Lucy, her pigtails neatly arranged, sat near the window and pretended to be reading that fascinating story, "The Pillars of the House." I say pretending, because Lucy did not care about reading at any time, and especially disliked the works of Charlotte Mary Yonge, but she thought that it looked well that she and nurse should be engaged upon literature whilst the rest of the world rioted and gambolled their time away. There was no one who at the moment could watch and admire her fine spirit, but you never knew who might come in.
The rioting and gambolling consisted in the attempts of Robert, Dorothy, and Roger, to give a realistic presentation to an audience of one, namely, the infant Timothy, of the life of the Red Indians and their Squaws. Underneath the nursery table, with a tablecloth, some chairs and a concertina, they were presenting an admirable and entirely engrossing performance.
Bim, under the window and quite close to Lucy, was giving a party. He had possessed himself of some of Dorothy's dolls' tea things, he had begged a sponge cake from nurse, and could be heard breaking from time to time into such sentences as, "Do have a little more tweacle pudding, Mrs. Smith. It's the best tweacle," and, "It's a nice day, isn't it!" but he was sorely interrupted by the noisy festivities of the Indians who broke, frequently, into realistic cries of "Oh! Roger, you're pulling my hair," or "I won't play if you don't look out!"
It may be that these interruptions disturbed the actuality of Bim's festivities, or it may be that the rattling of the rain upon the window panes diverted his attention. Once he broke into a chuckle. "Isn't they banging on the window, Lucy?" he said, but she was, it appeared, too deeply engaged to answer him. He found that, in a moment of abstraction, he had eaten the whole of the sponge cake, so that it was obvious that the party was over. "Good-bye, Mrs. Smith. It was really nice of you to come. Good-bye, dear, Mrs. —— I think the wain almost isn't coming now."
He said farewell to them all and climbed upon the window seat. Here, gazing down into the Square, he saw that the rain was stopping, and, on the farther side, above the roofs of the houses, a little splash of gold had crept into the grey. He watched the gold, heard the rain coming more slowly; at first, "spatter-spatter-spatter," then, "spatter—spatter." Then one drop very slowly after another drop. Then he saw that the sun from somewhere far away had found out the wet paths in the garden, and was now stealing, very secretly, along them. Soon it would strike the seat, and then the statue of the funny fat man in all his clothes, and then, perhaps, the fountain. He was unhappy a little, and he did not know why: he was conscious, perhaps, of the untidy, noisy room behind him, of his sister Dorothy who, now a Squaw of a quite genuine and realistic kind, was crying at the top of her voice: "I don't care. I will have it if I want to. You're not to, Roger," and of Timothy, his baby brother, who, moved by his sister's cries, howled monotonously, persistently, hopelessly.
"Oh, give over, do, Miss Dorothy!" said the nurse, raising her eye for a moment from her book. "Why can't you be quiet?"
Outside the world was beginning to shine and glitter, inside it was all horrid and noisy. He sighed a little, he wanted to express in some way his feelings. He looked at Lucy and drew closer to her. She had beside her a painted china mug which one of her uncles had brought her from Russia; she had stolen some daffodils from her mother's room downstairs and now was arranging them. This painted mug was one of her most valued possessions, and Bim himself thought it, with its strange red and brown figures running round it, the finest thing in all the world.
"Lucy," he said. "Do you s'pose if you was going to jump all the way down to the street and wasn't afraid that p'r'aps your legs wouldn't get broken?"
He was not, in reality, greatly interested in the answer to his question, but the important thing always with Lucy was first to enchain her attention. He had learnt, long ago, that to tell her that he loved her, to invite tenderness from her in return, was to ask for certain rebuff—he always began his advances then in this roundabout manner.
"What do you think, Lucy?"
"Oh, I don't know. How can I tell? Don't bother."
It was then that Bim felt what was, for him, a very rare sensation. He was irritated.
"I don't bovver," he said, with a cross look in the direction of his brother and sister Rochesters. "No, but, Lucy, s'pose some one—nurse, s'pose—did fall down into the street and broke all her legs and arms, she wouldn't be dead, would she?"
"You silly little boy, of course not."
He looked at Lucy, saw the frown upon her forehead, and felt suddenly that all his devotion to her was wasted, that she didn't want him, that nobody wanted him—now when the sun was making the garden glitter like a jewel and the fountain to shine like a sword.
He felt in his throat a hard, choking lump. He came closer to his sister.
"You might pay 'tention, Lucy," he said plaintively.
Lucy broke a daffodil stalk viciously. "Go and talk to the others," she said. "I haven't time for you."
The tears were hot in his eyes and anger was in his heart—anger bred of the rain, of the noise, of the confusion.
"You are howwid," he said slowly.
"Well, go away, then, if I'm horrid," she pushed with her hand at his knee. "I didn't ask you to come here."
Her touch infuriated him; he kicked and caught a very tender part of her calf.
"Oh! You little beast!" She came to him, leant for a moment across him, then slapped his cheek.
The pain, the indignity, and, above all, a strange confused love for his sister that was near to passionate rage, let loose all the devils that owned Bim for their habitation.
He did three things: He screamed aloud, he bent forward and bit Lucy's hand hard, he seized Lucy's wonderful Russian mug and dashed it to the ground. He then stood staring at the shattered fragments.
III
There followed, of course, confusion. Nurse started up. "The Shadow of Ashlydyat" descended into the ashes, the children rushed eagerly from beneath the table to the centre of hostilities.
But there were no hostilities. Lucy and Bim were, both of them, utterly astonished, Lucy, as she looked at the scattered mug, was, indeed, sobbing, but absent-mindedly—her thoughts were elsewhere. Her thoughts, in fact, were with Bim. She realised suddenly that never before had he lost his temper with her; she was aware that his affection had been all this time of value to her, of much more value, indeed, than the stupid old mug. She bent down—still absent-mindedly sobbing—and began to pick up the pieces. She was really astonished—being a dry and rather hard little girl—at her affection for Bim.
The nurse seized on the unresisting villain of the piece and shook him. "You naughty little boy! To go and break your sister's beautiful mug. It's your horrid temper that'll be the ruin of you, mark my words, as I'm always telling you." (Bim had never been known to lose his temper before.) "Yes, it will. You see, you naughty boy. And all the other children as good as gold and quiet as lambs, and you've got to go and do this. You shall stand in the corner all tea-time, and not a bite shall you have." Here Bim began, in a breathless, frightened way, to sob. "Yes, well you may. Never mind, Miss Lucy, I dare say your uncle will bring you another." Here she became conscious of an attentive and deeply interested audience. "Now, children, time to get ready for tea. Run along, Miss Dorothy, now. What a nuisance you all are, to be sure."
