'Doesn't it seem queer, Edward? Last night you were telling me such
beautiful things, and to-night I have been talking about that
disgraceful old man and his goings on.'
'I don't know,' answered Darnell, dreamily. 'On the walls of that great
church upon the hill I saw all kinds of strange grinning monsters,
carved in stone.'
The misdemeanours of Mr. Robert Nixon brought in their train
consequences strange beyond imagination. It was not that they continued
to develop on the somewhat fantastic lines of these first adventures
which Mrs. Darnell had related; indeed, when 'Aunt Marian' came over to
Shepherd's Bush, one Sunday afternoon, Darnell wondered how he had had
the heart to laugh at the misfortunes of a broken-hearted woman.
He had never seen his wife's aunt before, and he was strangely surprised
when Alice showed her into the garden where they were sitting on the
warm and misty Sunday in September. To him, save during these latter
days, she had always been associated with ideas of splendour and
success: his wife had always mentioned the Nixons with a tinge of
reverence; he had heard, many times, the epic of Mr. Nixon's struggles
and of his slow but triumphant rise. Mary had told the story as she had
received it from her parents, beginning with the flight to London from
some small, dull, and unprosperous town in the flattest of the Midlands,
long ago, when a young man from the country had great chances of
fortune. Robert Nixon's father had been a grocer in the High Street, and
in after days the successful coal merchant and builder loved to tell of
that dull provincial life, and while he glorified his own victories, he
gave his hearers to understand that he came of a race which had also
known how to achieve. That had been long ago, he would explain: in the
days when that rare citizen who desired to go to London or to York was
forced to rise in the dead of night, and make his way, somehow or other,
by ten miles of quagmirish, wandering lanes to the Great North Road,
there to meet the 'Lightning' coach, a vehicle which stood to all the
countryside as the visible and tangible embodiment of tremendous
speed--'and indeed,' as Nixon would add, 'it was always up to time,
which is more than can be said of the Dunham Branch Line nowadays!' It
was in this ancient Dunham that the Nixons had waged successful trade
for perhaps a hundred years, in a shop with bulging bay windows looking
on the market-place. There was no competition, and the townsfolk, and
well-to-do farmers, the clergy and the country families, looked upon the
house of Nixon as an institution fixed as the town hall (which stood on
Roman pillars) and the parish church. But the change came: the railway
crept nearer and nearer, the farmers and the country gentry became less
well-to-do; the tanning, which was the local industry, suffered from a
great business which had been established in a larger town, some twenty
miles away, and the profits of the Nixons grew less and less. Hence the
hegira of Robert, and he would dilate on the poorness of his beginnings,
how he saved, by little and little, from his sorry wage of City clerk,
and how he and a fellow clerk, 'who had come into a hundred pounds,' saw
an opening in the coal trade--and filled it. It was at this stage of
Robert's fortunes, still far from magnificent, that Miss Marian Reynolds
had encountered him, she being on a visit to friends in Gunnersbury.
Afterwards, victory followed victory; Nixon's wharf became a landmark to
bargemen; his power stretched abroad, his dusky fleets went outwards to
the sea, and inward by all the far reaches of canals. Lime, cement, and
bricks were added to his merchandise, and at last he hit upon the great
stroke--that extensive taking up of land in the north of London. Nixon
himself ascribed this _coup_ to native sagacity, and the possession of
capital; and there were also obscure rumours to the effect that some one
or other had been 'done' in the course of the transaction. However that
might be, the Nixons grew wealthy to excess, and Mary had often told her
husband of the state in which they dwelt, of their liveried servants, of
the glories of their drawing-room, of their broad lawn, shadowed by a
splendid and ancient cedar. And so Darnell had somehow been led into
conceiving the lady of this demesne as a personage of no small pomp. He
saw her, tall, of dignified port and presence, inclining, it might be,
to some measure of obesity, such a measure as was not unbefitting in an
elderly lady of position, who lived well and lived at ease. He even
imagined a slight ruddiness of complexion, which went very well with
hair that was beginning to turn grey, and when he heard the door-bell
ring, as he sat under the mulberry on the Sunday afternoon, he bent
forward to catch sight of this stately figure, clad, of course, in the
richest, blackest silk, girt about with heavy chains of gold.
