, found her taciturn and exacting. She would
have every household task performed precisely in her own way, without
compromise. And it appeared that the house, which had the air of being
in perfect order, was not in order at all, that indeed the processes
of organization had, in young Mrs. Fores' opinion, scarcely yet begun.
It appeared that there was no smallest part or corner of the house as
to which young Mrs. Fores had not got very definite ideas and plans.
The individuality of Mrs. Tams was to have scope nowhere. But after
all, this seemed quite natural to Mrs. Tams.
When Rachel went back to the bedroom, about 7.30, to get Louis by
ruthlessness and guile out of bed, she was surprised to discover that
he had already gone up to the bathroom. She guessed, with vague alarm,
from this symptom that he had a new and very powerful interest in
life. He came to breakfast at three minutes to eight, three minutes
before it was served. When she entered the parlour in the wake of
Mrs. Tams he kissed her with gay fervour. She permitted herself to be
kissed. Her unresponsiveness, though not marked, disconcerted him and
somewhat dashed his mood. Whereupon Rachel, by the reassurance of her
voice, set about to convince him that he had been mistaken in deeming
her unresponsive. So that he wavered between two moods.
As she sat behind the tray, amid the exquisite odours of fresh coffee
and Ted Malkin's bacon (for she had forgiven Miss Malkin), behaving
like a staid wife of old standing, she well knew that she was a
mystery for Louis. She was the source of his physical comfort, the
origin of the celestial change in his life which had caused him to
admit fully that to live in digs was "a rotten game"; but she was
also, that morning, a most sinister mystery. Her behaviour was
faultless. He could seize on no definite detail that should properly
disturb him; only she had woven a veil between herself and him. Still,
his liveliness scarcely abated.
"Do you know what I'm going to do this very day as ever is?" he asked.
"What is it?"
"I'm going to buy you a bike. I've had enough of that old crock I
borrowed for you. I shall return it and come back with a new 'un. And
I know the precise bike that I shall come back with. It's at Bostock's
at Hanbridge. They've just opened a new cycle department."
"Oh, Louis!" she protested.
His scheme for spending money on her flattered her. But nevertheless
it was a scheme for spending money. Two hundred and twenty-five
pounds had dropped into his lap, and he must needs begin instantly to
dissipate it. He could not keep it. That was Louis! She refused to
see that the purchase of a bicycle was the logical consequence of her
lessons. She desired to believe that by some miracle at some future
date she could possess a bicycle without a bicycle being bought--and
in the meantime was there not the borrowed machine?
Sudd |
