"ONE OF THE BEST THINGS LEFT."
The chambers in Jermyn Street occupied by Rupert Mernside, had a
character which seemed to reflect their owner. Perhaps all rooms in a
more or less degree are reflections of those who live in them: human
beings, whether consciously or unconsciously, stamp their personalities
upon their surroundings, and create their distinctive atmospheres, even
in hired lodgings. Rupert's rooms, filled as they were with the
furniture he had from time to time picked up, the walls hung with
pictures his fastidious taste had chosen, the bookcases filled with his
own special collection of books, were, to those with eyes to see, a
mirror of their master's nature. Simplicity was the keynote of the
whole. There were no expensive hangings, no luxurious rugs or heavily
upholstered chairs and couches; there was nothing of what Mernside
himself would have described as "frippery," nothing effeminate or
over-dainty. Matting, with here and there a soft-coloured rug, covered
the floor of the sitting-room; the walls, tinted a pale apricot yellow,
were hung with water-colour sketches, each one of which bore the mark
of a master hand; the bookcases were of carved oak, as were the one or
two tables, whilst the chairs, of a severely simple pattern, and even
the few armchairs, spoke rather of solid comfort, than of any undue
luxury. Upon the breakfast table, pushed near the window, stood a bowl
of chrysanthemums, touched into jewelled beauty by a faint ray of
November sunlight. Seeing the sunlight on the rich coloured blossoms,
Rupert smiled, as he entered the sitting-room a week after his return
from Bramwell Castle. It was not his habit to fill his rooms with
flowers: he had a fancy that such a custom savoured of womanishness;
but Cicely, his pretty little cousin, had rifled the greenhouse for him
with her own hands, and Cicely's fashion of giving would have made even
a dandelion a charming and acceptable gift.
Mernside was early that morning, and he had seated himself in front of
the silver coffee-pot and covered dishes, before Courtfield, his
irreproachable servant, brought in the letters.
"Good Lord, man!" his master exclaimed, as the salver was handed to
him, "those letters can't possibly all be for me," and he eyed the huge
pile with the disfavour of one who regards a letter merely as a rather
tiresome piece of business, which must perforce be answered.
"Well, sir, I should gather they were all for you," Courtfield answered
respectfully, whilst his master gathered the packet of envelopes into
his two hands. "I thought myself at first that there must be some
mistake, seeing that they are only addressed in initials. But the
number is correct, sir."
"By Jove!" Mernside exclaimed, gazing with stupefied eyes at the
unprecedented batch of correspondence, and observing that every letter
bore the initials only, "R.M.," and had been forwarded to him from a
newspaper office.
Courtfield noiselessly left the room, but his master's coffee remained
in the pot, and his breakfast untasted, whilst he sat and stared with a
petrified stare at the pile of unopened letters, with their
extraordinarily unfamiliar address. A dusky flush mounted to his
forehead, and he turned over one of the letters distastefully, as
though its very touch were odious to him.
"I am not in the habit of being addressed by initials only," he
muttered, "nor of corresponding through newspapers; the wretched things
are probably not meant for me at all--unless it's some confounded
hoax," he added, after a pause, at the same moment tearing open the top
letter of the pile, one addressed in an untidy, uneducated handwriting.
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, pushing back his chair, and staring down
at the letter he unfolded, with the disgusted stare of one who sees
something unexpectedly horrible, "is the woman mad? or am I
mad?--or--what does it mean?"
His eyes travelled quickly down the written page, the large, sprawling
writing imprinting itself upon his brain.
"DEAR SIR" (so the epistle ran),--
"Having seen your advertisement in yesterday's _Sunday Recorder_, I beg
to say that I should be pleased to enter into correspondence with
you--with a view to meeting, etc. Am twenty-one, tall, and said to be
elegant. Some call me pretty. Have large blue eyes, fair hair, and a
good complexion. Am domesticated and sweet-tempered. Would send
photograph if desired.
"Yours truly, ROSALIE."
"PS.--Should be pleased to cheer your loneliness."
Mernside read this effusion to the end; then one word only, and that a
forcible one, broke from his lips, and with grimly-set mouth, and eyes
grown suddenly steely, he began to open and read one after another of
the other letters, his expression becoming sterner and more grim as he
laid each one down in turn.
"My opinion of women is not enhanced by my morning's correspondence,"
he reflected cynically, during the course of his reading; "could one
have believed there were so many silly women in the world--or so many
plain ones?" and with a short laugh he picked up two photographs, and
looked with scornful scrutiny at the wholly unattractive features of
the ladies of uncertain age, and quite certain lack of beauty. Before
he had waded half through the packet of letters, his table was strewn
with his correspondence, and the look on his face was one, which, as
his best friends would have known, indicated no amiable frame of mind.
