Mr. Corin was anxious to make his friend's visit to London as pleasant
as possible, and in zeal for the enjoyment of Zachary Trewhella to
impress him with the importance and knowingness of William John Corin.
By way of extirpating at once any feeling of solitude, he was careful to
invite Jenny and May to take tea with them on the afternoon following
Trewhella's arrival. The first-floor sitting-room, once in the
occupation of Mr. Vergoe, looked very different nowadays; and indeed no
longer possessed much character. Corin's decorative extravagance had
never carried beyond the purchase of those glassy photographs of City
scenes in which from a confusion of traffic rise landmarks like St.
Paul's or the Royal Exchange. These, destined ultimately to adorn the
best parlor of his Cornish home, were now propped dismally against the
overmantel, individually obscured according to the vagaries of the
servant's dusting by a plush-bound photograph of Mr. Lloyd George. The
walls of the room were handed over to wall-paper save where two prints,
billowy with damp, showed Mr. Gladstone looking at the back of Mr.
Spurgeon's neck over some tabulated observations on tuberculosis among
cows.
Zachary Trewhella did more than share his friend's sitting-room: he
occupied it, not so much actively, as by sheer inanimate force. To see
him sitting in the arm-chair was to see a bowlder flung down in a flimsy
drawing-room. He was a much older man than Corin, probably about
thirty-eight, though Jenny fancied he could not be less than fifty. His
eyes, very deep brown and closely set, had a twinkle of money, and the
ragged mustache probably concealed a cruel and avaricious mouth. His
hands were rough and swollen with work and weather: his neck was lean
and his pointed ears were set so far back as to give his high
cheek-bones over which the skin was drawn very taut a prominence of
feature they would not otherwise have possessed. He belonged to a common
type of Cornish farmer, a little more than fox, a little less than wolf,
and judged by mere outward appearance, particularly on this occasion of
ill-fitting broadcloth and celluloid collar, he would strike the casual
glance as mean of form and feature. Yet he radiated force continually
and though actually a small man produced an effect of size and power. It
was impossible definitely to predicate the direction of this energy, to
divine whether it would find concrete expression in agriculture or lust
or avarice or religion. Yet so vitally did it exist that from the moment
Trewhella entered Corin's insignificant apartment, the room was haunted
by him, and not merely the room, but Hagworth Street itself and even
Islington.
"Well, Zack," said Mr. Corin, winking at the two girls, and for effect
lapsing into broadest dialect. "What du'ee thenk o' Lonnon, buoy, grand
auld plaaece 'tis, I b'liv."
"I don't know as I've thought a brae lot about it," said Zack.
"He's all the time brooding about this right of way," Mr. Corin
explained.
Jenny and May were frankly puzzled by Trewhella. He represented to them
a new element. Jenny felt she had received an impression incommunicable
by description, as if, having been flung suddenly into a room, one were
to try to record the experience in terms of the underground railway.
The farmer himself did not pay any attention to either of the girls, so
that Jenny was compelled to gain her impression of him as if he were an
animal in a cage, funny or dull or interesting, but always remote. She
was content to watch him eat with a detached curiosity that prevented
her from being irritated by his deliberation, or, after noisy drinking,
by the colossal fist that smudged his lips dry.
"Ess," Trewhella announced after swallowing a large mouthful of
plum-cake. "Ess, I shall be brim glad when I'm back to Trewinnard. 'Tis
my belief the devil's the only one to show a Cornishman round London
fittee."
Mr. Corin laughed at this sardonic witticism, but said he was going to
have a jolly good try at showing Zack the sights of the town that very
night.
"You ought to take him to the Orient," May advised.
"By gosh, and that's a proper notion," said Corin, slapping his thigh.
"That's you and me to-night, Zack."
"What's the Orient?" inquired Trewhella.
"Haven't you never heard of the Orient?" Jenny gasped, her sense of
fitness disturbed by such an abyss of ignorance.
"No, my dear, I never have," replied Trewhella, and for the first time
looked Jenny full in the face.
"I dance there," she told him, "in the ballet."
