Julian, having opened the case, disclosed twin brier pipes, silver-mounted, with alternative stems of various lengths and diverse mouthpieces—all reposing on soft couches of fawn-tinted stuff, with a crimson, silk-lined lid to serve them for canopy. A rich and costly array! Everybody was impressed, even startled. For not merely was the gift extremely handsome—it was more than a gift; it symbolized the end of an epoch in those lives. Mrs. Maldon had been no friend of tobacco. She had lukewarmly permitted cigarettes, which Louis smoked, smoking naught else. But cigars she had discouraged, and pipes she simply would not have! Now, Julian smoked nothing but a pipe. Hence in his great-aunt's parlour he had not smoked; in effect he had been forbidden to smoke there. The theory that a pipe was vulgar had been stiffly maintained in that sacred parlour. In the light of these facts did not Mrs. Maldon's gift indeed shine as a great and noble act of surrender? Was it not more than a gift, and entitled to stagger beholders? Was it not a sublime proof that the earth revolves and the world moves?
Mrs. Maldon was as susceptible as any one to the drama of the moment, perhaps more than any one. She thrilled and became happy as Julian in silence minutely examined the pipes. She had taken expert advice before purchasing, and she was tranquil as to the ability of the pipes to withstand criticism. They bore the magic triple initials of the first firm of brier-pipe makers in the world—initials as famous and as welcome on the plains of Hindustan as in the Home Counties or the frozen zone. She gazed round the table with increasing satisfaction. Louis, who was awkwardly fixed with regard to the light, the shadow of his bust falling always across his plate, had borne that real annoyance with the most charming good-humour. He was a delight to the eye; he had excellent qualities, especially social qualities. Rachel sat opposite to the hostess—an admirable girl in most ways, a splendid companion, and a sound cook. The meal had been irreproachable, and in the phrase of theSignal"ample justice had been done" to it. Julian was on the hostess's left, with his back to the window and to the draught. A good boy, a sterling boy, if peculiar! And there they were all close together, intimate, familiar, mutually respecting; and the perfect parlour was round about them: a domestic organism, honest, dignified, worthy, more than comfortable. And she, Elizabeth Maldon, in her old age, was the head of it, and the fount of good things.
"Thank ye!" ejaculated Julian, with a queer look askance at his benefactor. "Thank ye, aunt!"
It was all he could get out of his throat, and it was all that was expected of him. He hated to give thanks—and he hated to be thanked. The grandeur of the present flattered him. Nevertheless he regarded it as essentially absurd in its pretentiousness. The pipes were A1, but could a man carry about a huge contraption like that? All a man needed was an A1 pipe, which, if he had any sense, he would carry loose in his pocket with his pouch—and be hanged to morocco cases and silk linings!
"Stoke up, my hearties!" said Louis, drawing forth a gun-metal cigarette-case, which was chained to his person by a kind of cable.
Undoubtedly the case of pipes represented for Julian a triumph over Louis, or, at least, justice against Louis. For obvious reasons Julian had not quarrelled with a rich and affectionate great-aunt because she had accorded to Louis the privilege of smoking in her parlour what he preferred to smoke, while refusing a similar privilege to himself. But he had resented the distinction. And his joy in the spectacular turn of the wheel was vast. For that very reason he hid it with much care. Why should he bubble over with gratitude for having been at last treated fairly? It would be pitiful to do so. Leaving the case open upon the table, he pulled a pouch and an old pipe from his pocket, and began to fill the pipe. It was inexcusable, but it was like him—he had to do it.
"But aren't you going to try one of the new ones?" asked Mrs. Maldon, amiably but uncertainly.
"No," said he, with cold nonchalance. Upon nobody in the world had the sweet magic of Mrs. Maldon's demeanour less influence than upon himself. "Not now. I want to enjoy my smoke, and the first smoke out of a new pipe is never any good."
It was very true, but far more wanton than true. Mrs. Maldon in her ignorance could not appreciate the truth, but she could appreciate its wantonness. She was wounded—silly, touchy old thing! She was wounded, and she hid the wound.
Rachel flushed with ire against the boor.
"By the way," Mrs. Maldon remarked in a light, indifferent tone, just as though the glory of the moment had not been suddenly rent and shrivelled. "I didn't see your portmanteau in the back room just now, Julian. Has any one carried it upstairs? I didn't hear any one go upstairs."
"I didn't bring one, aunt," said Julian.
"Not bring—"
"I was forgetting to tell ye. I can't sleep here to-night. I'm off to South Africa to-morrow, and I've got a lot of things to fix up at my digs to-night." He lit the old pipe from a match which Louis passed to him.
"To South Africa?" murmured Mrs. Maldon, aghast. And she repeated, "South Africa?" To her it was an incredible distance. It was not a place—it was something on the map. Perhaps she had never imaginatively realized that actual people did in fact go to South Africa. "But this is the first I have heard of this!" she said. Julian's extraordinary secretiveness always disturbed her.
"I only got the telegram about my berth this morning," said Julian, rather sullenly on the defensive.
"Is it business?" Mrs. Maldon asked.
