“I DARESAY it will be all right; he seems quiet now,” said the poor lady
of the “parlours” a few days later, in reference to their litigious
neighbour and the precarious piano. The two lodgers had grown regularly
acquainted, and the piano had had much to do with it. Just as this
instrument served, with the gentleman at No. 4, as a theme for
discussion, so between Peter Baron and the lady of the parlours it had
become a basis of peculiar agreement, a topic, at any rate, of
conversation frequently renewed. Mrs. Ryves was so prepossessing that
Peter was sure that even if they had not had the piano he would have
found something else to thresh out with her. Fortunately however they
did have it, and he, at least, made the most of it, knowing more now
about his new friend, who when, widowed and fatigued, she held her
beautiful child in her arms, looked dimly like a modern Madonna. Mrs.
Bundy, as a letter of furnished lodgings, was characterised in general by
a familiar domestic severity in respect to picturesque young women, but
she had the highest confidence in Mrs. Ryves. She was luminous about her
being a lady, and a lady who could bring Mrs. Bundy back to a gratified
recognition of one of those manifestations of mind for which she had an
independent esteem. She was professional, but Jersey Villas could be
proud of a profession that didn’t happen to be the wrong one—they had
seen something of that. Mrs. Ryves had a hundred a year (Baron wondered
how Mrs. Bundy knew this; he thought it unlikely Mrs. Ryves had told
her), and for the rest she depended on her lovely music. Baron judged
that her music, even though lovely, was a frail dependence; it would
hardly help to fill a concert-room, and he asked himself at first whether
she played country-dances at children’s parties or gave lessons to young
ladies who studied above their station.
Very soon, indeed, he was sufficiently enlightened; it all went fast, for
the little boy had been almost as great a help as the piano. Sidney
haunted the doorstep of No. 3 he was eminently sociable, and had
established independent relations with Peter, a frequent feature of which
was an adventurous visit, upstairs, to picture books criticised for not
being _all_ geegees and walking sticks happily more conformable. The
young man’s window, too, looked out on their acquaintance; through a
starched muslin curtain it kept his neighbour before him, made him almost
more aware of her comings and goings than he felt he had a right to be.
He was capable of a shyness of curiosity about her and of dumb little
delicacies of consideration. She did give a few lessons; they were
essentially local, and he ended by knowing more or less what she went out
for and what she came in from. She had almost no visitors, only a decent
old lady or two, and, every day, poor dingy Miss Teagle, who was also
ancient and who came humbly enough to governess the infant of the
parlours. Peter Baron’s window had always, to his sense, looked out on a
good deal of life, and one of the things it had most shown him was that
there is nobody so bereft of joy as not to be able to command for
twopence the services of somebody less joyous. Mrs. Ryves was a
struggler (Baron scarcely liked to think of it), but she occupied a
pinnacle for Miss Teagle, who had lived on—and from a noble nursery—into
a period of diplomas and humiliation.
Mrs. Ryves sometimes went out, like Baron himself, with manuscripts under
her arm, and, still more like Baron, she almost always came back with
them. Her vain approaches were to the music-sellers; she tried to
compose—to produce songs that would make a hit. A successful song was an
income, she confided to Peter one of the first times he took Sidney,
blasé and drowsy, back to his mother. It was not on one of these
occasions, but once when he had come in on no better pretext than that of
simply wanting to (she had after all virtually invited him), that she
mentioned how only one song in a thousand was successful and that the
terrible difficulty was in getting the right words. This rightness was
just a vulgar “fluke”—there were lots of words really clever that were of
no use at all. Peter said, laughing, that he supposed any words he
should try to produce would be sure to be too clever; yet only three
weeks after his first encounter with Mrs. Ryves he sat at his delightful
davenport (well aware that he had duties more pressing), trying to string
together rhymes idiotic enough to make his neighbour’s fortune. He was
satisfied of the fineness of her musical gift—it had the touching note.
The touching note was in her person as well.
The davenport was delightful, after six months of its tottering
predecessor, and such a re-enforcement to the young man’s style was not
impaired by his sense of something lawless in the way it had been gained.
