vague, burning glance from me--when I heard a voice in the hall.
Immediately the door was thrown open--quietly; but no other human being
could quite achieve the soundlessness of Miss Susan’s performance.
Mr. Fenby, candle in hand, confronted us. The books--she was just taking
them from my hand--dropped to the floor with a little crash. The noise
woke me to a daylight reality. I almost expected the sea-green wrapper
to change in a twinkling to black stuff, and the braids of hair to
arrange themselves in compact Cinderella fashion on Miss Susan’s head.
But she did not change in any respect. She was evidently too much
surprised to adventure even into another manner all at once.
“What is this?” He stormed impartially at us both.
“Miss Susan asked me for some text-books. I found them and gave them to
her. She was just taking them up-stairs.”
“Carol’s text-books?”
“Yes,” I answered, “Carol’s text-books. He is quite through with them.
Have you any objection, Mr. Fenby?”
Miss Susan had not crumpled yet. She was quite self-possessed.
“Of course I have.” Mr. Fenby didn’t precisely shout, but his voice
sounded to my nervous ear like summer thunder. “What right have you to
Carol’s books? They belong to my dead son’s boy. Pick them up.”
I stooped and gathered up the books. I was not going to see any woman
obeying orders issued in that tone.
“Your dead son’s boy.” She spoke musingly. “No, I never did care for
your dead son.”
“And you come here, at night, in that costume”--he pointed a scornful
finger at her--“to get up an intrigue with this young man!”
“Nothing of the sort, Mr. Fenby,” I said, roundly. “I don’t know why
Miss Susan wants text-books, but neither could I be supposed to see why
she shouldn’t have them. She has been here only five minutes, and I have
been explaining to her how she had better begin. We have had no
conversation whatever on any other subject, so you will kindly reverse
your opinion.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, young man. I don’t suppose you’d look
at her. But you”--he turned to Miss Susan--“traipsing around my house at
midnight--not even in a decent dress--your hair down--It’s disreputable,
you--”
I won’t repeat the word he used. It’s sufficiently well known to be
guessed.
Before I could reply, either for myself or for Miss Susan, a tottering
figure stood in the doorway. Mrs. Fenby had crept down after her
husband, and was now making her way to his side. She stood there,
hunched and rounded and frail in dressing-gown and shawl, facing her
husband and the other woman.
“That is no word for _you_ to use to Susan, Horace.” Her voice was very
thin and piping, but she got an effective emphasis all the same.
He did not answer at once, but his rage against Miss Susan appeared to
abate. Or, at least, rage seemed to pass out of him, like air from a
deflated balloon. His wife’s eyes and his fixed each other during this
shrinking process; to my imagination, dark accusations passed silently
between them. When those few instants had passed, Mrs. Fenby turned to
Miss Susan. Her words came shrill and sudden.
“Go, woman! My husband is right. I have no doubt of your intentions. But
it shall not happen again. What deceptions you have practised on this
misguided young man it is not for me to say or to know. But they shall
not be practised any further. My household is safe from you. Do you
understand? Safe! I will see to that. Carol’s tutor should have been
sacred even to you.”
“Mrs. Fenby!” I, in my turn, almost shouted. “I have already told your
husband that Miss Susan came to me with a request for some paltry
school-books. She said she wished to study by herself. I gave them to
her. I don’t know the meaning of all your abominable talk, but it has
nothing to do with any facts I know anything about. If you choose to
insult her privately, I can’t control it, I suppose; but you shall not
insult her in my presence with lies. I did not see at first why she had
to conceal so innocent a request from you and Mr. Fenby, but I do see
now, and I shouldn’t have believed it possible!”
Miss Susan came forward and offered her hand to me. “Thank you,” she
said. “I didn’t know men ever spoke the truth. Apparently they do.
You’re good for that, whether you are good for anything else or not.”
She smiled straight into my face, maliciously--as if she had, after all,
in many ways found me wanting. Then she turned to Mr. and Mrs. Fenby.
“As for you two”--some word seemed to stick in her throat--“I apologize.
It shall not happen again. Your grandson’s books shall be sacred.”
And, lifting the little pile from the chimney-piece, she flung them on
the floor. Apparently the gesture relieved her pent emotion, for with
it all passion--and likewise all lustre--seemed to ebb from her. In
spite of her costume, she looked like her daily self once more. “I
apologize,” she repeated. “I wouldn’t have done it if I had known.”
