The basket of _petits fours_ had been removed; cigars and cigarettes
had been passed round; one or two of the half-dozen people gathered
about the small round table, rashly careless of a sleepless night,
were drinking coffee with their liqueurs; the conversation was
sprightly, at all events, if it was not witty, and laughter ran easily
in ripples; the little supper-party, in a word, was at its gayest when
Harry Caston suddenly pushed back his chair. Though the movement was
abrupt, it was not conspicuous; it did not interrupt the light
interchange of chaff and pleasantries for a moment. It was probably
not noticed, and certainly not understood by more than one in that
small company. The one, however, was a woman to whom Harry Gaston's
movements were a matter of much greater interest than he knew. Mrs.
Wordingham was sitting next to him, and she remarked quietly:
"So you are not going on to the Mirlitons' dance, after all?"
Harry Caston turned to her in surprise.
"You're a witch," he replied. "I have only just made up my mind to go
home instead."
"I know," said Mrs. Wordingham.
"Then you oughtn't to," retorted Harry Caston carelessly. Mrs.
Wordingham flushed.
"I wish I didn't," she answered in a low, submissive voice. She was
not naturally a submissive woman, and it was only in his ears that
this particular note was sounded.
"I meant that you had no right to be able to estimate so accurately
the hidden feelings of your brother-man," he answered awkwardly, and
wrapping up his awkwardness in an elaboration of words.
Harry Caston looked about the supper-room, with its walls of white and
gold, its clusters of bright faces, its flash of silver, its running
noise of merriment. His fingers twitched restlessly.
"Yes, I am going," he said. "I shall leave London to-morrow. I have a
house."
"I know that too--in the Isle of Wight."
"Not so very far, after all, is it?" he said.
"As far as Timbuctoo when you are there," replied Mrs. Wordingham. Her
great dark eyes rested wistfully upon his face; she leaned the least
little bit towards him. Harry Caston was silent for a moment. Then he
turned to her with a smile of apology.
"You know me----"
"Oh, don't I!" she cried in a low voice. "We shall see you no more
for--how many months?"
Harry Caston did not answer. His memories were busy with an afternoon
of early summer in that same year, when, as his motor-car slid down a
long straight slope into a village of red-brick cottages, he had seen,
on the opposite incline, a row of tall stone-pines, and glowing
beneath their shade the warm brown roof of a small and ancient house.
"Tell me about it," said Mrs. Wordingham, once more interpreting his
silence.
"There was a bridge at the bottom of the hill--a bridge across the
neck of a creek, with an old flour mill and a tiny roof at one side of
it. Inland of the bridge was a reach of quiet water running back
towards the downs through woods and meadows. Already I seemed to have
dropped from the crest of the hill into another century. Beyond the
bridge the road curved upwards. I went up on my second speed between
the hedge of a field which sloped down to the creek upon the one side,
and a low brick wall topped by a bank of grass upon the other. The
incline of the hill brought my head suddenly above the bank, and I
looked straight across a smooth lawn broken by great trees on to the
front of a house. And I stopped my car, believe me, almost with a
gasp. There was no fence or hedge to impede my view. I had come at
last across the perfect house, and I sat in the car and stared and
stared at it, not at first with any conscious desire to possess it,
but simply taken by the sheer beauty of the thing, just as one may
gaze at a jewel."
The lights went suddenly out in the supper-room, as a gentle warning
that time was up, and then were raised again. Harry Caston, however,
seemed unaware of any change. He was at the moment neither of that
party nor of that room.
"It was a small house of the E shape, raised upon a low parapet and
clothed in ivy. The middle part, set back a few feet behind flowers,
had big flat windows; the gabled ends had smaller ones and more of
them. Oh, I can't describe to you what I saw! The house in detail?
Yes. But that would not give you an idea of it. The woodwork of the
windows was painted white, and, where they stood open to the sunlight
and the air, they showed you deep embrasures of black oak within."
He stumbled on awkwardly, impelled to describe the house, yet aware
that his description left all unsaid. The tiles of the roof were
mellowed by centuries, so that shade ran into shade; and here they
were almost purple, and there brown with a glint of gold. Two great
chimney stacks stood high, not rising from the roof, but from the
sides of the house, flanking it like sentinels, and over these, too,
the ivy climbed.
