In the first-floor sitting-room of a lodging-house in Great College
Street, Westminster, a young man—he was tall and thin, with a good
deal of rather longish light-coloured hair, somewhat tumbled about;
and he wore a pince-nez, and was in slippers and the oldest of tattered
coats—a man of thirty-something was seated at a writing-table,
diligently scribbling at what an accustomed eye might have recognised as
“copy,” and negligently allowing the smoke from a cigarette to curl
round and stain the thumb and forefinger of his idle hand, when the
lodging-house maid-servant opened his door, and announced excitedly,
“A lady to see you, sir.”
With the air of one taken altogether by surprise, and at a cruel
disadvantage, the writer dropped his pen, and jumped up. He was in
slippers and a disgraceful coat, not to dwell upon the condition of
his hair. “You ought to have kept her downstairs until———” he
began, frowning upon the maid; and at that point his visitor entered the
room.
She was a handsome, dashing-looking young woman, in a toilette that
breathed the very last and crispest savour of Parisian elegance: a hat
that was a tangle of geraniums, an embroidered jacket, white gloves, a
skirt that frou-froued breezily as she moved; and she carried an amazing
silver-hilted sunshade, a thing like a folded gonfalon, a thing of red
silk gleaming through draperies of black lace.
Poising lightly near the threshold, with a little smile of
interrogation, this bewildering vision said, “Have I the honour of
addressing Mr. William Stretton?”
The young man bowed a vague acknowledgment of that name; but his gaze,
through the lenses of his pince-nez, was all perplexity and question.
“I’m very fortunate in finding you at home. I’ve called to see you
about a matter of business,” she informed him.
“Oh?” he wondered. Then he added, with a pathetic shake of the head,
“I’m the last man in the world whom any one could wisely choose
to see about a matter of business; but such as I am, I’m all at your
disposal.”
“So much the better,” she rejoined cheerily. “I infinitely prefer
to transact business with people who are unbusinesslike. One has some
chance of overreaching them.”
“You’ll have every chance of over-reaching me,” sighed he.
“What a jolly quarter of the town you live in,” she commented.
“It’s so picturesque and Gothic and dilapidated, with such an
atmosphere of academic calm. It reminds me of Oxford.”
“Yes,” assented he, “it is a bit like Oxford. Was your business
connected——?”
“Oh, it is like Oxford?” she interrupted. “Then never tell me
again that there’s nothing in intuitions. I’ve never been in Oxford,
but directly I passed the gateway of Dean’s Yard, I felt reminded of
it.”
“There’s undoubtedly a lot in intuitions,” he agreed; “and for
the future I shall carefully abstain from telling you there isn’t.”
“Those things are gardens, over the way, behind the wall, aren’t
they?” she asked, looking out of the window.
“Yes,” he said, “those things are gardens, the gardens of the
Abbey. The canons and people have their houses there.”
“Very comfortable and nice,” said she. “Plenty of grass. And the
trees aren’t bad, either, for town trees. It must be rather fun to
be a canon. As I live,” she cried, turning back into the room,
“you’ve got a Pleyel. This is the first Pleyel I’ve seen in
England. Let me congratulate you on your taste in pianos.” And with
her gloved hands she struck a chord and made a run or two. “You’ll
need the tuner soon, though. It’s just the shadow of a shadow out. I
was brought up on Pleyels. Do you know, I’ve half a mind to make you a
confidence?” she questioned brightly.
“Oh, do make it, I pray you,” he encouraged her.
“Well, then, I believe, if you were to offer me a chair, I believe I
could bring myself to sit down,” she admitted.
“I beg your pardon,” he exclaimed; and she sank rustling into the
chair that he pushed forward.
“Well, now for my business,” said she. “Would you just put this
thing somewhere?” She offered him her sunshade, which he took and
handled somewhat gingerly. “Oh, you needn’t be afraid. It’s quite
tame,” she laughed, “though I admit it looks a bit ferocious. What
a sweet room you’ve got—so manny, and smoky, and booky. Are they all
real books?”
“More or less real,” he answered; “as real as any books ever are
that a fellow gets for review.”
“Oh, you got them for review?” she repeated, with vivacity. “How
terribly exciting. I’ve never seen a book before that’s actually
passed through a reviewer’s hands. They don’t look much the worse
for it. Whatever else you said about them, I trust you didn’t deny
that they make nice domestic ornaments. But this isn’t business. You
wouldn’t call this business?” she enquired, with grave curiosity.
“No, I should call this pleasure,” he assured her, laughing.
“Would you?” She raised her eyebrows. “Ah, but then you’re
English.”
“Aren’t you?” asked he.
