IN THE NIGHT
I
Louis stood hesitant and slightly impatient in the parlour, alone. A
dark blue cloth now covered the table, and in the centre of it was
a large copper jar containing an evergreen plant. Of the feast no
material trace remained except a few crumbs on the floor. But the room
was still pervaded by the emotional effluence of the perturbed souls
who had just gone; and Louis felt it, though without understanding.
Throughout the evening he had of course been preoccupied by the
consciousness of having in his pocket bank-notes to a value unknown.
Several times he had sought for a suitable opportunity to disclose his
exciting secret. But he had found none. In practice he could not say
to his aunt, before Julian and Rachel: "Auntie, I picked up a lot of
bank-notes on the landing. You really ought to be more careful!" He
could not even in any way refer to them. The dignity of Mrs. Maldon
had intimidated him. He had decided, after Julian's announcement
of departure, that he would hand them over to her, simply and
undramatically and with no triumphant air, as soon as he and she
should for a moment be alone together. Then Mrs. Maldon vanished
upstairs. And she had not returned. Rachel also had vanished. And he
was waiting.
He desired to examine the notes, to let his eyes luxuriously rest upon
them, but he dared not take them from his pocket lest one or other of
the silent-footed women might surprise him by a sudden entrance. He
fingered them as they lay in their covert, and the mere feel of them,
raised exquisite images in his mind; and at the same time the whole
room and every object in the room was transformed into a secret
witness which spied upon him, disquieted him, and warned him. But
the fact that the notes were intact, that nothing irremediable had
occurred, reassured him and gave him strength, so that he could defy
the suspicions of those senseless surrounding objects.
Within the room there was no sound but the faint regular hiss of the
gas and an occasional falling together of coal in the weakening fire.
Overhead, from his aunt's bedroom, vague movements were perceptible.
Then these ceased, absolutely. The tension, increasing, grew too much
for him, and with a curt gesture, and a self-conscious expression
between a smile and a frown, he left the parlour and stood to listen
in the lobby. Not for several seconds did he notice the heavy ticking
of the clock, close to his ear, nor the chill draught that came under
the front door. He gazed up into the obscurity at the top of the
stairs. The red glow of the kitchen fire, in the distance to the right
of the stairs, caught his attention at intervals. He was obsessed,
almost overpowered, by the mysteriousness of the first floor. What had
happened? What was happening? And suddenly an explanation swept into
his brain--the obvious explanation. His aunt had missed the bank-notes
and was probably at that very instant working herself into an anguish.
What ought he to do? Should he run up and knock at her door? He was
spared a decision by the semi-miraculous appearance of Rachel at the
top of the stairs. She started.
"Oh! How you frightened me!" she exclaimed in a low voice.
He answered weakly, charmingly--
"Did I?"
"Will you please come and speak to Mrs. Maldon? She wants you."
"In her room?"
Rachel nodded and disappeared before he could ask another question.
With heart beating he ascended the stairs by twos. Through the
half-open door of the faintly lit room which he himself would occupy
he could hear Rachel active. And then he was at the closed door of his
aunt's room. "I must be jolly careful how I do it!" he thought as he
knocked.
II
He was surprised, and impressed, to see Mrs. Maldon in bed. She lay
on her back, with her striking head raised high on several pillows.
Nothing else of her was visible; the purple eider-down covered the
whole bed without a crease.
"Hello, auntie!" he greeted her, instinctively modifying his voice to
the soft gentleness proper to the ordered and solemn chamber.
Mrs. Maldon, moving her head, looked at him in silence. He tiptoed to
the foot of the bed and leaned on it gracefully. And as in the parlour
his shadow had fallen on the table, so now, with the gas just
behind him, it fell on the bed. The room was chilly and had a slight
pharmaceutical odour.
Mrs. Maldon said, with a weak effort--
"I was feeling faint, and Rachel thought I'd better get straight to
bed. I'm an old woman, Louis."
"She hasn't missed them!" he thought in a flash, and said, aloud--
"Nothing of the sort, auntie."
He was aware of the dim reflection of himself in the mirror of the
immense Victorian mahogany wardrobe to his left.
Mrs. Maldon again hesitated before speaking.
"You aren't ill, are you, auntie?" he said in a cheerful, friendly
whisper. He was touched by the poignant pathos of her great age and
her debility. It rent his heart to think that she had no prospect but
the grave.
She murmured, ignoring his question--
"I just wanted to tell you that you needn't go down home for your
night things--unless you specially want to, that is. I have all that's
necessary here, and I've given orders to Rachel."
"Certainly, auntie. I won't leave the house. That's all right."
No, she assuredly had not missed the notes! He was strangely uplifted.
He felt almost joyous in his relief. Could he tell her now as she lay
in her bed? Impossible! He would tell her in the morning. It would be
cruel to disturb her now with such a revelation of her own negligence.
He vibrated with sympathy for her, and he was proud to think that she
appreciated the affectionate, comprehending, subdued intimacy of his
attitude towards her as he leaned gracefully on the foot of the bed,
and that she admired him. He did not know, or rather he absolutely did
not realize, that she was acquainted with aught against his good fame.
He forgot his sins with the insouciance of an animal.
