absolutely unscrupulous, and he regularly bled the poor little woman.
Once her husband commented on her shabby hat, offered to raise her
allowance, and gave her five sovereigns to go on with. The yellow coins
dropped like burning blood into her palm. Twice a week she met Kinsman
in the lane--Kinsman, shabby and dissolute and a blackmailer. I don’t
know what he had been up to in those four years, something queer, no
doubt. He was always a bit of an enigma. He cleaned her out at last.
She had to tell him that she could not give him another penny. It was
in the lane as usual. A wet, sodden October afternoon. The sky was gray
and unrelenting, like Kinsman’s face. When they parted, after a piteous
scene on her part, it was on the understanding that he would come to
the house that night and give her husband those letters. That was all.
On her way home she met one or two people--her best friends. They
chatted a bit of little social things--the hockey ball, a wedding, to
which she had not been asked, some new people at a house on the hill,
on whom nobody had yet called.
That afternoon she did not change her dress, but went indoors and threw
herself on the drawing-room sofa in her short, bicycling skirt. In
front of the window she faced was a cherry tree, its boughs bent by the
wind and its long, dry leaves floating yellow to the grass. She tried
to form her plans. Would Dick turn her out that night? It was beginning
to rain; inside, the fire was cheery. The room had never looked so
nice. Her wild eyes roved over her little cherished gimcracks on the
tables--the dainty rubbish that housekeepers accumulate and love. When
she heard wheels outside she did not rise. She was afraid. Perhaps
Kinsman had stopped the trap on the way from the station. But Dick came
in and gave her the usual temperate kiss and asked in the usual hearty
way how the youngsters were and whether dinner was going to be
punctual. He sat sprawling in slippers and an old coat by the fire,
saying comfortably what a rough night it was and how the wind had
lashed into his eyes as he drove home.
She turned on her cushions and watched him. He was growing fat and
bald--there were prosperous, uninteresting curves all over him. He had
ripened into a flourishing business man who liked his dinner and a good
cigar, who considered his wife as one of his comforts--and very little
more. But she loved him. How she loved him! Would he send her away that
night?
He was mumbling sleepily that it was not fit weather in which to turn a
dog out. Would he turn her out? Would he let her take the baby?
She stared out at the autumn sky and tossing trees; in, at the
firelight chasing round the warm, picture-loaded walls. Where would
to-morrow find her? To-morrow she would be an outcast.
All the time her ears were pricking for the door bell and, when it
clanged, she started to her feet, with a choking sound in her dry
throat. Her face was clay above the severe line of her rigidly cut
cloth bodice. The bell rang again. She got up and almost crawled
toward that deep chair by the fire and kissed her husband--a kiss of
relinquishment. He patted her hair and looked at her in lazy surprise.
Then he said in a voice of mild irritation:
“That can’t be Crook” (he was the curate). “He said he’d look in one
night for a game of chess. But I didn’t ask him to dinner, and he
surely wouldn’t turn out in such weather. I hope it isn’t Crook. I want
to do some work to-night.”
He glanced at his black bag, which was bloated with papers which he had
brought from the City.
Mrs. Conifer looked at it too--resentfully. She was thinking, with her
woman’s logic, that it was this ardent devotion to business on her
husband’s part which had made her drift. If he had not, in the Russell
Square days, brought home that bag so often, she would not be in such a
pitiable plight to-night. There was a hurried opening of doors
downstairs, voices in the hall, then a sharp report and another.
Mrs. Conifer shrieked. Her husband pulled himself out of the depths of
the chair and rushed downstairs. Presently she stole after him,
her legs like lead and her wild heart thumping in her throat.
The hall was brightly lighted with a red and yellow light, filtering
through colored glass lanterns. Face downward on the tesselated floor
was the body of a man, his prone head in a pool. The door was flung
back. Black night outside and the sob of the wind!
Two men, the gardener and another, lifted something from the step and
carried it in. Mrs. Conifer dragged herself forward. The world swung
round with her--they were bringing in another woman. They stretched her
beside the man--a woman with the wreck of a gaudy black beauty. It was
a face which Mrs. Conifer had seen once--in the doorway of the Inn, the
face of Sophia Dominy, her savior.
The servants were telling Dick how it happened. Kinsman had called and
asked for him. The woman must have been close behind. As he stepped
across the threshold she fired, then turned the weapon to her own head.
