AT THE BAR OF THE "GUY OF WARWICK."
Next evening there came, not Richard, but a note saying that he would
see Alice the moment he could get away from town. As the old servant
departed northward, her solitude for the first time began to grow
irksome, and as the night approached, worse even than gloomy.
Her extemporised household made her laugh. It was not even a skeleton
establishment. The kitchen department had dwindled to a single person,
who ordered her luncheon and dinner, only two or three _plats_, daily,
from the "Guy of Warwick." The housemaid's department was undertaken by
a single servant, a short, strong woman of some sixty years of age.
This person puzzled Alice a good deal. She came to her, like the others,
with a note from her brother, stating her name, and that he had engaged
her for the few days they meant to remain roughing it at Mortlake, and
that he had received a very good account of her.
This woman has not a bad countenance. There is, indeed, no tenderness in
it; but there is a sort of hard good-humour. There are quickness and
resolution. She talks fluently of herself and her qualifications, and
now and then makes a short curtsey. But she takes no notice of any one
of Alice's questions.
A silence sometimes follows, during which Alice repeats her
interrogatory perhaps twice, with growing indignation, and then the new
comer breaks into a totally independent talk, and leaves the young lady
wondering at her disciplined impertinence. It was not till her second
visit that she enlightened her.
"I did not send for you. You can go!" said Alice.
"I don't like a house that has children in it, they gives a deal o'
trouble," said the woman.
"But I say you may go; you must go, please."
The woman looked round the room.
"When I was with Mrs. Montgomery, she had five, three girls and two
boys; la! there never was five such----"
"Go, this moment, please, I insist on your going; do you hear me, pray?"
But so far from answering, or obeying, this cool intruder continues her
harangue before Miss Arden gets half way to the end of her little
speech.
"That woman was the greatest fool alive--nothing but spoiling and
petting--I could not stand it no longer, so I took Master Tommy by the
lug, and pulled him out of the kitchen, the limb, along the passage to
the stairs, every inch, and I gave him a slap in the face, the fat young
rascal; you could hear all over the house! and didn't he rise the roof!
So missus and me, we quarrelled upon it."
"If you don't leave the room, _I_ must; and I shall tell my brother, Sir
Richard, how you have behaved yourself; and you may rely upon it----"
But here again she is overpowered by the strong voice of her visitor.
"It was in my next place, at Mr. Crump's, I took cold in my head, very
bad, Miss, indeed, looking out of window to see two fellows fighting, in
the lane--in both ears--and so I lost my hearing, and I've been deaf as
a post ever since!"
Alice could not resist a laugh at her own indignant eloquence quite
thrown away; and she hastily wrote with a pencil on a slip of paper:--
"Please don't come to me except when I send for you."
"La! Ma'am, I forgot!" exclaims the woman, when she had examined it; "my
orders was not to read any of _your_ writing."
"Not to read any of my writing!" said Alice, amazed; "then, how am I to
tell you what I wish about anything?" she inquires, for the moment
forgetting that not one word of her question was heard. The woman makes
a curtsey and retires. "What can Richard have meant by giving her such a
direction? I'll ask him when he comes."
It was likely enough that the woman had misunderstood him, still she
began to wish the little interval destined to be passed at Mortlake
before her journey to Yorkshire, ended.
She told her maid, Louisa Diaper, to go down to the kitchen and find out
all she could as to what people were in the house, and what duties they
had undertaken, and when her brother was likely to arrive.
Louisa Diaper, slim, elegant, and demure, descended among these
barbarous animals. She found in the kitchen, unexpectedly, a male
stranger, a small, slight man, with great black eyes, a big sullen
mouth, a sallow complexion, and a profusion of black ringlets. The deaf
woman was conning over some writing of his on a torn-off blank leaf of a
letter, and he was twiddling about the pencil, with which he had just
traced it, in his fingers, and, in a singing drawl, holding forth to the
other woman, who, with a long and high canvas apron on, and the handle
of an empty saucepan in her right hand, stood gaping at him, with her
arms hanging by her sides.
On the appearance of Miss Diaper, Mr. Levi, for he it was, directs his
solemn conversation to that young lady.
"I was just telling them about the robberies in the City and Wesht Hend.
La! there'sh bin nothin' like it for twenty year. They don't tell them
in the papersh, blesh ye! The 'ome Shecretary takesh precious good care
o' that; they don't want to frighten every livin' shoul out of London.
But there'll be talk of it in Parliament, I promish you. I know three
opposition membersh myshelf that will move the 'oushe upon it next
session."
Mr. Levi wagged his head darkly as he made this political revelation.
"Thish day twel'month the number o' burglariesh in London and the West
Hend, including Hizzlington, was no more than fifteen and a half a
night; and two robberiesh attended with wiolensh. What wazh it lasht
night? I have it in confidensh, from the polishe offish thish morning."