"Don't stay up too late," said Mrs. Maldon, as it were dismissing him.
"A long night will do you no harm for once in a way." She smiled. "I
know you'll see that everything's locked up."
He nodded soothingly, and stood upright.
"You might turn the gas down, rather low."
He tripped to the gas-bracket and put the room in obscurity. The
light of the street lamp irradiated the pale green blinds of the two
windows.
"That do?"
"Nicely, thank you! Good-night, my dear. No, I'm not ill. But you know
I have these little attacks. And then bed's the best place for me."
Her voice seemed to expire.
He crept across the wide carpet and departed with the skill of a
trained nurse, and inaudibly closed the door.
From the landing the whole of the rest of the house seemed to offer
itself to him in the night as an enigmatic and alluring field of
adventure ... Should he drop the notes under the chair on the landing,
where he had found them?... He could not! He could not!... He moved to
the head of the stairs, past the open door of the spare bedroom,
which was now dark. He stopped at the head of the stairs, and then
descended. The kitchen was lighted.
"Are you there?" he asked.
"Yes," replied Rachel.
"May I come?"
"Why, of course!" Her voice trembled.
He went towards the other young creature in the house. The old one lay
above, in a different world remote and foreign. He and Rachel had the
ground floor and all its nocturnal enchantment to themselves.
III
Mechanically, as he went into the kitchen, he drew his cigarette-case
from his pocket. It was the proper gesture of a man in any minor
crisis. He was not a frequenter of kitchens, and this visit, even more
than the brief first one, seemed to him to be adventurous.
Mrs. Maldon's kitchen--or rather Rachel's--was small, warm (though the
fire was nearly out), and agreeable to the eye. On the left wall was a
deal dresser full of crockery, and on the right, under the low window,
a narrow deal table. In front, opposite the door, gleamed the range,
and on either side of the range were cupboards with oak-grained
doors. There was a bright steel fender before the range, and then
a hearth-rug on which stood an oak rocking-chair. The floor was a
friendly chequer of red and black tiles. On the high mantelpiece were
canisters and an alarm-clock and utensils; sundry other utensils hung
on the walls, among the coloured images of sweet girls and Norse-like
men offered by grocers and butchers under the guise of almanacs; and
cupboard doors ajar dimly disclosed other utensils still, so that the
kitchen had the effect of a novel, comfortable kind of workshop; which
effect was helped by the clothes-drier that hung on pulley-ropes from
the ceiling, next to the gas-pendant and to a stalactite of onions.
The uncurtained window, instead of showing black, gave on another
interior, whitewashed, and well illuminated by the kitchen gas. This
other interior had, under a previous tenant of the property, been
a lean-to greenhouse, but Mrs. Maldon esteeming a scullery before a
greenhouse, it had been modified into a scullery. There it was that
Julian Maldon had preferred to make his toilet. One had to pass
through the scullery in order to get from the kitchen into the yard.
And the light of day had to pass through the imperfectly transparent
glass roof of the scullery in order to reach the window of the unused
room behind the parlour; and herein lay the reason why that room was
unused, it being seldom much brighter than a crypt.
At the table stood Rachel, in her immense pinafore-apron, busy with
knives and forks and spoons, and an enamel basin from which steam rose
gently. Louis looked upon Rachel, and for the first time in his life
liked an apron! It struck him as an exceedingly piquant addition to
the young woman's garments. It suited her; it set off the tints of her
notable hair; and it suited the kitchen. Without delaying her work,
Rachel made the protector of the house very welcome. Obviously she
was in a high state of agitation. For an instant Louis feared that the
agitation was due to anxiety on account of Mrs. Maldon.
"Nothing serious up with the old lady, is there?" he asked, pinching
the cigarette to regularize the tobacco in it.
"Oh, _no_!"
The exclamation in its absolute sincerity dissipated every trace of
his apprehension. He felt gay, calmly happy, and yet excited too. He
was sure, then, that Rachel's agitation was a pleasurable agitation.
It was caused solely by his entrance into the kitchen, by the
compliment he was paying to her kitchen! Her eyes glittered; her face
shone; her little movements were electric; she was intensely conscious
of herself--all because he had come into her kitchen! She could not
conceal--perhaps she did not wish to conceal--the joy that his near
presence inspired. Louis had had few adventures, very few, and this
experience was exquisite and wondrous to him. It roused, not the
fatuous coxcomb, nor the Lothario, but that in him which was honest
and high-spirited. A touch of the male's vanity, not surprising, was
to be excused.
"Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel, "had an idea that it was _me_ who
suggested your staying all night instead of your cousin." She raised
her chin, and peered at nothing through the window as she rubbed away
at a spoon.
"But when?" Louis demanded, moving towards the fire. It appeared to
him that the conversation had taken a most interesting turn.
"When?... When you brought the tray in here for me, I suppose."
"And I suppose you explained to her that I had the idea all out of my
own little head?"
"I told her that I should never have dreamed of asking such a thing!"
The susceptible and proud young creature indicated that the suggestion
was one of Mrs. Maldon's rare social errors, and that Mrs. Maldon had
had a narrow escape of being snubbed for it by the woman of the world
now washing silver. "I'm no more afraid of burglars than you are,"
Rachel added. "I should just like to catch a burglar here--that I
should!"