The words were spoken to Mrs. Fenby alone. She turned her back on the
husband.
Miss Susan’s movements had brought her very near the mistress of the
house; and at this point Mrs. Fenby, with a myopic start, caught at the
sea-green sleeve and held it to her eyes. “Wretched girl!” she piped.
“You wore this--down here--at midnight!”
“Yes, I did. But I never will again,” and the sea-green figure passed
out into the hall.
“I am cold, Horace--cold!” All Mrs. Fenby’s shrillness had gone. She
cowered against her husband in a shivering revulsion. Apparently she was
crying.
“Of course you are cold. You must go back to bed,” he said, vaguely,
while with one hand he mopped the sweat from his own brow. “Take my arm.
Or--if Mr. Sladen will go up-stairs ahead of us, I will give you my
dressing-gown to put round you.”
Mrs. Fenby’s teeth were chattering. There was nothing for it but to put
out the lamp and precede them, letting Mr. Fenby give his wife that
extra covering. This I did. After all, I wanted an interval of solitude
before the inevitable explanations came.
But the inevitable explanations, paradoxically, did not come. Mr. Fenby,
in his wife’s presence, the next day, apologized to me for anything that
might incidentally have offended me the evening before. His words were
as vague and inclusive as that. There was nothing for me to take up, I
saw by daylight, unless Miss Susan chose to appeal to me. Whatever dark
stuff of hatred they had woven between them was not for me to lift
unchallenged. Miss Susan was not visible to me for some days; but by the
end of the week she appeared again about the house. She seemed to take
pride in not altering her accustomed demeanor--in neither lifting her
eyes to mine nor quickening her pace when she had occasion to pass me. I
gave her chances; for, though I did not like her, I thought her
oppressed. She took none of them; and as I had now no reason to think
her either stupid or simple, I ceased to occupy myself with her.
That last statement is of course not quite true. I ceased to put myself,
however unobtrusively, in her way; but my hours of solitude were full of
wild surmises. I tried to keep away from the subject; for a time, I went
to my own room after prayers, eschewing the library. These people were
my employers; I needed their money; I was fond of Carol; I almost
respected them for not explaining to me things that most people--if they
did not turn me out of the house at once--would have bitten their
tongues in their haste to explain. Their power over Miss Susan was
certainly a moral power; for she had had chances to give me a sign, and
did not take them. The decent thing to do--since I wasn’t prepared to
chuck my position--was to forget. And yet, how could I?
There is scarcely a thinkable solution that my brain did not work out to
its passionate, illogical end. I sailed with the wind straight into
Sophoclean tragedy; I tacked--into Dumas _fils_. What had there been
between Miss Susan and Horace Fenby that stirred the crackling ire of
his wife? Or, had she embittered the son’s brief marriage? Carol’s
mother had died in childbirth, I had learned; his father, of typhoid,
not long after her. Or did it all go further back, and was Miss Susan
herself a result, not a cause, of scandal? Above all, had there been any
reason, any precedent, for their implication that she had sought me out
with no holy emotion? I could not think it; though I remembered the
malice of her final glance at me. What hold had she on people who hated
her so? Why did she stay with people she so detested? What strange
situation kept the balance between them--a claim they acknowledged so
meanly; a hatred that she could not keep from being humble? I made
nothing of it; and, as I say, I was not sure that I had the right to
wonder too cleverly, had I been able. They were paying for the full
bloom of my mental powers. I could not cheat Carol of that.
Yet, even so, my curious fever would not abate at once. It waxed with
the waxing heat of July. By August the heat was even greater, and other
symptoms began to possess me. A strange inward coolness took the place
of my brief delirium; my chill mind seemed to react against the physical
torridity and save me. I longed only for autumn to reconcile once more
the temperatures of body and brain. Perhaps the massive fixity of the
household hypnotized me. I took to sitting in the library again at
night; and after the first few evenings I ceased to expect a sea-green
shape to rise upon the threshold. Perhaps we had all been mad together;
crazed by the highest temperature in years.
In any case, it was upon a state of mind from which all expectancy had
been wrung that my third encounter with Miss Susan fell. I had gone back
to Richardson--not to _Sir Charles Grandison_, which indeed I have never
finished; but to _Pamela_. I was wondering idly what it would feel like
to be “Mr. B.”; I was even wondering, with equal idleness, what “Mr. B.”
would have made of the Fenby household. My brain was scarcely working,
as you can see, and it took me some moments to authenticate the smell of
smoke in my own nostrils. I was slow about investigating; it was a
nuisance to get up, and probably the kerosene-lamp beside me was guilty.
