The room still kept half its secrets. The discretion of the darkness
should be broken down. He must see more of this splendour--not in
unsatisfying dim detail, but in the lit gorgeous mass of it. The narrow
bar of the lantern's light chafed him. He sprang on to the dining-table,
and began to light the half-burnt chandelier. There were a hundred
candles, and he lighted all, so that the chandelier swung like a vast
living jewel in the centre of the hall. Then, as he turned, all the
colour in the room leapt out at him. The purple of the couches, the
green gleam of the delicate glass, the blue of the tapestries, and the
vivid scarlet of the velvet hangings, and with the colour sprang the
gleams of white from the silver, of yellow from the gold, of
many-coloured fire from strange inlaid work and jewelled caskets, till
the thief stood aghast with rapture in the strange, sudden revelation of
this concentrated splendour.
He went along the walls with a lighted candle in his hand--the wax
dripped warm over his fingers as he went--lighting one after another,
the tapers in the sconces of the silver-framed glasses. In the state
bedchamber he drew back suddenly, face to face with a death-white
countenance in which black eyes blazed at him with triumph and delight.
Then he laughed aloud. He had not known his own face in the strange
depths of this mirror. It had no sconces like the others, or he would
have known it for what it was. It was framed in Venice glass--wonderful,
gleaming, iridescent.
The thief dropped the candle and threw his arms wide with a gesture of
supreme longing.
"If I could carry it all away! All, all! Every beautiful thing! To sell
some--the less beautiful, and to live with the others all my days!"
And now a madness came over the thief. So little a part of all these
things could he bear away with him; yet all were his--his for the
taking--even the huge carved presses and the enormous vases of solid
silver, too heavy for him to lift--even these were his: had he not found
them--he, by his own skill and cunning? He went about in the rooms,
touching one after the other the beautiful, rare things. He caressed the
gold and the jewels. He threw his arms round the great silver vases; he
wound round himself the heavy red velvet of the curtain where the
griffins gleamed in embossed gold, and shivered with pleasure at the
soft clinging of its embrace. He found, in a tall cupboard,
curiously-shaped flasks of wine, such wine as he had never tasted, and
he drank of it slowly--in little sips--from a silver goblet and from a
green Venice glass, and from a cup of rare pink china, knowing that any
one of his drinking vessels was worth enough to keep him in idleness for
a long year. For the thief had learnt his trade, and it is a part of a
thief's trade to know the value of things.
He threw himself on the rich couches, sat in the stately carved chairs,
leaned his elbows on the ebony tables. He buried his hot face in the
chill, smooth linen of the great bed, and wondered to find it still
scented delicately as though some sweet woman had lain there but last
night. He went hither and thither laughing with pure pleasure, and
making to himself an unbridled carnival of the joys of possession.
In this wise the night wore on, and with the night his madness wore
away. So presently he went about among the treasures--no more with the
eyes of a lover, but with the eyes of a Jew--and he chose those precious
stones which he knew for the most precious, and put them in the bag he
had brought, and with them some fine-wrought goldsmith's work and the
goblet out of which he had drunk the wine. Though it was but of silver,
he would not leave it. The green Venice glass he broke and the cup, for
he said: "No man less fortunate than I, to-night, shall ever again drink
from them." But he harmed nothing else of all the beautiful things,
because he loved them.
Then, leaving the low, uneven ends of the candles still alight, he
turned to the door by which he had come in. There were two doors, side
by side, carved with straight lilies, and between them a panel wrought
with the griffin and the seven roses enwreathed. He pressed his finger
in the heart of the seventh rose, hardly hoping that the panel would
move, and indeed it did not; and he was about to seek for a secret
spring among the lilies, when he perceived that one of the doors wrought
with these had opened itself a little. So he passed through it and
closed it after him.
"I must guard my treasures," he said. But when he had passed through the
door and closed it, and put out his hand to raise the tattered tapestry
that covered it from without, his hand met the empty air, and he knew
that he had not come out by the door through which he had entered.
When the lantern was lighted, it showed him a vaulted passage, whose
floor and whose walls were stone, and there was a damp air and a
mouldering scent in it, as of a cellar long unopened. He was cold now,
and the room with the wine and the treasures seemed long ago and far
away, though but a door and a moment divided him from it, and though
some of the wine was in his body, and some of the treasure in his hands.