He had made the purchase in anticipation of the money he expected from
Mr. Locket, but Mr. Locket’s liberality was to depend on the ingenuity of
his contributor, who now found himself confronted with the consequence of
a frivolous optimism. The fruit of his labour presented, as he stared at
it with his elbows on his desk, an aspect uncompromising and
incorruptible. It seemed to look up at him reproachfully and to say,
with its essential finish: “How could you promise anything so base; how
could you pass your word to mutilate and dishonour me?” The alterations
demanded by Mr. Locket were impossible; the concessions to the platitude
of his conception of the public mind were degrading. The public mind!—as
if the public _had_ a mind, or any principle of perception more
discoverable than the stare of huddled sheep! Peter Baron felt that it
concerned him to determine if he were only not clever enough or if he
were simply not abject enough to rewrite his story. He might in truth
have had less pride if he had had more skill, and more discretion if he
had had more practice. Humility, in the profession of letters, was half
of practice, and resignation was half of success. Poor Peter actually
flushed with pain as he recognised that this was not success, the
production of gelid prose which his editor could do nothing with on the
one side and he himself could do nothing with on the other. The truth
about his luckless tale was now the more bitter from his having managed,
for some days, to taste it as sweet.
As he sat there, baffled and sombre, biting his pen and wondering what
was meant by the “rewards” of literature, he generally ended by tossing
away the composition deflowered by Mr. Locket and trying his hand at the
sort of twaddle that Mrs. Ryves might be able to set to music. Success
in these experiments wouldn’t be a reward of literature, but it might
very well become a labour of love. The experiments would be pleasant
enough for him if they were pleasant for his inscrutable neighbour. That
was the way he thought of her now, for he had learned enough about her,
little by little, to guess how much there was still to learn. To spend
his mornings over cheap rhymes for her was certainly to shirk the
immediate question; but there were hours when he judged this question to
be altogether too arduous, reflecting that he might quite as well perish
by the sword as by famine. Besides, he did meet it obliquely when he
considered that he shouldn’t be an utter failure if he were to produce
some songs to which Mrs. Ryves’s accompaniments would give a circulation.
He had not ventured to show her anything yet, but one morning, at a
moment when her little boy was in his room, it seemed to him that, by an
inspiration, he had arrived at the happy middle course (it was an art by
itself), between sound and sense. If the sense was not confused it was
because the sound was so familiar.
He had said to the child, to whom he had sacrificed barley-sugar (it had
no attraction for his own lips, yet in these days there was always some
of it about), he had confided to the small Sidney that if he would wait a
little he should be intrusted with something nice to take down to his
parent. Sidney had absorbing occupation and, while Peter copied off the
song in a pretty hand, roamed, gurgling and sticky, about the room. In
this manner he lurched like a little toper into the rear of the
davenport, which stood a few steps out from the recess of the window,
and, as he was fond of beating time to his intensest joys, began to bang
on the surface of it with a paper-knife which at that spot had chanced to
fall upon the floor. At the moment Sidney committed this violence his
kind friend had happened to raise the lid of the desk and, with his head
beneath it, was rummaging among a mass of papers for a proper envelope.
“I say, I say, my boy!” he exclaimed, solicitous for the ancient glaze of
his most cherished possession. Sidney paused an instant; then, while
Peter still hunted for the envelope, he administered another, and this
time a distinctly disobedient, rap. Peter heard it from within and was
struck with its oddity of sound—so much so that, leaving the child for a
moment under a demoralising impression of impunity, he waited with quick
curiosity for a repetition of the stroke. It came of course immediately,
and then the young man, who had at the same instant found his envelope
and ejaculated “Hallo, this thing has a false back!” jumped up and
secured his visitor, whom with his left arm he held in durance on his
knee while with his free hand he addressed the missive to Mrs. Ryves.
As Sidney was fond of errands he was easily got rid of, and after he had
gone Baron stood a moment at the window chinking pennies and keys in
pockets and wondering if the charming composer would think his song as
good, or in other words as bad, as he thought it. His eyes as he turned
away fell on the wooden back of the davenport, where, to his regret, the
traces of Sidney’s assault were visible in three or four ugly scratches.
“Confound the little brute!” he exclaimed, feeling as if an altar had
been desecrated. He was reminded, however, of the observation this
outrage had led him to make, and, for further assurance, he knocked on
the wood with his knuckle. It sounded from that position commonplace
enough, but his suspicion was strongly confirmed when, again standing
beside the desk, he put his head beneath the lifted lid and gave ear
while with an extended arm he tapped sharply in the same place. The back
was distinctly hollow; there was a space between the inner and the outer
pieces (he could measure it), so wide that he was a fool not to have
noticed it before. The depth of the receptacle from front to rear was so
great that it could sacrifice a certain quantity of room without
detection. The sacrifice could of course only be for a purpose, and the
purpose could only be the creation of a secret compartment. Peter Baron
was still boy enough to be thrilled by the idea of such a feature, the
more so as every indication of it had been cleverly concealed. The
people at the shop had never noticed it, else they would have called his
attention to it as an enhancement of value. His legendary lore
instructed him that where there was a hiding-place there was always a
hidden spring, and he pried and pressed and fumbled in an eager search
for the sensitive spot. The article was really a wonder of neat
construction; everything fitted with a closeness that completely saved
appearances.