But the odor was too strong and significant. I suddenly realized that,
and my limbs as suddenly ceased to be lazy. I walked quickly across the
library and opened the door. A great acrid gust choked me, and I dashed
up-stairs, where, in the darkness, I already heard a mild commotion. The
Gray Sisters rushed by me in weird nightgear. Two of them went to Mrs.
Fenby’s room, where I heard Mr. Fenby shouting encouragement to her. The
other fled before me down the corridor that led to Carol’s room in the
wing. That was the path I took instinctively, myself; and I called
through the smoke to the maid--Martha, the cook--to go to the stables
and wake the coachman and gardener. She turned and shuffled away through
the smoke.
That moment was such a chaos of sensations that even memory cannot
straighten it out. I know that I had a purpose at the back of my
mind--to get every living creature out of the house, and then, with the
other men, to see what could be done. The Fenbys and the servants were
awake and aware; but no sound had come from Carol. I intended, I know,
to carry the child outside, myself, in my own arms, before that terrible
air grew hotter. I could not yet see flames anywhere, but I heard
cracklings and rumblings. Mrs. Fenby’s fear had materialized. I heard
her excited moaning somewhere behind me as I rushed down to Carol’s
room; I heard the others pleading with her; but I did not stop. The
smoke grew greasier, hotter, thicker, with each step I took towards
Carol. I judged it--as far as in that dash I could judge anything--to
have started in the floor or walls above that wing; I hoped, beyond
Carol’s own room.
The child was sleeping, but woke, choking and spluttering, as I felt for
him roughly in the dark. He was frightened, but surrendered himself to
me without too much kicking. Common sense came to my rescue in a single
flash. I flung a blanket round him, picked up his slippers and put them
on his feet. His weight was more than I had bargained for, though; I
could not be sure of stumbling ahead fast enough with him in my arms. I
felt for the washstand, dipped a towel in the pitcher against
emergencies, and bade him walk quickly by my side, holding my hand. The
sleep was jolted out of him by this time, and he obeyed, whispering and
asking absurd questions. It seemed an age before I got him down the hall
to the main staircase; but the flames did not reach us, though they were
creeping stealthily down towards us now from the end of the wing.
Mrs. Fenby was calling in her piping shriek for Carol. I shouted that I
had him safe, and I heard them bumping down the stairs. Evidently they
had to carry her, among them. I told them we were following close
behind, and by this time they could hear Carol’s own voice still asking
angry questions. Their rickety progress was resumed. Martha had not yet
brought the men back from the stables. The whole group got, finally,
into the outer air, and Mr. Fenby and I rushed back for wraps. There
could be no question of trying to save anything on the upper floors.
Just as we came out of Mrs. Fenby’s room, staggering laden through the
smoke, feeling for the hand-rail of the staircase, something turned me
sick and nearly knocked me over. Not one of us had thought of Miss
Susan! I flung my load over the banisters into the hall below and
turned to the third-story staircase. Old Mr. Fenby started down, and I
let him go without speaking to him. It was too hideous to mention, that
we should not have thought of her. There was light now--the awful
apocalyptic light of flame where flame should not be. And as I
approached the attic stairs--no speech is quick enough to tell all this,
nor yet confused enough--a sea-green figure came half falling, half
running down them. I tried to stop Miss Susan, but could not. Her face
and hair were singed, and one blackened hand was bleeding. She tore past
me to the wing, straight into the beginning conflagration. “Carol!
Carol!” I heard her cry, as she dashed past me through the smoke.
“He is safe! He’s outdoors!” I shouted to her, but she did not hear me.
She tore her way into the fire, beating a passage through the smoke with
her wounded hand.
“Carol! Carol! I’m coming!”
“Miss Susan!” I screamed it in her ear. “I took him down. He’s safe.
Every one is safe.”
She heard me then and gripped my arm. “You swear it?”
“I swear it. I went for the boy first of all, of course. For God’s sake,
come! The ceiling is falling in.”
She turned. “It started in the attic next my room, I think. My door got
jammed. I had to fight my way out. It’s all burning up there. The
windows are all open. Where is he? Where is he?”