They were removed from the scene. Bim was placed in the corner with his face to the wall. He was aghast; no words can give, at all, any idea of how dumbly aghast he was. What possessed him? What, in an instant of time, had leapt down from the clouds, had sprung up from the Square and seized him? Between his amazed thoughts came little surprised sobs. But he had not abandoned himself to grief—he was too sternly set upon the problem of reparation. Something must be done, and that quickly.
The great thought in his mind was that he must replace the mug. He had not been very often in the streets beyond the Square, but upon certain occasions he had seen their glories, and he knew that there had been shops and shops and shops. Quite close to him, upon a shelf, was his money-box, a squat, ugly affair of red tin, into whose large mouth he had been compelled to force those gifts that kind relations had bestowed. There must be now quite a fortune there—enough to buy many mugs. He could not himself open it, but he did not doubt that the man in the shop would do that for him.
Not for many more moments would he be left alone. His hat was lying on the table; he seized that and his money-box, and was out on the landing.
The rest is his story. I cannot, as I have already said, vouch for the truth of it. At first, fortune was on his side. There seemed to be no one about the house. He went down the wide staircase without making any sound; in the hall he stopped for a moment because he heard voices, but no one came. Then with both hands, and standing on tiptoe, he turned the lock of the door, and was outside.
The Square was bathed in golden sun, a sun, the stronger for his concealment, but tempered, too, with the fine gleam that the rain had left. Never before had Bim been outside that door alone; he was aware that this was a very tremendous adventure. The sky was a washed and delicate purple, and behold! on the high railings, a row of sparrows were chattering. Voices were cold and clear, echoing, as it seemed, against the straight, grey walls of the houses, and all the trees in the garden glistened with their wet leaves shining with gold; there seemed to be, too, a dim veil of smoke that was homely and comfortable.
It is not usual to see a small boy of four alone in a London square, but Bim met, at first, no one except a messenger boy, who stopped and looked after him. At the corner of the Square—just out of the Square so that it might not shame its grandeur—was a fruit and flower shop, and this shop was the entrance to a street that had much life and bustle about it. Here Bim paused with his money-box clasped very tightly to him. Then he made a step or two and was instantly engulfed, it seemed, in a perfect whirl of men and women, of carts and bicycles, of voices and cries and screams; there were lights of every colour, and especially one far above his head that came and disappeared and came again with terrifying wizardry.
He was, quite suddenly, and as it were, by the agency of some outside person, desperately frightened. It was a new terror, different from anything that he had known before. It was as though a huge giant had suddenly lifted him up by the seat of his breeches, or a witch had transplanted him on to her broomstick and carried him off. It was as unusual as that.
His under lip began to quiver, and he knew that presently he would be crying. Then, as he always did, when something unusual occurred to him, he thought of "Mr. Jack." At this point, when you ask him what happened, he always says: "Oh! He came, you know—came walking along—like he always did."
"Was he just like other people, Bim?"
"Yes, just. With a beard, you know—just like he always was."
"Yes, but what sort of things did he wear?" "Oh, just ord'nary things, like you." There was no sense of excitement or wonder to be got out of him. It was true that Mr. Jack hadn't shown himself for quite a long time, but that, Bim felt, was natural enough. "He'll come less and seldomer and seldomer as you get big, you know. It was just at first, when one was very little and didn't know one's way about—just to help babies not to be frightened. Timothy would tell you only he won't. Then he comes only a little—just at special times like this was."
Bim told you this with a slightly bored air, as though it were silly of you not to know, and really his air of certainty made an incredulous challenge a difficult thing. On the present occasion Mr. Jack was just there, in the middle of the crowd, smiling and friendly. He took Bim's hand, and, "Of course," Bim said, "there didn't have to be any 'splaining. He knew what I wanted." True or not, I like to think of them, in the evening air, serenely safe and comfortable, and in any case, it was surely strange that if, as one's common sense compels one to suppose, Bim were all alone in that crowd, no one wondered or stopped him nor asked him where his home was. At any rate, I have no opinions on the subject. Bim says that, at once, they found themselves out of the crowd in a quiet, little "dinky" street, as he called it, a street that, in his description of it, answered to nothing that I can remember in this part of the world. His account of it seems to present a dark, rather narrow place, with overhanging roofs and swinging signs, and nobody, he says, at all about, but a church with a bell, and outside one shop a row of bright-coloured clothes hanging. At any rate, here Bim found the place that he wanted. There was a little shop with steps down into it and a tinkling bell which made a tremendous noise when you pushed the old oak door. Inside there was every sort of thing. Bim lost himself here in the ecstasy of his description, lacking also names for many of the things that he saw. But there was a whole suit of shining armour, and there were jewels, and old brass trays, and carpets, and a crocodile, which Bim called a "crodocile." There was also a friendly old man with a white beard, and over everything a lovely smell, which Bim said was like "roast potatoes" and "the stuff mother has in a bottle in her bedwoom."
Bim could, of course, have stayed there for ever, but Mr. Jack reminded him of a possibly anxious family. "There, is that what you're after?" he said, and, sure enough, there on a shelf, smiling and eager to be bought, was a mug exactly like the one that Bim had broken.
There was then the business of paying for it, the money-box was produced and opened by the old man with "a shining knife," and Bim was gravely informed that the money found in the box was exactly the right amount. Bim had been, for a moment, in an agony of agitation lest he should have too little, but as he told us, "There was all Uncle Alfred's Christmas money, and what mother gave me for the tooth, and that silly lady with the green dress who would kiss me." So, you see, there must have been an awful amount.
Then they went, Bim clasping his money-box in one hand and the mug in the other. The mug was wrapped in beautiful blue paper that smelt, as we were all afterwards to testify, of dates and spices. The crocodile flapped against the wall, the bell tinkled, and the shop was left behind them. "Most at once," Bim said they were by the fruit shop again; he knew that Mr. Jack was going, and he had a sudden most urgent longing to go with him, to stay with him, to be with him always. He wanted to cry; he felt dreadfully unhappy, but all of his thanks, his strange desires, that he could bring out was, in a quavering voice, trying hard, you understand, not to cry, "Mr. Jack. Oh! Mr.——" and his friend was gone.
IV
He trotted home; with every step his pride increased. What would Lucy say? And dim, unrealised, but forming, nevertheless, the basis for the whole of his triumph, was his consciousness that she who had scoffed, derided, at his "Mr. Jack," should now so absolutely benefit by him. This was bringing together, at last, the two of them.