"You may depend it isn't pleasure, aunt," he answered, and shut his lips tight on the pipe.
After a pause Mrs. Maldon tried again.
"Where do you sail from?"
Julian answered—
"Southampton."
There was another pause. Louis and Rachel exchanged a glance of sympathetic dismay at the situation.
Mrs. Maldon then smiled with plaintive courage.
"Of course if you can't sleep here, you can't," said she benignly. "I can see that. But we were quite counting on having a man in the house to-night—with all these burglars about—weren't we, Rachel?" Her grimace became, by an effort, semi-humorous.
Rachel diplomatically echoed the tone of Mrs. Maldon, but more brightly, with a more frankly humorous smile—
"We were, indeed!"
But her smile was a masterpiece of duplicity, somewhat strange in a girl so downright; for beneath it burned hotly her anger against the brute Julian.
"Well, there it is!" Julian gruffly and callously summed up the situation, staring at the inside of his teacup.
"Propitious moment for getting a monopoly of door-knobs at the Cape, I suppose?" said Louis quizzically. His cousin manufactured, among other articles, white and jet door-knobs.
"No need for you to be so desperately funny!" snapped Julian, who detested Louis' brand of facetiousness. It was the word "propitious" that somehow annoyed him—it had a sarcastic flavour, and it was "Louis all over."
"No offence, old man!" Louis magnanimously soothed him. "On the contrary, many happy returns of the day." In social intercourse the younger cousin's good-humour and suavity were practically indestructible.
But Julian still scowled.
Rachel, to make a tactful diversion, rose and began to collect plates. The meal was at an end, and for Mrs. Maldon it had closed in ignominy. From her quarter of the table she pushed crockery towards Rachel with a gesture of disillusion; the courage to smile had been but momentary. She felt old—older than she had ever felt before. The young generation presented themselves to her as almost completely enigmatic. She admitted that they were foreign to her, that she could not comprehend them at all. Each of the three at her table was entirely free and independent—each could and did act according to his or her whim, and none could say them nay. Such freedom seemed unreal. They were children playing at life, and playing dangerously. Hundreds of times, in conversation with her coevals, she had cheerfully protested against the banal complaint that the world had changed of late years. But now she felt grievously that the world was different—that it had indeed deteriorated since her young days. She was fatigued by the modes of thought of these youngsters, as a nurse or mother is fatigued by too long a spell of the shrillness and thenaïvetéof a family of infants. She wanted repose.... Was it conceivable that when, with incontestable large-mindedness, she had given a case of pipes to Julian, he should first put a slight on her gift and then, brusquely leaving her in the lurch, announce his departure for South Africa, with as much calm as though South Africa were in the next street?... And the other two were guilty in other ways, perhaps more subtly, of treason against forlorn old age.
And then Louis, in taking the slop-basin from her trembling fingers, to pass it to Rachel, gave her one of his adorable, candid, persuasive, sympathetic smiles. And lo! she was enheartened once more. And she remembered that dignity and kindliness had been the watchwords of her whole life, and that it would be shameful to relinquish the struggle for an ideal at the very threshold of the grave. She began to find excuses for Julian. The dear lad must have many business worries. He was very young to be at the head of a manufacturing concern. He had a remarkable brain—worthy of the family. Allowances must be made for him. She must not be selfish.... And assuredly that serviette and ring would reappear on the morrow.
"I'll take that out," said Louis, indicating the tray which Rachel had drawn from concealment under the Chesterfield, and which was now loaded. Mrs. Maldon employed an old and valued charwoman in the mornings. Rachel accomplished all the rest of the housework herself, including cookery, and she accomplished it with the stylistic smartness of a self-respecting lady-help.
"Oh no!" said she. "I can carry it quite easily, thanks."
Louis insisted masculinely—
"I'll take that tray out."
And he took it out, holding his head back as he marched, so that the smoke of the cigarette between his lips should not obscure his eyes. Rachel followed with some oddments. Behold those two away together in the seclusion of the kitchen; and Mrs. Maldon and Julian alone in the parlour!
"Very fine!" muttered Julian, fingering the magnificent case of pipes. Now that there were fewer spectators, his tongue was looser, and he could relent.
"I'm so glad you like it," Mrs. Maldon responded eagerly.
The world was brighter to her, and she accepted Julian's amiability as Heaven's reward for her renewal of courage.
"Auntie-" began Louis, with a certain formality.
"Yes?"
Mrs. Maldon had turned her chair a little towards the fire. The two visitants to the kitchen had reappeared. Rachel with a sickle-shaped tool was sedulously brushing the crumbs from the damask into a silver tray. Louis had taken the poker to mend the fire.
He said, nonchalantly—
"If you'd care for me to stay the night here instead of Julian, I will."
"Well—" Mrs. Maldon was unprepared for this apparently quite natural and kindly suggestion. It perturbed, even frightened her by its implications. Had it been planned in the kitchen between those two? She wanted to accept it; and yet another instinct in her prompted her to decline it absolutely and at once. She saw Rachel flushing as the girl industriously continued her task without looking up. To Mrs. Maldon it seemed that those two, under the impulsion of Fate, were rushing towards each other at a speed far greater than she had suspected.
