“Dear Miss Rolleston,” he wrote, “I have received your letter and the little poem, which is very nice. Poems about Spring are the pleasantest kind, I think.—With kind regards, I am yours sincerely.”
“Dear Miss Rolleston,” he wrote, “I have received your letter and the little poem, which is very nice. Poems about Spring are the pleasantest kind, I think.—With kind regards, I am yours sincerely.”
It was not, as you may see, worth theheartache with which Maisie watched for it.
It was when she wrote again, and sent more verses, that he decided he must not mince matters.
“Dear Miss Rolleston,” was his second letter, “it is good of you to write again. Now I do hope you won’t be offended with me for what I am going to say. I am so much older than you, you know, and I know you are alone at Yalding, with no one to advise you, so it must be my duty to do it, though, for my own sake, I should, of course, like to advise you quite differently. It was a great pleasure to me to hear from you, but I must not allow myself that pleasure again, even if you were willing to give it to me. It would not be fair to you to let you write any more to a man who is not related to you. Try to forgive me for being unselfish and acting in your interests and not my own.”
“Dear Miss Rolleston,” was his second letter, “it is good of you to write again. Now I do hope you won’t be offended with me for what I am going to say. I am so much older than you, you know, and I know you are alone at Yalding, with no one to advise you, so it must be my duty to do it, though, for my own sake, I should, of course, like to advise you quite differently. It was a great pleasure to me to hear from you, but I must not allow myself that pleasure again, even if you were willing to give it to me. It would not be fair to you to let you write any more to a man who is not related to you. Try to forgive me for being unselfish and acting in your interests and not my own.”
And again, with kind regards, he was hers sincerely.
“Poor, pretty little duffer!” he said, as he closed the envelope. “But it’s not real. Don’t I know the sort of thing? She’s simply bored to death down there. And it’s all my fault, anyhow. By Jove! I’llnever try to do any one a good turn again as long as I live. Fanny was perfectly right.”
The letter came by the second post, when Maisie was engaged in drearily reading her employer to sleep after lunch.
It lay on her lap, but she kept her eyes from it and read on intelligibly if not with expression.
The old lady dozed.
Maisie opened her letter. And before she could even have had time to put up a hand to save herself, her Spanish castle was tumbling about her ears. A curious giddy feeling seemed to catch at the back of her neck, the room gave a sickening half-turn. She caught at her self-control.
“Not here. I mustn’t faint here. Not with his letter in my hand.”
She got out of the room somehow, and somehow she got into hat and jacket and boots, put her quarter’s salary in her purse, and walked out of the front door and straight down the great drive that she had come up four months ago with such bright hopes. She went to the station, and she took a train, and she never stopped nor stayed till she was at home again. She pushed past the frightened maid, and, pale and shabby, withblack-ringed eyes and dusty black gown, she burst into her mother’s room. The scent of eau-de-Cologne and bees’-wax and buttered toast met her, and it was as the perfume of Paradise. Edward was there—but she was in no mood to bother about Edward. She threw herself on her knees and buried her face in the knitting on her mother’s lap, and felt thin arms go round her.
“It’s nothing. I’m tired of it all. I’ve come home,” was all she said. But presently she reached out a hand to Edward, and he took it and held it, as it were, absently, and the three sat by the fire and spoke little and were content.
To her dying day Maisie will never forget the sense of peace, of enfolding care, and love unchanging and unchangeable that came to her as she woke next morning to find her mother standing by her bed with a cup of tea in her hands.
“Oh, Mummy darling,” she cried, throwing her arms round her mother and nearly upsetting the tea, “I haven’t had a single drop of in-bed tea all the time I’ve been away!”
That was all she found words to tell her mother. Later there was Edward, and shetold him most things, but, I imagine, not all. But the mother was content without spoken confidences. She knew that Maisie had suffered, and that now she had her little girl again, to wrap warm in her love as before. This was happiness enough.
This story, I know, is instructive enough for a Sunday School prize. It ought to be tagged at the end with a Moral. I can’t help it: it is true. Of course, it is not what usually happens. Many companions, no doubt, marry Honourable James’s, or even Dukes, and are never at all glad to get home to their mothers and their Edwards. But Maisie was different. She feels now a sort of grateful tenderness for Yalding Towers, because, but for the dream she dreamed there she might never have really awakened—never have known fully and without mistake what it was in life that she truly cared for. And such knowledge is half the secret of happiness. That, by the way, is really the moral of this story.
“Yes; married by the 30th of June, introduce my wife to the tenants on Christmas Eve, or no fortune. That was my uncle’s last and worst joke; he was reputed a funny man in his time. The alternatives are pretty ghastly either way.”
“Doesn’t that rather depend?” Sylvia queried, with a swift blue glance from under veiling lashes.
Michael answered her with a look, the male counterpart of her own, from dark Devon eyes, the upper lid arched in a perfect semicircle over pure grey. “Yes; but my wife must have a hundred a year of her own in Consols, to protect me from fortune-hunters—lone, lorn lamb that I am!”
Sylvia emphasised the sigh with which she admitted her indigence. Her pretty eyebrows owned plaintively that she, a struggling artist, had no claim against the nation.
“Mary has just a hundred a year,” she said, her voice low-toned as she looked across the room to where, demure in braided locks and grey camlet, her companion sat knitting.
“I daresay,” Michael answered indifferently, following her eyes’ flight and her tone’s low pitch; “but she’s young. I shall advertise for an elderly housekeeper. Andqui vivra verra.”
The words, lightly cast on the thin soil of a foolish word-play with a pretty woman, bore fruit.