Kinsman was always a puzzle. What had he been doing in the intervening
four years? How had he disgraced himself? Had Sophia been with him
all the time? No one will ever know. One thing only is certain; that
Sophia, who was a very jolly, good sort of girl, had been bitterly
jealous of Mrs. Conifer.
Dead eyes blankly regarding her; blood circling sluggishly on the
floor; October wind moaning in and lifting sadly the draggled end of
smartness on the poor girl’s dress!
She lost all control, drew her shaking hands from her breast, and gave
a long cry of horror and despair. She couldn’t even be grateful for her
escape--couldn’t realize it. Dick turned. He saw her there for the
first time. He put an arm about her and led her upstairs--to the
firelit room, with the open piano, the bowls of autumn flowers, and the
pleasant litter of magazines. She flung herself into his arms, choking
with emotion.
“My God!” she gasped--suddenly, horribly vehement for so childish and
dainty a creature--“if--if--if----”
She was on the verge of a confession, but Dick’s trust was so complete
that he thought her merely hysterical--as well she might be. He lifted
her distorted face from its burrow in his coat and put his wife with
tender insistence on the sofa.
“There, there,” he said, patting her softly. “Don’t you give way. It’s
a beastly business. What the deuce could poor Kinsman have wanted with
me? I must go, dearie; there is a great deal to be arranged. I’ll send
one of the maids to look after you.”
“No,” she cried sharply, “I want to be alone.”
He kissed her and went away. After a little she heard him leave the
house. Then the baby wailed in the room above and the nurse crooned it
quiet. She heard the tramp of feet in the hall; heard the study door
shut stealthily, and guessed what this dread, subdued bustle meant.
She got up stiffly and went round and round the room, taking up
every little toy from the tables thoughtfully, arranging mats and
flowers--touching everything with a wistful clinging because it had
been spared to her. And then she suddenly remembered--remembered that
she was not quite safe yet.
Everything downstairs was still. She stole to the door and listened.
Then she pattered out onto the landing, stooped down, and taking
off her slippers carried them in her hand. She crept down the
stairs--cursing the steady tick of the tall clock, the rustle of her
silk petticoat. She reached the study and waited outside the door for a
moment. She was gathering courage to save her honor. She turned the
handle at last. Someone had lighted the lamp--the reading lamp with the
green shade. It cast a faint yellowish flicker on the horrible shrouded
things that were stretched, side by side, on the big table.
In the drawer of that table Conifer kept a flask of brandy. She took it
out and tipped some of the blazing spirit down her throat. It nerved
her to peel the sheet from Kinsman’s face, to draw it lower, to thrust
her delicate hand, heavy with Conifer’s jewels, into the inner pocket
of the dead man’s coat and steal her letters.
Then she drew the sheet back--heart, hand, and head heavy with
recollection. All sorts of minor things flashed through her dizzy
head--things which had been romantic, daring, delightful at the
time--which she exaggerated now into deadly sins, never, never to be
wiped out. At Sophia she did not look. But her light blue eyes fixed on
Kinsman. His thin lips seemed to have taken a mocking curve--although
she had the best of the game. His mouth was shut forever and her
letters were back in her own possession. She tucked them into her
bodice, remembered to pick up her slippers from the floor, and stole
away.
There was a servant in the drawing room tending the fire; there was
another, as she could hear, busy in the bedrooms, preparing for the
night. But the nurse was downstairs and the nurseries were empty,
except for the sleeping children.
She crept in, looking furtively round the firelit walls. She went over
to the hearth, dug the unclean letters fiercely in, and watched them
burn. There was a little white frock airing on the guard. She took it
up in her hot hands and kissed it. Toys were all over the floor; one, a
fur monkey with one eye missing and the other fiery-red, seemed to
blink up malignantly--and as if it knew and would one day tell her
children.
She went into the night nursery and looked at two small heads and two
small bodies curled under flowery eider downs. The children were both
babies under three. There were toys here too and little socks that she
had knitted. These two rooms filled her with a wilder misery and terror
than she had known before, because she had been so near losing those
little heads on the pillows.
Heavy with shame, thinking of those two--_things_--below, she slipped
to the floor and tried to pray--for the souls of the dead and the peace
of the living. But her knees stiffened. She stumbled to her feet,
moaning. A grotesque memory beat in on her. She remembered the old
superstition--that no witch could shed a tear; that this was the
witches’ most bitter punishment. Well, here was hers. She could not
pray. She had sinned, but she had come through the fire. She was
faithful to Conifer with a double fervor. She had a high constancy and
love which the mere faithful wife, who has never been tempted, cannot
attain. Still--she must bear the burden--of an interlude--all her days.
