tear-stained face. The little old lady stood beside him.
"Ah, don't!" she said softly--"don't! Believe me, it will be all right.
Your old wife won't live more than a year--I know it. Take courage."
"_Don't!_" he said in his turn; "it's a wicked thing I've done. Forgive
me! If only we could have been friends. I can't bear to think I shall
make you unhappy."
"My dear boy," she said, "we are friends. I am your housekeeper. In a
year at latest you will see the last of my white hairs. Be brave."
He could not understand the pang her words gave him.
And now began, for these two, a strange life. In those Temple
rooms--ideal nest for young lovers--Mrs Wood, the white-haired, kept
house with firm and capable little hands. Comfort, which Michael's lazy
nature loved but could not achieve, reigned peacefully. The old lady
kept much to her own rooms, but whenever he needed talk she was there.
And she could talk. She had read much, reflected much. In her mind his
own ideas found mating germs, and bore fruit of beautiful dreams, great
thoughts. His verses--neglected this long time, since Sylvia did not
care for poetry--flourished once more.
And music--Sylvia's taste in music had been Sullivan; the old wife
touched the piano with magic fingers, and Bach, Beethoven, Wagner came
to transfigure the Temple rooms. Michael had never been so
contented--never so wretched; for, as the quiet weeks went by, the
leaves fell from the plane tree, and the time drew near when he must
show his wife to the tenants--his white-haired wife. In these months a
very real friendship had grown up between them. Michael had never met a
woman, old or young, whose tastes chimed so tunefully with his own. Ah!
what a pity he had not met a _young_ woman with these tastes--this soul.
And now, liking, friendship, affection--all the finer, nobler side of
love--he could indeed feel for his old wife; but love--lovers' love,
that would set the seal on all the rest--this he might never know,
except for some other woman, who would succeed to his wife's title.
Badly as Michael had behaved, I think it is permissible to be sorry for
him. His wife, in fact, was very sorry.
One day he met Sylvia in the park, and all the other side of him
thrilled with pleasure. He sat by her an hour, his eyes drinking in her
fresh beauty, while his soul shrivelled more and more. Ah! why could she
not _talk_, as his wife could, instead of merely chattering?
His wife looked sad that evening. He asked the reason.
"I saw you in the park to-day," she said. "Are you going to see her?
Don't compromise her: it's not worth while."
He kissed her hand in its black mitten, and in a flash of pain saw the
black funeral, when she should be carried from his house, and he be left
free to marry Sylvia.
And now the days had dropped past; so even was their flow that it seemed
rapid, and in another week it would be Christmas.
"And I must show you to the tenants," said he.
"My poor boy," she said--it was just as she had risen to bid him good
night--"be brave. Perhaps it won't be so bad as you think. Good night."
He sat still after she had left him, gazing into the fire, and thinking
thoughts in which now the estate and the fortune played but little part.
At last he shrugged his shoulders.
"Well," he said, "I have no lover, no wife; but I have a companion, a
friend--one in a million." And again the black funeral trailed its slow
length before his eyes, and he shuddered.
I have not sought to deceive the reader. He knows as well as I do that
at this moment the door opened, and a young and beautiful woman stood on
the threshold. Her eyes were shining; round her neck were gleaming
pearls. She was playing for a high stake, and being a true woman she had
disdained no honest artifice that might help her. She wore shining white
silk, severely plain, and her brown hair was dressed high on her head. A
woman one shade less intuitive would have let the dusky masses fall over
a lace-covered tea-gown.
"Michael," she said, "I am your wife. Are you going to forgive me?"
He raised himself slowly from his chair, and his eyes dwelt on detail
after detail of the beauty before him.
"My wife!" he said. "You are a stranger!"
"I _did_ disguise myself well. My sister told me about your
advertisement; she lives with Sylvia Maddox. We each have a hundred
pounds a year. At first I did it for fun; but when I had seen how--how
nice you were--my mother is very poor. There are no excuses. But are you
going to forgive me?" Any other woman, to whom forgiveness meant all
that it meant to her, might have kneeled at his feet. Frances stood
erect by the door. "Anyway," she said, biting her lip, "I have saved you
from Sylvia. For the sake of that, forgive me."