His nurse, in a fine frenzy of agitation, met him. Her relief at his safety swallowed her anger. She could only gasp at him. "Well, Master Bim, and a nice state—— Oh, dear! to think; wherever——"
On the doorstep he forced his nurse to pause, and, turning, looked at the gardens now in shadow of spun gold, with the fountain blue as the sky. He nodded his head with satisfaction. It had been a splendid time. It would be a very long while, he knew, before he was allowed out again like that. Yes. He clasped the mug tightly, and the door closed behind him.
I don't know that there is anything more to say. There were the empty money-box and the mug. There was Bim's unhesitating and unchangeable story. There is a shop, just behind the Square, where they have some Russian crockery. But Bim alone!
I don't know.
CHAPTER V
Nancy Ross
I
Mr. Munty Ross's house was certainly the smartest in March Square; No. 14, where the Duchess of Crole lived, was shabby in comparison. Very often you may see a line of motor-cars and carriages stretching down the Square, then round the corner into Lent Street, and you may know then—as, indeed, all the Square did know and most carefully observed—that Mrs. Munty Boss was giving another of her smart little parties. That dark-green door, that neat overhanging balcony, those rows—in the summer months—of scarlet geraniums, that roll of carpet that ran, many times a week, from the door over the pavement to the very foot of the waiting vehicle—these things were Mrs. Munty Ross's.
Munty Ross—a silent, ugly, black little man—had had made his money in potted shrimps, or something equally compact and indigestible, and it really was very nice to think that anything in time could blossom out into beauty as striking as Mrs. Munty's lovely dresses, or melody as wonderful as the voice of M. Radiziwill, the famous tenor, whom she often "turned on" at her little evening parties. Upon Mr. Munty alone the shrimps seemed to have made no effect. He was as black, as insignificant, as ugly as ever he had been in the days before he knew of a shrimp's possibilities. He was very silent at his wife's parties, and sometimes dropped his h's. What Mrs. Munty had been before her marriage no one quite knew, but now she was flaxen and slim and beautifully clothed, with a voice like an insincere canary; she had "a passion for the Opera," a "passion for motoring," "a passion for the latest religion," and "a passion for the simple life." All these things did the shrimps enable her to gratify, and "the simple life" cost her more than all the others put together.
Heaven had blessed them with one child, and that child was called Nancy. Nancy, her mother always said with pride, was old for her age, and, as her age was only just five, that remark was quite true. Nancy Ross was old for any age. Had she herself, one is compelled when considering her to wonder, any conception during those first months of the things that were going to be made out of her, and had she, perhaps at the very commencement of it all, some instinct of protest and rebellion? Poor Nancy! The tragedy of her whole case was now none other than that she hadn't, here at five years old in March Square, the slightest picture of what she had become, nor could she, I suppose, have imagined it possible for her to become anything different. Nancy, in her own real and naked person, was a small child with a good flow of flaxen hair and light-blue eyes. All her features were small and delicate, and she gave you the impression that if you only pulled a string or pushed a button somewhere in the middle of her back you could evoke any cry, smile or exclamation that you cared to arouse. Her eyes were old and weary, her attitude always that of one who had learnt the ways of this world, had found them sawdust, but had nevertheless consented still to play the game. Just as the house was filled with little gilt chairs and china cockatoos, so was Nancy arrayed in ribbons and bows and lace. Mrs. Munty had, one must suppose, surveyed during certain periods in her life certain real emotions rather as the gaping villagers survey the tiger behind his bars in the travelling circus.
The time had then come when she put these emotions away from her as childish things, and determined never to be faced with any of them again. It was not likely, then, that she would introduce Nancy to any of them. She introduced Nancy to clothes and deportment, and left it at that. She wanted her child to "look nice." She was able, now that Nancy was five years old, to say that she "looked very nice indeed."
II
From the very beginning nurses were chosen who would take care of Nancy Boss's appearance. There was plenty of money to spend, and Nancy was a child who, with her flaxen hair and blue eyes, would repay trouble. She did repay it, because she had no desires towards grubbiness or rebellion, or any wildnesses whatever. She just sat there with her doll balanced neatly in her arms, and allowed herself to be pulled and twisted and squeezed and stretched. "There's a pretty little lady," said nurse, and a pretty little lady Nancy was sure that she was. The order for her day was that in the morning she went out for a walk in the gardens in the Square, and in the afternoon she went out for another. During these walks she moved slowly, her doll delicately carried, her beautiful clothes shining with approval of the way that they were worn, her head high, "like a little queen," said her nurse. She was conscious of the other children in the gardens, who often stopped in the middle of their play and watched her. She thought them hot and dirty and very noisy. She was sorry for their mothers.
It happened sometimes that she came downstairs, towards the end of a luncheon party, and was introduced to the guests. "You pretty little thing," women in very large hats said to her. "Lovely hair," or "She's the very image of you, Clarice," to her mother. She liked to hear that because she greatly admired her mother. She knew that she, Nancy Ross, was beautiful; she knew that clothes were of an immense importance; she knew that other children were unpleasant. For the rest, she was neither extravagantly glad nor extravagantly sorry. She preserved a fine indifference.... And yet, although, here my story may seem to matter-of-fact persons to take a turn towards the fantastic, this was not quite all. Nancy herself, dimly and yet uneasily, was aware that there was something else.
She was not a little girl who believed in fairies or witches or the "bogey man," or anything indeed that she could not see. She inherited from her mother a splendid confidence in the reality, the solid, unquestioned reality of all concrete and tangible things. She had been presented once with a fine edition of "Grimm's Fairy Tales," an edition with coloured pictures and every allure. She had turned its pages with a look of incredulous amazement. "What," she seemed to say—she was then aged three and a half—"are these absurd things that you are telling me? People aren't like that. Mother isn't in the least like that. I don't understand this, and it's tedious!"
"I'm afraid the child has no imagination," said her nurse.
"What a lucky thing!" said her mother.
Nor could Mrs. Ross's house be said to be a place that encouraged fairies. They would have found the gilt chairs hard to sit upon, and there were no mysterious corners. There was nothing mysterious at all. And yet Nancy Ross, sitting in her magnificent clothes, was conscious as she advanced towards her sixth year that she was not perfectly comfortable. To say that she felt lonely would be, perhaps, to emphasise too strongly her discomfort. It was perhaps rather that she felt inquisitive—only a little, a very little—but she did begin to wish that she could ask a few questions.
There came a day—an astonishing day—when she felt irritated with her mother. She had during her walk through the garden seen a little boy and a little girl, who were grubbing about in a little pile of earth and sand there in the corner under the trees, and grubbing very happily. They had dirt upon their faces, but their nurse was sitting, apparently quite easy in her mind, and the sun had not stopped in its course nor had the birds upon the trees ceased to sing. Nancy stayed for a moment her progress and looked at them, and something not very far from envy struck, in some far-distant hiding-place, her soul. She moved on, but when she came indoors and was met by her mamma and a handsome lady, her mamma's friend, who said: "Isn't she a pretty dear?" and her mother said: "That's right, Nancy darling, been for your walk?" she was, for an amazing moment, irritated with her beautiful mother.