But what had taken Caston by the throat was the glamour of repose on
that old house. Birds flickered about the lawn, and though the windows
stood open, and the grass was emerald green and smooth, no smoke rose
from any of the chimney-tops.
"I ran on for a few yards," he went on, "until I saw a road which
branched off to the right. I drove up it, and came to a gate with a
notice that the house was to be sold. I went in, and at the back of
the house, in a second queer little grass garden, screened by big
trees upon three sides and a low red-brick wall upon the fourth, over
which you could see the upper reach of the estuary and the woods on
the further hill, I found a garrulous old gardener."
Mrs. Wordingham leaned forward.
"And what story had he to tell?"
"Oh, none!" answered Caston with a laugh. "There's no tragic
or romantic history connected with the house. Of course, it's
haunted--that goes without saying. There's hardly a bedroom window
where the ivy does not tap upon the panes. But for history! Four old
ladies took it for a summer, and remained in it for forty years. The
last one of them died two years ago. That's all the history the
gardener knew. But he showed me over the house, the quaintest place
you ever dreamed of--a small stone-flagged hall, little staircases
rising straight and enclosed in the walls, great polished oak beams,
rooms larger than you would expect, and a great one on the first
floor, occupying the middle of the house and looking out upon the
grass garden at the back, and over the sunk road to the creek in
front. Anyway"--and he broke off abruptly--"I bought the house, and
I've furnished it, and now----"
"Now you are going to shut yourself up in it," said Mrs. Wordingham.
The lights were turned out now for the last time. The party sat almost
in darkness. Caston turned towards his companion. He could just see
the soft gleam of her dark eyes.
"For a little," he replied. "I have to, you know. I can't help it. I
enjoy all this. I like running about London as much as any man; I--I
am fond of my friends." The lady smiled with a little bitterness, and
Caston went on: "But the time comes when everything suddenly jars on
me--noise, company, everything--when I must get away with my books
into some refuge of my own, when I must take my bath of solitude
without anyone having a lien upon a single minute of my time. The
need has come on me to-night. The house is ready--waiting. I shall go
to-morrow."
Mrs. Wordingham glanced at him with a quick anxiety. There was a
trifle of exasperation in his voice. He was suddenly on wires.
"Yes, you look tired," she said. The head waiter approached the table,
and the party broke up and mounted the steps into the hall. Caston
handed Mrs. Wordingham into her carriage.
"I shall see you when I come back?" said he, and Mrs. Wordingham
answered with a well-assumed carelessness:
"I shall be in London in the autumn. Perhaps you will have some story
to tell me of your old house. Has it a name?"
"Oh, yes--Hawk Hill," replied Caston. "But there's no story about that
house," he repeated, and the carriage rolled away. Later on, however,
he was inclined to doubt the accuracy of his statement, confidently
though he had made it. And a little later still he became again aware
of its truth.
Here, at all events, is what occurred. Harry Caston idled through his
mornings over his books, sailed his sloop down the creek and out past
the black booms into the Solent in the afternoon, and came back to a
solitary dinner in the cool of the evening. Thus he passed a month. He
was not at all tired with his own company. The inevitable demand for
comrades and a trifle of gaiety had not yet been whispered to his
soul. The fret of his nerves ceased; London sank away into the mists.
Even the noise of the motor-horns in the hidden road beneath his lawn
merely reminded him pleasantly that he was free of that whirlpool and
of all who whirled in it. If he needed conversation, there were
the boatmen on the creek, with their interest in tides and shoals,
or the homely politics of the village. But Caston needed very
little. He drifted back, as it seemed to him, into the reposeful,
lavender-scented life of a century and a half ago. For though the
house was of the true E shape, and had its origin in Tudor times, it
was with that later period that Caston linked it in his thoughts.
Tudor times were stirring, and the recollection of them uncongenial to
Caston's mood.
