While this question was being put, and Steptoe was rising to what he
saw as the real occasion, Rashleigh Allerton too was having a new
experience. He couldn't understand it; he couldn't understand himself.
Not that that was strange, since he had hardly ever understood himself
at any time; but now he was, as he expressed it, "absolutely
stumped."
He had put on the table the bottle on which the kilted Highlander was
playing on the pipes; he had poured himself a glass. It was what he
called a good stiff glass, meant, metaphorically, to kill or cure, and
he hoped it would be to kill.
And that was all.
He had sat looking at it, or he had looked at it while walking about;
but he had only looked at it. It was as far as he could go. Now that
to go farther had become what he called a duty the perversity of his
nerves was such that they refused. It was like him. He could always do
the forbidden, the dare-devil, the crazily mad; but when it came to
the reasonable and straightforward something in him balked. Here he
was at what should have been the beginning of the end, and the demon
which at another time would have driven him on was holding him back.
Temptation had worked itself round the other way. It was temptation
not to do, when saving grace lay in doing.
An hour or more had gone by when Mr. Radbury knocked at the door,
timidly.
"Come in, Radbury," Allerton cried, in a gayety he didn't feel. "Have
a drink."
Mr. Radbury looked at the bottle and the glass. He looked at his young
employer, who with his hands in his pockets, was again standing by the
window. It was the first time in all the years of his service, first
with the father and then with the son, that this invitation had been
given him.
"Thanks, Mr. Rash," he said, with a thick, shaky utterance. "Liquor
and I are strangers. I wish I could feel----"
But the old man's trembling anxiety forced on Allerton the fact that
the foolish game was up. "All right, Radbury. Was only joking. No harm
done. Had only taken the thing out to--to look at it."
Before sitting down to read and sign the letters he put both glass and
bottle back into the keeping of Queen Caroline Murat, saying to
himself as he did so: "I must find some other way."
He was thrown back thus on Barbara's suggestion of a few hours
earlier. He must get rid of the girl! He had scarcely as yet
considered this proposal, though not because he deemed it unworthy of
himself. Nothing could be unworthy of himself. A man who was so little
of a man as he was entitled to do anything, however base, and feel no
shame. It was simply that his mind hadn't worked round to looking at
the thing as feasible. And yet it was; plainly it was. The law allowed
for it, if one only took advantage of the law's allowances. It would
be beastly, of course; and more beastly for him than the average of
men; but because it was beastly it were better done at once, before
the girl got used to luxurious surroundings.
But even this resolution, speedy as it was, came a little late. By
evening Letty was already growing used to luxurious surroundings, and
finding herself at home in them.
First, there were no longer any women in the house, and with the three
men--Steptoe's friends being already installed--she found herself safe
from the prying and criticizing feminine.
Secondly, some of the new clothes had already come home, and she was
now wearing the tea-gown she had long dreamt of but had never aspired
to possess. It was of a blue so dark as to be almost black, with a
flame colored bar across the breast, harmonizing with her hair and
eyes. Of her eyes she wasn't thinking; but her hair....
That, however, was another part of the day's fairy tale.
When the dresses had been bought and paid for madame presumed to
Steptoe that mademoiselle was under some rich gentleman's protection.
Taking words at their face value, as she, Letty, did herself, Steptoe
admitted that she was. Madam made it plain that she understood this
honor, which often came to girls of the humblest classes, and the need
there could be for supplementing wardrobes suddenly. After that it was
confidence for confidence. Madame had seen that in the matter of
lingerie mademoiselle "left to desire," and though Margot made no
specialty in this line, they happened to have on an upper floor a
consignment just arrived from Paris, and if monsieur would allow
mademoiselle to come up and inspect it.... Then it was Madame Simone's
coiffeur. At least it was the coiffeur whom Madame Simone recommended,
who came to the house, after Letty had donned a peignoir from the
consignment just arrived from Paris.... And now, at half past nine in
the evening, it was the memory of a day of mingled agony and
enchantment.
Having looked her over as he summoned her to dinner, Steptoe had
approved of her. He had approved of her with an inner emphasis
stronger than he expressed. Letty didn't know how she knew this; but
she knew. She knew that her transformation was a surprise to him. She
knew that though he had hoped much from her she was giving him more
than he had hoped. Nothing that he said told her this, but something
in his manner--in his yearning as he passed her the various dishes and
tactfully showed her how to help herself, in the tenderness with which
he repeated correctly her little slips in words--something in this
betrayed it.
She knew it, too, when after dinner he begged her not to escape to the
little back room, but to take her place in the drawing-room.
"Madam'll find that it'll pass the time for 'er. Maybe too Mr.
Rashleigh'll come in. 'E does sometimes--early like. I've known 'im to
come 'ome by 'alf past nine, and if 'is ma wasn't sittin' in the
drorin' room 'e'd be quite put out. Lydies mostly wytes till their
'usbands comes in; and in cyse madam'd feel lonely I'll leave the
door open to the back part of the 'ouse, and she'll 'ear me talkin' to
the boys."