The Cornishman looked round to his friend for an explanation.
"That's all right, boy," said Corin jovially. "You'll know soon enough
what dancing is. You and me's going there to-night."
Trewhella grunted, looked at Jenny again and said after a pause: "Well,
being in the city, I suppose we must follow city manners, but darn'ee, I
never thought to go gazing at dancing like maidens at St. Peter's Tide."
Corin chuckled at the easy defeat of the farmer's prejudice, and said he
meant to open old Zack's eyes before he went back to Cornwall, and no
mistake.
Soon after this the two girls left the tea-party, and while Jenny
dressed herself to go down to the theater, they discussed Mr. Z.
Trewhella.
"Did you ever hear anyone talk so funny. Oh, May, I nearly split myself
for laughing. Oh, he talks like a coon."
"I thought he talked like a gramaphone that wants winding up," said May.
"But what a dreadful thing to talk like that. Poor man, it's a shame to
laugh at him, though, because he can't help it." Jenny was twisting
round to see that no dust lay on the back of her coat.
"I wonder what he'll think of you dancing," May speculated. "But I don't
expect he'll recognize you."
"I think he will, then," contradicted Jenny as she dabbed her nose with
the powder-puff. "Perhaps you never noticed, but he looked at me very
funny once or twice."
"Did he?" said May. "Well, I'm jolly glad it wasn't me or I should have
had a fit of the giggles."
Presently, under the scud of shifting clouds, Jenny hurried through the
windy shadows of twilight down to the warm theater. When she was back in
the bedroom that night, May said:
"Mr. Trewhella's struck on you."
"What do you mean?"
"He is--honest. He raved about you."
"Shut up."
"He went to see you dance and he's going again to-morrow night and all
the time he's in London, and he wants you and me to go to tea again
to-morrow."
"I've properly got off," laughed Jenny, as down tumbled her fair hair,
and with a single movement she shook it free of a day's confinement.
"Do you like him?" May inquired.
"Yes, all right. Only his clothes smell funny. Lavingder or something. I
suppose they've been put away for donkey's years. Well, get on with it,
young May, and tell us some more about this young dream."
"You date," laughed her sister. "But don't make fun of the poor man."
"Oh, well, he is an early turn, now isn't he, Maisie? What did dad say
to him?"
"Oh, dad. If beer came from cows, dad would have had plenty to say."
"You're right," agreed Jenny, standing rosy-footed in her nightgown. She
gave one critical look at her image in the glass, as if in dreams she
meant to meet a lover, then put out all lights and with one leap buried
herself in the bedclothes.
On the following afternoon during tea Mr. Trewhella scarcely took his
eyes off Jenny.
"Well, how did you enjoy the ballet?" she inquired.
"I don't know so much about the ballet. I was all the time looking for
one maid in that great old magic lantern of a place, and when I found
her I couldn't see her so well as I wanted. But, darn'ee, I will
to-night. William John!"
"Zack!"
"William John, if it do cost a golden guinea to sit down along to-night,
we'm going to sit in they handsome chairs close up to the harmony."
"That's all right, boy," chuckled Corin. "We'll sit in the front row."
"That's better," sighed Trewhella, much relieved by this announcement.
When Jenny said she must go and get ready for the theater, the farmer
asked if he might put her along a bit of the way.
"If you like," she told him. "Only I hope you walk quicker than what you
eat, because I shall be most shocking late if you don't."
Trewhella said he would walk just as quick as she'd a mind to; but Jenny
insured herself against lateness by getting ready half an hour earlier
than usual.
They presented a curious contrast, the two of them walking down Hagworth
Street. There was a certain wildness in the autumnal evening that made
Trewhella look less out of keeping with the city. All the chimneys were
flying streamers of smoke. Heavy clouds, streaked with dull red veins,
were moving down the sky, and the street corners looked very bare in the
wind. Trewhella stalked on with his long, powerful body bent forward
from crooked legs. His twisted stick struck the pavement at regular
intervals: his Ascot tie of red satin gleamed in the last rays of the
sunset. Beside him was Jenny, not much shorter actually, but seeming
close to him very tiny indeed.