Julian stirred on his chair, under the sharp irritation caused by Louis' proposal. He despised Louis as a boy of no ambition—a butterfly being who had got no farther than the adolescent will-to-live, the desire for self-indulgence, whereas he, Julian, was profoundly conscious of the will-to-dominate, the hunger for influence and power. And also he was jealous of Louis on various counts. Louis had come to the Five Towns years after Julian, and had almost immediately cut a figure therein; Julian had never cut a figure. Julian had been the sole resident great-nephew of a benevolent aunt, and Louis had arrived and usurped at least half the advantages of the relationship, if not more; Louis lived several miles nearer to his aunt. Julian it was who, through his acquaintance with Rachel's father and her masterful sinister brother, had brought her into touch with Mrs. Maldon. Rachel was Julian's creation, so far as his aunt was concerned. Julian had no dislike for Rachel; he had even been thinking of her favourably. But Louis had, as it were, appropriated her ... From the steely conning-tower of his brows Julian had caught their private glances at the table. And Louis was now carrying trays for her, and hobnobbing with her in the kitchen! Lastly, because Julian could not pass the night in the house, Louis, the interloper, had the effrontery to offer to fill his place—on some preposterous excuse about burglars! And the fellow was so polite and so persuasive, with his finicking eloquence. By virtue of a strange faculty not uncommon in human nature Julian loathed Louis' good manners and appearance—and acutely envied them.
He burst out with scarcely controlled savagery—
"A lot of good you'd be with burglars!"
The women were outraged by his really shocking rudeness. Rachel bit her lip and began to fold up the cloth. Mrs. Maldon's head slightly trembled. Louis alone maintained a perfect equanimity. It was as if he were invulnerable.
"You never know!" he smiled amiably, and shrugged his shoulders. Then he finished his operation on the fire.
"I'm sure it's very kind and thoughtful of you, Louis," said Mrs. Maldon, driven to acceptance by Julian's monstrous behaviour.
"Moreover," Louis urbanely continued, smoothing down his trousers with a long perpendicular caress as he usually did after any bending—"moreover, there's always my revolver."
He gave a short laugh.
"Revolver!" exclaimed Mrs. Maldon, intimidated by the mere name. Then she smiled, in an effort to reassure herself. "Louis, you are a tease. You really shouldn't tease me."
"I'm not," said Louis, with that careful air of false blank casualness which he would invariably employ for his more breath-taking announcements. "I always carry a loaded revolver."
The fearful word "loaded" sank into the heart of the old woman, and thrilled her. It was a fact that for some weeks past Louis had been carrying a revolver. At intervals the craze for firearms seizes the fashionable youth of a provincial town, like the craze for marbles at school, and then dies away. In the present instance it had been originated by the misadventure of a dandy with an out-of-work artisan on the fringe of Hanbridge. Nothing could be more correct than for a man of spirit and fashion thus to arm himself in order to cow the lower orders and so cope with the threatened social revolution.
"Youdon't, Louis!" Mrs. Maldon deprecated.
"I'll show you," said Louis, feeling in his hip pocket.
"Please!" protested Mrs. Maldon, and Rachel covered her face with her hands and drew back from Louis' sinister gesture. "Please don'tshowit to us!" Mrs. Maiden's tone was one of imploring entreaty. For an instant she was just like a sentimentalist who resents and is afraid of hearing the truth. She obscurely thought that if she resolutely refused to see the revolver it would somehow cease to exist. With a loaded revolver in the house the situation seemed more dangerous and more complicated than ever. There was something absolutely terrifying in the conjuncture of a loaded revolver and a secret hoard of bank-notes.
"All right! All right!" Louis relented.
Julian cut across the scene with a gruff and final—
"I must clear out of this!"
He rose.
"Must you?" said his aunt.
She did not unduly urge him to delay, for the strain of family life was exhausting her.
"I must catch the 9.48," said Julian, looking at the clock and at his watch.
Herein was yet another example of the morbid reticence which so pained Mrs. Maldon. He must have long before determined to catch the 9.48; yet he had said nothing about it till the last moment! He had said nothing even about South Africa until the news was forced from him. It had been arranged that he should come direct to Bursley station from his commercial journey in Yorkshire and Derbyshire, pass the night at his aunt's house, which was conveniently near the station, and proceed refreshed to business on the morrow. A neat arrangement, well suiting the fact of his birthday! And now he had broken it in silence, without a warning, with the baldest possible explanation! His aunt, despite her real interest in him, could never extract from him a clear account of his doings and his movements. And this South African excursion was the last and worst illustration of his wilful cruel harshness to her.
