"I shall lock up all the doors and windows in the house--and then I
shall give you my latch-key, and you can let yourself in and stay the
night here--there is no one in the house. I will catch the night train,
and bring my mother up to-morrow. Then we will see what can be done."
The only excuse for this rash young man is to be found in the fact that
while he was feeding his strange guest with cake and wine she was
feeding, with her beauty, the first fire of his first love. Love at
first sight is all nonsense, we know--we who have come to forty
year--but at twenty-one one does not somehow recognise it for the
nonsense it is.
"But don't you know anyone in London?" he asked in a sensible
postscript.
It was not yet so dark but that he could see the crimson flush on her
face.
"Not _know_," she said. "Papa wouldn't like me to spoil my chances of
knowing the right people with any foolishness like this. There's no one
I could _let_ know. You see, papa's so very rich, and at home they
expect me to--to get acquainted with dukes and things--and--"
She stopped.
"American heiresses are expected to marry English dukes," he said, with
a distinct physical pain at his heart.
"It wasn't I who said that," said the girl, smiling; "but that's so,
anyhow." And then she sighed.
"So it's your destiny to marry a duke, is it?" the young man spoke
slowly. "All the same," he added irrelevantly, "you shall have the
latch-key."
"You _are_ kind," she said for the third time, and reached her hand out
to him. He did not kiss it then, only took it in his, and felt how small
and cold it was. Then it was taken away.
He says that he only talked to her for half an hour--but the neighbours,
from whose eyes suburban hawthorns and laburnums are powerless to
conceal the least of our actions, declare that he sat with the guitar
player on the iron seat till well after midnight; further, that when
they parted he kissed her hand, and that she then put her hands on his
shoulders--"quite shamelessly, you know"--and kissed him lightly on both
cheeks. It is known that he passed the night prowling in our suburban
lanes, and caught the 6.25 train in the morning to the place where his
people were staying.
The lady and the guitar certainly passed the night at Hill View Villa,
but when his mother, very angry and very frightened, came up with him at
about noon, the house looked just as usual, and no one was there but
the charwoman.
"An adventuress! I told you so!" said his mother at once--and the young
man sat down at his study table and looked at the title of his article
on "The Decadence of Criticism." It was surely a very long time ago that
he had written that. And he sat there thinking, till his mother's voice
roused him.
"The silver is all right, thank goodness," she said, "but your banjo
girl has taken a pair of your sister's silk stockings, and those new
shoes of hers with the silver buckles--and she's left _these_."
She held out a pair of little patent leather shoes, very worn and
dusty--the slender silken web of a black stocking, brown with dust, hung
from her hand. He answered nothing. She spent the rest of that day in
searching the house for further losses, but all things were in their
place, except the silver-handled button-hook--and that, as even his
sister owned, had been missing for months.
Yet his family would never leave him to keep house alone again: they
said he is not to be trusted. And perhaps they are right. The half
dozen pairs of embroidered silk stockings and the dainty French
silver-buckled shoes, which arrived a month later addressed to Miss
----, Hill View Villa, only confirmed their distrust. _He_ must have had
them sent--that tambourine girl could never have afforded these--why,
they were pure silk--and the quality! It was plain that his castanet
girl--his mother and sister took a pleasure in crediting her daily with
some fresh and unpleasing instrument--could have had neither taste,
money, nor honesty to such a point as this.
As for the young man, he bore it all very meekly, only he was glad when
his essays on the decadence of things in general led to a berth on the
staff of a big daily, and made it possible for him to take rooms in
town--because he had grown weary of living with his family, and of
hearing so constantly that She played the bones and the big drum and the
concertina, and that She was a twopenny adventuress who stole his
sister's shoes and stockings. He prefers to sit in his quiet room in the
Temple, and to remember that she played the guitar and sang
sweetly--that she had a mouth like a tired child's mouth, that her eyes
were like stars, and that she kissed him--on both cheeks--and that he
kissed--her hand only--as the scandalised suburb knows.