"Look, you maid," said Trewhella when, after a silent hundred yards,
they were clear of the house, "I never seed no such a thing as your
dancing before. I believe the devil has gotten hold of me at last. I sat
up there almost falling down atop of 'ee? Yet I'm the man who's sat
thinking of Heaven ever since I heard tell of it. Look, you maid, will
you be marrying me this week and coming home along back to Cornwall?"
"What?" cried Jenny. "Marry you?"
"Now don't be in a frizz to say no all at once. But hark what I do tell
'ee. I've got a handsome lill farm set proper and lew-- Bochyn we do call
it. And I've got a pretty lill house all a-shining wi' brass and all
a-nodding wi' roses and geraniums where a maid could sit looking out of
the window like a dove if she'd a mind to, smelling the stocks and
lilies in the garden and harking to the sea calling from the sands."
"Well, don't keep on so fast," Jenny interrupted. "You _don't_ think I'd
marry anyone I'd only just seen? And besides you don't hardly know me."
"But I do know you're the only maid for me, and I can't go back without
you. That's where it's to. When I've been preaching and sweating away
down to the chapel, when I've been shouting and roaring about the
glories of Heaven, I've all the time been thinking of maids' lips and
wondering how I didn't care to go courting. I'm going to have 'ee."
"Thanks," said Jenny loftily. "I seem to come on with the crowd in this
scene. I don't want to marry you."
"I don't know how you can be so crool-hearted as to think of leaving me
go back home along and whenever I see the corn in summer-time keep
thinking of your hair."
"But I'm not struck on you," said Jenny. "You're too old. Besides, it's
soppy to talk like that about my hair when you've never hardly seen it
at all."
Trewhella seemed oblivious to everything but the prosecution of his
suit.
"There's hundreds of maids have said a man was too old. And what is
love? Why, 'tis nothing but a great fire burning and burning in a man's
heart, and if 'tis hot enough, it will light a fire in the woman's
heart."
"Ah, but supposing, like me, she's got a fireproof curtain?" said Jenny
flippantly.
Trewhella looked at her, puzzled by this counter. He perceived, however,
it was hostile to his argument and went on more earnestly than before:
"Yes, but you wouldn't have me lusting after the flesh. I that found the
Lord years ago and kept Him ever since. I that showed fruits of the
Spirit before any of the chaps in the village. I that scat up two apple
orchards so as they shouldn't go to make cider and drunkenness. You
wouldn't have me live all my life in whorage of thoughts."
"Who cares what you do?" said Jenny, getting bored under this weight of
verbiage. "I don't want to marry."
"I've been too quick," said Trewhella. "I've been led away by my
preacher's tongue. But you'll see me there in front of 'ee to-night," he
almost shouted. "You'll see me there gazing at 'ee, and I don't belong
to be bested by nothing. Maid nor bullock. Good night, Miss Raeburn,
I'll be looking after William John."
"Good night," said Jenny pleasantly, relieved by his departure. "I'll
see you in front, then."
She thought as she said this how utterly inappropriate Trewhella and
Corin would look in the stalls of the Orient. She fancied how the girls
would laugh and ask in the wings what those strange figures could be. It
was lucky none of them were aware they lodged in Hagworth Street. What a
terrible thing it would be if it leaked out that such unnatural-looking
men, with such a funny way of talking, lodged at Jenny Pearl's. The
thought of the revelation made her blush. Yet Corin had not seemed
extraordinary before the arrival of his friend. It was Trewhella who had
infected them both with strangeness. He had an intensity, a dignity that
made him difficult to subdue with flippancy. He never seemed to laugh at
her retorts, and yet underneath that ragged mustache he seemed to be
smiling to himself all the time. And what terrible hands he had. More
like animals than hands. When Jenny caught his eye glinting down in the
stalls, she wished she were playing anything but an Ephesian flute-girl,
for Ephesian flute-girls, owning a happier climate, dressed very
lightly.
