Major Ambrose Wilbraham had embarked at Marseilles, and before the boat reached Gibraltar he had made the acquaintance of everyone on board, and had managed to exchange cards with a good many. The steamer was still within sight of Gibraltar when he introduced himself to Charnock with a manner of effusive jocularity to which Charnock did not respond. The Major was tall and about forty years of age. A thin crop of black hair was plastered upon his head; he wore a moustache which was turning grey; his eyebrows were so faultlessly regular that they seemed to have been stencilled on his forehead, and underneath them a pair of cold beady eyes counterfeited friendliness. Charnock could not call to mind that he had ever met a man on whom geniality sat with so ill a grace, or one whose acquaintance he less desired to improve.
Major Wilbraham, however, was not easily rebuffed, and he walked the deck by Charnock's side, talkative and unabashed.
Off the coast of Portugal the boat made bad weather, and she laboured through the cross-seas of the Bay under a strong south-westerly wind. Off Ushant she picked up a brigantine which Charnock watched from the hurricane deck without premonition, and indeed without more than a passing curiosity.
"Fine lines, eh, Charnock old fellow!" said a voice at his elbow.
The brigantine dipped her head into a roller, lifted it, and shook the water off her decks in a cascade of snow.
"I have seen none finer," answered Charnock, "except on a racing-yacht or a destroyer."
"She's almost familiar to me," speculated the Major.
"She reminds me of some boats I saw once at the West Indies," returned Charnock, "built for the fruit-trade, and so built for speed. Only they were schooners--from Salcombe, I believe. The Salcombe clippers they were called."
"Indeed!" said the Major, with a sharp interest, and he leaned forward over the rail. "Now I wonder what her name is."
Charnock held a pair of binoculars in his hand. He gave them to the Major. Wilbraham raised them to his eyes while the P. and O. closed upon the sailing-boat. The brigantine slid down the slope of a wave and hoisted her stern.
"The 'Tarifa,'" said the Major, and he shut up the binoculars. "What is her tonnage, do you think?"
"About three hundred, I should say."
"My notion precisely. Would it be of any advantage to alter her rig, supposing that she was one of the Salcombe schooners?"
"I should hardly think so," replied Charnock. "I rather understood that the schooners were noted boats."
"Ah, that's interesting," said Wilbraham, and he returned the binoculars. The steamer was now abreast of the brigantine, and in a little it drew ahead.
"By the way, Charnock, I shall hope to see more of you," resumed Major Wilbraham. "I haven't given you a card, have I?"
He produced a well-worn card-case.
"It's very kind of you," said Charnock, as he twirled the card between his forefinger and his thumb. "Don't you," he added, "find cards rather a heavy item in your expenses?"
Major Wilbraham laughed noisily.
"I take you, dear friend," he exclaimed, "I take you. But a friend in this world, sir, is a golden thread in a very dusty cobweb."
"But the friendship is rather a one-sided arrangement," rejoined Charnock. "For instance, the cards you give, Major Wilbraham, bear no address, the cards you receive, do." And while showing the card to his companion, he inadvertently dropped it into the sea.
Major Wilbraham blamed the negligence of a rascally printer, and made his way to the smoking-room.
The P. and O. boat touched at Plymouth the next morning, and landed both Major Wilbraham and Charnock. The latter remained in Plymouth for two days, and on the morning of the third day hired a hansom cab, and so met with the last of those incidents which were to link him in such close, strange ties with the fortunes of men and women who even in name were then utterly unknown to him.
A yellow handbill had led Charnock across the Straits to Tangier, and now it was nothing more serious than a draft upon Lloyd's bank which took him in a hansom cab through the streets of Plymouth. Spring was in the air; Charnock felt exceedingly light-hearted and cheerful. On the way he unconsciously worked his little finger into the eye of the brass bracket which juts inwards on each side of the front window at the level of the shoulder; and when the cab stopped in front of the bank he discovered that his finger was securely jammed.
Across the road he noticed a chemist's shop, and descending the steps of the bank a fair-haired gentleman of an agreeable countenance, who, quite appropriately in that town of sailors, had something of a nautical aspect.
"Sir," began Charnock, politely, as he leaned out of the window, "I shall be much obliged--"
To Charnock's surprise the good-natured gentleman precipitately sprang down the steps and began to walk rapidly away. Charnock was sufficiently human and therefore sufficiently perverse to become at once convinced that although there were others passing, this reluctant man was the only person in the world who could and must help him from his predicament.
So he leaned yet farther out of the cab.
"Hi, you sir!" he shouted, "you who are running away!"
The words had an electrical effect. The man of the agreeable countenance stopped suddenly, and so stood with his back towards Charnock while gently and thoughtfully he nodded his head. It seemed to Charnock that he might perhaps be counting over the voices with which he was familiar.
"Well," cried Charnock, who was becoming exasperated, "my dear sir, am I to wait for you all day?"
The street was populous with the morning traffic of a business quarter. Curious people stopped and attracted others. In a very few moments a small crowd would have formed. The stranger thereupon came slowly back to the hansom, showing a face which was no longer agreeable. He set a foot upon the step of the cab, and fixed a blue and watchful eye upon Charnock.
"I am afraid," said the latter, with severity, "that my first impression of you was wrong."
An indescribable relief was expressed by the other, but he spoke with surliness.