III
Once she was conscious of this desire to ask questions she had no more peace. Although she was only five years of age, she had all the determination not "to give herself away" of a woman of forty. She was not going to show that she wanted anything in the world, and yet she would have liked—A little wistfully she looked at her nurse. But that good woman, carefully chosen by Mrs. Ross, was not the one to encourage questions. She was as shining as a new brass nail, and a great deal harder.
The nursery was as neat as a pin, with a lovely bright rocking-horse upon which Nancy had never ridden; a pink doll's-house with every modern contrivance, whose doors had never been opened; a number of expensive dolls, which had never been disrobed. Nancy approached these joys—diffidently and with caution. She rode upon the horse, opened the doll's-house, embraced the dolls, but she had no natural imagination to bestow upon them, and the horse and the dolls, hurt, perhaps, at their long neglect, received her with frigidity. Those grubby little children in the Square would, she knew, have been "there" in a moment. She began then to be frightened. The nursery, her bedroom, the dark little passage outside, were suddenly alarming. Sometimes, when she was sitting quietly in her nursery, the house was so silent that she could have screamed.
"I don't think Miss Nancy's quite well, ma'am," said the nurse.
"Oh, dear! What a nuisance," said Mrs. Ross who liked her little girl to be always well and beautiful. "I do hope she's not going to catch something."
"She doesn't take that pleasure in her clothes she did," said the nurse.
"Perhaps she wants some new ones," said her mother. "Take her to Florice, nurse." Nancy went to Florice, and beautiful new garments were invented, and once again she was squeezed, and tightened, and stretched, and pulled. But Nancy was indifferent. As they tried these clothes, and stood back, and stepped forward, and admired and criticised, she was thinking, "I wish the nursery clock didn't make such a noise."
Her little bedroom next to nurse's large one was a beautiful affair, with red roses up and down the wall-paper and in and out of the crockery and round and round the carpet. Her bed was magnificent, with lace and more roses, and there was a fine photograph of her beautiful mother in a silver frame on the mantelpiece. But all these things were of little avail when the dark came. She began to be frightened of the dark.
There came a night when, waking with a suddenness that did of itself contribute to her alarm, she was conscious that the room was intensely dark, and that every one was very far away. The house, as she listened, seemed to be holding its breath, the clock in the nursery was ticking in a frightened, startled terror, and hesitating, whimsical noises broke, now close, now distant, upon the silence. She lay there, her heart beating as it had surely never been allowed to beat before. She was simply a very small, very frightened little girl. Then, before she could cry out, she was aware that some one was standing beside her bed. She was aware of this before she looked, and then, strangely (even now she had taken no peep), she was frightened no longer.
The room, the house, were suddenly comfortable and safe places; as water slips from a pool and leaves it dry, so had terror glided from her side. She looked up then, and, although the place had been so dark that she had been unable to distinguish the furniture, she could figure to herself quite clearly her visitor's form. She not only figured it, but also quite easily and readily recognised it. All these years she had forgotten him, but now at the vision of his large comfortable presence she was back again amongst experiences and recognitions that evoked for her once more all those odd first days when, with how much discomfort and puzzled dismay, she had been dropped, so suddenly, into this distressing world. He put his arms around her and held her; he bent down and kissed her, and her small hand went up to his beard in exactly the way that it used to do. She nestled up against him.
"It's a very long time, isn't it," he said, "since I paid you a visit!"
"Yes, a long, long time."
"That's because you didn't want me. You got on so well without me."
"I didn't forget about you," she said. "But I asked mummy about you once, and she said you were all nonsense, and I wasn't to think things like that."
"Ah! your mother's forgotten altogether. She knew me once, but she hasn't wanted me for a very, very long time. She'll see me again, though, one day."
"I'm so glad you've come. You won't go away again now, will you?"
"I never go away," he said. "I'm always here. I've seen everything you've been doing, and a very dull time you've been making of it."
He talked to her and told her about some of the things the other children in the Square were doing. She was interested a little, but not very much; she still thought a great deal more about herself than about anything or anybody else.
"Do they all love you?" she said.
"Oh, no, not at all. Some of them think I'm horrid. Some of them forget me altogether, and then I never come back, until just at the end. Some of them only want me when they're in trouble. Some, very soon, think it silly to believe in me at all, and the older they grow the less they believe, generally. And when I do come they won't see me, they make up their minds not to. But I'm always there just the same; it makes no difference what they do. They can't help themselves. Only it's better for them just to remember me a little, because then it's much safer for them. You've been feeling rather lonely lately, haven't you?"
"Yes," she said. "It's stupid now all by myself. There's nobody to ask questions of."
"Well, there's somebody else in your house who's lonely."
"Is there?" She couldn't think of any one.
"Yes. Your father."
"Oh! Father——" She was uninterested.
"Yes. You see, if he isn't——" and then, at that, he was gone, she was alone and fast asleep.
In the morning when she awoke, she remembered it all quite clearly, but, of course, it had all been a dream. "Such a funny dream," she told her nurse, but she would give out no details.
"Some food she's been eating," said her nurse.
Nevertheless, when, on that afternoon, coming in from her walk, she met her dark, grubby little father in the hall, she did stay for a moment on the bottom step of the stairs to consider him.
"I've been for a walk, daddy," she said, and then, rather frightened at her boldness, tumbled up on the next step. He went forward to catch her.
"Hold up," he said, held her for a moment, and then hurried, confused and rather agitated, into his dark sanctum. These were, very nearly, the first words that they had ever, in the course of their lives together, interchanged. Munty Ross was uneasy with grown-up persons (unless he was discussing business with them), but that discomfort was nothing to the uneasiness that he felt with children. Little girls (who certainly looked at him as though he were an ogre) frightened him quite horribly; moreover, Mrs. Munty had, for a great number of years, pursued a policy with regard to her husband that was not calculated to make him bright and easy in any society. "Poor old Munty," she would say to her friends, "it's not all his fault——" It was, as a fact, very largely hers. He had never been an eloquent man, but her playful derision of his uncouthness slew any little seeds of polite conversation that might, under happier conditions, have grown into brilliant blossom. It had been understood from the very beginning that Nancy was not of her father's world. He would have been scarcely aware that he had a daughter had he not, at certain periods, paid bills for her clothes.
"What's a child want with all this?" he had ventured once to say.