That stung him, as she had known it would.
"Forgive you?" he said. "Never. You've spoiled my life." But he took a
step towards her as he spoke.
She took an equal step back.
"Take courage," she said. "Who knows but I may die before next June,
after all. Good night."
"I hate you," he said, and took another step forward. But the door
closed in his face.
Next morning the old lady, white haired and mittened, appeared behind
the breakfast tea. Michael almost thought he had dreamed, till her eyes,
now without their glasses, met his timidly.
"Let us end this play-acting, at least," he said. Ten minutes of fuming
ended in tepid tea poured by a beautiful brown-haired girl.
He watched her in silence.
"It's horrible," he broke out. "You're a strange woman, and there you
sit, pouring tea out as if---- Who are you? I don't know you."
"Don't you?" she said quietly. And then he remembered all the old talks
with the old wife.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I don't want to be a brute."
"It's no use my saying I'm sorry," she said.
"_Are_ you?" He leaned forward to put the question.
"We must make the best of it," she said. "Perhaps---- Look here, don't
let's speak of it till after Christmas; let's just go on as we did
before."
So the days wore on. But the situation when Michael lived in torment in
the company of his old wife was simplicity itself compared to his new
life with a wife--young, beautiful, and a stranger, yet in all
essentials his dearest friend. This discomfort grew daily--hourly
branching out into ever fresh embarrassments--new and harassing,
vexatious, half understood, wholly resented.
The wife had her burden to bear also. The laundress had only known the
old wife as "Mrs Wood."
"She thought I was your mother," the wife said when Michael propounded
the difficulty. But the laundress's attitude to the new Mrs Wood had a
sting that was almost punishment enough to the wife, had Michael only
known, for all that she had done amiss.
The hour of departure for the Christmas festivities at Wood Grange came
as a relief from the persistent pinpricks of unexplained emotion which
tormented him. His wife was young and beautiful, yet he was only
conscious of repulsion. He hated her for her trickery. But most he hated
her because she had cheated him of the old wife--the friend, the
_confidante_, who had grown to be so much, and so much the best part, in
his life. For now there was no confidence between the two--no talk, no
reading, no music to brighten the Temple rooms. They lived in an almost
complete silence.
* * * * *
Every window of the Grange shone out with yellow light across the snow.
For once Christmas had been kind and seasonable--a white sheet covered
the world. Holly gleamed against old oak. Priceless silver, saved from
the smelting-pot in Cromwell's hard days, shone above white napery on
the long tables. The tenants' dinner was over, and now was the moment
when, according to the will, Michael Wood's wife must be presented to
the tenants then assembled.
The slender figure in white woollen cloth and white fur, with Christmas
roses at its breast, stood on the dais at the end of the great hall, and
the tenants cheered themselves hoarse at the mere sight of her beautiful
face, her kind eyes.
"It went off very well," Michael said when, the last guest gone, the
last shutter closed, the last servant departed, the two stood alone in
the long drawing-room.
"Yes; think if you had had to present to them the old white-haired
wife----"
"I loved the old wife," he said obstinately; but his voice was not quite
steady.
"I wish," she said, playing with the Christmas roses she wore, "I wish
you would try to forgive me. It was horribly wrong; but I began it as a
joke. You see, I had only just come over from the convent where I was
brought up. I thought it would be such fun: I was always good at
theatricals. I will never do anything silly again. And to-morrow I'll go
away, and you need never see me again. And you _have_ got the money and
the old place, haven't you? And I got them for you--and--do forgive me.
It began as a silly schoolgirl's joke indeed."
"But--a convent! You have read and thought----"
"It was my father. He made me read and think; and when he died all the
money went, and my mother is poor. Oh, Michael, don't be so flinty! Say
you forgive me before I go! It all began in a joke!"
"Began. Yes. But why did you go on?"