It took Baron some minutes to pursue his inquiry, during which he
reflected that the people of the shop were not such fools after all.
They had admitted moreover that they had accidentally neglected this
relic of gentility—it had been overlooked in the multiplicity of their
treasures. He now recalled that the man had wanted to polish it up
before sending it home, and that, satisfied for his own part with its
honourable appearance and averse in general to shiny furniture, he had in
his impatience declined to wait for such an operation, so that the object
had left the place for Jersey Villas, carrying presumably its secret with
it, two or three hours after his visit. This secret it seemed indeed
capable of keeping; there was an absurdity in being baffled, but Peter
couldn’t find the spring. He thumped and sounded, he listened and
measured again; he inspected every joint and crevice, with the effect of
becoming surer still of the existence of a chamber and of making up his
mind that his davenport was a rarity. Not only was there a compartment
between the two backs, but there was distinctly something _in_ the
compartment! Perhaps it was a lost manuscript—a nice, safe,
old-fashioned story that Mr. Locket wouldn’t object to. Peter returned
to the charge, for it had occurred to him that he had perhaps not
sufficiently visited the small drawers, of which, in two vertical rows,
there were six in number, of different sizes, inserted sideways into that
portion of the structure which formed part of the support of the desk.
He took them out again and examined more minutely the condition of their
sockets, with the happy result of discovering at last, in the place into
which the third on the left-hand row was fitted, a small sliding panel.
Behind the panel was a spring, like a flat button, which yielded with a
click when he pressed it and which instantly produced a loosening of one
of the pieces of the shelf forming the highest part of the
davenport—pieces adjusted to each other with the most deceptive
closeness.
This particular piece proved to be, in its turn, a sliding panel, which,
when pushed, revealed the existence of a smaller receptacle, a narrow,
oblong box, in the false back. Its capacity was limited, but if it
couldn’t hold many things it might hold precious ones. Baron, in
presence of the ingenuity with which it had been dissimulated,
immediately felt that, but for the odd chance of little Sidney Ryves’s
having hammered on the outside at the moment he himself happened to have
his head in the desk, he might have remained for years without suspicion
of it. This apparently would have been a loss, for he had been right in
guessing that the chamber was not empty. It contained objects which,
whether precious or not, had at any rate been worth somebody’s hiding.
These objects were a collection of small flat parcels, of the shape of
packets of letters, wrapped in white paper and neatly sealed. The seals,
mechanically figured, bore the impress neither of arms nor of initials;
the paper looked old—it had turned faintly sallow; the packets might have
been there for ages. Baron counted them—there were nine in all, of
different sizes; he turned them over and over, felt them curiously and
snuffed in their vague, musty smell, which affected him with the
melancholy of some smothered human accent. The little bundles were
neither named nor numbered—there was not a word of writing on any of the
covers; but they plainly contained old letters, sorted and matched
according to dates or to authorship. They told some old, dead story—they
were the ashes of fires burned out.
As Peter Baron held his discoveries successively in his hands he became
conscious of a queer emotion which was not altogether elation and yet was
still less pure pain. He had made a find, but it somehow added to his
responsibility; he was in the presence of something interesting, but (in
a manner he couldn’t have defined) this circumstance suddenly constituted
a danger. It was the perception of the danger, for instance, which
caused to remain in abeyance any impulse he might have felt to break one
of the seals. He looked at them all narrowly, but he was careful not to
loosen them, and he wondered uncomfortably whether the contents of the
secret compartment would be held in equity to be the property of the
people in the King’s Road. He had given money for the davenport, but had
he given money for these buried papers? He paid by a growing
consciousness that a nameless chill had stolen into the air the penalty,
which he had many a time paid before, of being made of sensitive stuff.
It was as if an occasion had insidiously arisen for a sacrifice—a
sacrifice for the sake of a fine superstition, something like honour or
kindness or justice, something indeed perhaps even finer still—a
difficult deciphering of duty, an impossible tantalising wisdom.
Standing there before his ambiguous treasure and losing himself for the
moment in the sense of a dawning complication, he was startled by a
light, quick tap at the door of his sitting-room. Instinctively, before
answering, he listened an instant—he was in the attitude of a miser
surprised while counting his hoard. Then he answered “One moment,
please!” and slipped the little heap of packets into the biggest of the
drawers of the davenport, which happened to be open. The aperture of the
false back was still gaping, and he had not time to work back the spring.
