_Wherein it would appear that the most respectable Stucco Architecture
may be but a Screen for Gnawing Secrets_
The boy Noll shut the door that gave on to the narrow landing from
the two large attics which were now his home, pushed back the silk
hat on his head, and thrusting his hands into his breeches pockets,
and whistling an air, he glanced up at the skylight above him to see
whether the weather held.
He tramped slowly down a few steps of the top flight of carpetless
stairs that proclaim the attic heights, and halted aimlessly.
It was more than vaguely borne in upon him that a great change had come
over his life since, a month ago, he had taken down his prints from the
walls of his empty home, and, with them tucked in a bundle under his
arm, had walked into the twilight, trudging it on foot after the cart
that contained the few pieces of furniture and such belongings as had
not been sold, and, at the solemn journey’s end, skipping up three or
four whitened steps, had entered the doors of this stucco well-to-do
house that was let in apartments, standing, one of a row of like
houses, glued together along the length of a long winding street--a
“street with a good address,” the advertisement had it.
The cushioned and unthinking ease of childhood was gone, buried in that
empty house he had left behind him--the door was shut on that for ever.
The rougher, hardier period of boyhood was upon him.
It now came to the boy, who had never even wondered where everything
came from, that each such everything had always had to be won by the
sweat of toil. He had wondered more than once why that for which he
had asked had sometimes been refused. But he now realized that the
lucky-bag from which childhood gets all it wants was empty--sold at
a tap of the hammer with the other things in that dead house, by an
auctioneer fellow--gone--vanished.
He tramped down some half-dozen bare board steps that resounded to his
boots, and halted again.
He was beginning to see that the fuel of life was not to be had for
the asking. His mother sitting the livelong day and far into the night
in that big attic he had just left--the one with his little bed in the
corner of it, the large room that served as general sitting-room by
day, his bed with coloured covering becoming in the daylight a couch
therein--his mother sitting there writing, with absent eyes fixed on
her distant purpose, brought into hard reality the harder fact that
money had to be earned--that it did not come from Somewhere for the
beckoning. His father’s long absences, and his boots muddied with long
trudges, were significant and unspoken about, hinting of mysteries he
could not wholly fathom--nor was the serious gaze of the handsome face
as his father sat at night and stared at the stove less troubling to
the boy.
He tramped down another step or two.
It bothered him that he could not help. He knew he must grow into youth
before his hand could win this wage that all the world was hurrying
after.
He tramped down a few more steps.
For one thing he felt glad. He had thought it a bore when his mother
had made out a scheme of reading for him, making him give his morning
and a couple of hours of the afternoon to a course of English
literature and history, and a promise to keep up his mathematics; but,
as a matter of fact, and to his intense surprise, he was enjoying it.
He tramped down a couple of steps.
It was so like the mother to have clung to her books when she sold even
her silks and satins!
He tramped down another step.
He wondered why there was no carpet to the attic flight. He wondered
who lived in the rooms on each of these four landings below. That Major
Modeyne, who lived on this one below them, seemed such a pleasant old
fellow--it was a great pity he came in so late and so often the worse
for liquor.... But he was mighty funny over it. He wondered if he felt
as funny as he looked. It seemed such an odd thing to fill one’s self
with strong liquors until one glugged hiccuping and ran over!
He tramped down several steps.
The boy had always thought of himself as being a part of a vague body
of people called gentlefolk--a people who were always provided for from
some gentlemanly source of livelihood which demanded clean hands and
a sense of duty and no manual labour or a shop, quite a species apart
from the mere middle-class world, and for whom the working classes
provided the comforts of life, cleaning their boots and doing them
service. Tradesmen and the labouring class, of course, were bound to
earn a livelihood--a thing which he had always felt, without being
expressly told so, to be rather a vulgar thing to do; although, of
course, it was a very good thing for that sort of people.
As he reached the bottom of the uncarpeted stair, and was about to step
on to the drugget of the landing, a door opened, and there came out on
to the landing a child of about twelve.
She shook back the nut-brown hair from her clear grey eyes and gazed
defiantly at Noll:
“You’re a fool!” she said.