Louis indulgently doubted the reality of this courage. He had been
too hastily concluding that what Rachel resented was an insinuation of
undue interest in himself, whereas she now made it seem that she was
objecting merely to any reflection upon her valour: which was much
less exciting to him. Still, he thought that both causes might have
contributed to her delightful indignation.
"Why was she so keen about having one of us to sleep here to-night?"
Louis inquired.
"Well, I don't know that she was," answered Rachel. "If you hadn't
said anything--"
"Oh, but do you know what she said to me upstairs?"
"No."
"She didn't want me even to go back to my digs for my things.
Evidently she doesn't care for the house to be left even for half an
hour."
"Well, of course old people are apt to get nervous, you
know--especially when they're not well."
"Funny, isn't it?"
There was perfect unanimity between them as to the irrational
singularity and sad weakness of aged persons.
Louis remarked--
"She said you would make everything right for me upstairs."
"I have done--I hope," said Rachel.
"Thanks awfully!"
One part of the table was covered with newspaper. Suddenly Rachel
tore a strip off the newspaper, folded the strip into a spill, and,
lighting it at the gas, tendered it to Louis' unlit cigarette.
The climax of the movement was so quick and unexpected as almost to
astound Louis. For he had been standing behind her, and she had not
turned her head before making the spill. Perhaps there was a faint
reflection of himself in the window. Or perhaps she had eyes in her
hair. Beyond doubt she was a strange, rare, angelic girl. The gesture
with which she modestly offered the spill was angelic; it was divine;
it was one of those phenomena which persist in a man's memory for
decades. At the very instant of its happening he knew that he should
never forget it.
The man of fashion blushed as he inhaled the first smoke created by
her fire.
Rachel dropped the heavenly emblem, all burning, into the ash-bin of
the range, and resumed her work.
Louis coughed. "Any law against sitting down?" he asked.
"You're very welcome," she replied primly.
"I didn't know I might smoke," he said.
She made no answer at first, but just as Louis had ceased to expect an
answer, she said--
"I should think if you can smoke in the sitting-room you can smoke in
the kitchen--shouldn't you?"
"I should," said he.
There was silence, but silence not disagreeable. Louis, lolling in
the chair, and slightly rocking it, watched Rachel at her task. She
completely immersed spoons and forks in the warm water, and then
rubbed them with a brush like a large nail-brush, giving particular
attention to the inside edges of the prongs of the forks; and then she
laid them all wet on a thick cloth to the right of the basin. But of
the knives she immersed only the blades, and took the most meticulous
care that no drop of water should reach the handles.
"I never knew knives and forks and things were washed like that,"
observed Louis.
"They generally aren't," said Rachel. "But they ought to be. I leave
all the other washing-up for the charwoman in the morning, but I
wouldn't trust these to her." (The charwoman had been washing up
cutlery since before Rachel was born.) "They're all alike," said
Rachel.
Louis acquiesced sagely in this broad generalization as to charwomen.
"Why don't you wash the handles of the knives?" he queried.
"It makes them come loose."
"Really?"
"Do you mean to say you didn't know that water, especially warm water
with soda in it, loosens the handles?" She showed astonishment, but
her gaze never left the table in front of her.
"Not me!"
"Well, I should have thought that everybody knew that. Some people use
a jug, and fill it up with water just high enough to cover the blades,
and stick the knives in to soak. But I don't hold with that because
of the steam, you see. Steam's nearly as bad as water for the handles.
And then some people drop the knives wholesale into a basin just for a
second, to wash the handles. But I don't hold with that, either. What
I say is that you can get the handles clean with the cloth you wipe
them dry with. That's what I say."
"And so there's soda in the water?"
"A little."
"Well, I never knew that either! It's quite a business, it seems to
me."
Without doubt Louis' notions upon domestic work were being modified
with extreme rapidity. In the suburb from which he sprang domestic
work--and in particular washing up--had been regarded as base, foul,
humiliating, unmentionable--as toil that any slut might perform
anyhow. It would have been inconceivable to him that he should admire
a girl in the very act of washing up. Young ladies, even in exclusive
suburban families, were sometimes forced by circumstances to wash
up--of that he was aware--but they washed up in secret and in shame,
and it was proper for all parties to pretend that they never had
washed up. And here was Rachel converting the horrid process into
a dignified and impressive ritual. She made it as fine as fine
needlework--so exact, so dainty, so proud were the motions of her
fingers and her forearms. Obviously washing up was an art, and the
delicate operation could not be scamped nor hurried ...
The triple pile of articles on the cloth grew slowly, but it grew; and
then Rachel, having taken a fresh white cloth from a hook, began to
wipe, and her wiping was an art. She seemed to recognize each fork as
a separate individuality, and to attend to it as to a little animal.
Whatever her view of charwomen, never would she have said of forks
that they were all alike.
Louis felt in his hip pocket for his reserve cigarette-case.
And Rachel immediately said, with her back to him--
"Have you really got a revolver, or were you teasing--just now in the
parlour?"
It was then that he perceived a small unframed mirror, hung at the
height of her face on the broad, central, perpendicular bar of the
old-fashioned window-frame. Through this mirror the chit--so he named
her in his mind at the instant--had been surveying him!