"You mistook me for someone else?"
"I mistook your disposition for something else," Charnock affably corrected. "I expected to find you a person of great good-nature."
"You hardly made such a point of summoning a perfect stranger," and here the blue eyes became very wary, "for no other reason than to tell him that."
"Certainly not," returned Charnock; "I would not trespass upon your time, which seems to be extremely valuable, without a better reason. But my finger is fixed, as you can see, in this brass ring, and I cannot withdraw it. So if you would kindly cross over to the chemist and buy me a pennyworth of vaseline, I shall be more than obliged." And with the hand which was free he felt in his pocket for a penny and held it out.
A look of utter incredulity showed upon the listener's face.
"Do you mean to tell me--" he blurted out.
"That I ask you to be my good Samaritan? Yes."
The stranger's face became suddenly vindictive. "Vaseline!" he cried.
"A pennyworth," said Charnock, again offering the penny.
The man of the agreeable countenance struck Charnock's hand violently aside, and the penny flew into a gutter. He stood up on the step and thrust his face, which was now inflamed with fury, into the cab.
"I tell you what," he cried, "you are a fair red-hotter, you are. Buy you vaseline! I hope your finger will petrify. I hope you'll just sit in that cab and rot away in your boots, until you have to ante up in kingdom come." He added expletives to his anathema.
"Really," said Charnock, "if I was a lady I don't think that I should like to listen to you any longer."
But before Charnock had finished the sentence, the good Samaritan, who was no Samaritan at all, had flung himself from the cab and was striding up the street.
"After all," thought Charnock, "I might just as well have driven across to the chemist, if I had only thought of it."
This he now did, got his finger free, cashed his draft, and took the train to London.
During this journey the discourteous stranger occupied some part of his thoughts. Between Charnock's eyes and the newspaper, against the red cliffs of Teignmouth, on the green of the home counties, his face obtruded, and for a particular reason. The marks of fear are unmistakable. The man whom he had called, had been scared by the call, nor had his fear quite left him when he had come face to face with Charnock. Set features which strove to conceal, and a brightness of the eye which betrayed emotion, these things Charnock remembered very clearly.
In London he dined alone at his hotel, and over against him the stranger's face bore him company. He went out afterwards into the street, and amidst the myriad ringing feet, was seized with an utter sense of loneliness, more poignant, more complete, than he had ever experienced in the waste places of the world. The lights of a theatre attracted him. He paid his money, took a seat in the stalls, and was at once very worried and perplexed. He turned to his neighbour, who was boisterously laughing.
"Would you mind telling me what this play is?" he asked.
"Oh, it's a musical comedy."
"I see. But what is it about?"
Charnock's neighbour scratched his head thoughtfully.
"I ought to remember," he said, "for I saw the piece early in the run."
Charnock went out, crossed a street, and came to another theatre, where he saw a good half of the tragedy ofMacbeth. Thence he returned to his hotel and went to bed.
The hotel was one of many balconies, situated upon the Embankment. From the single window or his bedroom Charnock looked across the river to where the name of a brewery perpetually wrote itself in red brilliant letters which perpetually vanished. It was his habit to sleep not merely with his window open, but with the blinds drawn up and the curtains looped back, and these arrangements he made as usual before he got into bed.
Now, the looking-glass stood upon a dressing-table in the window, with its back towards the window-panes; and since the night was moonless and dark, this mirror, it should be remembered, reflected nothing of the room or its furniture, but presented only to the view of Charnock, as he lay in bed, a surface of a black sheen.
Charnock recurred to his adventure of the morning, and thus the abusive stranger was in his thoughts when he fell asleep. He figured also in his dreams.
For, after he had fallen asleep, a curtain was raised upon a fantasticrevueof the past week. Hassan Akbar strode quickly and noiselessly behind his quarry, tracking him by some inappreciable faculty, not through the muddy Sôk, but across the polished floor of the ball-room in the musical comedy. Again Charnock shouted "Look out!" and the Moor with one bound leapt from the ball-room, which was now become a landing-stage, into a felucca. The crew of the felucca, it now appeared, was made up of Charnock, Lady Macbeth, and Hassan Akbar, and by casting lots with counters made of vaseline, Charnock was appointed to hold the tiller. This duty compelled extraordinary care, for the felucca would keep changing its rig and the bulk of its hull swelled and dwindled. At last, to Charnock's intense relief, the boat settled into a Salcombe clipper with the rig of a P. and O., but with immeasurably greater speed, so that within a very few seconds they sailed over a limitless ocean and anchored at Tangier. At once the crew entirely vanished. Charnock was not distressed, because he saw a hansom cab waiting for him at the Customs, though how the hansom was to pass up those narrow cobbled streets he could not think. That however was the driver's business.
"I hope your horse is good," said Charnock, springing into the cab.
"She comes of the great Red-hotter stock," replied the cabman, and lifting the trap in the roof he showered packets of visiting cards, which fell about Charnock like flakes of snow.
Charnock had not previously noticed that the cabman was Major Wilbraham.
The cab shot up the hill through the tunnel, past the closed shop. A figure sprang from the ground and thrust a face through the window of the cab. The man was in Moorish dress, but the face was the face of the abusive stranger of Plymouth--and all at once Charnock started up on his elbow, and in the smallest fraction of a second was intensely and vividly awake. There was no sound at all within the room. But in the black sheen of the mirror he saw a woman's face.