I led her down, almost at a run, my arm around her waist; for the second
floor was already doomed.
“Carol!” she called in the hall below. But there was no answer. The
family had gone, I realized afterward, to the far end of the lawn.
“Carol!” she called again in the doorway. And when no answer came, she
struck at me and ran back to the staircase. I clutched her, willing to
be brutal if necessary, for she was far gone in hysteria. By God’s
providence, at that moment Carol’s own cry came authentically from
outside. He ran across the lawn, wrapped in his blanket, elfin and comic
in the lurid glow.
“My son! my son! my own little son!” Neither Hannah nor Rachel could get
him, for a moment, out of Miss Susan’s clutch, though the boy,
frightened, no doubt, writhed to get free from her blackened face and
arms. At last, for sheer physical weakness, she let him go. But I had
heard the cry, and so had the maids and Mr. Fenby, who now stood beside
them.
“Take the boy to his grandmother,” he commanded. “You have frightened
him sick, Susan.”
He ran to meet the two men who had just reached the house, and tried to
pull me along with him. I half gave to his pull, but before I actually
moved from the spot I spoke to Miss Susan. “They have taken chairs off
the porch. Go over there and rest. You can’t do anything now. We must
try to save some of the books.”
“Rest?” She looked about her wildly. “Where should I rest? With my
mother over there, who has taken my boy away from me? I’ll stay here.”
And, wrapping her green garment about her, she flung herself face
downward on the turf.
“Get a blanket, Martha!” I called. Even in that instant I remembered it
was Martha who had tried first to save Carol. I managed finally to get
Miss Susan up from the ground and lead her to a wicker couch under a
tree. We had got wraps from the lower floor, and the women, at the far
end of the lawn, were protected from chill. Miss Susan would not have
her couch placed near the others when she saw that Carol’s sleepy head
was on his grandmother’s lap. Mrs. Fenby called to her peevishly, but
Miss Susan gave her only a curt reply as she passed.
“God has cursed me in my daughter, and now he has taken my home. Blessed
be the name of the Lord.” That solemn whimper of Mrs. Fenby’s in sight
of her blazing house haunts me still.
Then Susan Fenby turned on her. “You have frightened me with God long
enough, mother. You will never do it again. I see now that you are only
a fool.”
“Grace is not in you, Susan.” It was hardly more than a whisper, for all
its shrillness. The old woman’s chin dropped wearily on her breast, and
she was silent in her coil of wrappings. Miss Susan flung herself upon
her couch and gazed, unwinking and speechless, at the burning house.
After this bitter little interlude I ran back to help Mr. Fenby and the
men with the books. The silver, carefully carried up-stairs every night
to Mrs. Fenby’s room, we could not go for. We saved a few volumes--more
or less at random, I am afraid, for it was impossible either to turn Mr.
Fenby out or to disobey him, and he had completely lost his head. The
house was doomed from the start, and when, an hour later, the engines
came from the town, there was little they could do save fling some water
on what seemed the very spirit of fire.
The morrows of such nights are strange. By dawn we persuaded the women
to go down to the stables. Before dawn not one of them would stir. It
was eight o’clock before I went down myself; and when I got there I
found that Mr. Fenby, Carol, and all the women had been driven to the
hotel in the town. The gardener’s wife gave me breakfast, and I ate it
hungrily. The morning I spent in groping about among the ruins,
estimating the usefulness of the walls that were left, picking up
charred objects from the débris, waiting for Mr. Fenby’s return. I could
hardly divine what my next move would be until I had seen him.
It must have been noon when I was suddenly confronted, in the middle of
what had been the library, by a strange figure. Susan Fenby, in cheap
gingham, stood before me under the August sun.
“I walked back,” she said, simply. “They are all sleeping except Mr.
Fenby, who is seeing the insurance people. He will be here pretty soon.
I shan’t see you again.”
“Do you know what they are going to do?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Go somewhere, probably, until the house can
be rebuilt.”
“How is Mrs. Fenby?” I dared not be the first to mention Carol.
“Asleep, I told you.”
“And you think they won’t need my services any more?”
“They’ll never keep you on.” She shook her head. “They will have to keep
me. That will be bad enough--after last night. They’ll be very nice to
you; you won’t suffer. But you can be sure they will never want to see
you again.”
“Probably not,” I mused. “And you will still stay on--after last night?”