"Hardly your business, my dear," his wife had told him. "The child's clothes are marvellously cheap considering. I don't know how Florice does it for the money." He resented nothing—it was not his way—but he did feel, deep down in his heart, that the child was over-dressed, that it must be bad for any little girl to be praised in the way that his daughter was praised, that "the kid will grow up with the most tremendous ideas."
He resented it, perhaps a little, that his young daughter had so easily accustomed herself to the thought that she had no father. "She might just want to see me occasionally. But I'd only frighten her, I suppose, if she did."
Munty Ross had very little of the sentimentalist about him; he was completely cynical about the value of the human heart, and believed in the worth and goodness of no one at all. He had, for a brief wild moment, been in love with his wife, but she had taken care to kill that, "the earlier the better." "My dear," she would say to a chosen friend, "what Munty's like when he's romantic!" She never, after the first month of their married life together, caught a glimpse of that side of him.
Now, however, he did permit his mind to linger over that vision of his little daughter tumbling on the stairs. He wondered what had made her do it. He was astonished at the difference that it made to him.
To Nancy also it had made a great difference. She wished that she had stayed there on the stairs a little longer to hold a more important conversation. She had thought of her father as "all horrid"—now his very contrast to her little world pleased and interested her. It may also be that, although she was young, she had even now a picture in her mind of her father's loneliness. She may have seen into her mother's attitude with an acuteness much older than her actual years.
She thought now continually about her father. She made little plans to meet him, but these meetings were not, as a rule, successful, because so often he was down in the city. She would wait at the end of her afternoon walk on the stairs.
"Come along, Miss Nancy, do. What are you hanging about there for?"
"Nothing."
"You'll be disturbing your mother."
"Just a minute."
She peered anxiously, her little head almost held by the railings of the banisters; she gazed down into black, mysterious depths wherein her father might be hidden. She was driven to all this partly by some real affection that had hitherto found no outlet, partly by a desire for adventure, but partly, also, by some force that was behind her and quite recognised by her. It was as though she said: "If I'm nice to my father and make friends with him, then you must promise that I shan't be frightened in the middle of the night, that the clock won't tick too loudly, that the blind won't flap, that it won't all be too dark and dreadful." She knew that she had made this compact.
Then she had several little encounters with her father. She met him one day on the doorstep. He had come up whilst she was standing there.
"Had a good walk?" he said nervously. She looked at him and laughed. Then he went hurriedly indoors.
On the second occasion she had come down to be shown off at a luncheon party. She had been praised and petted, and then, in the hall, had run into her father's arms. He was in his top-hat, going down to his old city, looking, the nurse thought, "just like a monkey." But Nancy stayed, holding on to the leg of his trousers. Suddenly he bent down and whispered:
"Were they nice to you in there?"
"Yes. Why weren't you there?"
"I was. I left. Got to go and work."
"What sort of work?"
"Making money for your clothes."
"Take me too."
"Would you like to come?"
"Yes. Take me."
He bent down and kissed her, but, suddenly hearing the voices of the luncheon-party, they separated like conspirators. He crept out of the house.
After that there was no question of their alliance. The sort of affection that most children feel for old, ugly, and battered dolls, Nancy now felt for her father, and the warmth of this affection melted her dried, stubborn little soul, caught her up into visions, wonders, sympathies that had seemed surely denied to her for ever.
"Now sit still, Miss Nancy, while I do up the back."
"Oh, silly old clothes!" said Nancy.
Then one day she declared,
"I want to be dirty like those children in the garden."
"And a nice state your mother would be in!" cried the amazed nurse.
"Father wouldn't," Nancy thought. "Father wouldn't mind."
There came at last the wonderful day when her father penetrated into the nursery. He arrived furtively, very much, it appeared, ashamed of himself and exceedingly shy of the nurse. He did not remain very long. He said very little; a funny picture he had made with his blue face, his black shiny hair, his fat little legs, and his anxious, rather stupid eyes. He sat rather awkwardly in a chair, with Nancy on his knee; he wrung his hair for things to say.
The nurse left them for a moment alone together, and then Nancy whispered:
"Daddy, let's go into the gardens together, you and me; just us—no silly old nurse—one mornin'." (She found the little "g" still a difficulty.)
"Would you like that?" he whispered back. "I don't know I'd be much good in a garden."
"Oh, you'll be all right," she asserted with confidence. "I want to dig."
She'd made up her mind then to that. As Hannibal determined to cross the Alps, as Napoleon set his feet towards Moscow, so did Nancy Ross resolve that she would, in the company of her father, dig in the gardens. She stroked her father's hand, rubbed her head upon his sleeve; exactly as she would have caressed, had she been another little girl, the damaged features of her old rag doll. She was beginning, however, for the first time in her life, to love some one other than herself.
He came, then, quite often to the nursery. He would slip in, stay a moment or two, and slip out again. He brought her presents and sweets which made her ill. And always in the presence of Mrs. Munty they appeared as strangers.
The day came when Nancy achieved her desire—they had their great adventure.
IV
A fine summer morning came, and with it, in a bowler hat, at the nursery door, the hour being about eleven, Mr. Munty Boss.
"I'll take Nancy this morning, nurse," he said, with a strange, choking little "cluck" in his throat. Now, the nurse, although, as I've said, of a shining and superficial appearance, was no fool. She had watched the development of the intrigue; her attitude to the master of the house was composed of pity, patronage, and a rather motherly interest. She did not see how her mistress could avoid her attitude: it was precisely the attitude that she would herself have adopted in that position, but, nevertheless, she was sorry for the man. "So out of it as he is!" Her maternal feelings were uppermost now. "It's nice of the child," she thought, "and him so ugly."
"Of course, sir," she said.
"We shall be back in about an hour." He attempted an easy indifference, was conscious that he failed, and blushed.
He was aware that his wife was out.
He carried off his prize.
The gardens were very full on this lovely summer morning, but Nancy, without any embarrassment or confusion, took charge of the proceedings.
"Where are we going?" he said, gazing rather helplessly about him, feeling extremely shy. There were so many bold children—so many bolder nurses; even the birds on the trees seemed to deride him, and a stumpy fox-terrier puppy stood with its four legs planted wide barking at him.
"Over here," she said without a moment's hesitation, and she dragged him along. She halted at last in a corner of the gardens where was a large, overhanging chestnut and a wooden seat. Here the shouts and cries of the children came more dimly, the splashing of the fountain could be heard like a melodious refrain with a fascinating note of hesitation in it, and the deep green leaves of the tree made a cool, thick covering. "Very nice," he said, and sat down on the seat, tilting his hat back and feeling very happy indeed.
Nancy also was very happy. There, in front of her, was the delightful pile of earth and sand untouched, it seemed. In an instant, regardless of her frock, she was down upon her knees.