Nevertheless, the extreme and unimaginable remoteness of South Africa seemed to demand a special high formality in bidding him adieu, and she rendered it. If he would not permit her to superintend his packing (he had never even let her come to his rooms!), she could at least superintend the putting on of his overcoat. And she did. And instead of quitting him as usual at the door of the parlour, she insisted on going to the front door and opening it herself. She was on her mettle. She was majestic and magnificent. By refusing to see his ill-breeding she actually did terminate its existence. She stood at the open front door with the three young ones about her, and by the force of her ideal the front door became the portal of an embassy and Julian's departure a ceremony of state. He had to shake hands all round. She raised her cheek, and he had to kiss. She said, "God bless you!" and he had to say, "Thank you."
As he was descending the outer steps, the pipe-case clipped under his arm, Louis threw at him—
"I say, old man!"
"What?" He turned round with sharp defiance beneath the light of the street-lamp.
"How are you going to get to London to-morrow morning in time for the boat-train at Waterloo, if you're staying at Knype to-night."
Louis travelled little, but it was his foible to be learned in boat-trains and "connections."
"A friend o' mine's motoring me to Stafford at five to-morrow morning, if you want to know. I shall catch the Scotch express. Anything else?"
"Oh!" muttered Louis, checked.
Julian clanked the gate and vanished up the street, Mrs. Maldon waving.
"What friend? What motor?" reflected Mrs. Maldon sadly. "He is incorrigible with his secretiveness."
"Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel anxiously, "you look pale. Is it being in this draught?" She shut the door.
Mrs. Maldon sighed and moved away. She hesitated at the parlour door and then said—
"I must go upstairs a moment."
Louis stood hesitant and slightly impatient in the parlour, alone. A dark blue cloth now covered the table, and in the centre of it was a large copper jar containing an evergreen plant. Of the feast no material trace remained except a few crumbs on the floor. But the room was still pervaded by the emotional effluence of the perturbed souls who had just gone; and Louis felt it, though without understanding.
Throughout the evening he had of course been preoccupied by the consciousness of having in his pocket bank-notes to a value unknown. Several times he had sought for a suitable opportunity to disclose his exciting secret. But he had found none. In practice he could not say to his aunt, before Julian and Rachel: "Auntie, I picked up a lot of bank-notes on the landing. You really ought to be more careful!" He could not even in any way refer to them. The dignity of Mrs. Maldon had intimidated him. He had decided, after Julian's announcement of departure, that he would hand them over to her, simply and undramatically and with no triumphant air, as soon as he and she should for a moment be alone together. Then Mrs. Maldon vanished upstairs. And she had not returned. Rachel also had vanished. And he was waiting.
He desired to examine the notes, to let his eyes luxuriously rest upon them, but he dared not take them from his pocket lest one or other of the silent-footed women might surprise him by a sudden entrance. He fingered them as they lay in their covert, and the mere feel of them, raised exquisite images in his mind; and at the same time the whole room and every object in the room was transformed into a secret witness which spied upon him, disquieted him, and warned him. But the fact that the notes were intact, that nothing irremediable had occurred, reassured him and gave him strength, so that he could defy the suspicions of those senseless surrounding objects.
Within the room there was no sound but the faint regular hiss of the gas and an occasional falling together of coal in the weakening fire. Overhead, from his aunt's bedroom, vague movements were perceptible. Then these ceased, absolutely. The tension, increasing, grew too much for him, and with a curt gesture, and a self-conscious expression between a smile and a frown, he left the parlour and stood to listen in the lobby. Not for several seconds did he notice the heavy ticking of the clock, close to his ear, nor the chill draught that came under the front door. He gazed up into the obscurity at the top of the stairs. The red glow of the kitchen fire, in the distance to the right of the stairs, caught his attention at intervals. He was obsessed, almost overpowered, by the mysteriousness of the first floor. What had happened? What was happening? And suddenly an explanation swept into his brain—the obvious explanation. His aunt had missed the bank-notes and was probably at that very instant working herself into an anguish. What ought he to do? Should he run up and knock at her door? He was spared a decision by the semi-miraculous appearance of Rachel at the top of the stairs. She started.
"Oh! How you frightened me!" she exclaimed in a low voice.
He answered weakly, charmingly—
"Did I?"
"Will you please come and speak to Mrs. Maldon? She wants you."
"In her room?"
Rachel nodded and disappeared before he could ask another question. With heart beating he ascended the stairs by twos. Through the half-open door of the faintly lit room which he himself would occupy he could hear Rachel active. And then he was at the closed door of his aunt's room. "I must be jolly careful how I do it!" he thought as he knocked.
He was surprised, and impressed, to see Mrs. Maldon in bed. She lay on her back, with her striking head raised high on several pillows. Nothing else of her was visible; the purple eider-down covered the whole bed without a crease.
"Hello, auntie!" he greeted her, instinctively modifying his voice to the soft gentleness proper to the ordered and solemn chamber.
Mrs. Maldon, moving her head, looked at him in silence. He tiptoed to the foot of the bed and leaned on it gracefully. And as in the parlour his shadow had fallen on the table, so now, with the gas just behind him, it fell on the bed. The room was chilly and had a slight pharmaceutical odour.
Mrs. Maldon said, with a weak effort—
"I was feeling faint, and Rachel thought I'd better get straight to bed. I'm an old woman, Louis."