A week later Michael Wood stood aghast before a tray heaped with letters, answers to his advertisement:
“Housekeeper wanted. Must be middle-aged. The older the better. Salary, £500 a year.”
“Housekeeper wanted. Must be middle-aged. The older the better. Salary, £500 a year.”
Not much, he had thought, £500 a year—if, by paying it, he might win a wife who would entitle him to an annual £15,000, whose declining years he might kindly cheer, and whose death would set him free to marry a wife whom he could love. His fancy drifted pleasantly towards Sylvia.
Michael was a lazy man, who bristled with business instincts. He telephoned to the nearest “typewriters’ association” for asecretary, and to this young woman he committed the charge of answering the letters which his advertisement had drawn forth. The answer was to be the same to all:
“Call at 17 Hare Court, Temple, between 11 and 1.”
“Call at 17 Hare Court, Temple, between 11 and 1.”
And the dates fixed for such calling were arranged to allow about fifty interviews daily for the next week or two, for Michael was a bold man as well as a lazy one. The next morning, faultlessly dressed, with carnations in his buttonhole, he composed himself in his pleasant oak-furnished room to await his first batch of callers.
They came. And Michael, strong in his unswerving determination not to forfeit his chance of inheriting the £15,000 a year left him under his mad uncle’s mad will, saw them all, one after the other.
But he did not like any of them. They were old; that he did not mind—it was, indeed, of the essence of the contract. But they were frowsy, too, with reticules of scarred brownish leather, and mangy fur trimmings, worn fringes, and beaded mantles, whence time and poverty had clawed handfuls of the bright beads. Each of them was,as a wife, even as a wife in name, impossible. The task of rejection was softened to his hand by the fact that not one of them could boast the necessary hundred a year in Consols.
The interviews over, Michael, his spirit crushed by the spectacle of so many women anxious to find a refuge at an age when their children and grandchildren should, in their own homes, have been rising up to call them blessed, went to lounge a restorative hour in Sylvia’s bright little studio, and laugh with her over his dilemma. He would have liked to sigh with her, too, but the pathos of the homeless old women escaped her. She saw only the humour of the situation.
“There’s no harm done, if it amuses you,” she said, “but you’ll never marry an old woman.”
“Fifteen thousand pounds a year,” said Michael softly.
Next day more poor old ladies, all eager, anxious, ineligible.
It was on the third day that the old lady in dove-colour came in, sweet as a pressed flower in an old love-letter, dainty as a pigeon in spring. Her white hair, the white lace of her collar, the black lace of her mantle, her beautiful little hands in their perfect,dove-coloured gloves, all appealed irresistibly to Michael’s æsthetic sense.
“What an ideal housekeeper!” he said to himself, as he placed a chair for her. And then an odd thrill of discomfort and shame shot through him. This delicate, dainty old lady—he was to insult her by a form of marriage, and then to live near her, waiting for her death? No; it was impossible—the whole thing was impossible. He found himself in the middle of a sentence.
“And so I fear I am already suited.”
The old lady raised eyebrows as delicate as Sylvia’s own.
“Hardly, I think,” she said, “since your servant admitted me to an interview with you. May I ask you one or two questions before you finally decide against me?”
The voice was low and soft—the voice men loved in the early sixties, before the shrill shriek became the voice of fashionable ladies.
“Certainly,” Michael said. He could hardly say less, and in the tumult of embarrassment that had swept over him, he could not for his life have said more.
The old lady went on. “I am competent to manage a house. I can read aloud fairly well. I am a good nurse in case of sickness;and I am accustomed to entertain. But I gather from the amount of the salary offered that some other duties would be required of me?”
“That’s clever of her, too,” Michael thought; “none of the others saw that.”
He bowed.
“Would you enlighten me,” she went on, “as to the nature of the services you would require?”
“Ah—yes—of course,” he said glibly, and then stopped short.
“From your hesitation,” said the old lady, with unimpaired self-possession, “I gather that the matter involves an explanation of some delicacy, or else—pardon the egotism—that my appearance is personally unpleasing to you.”
“No—oh,no,” Michael said very eagerly; “on the contrary, if I may say so, it is just because you are so—so—exactly my ideal of an old lady, that I feel I can’t go on with the business; and that’s put stupidly, so that it sounds like an insult. Please forgive me.”
She looked him straight in the eyes through her gold-rimmed spectacles.
“You see, I am old enough to be yourgrandmother,” she said. “Why not tell me the truth?”
And, to his horror and astonishment, he told it.
“And that’s what I meant to do,” he ended. “It was a mad idea, and I see now that if I do it at all I must marry some one who is not—who is not like you. You have made me ashamed of myself.”
A spot of pink colour glowed in her faded cheek. The old lady put up her gloved hand and touched her cheek, as if it burned. She got up and walked to the window, and stood there, looking out.
“If youaregoing to do it,” she said in a voice that was hardly audible, “I have been used to live among beautiful surroundings—I should like to end my days among them. I do not come of a long-lived family. You would not have long to wait for your freedom and your second wife.”
Never in all his days had Michael known so sharp an agony of embarrassment.
“When must you be married,” the old lady went on calmly, “to ensure your fortunes and estates?”
“In about a month.”
“Well, Mr Wood, I make you a formaloffer of marriage, and for reference I can give you my banker and my solicitor——”
Her voice was calm; it was his voice that trembled as he answered: “You are too good. I can’t see that it would be fair to you. May I think about it till to-morrow?”