"Yes," he said, producing the second cigarette-case, "I was only
teasing." He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the previous one.
"Well," she said, "you did frighten Mrs. Maldon. I was so sorry for
her."
"And what about you? Weren't you frightened?"
"Oh no! I wasn't frightened. I guessed, somehow, you were only
teasing."
"Well, I just wasn't teasing, then!" said Louis, triumphantly yet with
benevolence. And he drew a revolver from his pocket.
She turned her head now, and glanced neutrally at the incontestable
revolver for a second. But she made no remark whatever, unless the
pouting of her tightly shut lips and a mysterious smile amounted to a
remark.
Louis adopted an indifferent tone--
"Strange that the old lady should be so nervous just to-night--isn't
it?--seeing these burglars have been knocking about for over a
fortnight. Is this the first time she's got excited about it?"
"Yes, I think it is," said Rachel faintly, as it were submissively,
with no sign of irritation against him.
With their air of worldliness and mature wisdom they twittered on like
a couple of sparrows--inconsequently, capriciously; and nothing that
they said had the slightest originality, weight, or importance. But
they both thought that their conversation was full of significance;
which it was, though they could not explain it to themselves. What
they happened to say did not matter in the least. If they had recited
the Koran to each other the inexplicable significance of their words
would have been the same.
Rachel faced him again, leaning her hands behind her on the table, and
said with the most enchanting, persuasive friendliness--
"I wasn't frightened--truly! I don't know why I looked as though I
was."
"You mean about the revolver--in the sitting-room?" He jumped nimbly
back after her to the revolver question.
"Yes. Because I'm quite used to revolvers, you know. My brother had
one. Only his was a Colt--one of those long things."
"Your brother, eh?"
"Yes. Did you know him?"
"I can't say I did," Louis replied, with some constraint.
Rachel said with generous enthusiasm--
"He's a wonderful shot, my brother is!"
Louis was curiously touched by the warmth of her reference to her
brother. In the daily long monotonous column of advertisements headed
succinctly "Money" in the _Staffordshire Signal_, there once
used to appear the following invitation: "WE NEVER REFUSE a loan to
a responsible applicant. No fussy inquiries. Distance no objection.
Reasonable terms. Strictest privacy. £3 to £10,000. Apply personally
or by letter. Lovelace Curzon, 7 Colclough Street, Knype." Upon a day
Louis had chosen that advertisement from among its rivals, and had
written to Lovelace Curzon. But on the very next day he had come
into his thousand pounds, and so had lost the advantage of business
relations with Lovelace Curzon. Lovelace Curzon, as he had learnt
later, was Reuben Fleckring, Rachel's father. Or, more accurately,
Lovelace Curzon was Reuben Fleckring, junior, Rachel's brother, a
young man in a million. Reuben, senior, had been for many years an
entirely mediocre and ambitionless clerk in a large works where
Julian Maldon had learnt potting, when Reuben, junior (whom he blindly
adored), had dragged him out of clerkship, and set him up as
the nominal registered head of a money-lending firm. An amazing
occurrence! At that time Reuben, junior, was a minor, scarcely
eighteen. Yet his turn for finance had been such that he had
already amassed reserves, and--without a drop of Jewish blood in his
veins--possessed confidence enough to compete in their own field with
the acutest Hebrews of the district. Reuben, senior, was the youth's
tool.
In a few years Lovelace Curzon had made a mighty and terrible
reputation in the world where expenditures exceed incomes. And
then the subterranean news of the day--not reported in the
_Signal_--was that something serious had happened to Lovelace
Curzon. And the two Fleckrings went to America, the father, as usual,
hypnotized by the son. And they left no wrack behind save Rachel.
It was at this period--only a few months previous to the opening of
the present narrative--that the district had first heard aught of the
womenfolk of the Fleckrings. An aunt--Reuben, senior's, sister, it
appeared--had died several years earlier, since when Rachel had alone
kept house for her brother and her father. According to rumour
the three had lived in the simplicity of relative poverty, utterly
unvisited except by clients. No good smell of money had ever escaped
from the small front room which was employed as an office into the
domestic portion of the house. It was alleged that Rachel had existed
in perfect ignorance of all details of the business. It was also
alleged that when the sudden crisis arrived, her brother had told her
that she would not be taken to America, and that, briefly, she must
shift for herself in the world. It was alleged further that he had
given her forty-five pounds. (Why forty-five pounds and not fifty,
none knew.) The whole affair had begun and finished--and the house was
sold up--in four days. Public opinion in the street and in Knype blew
violently against the two Reubens, but as they were on the Atlantic
it did not affect them. Rachel, with scarcely an acquaintance in the
world in which she was to shift for herself, found that she had a
streetful of friends! It transpired that everybody had always divined
that she was a girl of admirable efficient qualities. She behaved as
though her brother and father had behaved in quite a usual and proper
manner. Assistance in the enterprise of shifting for herself she
welcomed, but not sympathy. The devotion of the Fleckring women began
to form a legend. People said that Rachel's aunt had been another such
creature as Rachel.
