THE MAN WHO HESITATES.
Max had become accustomed, in the course of this adventurous visit, to
surprises and alarms. Every step in the enterprise he had undertaken had
brought a fresh excitement, a fresh horror. But nothing that he had so
far heard or seen had given him such a sick feeling of indefinable
terror as the sight of these two eyes, turning to watch his every
movement. For a moment he watched them, then he made a bold dash for the
place where he had seen them, and aimed a blow with his fist at the
wall.
He heard the loose plaster rattle down; but when he looked for the
result of his blow, he saw nothing but the old-fashioned, dirty paper on
the wall, apparently without a hole or tear in it.
The discovery made him feel sick.
He turned to make his escape from the house, to which he felt that he
was a fool to have returned at all, when the door by which he had
entered opened slowly, and the girl came in.
A little flash, as of pleased surprise, passed over her white face. Then
she said, under her breath:
"So you have come back. I didn't think you would. I--I am sorry you
did."
Max looked rather blank. The girl's attraction for him had increased
during the short period he had been absent from her. He had had time to
think over his feelings, to find his interest stimulated by the process.
Imagination, which does so much for a woman with a man, and for a man
with a woman, had begun to have play. He had come back determined to
find out more about the girl, to probe to the bottom of the mystery in
which, perhaps, consisted so much of the charm she had for him.
Even now, upon her entrance, the first sight of her face had made his
heart leap up.
There was a pause when she finished speaking. Max, who was usually
fluent enough with her sex, hesitated, stammered and at last said:
"You are sorry I came back? Yet you seemed anxious enough to make me
promise to come back!"
He observed that a great change had come over her. Instead of being
nerveless and lifeless, as he had left her, with dull eyes and weak,
helpless limbs, she was now agitated, excited; she glanced nervously
about her while he spoke, and tapped the finger-tips of one hand
restlessly with those of the other as she listened.
"I know," she replied, rapidly, "I know I was. But--Granny has come
back. She came in while you were gone."
Max glanced at the wall, where he had fancied he saw the pair of
watching eyes.
"Oh," said he, "that explains what I saw, perhaps. Where is your
grandmother?"
"She has gone upstairs to her room under the roof."
"Ah! Are you sure she is upstairs? That she is not in the next room, for
instance, watching me through some secret peep-hole of hers?"
The girl stared at him in silence as he pointed to the wall, and as he
ran his hand over its surface.
"I saw a pair of eyes watching me just now," he went on, "from the
middle of this wall. I could swear to it!"
The girl looked incredulous, and passed her hand over the wall in her
turn. Then she shook her head.
"I can feel nothing," said she. "It must be your fancy. There is no room
there. It is the ground-floor of an old warehouse next door which has
been to let for years and years--longer than this."
He still looked doubtful, and she added, sharply:
"You can see for yourself if you like."
As she spoke, she was turning to go back into the outhouse, with a sign
to him to follow her. But even as she did so, another thought must have
struck her, for she shut the door and turned back again.
"No," she said, decisively, "of course you don't want to see anything so
much as the outside of this gloomy old house. Don't think me ungrateful;
I am not, but"--she came a little nearer to Max, so that she could
whisper very close to his ear--"if Granny knew that I'd let a stranger
into the place while she was away, I should never hear the last of it;
and--and--when she's angry I'm afraid of her."
Max felt a pang of compassion for the girl.
"If you are afraid of her being angry," said he, "you had better let her
see me and hear my explanation. I can make things right with her. I have
great powers of persuasion--with old ladies--I assure you; and you don't
look as if you were equal to a strife of tongues with her or with
anybody just now; and I'd forgotten; I've brought something for you."
Max took from the pocket of his overcoat the little flat bottle filled
with brandy with which he had provided himself; but the girl pushed it
away with alarm.
"Don't let Granny see it!" she whispered.
"All right. But I want you to taste it; it will do you good."
She shook her head astutely.
"I am not ill," she said, shortly, "and I don't know that I should take
it if I were. I see too much of those things not to be afraid of them.
And, now, sir, will you go?" After a short pause she added, in an
ominous tone--"while you have the chance."
Max still lingered. He had forgotten his curiosity, he had almost
forgotten what had brought him to the house in the first instance. He
did not want to leave this girl, with the great, light-blue eyes and the
scarlet lips, the modest manner and the moving voice.