Noll took off his hat, sat down on the bottom step, put his chin in his
hands, and gazed at her:
“You’re very pretty,” he said.
“I didn’t say you were an impudent fool,” she said hotly--“I meant a
common, vulgar tomfool.”
Noll nodded.
The dainty slender girl before him gazed at him sternly:
“It was you that put all the water-cans about the landing, and the
water-jugs on the stairs, for my father to fall amongst when”--she
hesitated and flushed angrily--“when he came back late last night.”
Noll nodded:
“Yes,” said he--“and he fell amongst them.” He chuckled. “I watched
him over the rail. It was moonlight up here. He came crawling up the
stairs in the dark, saying Shush! to himself if a board creaked, and
carrying his boots in his hand so as not to wake the landlady--and when
he got on to this landing he gave a monstrous hiccup that jolly nearly
pulled him off his feet, and he tripped up amongst the cans--away went
his boots, and fell in the hall below. D’you know, I shall never play
a lark on your father again--he’s such a gentleman. Most people would
have sworn themselves putrid, but he just rubbed his shins and elbows,
sat up in the moonlight, and said with a hiccup: ‘_What a prodigious
number of stars there are at the north pole! Shakespeare has cracked
every nut--when beggars die, says he, there are no comets seen, the
heavens themselves blaze forth the fall of the landed gentry.... I did
not know all heaven held so many, various, multitudinous, and vast
prodigious stars!_’”
The girl waited grimly until he had done:
“It was you who made a booby-trap in his bed so that he could not get
into it?”
Noll nodded:
“Yes,” said he; “he looked jolly comic under the bed; he got under--he
must have slept there.”
“That’s just where you are mistaken,” said the child with a sneer. “I
never go to bed until my father is asleep. I got him out.... I suppose
you thought you were funny!”
Noll nodded:
“Yes,” he said; “I did, last night. But I don’t now. I think I was a
cad.”
“So do I,” she said....
Noll sat for awhile and gazed at her.
He got up and held out his hand sheepishly:
“Shake hands,” said he; “I apologize. It’s my birthday to-day.”
Betty considered.
She hesitated--then put out a delicate thin hand:
“What age are you?” she asked.
“Fourteen,” said Noll.
“I shall be twelve to-morrow,” she said.
“Then let’s keep it now,” said Noll. “I’m going to see a splendid
fellow, a friend of mine--he’s a prodigious clever fellow--he’s written
a book.”
The child’s eyes glittered:
“Has he?” she asked.
“Yes, rather. Come and see him too.”
“All right,” she said; “but come in and have tea first, and I’ll put on
my hat and jacket. We shan’t be very late out, shall we?”
“I’ll bring you back the moment you like,” said Noll. “We only have
high tea in the evenings now, so my people don’t mind my being late to
an hour or so; they know I’m with Netherby. But we’ll be back sharp,
and you can come to tea with us, eh? I’d like to introduce you to my
mother.”
The child nodded, and led the way into the Major’s quarters.
Noll, with the boy’s quick vision, took in a first picture of the
little lady’s surroundings that never left him.
It was a large and airy room, furnished within the absolute limits of
necessity. In a corner by a door stood the child’s little white bed,
but it required more imagination than was given to the ordinary to call
up the image of a small child that stood every night listening at that
other door to hear whether her father’s breathing were heavy enough for
sleep; to call up the vision of the slight figure that nightly opened
that same door with stealthy care to make sure of the candle being out,
and all danger of fire set far from the reach of awkward drunken hands;
it demanded a keener ear than his to hear the last sigh of the child as
she slipped into her bed in the small hours of the night and lay down
to take her long-delayed rest in that sleep that should have sealed her
eyes for hours, and had already held the rest of the world for a half
of the night.
The dainty little figure that now stood before the mirror, giving to
her hat just that touch which makes or mars the adornment of women,
showed no peevish rebellion against, nor carping discontent with, the
sordid burden of life that had been thrust upon her far too young and
sadly thin little shoulders. She might indeed have gone, as she stood,
to Court, and withal taught the ladies of fashion there assembled more
than something of the queenly attitude.