He saw it quite clearly for perhaps five seconds, the face rising white from the white column of the throat, the dark and weighty coronal of the hair, the curved lips which alone had any colour, the eyes, deep and troubled, which seemed to hint a prayer for help which they disdained to make--for five seconds perhaps the illusion remained, for five seconds the face looked out at him from the black mirror, lit palely, as it seemed, by its own pallor, and so vanished.
Charnock remained propped upon his elbow. A faint twilight from the stars crept timidly through the open window as though deprecating its intrusion. Charnock looked into the dark corners of the room, but nowhere did the darkness move. Nor could he hear any sound. Not even a board of the floor cracked, and outside the door there was no noise of a footstep on the stairs. Then from a great distance the jingle of a cab came through the open window to his ears with a light companionable lilt. Gradually the sound ceased, and again the silence breathed about him. Charnock struck a match and looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after three.
Charnock lay back in his bed wondering. For he had seen that face once, he had once exchanged glances with those eyes, once only, six years ago, and thereafter had entirely forgotten the incident--until this moment. He had stopped for a night at Monte Carlo and had seen--the girl--yes, thegirl, though it was a woman's face which had gleamed in the depths of his mirror--standing under the green shaded lamps in the big gambling-room. His attention, he now remembered, had been seized by the contrast between her amused indifference and the feverish haste of the gamblers about the table; between her fresh, clear looks and their heated complexions,--even between her frock of lilac silk and their more elaborate toilettes. The girl was entirely happy then, the red lips smiled, the violet eyes laughed. Why should her face appear to him now, after these years, and paled by this distress?
A queer fancy slipped into his mind--a fancy at the extravagance of which he knew very well he should laugh in the sane light of the morning, though he indulged it now--that somehow, somewhere, this woman needed help, and that it was thus vouchsafed to her, a stranger, to make her appeal to him in this way, which spared her the humiliation of making any appeal at all. Charnock fell asleep convinced that somehow, somewhere, he was destined to meet and know her. As he had foreseen, he laughed at his fancies in the morning, but nevertheless, he did meet her. It had, in fact, already been arranged that he should. For the face which he saw in the mirror was the face of Miranda Warriner.
Lady Donnisthorpe, with a sigh of relief, retired from her position at the head of the stairs, and catching Charnock in the interval between two dances:--
"You kept some dances free," she said, "didn't you? I want to introduce you to a cousin of mine, Miranda Warriner, because she lives at Ronda."
"At Ronda. Indeed?"
"Yes." Her ladyship added with a magnificent air of indifference, "She is a widow," and she led Charnock across the ball-room.
Miranda saw them approaching, noticed an indefinable air of expectation in Lady Donnisthorpe's manner, and smiled. A few excessively casual remarks concerning one Mr. Charnock, which Lady Donnisthorpe had dropped during the last few days, had not escaped the notice of Miranda, who was aware of her cousin's particular weakness. This was undoubtedly Mr. Charnock. She raised her eyes towards him, and had her ladyship been less fluttered, she might have remarked that Miranda's eyes lit up with a momentary sparkle of recognition.
"Mrs. Warriner--Mr. Charnock."
Lady Donnisthorpe effected the momentous introduction and felt immediately damped. She had not indeed expected that her two newest victims would at once and publicly embrace. But at all events she had decked out her ball-room as the sacrificial altar, and had taken care that a fitting company and cheerful music should do credit to the immolation. This tame indifference was less than she deserved.
Miranda, to whom Lady Donnisthorpe was looking, made the perfunctory dip of the head and smiled the perfunctory smile, and Charnock--why in the world did he not move or speak? Lady Donnisthorpe turned her eyes from Miranda to this awkward cavalier, and was restored to a radiant good-humour. "Dazzled," she said to herself, "absolutely dazzled!" For Charnock stood rooted to the ground and tongue-tied with amazement.
It was fortunate for Lady Donnisthorpe that at this point she thought it wise to withdraw. Otherwise she would surely have remarked an unmistakable look of disappointment which grew within Charnock's eyes and spread out over his face. Then the disappointment vanished, and as he compared programmes with Miranda, he recovered his speech.
Four dances must intervene before he could claim her, and Charnock was glad of the interval to get the better of his bewilderment. Here was the woman whom his mirror had shown to him! After all, his nocturnal fancy was fulfilled, or rather part of it, only part or it. He had met her, he was to dance with her. Some miracle had brought them together. From the corner by the doorway he watched Miranda, he remarked an unaffected friendliness in her manner towards her partners. Candour was written upon her broad white forehead and looked out from her clear eyes. He had no doubt it was fragrant too in her hair. There were heavy masses of that hair, as he knew very well from his mirror, but now the masses were piled and woven about her head with a cunning art, which to be sure they deserved. There was a ripple in her hair, too, which caught the light--a most taking ripple. Here was a woman divested of a girl's wiles and vanities. Charnock, without a scruple, aspersed all girls up to the age of say twenty-four, that he might give her greater praise.
He fell to wondering, not how it was that her face had appeared to him, nor by what miracle he was now enabled to have knowledge of her, but rather by what miracle of forgetfulness he had allowed her face, after he had seen it that one time six years ago, ever to slip from his thoughts, or her eyes after that one time he had exchanged a glance with them.
