THE MAN IN THE TRAIN
“Oldhampton! Oldhampton! Change here for Motchley and Monkshaven!”
It was with a sigh of relief that Sara, in obedience to the warning
raucously intoned by a hurrying porter, vacated her seat in the railway
compartment in which she had travelled from Fallowdene. Her companions
on the journey had been an elderly spinster and her maid, and as the
former had insisted upon the exclusion of every breath of outside air,
Sara felt half-suffocated by the time they ran into Oldhampton
Junction. The Monkshaven train was already standing in the station, and,
commissioning a porter to transfer her luggage, she sauntered leisurely
along the platform, searching vainly for an empty compartment, where the
regulation of the supply of oxygen would not depend upon the caprice of
an old maid.
The train appeared to be very full, but at last she espied a first-class
smoking carriage which boasted but a single occupant--a man in the far
corner, half-hidden behind the newspaper he was holding--and, tipping
her porter, she stepped into the compartment and busied herself
bestowing her hand-baggage in the rack.
The man in the corner abruptly lowered his newspaper.
“This be a smoker,” he remarked significantly.
Sara turned at the sound of his voice. The unwelcoming tones made it
abundantly clear that the remainder of his thought ran: “And you've no
business to get into it.” A spark of amusement lit itself in her eyes.
“The railway company indicate as much on the window,” she replied
placidly, with a glance towards the _Smoking Carriage_ label pasted
against the pane.
There came no response, unless an irritated crackling of newspaper could
be regarded as such--and the next moment, to the accompaniment of much
banging of doors and a final shout of: “Stand away there!” the train
began to move slowly out of the station.
Sara sat down with a sigh of relief that she had escaped her former
travelling companions, with their unpleasant predilection for a vitiated
atmosphere, and her thoughts wandered idly to the consideration of
the man in the corner, to whom she was obviously an equally unwelcome
fellow-passenger.
He had retired once more behind his newspaper, and practically all that
was offered for her contemplation consisted of a pair of knee-breeches
and well-cut leather leggings and two strong-looking, sun-tanned hands.
These latter intrigued Sara considerably--their long, sensitive fingers
and short, well-kept nails according curiously with their sunburnt
suggestion of great physical strength and an outdoor life. She wished
their owner would see fit to lower his newspaper once more, since her
momentary glimpse of his face had supplied her with but little idea of
his personality. And the hands, so full of contradictory suggestion,
aroused her interest.
As though in response to her thoughts, the newspaper suddenly crackled
down on to its owner's knees.
“I have every intention of smoking,” he announced aggressively. “This is
a smoking carriage.”
Sara, supported by the recollection of a dainty little gold and
enamel affair in her hand-bag, filled with some very special Russian
cigarettes, smiled amiably.
“I know it is,” she replied in unruffled tones. “That's why I got in. I,
too, have every intention of smoking.”
He stared at her in silence for a moment, then, without further comment,
produced a pipe and tobacco pouch from the depths of a pocket, and
proceeded to fill the former, carefully pressing down the tobacco with
the tip of one of those slender, capable-looking fingers.
Sara observed him quickly. As he lounged there indolently in his corner,
she was aware of a subtle combination of strength and fine tempering
in the long, supple lines of his limbs--something that suggested the
quality of steel, hard, yet pliant. He had a lean, hard-bitten face,
tanned by exposure to the sun and wind, and the clean-shaven lips met
with a curious suggestion of bitter reticence in their firm closing. His
hair was brown--“plain brown” as Sara mentally characterized it--but it
had a redeeming kink in it and the crispness of splendid vitality. The
eyes beneath the straight, rather frowning brows were hazel, and, even
in the brief space of time occupied by the inimical colloquy of a few
moments ago, Sara had been struck by the peculiar intensity of their
regard--an odd depth and brilliance only occasionally to be met with,
and then preferably in those eyes which are a somewhat light grey in
colour and ringed round the outer edge of the iris with a deeper tint.
The flare of a match roused her from her half-idle, half-interested
contemplation of her fellow-passenger, and, as he lit his pipe, she was
sharply conscious that his oddly luminous eyes were regarding her with a
glint of irony in their depths.
Instantly she recalled his hostile reception of her entrance into the
compartment, and the defiantly given explanation she had tendered in
return.