"He sat there looking me through and through," she told May, "till I
nearly run off to the side. He stared at me just like our cat stares at
the canary in the window next door."
"It's not a canary," May corrected. "It's a goldfinch."
"Now don't be silly, and shut up, you and your goldfinches. Who cares if
it's a parrot? You know what I mean. Tell me what I'm to do about Borneo
Bill."
May began to laugh.
"Well, he is. He's like the song."
On the next day Mr. Corin interviewed Jenny about the prospects of his
friend's suit.
"You know, Miss Raeburn, he's very serious about it, is Zack. He's
accounted quite a rich man down west. 'Tis his own farm freehold--and
he's asked Mr. Raeburn's permission."
"Well, that wins it!" Jenny proclaimed. "Asked my father's permission?
What for? What's it got to do with him who I marry? Thanks, I marry who
I please. What a liberty!"
Mr. Corin looked apologetic.
"I only told you that so as you shouldn't think there was anything funny
about it. I never saw a man so dead in earnest, and he's a religious
man, too."
"Well, I'm not," Jenny retorted. "I don't see what religion's got to do
with marrying."
"You come to think of it, Miss Raeburn, it's not such a bad offer. I
don't believe you could meet with a safer man than Zack. I suppose if
he's worth a dollar, he's worth three hundred pounds a year, and that's
comfortable living in Cornwall."
"But he's old enough to be my father," Jenny contended.
"He looks older than what he is," continued Mr. Corin plausibly.
"Actually he isn't much more than thirty-five."
"Yes, then he woke up," scoffed Jenny.
"No, really he isn't," Corin persisted. "But he's been a big worker all
his life. Thunder and sleet never troubled him. And, looking at it this
way, you know the saying, ''Tis better to be an old man's darling than a
young man's slave.'"
"But I don't like him--not in the way that I could marry him." Jenny had
a terrible feeling of battered down defenses, of some inexorable force
advancing against her.
"Yes; but you might grow to like him. It's happened before now with
maids. And look, he's willing for 'ee to have your sister to live with
you, and that means providing for her. What 'ud become of her if
anything happened to you or your father?"
"She could go and live with my sister Edie or my brother."
"Yes; but we all know what that may mean, whereas if she comes to live
with you, Zack will be so proud of her as if she were his very own
sister."
Jenny was staggered by the pertinacity of this wooing and made a slip.
"Yes; but when does he want to marry me?"
The pleader was not slow to take hold of this.
"Then you'll consider it, eh?"
"I never said so," Jenny replied in a quick attempt to retrieve her
blunder.
"Well, he wants to marry you now at once."
"But I couldn't. For one thing I couldn't leave the theater all in a
hurry. It would look so funny. Besides----"
"Well," Zack said, "Don't worry the maid, William John, but leave her to
find out her own mind and I'll bide here along till she do know it."
Mr. Corin dwelt on the magnanimity of his friend and having, as he
thought, made a skillful attack on Jenny's prejudice, retired to let his
arguments sink in. He had effected even more than he imagined by his
cool statement of the proposal. Put forward by him, devoid of all
passion and eccentricity of language, it seemed a very business-like
affair. Jenny began to think how such a step would solve the problem of
taking a new house, of moving the furniture, of providing for May, of
getting rid of her father, now daily more irritating on account of his
besotted manner of life. All the girls at the theater were marrying. It
was in the air. She was growing old. The time of romantic adventure was
gone. The carnival was petering out in a gloomy banality. Change was
imminent in every direction. Why not make a clean sweep of the old life
and, escaping to some strange new existence, create a fresh illusion of
pleasure? What would her mother have said to this offer? Jenny could not
help feeling she would have regarded it with very friendly eyes, would
have urged strongly its acceptance. Why, she had even been anxious for
Jenny to make a match with a baker; and here was a prosperous man, a
religious man, a steady man, inviting her to be mistress almost of a
country estate. She wished that Mr. Z. Trewhella were not so willing to
wait. It made him appear so sure, so inevitable. And the time for moving
was getting very near. Change was in the air. Jenny thought she would
sound May's views on the future in case of sudden accident or any
deliberate alteration of the present mode of life.