Hence the effect on Louis, who, through his aunt and his cousin,
was acquainted with the main facts and surmises, of Rachel's glowing
reference to the vanished Reuben.
"Where did your brother practise?" he asked.
"In the cellar."
"Of course it's easier with a long barrel."
"Is it?" she said incredulously. "You should see my brother's
score-card the first time he shot at that new miniature rifle-range in
Hanbridge!"
"Why? Is it anything special?"
"Well, you should see it. Five bulls, all cutting into each other."
"I should have liked to see that."
"I've got it upstairs in my trunk," said she proudly. "I dare say I'll
show you it some time."
"I wish you would," he urged.
Such loyalty moved him deeply. Louis had had no sisters, and his
youthful suburban experience of other people's sisters had not
fostered any belief that loyalty was an outstanding quality of
sisters. Like very numerous young men of the day, he had passed an
unfavourable judgment upon young women. He had found them greedy for
diversion, amazingly ruthless in their determination to exact the
utmost possible expensiveness of pleasure in return for their casual
society, hard, cruelly clever in conversation, efficient in certain
directions, but hating any sustained effort, and either socially or
artistically or politically snobbish. Snobs all! Money-worshippers
all!... Well, nearly all! It mattered not whether you were one of the
dandies or one of the hatless or Fletcherite corps that lolled on foot
or on bicycles, or shot on motor-cycles, through the prim streets of
the suburb--the young women would not remain in dalliance with you
for the mere sake of your beautiful eyes. Because they were girls
they would take all that you had and more, and give you nothing but
insolence or condescension in exchange. Such was Louis' judgment, and
scores of times he had confirmed it in private saloon-lounge talk
with his compeers. It had not, however, rendered the society of these
unconscionable and cold female creatures distasteful to him. Not a
bit! He had even sought it and been ready to pay for that society in
the correct manner--even to imperturbably beggaring himself of his
final sixpence in order to do the honours of the latest cinema. Only,
he had a sense of human superiority. It certainly did not occur to
him that in the victimized young men there might exist faults which
complemented those of the parasitic young women.
And now he contrasted these young women with Rachel! And he fell
into a dreamy mood of delight in her.... Her gesture in lighting his
cigarette! Marvellous! Tear-compelling!... Flippancy dropped away from
him.... She liked him. With the most alluring innocence, she did not
conceal that she liked him. He remembered that the last time he called
at his aunt's he had remarked something strange, something disturbing,
in Rachel's candid demeanour towards himself. He had made an
impression on her! He had given her the lightning-stroke! No shadow of
a doubt as to his own worthiness crossed his mind.
What did cross his mind was that she was not quite of his own class.
In the suburb, where "sets" are divided one from another by unscalable
barriers, she could not have aspired to him. But in the kitchen, now
become the most beautiful and agreeable and romantic interior that he
had ever seen--in the kitchen he could somehow perceive with absolute
clearness that the snobbery of caste was silly, negligible, laughable,
contemptible. Yes, he could perceive all that! Life in the kitchen
seemed ideal--life with that loyalty and that candour and that charm
and that lovely seriousness! Moreover, he could teach her. She had
already blossomed--in a fortnight. She was blossoming. She would
blossom further.
Odd that, when he had threatened to pull out a revolver, she, so
accustomed to revolvers, should have taken a girlish alarm! That queer
detail of her behaviour was extraordinarily seductive. But far beyond
everything else it was the grand loyalty of her nature that drew him.
He wanted to sink into it as into a bed of down. He really needed
it. Enveloped in that loving loyalty of a creature who gave all and
demanded nothing, he felt that he could truly be his best self, that
he could work marvels. His eyes were moist with righteous ardour.
The cutlery reposed in a green-lined basket. She had doffed the apron
and hung it behind the scullery door. With all the delicious curves of
her figure newly revealed, she was reaching the alarm-clock down from
the mantelpiece, and then she was winding it up. The ratchet of the
wheel clacked, and the hurried ticking was loud. In the grate of the
range burned one spot of gloomy red.
"Your bedtime, I suppose?" he murmured, rising elegantly.
She smiled. She said--
"Shall you lock up, or shall I?"
"Oh! I think I know all the tricks," he replied, and thought, "She's a
pretty direct sort of girl, anyway!"
IV
About an hour later he went up to his room. It was a fact that
everything had been made right for him. The gas burned low. He raised
it, and it shone directly upon the washstand, which glittered with
the ivory glaze of large earthenware, and the whiteness of towels that
displayed all the creases of their folding. There was a new cake of
soap in the ample soap-dish, and a new tooth-brush in a sheath of
transparent paper lay on the marble. "Rather complete this!" he
reflected. The nail-brush--an article in which he specialized--was
worn, but it was worn evenly and had cost good money. The water-bottle
dazzled him; its polished clarity was truly crystalline. He could
not remember ever having seen a toilet array so shining with strict
cleanness. Indeed, it was probable that he had never set eyes on an
absolutely clean water-bottle before; the qualities associated with
water-bottles in his memory were semi-opacity and spottiness.