"Domesticated." "Would make a lonely man intensely happy." "Only long
for a quiet home such as you suggest."
"Such as I suggest--_I_!" Mernside looked wildly round him. "Do I
appear to be in search of a quiet home?" he exclaimed, apostrophising
the pictures on the walls; "do I want a domesticated female? 'Am
considered pretty'--oh, are you, my good young woman? You can't write
a civilised letter, that's certain. 'I have a slender income of my
own--amply sufficient for my modest wants--but I gather you do not
require a fortune with the lady--only a companion for your loneliness.'
"A fortune with the lady? I don't require the lady, thank you," Rupert
soliloquised, picking, out sentences from the letters as he read them,
and flung them one by one upon the pile. "'I have been lonely for so
_long_ myself, that I can _fully_ understand what a lonely man feels.
I am no longer in my first youth, but I have a heart _overflowing_ with
tenderness. Your happiness would be my first, my only care, etc., etc.'
"Pshaw--what tommy rot!
"'All my friends say I am cheerful. I have often been called a little
ray of sunshine'"--Rupert lay back in his chair, and shouted with
sudden laughter. "'I would make your home a heaven of bliss.'"
"Oh! Good lord! Good lord!" quoth the unhappy reader, "who in
heaven's name has played this confounded practical joke upon me? And
what am I to do with these abominable letters and photographs? I
should like to burn the lot!--but oh! hang it all, the silly women have
taken some rotten hoax for earnest, and"--he paused, as though struck
by a sudden recollection, then bounced out of his chair with a good
round expletive.
"That young ass, Jack Layton! I'll take my oath he was at the bottom
of this tomfoolery. Wasn't he reading some matrimonial humbug out
of--wait!--by Jove! it was the _Sunday Recorder_," and without more
ado, Mernside strode across the room and rang the bell.
"Get me a copy of the _Sunday Recorder_ of the day before yesterday, at
once," he said curtly, when Courtfield appeared. As soon as the man
had vanished, he returned to the table, gathered up the letters he had
read, and thrust them into the bureau near the fireplace; and by the
time Courtfield came back with the paper in his hand, his master was
decorously eating a poached egg, and deliberately opening the
nineteenth or twentieth letter of his morning mail.
There was little deliberation in his movements when, alone once more,
he feverishly turned the pages of the _Sunday Recorder_, until his eyes
fell on the words, "Matrimonial Bureau." Yes--there it was. The
wretched thing seemed to leap into sight as though it were alive, and
to his disordered vision the lines appeared to be twice the size of the
ordinary print.
"Quiet and cultivated gentleman of means, who is very lonely, is
anxious to meet a young lady of good birth who needs a home. No
fortune is necessary, but marriage may be agreed upon, if both parties
are mutually satisfied."
"Oh! may it indeed?" Mernside said scathingly, flinging the paper upon
the floor. "A young lady of good birth!" His thoughts went back to
the letters he had just been perusing, most of them ill-written, many
mis-spelt, some genteel, some sentimental--but all bearing the
unmistakable stamp of having been penned by the underbred and the
vulgar.
"A young lady of good birth." Again he reflected grimly, continuing to
eat his breakfast, and to open letter after letter mechanically,
expending over their contents a force of language which would greatly
have surprised the writers, could they have heard it. "Not one of
these good women has the most elementary conception what the word
'lady' means. No lady would be likely to answer such an
advertisement," his thoughts continued contemptuously, as he picked up
the last letter of the pile, and glanced idly at the writing of the
address. That writing held his attention; it was different from the
others; yes, it was certainly different. It did not sprawl; it was not
exaggerated or affected; it was merely a round, simple, girlish hand,
with unmistakable character in the well-formed letters and clean
strokes. And when he had drawn out the contents of the envelope, and
read them slowly, some of the grim lines about his mouth faded away, a
softer look came into his eyes.
"This is different," he said, "very different," and for the second time
he read the terse phrases.
"c/o Mrs. Cole, Newsagent,
"100, Cartney Street, S.W.
"DEAR SIR,--
"I should not have answered your advertisement, but that I cannot find
work. I need a home very much. If I could make things better for
somebody else who is lonely, I should be very pleased. I am not at all
pretty or clever, but I can cook a little, and I can sew.
"Yours truly, C.M.