“Do I look English?”
“I’m not sure.” He hesitated for a second, studying her. “You
certainly don’t dress English.”
“Heaven forbid Δ She made a fervent gesture. “I’m a miserable
sinner, but at least I’m incapable of that. However, if you were
really kind, you’d affect just a little curiosity to know the errand
to which you owe my presence.”
“I’m devoured by curiosity,” he declared.
Again she raised her eyebrows. “You are? Then why don’t you show
it?”
“Perhaps because I have a sense of humour—amongst other reasons,”
he suggested, smiling.
“Well, since you’re devoured by curiosity, you must know,” she
began; but broke off suddenly—“Apropos, I wonder whether you could
be induced to tell me something.”
“I daresay I could, if it’s anything within my sphere of
knowledge.” He paused, expectant.
“Then tell me, please, why you keep your Japanese fan in your
fireplace,” she requested.
“Why shouldn’t I? Doesn’t it strike you as a good place for it?”
“Admirable. But my interest was psychological. I was wondering by what
mental processes you came to hit upon it.”
“Well, then, to be frank, it wasn’t I who hit upon it; it isn’t
my Japanese fan. It’s a conceit of my landlady’s. This is an age of
paradox, you know. Would you prefer silver paper?”
“Must one have one or the other?”
“You’re making it painfully clear,” he cautioned her, “that
you’ve never lived in lodgings.”
“If you go on at this rate,” she retorted, laughing, “I shall
never get my task accomplished. Here are twenty times that I’ve
commenced it, and twenty times you’ve put me off. Shall we now, at
last, proceed seriously to business?”
“Not on my account, I beg. I’m not in the slightest hurry,”
protested he.
“You said you were devoured by curiosity.”
“Did I say that?” He knitted his brow.
“Certainly you did.”
“It must have been aphasia. I meant contentment,” he explained.
“Devoured by contentment?”
“Why not, as well as by curiosity?”
“The phrase is novel,” she mused.
“It’s the occupation of my life to seek for novel phrases,” he
reminded her. “I’m what somebody or other has called a literary
man.”
“And you enjoy what somebody or other has called beating about the
bush?”
“Hugely—with such a fellow-beater,” he responded.
“You drive me to extremities.” She shook her head. “I see
there’s nothing for it but to plunge in médias res. You must know,
then, that I have been asked to call upon you by a friend—by my friend
Miss Johannah Rothe—I beg your pardon; I never can remember that
she’s changed her name—my friend Miss Johannah Silver—but Silver
née Rothe—of Silver Towers, in the County of Sussex.”
“Ah?” said he. “Ah, yes. Then never tell me again that there’s
nothing in intuitions. I’ve never met Miss Silver, but directly you
crossed the threshold of this room, I began to feel vaguely reminded of
her.”
“Oh, there’s a lot in intuitions,” she agreed. “But don’t
think to disconcert me. My friend Miss Silver——”
It was his turn to raise his eyebrows. “Your friend?”
“Considering the sacrifice I’m making on her behalf to-day, it’s
strange you should throw doubt upon my friendship for her,” she
argued.
“You make your sacrifices with a cheerful countenance. I should
never have guessed that you weren’t entirely happy. But forgive
my interruption. You were about to say that your friend Miss
Silver——”
“My occasional friend,” she substituted. “Sometimes, I confess, we
quarrel like everything, and remain at daggers drawn for months. She’s
such a flightly creature, dear Johannah, she not infrequently gets me
into a perfect peck of trouble. But since she’s fallen heir to all
this money, you’d be surprised to behold the devotion her friends
have shown her. I couldn’t very well refuse to follow their example.
One’s human, you see; and one can’t dress like this for nothing, can
one?”
“Upon my word, I’m not in a position to answer you. I’ve never
tried,” laughed he.
“In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I think we may safely
assume one can’t,” said she. “However, here you are, beating about
the bush again. I come to you as Johannah’s emissary. She desires me
to ask you several questions.”
“Yes?” said he, a trifle uncomfortably.
“She would be glad to know,” his visitor declared, looking straight
into his eyes, and smiling a little gravely, “why you have been so
excessively nasty to her?”
“Have I been nasty to her?” he asked, with an innocence that was
palpably counterfeit.
“Don’t you think you have?” She still looked gravely, smilingly,
into his eyes.
“I don’t see how.” He maintained his feint of innocence.
“Don’t you think you’ve responded somewhat ungraciously to her
overtures of friendship?” she suggested. “Do you think it was nice
to answer her letters with those curt little formal notes of yours?