He had furnished the house to suit his mood, and the room which he
chiefly favoured--a room at the back, with a great bay window thrown
out upon the grass, and the floor just a step below the level of the
garden--had the very look of some old parlour where Mr. Hardcastle
might have sipped his port, and Kate stitched at her samplers. Here he
was sitting at ten o'clock in the evening, about a month after he had
left London, when the first of the incidents occurred. It was nothing
very startling in itself--merely the sound of some small thing falling
upon the boards of the floor and rolling into a corner--a crisp, sharp
sound, as though a pebble had dropped.
Caston looked up from his book, at the first hardly curious. But in a
minute or so, it occurred to him that he was alone, and that he had
dropped nothing. Moreover, the sound had travelled from the other side
of the room. He was not as yet curious enough to rise from his chair,
and a round satin-wood table impeded his view. But he looked about the
room, and could see nothing from which an ornament could have dropped.
He turned back to his book, but his attention wandered. Once or twice
he looked sharply up, as though he expected to find another occupant
in the room. Finally he rose, and walking round the table, he saw what
seemed to be a big glass bead sparkling in the lamplight on the
dark-stained boards in a corner of the room. He picked the object up,
and found it to be not a large bead, but a small knob or handle of
cut-glass. He knew now whence it had come.
Against the wall stood a small Louis Seize table in white and gold,
which he remembered to have picked up at a sale, with some other
furniture, at some old mansion, across the water, in the New Forest.
He had paid no particular attention to the table, had never even
troubled to look inside of it. It had the appearance of being a lady's
secretaire or something of the kind. But there were three shallow
drawers, one above the other, in the middle part of it--it was what is
inelegantly called a kidney table--and these drawers were fitted with
small glass knobs such as that which he held in his hand.
Caston went over to the table, and saw that one of the knobs was
missing. He stooped to replace it, and at once stood erect again, with
the knob in his hand and a puzzled expression upon his face. He had
expected that the handles would fit on to projecting screws. But he
found that they were set into brass rings, and firmly set. This one
which he held seemed to have been wrenched out of its setting by some
violent jerk. He tried the drawers, but they were locked. There were
some papers and books spread upon the top. He removed them, and found
upon the white polish a half-erased crest. It was plain that the
middle part of the top was a lid and lifted up, but it was now locked
down. Caston did not replace the books and papers. He returned to his
chair. The servants probably had been curious. No doubt they had tried
to open the drawers, and in the attempt had loosened one of the
handles.
Caston was content with the explanation--for that night. But the next
evening, at the same hour, the legs of the table rattled on the wooden
floor. He sprang up from his seat. The table was shaking. He stepped
quickly across to it, and then stopped with his heart leaping in
his breast. The books and papers had not been replaced, and he had
seen--it might be that his eyes had played him a trick, but he had
_seen_--a small slim hand suddenly withdrawn from the lid of the
table. The hand had been lying flat upon its palm--Caston had just
time enough to see that--and it was the left hand.
"That's exactly the position," he said to himself, "in which one would
place the left hand to hold the table steady while one tried to force
the drawers open with one's right."
He stood without a movement, but the hand did not appear again; and
then he found himself saying in a quiet voice of reassurance:
"Can I help at all?"
The sound of his own words stirred him abruptly to laughter. Common
sense reasserted itself; his eyes had played him a trick. Too much
tobacco, very likely, was the cause and origin of his romantic vision.
But, none the less, he remained standing quite still, with his eyes
fixed upon the table's polished lid, for some minutes; and when he
went back at last to his chair, from time to time he glanced abruptly
from his book, in the hope that he might once more detect the hand
upon the table. But he was disappointed.
The next morning he saw the old gardener sweeping the leaves from the
front lawn, and he at once and rather eagerly went out to him.
"I think you told me, Hayes, that this house is supposed to be
haunted," he said, with a laugh at the supposition.
The gardener took off his hat and scratched his head reflectively.
"Well, they do say, sir, as it is. But I've never seen anything
myself, nor can I rightly say that I've ever come across anyone who
has. A pack o' nonsense, I call it."
"Very likely, Hayes," said Caston. "And what sort of a person is it
who's supposed to walk?"
"An old man in grey stockings," replied the gardener. "That's what
I've heard. But what he's supposed to be doing I don't know, sir, any
more than I know why there should be so much fuss about his wearing
grey stockings. Live men do that, after all."