He set about to find the way to the quiet night outside, for this
seemed to him a haven and a safeguard since, with the closing of that
door, he had shut away warmth, and light, and companionship. He was
enclosed in walls once more, and once more menaced by the invading
silence that was almost a presence. Once more it seemed to him that he
must creep softly, must hold his breath before he ventured to turn a
corner--for always he felt that he was not alone, that near him was
something, and that its breath, too, was held.
So he went by many passages and stairways, and could find no way out;
and after a long time of searching he crept by another way back to come
unawares on the door which shut him off from the room where the many
lights were, and the wine and the treasure. Then terror leaped out upon
him from the dark hush of the place, and he beat on the door with his
hands and cried aloud, till the echo of his cry in the groined roof
cowed him back into silence.
Again he crept stealthily by strange passages, and again could find no
way except, after much wandering, back to the door where he had begun.
And now the fear of death beat in his brain with blows like a hammer. To
die here like a rat in a trap, never to see the sun alight again, never
to climb in at a window, or see brave jewels shine under his lantern,
but to wander, and wander, and wander between these inexorable walls
till he died, and the rats, admitting him to their brotherhood, swarmed
round the dead body of him.
"I had better have been born a fool," said the thief.
Then once more he went through the damp and the blackness of the vaulted
passages, tremulously searching for some outlet, but in vain.
Only at last, in a corner behind a pillar, he found a very little door
and a stair that led down. So he followed it, to wander among other
corridors and cellars, with the silence heavy about him, and despair
growing thick and cold like a fungus about his heart, and in his brain
the fear of death beating like a hammer.
It was quite suddenly in his wanderings, which had grown into an aimless
frenzy, having now less of search in it than of flight from the
insistent silence, that he saw at last a light--and it was the light of
day coming through an open door. He stood at the door and breathed the
air of the morning. The sun had risen and touched the tops of the towers
of the house with white radiance; the birds were singing loudly. It was
morning, then, and he was a free man.
He looked about him for a way to come at the park, and thence to the
broken wall and the white road, which he had come by a very long time
before. For this door opened on an inner enclosed courtyard, still in
damp shadow, though the sun above struck level across it--a courtyard
where tall weeds grew thick and dank. The dew of the night was heavy on
them.
As he stood and looked, he was aware of a low, buzzing sound that came
from the other side of the courtyard. He pushed through the weeds
towards it; and the sense of a presence in the silence came upon him
more than ever it had done in the darkened house, though now it was day,
and the birds sang all gaily, and the good sun shone so bravely
overhead.
As he thrust aside the weeds which grew waist-high, he trod on something
that seemed to writhe under his feet like a snake. He started back and
looked down. It was the long, firm, heavy plait of a woman's hair. And
just beyond lay the green gown of a woman, and a woman's hands, and her
golden head, and her eyes; all about the place where she lay was the
thick buzzing of flies, and the black swarming of them.
The thief saw, and he turned and he fled back to his doorway, and down
the steps and through the maze of vaulted passages--fled in the dark,
and empty-handed, because when he had come into the presence that
informed that house with silence, he had dropped lantern and treasure,
and fled wildly, the horror in his soul driving him before it. Now fear
is more wise than cunning, so, whereas he had sought for hours with his
lantern and with all his thief's craft to find the way out, and had
sought in vain, he now, in the dark and blindly, without thought or
will, without pause or let, found the one way that led to a door, shot
back the bolts, and fled through the awakened rose garden and across the
dewy park.
He dropped from the wall into the road, and stood there looking eagerly
to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, like a
twisted ribbon over the great, grey shoulder of the hill; to the left
the road curved down towards the river. No least black fly of a figure
stirred on it. There are no travellers on such a road at such an hour.
XI
THE GIRL AT THE TOBACCONIST'S
John Selwyn Selborne cursed for the hundredth time the fool that had
bound him captive at the chariot wheels of beauty. That is to say, he
cursed the fool he had been to trust himself in the automobile of that
Brydges woman. The Brydges woman was pretty, rich, and charming;
omniscience was her pose. She knew everything: consequently she knew how
to drive a motor-car. She learned the lesson of her own incompetence at
the price of a broken ankle and a complete suit of bruises. Selborne
paid for his trusting folly with a broken collar-bone and a deep cut on
his arm. That was why he could not go to Portsmouth to see the last of
his young brother when he left home for the wars.
