When Rees re-entered the room, he found Deborah standing at the desk
examining the inkstand. It was quite dry.
“Ha! you’ve found me out,” he said, laughing. “Of course, I didn’t
really want you to dictate for me. One doesn’t waste the time of a
lovely girl like that. Come and sit by the fire and talk to me. We
have two hours before the old lady comes back.”
He put his arm round her, drew her to the fire, made her sit in the
arm-chair, from which he had risen, and placed himself on the
hearth-rug at her feet.
“Now,” he said, “we can talk.”
“Yes,” answered Deborah, who had been unusually grave and silent ever
since her arrival.
“I say,” he went on, looking up to examine her face with boldly
critical eyes, “you’ve changed a good deal, Deborah, surely.”
“Changed!” said she. “Have I ‘gone of,’ as they say?”
“No, it isn’t that exactly; but you seem to have grown older, more
staid, more demure. And--you dress differently, don’t you?”
“I’m not wearing the same things that I wore a year ago, of course. I
suppose you mean that I’m countrified beside the London ladies.”
“You’re much handsomer than they are, at any rate. I really think,
Deborah, without any joking, that you are the handsomest woman I’ve
ever seen.”
“Well, you have something more interesting than that to tell me, I
suppose. I want to know all about yourself; I’m not so submissive as
mamma, remember, and you can’t put me off as you can her.”
“No, I’m afraid you’re rather inclined to be strong-minded, Deb. No
need to ask whether you’re still heart whole and fancy free. No man
would ever have the courage to make up to you.”
“They have though; you will be surprised to hear that I’ve had two
offers, and that I refused them both because I was _not_ heart whole
and fancy free.”
Rees looked rather pleased. Grave, almost solemn as her manner was,
there was a tell-tale shyness in her glance, a marked maidenly reserve
about her actions, which told the already blasé young man that her
interest in him was as strong as ever.
“I can guess who the offers were from,” said he. “Godwin and Hervey.”
“No,” she said simply, “I didn’t count them.”
“Indeed, that’s flattering to us poor Pennants, to hear we don’t
count.”
Deborah said nothing to this.
“And in all this crowd of admirers, I suppose you never find time for
a thought of me? Being a Pennant, I suppose I don’t count either.”
“I think of you a great deal,” said Deborah quietly.
“And what is it you think of me? That you never want to see me again?”
he asked, leaning coaxingly against her knee.
“I think,” she said sorrowfully, “we never shall see the old Rees
again.”
“Did you care for the old Rees then?” asked the young man very softly,
with a tender inflection in his voice which was altogether new to her,
as he looked up into her face with pleading, passionate eyes.
The unsophisticated girl betrayed her secret altogether in a moment,
as her body began to tremble, her cheeks to flush, and her eyes to
fill. Rees at once seized his advantage. Crawling up to her side on
his knees, he put his arm round her waist and leaned his head against
her shoulder.
“Deb, Deb, you care for me still, don’t you, whether I’m good or bad,
whether I’m changed or not? If you knew that I wanted you, you’d come
to me, wouldn’t you, whatever they said? And you don’t care for
Godwin’s frigid love-making, or for Hervey’s virtuous homilies, but
you love your poor Rees through everything, don’t you, don’t you,
Deb?”
“Rees, you know that I love you,” whispered the girl passionately.
“And if I asked you to come up and live near me, you would, wouldn’t
you, Deb? If you knew that I was ill, and wanted your care and your
consolation? You wouldn’t leave me to the care of that cock-eyed old
lady who let you in, would you?”
“Oh, Rees, no! of course we wouldn’t. But if you are ill, why don’t
you come home and be nursed? We live comfortably now. I’m housekeeper,
and sometimes cook as well. And, oh! we should be so pleased and proud
to take you home again!”
Rees listened to this speech rather impatiently.
“My dear child,” he said, “I don’t feel inclined at present to settle
down to the old lady’s tea and toast and prayer meetings. One may end
in that, but it’s a little too early as yet. The fact is,” he went on
hurriedly, as he saw her face change, “that I couldn’t leave town just
now, however much I wished it. A man has his living to get, a career
to make, you know.”
“And you want us to come up and live in London?”
“Well, I want you, Deborah--_you_--to get used to the thought of a
London life. You see, my dearest child, I live a most harassing life,
bound by ties and responsibilities that are a perpetual burden to me.
I want some one near me who would be sweet and kind, and capable of
self-sacrifice for a man she loved; who would bear with his caprices,
keep him straight through his temptations, who would care nothing for
the world, but only for him. It’s a great deal to ask, Deborah; and I
don’t think there are many women capable of it.”
The girl interrupted him by laughing softly. She was brimming over
with happiness.
“Why, Rees, those things are not sacrifices to any woman worth her
salt. Your London ladies must be poor creatures if they’ve taught you
to think differently. And if I’m a little ‘countrified’ at first, as
you seem to think, I promise you that in the pride of being your wife
I shall soon grow into a very elegant person indeed.”
