NOCTURNAL
Many things which previously had not been plain to James Ollerenshaw
were plain to him that night, as, in the solitude of his chosen room, he
reflected upon the astonishing menu that Helen had offered him by way of
supplement to his tea. But the chief matter in his mind was the great,
central, burning, blinding fact of the endless worry caused to him by
his connection with the chit. He had bought Wilbraham Hall under her
threat to leave him if he did not buy it. Even at Trafalgar-road she had
filled the little house with worry. And now, within a dozen hours of
arriving in it, she had filled Wilbraham Hall with worry--filled it to
its farthest attic. If she had selected it as a residence, she would
have filled the Vatican with worry. All that James demanded was a quiet
life; and she would not let him have it. He wished he was back again in
Trafalgar-road. He wished he had never met Helen and her sunshade in the
park.
That is to say, he asserted to himself positively that he wished he had
never met Helen. But he did not mean it.
And so he was to help her to wrest Andrew Dean from Lilian Swetnam! He
was to take part in a shameful conspiracy! He was to assist in ruining
an innocent child's happiness! And he was deliberately to foster the raw
material of a scandal in which he himself would be involved! He, the
strong, obstinate, self-centred old man who had never, till Helen's
advent, done anything except to suit his own convenience!
The one bright spot was that Helen had no genuine designs on Emanuel
Prockter. As a son-in-law, Andrew Dean would be unbearable; but Emanuel
Prockter would have been--well, impossible. Andrew Dean (he mused) was
at any rate a man whom you could talk to and look at without feeling
sick.
When he had gazed at the affair from all points of view, and repeated to
himself the same deep moral truths (such as "There's no doing nowt wi' a
young woman afore she's forty") about thirty-nine times, and pitied
himself from every quarter of the compass, he rose to go to bed; he did
not expect to sleep. But the gas was not yet in order, and he had only
one candle, which was nearly at its latter end. The ladies--Helen and
Georgiana--had retired long since.
He left his little room, and was just setting forth on the adventure of
discovering his bedchamber, when a bell rang in the bowels of the
house. His flesh crept. It was as if--
The clock struck twelve, and shook the silent tower.
Then he collected his powers of memory and of induction, and recognised
in the sound of the bell the sound of the front door bell. Some one must
be at the front door. The singular and highly-disturbing phenomena of
distant clanging, of thrills, and of flesh-creepings were all resolved
into the simple fact that some one was at the front door.
He went back into his little room; instead of opening the front door
like a man, he opened the window of the little room, and stuck out the
tassel of his cap.
"Who's there?" he demanded.
"It's I, Mr. Ollerenshaw," said a voice, queenly and nervous.
"Not Mrs. Prockter?" he suggested.
"Yes."
"I reckon ye'd like to come in," he said.
She admitted the desire with a laugh which struck him as excessively
free. He did not know whether to be glad or sorry that Helen had
departed to bed. He did not even know whether to be glad or sorry that
Mrs. Prockter had called. But he vividly remembered what Helen had said
about caps.
Naturally, he had to let her in. He held the candle in his left hand,
as he opened the door with his right, and the tassel of his cap was over
his eye.
"You'll think I'm in the habit of calling on you at night," said Mrs.
Prockter, as she slid through the narrow space which James allotted to
her, and she laughed again. "Where is dear Helen?"
"She's gone to bed, missis," said James, holding high the candle and
gazing at the generous vision in front of him. It wore a bonnet, and a
rich Paisley shawl over its flowered silk.
"But it's only ten o'clock!" Mrs. Prockter protested.
"Yes. But her's gone to bed."
"Why," Mrs. Prockter exclaimed, changing the subject wilfully, "you are
all straight here!" (For the carpets had been unrolled and laid.)
And she sat down on a massive Early Victorian mahogany chair about
fifteen feet from the dying fire, and began to fan herself with her
hands. She was one of your women who are never cold.
James, having nothing to say, said nothing, following his custom.
"I'm not ill-pleased," said Mrs. Prockter, "that Helen is out of the
way. The fact is--it was you that I wanted to have a word with. You'll
guess what about?"
"Mr. Emanuel?" James hazarded.
"Precisely. I had to put him to bed. He is certainly in for a very
serious cold, and I trust--I fervently trust--it may not be bronchitis.
That would mean nurses, and nothing upsets a house more than nurses.
What happened, Mr. Ollerenshaw?"
James set the candle down on another Early Victorian chair, there being
no occasional table at hand, and very slowly lowered himself to a
sitting posture on a third.
"I'll tell you what happened, missis," he said, putting his hands on his
knees.
And he told her, beginning with the loss of the ship and ocean, and
ending with Helen's ever memorable words: "You must help me."