He hastily laid a big book over the place and then went and opened his
door.
It offered him a sight none the less agreeable for being unexpected—the
graceful and agitated figure of Mrs. Ryves. Her agitation was so visible
that he thought at first that something dreadful had happened to her
child—that she had rushed up to ask for help, to beg him to go for the
doctor. Then he perceived that it was probably connected with the
desperate verses he had transmitted to her a quarter of an hour before;
for she had his open manuscript in one hand and was nervously pulling it
about with the other. She looked frightened and pretty, and if, in
invading the privacy of a fellow-lodger, she had been guilty of a
departure from rigid custom, she was at least conscious of the enormity
of the step and incapable of treating it with levity. The levity was for
Peter Baron, who endeavoured, however, to clothe his familiarity with
respect, pushing forward the seat of honour and repeating that he
rejoiced in such a visit. The visitor came in, leaving the door ajar,
and after a minute during which, to help her, he charged her with the
purpose of telling him that he ought to be ashamed to send her down such
rubbish, she recovered herself sufficiently to stammer out that his song
was exactly what she had been looking for and that after reading it she
had been seized with an extraordinary, irresistible impulse—that of
thanking him for it in person and without delay.
“It was the impulse of a kind nature,” he said, “and I can’t tell you
what pleasure you give me.”
She declined to sit down, and evidently wished to appear to have come but
for a few seconds. She looked confusedly at the place in which she found
herself, and when her eyes met his own they struck him as anxious and
appealing. She was evidently not thinking of his song, though she said
three or four times over that it was beautiful. “Well, I only wanted you
to know, and now I must go,” she added; but on his hearthrug she lingered
with such an odd helplessness that he felt almost sorry for her.
“Perhaps I can improve it if you find it doesn’t go,” said Baron. “I’m
so delighted to do anything for you I can.”
“There may be a word or two that might be changed,” she answered, rather
absently. “I shall have to think it over, to live with it a little. But
I like it, and that’s all I wanted to say.”
“Charming of you. I’m not a bit busy,” said Baron.
Again she looked at him with a troubled intensity, then suddenly she
demanded: “Is there anything the matter with you?”
“The matter with me?”
“I mean like being ill or worried. I wondered if there might be; I had a
sudden fancy; and that, I think, is really why I came up.”
“There isn’t, indeed; I’m all right. But your sudden fancies are
inspirations.”
“It’s absurd. You must excuse me. Good-by!” said Mrs. Ryves.
“What are the words you want changed?” Baron asked.
“I don’t want any—if you’re all right. Good-by,” his visitor repeated,
fixing her eyes an instant on an object on his desk that had caught them.
His own glanced in the same direction and he saw that in his hurry to
shuffle away the packets found in the davenport he had overlooked one of
them, which lay with its seals exposed. For an instant he felt found
out, as if he had been concerned in something to be ashamed of, and it
was only his quick second thought that told him how little the incident
of which the packet was a sequel was an affair of Mrs. Ryves’s. Her
conscious eyes came back to his as if they were sounding them, and
suddenly this instinct of keeping his discovery to himself was succeeded
by a really startled inference that, with the rarest alertness, she had
guessed something and that her guess (it seemed almost supernatural), had
been her real motive. Some secret sympathy had made her vibrate—had
touched her with the knowledge that he had brought something to light.
After an instant he saw that she also divined the very reflection he was
then making, and this gave him a lively desire, a grateful, happy desire,
to appear to have nothing to conceal. For herself, it determined her
still more to put an end to her momentary visit. But before she had
passed to the door he exclaimed: “All right? How can a fellow be
anything else who has just had such a find?”
She paused at this, still looking earnest and asking: “What have you
found?”
“Some ancient family papers, in a secret compartment of my
writing-table.” And he took up the packet he had left out, holding it
before her eyes. “A lot of other things like that.”
“What are they?” murmured Mrs. Ryves.
“I haven’t the least idea. They’re sealed.”
“You haven’t broken the seals?” She had come further back.
“I haven’t had time; it only happened ten minutes ago.”
“I knew it,” said Mrs. Ryves, more gaily now.
“What did you know?”
“That you were in some predicament.”
“You’re extraordinary. I never heard of anything so miraculous; down two
flights of stairs.”
“_Are_ you in a quandary?” the visitor asked.
“Yes, about giving them back.” Peter Baron stood smiling at her and
rapping his packet on the palm of his hand. “What do you advise?”