"I ought to have a spade," she said.
"You'll make yourself dreadfully dirty, Nancy. Your beautiful frock——" But he had nevertheless the feeling that, after all, he had paid for it, and if he hadn't the right to see it ruined, who had?
"Oh!" she murmured with the ecstasy of one who has abandoned herself, freely and with a glad heart, to all the vices. She dug her hands into the mire, she scattered it about her, she scooped and delved and excavated. It was her intention to build something in the nature of a high, high hill. She patted the surface of the sand, and behold! it was instantly a beautiful shape, very smooth and shining.
It was hot, her hat fell back, her knees were thick with the good brown earth—that once lovely creation of Florice was stained and black.
She then began softly, partly to herself, partly to her father, and partly to that other Friend who had helped her to these splendours, a song of joy and happiness. To the ordinary observer, it might have seemed merely a discordant noise proceeding from a little girl engaged in the making of mud pies. It was, in reality, as the chestnut tree, the birds, the fountain, the flowers, the various small children, even the very earth she played with, understood, a fine offering—thanksgiving and triumphal pæan to the God of Heaven, of the earth, and of the waters that were under the earth.
Munty himself caught the refrain. He was recalled to a day when mud pies had been to him also things of surpassing joy. There was a day when, a naked and very ugly little boy, he had danced beside a mountain burn.
He looked upon his daughter and his daughter looked upon him; they were friends for ever and ever. She rose; her fingers were so sticky with mud that they stood apart; down her right cheek ran a fine black smear; her knees were caked.
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed. She flung herself upon him and kissed him; down his cheek also now a fine smear marked its way.
He looked at his watch—one o'clock. "Good heavens!" he said again. "I say, old girl, we'll have to be going. Mother's got a party." He tried ineffectually to cleanse his daughter's face.
"We'll come back," she cried, looking down triumphantly upon her handiwork.
"We'll have to smuggle you up into the nursery somehow." But he added, "Yes, we'll come again."
V
They hurried home. Very furtively Munty Boss fitted his key into the Yale lock of his fine door. They slipped into the hall. There before them were Mrs. Ross and two of her most splendid friends. Very fine was Munty's wife in a tight-clinging frock of light blue, and wearing upon her head a hat like a waste-paper basket with a blue handle at the back of it; very fine were her two lady friends, clothed also in the tightest of garments, shining and lovely and precious.
"Good God, Munty—and the child!"
It was a terrible moment. Quite unconscious was Munty of the mud that stained his cheek, perfectly tranquil his daughter as she gazed with glowing happiness about her. A terrible moment for Mrs. Ross, an unforgettable one for her friends; nor were they likely to keep the humour of it entirely to themselves.
"Down in a minute. Going up to clean." Smiling, he passed his wife. On the bottom step Nancy chanted:
"We've had the most lovely mornin', daddy and I. We've been diggin'. We're goin' to dig again. Aren't I dirty, mummy?"
Round the corner of the stairs in the shadow Nancy kissed her father again.
"I'm never goin' to be clean any more," she announced. And you may fancy, if you please, that somewhere in the shadows of the house some one heard those words and chuckled with delighted pleasure.
CHAPTER VI
'Enery
I
Mrs. Slater was caretaker at No. 21 March. Square. Old Lady Cathcart lived with her middle-aged daughter at No. 21, and, during half the year, they were down at their place in Essex; during half the year, then, Mrs. Slater lived in the basement of No. 21 with her son Henry, aged six.
Mrs. Slater was a widow; upon a certain afternoon, two and a half years ago, she had paused in her ironing and listened. "Something," she told her friends afterwards, "gave her a start—she couldn't say what nor how." Her ironing stayed, for that afternoon at least, where it was, because her husband, with his head in a pulp and his legs bent underneath him, was brought in on a stretcher, attended by two policemen. He had fallen from a piece of scaffolding into Piccadilly Circus, and was unable to afford any further assistance to the improvements demanded by the Pavilion Music Hall. Mrs. Slater, a stout, amiable woman, who had never been one to worry; Henry Slater, Senior, had been a bad husband, "what with women and the drink"—she had no intention of lamenting him now that he was dead; she had done for ever with men, and devoted the whole of her time and energy to providing bread and butter for herself and her son.
She had been Lady Cathcart's caretaker for a year and a half, and had given every satisfaction. When the old lady came up to London Mrs. Slater went down to Essex and defended the country place from suffragettes and burglars. "I shouldn't care for it," said a lady friend, "all alone in the country with no cheerful noises nor human beings."
"Doesn't frighten me, I give you my word, Mrs. East," said Mrs. Slater; "not that I don't prefer the town, mind you."
It was, on the whole, a pleasant life, that carried with it a certain dignity. Nobody who had seen old Lady Cathcart drive in her open carriage, with her black bonnet, her coachman, and her fine, straight back, could deny that she was one of Our Oldest and Best—none of your mushroom families come from Lord knows where—it was a position of trust, and as such Mrs. Slater considered it. For the rest she loved her son Henry with more than a mother's love; he was as unlike his poor father, bless him, as any child could be. Henry, although you would never think it to look at him, was not quite like other children; he had been, from his birth, a "little queer, bless his heart," and Mrs. Slater attributed this to the fact that three weeks before the boy's birth, Horny Slater, Senior, had, in a fine frenzy of inebriation, hit her over the head with a chair. "Dead drunk, 'e was, and never a thought to the child coming, ''Enery,' I said to him, 'it's the child you're hitting as well as me'; but 'e was too far gone, poor soul, to take a thought."
Henry was a fine, robust child, with rosy cheeks and a sturdy, thick-set body. He had large blue eyes and a happy, pleasant smile, but, although he was six years of age, he could hardly talk at all, and liked to spend the days twirling pieces of string round and round or looking into the fire. His eyes were unlike the eyes of other children, and in their blue depths there lurked strange apprehensions, strange anticipations, strange remembrances. He had never, from the day of his birth, been known to cry. When he was frightened or distressed the colour would pass slowly from his cheeks, and strange little gasping breaths would come from him; his body would stiffen and his hands clench. If he was angry the colour in his face would darken and his eyes half close, and it was then that he did, indeed, seem in the possession of some disastrous thraldom—but he was angry very seldom, and only with certain people; for the most part he was a happy child, "as quiet as a mouse." He was unusual, too, in that he was a very cleanly child, and loved to be washed, and took the greatest care of his clothes. He was very affectionate, fond of almost every one, and passionately devoted to his mother.