"Because I--I didn't like Sylvia--and I liked you--rather--but I won't
be a nuisance. I'll go back to mother. Say you forgive me. I'll go by
the first train in the morning."
"The first train," said Michael absently, "is the 9.17; but to-morrow is
Christmas Day--I daresay they'll run the same as on Sunday."
She took her white cloak from the settle by the fire.
"Good night," she said sadly; "you are very hard. Won't you even shake
hands?"
"We had no roses at our wedding," he said, still absently; "but there
are roses at Christmas." He raised his hand to the white flowers she
wore, and touched them softly. "White roses, too, for a wedding," he
said.
"Good night!" she said again.
"And you will go to your mother to-morrow by the 9.17 train, or the
10.5, if the trains run the same as on Sunday. And I am to forgive you,
and shake hands before we part. Well, well!"
He took the hand she held out, caught the other, and stood holding them,
his grey eyes seeking hers. Her head thrown back, her hands stretched
out, she looked at him from arm's length.
"Dear!" he said.
A mute glance questioned him. Then lashes longer than Sylvia's veiled
the dark eyes.
He spoke again. "Dear!"
"You know you hate me," she said.
He raised her hands to his lips.
"Have you forgotten Sylvia?"
"Absolutely, thank God! And you--I--after all, we are married, though
there were no roses at our June wedding."
Again her eyes questioned mutely.
He leaned forward and touched the Christmas roses with his lips. Then he
dropped her hands and caught her by the shoulders.
"Oh! foolish, foolish, foolish people!" he said. "We two are man and
wife. My wife! my wife! my wife! We are, aren't we?"
"I suppose we are," she said, and her face leaned a little towards his.
"Well, then!" said he.
X
THE HOUSE OF SILENCE
The thief stood close under the high wall, and looked to right and left.
To the right the road wound white and sinuous, lying like a twisted
ribbon over the broad grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road
turned sharply down towards the river; beyond the ford the road went
away slowly in a curve, prolonged for miles through the green marshes.
No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There were no travellers
at such an hour on such a road.
The thief looked across the valley, at the top of the mountain flushed
with sunset, and at the grey-green of the olives about its base. The
terraces of olives were already dusk with twilight, but his keen eyes
could not have missed the smallest variance or shifting of their lights
and shadows. Nothing stirred there. He was alone.
Then, turning, he looked again at the wall behind him. The face of it
was grey and sombre, but all along the top of it, in the crannies of the
coping stones, orange wallflowers and sulphur-coloured snapdragons shone
among the haze of feathery-flowered grasses. He looked again at the
place where some of the stones had fallen from the coping--had fallen
within the wall, for none lay in the road without. The bough of a mighty
tree covered the gap with its green mantle from the eyes of any chance
wayfarer; but the thief was no chance wayfarer, and he had surprised the
only infidelity of the great wall to its trust.
To the chance wayfarer, too, the wall's denial had seemed absolute,
unanswerable. Its solid stone, close knit by mortar hardly less solid,
showed not only a defence, it offered a defiance--a menace. But the
thief had learnt his trade; he saw that the mortar might be loosened a
little here, broken a little there, and now the crumbs of it fell
rustling on to the dry, dusty grass of the roadside. He drew back, took
two quick steps forward, and, with a spring, sudden and agile as a
cat's, grasped the wall where the gap showed, and drew himself up. Then
he rubbed his hands on his knees, because his hands were bloody from the
sudden grasping of the rough stones, and sat astride on the wall.
He parted the leafy boughs and looked down; below him lay the stones
that had fallen from the wall--already grass was growing upon the mound
they made. As he ventured his head beyond the green leafage, the level
light of the sinking sun struck him in the eyes. It was like a blow. He
dropped softly from the wall and stood in the shadow of the
tree--looking, listening.
Before him stretched the park--wide and still; dotted here and there
with trees, and overlaid with gold poured from the west. He held his
breath and listened. There was no wind to stir the leaves to those
rustlings which may deceive and disconcert the keenest and the boldest;
only the sleepy twitter of birds, and the little sudden soft movements
of them in the dusky privacy of the thick-leaved branches. There was in
all the broad park no sign of any other living thing.