"I am twenty."
"Poor little girl," Rupert murmured, "if this is genuine, I am sorry
for C.M. She is the only one of the lot who writes like a lady, and
the only one who does not suggest a meeting, or actually appoint a
meeting place. Those are points in her favour. But, had I ever any
intention of marrying, I should not make my matrimonial arrangements
through the medium of a newspaper!"
Each writer of the letters which had so disturbed Mernside at breakfast
time, received a few hours later a short note, and the wording of all
the notes was identical.
"DEAR MADAM,--
"I regret that both you and I should have been the victims of a hoax.
The advertisement in the _Sunday Recorder_ was inserted without my
knowledge or consent. Regretting any annoyance this may cause you.
"Yours faithfully, R.M."
But when, having laboured through the mass of "Rosalies," "Violets,"
"Lilians," and "Hildas," he finally reached the little note signed
"C.M.," Mernside paused.
"I--don't think I can let this little girl know she has been the victim
of a hoax," he mused, a pitiful tenderness creeping about his heart as
he thought of the girl who was without work or home; "the others are
fairly tough-skinned, I am ready to swear. This one"--he looked again
at the round, characteristic handwriting, the simple phrases--"this
one--did not make up her mind to write such a letter, excepting under
stress of circumstances, I am sure of that. This one--is different.
And if that incorrigible young ass, Jack Layton, hadn't started on a
yachting cruise last week, I--should jolly well like to give him a
thrashing."
Feeling the need, as he himself expressed it, of a balloon full of
fresh air after his distasteful occupation of the morning, Rupert went
out at about eleven o'clock, taking with him the pile of letters he had
to post.
"Can't leave them for Courtfield's inquisitive eyes," he muttered.
"Good chap as he is, Courtfield would think I had gone raving mad, if
he saw all these things addressed to Christian names and initials.
I'll get rid of the horrors, and then see if Margaret can take the
taste of them away from me."
The letters posted, he made his way briskly along Piccadilly, and
across the Park, to a quiet road in Bayswater, where he stopped before
a small detached house, standing a little back from the pavement, in
its own garden. His ring at the bell brought to the door a middle-aged
servant, whose plain but kindly face expanded into a smile when she saw
him. He was evidently a frequent and welcome visitor, for to his
cheery "Well, Elizabeth, how are things this morning?" she answered
with another smile--
"We've had a bad two days, sir, but Mrs. Stanforth is better now. She
is downstairs, sir," and, opening a door on the right of the tiny hall,
she ushered Rupert into a long narrow room, whose windows at either end
gave it an unusual look of brightness and sunshine. A piano took up a
large share of one wall, and over the piano hung some fine photographs
of Old Masters, chiefly of the Italian school. The fireplace was
flanked by bookshelves, and drawn close to one of these was a couch, on
which lay a woman of such rare and startling beauty, that Mernside,
familiar as her face was to him, caught his breath as he entered, and
for a moment stood still, looking silently down at her.
Her cheeks were very white, but it was the whiteness of a pure white
rose, and gave one no sense of ill-health, although there was about her
a certain air of fragility. Her hair, soft and dark, waved back from
her forehead in dusky masses, that made just the right background for
her exquisitely chiselled features, and for the eyes, that seemed to
concentrate in themselves all the loveliness of her face. They were
wonderful eyes--dark, deep, unfathomable--with a mystery in their
depths that enhanced their strange fascination. Those dark eyes with
their sweeping lashes, and the crimson line of her beautiful mouth,
were the only points of colour in her face, and as she turned her head
to greet the visitor, the gleam of light that shot into those eyes,
might well have turned a stronger head than Rupert's. Meeting her
glance, his pulses quickened, and his own eyes grew bright; but his
voice was very quiet, very self-contained, as he said--
"I am three days too soon--I know it, you need not tell me. But--I had
to come to-day."
She put one of her hands into his, but she did not move from her
prostrate position on the couch, and her visitor seated himself on a
low chair by her side, whilst she gently withdrew the hand he still
held, and said softly--
"Why especially to-day? You must not break through the stipulation,
Rupert. If there is a particular reason now--I--will forgive
you--but--we must keep to our bargain."
Gentle as was the voice, gentle as was the look in her eyes, a look of
almost maternal tenderness, there was evidence that behind the
tenderness, lay a most unusual strength of character. The woman with
the beautiful face, although she lay prone upon a sofa, and was
obviously an invalid, showed in her personality no trace of weakness.
Her eyes met the eyes of her visitor squarely and straightly, there was
almost a hint of severity in the set of her lips.