This was why he cursed. The curse was mild--it was indeed less a curse
than an invocation.
"Defend us from women," he said; "above all from the women who think
they know."
The grey gloom that stood for dawn that day crept through the curtains
and made ghosts of the shadows that lingered still in his room. He
stretched himself wearily, and groaned as the stretched nerves vibrated
to the chord of agony.
"There's no fool like an old fool," said John Selwyn Selborne. He had
thirty-seven years, and they weighed on him as the forty-seven when
their time came would not do.
He had said good-bye to the young brother the night before; here in this
country inn, the nearest to the scene of the enlightenment of the
Brydges woman. And to-day the boy sailed. John Selborne sighed.
Twenty-two, and off to the wars, heart-whole. Whereas he had been
invalided at the very beginning of things and now, when he was well and
just on the point of rejoining--the motor-car and the Brydges woman! And
as for heart-whole ... the Brydges woman again.
He fell asleep. When he awoke there was full sunshine and an orchestra
of awakened birds in the garden outside. There was tea--there were
letters. One was from Sidney--Sidney, who had left him not twelve hours
before.
He tore it open, and hurt his shoulder in the movement.
"DEAR JOHN," said the letter, "I wanted to tell you last night,
but you seemed so cheap, I thought I'd better not bother you.
But it's just come into my head that perhaps I may get a bullet
in my innards, and I want you to know. So here goes. There's a
girl I mean to marry. I know she'll say Yes, but I can't ask
her till I come back, of course. I don't want to have any
humbug or concealing things from you; you've always been so
decent to me. I know you hate jaw, so I won't go on about that.
But I must tell you I met her first when she was serving in a
tobacconist's shop. And her mother lets lodgings. You'll think
this means she's beneath me. Wait till you see her. I want you
to see her, and make friends with her while I'm away."
Here followed some lover's raptures, and the address of the lady.
John Selborne lay back and groaned.
Susannah Sheepmarsh, tobacconist's assistant, lodging-house keeper's
daughter, and Sidney Selborne, younger son of a house whose pride was
that it had been proud enough to refuse a peerage.
John Selborne thought long and deeply.
"I suppose I must sacrifice myself," he said. "Little adventuress! 'How
easy to prove to him,' I said, 'that an eagle's the game her pride
prefers, though she stoops to a wren instead.' The boy'll hate me for a
bit, but he'll thank me later. Yalding? That's somewhere on the Medway.
Fishing? Boating? Convalescence is good enough. Fiction aid us! What
would the villain in a book do to come between fond lovers? He would
take the lodgings: at least he would try. And one may as well do
something."
So he wrote to Mrs Sheepmarsh--she had rooms to let, he heard. Terms?
And Mrs Sheepmarsh wrote back; at least her reply was typewritten, which
was a bit of a shock. She had rooms. They were disengaged. And the terms
were thus and such.
Behold John Selwyn Selborne then, his baggage neatly labelled with his
first and second names, set down on the little platform of Yalding
Station. Behold him, waggonette-borne, crossing the old stone bridge and
the golden glory of the Leas, flushed with sunset.
Mrs Sheepmarsh's house was long and low and white. It had a classic
porch, and at one end a French window opened through cascades of jasmine
to a long lawn. There were many trees. A middle-aged lady in decent
black, with a white cap, and white lace about her neck, greeted him with
formal courtesy. "This way," she said, and moved for him to follow her
through a green gate and down a shrubbery that led without disguise or
pretence straight away from the house. It led also to a little white
building embowered in trees. "Here," said the lady. She opened the door.
"I'll tell the man to bring your luggage. Good evening----"
And she left him planted there. He had to bend his head to pass under
the low door, and he found himself in a tiny kitchen. Beyond were a
sitting-room and two bedchambers. All fitted sparsely, but with old
furniture, softly-faded curtains, quiet and pleasant to look upon. There
were roses in a jug of Gres de Flandre on the gate-table in the
sitting-room.
"What a singular little place!" he said. "So these are the lodgings. I
feel like a dog in a kennel. I suppose they will throw me a bone
by-and-by--or, at any rate, ask me what kind of bones I prefer."
He unpacked his clothes and laid his belongings in the drawers and
cupboards; it was oddly charming that each shelf or drawer should have
its own little muslin bag of grey lavender. Then he took up a book and
began to read. The sunset had died away, the daylight seemed to be
glowing out of the low window like a tide, leaving bare breadths of
darkness behind. He lighted candles. He was growing hungry--it was past
eight o'clock.