The contrast between the old lady’s dainty correctness of attire and speech, and the extraordinary unconventionality of her proposal, made Michael’s brain reel. She turned from the window, again looked him fairly in the eyes, and said: “You will not find me unconventional in other matters. This is purely an affair of business, and I approach it in a business spirit. You would be giving a home to one who wants it, and I should be helping you to what you need still more. I have never been married. I never wished to marry; and when I am dead—— Don’t look so horror-stricken. I should not die any sooner because you—you had married me. My name is Thrale—Frances Thrale. That is my card that you have been pulling to pieces while you have been talking to me. Shall I come and see you again at this time to-morrow? It is not a subject on which I should wish either to write or to receive letters.”
He could only acquiesce. At the door the old lady turned.
“If you think I look so old as to make your marriage too absurd,” she said—and now, for the first time, her voice trembled—“I could dye my hair.”
“Oh no,” Michael said, “your hair is beautiful. Good-bye, and thank you.”
As the old lady went down the dusty Temple stairs she stamped a small foot angrily on the worn oak.
“Fool!” she said, “how could you? Hateful, shameless, unwomanly! And it’s all for nothing, too. He’ll never do it. It’stoomad!”
Michael went straight to Sylvia, and told his tale.
“And I felt I couldn’t,” he said; “she is the daintiest, sweetest little old lady. I couldn’t marry her and see her every day and live in the hope of her death.”
“I don’t see why not,” Sylvia said, a little coldly. “She wouldn’t die any sooner because you married her, and, anyway, she can’t have long to live.”
The words were almost those of the little old lady herself. Yet—or perhaps for that very reason—they jarred on Michael’s mood.He alleged business, and cut short his call.
Next day Miss Thrale called again. Mr Wood was sorry to have given her so much trouble. He had decided that the idea was too wild, and must be abandoned.
“Is it because I am too old?” said the old lady wistfully; “would you marry me if I were young?”
“Upon my word, I believe I would,” Michael surprised himself by saying. That it was not the answer Miss Thrale expected was evident from her smile of sudden amusement.
“May I say,” she said, “in return for what, in its way, is a compliment, that I like you very much. I would take care of you, and I shall perhaps not live more than a year or two.”
The tremor of her voice touched him. The £15,000 a year pulled at his will. In that instant he saw the broad glades of waving bracken, the big trees of the park, the sober face of the great house he might inherit, looking out over the smooth green lawns. He looked again at the little lady. After all, he was more than thirty. The world would laugh—well, they laughed bestwho laughed last. And, after a few years, there would be Sylvia—pretty, charming, enchanting Sylvia. He put the thought of her roughly away. Not because he was ashamed of it, but because it hurt him. The thought that Sylvia should wait for a dead woman’s shoes had seemed natural; what hurt him was that she herself should see nothing unnatural in such waiting.
The silence had grown to the limit that spells discomfort; the ticking of the tall clock, the rustle of the plane tree’s leaves outside the window, the discords of Fleet Street harmonised by distance, all deepened the silence and italicised it. She spoke.
“Well?” she said.
The plane tree’s leaves murmured eloquently of the great oaks in the park. The old lady’s eyes looked at him appealingly through the pale-smoked glasses. How she would like that old place! And his debts—he could pay them all.
“I will,” he said suddenly; “if you will, I will; and I pray you may never regret it.”
“I don’t thinkyouwill regret it,” she said gently; “it is a truly kind act to me.”
Bank and solicitor, duly consulted, testified to Miss Thrale’s respectability and to herincome—the requisite hundred a year in Consols. And on a certain day in June Michael Wood woke from a feverish dream, in which obstinacy and the longing for money had fought with many better things and worsted them, to find himself married to a white-haired woman of sixty.
The awakening took place in his rooms in the Temple. He had yielded to the little old lady’s entreaties, and consented, most willingly, to forego the “wedding journey,” in this case so sad a mockery.
The set was a large one—five rooms; it seemed that they might live here, and neither irk the other.
And she was in the room he had caused to be prepared for her—dainty and neat as herself—and he, left alone in the room where he had first seen her, crossed his arms on the table, and thought. His wedding-day! And it might have been Sylvia, the rustle of whose dress he could hear in the next room. He groaned. Then he laid his head on his arms and cried—like a child that has lost its favourite toy: for he saw, suddenly, that respect for his old wife must keep him from ever seeing Sylvia now; and life looked grey as the Thames in February twilight.
A timid hand on his shoulder startled him to the raising of his tear-stained face. The little old lady stood beside him.
“Ah, don’t!” she said softly—“don’t! Believe me, it will be all right. Your old wife won’t live more than a year—I know it. Take courage.”
“Don’t!” he said in his turn; “it’s a wicked thing I’ve done. Forgive me! If only we could have been friends. I can’t bear to think I shall make you unhappy.”
“My dear boy,” she said, “we are friends. I am your housekeeper. In a year at latest you will see the last of my white hairs. Be brave.”
He could not understand the pang her words gave him.
And now began, for these two, a strange life. In those Temple rooms—ideal nest for young lovers—Mrs Wood, the white-haired, kept house with firm and capable little hands. Comfort, which Michael’s lazy nature loved but could not achieve, reigned peacefully. The old lady kept much to her own rooms, but whenever he needed talk she was there. And she could talk. She had read much, reflected much. In her mind his own ideas found mating germs, and bore fruit ofbeautiful dreams, great thoughts. His verses—neglected this long time, since Sylvia did not care for poetry—flourished once more.