Look. Johannah sat down to write to you. And she began her letter Dear
Mr. Stretton. And then she simply couldn’t. So she tore up the sheet,
and began another My Dear Cousin Will. And what did she receive in
reply? A note beginning Dear Miss Silver. Do you think that was kind?
Don’t you think it was the least bit mortifying? And why have you
refused in such a stiff-necked way to go down to see her at Silver
Towers?”
“Oh,” he protested, “in all fairness, in all logic, your questions
ought to be put the other way round.”
“Bother logic! But put them any way you like,” said she.
“What right had Miss Silver to expect me to multiply the complications
of my life by rushing into an ecstatic friendship with her? And why,
being very well as I am in town just now, why should I disarrange myself
by a journey into the country?”
“Why indeed?” she echoed. “I’m sure I can give no reason. Why
should one ever do any one else a kindness? Your cousin has conceived a
great desire to meet you.”
“Oh, a great desire!” He tossed his head. “One knows these great
desires. She’ll live it down. A man named Burrell has been stuffing
her up.”
“Stuffing her up?” She smiled enquiringly. “The expression is new
to me.”
“Greening her, filling her head with all sorts of nonsensical
delusions, painting my portrait for her in all the colours of the
rainbow. Oh, I know my Burrell. He’s tried to stuff me up, too, about
her.”
“Oh? Has he? What has he said?” she questioned eagerly.
“The usual rubbishy things one does say, when one wants to stuff a
fellow up.”
“For instance?”
“Oh, that she’s tremendously good-looking, with hair and eyes and
things, and very charming.”
“What a dear good person the man named Burrell must be,” she
murmured.
“He’s not a bad chap,” he conceded, “but you must remember that
he’s her solicitor.”
“And, remembering that, you weren’t to be stuffed?” she said.
“If she was charming and good-looking, it was a reason the more for
avoiding her,” said he.
“Oh?” She looked perplexed.
“There’s nothing on earth so tiresome as charming women. They’re
all exactly alike,” asserted he.
“Thank you,” his guest exclaimed, bowing.
“Oh, nobody could pretend that you’re exactly alike,” he assured
her hastily. “I own at once that you’re delightfully different. But
Burrell has no knack for character drawing.”
“You’re extremely flattering. But aren’t you taking a slightly
one-sided point of view? Let us grant, for the sake of the argument,
that it is Johannah’s bad luck to be charming and good-looking.
Nevertheless, she still has claims on you.”
“Has she?”
“She’s your cousin.”
“Oh, by the left hand,” said he.
She stared for an instant, biting her lip. Then she laughed.
“And only my second or third cousin at that,” he went on serenely.
She looked at him with eyes that were half whimsical, half pleading.
“Would you mind being quite serious for a moment?” she asked.
“Because Johannah’s situation, absurd as it seems, really is
terribly serious for Johannah. I should like to submit it to your better
judgment. We’ll drop the question of cousinship, if you wish—though
it’s the simple fact that you’re her only blood-relation in this
country, where she feels herself the forlornest sort of alien. She’s
passed her entire life in Italy and France, you know, and this is the
first visit she’s made to England since her childhood. But we’ll
drop the question of cousinship. At any rate, Johannah is a human
being. Well, consider her plight a little. She finds herself in the most
painful, the most humiliating circumstances that can be imagined;
and you’re the only person living who can make them easier for her.
Involuntarily—in spite of herself—she’s come into possession of
a fortune that naturally, morally, belongs to you. She can’t help it.
It’s been left to her by will—by the will of a man who never saw
her, never had any kind of relations with her, but chose her for his
heir just because her mother, who died when Johannah was a baby, had
chanced to be his cousin. And there the poor girl is. Can’t you see
how like a thief she must feel at the best? Can’t you see how much
worse you make it for her, when she holds out her hand, and you refuse
to take it? Is that magnanimous of you? Isn’t it cruel? You couldn’t
treat her with greater unkindness if she’d actually designed, and
schemed, and intrigued, to do you out of your inheritance, instead of
coming into it in the passive way she has. After all, she’s a human
being, she’s a woman. Think of her pride.”
“Think of mine,” said he.
“I can’t see that your pride is involved.”
“To put it plainly, I’m the late Sir William Silver’s illegitimate
son.”
“Well? What of that?”
“Do you fancy I should enjoy being taken up and patronised by his
legitimate heir?”
“Oh!” she cried, starting to her feet. “You can’t think I would
be capable of anything so base as that.”
And he saw that her eyes had suddenly filled with tears.
“I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon a thousand times,” he said.
“You would be utterly incapable of anything that was not generous
and noble. But you must remember that I had never seen you. How could I
know?”