"She hasn't missed them!" he thought in a flash, and said, aloud—
"Nothing of the sort, auntie."
He was aware of the dim reflection of himself in the mirror of the immense Victorian mahogany wardrobe to his left.
Mrs. Maldon again hesitated before speaking.
"You aren't ill, are you, auntie?" he said in a cheerful, friendly whisper. He was touched by the poignant pathos of her great age and her debility. It rent his heart to think that she had no prospect but the grave.
She murmured, ignoring his question—
"I just wanted to tell you that you needn't go down home for your night things—unless you specially want to, that is. I have all that's necessary here, and I've given orders to Rachel."
"Certainly, auntie. I won't leave the house. That's all right."
No, she assuredly had not missed the notes! He was strangely uplifted. He felt almost joyous in his relief. Could he tell her now as she lay in her bed? Impossible! He would tell her in the morning. It would be cruel to disturb her now with such a revelation of her own negligence. He vibrated with sympathy for her, and he was proud to think that she appreciated the affectionate, comprehending, subdued intimacy of his attitude towards her as he leaned gracefully on the foot of the bed, and that she admired him. He did not know, or rather he absolutely did not realize, that she was acquainted with aught against his good fame. He forgot his sins with the insouciance of an animal.
"Don't stay up too late," said Mrs. Maldon, as it were dismissing him. "A long night will do you no harm for once in a way." She smiled. "I know you'll see that everything's locked up."
He nodded soothingly, and stood upright.
"You might turn the gas down, rather low."
He tripped to the gas-bracket and put the room in obscurity. The light of the street lamp irradiated the pale green blinds of the two windows.
"That do?"
"Nicely, thank you! Good-night, my dear. No, I'm not ill. But you know I have these little attacks. And then bed's the best place for me." Her voice seemed to expire.
He crept across the wide carpet and departed with the skill of a trained nurse, and inaudibly closed the door.
From the landing the whole of the rest of the house seemed to offer itself to him in the night as an enigmatic and alluring field of adventure ... Should he drop the notes under the chair on the landing, where he had found them?... He could not! He could not!... He moved to the head of the stairs, past the open door of the spare bedroom, which was now dark. He stopped at the head of the stairs, and then descended. The kitchen was lighted.
"Are you there?" he asked.
"Yes," replied Rachel.
"May I come?"
"Why, of course!" Her voice trembled.
He went towards the other young creature in the house. The old one lay above, in a different world remote and foreign. He and Rachel had the ground floor and all its nocturnal enchantment to themselves.
Mechanically, as he went into the kitchen, he drew his cigarette-case from his pocket. It was the proper gesture of a man in any minor crisis. He was not a frequenter of kitchens, and this visit, even more than the brief first one, seemed to him to be adventurous.
Mrs. Maldon's kitchen—or rather Rachel's—was small, warm (though the fire was nearly out), and agreeable to the eye. On the left wall was a deal dresser full of crockery, and on the right, under the low window, a narrow deal table. In front, opposite the door, gleamed the range, and on either side of the range were cupboards with oak-grained doors. There was a bright steel fender before the range, and then a hearth-rug on which stood an oak rocking-chair. The floor was a friendly chequer of red and black tiles. On the high mantelpiece were canisters and an alarm-clock and utensils; sundry other utensils hung on the walls, among the coloured images of sweet girls and Norse-like men offered by grocers and butchers under the guise of almanacs; and cupboard doors ajar dimly disclosed other utensils still, so that the kitchen had the effect of a novel, comfortable kind of workshop; which effect was helped by the clothes-drier that hung on pulley-ropes from the ceiling, next to the gas-pendant and to a stalactite of onions.
The uncurtained window, instead of showing black, gave on another interior, whitewashed, and well illuminated by the kitchen gas. This other interior had, under a previous tenant of the property, been a lean-to greenhouse, but Mrs. Maldon esteeming a scullery before a greenhouse, it had been modified into a scullery. There it was that Julian Maldon had preferred to make his toilet. One had to pass through the scullery in order to get from the kitchen into the yard. And the light of day had to pass through the imperfectly transparent glass roof of the scullery in order to reach the window of the unused room behind the parlour; and herein lay the reason why that room was unused, it being seldom much brighter than a crypt.
At the table stood Rachel, in her immense pinafore-apron, busy with knives and forks and spoons, and an enamel basin from which steam rose gently. Louis looked upon Rachel, and for the first time in his life liked an apron! It struck him as an exceedingly piquant addition to the young woman's garments. It suited her; it set off the tints of her notable hair; and it suited the kitchen. Without delaying her work, Rachel made the protector of the house very welcome. Obviously she was in a high state of agitation. For an instant Louis feared that the agitation was due to anxiety on account of Mrs. Maldon.
"Nothing serious up with the old lady, is there?" he asked, pinching the cigarette to regularize the tobacco in it.
"Oh,no!"