"I believe the old lady has forgotten my existence," he said, and
therewith opened his cottage door and went out into the lighter twilight
of the garden. The shrubbery walks were winding. He took the wrong
turning, and found himself entering on the narrow lawn. From the French
window among the jasmine came lamplight--and voices.
"No servant, no food? My good mother, you've entertained a lunatic
unawares."
"He had references."
"Man cannot live by references alone. The poor brute must be
starving--unless he's drunk."
"Celia! I do wish you wouldn't----"
John Selborne hastening by, put a period to the conversation by boots
crunching heavily and conscientiously on the gravel. Both voices
ceased. He presented himself at the lamp-lit oblong of the window.
Within that lamplight glowed on the last remnants of a meal--dinner, by
the glasses and the fruit. Also on the lady in the cap, and on a
girl--the one, doubtless, who had evolved the lunatic idea. Both faces
were turned towards him. Both women rose: there was nothing for it but
advance. He murmured something about intrusion--"awfully sorry, the
walks wind so," and turned to go.
But the girl spoke: "Oh, wait a moment. Is this Mr Selwyn, mother?"
"My daughter, Miss Sheepmarsh--Mr Selwyn," said the mother reluctantly.
"We were just talking about you," said the girl, "and wondering whether
you were ill or anything, or whether your servant hasn't turned up, or
something."
"Miss Sheepmarsh." He was still speechless. This the little adventuress,
the tobacconist's assistant? This girl with the glorious hair severely
braided, the round face, the proud chin, the most honest eyes in the
world? She might be sister to the adventuress--cousin, perhaps? But the
room, too--shining mahogany, old china, worn silver, and fine
napery--all spoke of a luxury as temperate as refined: the luxury of
delicate custom, of habit bred in the bone; no mushroom growth of gross
self-indulgence, but the unconscious outcome of generations of clear
self-respect.
"Can we send anything over for you?" the elder lady asked. "Of course
we----"
"We didn't mean by 'entirely private' that we would let our tenant
starve," the girl interrupted.
"There is some mistake." Selborne came to himself suddenly. "I thought I
was engaging furnished apartments with er--attendance."
The girl drew a journal from a heap on the sofa.
"This was the advertisement, wasn't it?" she asked.
And he read:
"Four-roomed cottage, furnished, in beautiful grounds. Part of
these are fenced in for use of tenant of cottage. And in the
absence of the family the whole of the grounds are open to
tenant. When at home the family wish to be entirely private."
"I never saw this at all," said Selborne desperately. "My--I mean I was
told it was furnished lodgings. I am very sorry I have no servant and
no means of getting one. I will go back to London at once. I am sorry."
"The last train's gone," said Miss Sheepmarsh. "Mother, ask Mr Selborne
to come in, and I'll get him something to eat."
"My dear," said the mother, "surely Mary----"
"My dear mother," said the girl, "you know Mary is having her supper."
The bewildered Selborne presently found himself seated at the
white-spread, silver-sparkling table, served with food and drink by this
Hebe with the honest eyes. He exerted himself to talk with the
mother--not of the difference between a lodger and a tenant, but of
music, art, and the life of the great world.
It was the girl who brought the conversation down from the gossip of
Courts and concert-rooms to the tenant's immediate needs.
"If you mean to stay, you could have a woman in from the village," said
she.
"But wouldn't you rather I went?" he said.
"Why should we? We want to let the cottage, or we shouldn't have
advertised it. I'll get you some one to-morrow. Mrs Bates would be the
very thing, mother. And you'll like her, Mr Selwyn. She's a great
dear----"
Sure enough, the next morning brought a gentle, middle-aged woman to "do
for" Mr Selwyn. And she did excellently. And three slow days passed. He
got a boat and pulled up and down the green willow-fringed river. He
tried to fish; he read somewhat, and he thought more. And he went in and
out of his cottage, which had its own private path debouching on the
highway. Many times a day he went in and out, but he saw no more the red
hair, the round face, and the honest eyes.
On the fourth day he had nursed his interest in the girl to a strong,
well-grown sentiment of curiosity and attraction. Coming in at his own
gate, he saw the mother leaving hers, with sunshade and cardcase--an
afternoon of calls evidently setting in.