"Why did you come to-day?" she repeated, when he stirred uneasily in
his chair, and kicked away a footstool in front of him, with a touch of
irritability.
"When I begin to put it into words, it sounds a babyish reason; but
that jackanapes, Layton, has been playing an idiotic practical joke
upon me, and I--was fool enough to mind it. I wanted soothing down;
and--I wanted your advice about a girl."
"About--a girl--you!" A note of excitement was apparent in her
accents; she looked at him narrowly. "Has it--come--at last, Rupert?"
she questioned, and her quiet voice shook just a little.
"No--no--my God--_no_!" he exclaimed, "nothing of that sort is ever
likely to come into my life--again"--he uttered the last words under
his breath, and his eyes rested hungrily on her beautiful face--"there
is no question of--my caring for any girl--only--young Jack Layton has
made me responsible for what may make a perfectly innocent girl
unhappy." And forthwith he plunged into a full description of the
sheaf of letters received that morning, winding up with a mention of
the terse little letter signed "C.M." His listener's eyes twinkled
mischievously as he told the first part of his story in wrathful
accents, and over some of his quotations from the letters that had
reached him she laughed--a frank, delicious laugh that seemed oddly out
of keeping with the tragic mystery of her eyes. But as he described
that last letter, with its simple wording, her face grew grave again,
and when his voice ceased, she uttered the precise words that had
fallen from his own lips three hours earlier.
"Poor little girl--oh! poor little girl!"
"I am sorry for her," Mernside said impetuously, "and it doesn't seem
fair that she should perhaps suffer for that idiotic young fool's love
of practical jokes. Goodness knows what hopes she may have built upon
this letter, and upon me. Of course, I can't give her a home, and I
don't want to meet her--with a view to--anything. There is no place in
my life for women, even as friends. There is no place in my life for
more than--one woman," he ended vehemently.
"Hush!" she said softly. "Remember--you promised; and--if you break
your promise, I can't ever let you come here again."
"I know--I know!" he cried, with an impetuosity very foreign to his
usual self-control; "but, Margaret, is it to be like this always? Will
a time never come when you--when I----"
She put out her hand and laid it over one of his, with a firm touch
that had a curiously quieting effect upon him.
"You and I are great friends, as we have been for--longer than we care
to think. But--there could not ever be an idea between us of anything
else, not even the thought of such a thing. It is out of the question.
It always has been out of the question. You know that as well as I do,
and you must not come here at all, unless you can keep to our agreement
in spirit as well as in letter."
"Is our friendship nothing to you?" he asked sullenly.
"It is--so much to me--that I will not risk spoiling it for ever," she
said firmly; "but if you talk as you are talking now, I shall tell
Elizabeth I cannot see you."
"And you are putting up this fence between us, when--I might be some
comfort to you," he exclaimed, almost roughly, getting up as he spoke
to lean against the mantelpiece, and glower threateningly down at her,
"when every reasonable being would tell you that he----"
"Ah! hush!" she cried, and the sudden sharp anguish in her tones gave
him pause; "don't let us go into it all over again. Whilst I feel--as
I do feel--I must go on in the way I have marked out for myself, one
can only follow the right as one sees it. Besides which----"
"Besides which--his little finger is more to you than----"
"Ah! don't--_don't_!" she interrupted him again, her eyes darkening and
deepening with agony. "Rupert, I can't bear it; there are some things
I am not strong enough to bear."
"I was a brute," he said, his rough tone changing all at once into
caressing tenderness; "I let myself go--I was an utter brute. Forgive
me, dear--and--try to forget."
He sat down beside her again, and his face, which had shown the same
strong emotion that had rang in his words, resumed its quiet look of
strength. A great relief swept over the woman's beautiful features,
but she was shivering from head to foot, and in her eyes there still
lay a haunting anguish. With an effort--how great an effort only she
herself knew--she regained her self-control, and her voice, though
still shaken, was very gentle again.
"Tell me now about the poor little girl, and the matrimonial letter.
Can we put our heads together to devise any way of helping her?"
"I might conceivably get her some work," Rupert answered, "but people
are a little chary of engaging employees recommended by bachelors like
myself. Cicely might help her, but, first of all, I must find out if
she is genuine. I couldn't impose a stranger, even on Cicely,
good-natured, easy-going little soul that she is. And to find out
anything about this girl will entail--meeting her!"
Margaret Stanforth smiled.
"Poor Rupert!"