"That's what happened, missis," he said, grimly.
She had punctuated his recital by several exclamations, and when he had
finished she gave rein to her sentiments.
"My _dear_ Mr. Ollerenshaw," she said, in the kindest manner
conceivable, "how I sympathise with you! How I wish I could help you!"
Her sympathy was a genuine comfort to him. He did not, in that instant,
care a fig for Helen's notion about the direction of caps. He was simply
and humanly eased by the sweet tones of this ample and comely dame.
Besides, the idea of a woman such as Mrs. Prockter marrying a man such
as him was (he knew) preposterous. She belonged to a little world which
called him "Jimmy," whereas he belonged to a little world of his own.
True, he was wealthy; but she was not poor--and no amount of money (he
thought) could make a bridge to join those two worlds. Nevertheless,
here she was, talking to him alone at ten o'clock at night--and not for
the first time, either! Obviously, then, there was no nonsense about
_her_, whatever nonsensical world she belonged to.
She ran over with sympathy. Having no further fear of Helen making
trouble in her own family, she had all her feelings at liberty to
condone with James.
The candle, throwing a small hemisphere of feeble radiance in the
vastness of the dim hall, sat on its chair between them.
"I _can_ help you," she said, suddenly, after grunts from James. "I'm
calling on the Swetnams the day after to-morrow. I'll tell them
about--about to-day, and when Mrs. Swetnam asks me for an explanation of
it, I will be mysterious. If Lilian is there, Mrs. Swetnam will
certainly get her out of the room. Then I will just give the faintest
hint that the explanation is merely jealousy between Emanuel and Mr.
Dean concerning--a certain young lady. I shall treat it all as a joke;
you can rely on me. Immediately I am gone Lilian will hear about it. She
will quarrel with Andrew the next time she sees him; and if he _wishes_
to be free, he may be."
She smiled the arch, naughty, pleasantly-malign smile of a terribly
experienced dowager. And she seemed positively anxious that James should
have Andrew Dean for a son-in-law.
James, in his simplicity, was delighted. It appeared to him a
Mephistophelian ingenuity. He thought how clever women were, on their
own ground, and what an advantage they had in their immense lack of
scruple.
"Of course," said she, "I have always said that a marriage between
Andrew Dean and Lilian would be a mistake--a very serious mistake. They
are quite unsuited to each other. She isn't in love with him--she's only
been flattered by his attentions into drawing him on. I feel sorry for
the little thing."
At a stroke, she had converted a shameful conspiracy into an act of the
highest virtue. And her smile changed, too--became a _good_ smile, a
smile on which a man might depend. His heart went out to her, and he
contemplated the smile in a pleased, beatific silence.
Just then the candle--a treacherous thing--flamed up and went out.
"Oh!" cried Mrs. Prockter.
And James had not a match. He never smoked. And without an atlas of the
Hall, showing the location of match-boxes, he saw no hope of finding a
match.
The fire was as good as gone. A few cinders burnt red under the ash,
showing the form of the chimney-piece, but no more.
"An ye got a match?" he asked her.
"No," she said, drily, "I don't carry matches. But I can tell you I
don't like being in the dark at all." Her voice came to him out of
nothing, and had a most curious effect on his spine. "Where are you, Mr.
Ollerenshaw?"
"I'm a-sitting here," he replied.
"Well," said she, "if _you_ can't find a match, I think you had better
lead me to the door. I certainly can't find my way there myself. Where
is your hand?"
Then a hand touched his shoulder and burnt him. "Is that you?" asked the
voice.
"Ay!" he said.
And he took the hand, and the hand squeezed his hand--squeezed it
violently. It may have been due to fear, it may have been due to mere
inadvertence on the part of the hand; but the hand did, with
unmistakable, charming violence, squeeze his hand.
And he rose.
"What's that light there?" questioned the voice, in a whisper.
"Where?" he whispered also.
"There--behind."
He turned. A luminance seemed to come from above, from the unseen
heights of the magnificent double staircase. As his eyes grew accustomed
to the conditions, he gradually made out the details of the staircase.
"You'd better go and see," the whispering voice commanded.
He dropped the hand and obeyed, creeping up the left wing of the
staircase. As he faced about at the half-landing, he saw Helen, in an
orange-tinted peignoir, and her hair all down her back, holding a
candle. She beckoned to him. He ascended to her.
"Who's there?" she inquired, coldly.
"Mrs. Prockter," he murmured.
"And are you sitting together in the dark?" she inquired, coldly.
The story that the candle had expired seemed feeble in the extreme. And
for him the word "cap" was written in letters of fire on the darkness
below.
He made no attempt to answer her question.