I was deeply embarrassed. But, leaning against the cracked marble of the
fireplace, in that roofless room, under the crude August sun, it seemed
to me that nothing was too strange to be said.
“I shall stay. It’s in the bargain. I have done everything they made
me--standing up, sitting down, and on my knees--for the sake of being
near Carol. If you are out of the way, it will all go on as before. If
it hadn’t been for the fire, I should never have broken out again. And I
shan’t now, as long as Carol is still at home. I’m not afraid of God any
more, as I used to be--nor of them. But I have learned how to hold my
tongue. Only, of course, you’ll have to go. They couldn’t stand it with
any one who _knew_--except the maids, and they have always known.
They’ve been with us since I was born.”
“But what about Carol?”
“They’re already hoping he’s forgotten, in the excitement. I dare say he
has.” She passed her handkerchief nervously over her lips with her
bandaged hand, then broke out, passionately: “I _did_ keep my word. I
should never have told him if I hadn’t been mad with fear for him.”
She closed her eyes convulsively. Her whole face twitched.
“What I really came for,” she said, dully, “was to advise you to ask
your own price. I mean, for going away like a gentleman and holding your
tongue. Probably you would do it, anyhow, but they might as well pay.”
“Miss Susan!” I exclaimed. “What do you take me for?”
“I don’t know anything about you, but if any one can get anything out of
them, it’s all to the good.”
“Besides,” I went on--for she laid no leash on curiosity--“what is there
for me to tell?”
“I should think that it was clear enough,” she said, indifferently. “My
name is Susan Fenby, and Carol is my son. That is more than enough for
them, anyhow. I was their only child, remember.”
“How they have had to lie!” I murmured.
“Of course they’ve had to. And they don’t like it, either; so that shows
you how they feel about it--if they can lie like that when they think
it’s a sin to lie. They had to come here to this God-forsaken place to
live, too. I’m not defending myself, you understand. I used to think I
was as bad as my mother said I was. I never took much stock in what my
father said. He was no saint himself, I guess, in the beginning. I don’t
think anything much, now--and I guess it’s ‘pull Dick, pull devil,’
between us. He has a temper, and she is as cold as ice. I’m like both of
them. That’s all.” She began to pick her way out of the débris. “I only
came to tell you to ask, in reason, what you like. They’ll give it to
you. They can afford to. I must go now, or he’ll find me when he comes.”
“Miss Susan--” I stopped her--“why do you give me this advice?”
“Because you were kind about the school-books. I did want to keep up
with Carol. And I liked having his books in my hands. But--” Suddenly
she turned wholly round to me, her deep blush making her almost handsome
again. In that most unbecoming scene and light she had been like the
Miss Susan I used to see slip through the corridors slavishly intent on
Mrs. Fenby’s business. “They were quite wrong, that night. It was only
the school-books. Though”--she raised her eyes to mine with one
desperate grip on honesty--“I don’t blame them. They had no reason to
trust me. Good-bye!” She would not take my hand; would not even let me
help her, in spite of her crippled arm; and I watched her pick her way
out of the ruined house. Five minutes later Mr. Fenby had returned.
I did not follow up Miss Susan’s suggestion of putting a price on my
silence. But I fell in with Mr. Fenby’s idea of an immediate departure,
and I accepted his own offer of paying me six months’ salary the more
readily because I knew how grateful he was for the chance to give it. I
agreed with him very gravely that we had all gone off our heads the
night before. He trusted me to the point of letting me spend one long
morning alone with Carol. Carol talked to me, as freely as a running
brook, of all that had happened; but he mentioned Miss Susan only
casually. I honestly believe that, in the drugged sleep which followed
close on such excitement, he _had_ forgotten.
IX
THE PENALTIES OF ARTEMIS
Persis Lambert was asleep in her berth when the catastrophe came. The
boat was not crowded--she was not an Atlantic liner nor yet a P. & O. in
the season--and Miss Lambert’s aunt, with whom she was travelling, had,
with her maid, a separate stateroom. The niece was the solitary occupant
of her own. The alarm was sudden, and the ship’s discipline none of the
best. Mrs. Lambert’s maid, having an eye to a legacy long promised, and
the utter futility of the legacy if she did not survive, clothed her
bulky invalidish asset as well as she could, and put her whole soul into
dragging herself and the asset on deck. There were valuables, too, to
collect in that hurried moment, for the chief asset would not stir
without them.