The dressing-table matched the washstand. A carriage clock in leather
had been placed on the mantelpiece. In front of the mantelpiece was an
old embroidered fire-screen. Peeping between the screen and the grate,
he saw that a fire had been scientifically laid, ready for lighting;
but some bits of paper and oddments on the top of the coal showed that
it was not freshly laid. The grate had a hob at one side, and on
this was a small, bright tin kettle. The bed was clearly a good bed,
resilient, softly garnished. On it was stretched a long, striped
garment of flannel, with old-fashioned pearl buttons at neck and
sleeves. An honest garment, quite surely unshrinkable! No doubt in the
sixties, long before the mind of man had leaped to the fine perverse
conception of the decorated pyjama, this garment had enjoyed the
fullest correctness. Now, after perhaps forty years in the cupboards
of Mrs. Maldon, it seemed to recall the more excellent attributes of
an already forgotten past, and to rebuke what was degenerate in the
present.
Louis, ranging over his experiences in the disorderly and mean
pretentiousness of the suburban home, and in the discomfort of
various lodgings, appreciated the grave, comfortable benignity of that
bedroom. Its appeal to his senses was so strong that it became for
him almost luxurious. The bedroom at his latest lodgings was full
of boot-trees and trouser-stretchers and coat-holders, but it was a
paltry thing and a grimy. He saw the daily and hourly advantages of
marriage with a loving, simple woman whose house was her pride. He had
a longing for solidities, certitudes, and righteousness.
Musing delectably, he drew aside the crimson curtain from the window
and beheld the same prospect that Rachel had beheld on her walk
towards Friendly Street--the obscurity of the park, the chain of lamps
down the slope of Moorthorne Road, and the distant fires of industry
still farther beyond, towards Toft End. He had hated the foul, sordid,
ragged prospects and vistas of the Five Towns when he came new to them
from London, and he had continued to hate them. They desolated him.
But to-night he thought of them sympathetically. It was as if he was
divining in them for the first time a recondite charm. He remembered
what an old citizen named Dain had said one evening at the
Conservative Club: "People may say what they choose about Bursley.
I've just returned from London and I tell thee I was glad to get back.
I _like_ Bursley." A grotesque saying, he had thought, then.
Yet now he positively felt himself capable of sharing the sentiment.
Rachel in the kitchen, and the kitchen in town, and the town amid
those scarred and smoking hillocks!... Invisible phenomena! Mysterious
harmonies! The influence of the night solaced and uplifted him and
bestowed on him new faculties of perception.
At length, deciding, after characteristic procrastination, that
he must really go to bed, he wound up his watch and put it on the
dressing-table. His pockets had to be emptied and his clothes hung or
folded. His fingers touched the notes in the left-hand outside pocket
of his coat. Not for one instant had the problem of the bank-notes
been absent from his mind. Throughout the conversation with Rachel,
throughout the interval between her retirement and his own, throughout
his meditations in the bedroom, he had not once escaped from the
obsession of the bank-notes and their problem. He knew now how the
problem must be solved. There was, after all, only one solution, and
it was extremely simple. He must put the notes back where he had found
them, underneath the chair on the landing. If advisable, he might
rediscover them in the morning and surrender them immediately. But
they must not remain in his room during the night. He must not examine
them--he must not look at them.
He approached the door quickly, lest he might never reach the door.
But he was somehow forced to halt at the wardrobe, to see if it
had coat-holders. It had one coat-holder.... His hand was on the
door-knob. He turned it with every species of precaution--and it
complained loudly in the still night. The door opened with a terrible
explosive noise of protest. He gazed into the darkness of the landing,
and presently, by the light from the bedroom, could distinguish the
vague boundaries of it. The chair, invisible, was on the left. He
opened the door wider to the nocturnal riddle of the house. His hand
clasped the notes in his pocket. No sound! He listened for the ticking
of the lobby clock and could not catch it. He listened more intently.
It was impossible that he should not hear the ticking of the lobby
clock. Was he dreaming? Was he under some delusion? Then it occurred
to him that the lobby clock must have run down or otherwise stopped.
Clocks did stop.... And then his heart bounded and his flesh crept. He
had heard footsteps somewhere below. Or were the footsteps merely in
his imagination?
Alone in the parlour, after Rachel had gone to bed, he had spent some
time in gazing at the _Signal_; for there had been absolutely
nothing else to do, and he could not have thought of sleep at such an
early hour. It is true that, with his intense preoccupations, he had
for the most part gazed uncomprehendingly at the _Signal_. The
tale of the latest burglaries, however, had by virtue of its intrinsic
interest reached his brain through his eyes, and had impressed him,
despite preoccupations. And now, as he stood in the gloom at the door
of his bedroom and waited feverishly for the sound of more footsteps,
it was inevitable that visions of burglars should disturb him.
The probability of burglars visiting any particular house in the
town was infinitely slight--his common sense told him that. But
supposing--just supposing that they actually had chosen his aunt's
abode for their prey!... Conceivably they had learnt that Mrs. Maldon
was to have a large sum of money under her roof. Conceivably a complex
plan had been carefully laid. Conceivably one of the great burglaries
of criminal history might be in progress. It was not impossible. No
wonder that, with bank-notes loose all over the place, his shockingly
negligent auntie should have special qualms concerning burglars on
that night of all nights! Fortunate indeed that he carried a revolver,
that the revolver was loaded, and that he had some skill to use it! A
dramatic surprise--his gun and the man behind it--for burglars who had
no doubt counted on having to deal with a mere couple of women! He
had but to remove his shoes and creep down the stairs. He felt at the
revolver in his pocket. Often had he pictured himself in the act of
calmly triumphing over burglars or other villains.