The exclamation in its absolute sincerity dissipated every trace of his apprehension. He felt gay, calmly happy, and yet excited too. He was sure, then, that Rachel's agitation was a pleasurable agitation. It was caused solely by his entrance into the kitchen, by the compliment he was paying to her kitchen! Her eyes glittered; her face shone; her little movements were electric; she was intensely conscious of herself—all because he had come into her kitchen! She could not conceal—perhaps she did not wish to conceal—the joy that his near presence inspired. Louis had had few adventures, very few, and this experience was exquisite and wondrous to him. It roused, not the fatuous coxcomb, nor the Lothario, but that in him which was honest and high-spirited. A touch of the male's vanity, not surprising, was to be excused.
"Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel, "had an idea that it wasmewho suggested your staying all night instead of your cousin." She raised her chin, and peered at nothing through the window as she rubbed away at a spoon.
"But when?" Louis demanded, moving towards the fire. It appeared to him that the conversation had taken a most interesting turn.
"When?... When you brought the tray in here for me, I suppose."
"And I suppose you explained to her that I had the idea all out of my own little head?"
"I told her that I should never have dreamed of asking such a thing!" The susceptible and proud young creature indicated that the suggestion was one of Mrs. Maldon's rare social errors, and that Mrs. Maldon had had a narrow escape of being snubbed for it by the woman of the world now washing silver. "I'm no more afraid of burglars than you are," Rachel added. "I should just like to catch a burglar here—that I should!"
Louis indulgently doubted the reality of this courage. He had been too hastily concluding that what Rachel resented was an insinuation of undue interest in himself, whereas she now made it seem that she was objecting merely to any reflection upon her valour: which was much less exciting to him. Still, he thought that both causes might have contributed to her delightful indignation.
"Why was she so keen about having one of us to sleep here to-night?" Louis inquired.
"Well, I don't know that she was," answered Rachel. "If you hadn't said anything—"
"Oh, but do you know what she said to me upstairs?"
"No."
"She didn't want me even to go back to my digs for my things. Evidently she doesn't care for the house to be left even for half an hour."
"Well, of course old people are apt to get nervous, you know—especially when they're not well."
"Funny, isn't it?"
There was perfect unanimity between them as to the irrational singularity and sad weakness of aged persons.
Louis remarked—
"She said you would make everything right for me upstairs."
"I have done—I hope," said Rachel.
"Thanks awfully!"
One part of the table was covered with newspaper. Suddenly Rachel tore a strip off the newspaper, folded the strip into a spill, and, lighting it at the gas, tendered it to Louis' unlit cigarette.
The climax of the movement was so quick and unexpected as almost to astound Louis. For he had been standing behind her, and she had not turned her head before making the spill. Perhaps there was a faint reflection of himself in the window. Or perhaps she had eyes in her hair. Beyond doubt she was a strange, rare, angelic girl. The gesture with which she modestly offered the spill was angelic; it was divine; it was one of those phenomena which persist in a man's memory for decades. At the very instant of its happening he knew that he should never forget it.
The man of fashion blushed as he inhaled the first smoke created by her fire.
Rachel dropped the heavenly emblem, all burning, into the ash-bin of the range, and resumed her work.
Louis coughed. "Any law against sitting down?" he asked.
"You're very welcome," she replied primly.
"I didn't know I might smoke," he said.
She made no answer at first, but just as Louis had ceased to expect an answer, she said—
"I should think if you can smoke in the sitting-room you can smoke in the kitchen—shouldn't you?"
"I should," said he.
There was silence, but silence not disagreeable. Louis, lolling in the chair, and slightly rocking it, watched Rachel at her task. She completely immersed spoons and forks in the warm water, and then rubbed them with a brush like a large nail-brush, giving particular attention to the inside edges of the prongs of the forks; and then she laid them all wet on a thick cloth to the right of the basin. But of the knives she immersed only the blades, and took the most meticulous care that no drop of water should reach the handles.
"I never knew knives and forks and things were washed like that," observed Louis.
"They generally aren't," said Rachel. "But they ought to be. I leave all the other washing-up for the charwoman in the morning, but I wouldn't trust these to her." (The charwoman had been washing up cutlery since before Rachel was born.) "They're all alike," said Rachel.
Louis acquiesced sagely in this broad generalization as to charwomen.
"Why don't you wash the handles of the knives?" he queried.
"It makes them come loose."
"Really?"
"Do you mean to say you didn't know that water, especially warm water with soda in it, loosens the handles?" She showed astonishment, but her gaze never left the table in front of her.
"Not me!"
"Well, I should have thought that everybody knew that. Some people use a jug, and fill it up with water just high enough to cover the blades, and stick the knives in to soak. But I don't hold with that because of the steam, you see. Steam's nearly as bad as water for the handles. And then some people drop the knives wholesale into a basin just for a second, to wash the handles. But I don't hold with that, either. What I say is that you can get the handles clean with the cloth you wipe them dry with. That's what I say."
"And so there's soda in the water?"
"A little."
"Well, I never knew that either! It's quite a business, it seems to me."