He started with amazement when he saw the strange presence that followed
the servant into the garden. Mrs. Nixon was a little, thin old woman,
who bent as she feebly trotted after Alice; her eyes were on the ground,
and she did not lift them when the Darnells rose to greet her. She
glanced to the right, uneasily, as she shook hands with Darnell, to the
left when Mary kissed her, and when she was placed on the garden seat
with a cushion at her back, she looked away at the back of the houses in
the next street. She was dressed in black, it was true, but even Darnell
could see that her gown was old and shabby, that the fur trimming of her
cape and the fur boa which was twisted about her neck were dingy and
disconsolate, and had all the melancholy air which fur wears when it is
seen in a second-hand clothes-shop in a back street. And her
gloves--they were black kid, wrinkled with much wear, faded to a bluish
hue at the finger-tips, which showed signs of painful mending. Her hair,
plastered over her forehead, looked dull and colourless, though some
greasy matter had evidently been used with a view of producing a
becoming gloss, and on it perched an antique bonnet, adorned with black
pendants that rattled paralytically one against the other.
And there was nothing in Mrs. Nixon's face to correspond with the
imaginary picture that Darnell had made of her. She was sallow,
wrinkled, pinched; her nose ran to a sharp point, and her red-rimmed
eyes were a queer water-grey, that seemed to shrink alike from the light
and from encounter with the eyes of others. As she sat beside his wife
on the green garden-seat, Darnell, who occupied a wicker-chair brought
out from the drawing-room, could not help feeling that this shadowy and
evasive figure, muttering replies to Mary's polite questions, was almost
impossibly remote from his conceptions of the rich and powerful aunt,
who could give away a hundred pounds as a mere birthday gift. She would
say little at first; yes, she was feeling rather tired, it had been so
hot all the way, and she had been afraid to put on lighter things as
one never knew at this time of year what it might be like in the
evenings; there were apt to be cold mists when the sun went down, and
she didn't care to risk bronchitis.
'I thought I should never get here,' she went on, raising her voice to
an odd querulous pipe. 'I'd no notion it was such an out-of-the-way
place, it's so many years since I was in this neighbourhood.'
She wiped her eyes, no doubt thinking of the early days at Turnham
Green, when she married Nixon; and when the pocket-handkerchief had done
its office she replaced it in a shabby black bag which she clutched
rather than carried. Darnell noticed, as he watched her, that the bag
seemed full, almost to bursting, and he speculated idly as to the nature
of its contents: correspondence, perhaps, he thought, further proofs of
Uncle Robert's treacherous and wicked dealings. He grew quite
uncomfortable, as he sat and saw her glancing all the while furtively
away from his wife and himself, and presently he got up and strolled
away to the other end of the garden, where he lit his pipe and walked to
and fro on the gravel walk, still astounded at the gulf between the real
and the imagined woman.
Presently he heard a hissing whisper, and he saw Mrs. Nixon's head
inclining to his wife's. Mary rose and came towards him.
'Would you mind sitting in the drawing-room, Edward?' she murmured.
'Aunt says she can't bring herself to discuss such a delicate matter
before you. I dare say it's quite natural.'
'Very well, but I don't think I'll go into the drawing-room. I feel as
if a walk would do me good. You mustn't be frightened if I am a little
late,' he said; 'if I don't get back before your aunt goes, say good-bye
to her for me.'
He strolled into the main road, where the trams were humming to and fro.
He was still confused and perplexed, and he tried to account for a
certain relief he felt in removing himself from the presence of Mrs.
Nixon. He told himself that her grief at her husband's ruffianly conduct
was worthy of all pitiful respect, but at the same time, to his shame,
he had felt a certain physical aversion from her as she sat in his
garden in her dingy black, dabbing her red-rimmed eyes with a damp
pocket-handkerchief. He had been to the Zoo when he was a lad, and he
still remembered how he had shrunk with horror at the sight of certain
reptiles slowly crawling over one another in their slimy pond. But he
was enraged at the similarity between the two sensations, and he walked
briskly on that level and monotonous road, looking about him at the
unhandsome spectacle of suburban London keeping Sunday.
There was something in the tinge of antiquity which still exists in
Acton that soothed his mind and drew it away from those unpleasant
contemplations, and when at last he had penetrated rampart after rampart
of brick, and heard no more the harsh shrieks and laughter of the people
who were enjoying themselves, he found a way into a little sheltered
field, and sat down in peace beneath a tree, whence he could look out on
a pleasant valley. The sun sank down beneath the hills, the clouds
changed into the likeness of blossoming rose-gardens; and he still sat
there in the gathering darkness till a cool breeze blew upon him, and
he rose with a sigh, and turned back to the brick ramparts and the
glimmering streets, and the noisy idlers sauntering to and fro in the
procession of their dismal festival. But he was murmuring to himself
some words that seemed a magic song, and it was with uplifted heart that
he let himself into his house.
Mrs. Nixon had gone an hour and a half before his return, Mary told him.