Then, with no further hesitation, he silently closed the door--on the
inside!... How could there be burglars in the house? The suspicion was
folly. What he had heard could be naught but the nocturnal cracking
and yielding of an old building at night. Was it not notorious that
the night was full of noises? And even if burglars had entered!...
Better, safer, to ignore them! They could not make off with a great
deal, for the main item of prey happened to be in his own pocket.
Let them search for the treasure! If they had the effrontery to come
searching in his bedroom, he would give them a reception! Let them
try! He looked at the revolver, holding it beneath the gas. Could he
aim it at a human being?...
Or--another explanation--possibly Rachel, having forgotten something
or having need of something, had gone downstairs for it. He had not
thought of that. But what more natural? Sudden toothache--a desire for
laudanum--a visit to a store cupboard: such was the classic order of
events.
He listened, secure within the four walls of his bedroom. He smiled.
He could have fancied that he heard an electric bell ring ever so
faintly at a distance--in the next house, in the next world.
He laughed to himself.
Then at length he moved again towards the door; and he paused in front
of it. There were no burglars! The notion of burglars was idiotic! He
must put the notes back under the chair. His whole salvation depended
upon his putting the notes back under the chair on the landing!...
An affair of two seconds!... With due caution he opened the door. And
simultaneously, at the very selfsame instant, he most distinctly heard
the click of the latch of his aunt's bedroom door, next his own! Now,
in a horrible quandary, trembling and perspiring, he felt completely
nonplussed. He pushed his own door to, but without quite closing it,
for fear of a noise; and edged away from it towards the fireplace.
Had his aunt wakened up, and felt a misgiving about the notes, and
found that they were not where they ought to be?
No further sound came though the crack of his door. In the dwelling
absolute silence seemed to be established. He stood thus for an
indefinite period in front of the fireplace, the brain's action
apparently suspended, until his agitation was somewhat composed. And
then, because he had no clear plan in his head, he put his hand into
the pocket containing the notes and drew them out. And immediately he
was aware of a pleasant feeling of relief, as one who, after battling
against a delicious and shameful habit, yields and is glad. The beauty
of the notes was eternal; no use could stale it. Their intoxicating
effect on him was just as powerful now as before supper. And now, as
then, the mere sight of them filled him with a passionate conviction
that without them he would be ruined. His tricks to destroy the
suspicions of Horrocleave could not possibly be successful. Within
twenty-four hours he might be in prison if he could not forthwith
command a certain sum of money. And even possessing the money, he
would still have an extremely difficult part to play. It would be
necessary for him to arrive early at the works, to change notes for
gold in the safe, to erase many of his pencilled false additions,
to devise a postponement of his crucial scene with Horrocleave, and
lastly to invent a plausible explanation of the piling up of a cash
reserve.
If he had not been optimistic and an incurable procrastinator and a
believer in luck at the last moment, he would have seen that nothing
but a miracle could save him if Horrocleave were indeed suspicious.
Happily for his peace of mind, he was incapable of looking a fact
in the face. Against all reason he insisted to himself that with the
notes he might reach salvation. He did not trouble even to estimate
the chances of the notes being traced by their numbers. Such is the
magic force of a weak character.
But he powerfully desired not to steal the notes, or any of them.
The image of Rachel rose between him and his temptation. Her honesty,
candour, loyalty, had revealed to him the beauty of the ways of
righteousness. He had been born again in her glance. He swore he would
do nothing unworthy of the ideal she had unconsciously set up in him.
He admitted that it was supremely essential for him to restore the
notes to the spot whence he had removed them.... And yet--if he did
so, and was lost? What then? For one second he saw himself in the
dock at the police-court in the town hall. Awful hallucination! If it
became reality, what use, then, his obedience to the new ideal? Better
to accomplish this one act of treason to the ideal in order to be able
for ever afterwards to obey it and to look Rachel in the eyes! Was
it not so? He wanted advice, he wanted to be confirmed in his own
opportunism, as a starving beggar may want food.
And in the midst of all this torture of his vacillations, he was
staggered and overwhelmed by the sudden noise of Mrs. Maldon's door
brusquely opening, and of an instant loud, firm knock on his own door.
The silence of the night was shattered as by an earthquake.
Almost mechanically he crushed the notes in his left hand--crushed
them into a ball; and the knuckles of that hand turned white with the
muscular tension.
"Are you up?" a voice demanded. It was Rachel's voice.
"Ye-es," he answered, and held his left hand over the screen in front
of the fireplace.
"May I come in?"
And with the word she came in. She was summarily dressed, and very
pale, and her hair, more notable than ever, was down. As she entered
he opened his hand and let the ball of notes drop into the littered
grate.
V
"Anything the matter?" he asked, moving away from the region of the
hearth-rug.
She glanced at him with a kind of mild indulgence, as if to say:
"Surely you don't suppose I should be wandering about in the night
like this if nothing was the matter!"