“My wife!” said Rees, coming closer to her, and joining his arms round
her waist. “Yes, that would be jolly, wouldn’t it? For me to come home
and find you waiting for me, making a lovely picture by the fireside.
But you know, Deb, I’m very poor. I can’t afford to marry yet. In the
meantime I am slowly dying, I really believe, for want of the care
that only a woman can give.”
Deborah started and looked down with anxious solicitude into his face.
“Oh, Rees, you don’t mean that. It can’t be true! If it is, of course
mamma and I must leave Carstow and come up at once to you.”
“But you can’t break up the old home like that,” objected Rees,
quickly. “It would be most unfair both to my mother and to Hervey.”
“Yes, but if there is nothing else to be done to save your life, Rees,
I know neither of them would hesitate for a moment.”
Rees leapt up from the floor and began to pace up and down the little
room in a state of high excitement.
At that moment there was heard the sound of a latch-key in the front
door, and then steps along the passage. The door of the room was
thrown open, and a well-dressed elderly man came quickly in. Deborah
started up in astonishment.
“Lord St. Austell!” she exclaimed.
With a bow and a harsh laugh the man came nearer.
Rees stamped his foot, and said haughtily:
“Don’t mention that wretch’s name here.”
Deborah looked at the new-comer again. It was Amos Goodhare. Except
that he was evidently older, better-dressed, and that he lacked the
earl’s geniality of manner, Amos was the very counterpart of Lord St.
Austell, down to the libertinism of expression which had always marred
the earl’s countenance.
The meeting gave the girl a great shock. Goodhare’s presence poisoned
all the pleasure she had felt in Rees’s protestations of affection.
With a sudden change to extreme dignity and reticence, she turned to
Rees, and told him that she would go and find his mother; she was
afraid something had happened to detain her. Then, before he could
remember that she did not know where Mrs. Pennant was, Deborah shook
hands with him, bowed coldly to Goodhare, and left the house.
Once outside in the street she did not know where to go. It was not
much past midday, but already the fog was hanging in a thick brown
veil over the houses; in a few hours even old Londoners would be
unable to find their way from place to place. She turned to the left,
and walking a few paces slowly up the street, found herself at the
corner of a paved passage, which ran, between two rows of dismal,
deserted houses, into Charing Cross-road. The entrance to this passage
was flanked by high boardings, which were covered with flaming
advertisement posters, among which there flaunted conspicuously the
colossal portrait of a lady with a marvellous abundance of curly hair,
whose eyes had been carefully picked out by the ubiquitous boy.
Deborah gazed up at the houses with fascinated interest. They were
old, almost ruinous. The windows, the glass of which had in nearly all
cases disappeared, were covered by nailed-up boards. Most of these
buildings had been small shops which had gone gradually down in the
world, as was proved by the fact that in some cases two had been made
out of what was originally one. The doors were nailed up as well as
the windows, and pasted over the whole of the ground-floor walls were
the dingy remains of more posters, which the damp had reduced to
fluttering rags.
There was a look about these hole-and-corner beetle-browed little
shops which would have suggested to a more sophisticated observer the
unsavory literature of Holywell-street. To Deborah the place was
eloquent only of black poverty and wretchedness, such as, in her
pleasant country life, she had scarcely dreamed of. She glanced down
the gratings into the disused cellars, full of dust and rubbish, then
up at the great beam which had been put across from side to side at
one end of the passage to keep the tottering buildings from falling
in, while they awaited their impending demolition. As she raised her
head and watched with a kind of horror the great clouds of mist and
smoke that seemed to roll down towards the earth from the brown sky,
she heard footsteps on the flags behind her, and turned with a start
to see Amos Goodhare.
His mouth expanded with an ugly smile as his eyes met hers. The girl
thought that he looked like the incarnate spirit of evil, and that his
figure harmonised with the hideous surroundings.
“I am so pleased to see you, Miss Audaer,” he said, courteously
enough. His old pedagogic manners seemed to have given place to a
burlesque of those of the earl. “But I am surprised, too, for I had
heard that you were married.”
“No,” said Deborah, “I am not married.”
“Well, I am jealously inclined to be glad that no unworthy wretch of a
man has yet obtained a prize much too good for him. But matrimony
seems to be in the air just now, and I didn’t know whether you had yet
fallen a victim. Rees and Lady Marion Cenarth are the last pair. But
of course you’ve heard that. It’s a secret at present, and I’m the
letter-carrier.”
He held out for her inspection a letter, stamped and directed to
“M.C.” at a shop in South Audley-street.
Deborah was for the moment so absolutely stunned as to be incapable,
not only of showing, but of feeling anything. She looked at the
envelope and appeared to be examining the address, which she perceived
to be in Rees’s handwriting. She was intelligent enough to understand
in a moment the meaning of Rees’s strange love-making and the extent
to which the evil influence of the man before her had corrupted the
unhappy lad. At the same time there sprang up in her mind a defiant
determination that this depraved Goodhare should not triumph in her
humiliation.
“I did not know of it,” she said at last, very quietly, “though I
rather guessed at something of the sort from his manner. Are they
already married then?” she went on; and, having quite recovered her
serenity she looked up in his face.