"To be sure," replied Caston. "You may count them by dozens on
bicycles if you stand for an hour or two above the road here." And he
went back to the house. It was quite clear that his visitant of last
night, if there had been one, was not the native spectre of this small
old manor-house.
"The slim white hand I saw," Caston argued, "belonged to no old man in
grey stockings or out of them. It was the hand of a quite young woman.
But if she doesn't belong to the house, if she isn't one of the
fixtures to be taken on by the incoming tenant--if, in a word, she's a
trespasser--how in the world did she find her way here?"
Caston suddenly saw an answer to the question--a queer and a rather
attractive answer, especially to a man who had fed for a month on
solitude and had grown liable to fancies. He had all through this
lonely month been gradually washing from his body and his mind the
dust of his own times. He had sought to reproduce the quiet of an
older age, and in the seeking had perhaps done more than reproduce.
That was his thought. He had, perhaps, by ever so little, penetrated
the dark veil which hides from men all days but their own--just
enough, say, to catch a glimpse of a hand. He himself was becoming
more and more harmonious with his house; the cries of the outer world
hardly reached his ears in that little parlour which opened on to the
hidden garden. It seemed to him that other times, through some
thinning out of the thick curtain of his senses, were becoming actual
and real just to him.
"The first month passed," he said to himself. "I was undisturbed; no
sign was made. I was still too near to what I had left behind--London
and the rest of it. But now I pass more and more over the threshold
into that other century. First of all, I was only aware of a movement,
a presence; then I was able to see--nothing much, it is true--only a
small hand. But tonight I may see her to whom the hand belongs. In a
week I may be admitted into her company."
Thus he argued, pretending to himself the while that he was merely
playing with his fancy, pursuing it like a ball in a game, and ready
to let it fall and lie the moment that he was tired. But the sudden
hum of a motor-car upon his drive, and a joyous outcry of voices, soon
dispelled the pretence. A party of his friends invaded him, clamouring
for luncheon, and in his mind there sprang up a fear so strong that it
surprised him. They would thicken the thinning curtain between himself
and her whose hand had lain upon the table. They would drag him back
into his own century. The whole process of isolation would have to
begin again. The talk at luncheon was all of regattas and the tonnage
of yachts. Caston sat at the table with his fear increasing. His
visitors were friends he would have welcomed five weeks ago, and he
would have gaily taken his part in their light talk. Now it was every
moment on his lips to cry out:
"Hold your tongues and go!"
They went off at three o'clock, and a lady of the party wisely nodded
a dainty head at him as he stood upon the steps, and remarked:
"You hated us visiting you, Mr. Caston. You have someone in that
house--someone you won't show to us."
Caston coloured to the roots of his hair.
The lady laughed. "There--I knew I was right! Let me guess who it can
be."
Caston raised his head in a quick protest.
"No, there is no one." He tried to laugh easily. "That's my trouble.
There is no one, I am afraid."
They had driven his visitor away, without a doubt; and though he sat
very still in his arm-chair that night, careful as a hunter by no
abrupt movement to scare away his quarry, he sat undisturbed. He
waited until the light was grey and the birds singing upon the lawn.
He went to bed disappointed as a lover whose mistress had failed to
keep her tryst.
On the next day he searched for and found the catalogue of the sale at
which he had bought the table. The sale had been held at a house
called Bylanes, some five miles from the Beaulieu river, and the
furniture was advertised as the property of Geoffrey Trimingham, Esq.,
deceased, and sold by his young widow. Caston's memory was quickened
by these meagre details. He recollected stories which he had heard
during the three days of the sale. The Triminghams were a branch of
the old Norfolk family of that name, and had settled in the New Forest
so far back as the reign of the first George. Geoffrey Trimingham,
however, had delayed marriage until well sped in years, and then had
committed the common fault of marrying a young woman, who, with no
children and no traditions to detain her in a neighbourhood which she
considered gloomy, had, as soon as she was free, sold off house and
furniture--lock, stock, and barrel--so that she might retire to what
she considered the more elegant neighbourhood of Blandford Square.