Very deliberately she extracted her cigarette-case from her bag and
selected a cigarette, only to discover that she had not supplied herself
with a matchbox. She hunted assiduously amongst the assortment of odds
and ends the bag contained, but in vain, and finally, a little nettled
that her companion made no attempt to supply the obvious deficiency, she
looked up to find that he was once more, to all appearances, completely
absorbed in his newspaper.
Sara regarded him with indignation; in her own mind she was perfectly
convinced that he was aware of her quandary and had no mind to help
her out of it. Evidently he had not forgiven her intrusion into his
solitude.
“Boor!” she ejaculated mentally. Then, aloud, and with considerable
acerbity:
“Could you oblige me with a match?”
With no show of alacrity, and with complete indifference of manner, he
produced a matchbox and handed it to her, immediately reverting to his
newspaper as though considerably bored by the interruption.
Sara flushed, and, having lit her cigarette, tendered him his matchbox
with an icy little word of thanks.
Apparently, however, he was quite unashamed of his churlishness, for he
accepted the box without troubling to raise his eyes from the page
he was reading, and the remainder of the journey to Monkshaven was
accomplished in an atmosphere that bristled with hostility.
As the train slowed up into the station, it became evident to Sara that
Monkshaven was also the destination of her travelling companion, for he
proceeded with great deliberation to fold up his newspaper and to hoist
his suit-case down from the rack. It did not seem to occur to him
to proffer his service to Sara, who was struggling with her own
hand-luggage, and the instant the train came to a standstill he opened
the door of the compartment, stopped out on to the platform, and marched
away.
A gleam of amusement crossed her face.
“I wonder who he is?” she reflected, as she followed in the wake of
a porter in search of her trunks. “He certainly needs a lesson in
manners.”
Within herself she registered a vindictive vow that, should the
circumstances of her residence in Monkshaven afford the opportunity, she
would endeavour to give him one.
Monkshaven was but a tiny little station, and it was soon apparent that
no conveyance of any kind had been sent to meet her.
“No, there would be none,” opined the porter of whom she inquired. “Dr.
Selwyn keeps naught but a little pony-trap, and he's most times using it
himself. But there's a 'bus from the Cliff Hotel meets all trains, miss,
and”--with pride--“there's a station keb.”
In a few minutes Sara was the proud--and thankful--occupant of the
“station keb,” and, after bumping over the cobbles with which the
station yard was paved, she found herself being driven in leisurely
fashion through the high street of the little town, whilst her driver,
sitting sideways on his box, indicated the points of interest with his
whip as they went along.
Presently the cab turned out of the town and began the ascent of a steep
hill, and as they climbed the winding road, Sara found that she could
glimpse the sea, rippling greyly beyond the town, and tufted with little
bunches of spume whipped into being by the keen March wind. The town
itself spread out before her, an assemblage of red and grey tiled roofs
sloping downwards to the curve of the bay, while, on the right, a bold
promontory thrust itself into the sea, grimly resisting the perpetual
onslaught of the wave. Through the waning light of the winter's
afternoon, Sara could discern the outline of a house limned against
the dark background of woods that crowned it. Linked to the jutting
headland, a long range of sea-washed cliffs stretched as far as the eyes
could reach.
“That be Monk's Cliff,” vouchsafed the driver conversationally. “Bit of
a lonesome place for folks to choose to live at, ain't it?”
“Who lives there?” asked Sara with interest.
“Gentleman of the name of Trent--queer kind of bloke he must be, too,
if all's true they say of 'im. He's lived there a matter of ten years or
more--lives by 'imself with just a man and his wife to do for 'im. Far
End, they calls the 'ouse.”
“Far End,” repeated Sara. The name conveyed an odd sense of remoteness
and inaccessibility. It seemed peculiarly appropriate to a house built
thus on the very edge of the mainland.
Her eyes rested musingly on the bleak promontory. It would be a fit
abode, she thought, for some recluse, determined to eschew the society
of his fellow-men; here he could dwell, solitary and apart, surrounded
on three sides by the grey, dividing sea, and protected on the fourth
by the steep untempting climb that lay betwixt the town and the lonely
house on the cliff.
“'Ere you are, miss. This is Dr. Selwyn's.”
The voice of her Jehu roused her from her reflections to find that the
cab had stopped in front of a white-painted wooden gate bearing the
legend, “Sunnyside,” painted in black letters across its topmost bar.
“I'll take the keb round to the stable-yard, miss; it'll be more
convenient-like for the luggage,” added the man, with a mildly
disapproving glance towards the narrow tiled path leading from the gate
to the house-door.