Goodhare was puzzled, disappointed. This she saw and hated him for.
“I’m not sure whether they’re married yet,” he said; “but, at any
rate, they’re going to be. They’ve been corresponding all this year.”
“Oh dear, I hope the earl won’t be very angry.”
Goodhare’s face, as usual, grew black at the mention of the earl’s
name.
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” he said, shortly. “But I don’t suppose he’ll
be pleased.”
“I do hope, though, that he’ll forgive them very soon. But now I must
say good-bye to you, Mr. Goodhare, for my mother must be by this time
waiting for me at Rees’s lodgings.”
She bowed to him, and turning, walked rapidly back to St.
Martin’s-lane, where she found Mrs. Pennant in the act of getting out
a cab.
“What is the matter, my dear? You look so dreadfully white,” cried the
old lady on seeing her.
The girl ran up and clung to her hand.
“Mamma, mamma, don’t go in again, or if you do, let me go away without
you,” she whispered in a hoarse voice. “I cannot bear it.”
Mrs. Pennant was a strangely reticent woman, whose thoughts were
difficult to guess. She turned as pale as the girl herself, however,
and drawing her into the cab without more inquiries, directed the
cabman to drive to Paddington.
The two ladies reached Carstow late that night; but neither during the
journey, on their arrival, nor ever afterwards, did they exchange
confidences on the subject of the impressions the visit to Rees had
left on their minds.
In the meantime the first thick fog of the season was settling down
steadily over London, and when Amos Goodhare rejoined Rees in the
little back room, the gas which they were obliged to light shone dimly
through a murky mist. The young man lay stretched on the narrow sofa.
“Where is she?” he cried, starting up, with dishevelled hair and wild
eyes.
“Who? Lady Marion?” asked Goodhare lightly.
“Lady Marion! No, d---- Lady Marion. I mean Deborah--my beautiful
Deborah! I will see her--I must! If she will have me, I’ll give up all
thoughts of that lanky caricature of a woman, beg her to forgive me,
and marry her.”
“Too late, too late, my impulsive young friend. ‘Your’ beautiful
Deborah is on her way back to Carstow, too utterly disgusted with you
to give you another thought.”
“But, Goodhare, she did not understand. She is too pure, too good to
believe that men can be such blackguards as you have made me. Let me
go, I tell you, let me go!”
He struggled to pass Goodhare, who locked the door and put the key in
his pocket.
“I am not going to have that poor girl insulted any more,” he said.
“If she did not understand what you meant while she was with you, she
did before she left London.”
“You infernal scoundrel! You told her! You explained to her! You have
ruined and degraded me, and you wanted to make me ruin and degrade
her!”
He flew at the elder man, who held him off with long, sinewy hands, as
he could not have done before the once athletic young man had become
weakened by excesses and dissipation.
“_You_ degrade her! _You_ degrade that girl!” said Amos, letting the
contempt he felt for his poor tool shine for once full from his eyes;
“women of her sort are not degraded by such as you, nor by such as I
either. You have to marry Lady Marion. I had to bring that about by
any means I could. That’s explanation enough. And now to business.”
He let the young man go, for Rees Pennant’s outburst of anger had
already given place to sullen passivity, and he had thrown himself
limply into a chair. Goodhare took a seat beside him.
“Listen,” he said, “I have something to say to you. You know that we
have come to the end of our money?” Rees nodded. “And of our credit?”
Rees nodded again. “That at present there are no more new clothes to
wear, horses to ride, evenings at the theater, suppers afterwards,
trips to Paris, and the rest of it?”
“Well, of course, I know it. Hasn’t every caller been a dun, and every
letter a bill, for weeks past?”
“Quite so. Now the question is, whether you want any more of those
past pleasures, or whether you would prefer to set to work as a clerk
on twenty shillings a week, or to creep back to Carstow, and live on
the charity of your younger brothers?”
Rees writhed.
“Out with it. What do you want me to do? You know you have made work
impossible to me; quiet life in the country insupportable. What have I
got to do?”
“Well, I suppose you know that, in the straits we are in, one mustn’t
be too particular.”
“I can’t be a lower rascal than I showed myself this morning. Go on.”
“Put on your hat, button up your overcoat, and come out.”
“Out! What, in this fog, that’s almost blinding even indoors?”
“Yes. I found you one fortune in the bowels of the earth. The second
we must hunt for in the dim recesses of the air.”
With a short laugh Goodhare rose, and waited while Rees slowly
prepared himself for the walk.
When they reached the street the brown mist was already so thick that
the houses on the opposite side of the way were scarcely visible.
Goodhare drew his young companion’s arm through his with a laugh.
“Look at this beautiful atmosphere,” he said; “feel it, hug it up to
you. Talk of the blue skies of Italy! I wouldn’t give twopence for the
brightest of them. These sweet, fair brown skies were made for
rogues--like you and me.”
Rees shuddered, but he did not dispute the point.
Slowly, through the ever-thickening fog-cloud, they made their way
together towards Trafalgar-square.