* * * * *
She was out of sorts for a long time afterward--taking no interest in
her bees, her poultry,--they are rose-comb Andalusians, she told me
impressively,--or her children. The local doctor said that her nerves
were all wrong. He recommended raw eggs and a thorough change. Conifer
has brought her up to town. He has been taking her the round of the
theaters--French plays, farces--imagine her sitting through them! On
this, her first free night--he’s dining with a City company--she came
to me! came creeping through the Inn in the old way, because she
couldn’t help it.
What an impulsive, delightful, compromising fool a true woman is! I
only met her twice--for a minute, by accident--with Kinsman--and yet
she came to me to-night. Put herself absolutely in my power. I might
blackmail her as Kinsman did. I might tell Conifer. Fortunately for her
I shan’t.
She sat and talked, elaborated every detail, shredded every sensation,
just as Pray did. I wish these remorseful, perplexed, sinned against
and sinning people would not come to me. They shove their skeletons in
my face, rattling every bone, speaking of the past--always, always the
past--to a fellow who wants to keep young, who doesn’t feel his age.
MORTGAGED.
I HAVE told you about Kinsman--his china and oak, his flirtations--never
from the heart--his downfall and sorry end.
Poor Kinsman! Like most born bad lots he was a charming companion. If
it had not been for the apocryphal aristocratic connections to whom he
persistently alluded, he would have been perfect. He was so charmingly
enthusiastic over his curios; such a solemn enthusiasm--the only
earnest thing about him.
Yet over the affair of that one supreme curio he kept rigid silence. He
told me; but it was a couple of years later--when the Inn had ceased to
talk about Harrowsmith. A couple of years later! By then Kinsman had
lived down the first strength of his angry regret. He told me fully,
lovingly, sadly, opening out his passionate collector’s soul. He made
me understand the full virility of those odd emotions which had once
fired and wasted him.
Yes. He was silent enough while the affair was in progress. That odd,
weird, inanimate affair! How little any of us suspected the nature of
the struggle that was going on behind his constantly sported oak.
It was in this way. Let me begin, as he began, with his introduction to
the brown, burly god which gained possession of him.
Harrowsmith asked him to lunch one Saturday. After lunch he brought out
cigars; he had money and could afford them daily. To him cigar-smoking
was a habit, not an occasional indulgence.
The last course of the luncheon still stood on the table, which the two
men had pushed well back so that they might rest their feet upon the
fender. It was a hard March day; a day of penetrating wind. The
draughts licked under the door and danced between the carpet and the
shrunken boards. Outside in the square the only sound was the savage
“boo” of the young spring gale.
Harrowsmith’s fripperies--of photographs and gimcrack furniture in the
lightest and latest style--appeared meager in the ancient room of his
chambers--the little room with the heavily corniced ceiling and paneled
walls. These fripperies, which he considered showed taste, were in the
light of a personal affront to the solid oak cabinet against the wall
immediately opposite the fireplace. Kinsman, of course, found this
piece of furniture the only thing that he could look at with tolerance.
He had been invited to meet it--to give his expert opinion on it.
He kept turning his head and looking pityingly, covetously at it. He
felt sorry for it, set as it was among modern cabinet-making and garish
ornament. It was passing through a period of degradation, this stout
cabinet of oak which had lived most likely for a couple of centuries in
some manor house. He thought that it must surely feel its shame of
contact. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. Once he found himself
fancifully wishing that he wore blinkers like a horse so that he might
shut out Harrowsmith’s other effects.
“It’s beautiful, beautiful,” he sighed, shading his eyes with his hands
and staring straight at the wall. “It’s original, every bit, even the
cornice. I should like to know its history. If these old things could
only talk!”
“It’s all he left me. I expected a thousand at least,” grumbled
Harrowsmith.
Kinsman was still ardently drinking in the solid beauty of the
cabinet--with its linen-patterned panels. One never saw carving of that
pattern save on Tudor work. The thing was late Tudor. It was
unique--and yet this materialistic doctor was not satisfied. He gazed
at the glowing brown wood, at the slim posts supporting the upper
cupboard, at the cunning hinges of iron. Never had he thrown at a woman
so heart-whole a glance.