When the silence which followed her words had lasted some seconds, she
turned from him impatiently, and leaving him by the door, crossed the
little room quickly, opened one of the two wooden doors which stood one
on each side of the fireplace, revealing a cupboard with rows of
shelves, and took from the bottom a few chips of dry wood, evidently
gleaned from the wharf outside, a box of matches and part of a
newspaper, and dropping down on her knees on the hearth, began briskly
to rake out the ashes and to prepare a fire.
Max stood watching her, divided between prudence, which urged him to go,
and inclination, which prompted him to stay.
She went on with her work steadily for some minutes, without so much as
a look behind. Yet Max felt that she was aware of his presence, and he
knew also, without being sure how the knowledge came to him, that the
girl's feeling toward himself had changed now that she was no longer
alone in the house with him. The constraint which might have been
expected toward a person of the opposite sex in the strange
circumstances, which had been so entirely absent from her manner on
their first meeting, had now stolen into her attitude toward him.
Yet, although the former absence of this constraint had been a most
effective part of her attraction for him, Max began to think that the
new and slight self-consciousness which caused her to affect to ignore
him was a fresh charm. Before, while she implored him to come into the
house with her, it was to a fellow-creature only that the frightened
girl had made her appeal. Now that her grandmother had returned, and she
was lonely and unprotected no longer, she remembered that he was a man.
This change in her attitude toward him was strikingly exemplified when,
having lit the fire, she rose from her knees, and taking a kettle from
the hob, turned toward the door.
"You haven't gone then?" said she.
"No!"
She came forward, taking the lid off the kettle as she walked.
"You won't be advised?"
She was passing him swiftly, with the manner of a busy housewife, when
Max, encouraged by her new reserve, and a demure side-look, which was
not without coquetry, seized the hand which held the kettle, and asked
her if he was to get no thanks for coming to her assistance as he had
done.
"I did thank you," said she, not attempting to withdrew her hand, but
standing, grave and with downcast eyes, between him and the door.
"Well, in a way, you did. But you didn't thank me enough. You yourself
admit it was a bold thing for a stranger to do!"
The girl looked suddenly up into his face, and again he saw in her
expressive eyes a look which was altogether new. Like flashes of
lightning the changes passed over her small, mobile features, to which
the absence of even a tinge of healthy pink color gave, perhaps, an
added power of portraying the emotions which might be agitating her.
There was now something like defiance in her eyes.
"What was your boldness compared to mine?" said she. "You are a man; you
have strong arms, at any rate, I suppose. I am only a girl, and you are
a gentleman, and gentlemen are not chivalrous. Who dared the most then,
you or I?"
"So gentlemen are not chivalrous?" said Max, ignoring the last part of
her speech. "All gentlemen are not, I suppose you mean? Or rather, all
the men who ought to be gentlemen?"
"No," answered the girl, stubbornly. "I mean what I said. You with the
rest. You'd act rightly toward a man, I suppose, as a matter of course.
You can't act rightly toward a woman, a girl, without expecting to be
paid for it."
Max was taken aback. Here was a change, indeed, from the poor, clinging,
pleading, imploring creature of twenty minutes before. He reddened a
little and let her hand slip from his grasp.
"I believe you are right," he said, at last, "though you are rather
severe. But let me tell you that the word 'chivalry' is misleading
altogether. It is applied to those middle-aged Johnnies--no, I mean
those Johnnies of the Middle Ages--who were supposed to go about
rescuing damsels in distress, isn't it? Well, you don't know what
happened after the rescue was effected; but I like to suppose, myself,
that the girl didn't just say 'Thanks--awfully' and cut him dead forever
afterward."
"You think the knight expected payment, just as you do, for his
services?"
"I think so. A very small payment, but one which he would appreciate
highly."
The girl leaned against the wall by the door and looked at him with
something like contempt for a moment. Then she smiled, not
encouragingly, but with mockery in her eyes.
"You have a tariff, I suppose," said she, cuttingly, "a regular scale of
charges, as, perhaps, you will say the knights had. Pray, what is your
charge in the present instance? A kiss, perhaps, or two?"
Now, Max had, indeed, indulged the hope that she would bestow upon him
this small mark of gratitude. It came upon him with a shock of surprise
that a girl who had been so bold as to summon him should make so much
fuss about the reward he had certainly earned. He had expected to get it
with a laugh and a blush, as a matter of course. For his modest
suggestion to be taken so seriously was a disconcerting occurrence. He
drew himself up a little.
"I don't pretend I should have been generous enough to refuse such a
payment if you had shown the slightest willingness to make it," said he.