"Where would you live if I went away?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" said May, looking very much alarmed by the prospect,
and turning sharply on her pillow.
"I mean who would you live with? Alfie or Edie?"
"Neither," May affirmed emphatically.
"Why not?"
"Because I wouldn't."
This reply, however unsatisfactory it might have been to a logician, was
to Jenny the powerfullest imaginable.
"But supposing I got married?" she went on.
"Well, couldn't I live with you? No, I suppose I couldn't," said May
dejectedly. "I'm a lot of good, ain't I? Yes, you grumble sometimes, but
what about if you was like me?"
Jenny had always accepted May's cheerfulness under physical disability
so much as a matter of fact that a complaint from her came with a shock.
More than ever did the best course for May seem the right course for
Jenny. She recalled how years ago her mother had intrusted May to her
when a child. How much more sacred and binding was that trust now that
she who imposed it was dead.
"Don't get excited," said Jenny, petting her little sister. "Whatever I
done or wherever I went, you should come along of me."
May, not to display emotion, said:
"Well, you needn't go sticking your great knee in my back." But Jenny
knew by the quickness with which she fell asleep that May was happy and
secure.
"I'm going to have a rare old rout out this morning," Jenny announced
when she woke up to the sight of an apparently infinitely wet day, a
drench in a gray monotone of sky from dawn to nightfall.
About eleven o'clock the rout out began and gradually the accumulated
minor rubbish of a quarter of a century was stacked in various heaps all
over the house.
"What about mother's things?" May inquired.
"I'm going to put them all away in a box. I'm going through them this
afternoon," said Jenny.
"I've promised to go out and see some friends of mine this afternoon,"
said May. "So I'll leave them to you because they aren't tiring."
"All right, dear."
After dinner when her sister had gone out and Jenny, except for the
servant, was alone in the old house, she began to sort her mother's
relics. One after another they were put away in a big trunk still
plentifully plastered with railway labels of Clacton G.E.R. and
Liverpool Street, varied occasionally by records of Great Yarmouth.
Steadily the contents of the box neared the top with ordered layers of
silk dresses and mantles. Hidden carefully in their folds were old
prayer books and thimbles, ostrich plumes and lace. Jenny debated for a
moment whether to bury an old wax doll with colorless face and fragile
baby-robes of lawn--a valuable old doll, the plaything in childhood of
the wife of Frederick Horner, the chemist.
"I suppose by rights Alfie or Edie ought to have that," Jenny thought.
"But it's too old for kids to knock about. If they remember about it,
they can have it."
So the old doll was relegated to a lavendered tomb. "After all," thought
Jenny, "we wasn't even allowed to play with it. Only just hold it gently
for a Sunday treat."
Next a pile of old housekeeping books figured all over in her mother's
neat thin handwriting were tied round with a bit of blue ribbon and put
away. Then came the problem of certain pieces of china which Mrs.
Raeburn when alive had cherished. Now that she was dead Jenny felt they
should be put away with other treasures. These ornaments were vital with
the pride of possession in which her mother had enshrined them and
should not be liable to the humiliation of careless treatment.
At last only the contents of the desk remained, and Jenny thought it
would be right to look carefully through these that nothing which her
mother would have wished to be destroyed should be preserved for
impertinent curiosity. The desk smelt strongly of the cedar-wood with
which it was lined, and the perfume was powerfully evocative of the
emotions of childish inquisitiveness and awe which it had once always
provoked. Here were the crackling letters of the old Miss Horners, and
for the first time Jenny read the full history of her proposed adoption.
"Good job that idea got crushed," she thought, appalled by the profusion
of religious sentiment and half annoyed by their austere prophecies and
savage commentaries upon the baby Jenny. In addition to these letters
there was a faded photograph of her parents in earliest matrimony and
another photograph of someone she did not recognize--a man with a heavy
mustache and by the look of his clothes prosperous.
"Wonder who he was," Jenny speculated. "Perhaps that man who was struck
on her and who she wouldn't go away with." This photograph she burned.