This was all very well, but it did not bring Harry Gaston very much
nearer to the identification of his visitor. She was a Trimingham,
probably, but even that was by no means certain; and to what
generation of Triminghams she belonged, he knew no more than he knew
her Christian name. He searched the house for the keys of the table,
but nowhere could he find them. He had never opened the drawers, he
had never raised the lid. It seemed to him that he must have bought
the table without the keys at all.
He might have broken it open, of course, and from time to time, as the
evenings passed in an expectation which was not fulfilled, he was
tempted to take a chisel in his hand and set to work. But he resisted.
The table was not his. It was _hers_, and in her presence alone it
must be opened.
Thus Caston passed a week, and then one evening there fell a shadow
across the open page of his book. He looked swiftly up. He saw nothing
but the empty room, and the flame of the lamp burned bright and
steady. She was here, then, and as the conviction grew within him to a
veritable exultation, he was aware of rustling of a woman's gown. The
sound came from behind him. He turned with a leap of his heart, and
saw her--saw her from the crown of her small head, with its thick
brown hair, to the hem of her dress--not a shadow, not a vague shape
dimly to be apprehended, but as actual as flesh and blood could be.
She was dressed in a gown of pale blue satin of an ancient mode, and
was slender as a child. Her face, too, was the face of one little more
than a child, though pain and trouble had ravaged it.
She stood as though she had just stepped from the garden on to the
window-seat, and so to the floor, and in her dark eyes there was a
look of the direst urgency. She moved swiftly across the room to the
table, pulled at the glass handles, and sought to lift the lid, and
all in a feverish haste, with her young and troubled face twitching as
though she were at pains to check her tears. Caston watched her
eagerly. He noticed that once more her left hand was pressed flat
upon the lid, as she tried to open the drawer, and then a flash of
gold caught and held his eyes. Young though she was, she wore a
wedding-ring. He had barely noticed it, when she turned from the table
and came straight towards him. Caston rose from his chair. He heard
himself saying once more:
"Can I help?"
But this time he did not laugh upon the words. She stood before him
with so pitiful an appeal, her hands clutched together in front of
her, her face convulsed. He spoke with the deference due to those who
have greatly suffered. Then came to him a whisper in reply, so low
that he barely heard it--so low that perhaps he only imagined it.
"Yes."
Caston went across to the table, and, opening his knife, inserted it
under the lid. The girl stood at his side, a gleam of hope in her
eyes. Caston ran the blade of the knife along to the lock and turned
it, prising up the lid. There was a sound of the splitting of wood,
and the lock gave. Caston lifted the lid. It rose on hinges, and had
upon the under-side a bevelled mirror, and it disclosed, when open, a
fixed tray lined with blue velvet. The tray was empty.
But now that the lid was raised in the centre of the table, the
side-pieces could be opened too. The girl opened the one at her hand.
Caston saw a well, lined, like the rest, with velvet, and filled with
the knick-knacks and belongings of a girl. She took them out
hurriedly, heaping them together on the tray--a walnut-wood housewife
shaped and shut like a large card-case, with scissors, thimble,
needle-case, tiny penknife, all complete--for she opened it, as she
opened everything in the haste and urgency of her search--a large
needle-case of ivory, a walnut-wood egg, which unscrewed and showed
within a reel with silk still wound upon it, and a little oval box
with a label on the top of it, and the royal arms. Caston read the
label:
STRINGER'S CANDY.
PREPARED AND SOLD ONLY BY THE PROPRIETOR,
R. STRINGER,
DRUGGIST TO THE KING.
The top fell from the little box, and a shower of shells rattled out
of it. Bags of beads followed, wash-leather bags carefully tied up,
and some of them filled with the minutest of beads. It made Caston's
eyes ache to think of anyone stringing them together. In the end the
well was emptied, and, with a gesture of despair, the girl slipped
round to the other side of Caston. She turned back the flap upon this
side.