The whirl of the dance carried her by his corner. She swung past him with the lightest imaginable step, and he was suddenly struck through and through with a chilling apprehension that by some unconscionable maladroitness he would surely tread upon her toes.
At once he proceeded to count over the dances in which he had borne himself with credit. He had danced with Spanish women, he assured himself, and they had not objected. He was thus consoling himself when the time came for him to lead her out. And the touch of her hand in his, he remembers, turned him into a babbling idiot.
He recollects that they danced with great celerity; that they passed Lady Donnisthorpe, who smiled at him with great encouragement, and that he was dolefully humorous concerning Major Wilbraham and his exchanges of cards, though why Major Wilbraham should have thrust his bald head into the conversation, he was ever at a loss to discover. And then Miranda said, "Shall we stop?"
"Oh, I didn't, did I?" exclaimed the horror-stricken Charnock, as he looked downwards at her toes.
"No, you didn't," Miranda assured him with a laugh. "Do you usually?"
"No," he declared vehemently, "believe me, no! Never, upon my word! I have danced with Spanish women,--not at all,--no--no--no--no."
"Quite so," said Miranda.
And they laughed suddenly each to the other, and in a moment they were friends. Conversation came easily to their tongues, and underneath the surface of their light talk, the deeps of character called steadily like to like.
"I have seen you once before, Mrs. Warriner," said Charnock, as they seated themselves in an alcove of the room.
"Yes," she returned promptly, "at Monte Carlo, six years ago," and her face lost its look of enjoyment and darkened with some shadow from her memories. The change was, however, unremarked by Charnock.
"It seems strange," he said in an absent voice, "that we should meet first of all in a gambling-room, and the next time at a ball."
"Why?"
The question could not be answered. Charnock had a real but inexplicable feeling that Miranda and he should have met somewhere amidst the grandeur of open spaces, in the centre of the Sahara, and for the moment he forgot to calculate the effect of the sand upon Miranda's eyes. This feeling, however, he could hardly express at the present point of their acquaintanceship; and, indeed, he immediately ceased to be aware of it.
"Do you actually remember our meeting in that way six years ago?" he exclaimed. "How wonderful of you!"
"Why?" again asked Mrs. Warriner. "Why is it wonderful, since you remember it?"
"Ah, but I didn't remember it until"--he paused for a second or two--"until I saw your face in a looking-glass."
Miranda glanced at him in considerable perplexity. Then she said with a demure smile, "I have at times seen it there myself."
"No doubt," he replied with a glance at the cunning arrangement of her hair.
"My maid does that," said she, biting her lip.
"No doubt, but you sit in front of the glass at the time. You're in the room," he continued hastily; "but when I saw your face in my mirror, you couldn't be. I was in bed,--I mean,--let me tell you!" He stopped, overwhelmed with embarrassment. Miranda, with an air of complete unconsciousness, carefully buttoned her glove; only the glove was already buttoned, and her mouth twitched slightly at the corners.
"It was just a week ago to-day," Charnock began again. "I got home to my hotel late."
"Ah!" murmured Mrs. Warriner, as though the whole mystery was now explained to her.
"I assure you," he retorted with emphasis, "that I dined in the train and drank nothing more serious than railway claret."
"I made no accusation whatever," Miranda blandly remarked, and seemed very well pleased.
"After I had fallen asleep, I began to dream, but not about you, Mrs. Warriner; that's the strange feature of the business. It wasn't that I had been thinking of you that evening, or indeed, that I had ever been at all in the habit of thinking--" Again Charnock was utterly confused. "I don't seem to be telling the story with the best taste in the world, do I?" he said ruefully.
"Never mind," she said in a soothing voice.
"Of course, I could have turned it into a compliment," he continued. "Only I take it you have no taste for compliments, and I lack the experience to put them tactfully."
"For a novice," said she, "you seem to be doing very well." Charnock resumed his story. "I dreamt solely of people I had seen, and incidents I had witnessed during the last week, at Tangier and at Plymouth. I dreamed particularly of a man I quarrelled with at Plymouth, and I suddenly woke up and saw your face in the mirror."
"As you fancied."
"It was no fancy. It was no dream-face that I saw--dream-faces are always elusive. It was no dream-face, it was yours."
"Or one like mine."
"There cannot be two."
"For a novice," repeated Miranda, with a smile, "youaredoing very well."
Charnock had watched her carefully while he told his story, on the chance that her looks, if not her lips, might give him some clue to the comprehension of his mysterious vision. But she had expressed merely an unconcerned curiosity and some amusement.
"Shall I explain your vision?" said she. "You must have seen me in London during the day: the recollection that you had seen me must have lain latent, so that when you woke up you saw me in your mirror and did not remember that you had seen me during the day."
"Were you at any theatre this day week?"
"No," said Miranda, after counting over the days.
"You did not seeMacbeththat night?"
"No."
"Then it is impossible I should have seen you. For I came up from Plymouth only that afternoon. I drove from Paddington to my hotel; from the hotel I went to the theatre; from the theatre I walked back to the hotel. It is impossible."