“Well, now that you have seen me,” she responded, her eyes all
smiles again, “now that I have put my pride in my pocket, and bearded
you in your den, I don’t mind confiding in you that it’s nearly
lunchtime, and also that I’m ravenously hungry. Could you ring your
bell, and order up something in the nature of meat and drink? And while
you are about it, you might tell your landlady or some one to pack your
bag. We take,” she mentioned, examining a tiny watch, that seemed
nothing more than a frivolous incrustation of little diamonds and
rubies, “we take the three-sixteen for Silver Towers.” II.
Seated opposite her in the railway-carriage, as their train bore them
through the pleasant dales and woods of Surrey, Will Stretton fell to
studying his cousin’s appearance. “Burrell was right,” he told
himself; “she really is tremendously good-looking,” and that, in
spite of a perfectly reckless irregularity of feature. Her nose was too
small, but it was a delicate, pert, pretty nose, notwithstanding. Her
mouth was too large, but it was a beautiful mouth, all the same, softly
curved and red as scarlet, with sensitive, humorous little quirks in
its corners. Her eyes he could admire without reservation, brown and
pellucid, with the wittiest, teasingest, mockingest lights dancing in
them, yet at the same time a deeper light that was pensive, tender,
womanly. Her hair, too, he decided, was quite lovely, abundant,
undulating, black, blue-black even, but fine, but silky, escaping in a
flutter of small curls above her brow. “It’s like black foam,”
he said. And he would have been ready to go to war for her complexion,
though it was so un-English a complexion that one might have mistaken
her for a native of the France or Italy she had inhabitated: warm, dusky
white, with an elusive shadow of rose glowing through it. Yes, she was
tremendously good-looking, he concluded. She looked fresh and strong and
real. She looked alert, alive, full of the spring and the joy of life.
She looked as if she could feel quick and deep, as if her blood flowed
swiftly, and was red. He liked her face, and he liked her figure—it
was supple and vigorous. He liked the way she dressed—there was
something daring and spirited in the uncompromising, unabashed luxury of
it. “Who ever saw such a hat—or such a sunshade?” he reflected.
“There’ll be no coach-and-four to meet us at the station,” she
warned him, as they neared their journey’s end, “because I have no
horses. But we’ll probably find Madame Dornaye there, piaffer-ing in
person. Can you resign yourself to the prospect of driving up to your
ancestral mansion in a hired fly?”
“I could even, at a pinch, resign myself to walking,” he declared.
“But who is Madame Dornaye?”
“Madame Dornaye is my burnt-offering to that terrible sort of
fetich called the County. She’s what might be technically termed my
chaperon.”
“Oh, to be sure,” he said; “I had forgotten. Of course, you’d
have a chaperon.”
“By no means of course,” she corrected him. “Until the other day
I’d never thought of such a thing. But it’s all along o’ the man
named Burrell. He insisted that I mustn’t live alone—that I was too
young. He has such violent hallucinations about people’s ages. He
said the County would be horrified. I must have an old woman, a sound,
reliable old woman, to live with me. I begged and implored him to come
and try it, but he protested with tears in his eyes that he wasn’t
an old woman. So I sent for Madame Dornaye, who is, every inch of her.
She’s the widow of a man who used to be a professor at the Sorbonne,
or something. I’ve known her for at least a hundred years. She’s
connected in some roundabout way with the family of my father’s
stepmother. She’s like a little dry brown leaf; and she plays Chopin
comme pas un; and she lends me a false air of respectability, I suppose.
She calls me Jeanne ma fille, if you can believe it, as if my name
weren’t common Johannah. If you chance to please her, she’ll very
likely call you Jean mon fils. But see how things turn out. The man
named Burrell also insisted that I must put on mourning, as a symbol of
my grief for the late Sir William. That I positively refused to think
of. So the County’s horrified, all the same—which proves the
futility of concessions.”
“Oh?” questioned Will. “What does the County do?”
“It comes and calls on me, and walks round me, and stares, with a
funny little deprecating smile, as it I were some outlandish and not
very proper animal, cast up by the sea. To begin with, there’s the
vicar, with all his wives and daughters. Their emotions are complicated
by the fact that I am a Papist. Then there’s old Lord Belgard; and
there’s Mrs. Breckenbridge, with her marriageable sons; and there’s
the Bishop of Salchester, with his Bishopess, Dean, and Chapter. The
dear good people make up parties in the afternoon, to come and have a
look at me; and they sip my tea with an air of guilt, as if it smacked
of profligacy; and they suppress demure little knowing glances among
themselves. And then at last they go away, shaking their heads, and
talking me over in awe-struck voices.”
“I can see them, I can hear them,” Will laughed.