The October evening being chilly he lit a fire. Drawing up in front of
it a small armchair, suited for a lady's use, he placed behind it a
table with an electric lamp. Letty smiled up at him. He had never seen
her smile before, and now that he did he made to himself another
comment of approval.
"You're awful good to me."
He reflected as to how he could bring home to her the grammatical
mistake.
"Madam finds me _horfly_ good, does she? P'rhaps that's because madam
don't know that 'er comin' to this 'ouse gratifies a tyste o' mine for
which I ain't never 'ad no gratificytion."
As he put a footstool to her feet he caught the question she so easily
transmitted by her eyes.
"P'raps madam can hunderstand that after doin' things all my life for
people as is used to 'em I've 'ad a kind o' cryvin' to do 'em for them
as 'aven't 'ad nothink, and who could enjoy them more. I told madam
yesterday I was somethink of a anarchist, and that's 'ow I am--wantin'
to give the poor a wee little bit of what the rich 'as to throw
awye."
Later he brought her an old red book, open at a page on which she
read, _The Little Mermaid_.
Her heart leaped. It was from this volume that Miss Pye had read to
the Prince when he was a child. She let her eyes run along the opening
words.
"Far out in the sea the water is as blue as the petals of the
cornflower, and clear as the purest glass."
She liked this sentence. It took her into a blue world. It was
curious, she thought, how much meaning there was in colors. If you
looked through red glass the world was angry; if through yellow, it
was lit with an extraordinary sun; if through blue, you had the
sensation of universal happiness. She supposed that that was why blue
flowers always made you feel that there was a want in life which ought
to be supplied--and wasn't.
She remembered a woman who had a farm near them in Canada, who grew
only blue flowers in her garden. The neighbors said she was crazy; but
she, Letty, had liked that garden better than all the gardens she
knew. She would go there and talk to that woman, and listen to what
she had to say of Nature's peculiar love of blue. The sea and sky were
loveliest when they were blue, and so were the birds. There were blue
stones, the woman said, precious stones, and other stones that were
little more than rocks, which said something to the heart when pearls
and diamonds spoke only to the eyes. In the fields, orchards, and
gardens, white flowers, yellow flowers, red flowers were common; but
blue flowers were rare and retiring, as if they guarded a secret which
men should come and search out.
To this there was only one exception. Letty would notice as she
trudged back to her father's farm that along the August roadsides
there was a blue flower--of a blue you would never see anywhere else,
not even in the sky--which grew in the dust, and lived on dust, and
out of the dust drew elements of beauty such as roses and lilies
couldn't boast of. "That means," the crazy woman said, "that there's
nothing so dry, or parched, or sterile, that God can't take it and
fashion from it the most priceless treasures of loveliness, if we only
had the eyes to see them."
Letty never forgot this, and during all the intervening years the dust
flower, with its heavenly color, had been the wild growing thing she
loved best. It spoke to her. It not only responded to the ache she
felt within herself, but gave a promise of assuagement. She had never
expected the fulfilment of that promise, but was it possible that now
it was going to be kept?
With her eyes on the fire she saw the color of the dust flower close
to the flaming wood. It was the closest of all the colors, the one the
burning heart kept nearest to itself. It seemed to be, as the crazy
woman said, dear to Nature itself, its own beloved secret, the secret
which, even when written in the dust of the wayside, or in the fire on
the hearth, hardly anyone read or found out.
And as she was dreaming of this and of her Prince, Rashleigh was
walking up the avenue, saying to himself that he must make an end of
it. He was walking home because, having dined at the Club, he found
himself too restless to stay there. Walking relieved his nerves, and
enabled him to think. He must have the thing over and done with. She
would go decently, of course, since, as he had promised her, she would
have plenty of money to go with--plenty of money for the rest of her
life--and that was the sole consideration. She would doubtless be as
glad to escape as he to have her disappear. After that, so his lawyer
had assured him in the afternoon, the legal steps would be relatively
easy.
Letting himself in with his latchkey he was surprised to see a light
in the drawing-room. It had not been lighted up at night, as far as he
could remember, since the days when his mother was accustomed to sit
there. If he came home early he had always used the library, which was
on the other side of the house and at the back.
He went into the front drawing-room, which was empty; but a fire burnt
in the back one, and before it someone was seated. It was not the girl
he had found in the park. It was a lady whom he didn't recognize, but
clearly a lady. She was reading a book, and had evidently not heard
his entrance or his step.
With the shadows of the front drawing-room behind him he stood between
the portieres, and looked. He had looked for some seconds before the
lady raised her eyes. She raised them with a start. Slowly there stole
into her cheek the dark red of confusion. She dropped the book. She
rose.
It wasn't till she rose that he knew her. It wasn't till he knew her
that he was seized by an astonishment which almost made him laugh. It
wasn't till he almost laughed that he went forward with the words,
which insensibly bridged some of the gulf between them:
"Oh! So this is--_you_!"