The atmosphere of the child it was that took the sense of emptiness
from the empty room. The little table that stood before the fireplace,
with a napkin spread upon it for tablecloth--it had been washed by
her small hands--and the coarse tea-things set out upon it: these
things and the kettle that bubbled on the hob had quite evidently been
deserted by the child when she marched out to her attack in the passage.
Noll now proceeded to make the tea at her bidding--she giving him
orders as she gazed into the mirror, in which she commanded a view of
the room.
The lad’s eyes wandered over the walls, which were bare enough to bring
his quick attention to rest on the picture of a man in uniform that
hungover the mantel--the picture of handsome Cornelius Mauduit Modeyne
as he had been when he married the mild beauty with the tragic eyes
that dreamed out of the picture hanging pendant to his, and to whom
the child bore more than a little likeness. Had the pictures been
inspired with the history of these lives, they would have revealed the
early death of the brooding beauty in the birth of the small child
whose hands were now the only hands that tended these two miniatures
with the caressing touch of affection--the man’s picture would have
continued the confidence, and told of handsome Corney Modeyne’s seeking
relief from loneliness in the mad lees of the bottle--it would have
whispered, too, of the meeting of his old comrades in his room to tell
him he must slip quietly out of his old regiment--of his retirement
with a step of rank--of the two years of his living upon his relations
until they grew first weary, then exasperated, then hostile towards
him, and the always rather silent child that flushed at all their harsh
thrusts at her easy-going father--and of his final collapse as that
mysterious personage who is an urgent daily “something in the city.” It
would have revealed what was hidden even from the buzzing gossips of
the Street with the Good Address--that Major Cornelius Mauduit Modeyne,
when he sallied out at the breakfast hour with a swaggering air, in
well-groomed attire, polished boots, and shining hat, as soon as he
could be got out of bed by the silent child who guarded all his secrets
that could be hid, owed his good care to those self-same small hands.
As it would also have revealed that, in spite of all shame, the dainty
hands that did these things and had these cares, touched everything
that had to do with this foolish sinning man with a fierce affection.
Indeed, there is more in noble tradition than in blood. The battle-cry
of the ancient Modeynes had been Loyalty.
Modeyne came of old aristocratic Catholic stock, but he had long ceased
to attend his church; and the image, a very beautiful image of the Mary
and Child, that stood upon his mantel was the sole relic of his old
beliefs--even it did not stand there from any vague sentiment towards
his church; indeed, it had not gone to the pawnbroker as much from
negligence as from religious bias.
The child would sing to herself at times the beautiful lines of the
_Ave Maria_ that Gounod has set to Bach’s Fugue, just as she would lilt
a nursery rhyme; but the learning of it was an early reminiscence of
her father in his cups, moved to song. Her prayers, on going to bed
at night, were just a part of her duty in putting off her clothes--it
warmed and coloured the child’s imagination, was the full stop to her
day, but it was quite aloof from the conduct of the world. From Modeyne
the child had inherited remarkable charm of manner as well as much of
her dainty delicacy....
The hat and jacket being arranged to her taste, the child went and sat
down beside Noll, and presided over the hospitalities. She apologized
for the thickness of the bread and butter, but she said it was her last
meal of the day, and she was always hungry for it. She remembered she
had some cake, and tripped off to the cupboard; but her face fell when
she took the fragment out of its carefully enwrapping silver-paper.
“I got it nearly a month ago--for my father’s birthday,” she said
simply. “I’m afraid it’s gone dry.”
“I like it all rubbly best,” said Noll--“it tastes so nutty.” He
deceived the child into a smile. In any case he was in the caterpillar
stage of youth.
They ate it between them.
“It _is_ rather nutty,” she said. “I never noticed that before.”
Childhood takes the world for granted.
As the two went cheerily down the stairs and out into the street,
the boy’s heart lightened; the gnawing sense of loneliness that had
oppressed him fell from him, and the stucco street turned to a way of
palaces in the grey of the twilight.