And music—Sylvia’s taste in music had been Sullivan; the old wife touched the piano with magic fingers, and Bach, Beethoven, Wagner came to transfigure the Temple rooms. Michael had never been so contented—never so wretched; for, as the quiet weeks went by, the leaves fell from the plane tree, and the time drew near when he must show his wife to the tenants—his white-haired wife. In these months a very real friendship had grown up between them. Michael had never met a woman, old or young, whose tastes chimed so tunefully with his own. Ah! what a pity he had not met ayoungwoman with these tastes—this soul. And now, liking, friendship, affection—all the finer, nobler side of love—he could indeed feel for his old wife; but love—lovers’ love, that would set the seal on all the rest—this he might never know, except for some other woman, who would succeed to his wife’s title.
Badly as Michael had behaved, I think it is permissible to be sorry for him. His wife, in fact, was very sorry.
One day he met Sylvia in the park, and allthe other side of him thrilled with pleasure. He sat by her an hour, his eyes drinking in her fresh beauty, while his soul shrivelled more and more. Ah! why could she nottalk, as his wife could, instead of merely chattering?
His wife looked sad that evening. He asked the reason.
“I saw you in the park to-day,” she said. “Are you going to see her? Don’t compromise her: it’s not worth while.”
He kissed her hand in its black mitten, and in a flash of pain saw the black funeral, when she should be carried from his house, and he be left free to marry Sylvia.
And now the days had dropped past; so even was their flow that it seemed rapid, and in another week it would be Christmas.
“And I must show you to the tenants,” said he.
“My poor boy,” she said—it was just as she had risen to bid him good night—“be brave. Perhaps it won’t be so bad as you think. Good night.”
He sat still after she had left him, gazing into the fire, and thinking thoughts in which now the estate and the fortune played but little part. At last he shrugged his shoulders.
“Well,” he said, “I have no lover, no wife; but I have a companion, a friend—one in a million.” And again the black funeral trailed its slow length before his eyes, and he shuddered.
I have not sought to deceive the reader. He knows as well as I do that at this moment the door opened, and a young and beautiful woman stood on the threshold. Her eyes were shining; round her neck were gleaming pearls. She was playing for a high stake, and being a true woman she had disdained no honest artifice that might help her. She wore shining white silk, severely plain, and her brown hair was dressed high on her head. A woman one shade less intuitive would have let the dusky masses fall over a lace-covered tea-gown.
“Michael,” she said, “I am your wife. Are you going to forgive me?”
He raised himself slowly from his chair, and his eyes dwelt on detail after detail of the beauty before him.
“My wife!” he said. “You are a stranger!”
“Ididdisguise myself well. My sister told me about your advertisement; she lives with Sylvia Maddox. We each havea hundred pounds a year. At first I did it for fun; but when I had seen how—how nice you were—my mother is very poor. There are no excuses. But are you going to forgive me?” Any other woman, to whom forgiveness meant all that it meant to her, might have kneeled at his feet. Frances stood erect by the door. “Anyway,” she said, biting her lip, “I have saved you from Sylvia. For the sake of that, forgive me.”
That stung him, as she had known it would.
“Forgive you?” he said. “Never. You’ve spoiled my life.” But he took a step towards her as he spoke.
She took an equal step back.
“Take courage,” she said. “Who knows but I may die before next June, after all. Good night.”
“I hate you,” he said, and took another step forward. But the door closed in his face.
Next morning the old lady, white haired and mittened, appeared behind the breakfast tea. Michael almost thought he had dreamed, till her eyes, now without their glasses, met his timidly.
“Let us end this play-acting, at least,” he said. Ten minutes of fuming ended in tepid tea poured by a beautiful brown-haired girl.
He watched her in silence.
“It’s horrible,” he broke out. “You’re a strange woman, and there you sit, pouring tea out as if—— Who are you? I don’t know you.”
“Don’t you?” she said quietly. And then he remembered all the old talks with the old wife.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I don’t want to be a brute.”
“It’s no use my saying I’m sorry,” she said.
“Areyou?” He leaned forward to put the question.
“We must make the best of it,” she said. “Perhaps—— Look here, don’t let’s speak of it till after Christmas; let’s just go on as we did before.”
So the days wore on. But the situation when Michael lived in torment in the company of his old wife was simplicity itself compared to his new life with a wife—young, beautiful, and a stranger, yet in all essentials his dearest friend. This discomfort grew daily—hourly branching out into ever fresh embarrassments—newand harassing, vexatious, half understood, wholly resented.
The wife had her burden to bear also. The laundress had only known the old wife as “Mrs Wood.”
“She thought I was your mother,” the wife said when Michael propounded the difficulty. But the laundress’s attitude to the new Mrs Wood had a sting that was almost punishment enough to the wife, had Michael only known, for all that she had done amiss.
The hour of departure for the Christmas festivities at Wood Grange came as a relief from the persistent pinpricks of unexplained emotion which tormented him. His wife was young and beautiful, yet he was only conscious of repulsion. He hated her for her trickery. But most he hated her because she had cheated him of the old wife—the friend, theconfidante, who had grown to be so much, and so much the best part, in his life. For now there was no confidence between the two—no talk, no reading, no music to brighten the Temple rooms. They lived in an almost complete silence.
Every window of the Grange shone out with yellow light across the snow. For onceChristmas had been kind and seasonable—a white sheet covered the world. Holly gleamed against old oak. Priceless silver, saved from the smelting-pot in Cromwell’s hard days, shone above white napery on the long tables. The tenants’ dinner was over, and now was the moment when, according to the will, Michael Wood’s wife must be presented to the tenants then assembled.