"I am not by way of making rendezvous with young women," he said with
sarcasm; "it is not a pastime in which I have ever indulged. At the
same time, I don't want to let a fellow creature go empty away, if I
could really help her."
"How would it be if you suggested her coming here? I could see her
too, and--two heads being better than one--we might be able to do
something really helpful. If the letter is sincere, it is obvious the
girl is not a mere husband hunter; she is at her wits' end, and--I
can't bear to think of any girl stranded in this great hungry London.
I myself"--she pulled herself up short, leaving her sentence
unfinished, then went on more quietly: "Write to C.M. and appoint a
meeting here. Say this is the house of a lady of your acquaintance,
ask her to come and see me--and incidentally to see you."
"It is like you to make such a suggestion about a total stranger,"
Rupert exclaimed, "but--she may turn out an entire fraud--an arrant
adventuress--and I could not be responsible for bringing such a person
here."
"Such a person! My dear Rupert, even if she were all the terrible
things you describe, I don't think she could hurt me. I have seen--so
much of the seamy side of life." For a moment Rupert looked at her
silently. Long as he had known her, Margaret Stanforth was still
largely an enigma to him, and it often seemed to him that the
mysterious depths of her eyes veiled mysteries of her life which he had
never fathomed.
"For my own sake, for this girl's sake, I should like to jump at your
offer," he said, after that long, searching look into her face,
"but----"
"There is no 'but,'" she put in gaily, a sudden smile momentarily
chasing away the sadness of her face. "Write a civil, non-committal
letter to C.M., and ask her, as I say, to come here. Surely, between
us, we can do something for this poor little waif and stray. Why not
fix to-morrow afternoon, at five o'clock? If the poor girl's need is
urgent, we ought not to delay."
"And--you forgive me for all I ought not to have said this morning,"
Rupert said when, ten minutes later, he rose to depart. "I--have not
hurt you?"
"No, you have not hurt me; but in future, you will remember--our
bargain? And there are some things--I can't bear."
Rupert Mernside walked slowly away from the house, his brain and heart
full of the woman he had just left, who, after his departure, lay back
amongst the silken cushions on her sofa, with a look of profound
exhaustion.
"There now, my dearie, you didn't ought to let him come and tire you
this way; you get worn out with him coming worrying." The faithful
Elizabeth had entered the room with a salver in her hand, and stood
looking into her mistress's white face, with distress written all over
her plain kindly features. Margaret opened her eyes, and smiled up
into the loving ones fixed upon her.
"No, he doesn't worry me; he is--a comfort, he helps me. Don't scold,
nursie dear; his friendship is one of the best things I have in
life--one of the best things I have left out of all the wreckage; but
to-day--he brought back some of the old memories, and--I--am so silly
still. They hurt; sometimes it all feels--unbearable."
The ring of almost uncontrollable pain in her voice, brought a spasm of
answering pain into the other's face, and she laid a work-roughened
hand tenderly upon the dusky head against the cushions. "There, my
dearie, there--there," she murmured, speaking as if her beautiful,
stately mistress were a little child; "there's nothing so hard in this
world but what it can be borne, if we look at it in the right way. The
strength comes along with the sorrow, and 'tis all for the best."
"Is it?" Into the dark eyes there flashed for a second a look of
bitterness, and then Margaret drew the other woman's hand down to her
lips, and kissed it. "I wish I had your simple straightforward faith,
dear old nurse of mine," she said wearily; "you are so sure things will
come right, and that what hurts us is for our good. And I--I can't
say, 'Thy will be done'; at least, I can't say it as if I meant it.
But what did you bring in on that salver?" she asked, after a moment of
silence, and with an effort at brightness.
"There, my pretty; I nearly forgot it after all. It came when I was
speaking to the butcher on the doorstep, and Mr. Mernside was here, so
I waited to bring it in till he was gone."
She had a purpose in lengthening her story, and chatting on garrulously
whilst Margaret opened the orange envelope, for the faithful creature
had seen the sudden dilation of her mistress's dark eyes, the whitening
of her lips; had seen, too, how her hands shook as they unfolded the
telegram.
"I don't understand it," Mrs. Stanforth whispered shakily, when her
eyes had scanned the few words before her. "I don't know what it
means--Elizabeth--but--I must go--I must go--at once."
The servant drew the flimsy paper from her trembling hands and read the
message, shaking her head in bewilderment, as the sense of it
penetrated to her brain.
"I'm sure I don't know what it means no more than you do, dearie," she
said.
"Graystone.
"Come at once; prepare for surprise.
"MARION."