Mrs. Slater was a woman with very little imagination. She never speculated on "how different things would be if they were different," nor did she sigh after riches, nor possessions, nor any of the goods Fate bestows upon her favourites. She would, most certainly, have been less fond of Henry had he been more like other children, and his dependence upon her gave her something of the feeling that very rich ladies have for very small dogs. She was too, in a way, proud. "Never been able to talk, nor never will, they tell me, the lamb," she would assure her friends, "but as gentle and as quiet!"
She would sit, sometimes, in the evening before the fire and think of the old noisy, tiresome days when Henry, Senior, would beat her black and blue, and would feel that her life had indeed fallen into pleasant places.
There was nothing whatever in the house, all silent about her and filled with shrouded furniture, that could alarm her. "Ghosts!" she would cry. "You show me one, that's all. I'll give you ghosts!"
Her digestion was excellent, her sleep undisturbed by conscience or creditors. She was a happy woman.
Henry loved March Square. There was a window in an upstairs passage from behind whose glass he could gaze at the passing world. The Passing World!... the shrouded house behind him. One was as alive, as bustling, as demonstrative to him as the other, but between the two there was, for him, no communication. His attitude to the Square and the people in it was that he knew more about them than anyone else did; his attitude to the House, that he knew nothing at all compared with what "They" knew. In the Square he could see through the lot of them, so superficial were they all; in the House he could only wait, with fingers on lip, for the next revelation that they might vouchsafe to him.
Doors were, for the most part, locked, yet there were many days when fires were lit because the house was an old one, and damp Lady Cathcart had a horror of.
Always for young Henry the house wore its buried and abandoned air. He was never to see it when the human beings in it would count more than its furniture, and the human life in it more than the house itself. He had come, a year and a half ago, into the very place that his dreams had, from the beginning, built for him. Those large, high rooms with the shining floors, the hooded furniture, the windows gaping without their curtains, the shadows and broad squares of light, the little whispers and rattles that doors and cupboards gave, the swirl of the wind as it sprang released from corners and crevices, the lisp of some whisper, "I'm coming! I'm coming! I'm coming!" that, nevertheless, again and again defeated expectation. How could he but enjoy the fine field of affection that these provided for him?
His mother watched him with maternal pride. "He's that contented!" she would say. "Any other child would plague your life away, but 'Enery——"
It was part of Henry's unusual mind that he wondered at nothing. He remained in constant expectation, but whatever was to come to him it would not bring surprise with it. He was in a world where anything might happen. In all the house his favourite room was the high, thin drawing-room with an old gold mirror at one end of it and a piano muffled in brown holland. The mirror caught the piano with its peaked inquiring shape, that, in its inflection, looked so much more tremendous and ominous than it did in plain reality. Through the mirror the piano looked as though it might do anything, and to Henry, who knew nothing about pianos, it was responsible for almost everything that occurred in the house.
The windows of the room gave a fine display of the gardens, the children, the carriages, and the distant houses, but it was when the Square was empty that Henry liked best to gaze down into it, because then the empty house and the empty square prepared themselves together for some tremendous occurrence. Whenever such an interval of silence struck across the noise and traffic of the day, it seemed that all the world screwed itself up for the next event. "One—two—three." But the crisis never came. The noise returned again, people laughed and shouted, bells rang and motors screamed. Nevertheless, one day something would surely happen.
The house was full of company, and the boy would, sometimes, have yielded to the Fear that was never far away, had it not been for some one whom he had known from the very beginning of everything, some one who was as real as his mother, some one who was more powerful than anything or any one in the house, and kinder, far, far kinder.
Often when Mrs. Slater would wonder of what her son was thinking as he sat twisting string round and round in front of the fire, he would be aware of his Friend in the shadow of the light, watching gravely, in the cheerful room, having beneath his hands all the powers, good and evil, of the house. Just as Henry pictured quite clearly to himself other occupants of the house—some one with taloned claws behind the piano, another with black-hooded eyes and a peaked cap in the shadows of an upstairs passage, another brown, shrivelled and naked, who dwelt in a cupboard in one of the empty bedrooms so, too, he could see his Friend, vast and shadowy, with a flowing beard and eyes that were kind and shining.
Often he had felt the pressure of his hand, had heard his reassuring whisper in his ears, had known the touch of his lips upon his forehead. No harm could come to him whilst his Friend was in the house—and his Friend was always there.
He went always with his mother into the streets when she did her shopping or simply took the air. It was natural that on these occasions, he should be more frightened than during his hours in the house. In the first place his Friend did not accompany him on these out-of-door excursions, and his mother was not nearly so strong a protector as his Friend.
Then he was disturbed by the people who pressed and pushed about him—he had a sense that they were all like birds with flapping wings and strange cries, rushing down upon him—the colours and confusion of the shops bewildered him. There was too much here for him properly to understand; he had enough to do with the piano, the mirror, the shadowed passages, the staring windows.
But in the Square he was happy again. Mrs. Slater never ventured into the gardens; they were for her superiors, and she complacently accepted a world in which things were so ordered as the only world possible. But there was plenty of life outside the gardens.
There were, on the different days of the week, the various musicians, and Henry was friendly with them all. He delighted in music; as he stood there, listening to the barrel-organ, the ideas, pictures, dreams, flew like flocks of beautiful birds through his brain, fleet, and always just beyond his reach, so that he could catch nothing, but would nod his head and would hope that the tune would be repeated, because next time he might, perhaps, be more fortunate.
The Major, who played the harp on Saturdays, was a friend of Mrs. Slater. "Nice little feller, that of yours, mum," he would say. "'Ad one meself once."
"Indeed?"
"Yes, sure enough.... Nice day.... Would you believe it, this is the only London square left for us to play in?... 'Tis, indeed. Cruel shame, I call it; life's 'ard.... You're right, mum, it is. Well, good-day."
Mrs. Slater looked after him affectionately. "Pore feller; and yet I dare say he makes a pretty hit of it if all was known."
Henry sighed. The birds were flown again. He was left with the blue-flecked sky and the grey houses that stood around the gardens like beasts about a water-pool. The sun (a red disc) peered over their shoulders. He went, with his mother within doors. Instantly on his entrance the house began to rustle and whisper.