The slender figure in white woollen cloth and white fur, with Christmas roses at its breast, stood on the daïs at the end of the great hall, and the tenants cheered themselves hoarse at the mere sight of her beautiful face, her kind eyes.
“It went off very well,” Michael said when, the last guest gone, the last shutter closed, the last servant departed, the two stood alone in the long drawing-room.
“Yes; think if you had had to present to them the old white-haired wife——”
“I loved the old wife,” he said obstinately; but his voice was not quite steady.
“I wish,” she said, playing with the Christmas roses she wore, “I wish you would try to forgive me. It was horribly wrong; but I began it as a joke. You see, I had only just come over from the conventwhere I was brought up. I thought it would be such fun: I was always good at theatricals. I will never do anything silly again. And to-morrow I’ll go away, and you need never see me again. And youhavegot the money and the old place, haven’t you? And I got them for you—and—do forgive me. It began as a silly schoolgirl’s joke indeed.”
“But—a convent! You have read and thought——”
“It was my father. He made me read and think; and when he died all the money went, and my mother is poor. Oh, Michael, don’t be so flinty! Say you forgive me before I go! It all began in a joke!”
“Began. Yes. But why did you go on?”
“Because I—I didn’t like Sylvia—and I liked you—rather—but I won’t be a nuisance. I’ll go back to mother. Say you forgive me. I’ll go by the first train in the morning.”
“The first train,” said Michael absently, “is the 9.17; but to-morrow is Christmas Day—I daresay they’ll run the same as on Sunday.”
She took her white cloak from the settle by the fire.
“Good night,” she said sadly; “you are very hard. Won’t you even shake hands?”
“We had no roses at our wedding,” he said, still absently; “but there are roses at Christmas.” He raised his hand to the white flowers she wore, and touched them softly. “White roses, too, for a wedding,” he said.
“Good night!” she said again.
“And you will go to your mother to-morrow by the 9.17 train, or the 10.5, if the trains run the same as on Sunday. And I am to forgive you, and shake hands before we part. Well, well!”
He took the hand she held out, caught the other, and stood holding them, his grey eyes seeking hers. Her head thrown back, her hands stretched out, she looked at him from arm’s length.
“Dear!” he said.
A mute glance questioned him. Then lashes longer than Sylvia’s veiled the dark eyes.
He spoke again. “Dear!”
“You know you hate me,” she said.
He raised her hands to his lips.
“Have you forgotten Sylvia?”
“Absolutely, thank God! And you—I—after all, we are married, though there were no roses at our June wedding.”
Again her eyes questioned mutely.
He leaned forward and touched the Christmas roses with his lips. Then he dropped her hands and caught her by the shoulders.
“Oh! foolish, foolish, foolish people!” he said. “We two are man and wife. My wife! my wife! my wife! We are, aren’t we?”
“I suppose we are,” she said, and her face leaned a little towards his.
“Well, then!” said he.
The thief stood close under the high wall, and looked to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, lying like a twisted ribbon over the broad grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road turned sharply down towards the river; beyond the ford the road went away slowly in a curve, prolonged for miles through the green marshes.
No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There were no travellers at such an hour on such a road.
The thief looked across the valley, at the top of the mountain flushed with sunset, and at the grey-green of the olives about its base. The terraces of olives were already dusk with twilight, but his keen eyes could not have missed the smallest variance or shifting of their lights and shadows. Nothing stirred there. He was alone.
Then, turning, he looked again at the wall behind him. The face of it was grey and sombre, but all along the top of it, in the crannies of the coping stones, orange wallflowers and sulphur-coloured snapdragons shone among the haze of feathery-flowered grasses. He looked again at the place where some of the stones had fallen from the coping—had fallen within the wall, for none lay in the road without. The bough of a mighty tree covered the gap with its green mantle from the eyes of any chance wayfarer; but the thief was no chance wayfarer, and he had surprised the only infidelity of the great wall to its trust.
To the chance wayfarer, too, the wall’s denial had seemed absolute, unanswerable. Its solid stone, close knit by mortar hardly less solid, showed not only a defence, it offered a defiance—a menace. But the thief had learnt his trade; he saw that the mortar might be loosened a little here, broken a little there, and now the crumbs of it fell rustling on to the dry, dusty grass of the roadside. He drew back, took two quick steps forward, and, with a spring, sudden and agile as a cat’s, grasped the wall where the gap showed, and drew himself up. Thenhe rubbed his hands on his knees, because his hands were bloody from the sudden grasping of the rough stones, and sat astride on the wall.
He parted the leafy boughs and looked down; below him lay the stones that had fallen from the wall—already grass was growing upon the mound they made. As he ventured his head beyond the green leafage, the level light of the sinking sun struck him in the eyes. It was like a blow. He dropped softly from the wall and stood in the shadow of the tree—looking, listening.
Before him stretched the park—wide and still; dotted here and there with trees, and overlaid with gold poured from the west. He held his breath and listened. There was no wind to stir the leaves to those rustlings which may deceive and disconcert the keenest and the boldest; only the sleepy twitter of birds, and the little sudden soft movements of them in the dusky privacy of the thick-leaved branches. There was in all the broad park no sign of any other living thing.
The thief trod softly along under the wall where the trees were thickest, and at every step he paused to look and listen.
It was quite suddenly that he came uponthe little lodge near the great gates of wrought iron with the marble gate-posts bearing upon them the two gaunt griffins, the cognisance of the noble house whose lands these were. The thief drew back into the shadow and stood still, only his heart beat thickly. He stood still as the tree trunk beside him, looking, listening. He told himself that he heard nothing—saw nothing—yet he became aware of things. That the door of the lodge was not closed, that some of its windows were broken, and that into its little garden straw and litter had drifted from the open door: and that between the stone step and the threshold grass was growing inches high. When he was aware of this he stepped forward and entered the lodge. All the sordid sadness of a little deserted home met him here—broken crocks and bent pans, straw, old rags, and a brooding, dusty stillness.