Suddenly, at the bottom of the packet of letters, Jenny caught sight of
a familiar handwriting which made her heart beat with the shock of
unexpected discovery.
"However on earth did that come there?" she murmured as she read the
following old letter from Maurice.
422 G. R.
Friday.
My little darling thing,
I've got to go away this week-end, but never mind, I shall see you
on Tuesday, or anyway Wednesday for certain. I'll let you know at
the theater. Good night, my sweet one. You know I'm horribly
disappointed after all our jolly plans. But never mind, my dearest,
next week it will be just as delightful. 422 kisses from Maurice.
The passion which had once made such sentences seem written with fire
had long been dead. So far as the author was concerned, this old letter
had no power to move with elation or dejection. No vestige even of
fondness or sentiment clung to this memorial of anticipated joy. But why
was it hidden so carefully in her mother's desk, and why was it crumpled
by frequent reading? And how could it have arrived there in the
beginning? It was written in February after Jenny had left home. She
must have dropped it on one of her visits, and her mother finding it
must have thought there was something behind those few gay words. Jenny
tried to remember if she had roused the suspicion of an intrigue by
staying for a week-end with some girl friend. But, of course, she was
away all the time, and often her mother must have thought she was
staying with Maurice. All her scruples, all her care had gone for
nothing. She had wrecked her love to no purpose, for her mother must
have been weighed down by the imagination of her daughter's frailty. She
must have brooded over it, fed her heart with the bitterness of
disappointment and, ever since that final protest which made Jenny leave
home, in gnawing silence. Jenny flung the letter into the fire and sat
down to contemplate the dreadful fact that she had driven her mother
slowly mad. These doctors with their abscess were all wrong. It was
despair of her daughter's behavior which had caused it all. She went
into the kitchen and watched the servant wrestle inadequately with her
work, then wandered back to the parlor and slammed the lid of the trunk
down to shut out the reproach of her mother's possessions. It was
growing late. Soon she must get ready to start for the theater. What a
failure she was! The front door bell rang and Jenny, glad of relief from
her thoughts, went to open it. Trewhella, wringing wet, stepped into the
passage.
"Why, Miss Raeburn," he said, "here's a grand surprise."
"Have you had your tea?" the hostess inquired.
"Ess, had tea an hour ago or more. Dirty weather, 'tis, sure enough."
He had followed her into the parlor as he spoke, and in the gray gloom
he seemed to her gigantic and like rock immovable.
"Finished your business?" she asked, oppressed by the silence which
succeeded his entrance.
"Ess, this right of way is settled for good or bad, according to which
one's happy. And now I've got nothing to do but wait for your answer."
The lamplighter's click and dying footfall left the room in a ghostly
radiance, and the pallid illumination streaming through the lace
curtains threw their reflection on the walls and table in a filigree of
shadows.
"I'll light the gas," said Jenny.
"No, don't; but hark to what I do say. I'm regular burnt up for love of
'ee. My heart is like lead so heavy for the long waiting. Why won't 'ee
marry me, my lovely? 'Tis a proper madness of love and no mistake. Maid
Jenny, what's your answer?"
"All right. I will marry you," she said coldly. "And now let me turn on
the gas."
She struck a match, and in the wavering glow she saw his form loom over
her.
"No," she half screamed; "don't kiss me. Not yet. Not yet. People can
see through the window."
"Leave 'em stare so hard as they've a mind to. What do it matter to we?"
"No, don't be silly. I don't want to start kissing. Besides, I must run.
I'm late for the theater."
"Darn the theater. You don't want to go there no more."
"I must give a fortnight's notice."
Mr. Z. Trewhella, a little more than fox, perceived it would not take
much to make her repudiate her promise and wisely did not press the
point.
"Will I putt 'ee down along a little bit of the road?" he asked.
"No, no. I'm in a hurry. Not to-night."
Presently, in the amber fog that on wet nights suffuses the inside of a
tram, Jenny rode down towards the Tube station, picturing to herself her
little sister in a garden of flowers.