The thief trod softly along under the wall where the trees were
thickest, and at every step he paused to look and listen.
It was quite suddenly that he came upon the little lodge near the great
gates of wrought iron with the marble gate-posts bearing upon them the
two gaunt griffins, the cognisance of the noble house whose lands these
were. The thief drew back into the shadow and stood still, only his
heart beat thickly. He stood still as the tree trunk beside him,
looking, listening. He told himself that he heard nothing--saw
nothing--yet he became aware of things. That the door of the lodge was
not closed, that some of its windows were broken, and that into its
little garden straw and litter had drifted from the open door: and that
between the stone step and the threshold grass was growing inches high.
When he was aware of this he stepped forward and entered the lodge. All
the sordid sadness of a little deserted home met him here--broken crocks
and bent pans, straw, old rags, and a brooding, dusty stillness.
"There has been no one here since the old keeper died. They told the
truth," said the thief; and he made haste to leave the lodge, for there
was nothing in it now that any man need covet--only desolation and the
memory of death.
So he went slowly among the trees, and by devious ways drew a little
nearer to the great house that stood in its walled garden in the middle
of the park. From very far off, above the green wave of trees that broke
round it, he could see the towers of it rising black against the sunset;
and between the trees came glimpses of its marble white where the faint
grey light touched it from the east.
Moving slowly--vigilant, alert, with eyes turning always to right and to
left, with ears which felt the intense silence more acutely than they
could have felt any tumult--the thief reached the low wall of the
garden, at the western side. The last redness of the sunset's reflection
had lighted all the many windows, and the vast place blazed at him for
an instant before the light dipped behind the black bar of the trees,
and left him face to face with a pale house, whose windows now were
black and hollow, and seemed like eyes that watched him. Every window
was closed; the lower ones were guarded by jalousies; through the glass
of the ones above he could see the set painted faces of the shutters.
From far off he had heard, and known, the plash-plash of fountains, and
now he saw their white changing columns rise and fall against the
background of the terrace. The garden was full of rose bushes trailing
and unpruned; and the heavy, happy scent of the roses, still warm from
the sun, breathed through the place, exaggerating the sadness of its
tangled desolation. Strange figures gleamed in the deepening dusk, but
they were too white to be feared. He crept into a corner where Psyche
drooped in marble, and, behind her pedestal, crouched. He took food from
his pockets and ate and drank. And between the mouthfuls he listened and
watched.
The moon rose, and struck a pale fire from the face of the house and
from the marble limbs of the statues, and the gleaming water of the
fountains drew the moonbeams into the unchanging change of its rise and
fall.
Something rustled and stirred among the roses. The thief grew rigid: his
heart seemed suddenly hollow; he held his breath. Through the deepening
shadows something gleamed white; and not marble, for it moved, it came
towards him. Then the silence of the night was shattered by a scream, as
the white shape glided into the moonlight. The thief resumed his
munching, and another shape glimmered after the first. "Curse the
beasts!" he said, and took another draught from his bottle, as the white
peacocks were blotted out by the shadows of the trees, and the stillness
of the night grew more intense.
In the moonlight the thief went round and about the house, pushing
through the trailing briers that clung to him--and now grown bolder he
looked closely at doors and windows. But all were fast barred as the
doors of a tomb. And the silence deepened as the moonlight waxed.
There was one little window, high up, that showed no shutter. He looked
at it; measured its distance from the ground and from the nearest of the
great chestnut trees. Then he walked along under the avenue of chestnuts
with head thrown back and eyes fixed on the mystery of their interlacing
branches.
At the fifth tree he stopped; leaped to the lowest bough, missed it;
leaped again, caught it, and drew up his body. Then climbing, creeping,
swinging, while the leaves, agitated by his progress, rustled to the
bending of the boughs, he passed to that tree, to the next--swift,
assured, unhesitating. And so from tree to tree, till he was at the
last tree--and on the bough that stretched to touch the little window
with its leaves.