“There has been no one here since the old keeper died. They told the truth,” said the thief; and he made haste to leave the lodge, for there was nothing in it now that any man need covet—only desolation and the memory of death.
So he went slowly among the trees, andby devious ways drew a little nearer to the great house that stood in its walled garden in the middle of the park. From very far off, above the green wave of trees that broke round it, he could see the towers of it rising black against the sunset; and between the trees came glimpses of its marble white where the faint grey light touched it from the east.
Moving slowly—vigilant, alert, with eyes turning always to right and to left, with ears which felt the intense silence more acutely than they could have felt any tumult—the thief reached the low wall of the garden, at the western side. The last redness of the sunset’s reflection had lighted all the many windows, and the vast place blazed at him for an instant before the light dipped behind the black bar of the trees, and left him face to face with a pale house, whose windows now were black and hollow, and seemed like eyes that watched him. Every window was closed; the lower ones were guarded by jalousies; through the glass of the ones above he could see the set painted faces of the shutters.
From far off he had heard, and known, the plash-plash of fountains, and now he saw their white changing columns rise and fallagainst the background of the terrace. The garden was full of rose bushes trailing and unpruned; and the heavy, happy scent of the roses, still warm from the sun, breathed through the place, exaggerating the sadness of its tangled desolation. Strange figures gleamed in the deepening dusk, but they were too white to be feared. He crept into a corner where Psyche drooped in marble, and, behind her pedestal, crouched. He took food from his pockets and ate and drank. And between the mouthfuls he listened and watched.
The moon rose, and struck a pale fire from the face of the house and from the marble limbs of the statues, and the gleaming water of the fountains drew the moonbeams into the unchanging change of its rise and fall.
Something rustled and stirred among the roses. The thief grew rigid: his heart seemed suddenly hollow; he held his breath. Through the deepening shadows something gleamed white; and not marble, for it moved, it came towards him. Then the silence of the night was shattered by a scream, as the white shape glided into the moonlight. The thief resumed his munching, and another shape glimmered after the first. “Curse thebeasts!” he said, and took another draught from his bottle, as the white peacocks were blotted out by the shadows of the trees, and the stillness of the night grew more intense.
In the moonlight the thief went round and about the house, pushing through the trailing briers that clung to him—and now grown bolder he looked closely at doors and windows. But all were fast barred as the doors of a tomb. And the silence deepened as the moonlight waxed.
There was one little window, high up, that showed no shutter. He looked at it; measured its distance from the ground and from the nearest of the great chestnut trees. Then he walked along under the avenue of chestnuts with head thrown back and eyes fixed on the mystery of their interlacing branches.
At the fifth tree he stopped; leaped to the lowest bough, missed it; leaped again, caught it, and drew up his body. Then climbing, creeping, swinging, while the leaves, agitated by his progress, rustled to the bending of the boughs, he passed to that tree, to the next—swift, assured, unhesitating. And so from tree to tree, till he was at the lasttree—and on the bough that stretched to touch the little window with its leaves.
He swung from this. The bough bent and cracked, and would have broken, but that at the only possible instant the thief swung forward, felt the edge of the window with his feet, loosed the bough, sprang, and stood, flattened against the mouldings, clutching the carved drip-stone with his hands. He thrust his knee through the window, waiting for the tinkle of the falling glass to settle into quietness, opened the window, and crept in. He found himself in a corridor: he could see the long line of its white windows, and the bars of moonlight falling across the inlaid wood of its floor.
He took out his thief’s lantern—high and slender like a tall cup—lighted it, and crept softly along the corridor, listening between his steps till the silence grew to be like a humming in his ears.
And slowly, stealthily, he opened door after door; the rooms were spacious and empty—his lantern’s yellow light flashing into their corners told him this. Some poor, plain furniture he discerned, a curtain or a bench here and there, but not what he sought. So large was the house, that presently it seemedto the thief that for many hours he had been wandering along its galleries, creeping down its wide stairs, opening the grudging doors of the dark, empty rooms, whose silence spoke ever more insistently in his ears.
“But it is as he told me,” he said inwardly: “no living soul in all the place. The old man—a servant of this great house—he told me; he knew, and I have found all even as he said.”
Then the thief turned away from the arched emptiness of the grand staircase, and in a far corner of the hall he found himself speaking in a whisper because now it seemed to him that nothing would serve but that this clamorous silence should be stilled by a human voice.
“The old man said it would be thus—all emptiness, and not profit to a man; and he died, and I tended him. Dear Jesus! how our good deeds come home to us! And he told me how the last of the great family had gone away none knew whither. And the tales I heard in the town—how the great man had not gone, but lived here in hiding—— It is not possible. There is the silence of death in this house.”
He moistened his lips with his tongue. The stillness of the place seemed to press upon him like a solid thing. “It is like a dead man on one’s shoulders,” thought the thief, and he straightened himself up and whispered again: “The old man said, ‘The door with the carved griffin, and the roses enwreathed, and the seventh rose holds the secret in its heart.’”
With that the thief set forth again, creeping softly across the bars of moonlight down the corridor.