Darnell sighed with relief, and he and his wife strolled out into the
garden and sat down side by side.
They kept silence for a time, and at last Mary spoke, not without a
nervous tremor in her voice.
'I must tell you, Edward,' she began, 'that aunt has made a proposal
which you ought to hear. I think we should consider it.'
'A proposal? But how about the whole affair? Is it still going on?'
'Oh, yes! She told me all about it. Uncle is quite unrepentant. It seems
he has taken a flat somewhere in town for that woman, and furnished it
in the most costly manner. He simply laughs at aunt's reproaches, and
says he means to have some fun at last. You saw how broken she was?'
'Yes; very sad. But won't he give her any money? Wasn't she very badly
dressed for a woman in her position?'
'Aunt has no end of beautiful things, but I fancy she likes to hoard
them; she has a horror of spoiling her dresses. It isn't for want of
money, I assure you, as uncle settled a very large sum on her two years
ago, when he was everything that could be desired as a husband. And that
brings me to what I want to say. Aunt would like to live with us. She
would pay very liberally. What do you say?'
'Would like to live with us?' exclaimed Darnell, and his pipe dropped
from his hand on to the grass. He was stupefied by the thought of Aunt
Marian as a boarder, and sat staring vacantly before him, wondering what
new monster the night would next produce.
'I knew you wouldn't much like the idea,' his wife went on. 'But I do
think, dearest, that we ought not to refuse without very serious
consideration. I am afraid you did not take to poor aunt very much.'
Darnell shook his head dumbly.
'I thought you didn't; she was so upset, poor thing, and you didn't see
her at her best. She is really so good. But listen to me, dear. Do you
think we have the right to refuse her offer? I told you she has money of
her own, and I am sure she would be dreadfully offended if we said we
wouldn't have her. And what would become of me if anything happened to
you? You know we have very little saved.'
Darnell groaned.
'It seems to me,' he said, 'that it would spoil everything. We are so
happy, Mary dear, by ourselves. Of course I am extremely sorry for your
aunt. I think she is very much to be pitied. But when it comes to having
her always here----'
'I know, dear. Don't think I am looking forward to the prospect; you
know I don't want anybody but you. Still, we ought to think of the
future, and besides we shall be able to live so very much better. I
shall be able to give you all sorts of nice things that I know you ought
to have after all that hard work in the City. Our income would be
doubled.'
'Do you mean she would pay us L150 a year?'
'Certainly. And she would pay for the spare room being furnished, and
any extra she might want. She told me, specially, that if a friend or
two came now and again to see her, she would gladly bear the cost of a
fire in the drawing-room, and give something towards the gas bill, with
a few shillings for the girl for any additional trouble. We should
certainly be more than twice as well off as we are now. You see, Edward,
dear, it's not the sort of offer we are likely to have again. Besides,
we must think of the future, as I said. Do you know aunt took a great
fancy to you?'
He shuddered and said nothing, and his wife went on with her argument.
'And, you see, it isn't as if we should see so very much of her. She
will have her breakfast in bed, and she told me she would often go up to
her room in the evening directly after dinner. I thought that very nice
and considerate. She quite understands that we shouldn't like to have a
third person always with us. Don't you think, Edward, that, considering
everything, we ought to say we will have her?'
'Oh, I suppose so,' he groaned. 'As you say, it's a very good offer,
financially, and I am afraid it would be very imprudent to refuse. But I
don't like the notion, I confess.'
'I am so glad you agree with me, dear. Depend upon it, it won't be half
so bad as you think. And putting our own advantage on one side, we shall
really be doing poor aunt a very great kindness. Poor old dear, she
cried bitterly after you were gone; she said she had made up her mind
not to stay any longer in Uncle Robert's house, and she didn't know
where to go, or what would become of her, if we refused to take her in.
She quite broke down.'
'Well, well; we will try it for a year, anyhow. It may be as you say; we
shan't find it quite so bad as it seems now. Shall we go in?'
He stooped for his pipe, which lay as it had fallen, on the grass. He
could not find it, and lit a wax match which showed him the pipe, and
close beside it, under the seat, something that looked like a page torn
from a book. He wondered what it could be, and picked it up.
The gas was lit in the drawing-room, and Mrs. Darnell, who was arranging
some notepaper, wished to write at once to Mrs. Nixon, cordially
accepting her proposal, when she was startled by an exclamation from her
husband.
'What is the matter?' she said, startled by the tone of his voice. 'You
haven't hurt yourself?'
'Look at this,' he replied, handing her a small leaflet; 'I found it
under the garden seat just now.'