“I wish a rich uncle would leave me such a thing,” he sighed. “Why,
man, money won’t buy it. You may wait, you may search a lifetime, and
not find such a well-preserved specimen of the period.”
“Oh, yes, I know you have the old-oak craze. But I like smart, modern
stuff. I like pretty things about me. You understand? What would that
fetch at auction?”
Harrowsmith took the cigar out of his mouth and pointed it, with its
long, trembling tip of ash, toward the cabinet.
“Impossible to say. So much depends. But you surely wouldn’t sell it?”
“If I could get a good price. Why not?”
Kinsman had never before felt so deeply the disadvantages of poverty.
Fate, which had given him an unsuccessful father, which had chained him
to a clerk’s stool in a City office, had further cursed him with a fine
taste in art. He knew a good thing by instinct. He trifled with
_bric-à-brac_, with Chippendale; he had an eye for the voluptuous
coloring of the Empire period; but his best affections he reserved for
oak. All the rest was thin, unsatisfying. In oak, despite the poverty
which allowed him to criticise, but rarely to buy, he was a
connoisseur. He could tell--blindfold--by a caressing turn of his hands
about the different members, if a piece of oak furniture were original
or if it were some bastard thing built together from old wood for the
hoodwinking of people with money and a fashionable desire for the
antique. How savagely I’ve heard him disclaim against people of that
sort!
He got up. The slim pillars seemed to draw him--to wink and beckon and
plead.
“Why don’t you buy it off me?” Harrowsmith asked, idly watching him and
looking contemptuously amused.
He spoke with the carelessness of a man to whom money is not of
immediate moment. He wheeled round in his chair and took a long, sulky
look at the oak. It irritated him. It took up room. More than that, it
was reminiscent of disappointment. His Uncle Bob had always promised to
remember him in his will. He didn’t consider that a Tudor cabinet was
remembrance--enough.
“You shall have it for thirty pounds,” he said.
Kinsman did not answer. He grew pale. The hand that was running about
the rich wood twitched nervously.
Harrowsmith misunderstood his silence, and said, with slight asperity:
“Is that too much for you? To get rid of the thing I’ll say
twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five!” You may be sure there was a catch in Kinsman’s voice.
“It would be cheap at thirty. But you know that I could as easily raise
three hundred. How can a poor beggar save out of five pounds a week?”
Harrowsmith shrugged and said, “I shall get a dealer in. Can you
recommend one? You’re hand in glove with all those fellows. I hate the
thing. It’s too heavy. It dwarfs the room.”
Kinsman with his finger was tracing the panels. He threw a look of
desperation, of pleading even, at the oak, as if he thought that a
thing which had been so long in the world and had witnessed the
perplexities of so many generations was really sentient and could
suggest. As he looked, his cheeks flushed, his lips smiled, and his
whole attitude became suddenly _débonnaire._
He returned to the fire, walking ludicrously sideways, as if he were
afraid to take his eyes off the cabinet--the wise, resourceful cabinet.
It _had_ suggested. He suddenly remembered. He became confused, dizzy,
elated with remembrance. He could buy it--if not with coin of the
realm, with something equally marketable. Harrowsmith had said it was
marketable. He would buy it. Why not? Within his own body he carried
the means to buy--his own imperfect, freakish body!
“Do you remember,” he asked, in the hurried, jerky tones of a clock
that is out of gear, “the offer you once made me?”
Harrowsmith looked perplexed, and then his face lighted.
“To buy your body--yes.”
“Does it still hold good?”
The doctor stared. Then he laughed and poked the fire until the hot
light ran round the room, and, darting down the panels of the cabinet,
made it wink and beckon more than before.
“You didn’t like the idea,” he said at last.
“Your Uncle Bob hadn’t left you the cabinet then,” Kinsman reminded him
pointedly.
“That’s ingenious. I see, I see. You propose to sell yourself--for a
bit of wood.”
“I should be a fool if I didn’t. You want my body after I am dead
because it differs in some slight detail from other bodies, because,
dead, I shall be to you medical fellows a curio. That’s grim.”
“A curio, exactly--to use your own fanciful term,” said Harrowsmith,
professional enthusiasm lighting its cold taper in his eye. “And I, as
you know, have made a special study of the thorax. Are you really
serious?”