Sara nodded, and, having paid him his fare, made her way through the
white gateway and along the path.
There seemed a curious absence of life about the place. No sound of
voices broke the silence, and, although the front door stood invitingly
open, there was no sign of any one hovering in the background ready to
receive her.
Vaguely chilled--since, of course, they must be expecting her--she rang
the bell. It clanged noisily through the house but failed to produce
any more important result than the dislodging of some dust from a ledge
above which the bell-wire ran. Sara watched it fall and lie on the floor
in a little patch of fine, greyish powder.
The hall, of which the open door gave view, though of considerable
dimensions, was poorly furnished. The wide expanse of colour-washed
wall was broken only by a hat-stand, on which hung a large assortment of
masculine hats and coats, all of them looking considerably the worse
for wear, and by two straight-backed chairs placed with praiseworthy
exactitude at equal distances apart from the aforesaid rather
overburdened piece of furniture. The floor was covered with linoleum
of which the black and white chess-board pattern had long since
retrogressed with usage into an uninspiring blur. A couple of threadbare
rugs completed a somewhat depressing “interior.”
Sara rang the bell a second time, on this occasion with an irritable
force that produced clangour enough, one would have thought, to awaken
the dead. It served, at all events, to arouse the living, for presently
heavy footsteps could be heard descending the stairs, and, finally, a
middle-aged maidservant, whose cap had obviously been assumed in haste,
appeared, confronting Sara with an air of suspicion that seemed rather
to suggest that she might have come after the spoons.
“The doctor's out,” she announced somewhat truculently. Then, before
Sara had time to formulate any reply, she added, a thought more
graciously: “Maybe you're a stranger to these parts. Surgery hour's not
till six o'clock.”
She was evidently fully prepared for Sara to accept this as a dismissal,
and looked considerably astonished when the latter queried meekly:
“Then can I see Miss Selwyn, please? I understand Mrs. Selwyn is an
invalid.”
“You're right there. The mistress isn't up for seeing visitors. And Miss
Molly, she's not home--she's away to Oldhampton.”
“But--but----” stammered Sara. “They're expecting me, surely? I'm Miss
Tennant,” she added by way of explanation.
“Miss Tennant! Sakes alive!” The woman threw up her hands, staring
at Sara with an almost comic expression, halting midway between
bewilderment and horror. “If that isn't just the way of them,” she went
on indignantly, “never mentioning that 'twas to-day you were coming--and
no sheets aired to your bed and all! The master, he never so much as
named it to me, nor Miss Molly neither. But please to come in, miss--”
her outraged sense of hospitality infusing a certain limited cordiality
into her tones.
The woman led the way into a sitting-room that opened off the hall,
standing aside for Sara to pass in, then, muttering half-inaudibly,
“You'll be liking a cup of tea, I expect,” she disappeared into the back
regions of the house, whence a distant clattering of china shortly gave
indication that the proffered refreshment was in course of preparation.
Sara seated herself in a somewhat battered armchair and proceeded to
take stock of the room in which she found herself. It tallied accurately
with what the hall had led her to expect. Most of the furniture had been
good of its kind at one time, but it was now all reduced to a drab level
of shabbiness. There were a few genuine antiques amongst it--a couple
of camel-backed Chippendale chairs, a grandfather's clock, and some
fine old bits of silver--which Sara's eye, accustomed to the rare and
beautiful furnishings of Barrow Court, singled out at once from the
olla podrida of incongruous modern stuff. These alone had survived the
general condition of disrepair; but, even so, the silver had a neglected
appearance and stood badly in need of cleaning.
This latter criticism might have been leveled with equal justice at
almost everything in the room, and Sara, mindful of her reception,
reflected that in such an oddly conducted household, where the advent of
an expected, and obviously much-needed, paying guest could be
completely overlooked, it was hardly probable that smaller details of
house-management would receive their meed of attention.
Instead of depressing her, however, the forlorn aspect of the room
assisted to raise her spirits. It looked as though there might very
well be a niche in such a household that she could fill. Mentally she
proceeded to make a tour of the room, duster in hand, and she had just
reached the point where, in imagination, she was about to place a great
bowl of flowers in the middle desert of the table, when the elderly
Abigail re-appeared and dumped a tea-tray down in front of her.
Sara made a wry face over the tea. It tasted flat, and she could well
imagine the long-boiling kettle from which the water with which it had
been made was poured.
“I'm sure that tea's beastly!”