Without doubt Louis' notions upon domestic work were being modified with extreme rapidity. In the suburb from which he sprang domestic work—and in particular washing up—had been regarded as base, foul, humiliating, unmentionable—as toil that any slut might perform anyhow. It would have been inconceivable to him that he should admire a girl in the very act of washing up. Young ladies, even in exclusive suburban families, were sometimes forced by circumstances to wash up—of that he was aware—but they washed up in secret and in shame, and it was proper for all parties to pretend that they never had washed up. And here was Rachel converting the horrid process into a dignified and impressive ritual. She made it as fine as fine needlework—so exact, so dainty, so proud were the motions of her fingers and her forearms. Obviously washing up was an art, and the delicate operation could not be scamped nor hurried ...
The triple pile of articles on the cloth grew slowly, but it grew; and then Rachel, having taken a fresh white cloth from a hook, began to wipe, and her wiping was an art. She seemed to recognize each fork as a separate individuality, and to attend to it as to a little animal. Whatever her view of charwomen, never would she have said of forks that they were all alike.
Louis felt in his hip pocket for his reserve cigarette-case.
And Rachel immediately said, with her back to him—
"Have you really got a revolver, or were you teasing—just now in the parlour?"
It was then that he perceived a small unframed mirror, hung at the height of her face on the broad, central, perpendicular bar of the old-fashioned window-frame. Through this mirror the chit—so he named her in his mind at the instant—had been surveying him!
"Yes," he said, producing the second cigarette-case, "I was only teasing." He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the previous one.
"Well," she said, "you did frighten Mrs. Maldon. I was so sorry for her."
"And what about you? Weren't you frightened?"
"Oh no! I wasn't frightened. I guessed, somehow, you were only teasing."
"Well, I just wasn't teasing, then!" said Louis, triumphantly yet with benevolence. And he drew a revolver from his pocket.
She turned her head now, and glanced neutrally at the incontestable revolver for a second. But she made no remark whatever, unless the pouting of her tightly shut lips and a mysterious smile amounted to a remark.
Louis adopted an indifferent tone—
"Strange that the old lady should be so nervous just to-night—isn't it?—seeing these burglars have been knocking about for over a fortnight. Is this the first time she's got excited about it?"
"Yes, I think it is," said Rachel faintly, as it were submissively, with no sign of irritation against him.
With their air of worldliness and mature wisdom they twittered on like a couple of sparrows—inconsequently, capriciously; and nothing that they said had the slightest originality, weight, or importance. But they both thought that their conversation was full of significance; which it was, though they could not explain it to themselves. What they happened to say did not matter in the least. If they had recited the Koran to each other the inexplicable significance of their words would have been the same.
Rachel faced him again, leaning her hands behind her on the table, and said with the most enchanting, persuasive friendliness—
"I wasn't frightened—truly! I don't know why I looked as though I was."
"You mean about the revolver—in the sitting-room?" He jumped nimbly back after her to the revolver question.
"Yes. Because I'm quite used to revolvers, you know. My brother had one. Only his was a Colt—one of those long things."
"Your brother, eh?"
"Yes. Did you know him?"
"I can't say I did," Louis replied, with some constraint.
Rachel said with generous enthusiasm—
"He's a wonderful shot, my brother is!"
Louis was curiously touched by the warmth of her reference to her brother. In the daily long monotonous column of advertisements headed succinctly "Money" in theStaffordshire Signal, there once used to appear the following invitation: "WE NEVER REFUSEa loan to a responsible applicant. No fussy inquiries. Distance no objection. Reasonable terms. Strictest privacy. £3 to £10,000. Apply personally or by letter. Lovelace Curzon, 7 Colclough Street, Knype." Upon a day Louis had chosen that advertisement from among its rivals, and had written to Lovelace Curzon. But on the very next day he had come into his thousand pounds, and so had lost the advantage of business relations with Lovelace Curzon. Lovelace Curzon, as he had learnt later, was Reuben Fleckring, Rachel's father. Or, more accurately, Lovelace Curzon was Reuben Fleckring, junior, Rachel's brother, a young man in a million. Reuben, senior, had been for many years an entirely mediocre and ambitionless clerk in a large works where Julian Maldon had learnt potting, when Reuben, junior (whom he blindly adored), had dragged him out of clerkship, and set him up as the nominal registered head of a money-lending firm. An amazing occurrence! At that time Reuben, junior, was a minor, scarcely eighteen. Yet his turn for finance had been such that he had already amassed reserves, and—without a drop of Jewish blood in his veins—possessed confidence enough to compete in their own field with the acutest Hebrews of the district. Reuben, senior, was the youth's tool.
In a few years Lovelace Curzon had made a mighty and terrible reputation in the world where expenditures exceed incomes. And then the subterranean news of the day—not reported in theSignal—was that something serious had happened to Lovelace Curzon. And the two Fleckrings went to America, the father, as usual, hypnotized by the son. And they left no wrack behind save Rachel.