"It is very strange," said Miranda, whose interest was increasing, and whose sense of amusement had vanished; for she saw that her companion was moved by something more than curiosity. It was evident to her from his urgent tones, from the eagerness of his face, that he had some hidden reason for his desire to fathom the mystery. It seemed to her that he nourished some intention, some purpose in the back of his mind, which depended for fulfilment upon whether or no there was any feasible solution.
"Tell me your dream," she said.
"It was the oddest jumble,--it had neither sense nor continuity. Moors figured in it, ships, Lady Macbeth, the Major with his card-case, and the stranger who swore at me through the cab-window at Plymouth. The phrases that man used came into it."
"What phrases?"
"I couldn't repeat to you the most eloquent. There were milder ones, however. He called me a fair red-hotter amongst other things," said Charnock, laughing at his recollections, "and expressed a wish that I might--well, sit in that cab until I ante'd up in kingdom come."
Miranda leaned back in her seat and opened and shut her fan. "He was a stranger to you, you say?"
"Quite."
"You are sure?"
"Quite."
"You had never seen him anywhere--anywhere? Think!"
Charnock deliberated for a few seconds. "Never anywhere," he replied.
There was a moment's silence. Mrs. Warriner gently fanned herself as she leaned back in the shadow of the alcove. "Describe him to me," she said quietly.
"A man of a slight figure, a little under the middle height, fair hair, bright blue eyes, an open, good-natured face, and I should say a year or so under forty. I took him to be a sailor."
The fan stopped. Miranda let it fall upon her lap. That was the only movement which she made, and from the shadow of the recess, she said: "There is no explanation."
Charnock drew a breath and leaned forward, his hands clasped, his elbows on his knees. It seemed he had been waiting for just that one sentence. As he sat now his face was in the light, and Miranda remarked a certain timidity upon it, as though now that he had heard the expected words, he dared not after all reply to them. He did not look towards her. He stared at the dancers, but with vacant eyes. He saw nothing of their jewels, or their coloured robes, or the flash of their silver feet, and the noise of their chatter sounded very dimly in his ears. He was quite occupied, indeed, with the hardihood of what he had it on his tongue's tip to say--when he had gained sufficient courage.
Miranda moved restlessly, unbuttoned a glove, drew it off her wrist unconsciously, and then was still as Charnock began to speak.
"Is there no explanation?" he asked. "I imagined one. You know how fancies come to one in the dark. That night I imagined one. I laughed at it the next morning, but now, since I have talked with you, I have been wondering whether by any miracle, it might be true. And if there's an infinitesimal chance that it's true, I think that I ought to tell you it, even though it may seem merely ridiculous, even though it may offend you. But I have lived for the most part of my time, since I was a man, in the waste places of the earth, and what may well be an impertinence--for we are only these few minutes acquainted--you will perhaps pardon on that account."
He received no encouragement to continue; on the other hand he received no warning to stop, for Miranda neither spoke nor moved. He did not look at her face lest he should read the warning there; but from the tail of his eye, he could see the fan, the white glove lying idle upon the black satin of her dress. The skirt hung from her knee to her foot without a stir in its folds, nor did her foot stir where it showed beneath the hem. She remained in a pose of most enigmatical quietude.
"The face which my mirror showed to me," he went on, "was your face, as I said; but in expression it was not your face as I see it to-night. It was very troubled, it was very pale; the eyes haunted me because of the pain in them, and because of--something else beside. It was a tortured face I saw, and the eyes seemed to ask--but to ask proudly--for help. Is it plain, the explanation which occurred to me?" His voice sank; he went on, slowly choosing every word with care, and speaking it with hesitation. "I imagined that out of all the millions of women in the world, here was one who needed help--my help, who was allowed to appeal to me for it, without, if you understand, making any appeal at all, and the explanation was not ... unpleasant ... to a man who lives much alone. In fact it has been so pleasant, and has become so familiar during this last week, that when I saw you to-night without a care, just as I saw you that night at Monte Carlo," and indeed it seemed to Charnock that the black dress she wore alone marked the passage of those six years,--"I am ashamed to say that I was disappointed."
"Yes," said Miranda. "I noticed the disappointment, but there's a simpler explanation of the troubled face than yours. You had been toMacbeththat evening; Lady Macbeth played a part in your dreams. What if Lady Macbeth lent her pallor and her distress to the face which you saw in your mirror?"
Charnock swung abruptly round towards her. It was not the explanation which surprised him, but the altered voice she used. And if her voice surprised him, he was shocked and startled by her looks. She was still leaning back in the shadow of the alcove, and her head rested against the dark wood-panels. She did not move when he looked towards her.
"My God," he said in a hushed and trembling whisper, and she gave no sign that she heard. She might have fainted, but that her eyes glittered out of the shadow straight and steadily into his. She might be dead from the whiteness of her face against the panels, but that her bosom rose and fell.
"What can I do?" he exclaimed.
"Hush!" she replied, and rose to her feet. "Here is Lady Donnisthorpe." She walked abruptly past him across the room to the open window. Charnock remained nailed to the ground, following her with his eyes. For in that alcove, leaning against the dark panels, he had seen not merely the features, but the expression on the features, he had seen exact in every detail the face which he had seen in the polished darkness of his mirror. The sheen of the dark polished panels helped the illusion. His fancy had come true, was transmuted into fact. Somewhere, somehow, he was to meet that woman. He had met her here and in this way, and her eyes and her face uttered her distress as with a piercing cry. Her eyes! The resemblance was perfect to the last detail. For Charnock ventured to surmise in them the same involuntary appeal which he had seen in the eyes that had looked out from his mirror. What then if the rest were true? What if his explanation was as true as the true facts which it explained? What if it was given to him and to her to stand apart from their fellows in this mysterious relation?...