He pulled a pocket-book, rather greasy, from his breast, and from this
depositary, it is to be presumed, of statistical secrets, he read the
following official memorandum:--
"Number of 'oushes burglarioushly hentered lasht night, including
private banksh, charitable hinshtitutions, shops, lodging-'oushes,
female hacadamies, and private dwellings, and robbed with more or less
wiolench, one thoushand sheven hundred and shixty-sheven. We regret to
hadd," he continued, the official return stealing, as it proceeded,
gradually into the style of "The Pictorial Calendar of British Crime," a
half-penny paper which he took in--"this hinundation of crime seems
flowing, or rayther rushing northward, and hazh already enweloped
Hizhlington, where a bald-headed clock and watch maker, named Halexander
Goggles, wazh murdered with his sheven shmall children, with
unigshampled ba-arba-arity."
Mr. Levi eyed the women horribly all round as he ended the sentence, and
he added,--
"Hizhlington'sh only down there. It ain't five minutesh walk; only a
pleasant shtep; just enough to give a fellow azh has polished off a
family there a happetite for another up here. Azh I 'ope to be shaved, I
shleep every night with a pair of horshe pishtols, a blunderbush, and a
shabre by my bed; and Shir Richard wantsh every door in the 'oushe fasht
locked, and the keysh with him, before dark, thish evening, except only
such doors as you want open; and he gave me a note to Miss Harden." And
he placed the note in Miss Diaper's hand. "He wantsh the 'oushe a bit
more schecure," he added, following her towards the hall. "He wishes to
make you and she quite shafe, and out of harm's way, if anything should
occur. It will be only a few days, you know, till you're both away."
The effect of this little alarm, accompanied by Sir Richard's note, was
that Mr. Levi carried out a temporary arrangement, which assigned the
suite of apartments in which Alice's room was as those to which she
would restrict herself during the few days she was to remain there, the
rest of the house, except the kitchen and a servant's room or two
down-stairs, being locked up.
By the time Mr. Levi had got the keys together, and all safe in
Mortlake, the sun had set, and in the red twilight that followed he set
off in his cab towards town. At the "Guy of Warwick"--from the bar of
which already was flaring a good broad gas-light--he stopped and got
out. There was a full view of the bar from where he stood; and,
pretending to rummage his pockets for something, he was looking in to
see whether "the coast was clear."
"She's just your sort--not too bad and not too good--not too nashty, and
not too nishe; a good-humoured lash, rough and ready, and knowsh a thing
or two."
"Ye're there, are ye?" inquired Mr. Levi, playfully, as he crossed the
door-stone, and placed his fists on the bar grinning.
"What will you take, Sir, please?" inquired the young woman, at one side
of whom was the usual row of taps and pump-handles.
"Now, Miss Phoebe, give me a brandy and shoda, pleashe. When I talked to
you in thish 'ere place 'tother night, you wished to engage for a lady's
maid. What would you shay to me, if I was to get you a firsht-chop
tip-top pla-ashe of the kind? Well, don't you shay a word--that brandy
ain't fair measure--and I'll tell you. It'sh a la-ady of ra-ank! where
wagesh ish no-o object; and two years' savings, and a good match with a
well-to-do 'andsome young fellow, will set you hup in a better place
than this 'ere."
"It comes very timely, Sir, for I'm to leave to-morrow, and I was
thinking of going home to my uncle in a day or two, in Chester."
"Well it's all settled. Come you down to my offishe, you know where it
is, to-morrow, at three, and I'll 'av all partickulars for you, and a
note to the lady from her brother, the baronet; and if you be a good
girl, and do as you're bid, you'll make a little fortune of it."
She curtsied, with her eyes very round, as he, with a wag of his head
drank down what remained of his brandy and soda, and wiping his mouth
with his glove, he said, "Three o'clock sha-arp, mind; good-bye, Phoebe,
lass, and don't you forget all I said."
He stood ungallantly with his back towards her on the threshold lighting
a cigar, and so soon as he had it in his own phrase, "working at high
blast," he got into his cab, and jingled towards his office, with all
his keys about him.
While Miss Arden remained all unconscious, and even a little amused at
the strange shifts to which her brief stay and extemporised household at
Mortlake exposed her, a wily and determined strategist was drawing his
toils around her.
The process of isolation was nearly completed, without having once
excited her suspicions; and, with the same perfidious skill, the house
itself was virtually undergoing those modifications which best suited
his designs.
Sir Richard appeared at his club as usual. He was compelled to do so.
The all-seeing eye of his pale tyrant pursued him everywhere; he lived
under terror. A dreadful agony all this time convulsed the man, within
whose heart Longcluse suspected nothing but the serenity of death.
"What easier than to tell the story to the police. Meditated duresse.
Compulsion. Infernal villain! And then: what then? A pistol to his head,
a flash, and--darkness!"