It was at this period—only a few months previous to the opening of the present narrative—that the district had first heard aught of the womenfolk of the Fleckrings. An aunt—Reuben, senior's, sister, it appeared—had died several years earlier, since when Rachel had alone kept house for her brother and her father. According to rumour the three had lived in the simplicity of relative poverty, utterly unvisited except by clients. No good smell of money had ever escaped from the small front room which was employed as an office into the domestic portion of the house. It was alleged that Rachel had existed in perfect ignorance of all details of the business. It was also alleged that when the sudden crisis arrived, her brother had told her that she would not be taken to America, and that, briefly, she must shift for herself in the world. It was alleged further that he had given her forty-five pounds. (Why forty-five pounds and not fifty, none knew.) The whole affair had begun and finished—and the house was sold up—in four days. Public opinion in the street and in Knype blew violently against the two Reubens, but as they were on the Atlantic it did not affect them. Rachel, with scarcely an acquaintance in the world in which she was to shift for herself, found that she had a streetful of friends! It transpired that everybody had always divined that she was a girl of admirable efficient qualities. She behaved as though her brother and father had behaved in quite a usual and proper manner. Assistance in the enterprise of shifting for herself she welcomed, but not sympathy. The devotion of the Fleckring women began to form a legend. People said that Rachel's aunt had been another such creature as Rachel.
Hence the effect on Louis, who, through his aunt and his cousin, was acquainted with the main facts and surmises, of Rachel's glowing reference to the vanished Reuben.
"Where did your brother practise?" he asked.
"In the cellar."
"Of course it's easier with a long barrel."
"Is it?" she said incredulously. "You should see my brother's score-card the first time he shot at that new miniature rifle-range in Hanbridge!"
"Why? Is it anything special?"
"Well, you should see it. Five bulls, all cutting into each other."
"I should have liked to see that."
"I've got it upstairs in my trunk," said she proudly. "I dare say I'll show you it some time."
"I wish you would," he urged.
Such loyalty moved him deeply. Louis had had no sisters, and his youthful suburban experience of other people's sisters had not fostered any belief that loyalty was an outstanding quality of sisters. Like very numerous young men of the day, he had passed an unfavourable judgment upon young women. He had found them greedy for diversion, amazingly ruthless in their determination to exact the utmost possible expensiveness of pleasure in return for their casual society, hard, cruelly clever in conversation, efficient in certain directions, but hating any sustained effort, and either socially or artistically or politically snobbish. Snobs all! Money-worshippers all!... Well, nearly all! It mattered not whether you were one of the dandies or one of the hatless or Fletcherite corps that lolled on foot or on bicycles, or shot on motor-cycles, through the prim streets of the suburb—the young women would not remain in dalliance with you for the mere sake of your beautiful eyes. Because they were girls they would take all that you had and more, and give you nothing but insolence or condescension in exchange. Such was Louis' judgment, and scores of times he had confirmed it in private saloon-lounge talk with his compeers. It had not, however, rendered the society of these unconscionable and cold female creatures distasteful to him. Not a bit! He had even sought it and been ready to pay for that society in the correct manner—even to imperturbably beggaring himself of his final sixpence in order to do the honours of the latest cinema. Only, he had a sense of human superiority. It certainly did not occur to him that in the victimized young men there might exist faults which complemented those of the parasitic young women.
And now he contrasted these young women with Rachel! And he fell into a dreamy mood of delight in her.... Her gesture in lighting his cigarette! Marvellous! Tear-compelling!... Flippancy dropped away from him.... She liked him. With the most alluring innocence, she did not conceal that she liked him. He remembered that the last time he called at his aunt's he had remarked something strange, something disturbing, in Rachel's candid demeanour towards himself. He had made an impression on her! He had given her the lightning-stroke! No shadow of a doubt as to his own worthiness crossed his mind.
What did cross his mind was that she was not quite of his own class. In the suburb, where "sets" are divided one from another by unscalable barriers, she could not have aspired to him. But in the kitchen, now become the most beautiful and agreeable and romantic interior that he had ever seen—in the kitchen he could somehow perceive with absolute clearness that the snobbery of caste was silly, negligible, laughable, contemptible. Yes, he could perceive all that! Life in the kitchen seemed ideal—life with that loyalty and that candour and that charm and that lovely seriousness! Moreover, he could teach her. She had already blossomed—in a fortnight. She was blossoming. She would blossom further.
Odd that, when he had threatened to pull out a revolver, she, so accustomed to revolvers, should have taken a girlish alarm! That queer detail of her behaviour was extraordinarily seductive. But far beyond everything else it was the grand loyalty of her nature that drew him. He wanted to sink into it as into a bed of down. He really needed it. Enveloped in that loving loyalty of a creature who gave all and demanded nothing, he felt that he could truly be his best self, that he could work marvels. His eyes were moist with righteous ardour.
The cutlery reposed in a green-lined basket. She had doffed the apron and hung it behind the scullery door. With all the delicious curves of her figure newly revealed, she was reaching the alarm-clock down from the mantelpiece, and then she was winding it up. The ratchet of the wheel clacked, and the hurried ticking was loud. In the grate of the range burned one spot of gloomy red.
"Your bedtime, I suppose?" he murmured, rising elegantly.
She smiled. She said—
"Shall you lock up, or shall I?"
"Oh! I think I know all the tricks," he replied, and thought, "She's a pretty direct sort of girl, anyway!"