"But as it's the sort of coin that has no value unless given
voluntarily, we will consider the debt settled without it."
He made a pretense of leaving her at this point, without the slightest
intention of persisting in it. This curious conference had all the zest
of a most novel kind of flirtation, which was none the less piquant for
the girl's haughty airs.
There are feminine eyes which allure as much while they seem to repel as
they do when they consciously attract; and the light-blue ones which
shone in the white face of this East End enchantress were of the number.
Max opened the door and slowly stepped into the outhouse. At the moment
of glancing back--an inevitable thing--he saw that she looked sorry,
dismayed. He took his gloves out of his pocket and began to draw them
on, to fill up the time. By the time the second finger of the first
glove was in its place, for he was deliberate, the girl had come into
the outhouse, passed him, and was drawing water from the tap into her
kettle. He watched her. She knew it, but pretended not to notice. The
circumstance of the water flowing freely in the house which was supposed
to be deserted made an excuse for another remark, and a safe one.
"I thought they cut the water off from empty houses; that is, houses
supposed to be empty."
She turned round with so much alacrity as to suggest that she was glad
of the pretext for reopening communications. And this time there was a
bright look of arch amusement on her face instead of her former
expression of outraged dignity.
"So they do. But--the people who know how to live without paying rent
know a few other things, too."
Max laughed a little, but he was rather shocked. This pretty and in some
respects fastidiously correct young person ought not surely to find
amusement in defrauding even a water company.
The fact reminded him of that which the intoxication caused by a pretty
face had made him forget--that he was in a house of dubious character,
from which he would be wise in escaping without further delay. But then,
again, it was the very oddness of the contrast between the character of
the house and the behavior of the girl which made the piquancy of the
situation.
"Oh, yes; of course; I'd forgotten that," assented Max, limply.
And then he fell into silence, and the girl stood quietly by the tap,
which ran slowly, till the kettle was full.
And then it began to run over.
Now this incident was a provocation. Max was artful enough to know that
no girl who ever fills a kettle lets it run over unless she is much
preoccupied. He chose to think she was preoccupied with him. So he
laughed, and she looked quickly round and blushed, and turned her back
upon him with ferocity.
He came boldly up to her.
"I'm so sorry," said he, in a coaxing, confidential, persuasive tone,
such as she had given him no proper encouragement to use, "that we've
had a sort of quarrel just at the last, and spoiled the impression of
you I wanted to carry away."
He was evidently in no hurry to carry anything away, though he went on
with the glove-buttoning with much energy.
She listened, with her eyes down, making, kettle and all, the prettiest
picture possible. There was no light in the outhouse except that which
came from a little four-penny brass hand-lamp, which the girl must have
lit just before her last entrance into the inner room. It was behind
her, on a shelf against the wall; and the light shone through the loose
threads of her fair hair, making an aureole round the side view of her
little head.
She was bewitching like that, so the susceptible Max thought, while he
debated with himself whether he now dared to try again for that small
reward. And he reluctantly decided that he did not dare. And again there
was something piquant in the fact of his not daring.
The girl, after a short pause, looked up; perhaps, though not so
susceptible as he, she was not insensible to the fact that Max was young
and handsome, well dressed, a little in love with her, and altogether
different from the types of male humanity most common to Limehouse.
"If," she suggested at last, with some hesitation, "you really think it
better to see my grandmother, she will be down very soon. I'm going to
make some tea; and you could wait, if you liked, in the next room."
"I should be delighted," said Max.
Off came the gloves; and as the girl tripped quickly into the adjoining
room, he followed with alacrity.
"Mind," cried she suddenly, as she turned from the fireplace and stood
by the table in an attitude of warning, "it is at your own risk, you
know, that you stay. You can guess that the people who belong to a
hole-and-corner place like this are not the sort you're accustomed to
meet at West-End dinner tables, nor yet at an archbishop's garden-party.
But as you've stayed so long, it will be better for me if you stay till
you have seen Granny, as she must have heard me talking to you by this
time."
Now Max, in the interest of his conversation with the girl, had
forgotten all about less pleasant subjects. Now that they were suddenly
recalled to his mind, he felt uneasy at the idea of the unseen but
ever-watchful "Granny," who might be listening to every word he uttered,
noting every glance he threw at the girl.
And then the natural suspicion flashed into his mind: Was there a
"Granny" after all? or was the invisible one some person more to be
dreaded than any old woman?
Another glance at the girl, and the fascinated, bewildered Max resolved
to risk everything for a little more of her society.