“Haven’t you in English a somewhat homely proverbial expression
about the fat and the fire?” asked Johannah.
“About the fat getting into the fire? Yes,” said Will.
“Well, then, to employ that somewhat homely proverbial expression,”
she went on, “the fat got into the fire at the Bishop’s palace. Mrs.
Rawley was kind enough to write and ask us to dinner, and she added that
she had heard I sang, and wouldn’t I bring some music? But nobody had
ever told me that it’s bad form in England to sing well. So,
after dinner, when Mrs. Rawley said, ’Now, Miss Silver, do sing us
something,’ I made the incredible blunder of singing as well as
I could. I sang the Erlkônig, and Madame Dornaye played the
accompaniment, and we both did our very bestest, in our barefaced,
Continental way. We were a little surprised, and vastly enlightened,
to perceive that we’d shocked everybody. And by-and-by the Bishop’s
daughters consented to sing in their turn, and then we saw the correct
British style of doing it. If you don’t want to be considered rowdyish
and noisy in a British drawing-room, you must sing under your breath,
faintly, faintingly, as if you were afraid somebody might hear you.”
“My poor dear young lady,” her cousin commiserated her, “fancy
your only just discovering that. It’s one of the foundation-stones of
our social constitution. If you sing with any art or with any feeling,
you expose yourself to being mistaken for a paid professional.”
“Another thing that’s horrified the County,” pursued Johannah,
“is the circumstance that I keep no horses. I don’t like
horses—except in pictures. In pictures, I admit at once, they make a
very pleasant decorative motive. But in life—they’re too strong and
too unintelligent; and they’re perpetually bolting. By-the-bye, please
choose a good feeble jaded one, when you engage our fly. I’m devoted
to donkeys, though. They’re every bit as decorative as the horse,
and they’re really wise—they only baulk. I had a perfect love of
a little donkey in Italy; his name was Angelo. If I decide to stay in
England, I shall have a spanking team of four donkeys, with scarlet
trappings and silver bells. But the County say ’Oh, you must have
horses,’ and casts its eyes appealingly to heaven when I say I
won’t.”
“The County lacks a sense of situations,” he reflected. “It’s
really a deliciously fresh one—a big country house, and not a horse in
the stables.”
“Apropos of the house, that brings me to another point,” said she.
“The County feels very strongly that I ought to put the house in
repair—that dear old wonderful, rambling, crumbling house. They take
it as the final crushing evidence of my depravity, that I prefer to
leave it in its present condition of picturesque decay. I’m sure you
agree with me, that it would be high treason to allow a carpenter or
mason to lay a hand on it. By-the-bye, I hope you have no conscientious
scruples against speaking French; for Madame Dornaye only knows two
words of English, and those she mispronounces. There she is—yes, that
little black and grey thing, in the frock. She’s come to meet me,
because we had a bet. You owe me five shillings,” she called out to
Madame Dornaye, as Will helped her from the carriage. “You see, I’ve
brought him.”
Madame Dornaye, who had a pair of humorous old French eyes, responded,
blinking them, “Oh, before I pay you, I shall have to be convinced
that it is really he.”
“I’m afraid it’s really he,” laughed Will; “but rather than
let so immaterial a detail cost you five shillings, I’m prepared to
maintain with my dying breath that there’s no such person.”
“Don’t mind him,” interposed Johannah. “He’s trying to flatter
you up, because he wants you to call him Jean mon fils, as if his name
weren’t common William.” Then, to him, “Go,” she said, with an
imperious gesture, “go and find a vehicle with a good tired horse.”
And when the vehicle with the good tired horse had brought them to
their destination, and they stood before the hall-door of Silver Towers,
Johannah looked up at the escutcheon carved in the pale-grey stone above
it, and said pensively, “On a field argent, a heart gules, crowned
with an imperial crown or; and the motto, ’Qu’il régne!’ If, when
you got my first letter, Cousin Will, if you’d remembered the arms
of our family, and the motto—if you had ’let it reign’—I should
have been spared the trouble and expense of a journey to town to-day.”
“But I should have missed a precious experience,” said he. “You
forget what I couldn’t help being supremely conscious of—that I bear
those arms with a difference. I hope, though, that you won’t begrudge
the journey to town. I think there are certain aspects of your character
that I might never have discovered if I’d met you in any other way.”
That evening Johannah wrote a letter:
“Dear Mr. Burrell,—Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut. The first part
of my rash little prophecy has already come true. Will Stretton is
staying in this house, a contented guest. At the present moment he’s
hovering about the piano, where Madame Dornaye is playing Chopin; and
he’s just remarked that he never hears Chopin without thinking of
those lines of Browning’s:
’I discern