And after much seeking he found at last, under the angle of the great stone staircase behind a mouldering tapestry wrought with peacocks and pines, a door, and on it carved a griffin, wreathed about with roses. He pressed his finger into the deep heart of each carven rose, and when he pressed the rose that was seventh in number from the griffin, he felt the inmost part of it move beneath his finger as though it sought to escape. So he pressed more strongly, leaning against the door till it swung open, and he passed through it, looking behind him to see that nothing followed. The door he closed as he entered.
And now he was, as it seemed, in some other house. The chambers were large andlofty as those whose hushed emptiness he had explored—but these rooms seemed warm with life, yet held no threat, no terror. To the dim yellow flicker from the lantern came out of the darkness hints of a crowded magnificence, a lavish profusion of beautiful objects such as he had never in his life dreamed of, though all that life had been one dream of the lovely treasures which rich men hoard, and which, by the thief’s skill and craft, may come to be his.
He passed through the rooms, turning the light of his lantern this way and that, and ever the darkness withheld more than the light revealed. He knew that thick tapestries hung from the walls, velvet curtains masked the windows; his hand, exploring eagerly, felt the rich carving of chairs and presses; the great beds were hung with silken cloth wrought in gold thread with glimmering strange starry devices. Broad sideboards flashed back to his lantern’s questionings the faint white laugh of silver; the tall cabinets could not, with all their reserve, suppress the confession of wrought gold, and, from the caskets into whose depths he flashed the light, came the trembling avowal of rich jewels. And now, at last, that carved doorclosed between him and the poignant silence of the deserted corridors, the thief felt a sudden gaiety of heart, a sense of escape, of security. He was alone, yet warmed and companioned. The silence here was no longer a horror, but a consoler, a friend.
And, indeed, now he was not alone. The ample splendours about him, the spoils which long centuries had yielded to the grasp of a noble family—these were companions after his own heart.
He flung open the shade of his lantern and held it high above his head. The room still kept half its secrets. The discretion of the darkness should be broken down. He must see more of this splendour—not in unsatisfying dim detail, but in the lit gorgeous mass of it. The narrow bar of the lantern’s light chafed him. He sprang on to the dining-table, and began to light the half-burnt chandelier. There were a hundred candles, and he lighted all, so that the chandelier swung like a vast living jewel in the centre of the hall. Then, as he turned, all the colour in the room leapt out at him. The purple of the couches, the green gleam of the delicate glass, the blue of the tapestries, and the vivid scarlet of the velvet hangings, and with the colour sprangthe gleams of white from the silver, of yellow from the gold, of many-coloured fire from strange inlaid work and jewelled caskets, till the thief stood aghast with rapture in the strange, sudden revelation of this concentrated splendour.
He went along the walls with a lighted candle in his hand—the wax dripped warm over his fingers as he went—lighting one after another, the tapers in the sconces of the silver-framed glasses. In the state bedchamber he drew back suddenly, face to face with a death-white countenance in which black eyes blazed at him with triumph and delight. Then he laughed aloud. He had not known his own face in the strange depths of this mirror. It had no sconces like the others, or he would have known it for what it was. It was framed in Venice glass—wonderful, gleaming, iridescent.
The thief dropped the candle and threw his arms wide with a gesture of supreme longing.
“If I could carry it all away! All, all! Every beautiful thing! To sell some—the less beautiful, and to live with the others all my days!”
And now a madness came over the thief.So little a part of all these things could he bear away with him; yet all were his—his for the taking—even the huge carved presses and the enormous vases of solid silver, too heavy for him to lift—even these were his: had he not found them—he, by his own skill and cunning? He went about in the rooms, touching one after the other the beautiful, rare things. He caressed the gold and the jewels. He threw his arms round the great silver vases; he wound round himself the heavy red velvet of the curtain where the griffins gleamed in embossed gold, and shivered with pleasure at the soft clinging of its embrace. He found, in a tall cupboard, curiously-shaped flasks of wine, such wine as he had never tasted, and he drank of it slowly—in little sips—from a silver goblet and from a green Venice glass, and from a cup of rare pink china, knowing that any one of his drinking vessels was worth enough to keep him in idleness for a long year. For the thief had learnt his trade, and it is a part of a thief’s trade to know the value of things.
He threw himself on the rich couches, sat in the stately carved chairs, leaned his elbows on the ebony tables. He buried his hotface in the chill, smooth linen of the great bed, and wondered to find it still scented delicately as though some sweet woman had lain there but last night. He went hither and thither laughing with pure pleasure, and making to himself an unbridled carnival of the joys of possession.
In this wise the night wore on, and with the night his madness wore away. So presently he went about among the treasures—no more with the eyes of a lover, but with the eyes of a Jew—and he chose those precious stones which he knew for the most precious, and put them in the bag he had brought, and with them some fine-wrought goldsmith’s work and the goblet out of which he had drunk the wine. Though it was but of silver, he would not leave it. The green Venice glass he broke and the cup, for he said: “No man less fortunate than I, to-night, shall ever again drink from them.” But he harmed nothing else of all the beautiful things, because he loved them.
Then, leaving the low, uneven ends of the candles still alight, he turned to the door by which he had come in. There were two doors, side by side, carved with straight lilies, and between them a panelwrought with the griffin and the seven roses enwreathed. He pressed his finger in the heart of the seventh rose, hardly hoping that the panel would move, and indeed it did not; and he was about to seek for a secret spring among the lilies, when he perceived that one of the doors wrought with these had opened itself a little. So he passed through it and closed it after him.
“I must guard my treasures,” he said. But when he had passed through the door and closed it, and put out his hand to raise the tattered tapestry that covered it from without, his hand met the empty air, and he knew that he had not come out by the door through which he had entered.