Now or never! The swift impulse took him, and before he had time to
recall the terms of that advertisement, he had passed the green fence of
division, and his feet were on the wandering ways of the shrubbery. He
felt, as he went, a glow of gratitude to the fate which was rewarding
his care of his brother's future with an interest like this. The
adventuress?--the tobacconist's assistant?--he could deal with her
later.
Through the garden's green a gleam of white guided--even, it seemed,
beckoned.
He found the girl with the red hair and the honest eyes in a hammock
swung between two cedars.
"Have pity on me," he said abruptly.
She raised her eyes from her book.
"Oh, it's you!" she said. "I am so glad. Get a chair from under the
weeping ash, and sit down and talk."
"This turf is good enough for me," said he; "but are you sure I'm not
trespassing?"
"You mean the advertisement? Oh, that was just because we had some
rather awful people last year, and we couldn't get away from them, and
mother wanted to be quite safe; but, of course, you're different. We
like you very much, what we've seen of you." This straightforward
compliment somehow pleased him less than it might have done. "The other
people were--well, he was a butterman. I believe he called himself an
artist."
"Do you mean that you do not like persons who are in trade," he asked,
thinking of the tobacconist's assistant.
"Of course I don't mean that," she said; "why, I'm a Socialist!
Butterman just means a person without manners or ideals. But I do like
working people better than shoppy people, though I know it's wrong."
"How can an involuntary liking or disliking be wrong?" he asked.
"It's snobbish, don't you think? We ought to like people for what they
are, not for what they have, or what they work at."
"If you weren't so pretty, and hadn't that delightful air of having just
embraced the Social Gospel, you'd be a prig," he said to himself. To her
he said: "Roughly speaking, don't you think the conventional
classifications correspond fairly well with the real ones?"
"No," she answered roundly.
And when the mother returned, weary from her calls, she found her tenant
and her daughter still discussing the problems of good and evil, of
heredity and environment, of social inequalities and the injustice of
the world. The girl fought for her views, and she fought fairly, if
fiercely. It was the first of many such fights. When he had gone the
mother protested.
"Dearest," said the girl, "I can't help it! I must live my own life, as
people say in plays. After all, I'm twenty-six. I've always talked to
people if I liked them--even strangers in railway carriages. And people
aren't wild beasts, you know: everything is always all right. And this
man can talk; he knows about things. And he's a gentleman. That ought to
satisfy you--that and his references. Don't worry, there's a darling.
Just be nice to him yourself. He's simply a godsend in a place like
this."
"He'll fall in love with you, Celia," said the mother warningly.
"Not he!" said the daughter. But the mother was right.
Living alone in the queer little cottage, the world, his accustomed
life, the Brydges woman, all seemed very far away. Miss Sheepmarsh was
very near. Her frank enjoyment of his talk, her gay acceptance of their
now almost constant companionship, were things new in his experience of
women, and might have warned him that she at least was heart-whole. They
would have done had he ever faced the fact that his own heart had caught
fire. He bicycled with her along the pleasant Kentish lanes; he rowed
with her on the little river of dreams; he read to her in the quiet of
the August garden; he gave himself up wholly to the pleasure of those
hours that flew like moments--those days that passed like hours. They
talked of books and of the heart of books--and inevitably they talked of
themselves. He talked of himself less than most men, but he learned much
of her life. She was an ardent social reformer; had lived in an
Art-and-Culture-for-the-People settlement in Whitechapel; had studied at
the London School of Economics. Now she had come back to be with her
mother, who needed her. She and her mother were almost alone in the
world; there was enough to live on, but not too much. The letting of the
little house had been Celia's idea: its rent was merely for "luxuries."
He found out from the mother, when she came to tolerate him, that the
"luxuries" were Celia's--the luxuries of helping the unfortunate,
feeding the hungry, and clothing little shivering children in winter
time.
And all this while he had not heard a word of sister or cousin--of any
one whom he might identify as the tobacconist's assistant.
It was on an evening when the level sunbeams turned the meadows by the
riverside to fine gold, and the willows and alders to trees of Paradise,
that he spoke suddenly, leaning forward on his sculls. "Have you," he
asked, looking into her face, "any relation who is in a shop?"
"No," said she; "why?"
"I only wondered," said he coldly.
"But what an extraordinary thing to wonder!" she said. "Do tell me what
made you think of it."