On the other side were the implements of work; here was the finished
product. She lifted out two small anti-macassars, completely made up
of tiny beads in crystal and turquoise colours, and worked in the most
intricate patterns. They were extraordinarily heavy, and must have
taken months in the making. Under these were still more beads, in
boxes and in bags and coiled in long strings. She heaped them out upon
the tray, and looked into the well. Her face flashed into relief. She
thrust her hands in; she drew out from the very bottom a faded bundle
of letters. She clasped them for a moment close against her heart,
then very swiftly, as though she feared to be stopped, she took them
over to the fireplace.
A fire was burning in the grate, for the night was chilly. She dropped
the bundle into the flames, and stood there while it was consumed.
Caston saw the glare of the flames behind the paper light up here and
there a word or a phrase, and then the edges curled over and the
sparks ran across the sheets, and the letters changed to white ashes
and black flakes. When all was done, she sighed and turned to Caston
with a wistful smile of thanks. She moved back to the table, and with
a queer orderliness which seemed somehow in keeping with her looks and
manner, she replaced the beads, the little boxes, and the
paraphernalia of her work carefully in the wells, and shut the table
up. She turned again to Caston at the end. Just for a second she stood
before him, her face not happy, but cleared of its trouble, and with a
smile upon her lips. She stood, surely a living thing. Caston advanced
to her. "You will stay now!" he cried, and she was gone.
This is the story as Harry Caston told it to Mrs. Wordingham when he
returned to London in the autumn. She ridiculed it gently and with a
trifle of anxiety, believing that solitude had bred delusions.
"Thank you," said Harry Caston grimly, and sitting up very erect. Mrs.
Wordingham changed her note.
"It's the most wonderful thing to have happened to you," she said. "I
should have been frightened out of my life. And you weren't?"
Harry Gaston's face hardly relaxed.
"You don't believe a word of it," he asserted sternly.
"Of course I do," she replied soothingly, "and I quite see that, with
us nowhere near you, all your senses became refined, and you
penetrated behind the curtain. Yes, I see all that, Harry. But she
might, perhaps, have told you a little more, mightn't she? As a story,
it almost sounds unfinished."
Harry Caston rose to his feet.
"I tell you what you are doing," he said, standing over her--"you are
getting a little of your own back."
"But such a very little, Harry," murmured Mrs. Wordingham; and Harry
Caston flung out of the room.
He did not refer to the subject again for some little while. But in
the month of December, on one foggy afternoon, he arrived with a new
book under his arm. He put it down on the floor beside his chair
rather ostentatiously, as one inviting questions. Mrs. Wordingham was
serenely unaware of the book.
"Where have you been, Harry?" she asked as she gave him a cup of tea.
"In Norfolk--shooting," he said.
"Many birds?"
"So few that we did not go out on the second day. We motored to a
church instead--a very old church with a beautiful clerestory."
Mrs. Wordingham affected an intense interest.
"Old churches are wonderful," she said.
"You care no more about them than I do," said Harry Gaston brutally.
"I am not going to tell you about the church."
"Oh, aren't you?" said Mrs. Wordingham.
"No. What I am going to tell you is this. The vicar is a friend of my
host, and happened to be in the church when we arrived. He showed us
the building himself, and then, taking us into the vestry, got out the
parish register. It dates back a good many years. Well, turning over
the leaves, I noticed quite carelessly an entry made by the vicar in
the year 1786. It was a note of a donation which he had made to the
parish as a thanksgiving for his recovery from a severe operation
which had been performed upon him in Norwich by a famous surgeon of
the day named Twiddy."
"Yes?" said Mrs. Wordingham.
"That little entry occupied my mind much more than the church,"
continued Caston. "I wondered what the vicar must have felt as he
travelled into Norwich in those days of no chloroform, no antiseptics,
of sloughing wounds, and hospital fevers. Not much chance of _his_
ever coming back again, eh? And then the revulsion when he did
recover--the return home to Frimley-next-the-Sea alive and well! It
must all have been pretty wonderful to the vicar in 1786, eh?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Wordingham submissively.
"I couldn't get him out of my head and when I returned to London a
couple of days ago, I saw in a bookseller's this book."
Caston picked the volume up from the floor.
"It seems that Twiddy was no end of a swell with his knife, so some
one of his devoted descendants has had a life written of him, with all
his letters included. He kept up an extensive correspondence, as
people did in those days. He had a shrewd eye and a knack of telling a
story. There's one here which I wish you to read if you will. No, not
now--when I have gone. I have put a slip of paper in at the page. I
think it will interest you."