He saw that Miranda was already near the window, that Lady Donnisthorpe was approaching him. He followed instantly in Miranda's steps, and Lady Donnisthorpe, perceiving his attention, had the complaisance to turn aside. For the window opened on to a balcony wherein discreet palms sheltered off a nook. There was one of Lady Donnisthorpe's guests who did not share her ladyship's complacency. A censorious dowager sitting near to the window had kept an alert eye upon the couple in the recess during the last three dances; and each time that her daughter--a pretty girl with hair of the palest possible gold, and light blue eyes that were dancing with a child's delight at all the wonders of a first season--returned to the shelter of her portly frame, the dowager drew moral lessons for her benefit from the text of the oblivious couple. She remarked with pain upon their increasing infatuation for each other; she pointed out to her daughter a hapless youth who tiptoed backwards and forwards before Mrs. Warriner, with a dance-card in his hand, too timorous to interrupt the intimate conversation; and when Mrs. Warriner dropped a glove as she stepped over the window-sill on to the balcony, the dowager nudged her daughter with an elbow.
"Now, Mabel, there's a coquette," she said.
Charnock was close behind, and overheard the triumphant remark.
"I beg your pardon," he said politely, "it was the purest accident."
The dowager bridled; her face grew red; she raised her tortoiseshell glasses and annihilated Charnock with a single stare. Charnock had the audacity to smile. He stooped and picked up the glove. Mrs. Warriner had indeed dropped the glove by accident; but since it fell in Charnock's way and since he picked it up, it was to prove, like the handbill at Gibraltar and the draft on Lloyd's bank, a thing trivial in itself, but the opportunity of strange events.
Lady Donnisthorpe's house stood in Queen Anne's Gate, and the balcony overlooked St. James's Park. There Charnock found Miranda; he leaned his elbows upon the iron balustrade, and for a while neither of them spoke. It was a clear night of early June, odorous with messages of hedgerows along country lanes and uplands of young grass, and of bells ringing over meadows. In front of them the dark trees of the Park rippled and whispered to the stray breaths of wind; between the trees one line of colourless lamps marked the footpath across the bridge to the Mall; and the carriages on the outer roadway ringed that enclosure of thickets and lawns with flitting sparks of fire.
Charnock was still holding the glove which he had picked up on the window-sill.
"That's mine," said Miranda; "thank you," and she stretched out her hand for it.
"Yes," said Charnock, absently, and he drew the glove through his fingers. It was a delicate trifle of white kid; he smoothed it, and his hand had the light touch of a caress. "Miranda," he said softly but distinctly, and lingered on the word as though the sound pleased him.
Miranda started and then sank back again in her chair with a quiet smile. Very likely she blushed at this familiar utterance of her name, and at the caressing movement of his hand which accompanied and perhaps interpreted the utterance, or perhaps it was only at a certain throb of her own heart that she blushed. At all events, the darkness concealed the blush, and Charnock was not looking in her direction.
The freshness of the night air had restored her, but she was very willing to sit there in silence so long as no questions were asked of her, and Charnock had rather the air of one who works out a private problem for himself than one who seeks the answer from another.
The clock upon Westminster tower boomed the hour of twelve. Miranda noticed that Charnock raised his head and listened to the twelve heavy strokes with a smile. His manner was that of a man who comes unexpectedly upon some memento of an almost forgotten time.
"That is a familiar sound to you," said Mrs. Warriner, and she was suddenly sensible of a great interest in all of the past life of this man who was standing beside her.
"Yes," said Charnock, turning round to her.
"You lived in Westminster, then? At one time I used to stay here a good deal. Where did you live?"
Charnock laughed. "You would probably be no wiser if I named the street; it is not of those which you and your friends go up and down," he replied simply. "Yes, I lived in Westminster for three hard, curious years."
"It's not only the years that are curious," said Miranda, but the hint was lost, for Charnock had turned back to the balustrade. She was still, however, inclined to persist. The details which Lady Donnisthorpe had sown in her mind, now bore their crop. Interested in the man, now that she knew him, she was also interested in his career, in his hurried migratory life, in the mystery which enveloped his youth, and all the more because of the contrast between her youth and his. He had lived for three years in some small back street of Westminster; very likely she had more than once rubbed shoulders with him in the streets on the occasions when she had come up from her home in Suffolk. That home became instantly very distinct in her memories--an old manor-house guarded by a moat of dark silent water, a house or broad red-brick chimneys whereon she had known the roses to bloom on a Christmas-day, and of leaded windows upon which the boughs of trees continually tapped.
"I should like to show you my home," she said with a sudden impulse, and did not check herself before the words were spoken. "Perhaps some day," she continued hurriedly, "you will tell me of those three years you spent in Westminster." And she hoped that he had not heard the first sentence of the two.
"I will make an exchange," said Charnock. "I will exchange some day, if you will, the history of my three years for the history of your trouble." He turned eagerly towards her, but she held up her hand.