She herself smiled now, with her eyes on the sealed parcel. “Back to
whom?”
“The man of whom I bought the table.”
“Ah then, they’re not from _your_ family?”
“No indeed, the piece of furniture in which they were hidden is not an
ancestral possession. I bought it at second hand—you see it’s old—the
other day in the King’s Road. Obviously the man who sold it to me sold
me more than he meant; he had no idea (from his own point of view it was
stupid of him), that there was a hidden chamber or that mysterious
documents were buried there. Ought I to go and tell him? It’s rather a
nice question.”
“Are the papers of value?” Mrs. Ryves inquired.
“I haven’t the least idea. But I can ascertain by breaking a seal.”
“Don’t!” said Mrs. Ryves, with much expression. She looked grave again.
“It’s rather tantalising—it’s a bit of a problem,” Baron went on, turning
his packet over.
Mrs. Ryves hesitated. “Will you show me what you have in your hand?”
He gave her the packet, and she looked at it and held it for an instant
to her nose. “It has a queer, charming old fragrance,” he said.
“Charming? It’s horrid.” She handed him back the packet, saying again
more emphatically “Don’t!”
“Don’t break a seal?”
“Don’t give back the papers.”
“Is it honest to keep them?”
“Certainly. They’re yours as much as the people’s of the shop. They
were in the hidden chamber when the table came to the shop, and the
people had every opportunity to find them out. They didn’t—therefore let
them take the consequences.”
Peter Baron reflected, diverted by her intensity. She was pale, with
eyes almost ardent. “The table had been in the place for years.”
“That proves the things haven’t been missed.”
“Let me show you how they were concealed,” he rejoined; and he exhibited
the ingenious recess and the working of the curious spring. She was
greatly interested, she grew excited and became familiar; she appealed to
him again not to do anything so foolish as to give up the papers, the
rest of which, in their little blank, impenetrable covers, he placed in a
row before her. “They might be traced—their history, their ownership,”
he argued; to which she replied that this was exactly why he ought to be
quiet. He declared that women had not the smallest sense of honour, and
she retorted that at any rate they have other perceptions more delicate
than those of men. He admitted that the papers might be rubbish, and she
conceded that nothing was more probable; yet when he offered to settle
the point off-hand she caught him by the wrist, acknowledging that,
absurd as it was, she was nervous. Finally she put the whole thing on
the ground of his just doing her a favour. She asked him to retain the
papers, to be silent about them, simply because it would please her.
That would be reason enough. Baron’s acquaintance, his agreeable
relations with her, advanced many steps in the treatment of this
question; an element of friendly candour made its way into their
discussion of it.
“I can’t make out why it matters to you, one way or the other, nor why
you should think it worth talking about,” the young man reasoned.
“Neither can I. It’s just a whim.”
“Certainly, if it will give you any pleasure, I’ll say nothing at the
shop.”
“That’s charming of you, and I’m very grateful. I see now that this was
why the spirit moved me to come up—to save them,” Mrs. Ryves went on.
She added, moving away, that now she had saved them she must really go.
“To save them for what, if I mayn’t break the seals?” Baron asked.
“I don’t know—for a generous sacrifice.”
“Why should it be generous? What’s at stake?” Peter demanded, leaning
against the doorpost as she stood on the landing.
“I don’t know what, but I feel as if something or other were in peril.
Burn them up!” she exclaimed with shining eyes.
“Ah, you ask too much—I’m so curious about them!”
“Well, I won’t ask more than I ought, and I’m much obliged to you for
your promise to be quiet. I trust to your discretion. Good-by.”
“You ought to _reward_ my discretion,” said Baron, coming out to the
landing.
She had partly descended the staircase and she stopped, leaning against
the baluster and smiling up at him. “Surely you’ve had your reward in
the honour of my visit.”
“That’s delightful as far as it goes. But what will you do for me if I
burn the papers?”
Mrs. Ryves considered a moment. “Burn them first and you’ll see!”
On this she went rapidly downstairs, and Baron, to whom the answer
appeared inadequate and the proposition indeed in that form grossly
unfair, returned to his room. The vivacity of her interest in a question
in which she had discoverably nothing at stake mystified, amused and, in
addition, irresistibly charmed him. She was delicate, imaginative,
inflammable, quick to feel, quick to act. He didn’t complain of it, it
was the way he liked women to be; but he was not impelled for the hour to
commit the sealed packets to the flames. He dropped them again into
their secret well, and after that he went out. He felt restless and
excited; another day was lost for work—the dreadful job to be performed
for Mr. Locket was still further off.