He swung from this. The bough bent and cracked, and would have broken,
but that at the only possible instant the thief swung forward, felt the
edge of the window with his feet, loosed the bough, sprang, and stood,
flattened against the mouldings, clutching the carved drip-stone with
his hands. He thrust his knee through the window, waiting for the tinkle
of the falling glass to settle into quietness, opened the window, and
crept in. He found himself in a corridor: he could see the long line of
its white windows, and the bars of moonlight falling across the inlaid
wood of its floor.
He took out his thief's lantern--high and slender like a tall
cup--lighted it, and crept softly along the corridor, listening between
his steps till the silence grew to be like a humming in his ears.
And slowly, stealthily, he opened door after door; the rooms were
spacious and empty--his lantern's yellow light flashing into their
corners told him this. Some poor, plain furniture he discerned, a
curtain or a bench here and there, but not what he sought. So large was
the house, that presently it seemed to the thief that for many hours he
had been wandering along its galleries, creeping down its wide stairs,
opening the grudging doors of the dark, empty rooms, whose silence spoke
ever more insistently in his ears.
"But it is as he told me," he said inwardly: "no living soul in all the
place. The old man--a servant of this great house--he told me; he knew,
and I have found all even as he said."
Then the thief turned away from the arched emptiness of the grand
staircase, and in a far corner of the hall he found himself speaking in
a whisper because now it seemed to him that nothing would serve but that
this clamorous silence should be stilled by a human voice.
"The old man said it would be thus--all emptiness, and not profit to a
man; and he died, and I tended him. Dear Jesus! how our good deeds come
home to us! And he told me how the last of the great family had gone
away none knew whither. And the tales I heard in the town--how the great
man had not gone, but lived here in hiding---- It is not possible. There
is the silence of death in this house."
He moistened his lips with his tongue. The stillness of the place seemed
to press upon him like a solid thing. "It is like a dead man on one's
shoulders," thought the thief, and he straightened himself up and
whispered again: "The old man said, 'The door with the carved griffin,
and the roses enwreathed, and the seventh rose holds the secret in its
heart.'"
With that the thief set forth again, creeping softly across the bars of
moonlight down the corridor.
And after much seeking he found at last, under the angle of the great
stone staircase behind a mouldering tapestry wrought with peacocks and
pines, a door, and on it carved a griffin, wreathed about with roses. He
pressed his finger into the deep heart of each carven rose, and when he
pressed the rose that was seventh in number from the griffin, he felt
the inmost part of it move beneath his finger as though it sought to
escape. So he pressed more strongly, leaning against the door till it
swung open, and he passed through it, looking behind him to see that
nothing followed. The door he closed as he entered.
And now he was, as it seemed, in some other house. The chambers were
large and lofty as those whose hushed emptiness he had explored--but
these rooms seemed warm with life, yet held no threat, no terror. To the
dim yellow flicker from the lantern came out of the darkness hints of a
crowded magnificence, a lavish profusion of beautiful objects such as he
had never in his life dreamed of, though all that life had been one
dream of the lovely treasures which rich men hoard, and which, by the
thief's skill and craft, may come to be his.
He passed through the rooms, turning the light of his lantern this way
and that, and ever the darkness withheld more than the light revealed.
He knew that thick tapestries hung from the walls, velvet curtains
masked the windows; his hand, exploring eagerly, felt the rich carving
of chairs and presses; the great beds were hung with silken cloth
wrought in gold thread with glimmering strange starry devices. Broad
sideboards flashed back to his lantern's questionings the faint white
laugh of silver; the tall cabinets could not, with all their reserve,
suppress the confession of wrought gold, and, from the caskets into
whose depths he flashed the light, came the trembling avowal of rich
jewels. And now, at last, that carved door closed between him and the
poignant silence of the deserted corridors, the thief felt a sudden
gaiety of heart, a sense of escape, of security. He was alone, yet
warmed and companioned. The silence here was no longer a horror, but a
consoler, a friend.
And, indeed, now he was not alone. The ample splendours about him, the
spoils which long centuries had yielded to the grasp of a noble
family--these were companions after his own heart.