"Please, please!" she said in a low, shaking voice, for her distress had come back upon her. She had begun, if not to forget it, at all events to dull the remembrance of it since she had come out upon the balcony. She had, in a word, sought and found a compensation in the new friendship of this man, and a relief in his verynaïveté. But he had brought her anxieties back to her, as he clearly understood, for he said: "That is the second time this evening. I am sorry."
"The second time?" said Miranda, quickly. "Why do you say that?"
"Am I wrong?" he asked. "Am I wrong in fearing that I myself have brought on you the trouble which I fancied I was to avert? I should be glad to know that I was wrong, for since I have stood here on this balcony, that fear has been growing. Your face so changed at the story I told you. At what point of it I do not know. I was not looking. Did I show you some misfortune you were unaware of, and might still be unaware of, if I had only held my tongue? In offering to shield you, did I only strike at you? I do not know, I am in the dark." He spoke in a voice of intense remorse, pleading for a proof that his fear was groundless, and Miranda did not answer him at all. "I do not ask you to speak freely now," he continued; "but sometime perhaps you will. You see, we shall be neighbours."
"Neighbours!" exclaimed Miranda, and her lips parted in a smile.
"You live at Ronda, Lady Donnisthorpe tells me; my headquarters now are at Algeciras;" and he told her briefly of his business there.
"My cousin did not tell me that," said Miranda.
Lady Donnisthorpe, in the wisdom of her heart, had, in fact, carefully concealed Charnock's place of abode, thinking it best that Miranda should learn it from Charnock's lips, and be pleasantly surprised thereby. That Miranda was pleasantly surprised might perhaps have been inferred by a more experienced man, from the extreme chilliness of her reply.
"Ronda is at the top," she said, "Algeciras at the bottom, and there are a hundred miles of hillside and cork-forest between."
"There are also," retorted Charnock, "a hundred miles of railway."
"Shall we go back into the room?" suggested Miranda.
"If you wish. Only there is something else I am trying to say to you," said Charnock, and at that Miranda laughed, and laughed with a fresh bright trill of amusement. It broke suddenly and spontaneously from her lips and surprised Charnock, who was at a loss to reconcile it with the signs of her distress. He turned towards her. "What is it?" he asked.
"Nothing," she said hastily, "nothing at all."
"You wished to go in?"
"Not now,--not for the world."
She was genuinely amused. Her eyes laughed at him in the starlight. Charnock was very content at the change in her, though he did not at all understand it. It made what he meant to say easier, if he could only find the means to say it. He held the means unwittingly in his hand, for he held Miranda's glove. It was that glove which provoked her amusement. Charnock, with a pertinacity which was only equalled by his absence of mind, was trying to force his hand into Mrs. Warriner's glove. He had already succeeded in slipping the long sleeve of it over his palm; he was now engaged in the more strenuous task of fitting his fingers into its slender fingers, as he leaned upon the balcony.
"You are laughing, no doubt, at my pertinacity, and it is true that our acquaintanceship is very slight," said he.
"In a moment you will irretrievably destroy it," said she, looking at the glove.
"I hope you don't mean that," he answered sadly, as he smoothed the finger-tip of the forefinger down upon his own, and at once proceeded to the other fingers. The little finger in particular needed a deal of strenuous coaxing, and caused him to break up his words with intervals of physical effort. "Because--as I say--we shall be neighbours--there!"--The exclamation "there" meant that he was satisfied with the third finger.--"A hundred miles of hill-side--in a foreign country--on a map a thumb will cover it."
"Will it cover a thumb, though?" asked Miranda, who took a feminine interest in the durability of her glove. She leaned forward in a delighted suspense, as Charnock proceeded to answer her question by experiment.
"There's the railway too," said he, as he struggled with the thumb of the glove, "and as I say, a foreign country. Very likely, we shall be nearer neighbours, though you are at Ronda and I am at Algeciras, than if you lived in this house and I at the house next door. Because after all there's one advantage in trouble of any kind. Trouble is the short foot-path to friendship, don't you think? Like that line of lamps across the Park."
Miranda forgot the glove. She was touched by the deep sincerity of his voice, by the modesty of his manner. She rose from her chair and stood by his side at the balustrade. "Yes," she answered, looking at the circling lights on the outer rim of the Park. "I think that is true. It spares one the long carriage-road of ceremonial acquaintanceship. But," she said thoughtfully, "I do not know whether after all I shall soon return to Ronda."
She heard a little sound of something tearing, and there was Charnock contemplating in amazement upon his left hand a white kid glove of which the kid was ripped across the palm. He felt in his pocket with his right hand and drew out both of his own gloves, which he had taken off while he was talking in the alcove. Then he looked at Miranda and his amazement became remorse.
"It's yours!" he said. "Of course, I picked it up. I had forgotten even that I was holding it. I had no notion that I was putting it on."
"I gave you fair warning," said Miranda, with a frank laugh, "but you would not pay any attention."
Charnock looked at her with absolute incredulity. "You mean to say that you don't mind? You are wonderful!"
"It seems almost too late to mind," said she, looking at the tattered glove.
"Or to mend," said he, ruefully, drawing it off with extreme care, and as a new thought struck him. "Oh!" he exclaimed, "suppose it had belonged to anyone else, the dowager in the window, for instance." He dangled the glove in the air. "Now that's a lesson!"