She replied, speaking quickly and eagerly--"I'm so glad you aren't in
bed. I want you to go and fetch the doctor--at once."
"Auntie ill?"
She gave him another glance like the first, as if to say: "_I'm_
not ill, and _you_ aren't. And Mrs. Maldon is the only other
person in the house--"
"I'll go instantly," he added in haste. "Which doctor?"
"Yardley in Park Road. It's near the corner of Axe Street. You'll know
it by the yellow gate--even if his lamp isn't lighted."
"I thought old Hawley up at Hillport was auntie's doctor."
"I believe he is, but you couldn't get up to Hillport in less than
half an hour, could you?"
"Not so serious as all that, is it?"
"Well, you never know. Best to be on the safe side. It's not quite
like one of her usual attacks. She's been upset. She actually went
downstairs."
"I thought I heard somebody. Did you hear her, then?"
"No, she rang for me afterwards. There's a little electric bell over
my bed, from her room."
"And I heard that too," said Louis.
"Will you ask Dr. Yardley to come at once?"
"I'm off," said he. "What a good thing I wasn't in bed!"
"What a good thing you're here at all!" Rachel murmured, suddenly
smiling.
He was waiting anxiously for her to leave the room again. But instead
of leaving it she came to the fireplace and looked behind the screen.
He trembled.
"Oh! That kettle _is_ there! I thought it must be!" And picked it
up.
Then, with the kettle in one hand, she went to a large cupboard let
into the wall opposite the door, and opened it.
"You know Park Road, I suppose?" she turned to him.
"Yes, yes, I'm off!"
He was obliged to go, surrendering the room to her. As he descended
the stairs he heard her come out of the room. She was following him
downstairs. "Don't bang the door," she whispered. "I'll come and shut
it after you."
The next moment he had undone the door and was down the front steps
and in the solitude of Bycars Lane. He ran up the street, full of the
one desire to accomplish his errand and be back again in the spare
bedroom alone. The notes were utterly safe where they lay, and
yet--astounding events might happen. Was it not a unique coincidence
that on this very night and no other his aunt should fall ill, and
that as a result Rachel should take him unawares at the worst moment
of his dilemma? And further, could it be the actual fact, as he had
been wildly guessing only a few minutes earlier, that his aunt had at
last missed the notes? Could it be that it was this discovery which
had upset her and brought on an attack?... An attack of what?
He swerved at the double into Park Road, which was a silent desert
watched over by forlorn gaslamps. He saw the yellow gate. The yellow
gate clanked after him. He searched in the deep shadow of the porch
for the button of the night bell, and had to strike a match in order
to find it. He rang; waited and waited, rang again; waited; rang a
third time, keeping his finger hard on the button. Then arose and
expired a flickering light in the hall of the house.
"That'll do! That'll do! You needn't wear the bell out." He could hear
the irritated accents through the glazed front door.
A dim figure in a dressing-gown opened.
"Are you Dr. Yardley?" Louis gasped between rapid breaths.
"What is it?" The question was savage.
With his extraordinary instinctive amiability Louis smiled naturally
and persuasively.
"You're wanted at Mrs. Maldon's, Bycars. Awfully sorry to disturb
you."
"Oh!" said the dressing-gown in a changed, interested tone. "Mrs.
Maldon's! Right. I'll follow you."
"You'll come at once?" Louis urged.
"I shall come at once."
The door was curtly closed.
"So that's how you call a doctor in the middle of the night!" thought
Louis, and ran off. He had scarcely deciphered the man's face.
The return, being chiefly downhill, was less exhausting. As he
approached his aunt's house he saw that there was a light on the
ground floor as well as in the front bedroom. The door opened as he
swung the gate. The lobby gas had been lighted. Rachel was waiting for
him. Her hair was tied up now. The girl looked wise, absurdly so.
It was as though she was engaged in the act of being equal to the
terrible occasion.
"He's coming," said Louis.
"You've been frightfully quick!" said she, as if triumphantly. She
appeared to glory in the crisis.
He passed within as she held the door. He was frantic to rush upstairs
to the fireplace in his room; but he had to seem deliberate.
"And what next?" he inquired.
"Well, nothing. It'll be best for you to sit in your bedroom for
a bit. That's the only place where there's a fire--and it's rather
chilly at this time of night."
"A fire?" he repeated, incredulous and yet awe-struck.
"I knew you wouldn't mind," said she. "It just happened there wasn't
two drops of methylated spirits left in the house, and as there was
a fire laid in your room, I put a match to it. I must have hot water
ready, you see. And Mrs. Maldon only has one of those old-fashioned
gas-stoves in her bedroom--"
"I see," he agreed.
They mounted the steps together. The grate in his room was a mass of
pleasant flames, in the midst of which gleamed the bright kettle.
"How is she now?" He asked in a trance. And he felt as though it was
another man in his own body who was asking.
"Oh! It's not very serious, I hope," said Rachel, kneeling to coax the
fire with a short, wiry poker. "Only you never know. I'm just going
in again.... She seems to lose all her vitality--that's what's apt to
frighten you."
The girl looked wise--absurdly, deliciously wise. The spectacle of her
engaged in the high act of being equal to the occasion was exquisite.
But Louis had no eye for it.