“Absolutely. I’ll give you my body when I’ve done with it if you’ll
give me the cabinet at once.”
Harrowsmith looked at his watch and jumped up.
“It’s not quite four,” he said. “Kent, the commissioner for oaths, on
the ground floor, has probably not gone. He stays late. You must sign a
document of some sort. He’ll draw it up. I like to have things in form.
In the event of your predeceasing me----”
“I’m yours. Yes; that’s all right. If I die first,” assented Kinsman
carelessly. He was amused and scornful in his turn at an interest which
was to him inexplicable.
He thought the doctor a fool. He was also positively grateful to his
singular thorax. Men with normal organs could not always afford Tudor
furniture. Over his enthusiastic face slid the expression of a personal
greeting as he gave a full look at the cabinet and saluted it.
“You’ve got a bargain,” Harrowsmith said. “You’ll be able to sell the
thing, when you are tired of it, at a profit.”
Kinsman winced. The first hint of shadow drew his brows together.
“Sell it! Why, I’d sell myself first. No joke intended. By Jove! I
_have_ sold myself.”
They both laughed--laughter that tripped and tumbled down the old, wide
stairs; laughter that was caught up by the rough wind outside and
carried--whither?
* * * * *
For some weeks Kinsman had his silent chuckle against Harrowsmith. He
told himself that this was mean and narrow. He struggled against his
jubilation and his contemptuous reflection that the doctor was a fool.
He tried to regard him as a fellow-enthusiast--with a different
objective. He wished to avoid the narrow outlook of the average
collector. He imagined that his flirtations with china, with Empire
lounges and candelabra, with the tapering legs of Chippendale chairs
had made him tolerant and broadly sympathetic. Evidently it was not so.
He looked at his cabinet; he thought of his eccentric thorax--which,
after all, Harrowsmith might never possess--and again, silently, in the
seclusion of his own rooms, he chuckled.
After dinner each night, as he sat and smoked, he stole frequent
moments for the cabinet. He jumped up now and then imagining that he
had discovered some new minute detail in the work. Or he opened the
doors and stuck his head far into the cavernous cupboards. They exhaled
an aromatic perfume. Perhaps some woman had once kept Eastern
embroideries there; this was a superficial speculation which he
afterward discarded as being unworthy and improbable. He finally
decided that it had been used as a linen press--linen folded away with
lavender; or a thrifty housewife had stored within choice apples. It
was the perfume of old orchards that teased his nostrils.
He tried to supply the cabinet with a history. Harrowsmith could tell
him nothing except that his Uncle Bob had bought it at a sale.
Sometimes he looked at it so long, so ardently, that he almost thought
he was on the point of drawing from the massive brown thing the secrets
of dead generations.
He could never tell me the exact momentous occasion when the first
faint chill of repugnance struck him. He did remember the night when,
as he came home tired from the City, and cast his eyes on the cabinet
as usual, it seemed insufficient for the first time. What was it, after
all, to make so much fuss about? Had he paid too great a price? Until
that moment he had never given one thought to the price.
In the evenings, smoking his cigarette, one hand loose on his knee, he
asked himself how that hand would look--dead. Involuntarily he
stiffened it. Perhaps it was the slowly rising horror in him which made
it appear whiter than it ever had been before. His hand! He was sorry
for it. His body! What an injustice he had done it. Had any man the
right to rob his body of the sanctity and superb solitude which come
after death? The meanest wretch living retained the right to that
majestic aloofness. He had mortgaged his. The first seeds of hate and
fear sprouted in his heart.
He dashed out of his chambers and went down Chancery Lane into Fleet
Street. He walked west to a theater. The play was a tragedy. As he sat
in the pit he laughed when the other people thrilled. He then looked in
amazement at the scandalized faces surrounding him.
He had left his chambers without casting a farewell look at the
cabinet, without murmuring some word of admiration. This had never
happened before. He became grave. He reproached himself. He was tender
with foolish little penitences--as one would be with a loved woman.
That night in his bed the grewsome fancy seized him to lie straight and
still, hands folded and chin well up. That’s how he would lie when he
was dead--the majesty of death. But in his case it would be a mere
tinsel majesty--like the amusingly solemn antics of a gypsy monarch. He
was not his own.
He got up and lit the light and smoked. He was ashamed of himself. He
was afraid of himself, and of Harrowsmith and of the cabinet. They were
a dread trio, banded in a terrible way.