Harry Caston went away. Mrs. Wordingham had her curtains closed and
her lamps lit. She drew her chair up to the fire, and she opened "The
Life and Letters of Mr. Edmund Twiddy, Surgeon, of Norwich," with a
shrug of the shoulders and a little grimace of discontent. But the
grimace soon left her face, and when her maid came with a warning that
she had accepted an invitation for that night to dinner, she found her
mistress with the book still open upon her knees, and her eyes staring
with a look of wonder into the fire. For this is what she had read in
"The Life and Letters of Mr. Edmund Twiddy."
"I have lately had a curious case under my charge, which has given me
more trouble than I care to confess. For sentiment is no part of the
equipment of a surgeon. It perplexed as well as troubled me, and some
clue to the explanation was only afforded me yesterday. Three months
ago my servant brought me word one evening that there was a lady very
urgent to see me, of the name of Mrs. Braxfield. I replied that my
work was done, and she must return at a more seasonable time. But
while I was giving this message the door was pushed open, and already
she stood in front of me. She was a slip of a girl, very pretty to
look at, and shrinking with alarm at her own audacity. Yet she held
her ground.
"'Mrs. Braxfield,' I cried, 'you have no right to be married--you are
much too young! Young girls hooked at your age ought to be put back.'
"'I am ill,' she said, and I nodded to the servant to leave us.
"'Very well,' I said. 'What's the matter?'
"'My throat,' said she.
"I looked at it. There was trouble, but the trouble was not so very
serious, though I recognised that at some time treatment would be
advisable.
"'There's no hurry at all about it,' I said, when my examination was
concluded, 'but, on the whole, you are right to get it looked to
soon.' I spoke roughly, for I shrank a little from having this tender
bit of a girl under my knife. 'Where's your husband?'
"'He is in Spain,' she replied.
"'Oh, indeed!' said I with some surprise. 'Well, when he returns, we
can talk about it.'
"Mrs. Braxfield shook her head.
"'No, I want it done now, while he's away,' she said, and nothing that
I could say would shake her from her purpose. I fathered her, and
bullied her, and lectured her, but she stood her ground. Her lips
trembled; she was afraid of me, and still more desperately afraid of
what waited for her. I could see her catch her breath and turn pale as
she thought upon the ordeal. But the same sort of timid courage which
had made her push into my room before I could refuse to see her,
sustained her now. I raised my hands at last in despair.
"'Very well,' I said. 'Give me your husband's address. I will send a
letter to him, and if he consents, we will not wait for his return.'
"'No,' she insisted stubbornly, 'I do not want him to know anything
about it. But if you will not attend me, no doubt someone else will.'
"That was my trouble. The throat, look at it how you will, is a
ticklish affair. If she went away from me, Heaven knows into whose
hands she might fall. She had some money and was well dressed. Some
quack would have used his blundering knife. I could have shaken her
for her obstinacy, and would have, if I had had a hope that I would
shake it out of her. But she had screwed herself up to a pitch of
determination almost unbelievable in her. I could make her cry; I
could not make her draw back from her resolve. Nor, on the other hand,
could I allow her to go out of my house and hand herself over to be
butchered by any Tom, Dick, or Harry of a barber on the look-out for a
fat fee. So I gave in.
"I got her a lodging in this town, and a woman to look after her, and
I did what needed to be done with as little pain as might be.
"'You won't hurt me more than you can help,' she said in a sort of
childish wail. And then she shut her eyes and bore it with an
extraordinary fortitude; while, for my part, I never worked more
neatly or more quickly in my life, and in a few days she was quite
comfortable again.
"But here she began to perplex me. For though the wound healed, and
there was no fever, she did not mend. She lay from day to day in an
increasing weakness, for which I could not account. I drew a chair up
to her bed one morning and took my seat.
"'My dear,' I said, 'a good many of us are father-confessors as well
as doctors. We needs must be at times if our patients are to get well
and do us credit. You are lying here surely with a great trouble on
your mind. It shall be sacred to me, but I must know it if I am to
cure you.'