When the lantern was lighted, it showed him a vaulted passage, whose floor and whose walls were stone, and there was a damp air and a mouldering scent in it, as of a cellar long unopened. He was cold now, and the room with the wine and the treasures seemed long ago and far away, though but a door and a moment divided him from it, and though some of the wine was in his body, and some of the treasure in his hands. He set about to find theway to the quiet night outside, for this seemed to him a haven and a safeguard since, with the closing of that door, he had shut away warmth, and light, and companionship. He was enclosed in walls once more, and once more menaced by the invading silence that was almost a presence. Once more it seemed to him that he must creep softly, must hold his breath before he ventured to turn a corner—for always he felt that he was not alone, that near him was something, and that its breath, too, was held.
So he went by many passages and stairways, and could find no way out; and after a long time of searching he crept by another way back to come unawares on the door which shut him off from the room where the many lights were, and the wine and the treasure. Then terror leaped out upon him from the dark hush of the place, and he beat on the door with his hands and cried aloud, till the echo of his cry in the groined roof cowed him back into silence.
Again he crept stealthily by strange passages, and again could find no way except, after much wandering, back to the door where he had begun.
And now the fear of death beat in his brain with blows like a hammer. To die here like a rat in a trap, never to see the sun alight again, never to climb in at a window, or see brave jewels shine under his lantern, but to wander, and wander, and wander between these inexorable walls till he died, and the rats, admitting him to their brotherhood, swarmed round the dead body of him.
“I had better have been born a fool,” said the thief.
Then once more he went through the damp and the blackness of the vaulted passages, tremulously searching for some outlet, but in vain.
Only at last, in a corner behind a pillar, he found a very little door and a stair that led down. So he followed it, to wander among other corridors and cellars, with the silence heavy about him, and despair growing thick and cold like a fungus about his heart, and in his brain the fear of death beating like a hammer.
It was quite suddenly in his wanderings, which had grown into an aimless frenzy, having now less of search in it than of flight from the insistent silence, that he saw at lasta light—and it was the light of day coming through an open door. He stood at the door and breathed the air of the morning. The sun had risen and touched the tops of the towers of the house with white radiance; the birds were singing loudly. It was morning, then, and he was a free man.
He looked about him for a way to come at the park, and thence to the broken wall and the white road, which he had come by a very long time before. For this door opened on an inner enclosed courtyard, still in damp shadow, though the sun above struck level across it—a courtyard where tall weeds grew thick and dank. The dew of the night was heavy on them.
As he stood and looked, he was aware of a low, buzzing sound that came from the other side of the courtyard. He pushed through the weeds towards it; and the sense of a presence in the silence came upon him more than ever it had done in the darkened house, though now it was day, and the birds sang all gaily, and the good sun shone so bravely overhead.
As he thrust aside the weeds which grew waist-high, he trod on something that seemed to writhe under his feet like a snake. Hestarted back and looked down. It was the long, firm, heavy plait of a woman’s hair. And just beyond lay the green gown of a woman, and a woman’s hands, and her golden head, and her eyes; all about the place where she lay was the thick buzzing of flies, and the black swarming of them.
The thief saw, and he turned and he fled back to his doorway, and down the steps and through the maze of vaulted passages—fled in the dark, and empty-handed, because when he had come into the presence that informed that house with silence, he had dropped lantern and treasure, and fled wildly, the horror in his soul driving him before it. Now fear is more wise than cunning, so, whereas he had sought for hours with his lantern and with all his thief’s craft to find the way out, and had sought in vain, he now, in the dark and blindly, without thought or will, without pause or let, found the one way that led to a door, shot back the bolts, and fled through the awakened rose garden and across the dewy park.
He dropped from the wall into the road, and stood there looking eagerly to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, like a twisted ribbon over thegreat, grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road curved down towards the river. No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There are no travellers on such a road at such an hour.
John Selwyn Selborne cursed for the hundredth time the fool that had bound him captive at the chariot wheels of beauty. That is to say, he cursed the fool he had been to trust himself in the automobile of that Brydges woman. The Brydges woman was pretty, rich, and charming; omniscience was her pose. She knew everything: consequently she knew how to drive a motor-car. She learned the lesson of her own incompetence at the price of a broken ankle and a complete suit of bruises. Selborne paid for his trusting folly with a broken collar-bone and a deep cut on his arm. That was why he could not go to Portsmouth to see the last of his young brother when he left home for the wars.
This was why he cursed. The curse was mild—it was indeed less a curse than an invocation.
“Defend us from women,” he said; “above all from the women who think they know.”
The grey gloom that stood for dawn that day crept through the curtains and made ghosts of the shadows that lingered still in his room. He stretched himself wearily, and groaned as the stretched nerves vibrated to the chord of agony.
“There’s no fool like an old fool,” said John Selwyn Selborne. He had thirty-seven years, and they weighed on him as the forty-seven when their time came would not do.
He had said good-bye to the young brother the night before; here in this country inn, the nearest to the scene of the enlightenment of the Brydges woman. And to-day the boy sailed. John Selborne sighed. Twenty-two, and off to the wars, heart-whole. Whereas he had been invalided at the very beginning of things and now, when he was well and just on the point of rejoining—the motor-car and the Brydges woman! And as for heart-whole ... the Brydges woman again.
He fell asleep. When he awoke there was full sunshine and an orchestra of awakened birds in the garden outside. There was tea—there were letters. One was fromSidney—Sidney, who had left him not twelve hours before.
He tore it open, and hurt his shoulder in the movement.