A masculine voice sounded abruptly from the doorway, and, looking up,
Sara beheld a tall, eager-faced man, wearing a loose shabby coat and
carrying in one hand a professional-looking doctor's bag. The bag,
however, was the only professional-looking thing about him. For the
rest, he might have been taken to be either an impoverished country
squire and sportsman, or a Roman Catholic dignitary, according
to whether you assessed him by his broad, well-knit figure and
weather-beaten complexion, puckered with wrinkles born of jolly
laughter, or by the somewhat austere and controlled set of his mouth and
by the ardent luminous grey eyes, with their touch of the visionary and
fanatic.
Sara set down her cup hastily.
“And I'm sure you're Dr. Selwyn,” she said, a flicker of amusement at
his unconventional greeting in her voice.
“Right!” he answered, shaking hands. “How are you, Miss Tennant? It
was plucky of you to decide to risk us after all, and I hope--” with a
slight grimace--“you won't find we are any worse than I depicted. I was
very sorry I had to be out when you came,” he went on genially, “but I
expect Molly has looked after you all right? By the way”--glancing round
him in some perplexity--“where _is_ Molly?”
“I understood,” replied Sara tranquilly, “that she had gone in to
Oldhampton.”
Dr. Selwyn's expression was not unlike that of a puppy caught in the
unlawful possession of his master's slipper.
“What did I warn you?” he exclaimed with a rueful laugh. “We're quite
a hopeless household, I'm afraid. And Molly's the most absent-minded of
beings. I expect she has clean forgotten that you were coming to-day.
She's by way of being an artist--art-student, rather”--correcting
himself with a smile. “You know the kind of thing--black carpets and
Futurist colour schemes in dress. So you must try and forgive her. She's
only seventeen. But Jane--I hope Jane did the honours properly? She is
our stand-by in all emergencies.”
Sara's eyes danced.
“I'm afraid I came upon Jane entirely in the light of an unpleasant
surprise,” she responded mildly.
“What! Do you mean to say she wasn't prepared for you? Oh, but this is
scandalous! What must you think of us all?” he strode across the room
and pealed the bell, and, when Jane appeared in answer to the summons,
demanded wrathfully why nothing was in readiness for Miss Tennant's
arrival.
Jane surveyed him with the immovable calm of the old family servant, her
arms akimbo.
“And how should it be?” she wanted to know. “Seeing that neither you nor
Miss Molly named it to me that the young lady was coming to-day?”
“But I asked Miss Molly to make arrangements,” protested Selwyn feebly.
“And did you expect her to do so, sir, may I ask?” inquired Jane with
withering scorn.
“Do you mean to tell me that Miss Molly gave you no orders about
preparing a room?” countered the doctor, skillfully avoiding the point
raised?
“No, sir, she didn't. And if I'm kep' here talking much longer, there
won't _be_ one prepared, neither! 'Tis no use crying over spilt milk.
Let me get on with the airing of my sheets, and do you talk to the young
lady whiles I see to it.”
And Jane departed forthwith about her business.
“Jane Crab,” observed Selwyn, twinkling, “has been with us
five-and-twenty years. I had better do as she tells me.” He threw a
doleful glance at the unappetizing tea in Sara's cup. “I positively
dare not order you fresh tea--in the circumstances. Jane would probably
retaliate with an ultimatum involving a rigid choice between tea and
the preparation of your room, accompanied by a pithy summary of the
capabilities of one pair of hands.”
“Wouldn't you like some tea yourself?” hazarded Sara.
“I should--very much. But I see no prospect of getting any while Jane
maintains her present attitude of mind.”
“Then--if you will show me the kitchen--_I'll_ make some,” announced
Sara valiantly.
Selwyn regarded her with a pitying smile.
“You don't know Jane,” he said. “Trespassers in the kitchen are
not--welcomed.”
“And Jane doesn't know _me_,” replied Sara firmly.
“On your own head be it, then,” retorted the doctor, and led the way to
the sacrosanct domain presided over by Jane Crab.
How Sara managed it Selwyn never knew, but she contrived to invade
Jane's kitchen and perform the office of tea-making without offending
her in the very least. Nay, more, by some occult process known only to
herself, she succeeded in winning Jane's capacious heart, and from
that moment onwards, the autocrat of the kitchen became her devoted
satellite; and later, when Sara started to make drastic changes in the
slip-shod arrangements of the house, her most willing ally.
“Miss Tennant's the only body in the place as has got some sense in her
head,” she was heard to observe on more than one occasion.