"The girl looked at me with a poor little smile.
"'No, there's nothing at all,' she said; and even while she spoke she
lifted her head from the pillow, and a light dawned in her eyes.
"'Listen!' she said.
"I heard a step coming nearer and nearer along the pavement outside.
As it grew louder, she raised herself upon her elbow, and when the
footsteps ceased outside the door, her whole soul leapt into her face.
"'There will be a letter for me!' she cried, with a joyous clapping of
her hands.
"The footsteps moved on and became fainter and more faint. The girl
remained propped up, with her eyes fixed upon the door. But no one
came.
"'It has been left in the hall,' she said, turning wistfully to me.
"'I will send it up if it is there,' said I.
"I went downstairs rather heavy at heart. Here was the reason why she
did not mend. Here it was, and I saw no cure for it. There was no
letter in the hall, nor did I expect to find one. I sent for the woman
who waited upon her. 'Does she always expect a letter?'
"The woman nodded.
"'She knows the postman's step, sir, even when he is a long way off.
She singles it out from all other sounds. If he stops at the door, I
must run down upon the instant. But whether he stops or not, it is
always the same thing--there is no letter for her.'
"I went upstairs again and into her room. The girl was lying upon her
side, with her faced pressed into the pillow, and crying. I patted her
shoulder.
"'Come, Mrs. Braxfield, you must tell me what the trouble is, and we
will put our heads together and discover a remedy.'
"But she drew away from me. 'There is nothing,' she repeated. 'I am
weak--that is all.'
"I could get no more from her, and the next day I besought her to tell
me where I might find her husband. But upon that point, too, she was
silent. Then came a night, about a week later, when she fell into a
delirium, and I sat by her side and wrestled with death for her. I
fought hard with what resources I had, for there was no reason why she
should die but the extreme weakness into which she had fallen.
"I sat by the bed, thinking that now at last I should learn the secret
which ravaged her. But there was no coherency in what she said. She
talked chiefly, I remember, of a work-table and of something hidden
there which she must destroy. She was continually, in her delirium,
searching its drawers, opening the lid and diving amongst her
embroidery and beads, as though she could not die and let the thing be
found.
"So till the grey of the morning, when she came out of her delirium,
turned very wistfully to me with a feeble motion of her hands, and
said:
"'You have been very good to me, doctor.'
"She lay thus for a few moments, and then she cried in a low sad
voice: 'Oh, Arthur, Arthur!' And with that name upon her lips she
died.
"She carried her secret with her, leaving me in the dark as to who she
was and how I was to lay my hands upon one of her relations. I buried
the poor girl here, and I advertised for her husband in _The London
Newsletter_, and I made inquiries of our ambassador in Spain. A week
ago Mr. Braxfield appeared at my house. He was a man of sixty years of
age, and his Christian name was Robert.
"He gave me some few details about his marriage, and from them I am
able to put together the rest of the story. Mr. Braxfield is a Spanish
merchant of means, and the girl, a Trimingham of that branch of the
family which moved a long while since into Hampshire, was, no doubt,
pressed into marriage with him owing to the straitened position of her
parents. Mr. Braxfield and his young wife took up their residence in
Soho Square, in London, until, at the beginning of this year, business
called him once more to Spain for some months.
"His wife thereupon elected to return to her home, and there Mr.
Braxfield believed her to be, until chance threw one of my
advertisements in his way. Her own parents, for their part, understood
that she had returned to her house in Soho Square. To me, then, the
story is clear. Having married without love, she had given her heart
to someone, probably after her return to her own home--someone called
Arthur. Whether he had treated her ill, I cannot say. But I take it
that he had grown cold, and she had looked upon this trouble with her
throat as her opportunity to hold him. The risk, the suffering--these
things, one can imagine her believing, must make their appeal. She had
pretended to return to London. She had travelled, instead, to Norwich,
letting him and him alone know what she was about. The great
experiment failed. She looked for some letter; no letter came. But had
letters passed? Are these letters locked up amongst the embroidery and
the beads in that work-table, I wonder? Let us hope that, if they are,
they trouble her no longer."