"Perhaps it's a parable," said Miranda, as she took the glove from him.
Charnock saw that she had grown quite serious. "If so," said he, "I cannot expound it."
"Shall I?" The smile had faded from her lips, her eyes shone upon his, with no longer a sparkle of merriment, but very still, very grave.
"Yes."
"Well, then," she said slowly, "shall I say that no man can offer a woman his friendship or help without doing her a hurt in some other way?"
His eyes as steadily answered back to hers. "Do you believe that?" he said. He spoke quite simply without raising his voice in any way, but none the less Mrs. Warriner was certain that she had but to say "yes," and there would be an end, now and forever, of his questions, of his help, of his friendship, of everything between them beyond the merest acquaintanceship. Perhaps some day they might cross the harbour together in the same ferry from Algeciras to Gibraltar, and bow and exchange a careless word, but that would be all--and only that until his work was finished there.
"Do you believe that?"
She was half tempted to say "yes"; but she had an instinct, a premonition, that whatever answer she made would stretch out to unknown and incalculable consequences. She seemed to herself to be drawing the lots which one way or another would decide and limit all her years to come. Upon the tiny "yes" or "no" between which she had to make her choice, her whole life was destined to pivot. Accordingly, she made up her mind to say neither, but to turn the matter into a jest. "Here's the proof," said she, as lightly as she could, and she flourished the glove.
But the man steadily held her to his question, with his eyes, with his voice, with his very attitude. "Do you believe that?" he repeated.
"I don't know whether I believe it," she murmured resentfully. "I don't see why I should be asked to mean what I say, or whether I mean what I say.... But it might be so, I think.... I don't know.... I don't know."
To her relief Charnock moved. If he had stood like that, demanding an answer with every line of his body, for another instant, she knew she would have been compelled to answer one way or another; and she felt certain, too, that whatever answer she gave it would have been the one she would have wished afterwards to take back. "Now if you are satisfied," she added with a touch of petulance, "we will go in."
He moved aside for her to pass, but before she had time to step forward, he moved back again and barred the way. "No, please," he said quickly, and his voice thrilled as though he had hit upon an inspiration.
"Lady Donnisthorpe told me you were rather unconventional," she remarked with a sigh, which was only half of it a jest; and she drew back as though she did not wish to hear what he had to say, as though she almost feared to hear it.
But Charnock barely even remarked her reluctance. "That glove," he said, and pointed to it. Miranda imagined that he was reaching out a hand for it.
"I haveheapsof pairs," she exclaimed, whipping it behind her back; "there is no need to trouble about it at all."
"I do not ask for it; I had no thought of that. On the contrary, I would ask you to keep it if you will. There is something else which I was trying to say, if you remember."
"Dear, dear!" said Miranda, ruefully, "I could wish after all that you had trodden on my toes."
"I beg your pardon," said Charnock, and instantly he drew aside. He left the way clear for her. She passed him, and went towards the window, from which the lights and the music streamed out into the night. Had he followed, she would have stepped into the room, amongst the dancers; she would have been claimed by a partner, and she would have seen no more of Charnock, and the only consequences of this interview upon the balcony would have been a memory in her thoughts, a curiosity in her speculations.
But Charnock did not follow her. He remained where she left him, and her feet loitered more with every step she took. At the edge of the window she stopped. For the second time that evening she became aware that one way or other she must do the irrevocable thing. It was a mere step to make across the sill of the window, from the stone of the balcony to the parquet of the ball-room floor,--a thing insignificant in itself and in its consequences most momentous. She stood for a second undecided. The sight of her partner looking about the room decided her. She came back to where Charnock stood in a soldierly rigidity.
"You might have come half-way to meet me," she said in a whimsical complaint, and then very gently: "I will hear what you wish to say, if you will still say it."
"What I mean is this," he replied; "it is what I was trying to say. The hardest thing, if one ever wants help, is--don't you think?--the asking for it. I could not say that to you until I had hit upon a means by which the asking, should it ever be necessary, might be dispensed with. And it seemed to me that there was something providential in my tearing that glove; for that torn glove can be the means, if ever you see fit to use it. You live at Ronda; for the next year I am to be found at Algeciras; you will only have to send that torn glove to me in an envelope. I shall know without a word from you; and when I answer it by coming up to you at Ronda, it will be understood by both of us, again without a word, why I have come. I shall not need to speak at all; you will only need to say the precise particular thing which needs to be done."
Miranda stood with her eyelids closed, and her ungloved hand pressed over her heart. The blood darkened her cheeks. Charnock saw her whole face soften and sweeten. "I understand," she said in a low voice. "I might appeal and be spared the humiliation of appealing, like the face in your mirror."
"I believe," said he, "that my mirror sent me a message on that night. I have tried to deliver it."
Miranda slowly raised her eyes and they glistened with something other than the starlight. "Thank you," she said; "for the delicacy of the thought I am most grateful. What woman would not be? But I do not think that I shall ever send you the glove: not because I would not be glad to owe gratitude to you, but just for the same reason which has kept me from telling you anything of my troubles. Such as they are I must fight them through by myself."
This time she passed over the sill into the ballroom; but she was holding the glove tight against her breast, and she had a feeling that Charnock very surely knew that at some time she would send it to him.