II
Mrs. Slater, although an amiable and kind-hearted human being who believed with confident superstition in a God of other people's making, did not, on the whole, welcome her lady friends with much cordiality. It was not, as she often explained, as though she had her own house into which to ask them. Her motto was, "Friendly with All, Familiar with None," and to this she very faithfully held. But in her heart there was reason enough for this caution; there had been days—yes, and nights too—when, during her lamented husband's lifetime, she had "taken a drop," taken it, obviously enough, as a comfort, and a solace when things were going very hard with her, and "'Enery preferrin' 'er to be jolly 'erself to keep 'im company." She had protested, but Fate and Henry had been too strong for her. "She had fallen into the habit!" Then, when No. 21 had come under her care, she had put it all sternly behind her, but one did not know how weak one might be, and a kindly friend might with her persuasion——
Therefore did Mrs. Slater avoid her kindly friends. There was, however, one friend who was not so readily to be avoided; that was Mrs. Carter. Mrs. Carter also was a widow, or rather, to speak the direct truth, had discovered one morning, twenty years ago, that Mr. Carter "was gone"; he had never returned. Those who knew Mrs. Carter intimately said that, on the whole, "things bein' as they was," his departure was not entirely to be wondered at. Mrs. Carter had a temper of her own, and nothing inflamed it so much as a drop of whisky, and there was nothing in the world she liked so much as "a drop."
To meet her casually, you would judge her nothing less than the most amiable of womankind—a large, stout, jolly woman, with a face like a rose, and a quantity of black hair. At her best, in her fine Sunday clothes, she was a superb figure, and wore round her neck a rope of sham pearls that would have done credit to a sham countess. During the week, however, she slipped, on occasion, into "déshabille," and then she appeared not quite so attractive. No one knew the exact nature of her profession. She did a bit of "char"; she had at one time a little sweetshop, where she sold sweets, the Police Budget, and—although this was revealed only to her best friends—indecent photographs. It may be that the police discovered some of the sources of her income; at any rate the sweetshop was suddenly, one morning, abandoned. Her movements in everything were sudden; it was quite suddenly that she took a fancy to Mrs. Slater. She met her at a friend's, and at once, so she told Mrs. Slater, "I liked yer, just as though I'd met yer before. But I'm like that. Sudden or not at all is my way, and not a bad way either!"
Mrs. Slater could not be said to be everything that was affectionate in return. She distrusted Mrs. Carter, disliked her brilliant colouring and her fluent experiences, felt shy before her rollicking suggestiveness, and timid at her innuendoes. For a considerable time she held her defences against the insidious attack. Then there came a day when Mrs. Carter burst into reluctant but passionate tears, asserting that Life and Mr. Carter had been, from the beginning, against her; that she had committed, indeed, acts of folly in the past, but only when driven desperately against a wall; that she bore no grudge against any one alive, but loved all humanity; that she was going to do her best to be a better woman, but couldn't really hope to arrive at any satisfactory improvement without Mrs. Slater's assistance; that Mrs. Slater, indeed, had shown her a New Way, a New Light, a New Path.
Mrs. Slater, humble woman, had no illusions as to her own importance in the scheme of things; nothing touched her so surely as an appeal to her strength of character. She received Mrs. Carter with open arms, suggested that they should read the Bible together on Sunday mornings, and go, side by side, to St. Matthew's on Sunday evenings. There was nothing like a study of the "Holy Word" for "defeating the bottle," and there was nothing like "defeating the bottle" for getting back one's strength and firmness of character.
It was along these lines that Mrs. Slater proposed to conduct Mrs. Carter.
Now unfortunately Henry took an instant and truly savage dislike to his mother's new friend. He had been always, of course, "odd" in his feelings about people, but never was he "odder" than he was with Mrs. Carter. "Little lamb," she said, when she saw him for the first time. "I envy you that child, Mrs. Slater, I do indeed. Backwards 'e may be, but 'is being dependent, as you may say, touches the 'eart. Little lamb!"
She tried to embrace him; she offered him sweets. He shuddered at her approach, and his face was instantly grey, like a pool the moment after the sun's setting. Had he been himself able to put into words his sensations, he would have said that the sight of Mrs. Carter assured him, quite definitely, that something horrible would soon occur.
The house upon whose atmosphere he so depended instantly darkened; his Friend was gone, not because he was no longer able to see him (his consciousness of him did not depend at all upon any visual assurance), but because there was now, Henry was perfectly assured, no chance whatever of his suddenly appearing. And, on the other hand, those Others—the one with the taloned claws behind the piano, the one with the black-hooded eyes—were stronger, more threatening, more dominating. But, beyond her influence on the house, Mrs. Carter, in her own physical and actual presence, tortured Henry. When she was in the room, Henry suffered agony. He would creep away were he allowed, and, if that were not possible, then he would retreat into the most distant corner and watch. If he were in the room his eyes never left Mrs. Carter for a moment, and it was this brooding gaze more than his disapproval that irritated her. "You never can tell with poor little dears when they're 'queer' what fancies they'll take. Why, he quite seems to dislike me, Mrs. Slater!"
Mrs. Slater could venture no denial; indeed, Henry's attitude aroused once again in her mind her earlier suspicions. She had all the reverence of her class for her son's "oddness." He knew more than ordinary mortal folk, and could see farther; he saw beyond Mrs. Carter's red cheeks and shining black hair, and the fact that he was, as a rule, tractable to cheerful kindness, made his rejection the more remarkable. But it might, nevertheless, be that the black things in Mrs. Carter's past were the marks impressed upon Henry's sensitive intelligence; and that he had not, as yet, perceived the new Mrs. Carter growing in grace now day by day.
"'E'll get over 'is fancy, bless 'is 'eart." Mrs. Slater pursued then her work of redemption.
III
On a certain evening in November, Mrs. Carter, coming in to see her friend, invited sympathy for a very bad cold.
"Drippin' and runnin' at the nose I've been all day, my dear. Awake all night I was with it, and 'tain't often that I've one, but when I do it's somethin' cruel." It seemed to be better this evening, Mrs. Slater thought, but when she congratulated her friend on this, Mrs. Carter, shaking her head, remarked that it had left the nose and travelled into the throat and ears. "Once it's earache, and I'm done," she said. Horrible pictures she drew of this earache, and it presently became clear that Mrs. Carter was in perfect terror of a night made sleepless with pain. Once, it seemed, had Mrs. Carter tried to commit suicide by hanging herself to a nail in a door, so maddening had the torture been. Luckily (Mrs. Carter thanked Heaven) the nail had been dragged from the door by her weight—"not that I was anything very 'eavy, you understand." Finally, it appeared that only one thing in the world could be relied upon to stay the fiend.
Mrs. Carter produced from her pocket a bottle of whisky.
Upon that it followed that, since her reformation, Mrs. Carter had come to loathe the very smell of whisky, and as for the taste of it! But rather than be driven by flaming agony down the long stony passages of a sleepless night—anything.
It was here, of course, that Mrs. Slater should have protested, but, in her heart, she was afraid of her friend, and afraid of herself. Mrs. Carter's company had, of late, been pleasant to her. She had been strengthened in her own resolves towards a fine life by the sight of Mrs. Carter's struggle in that direction, and that good woman's genial amiability (when it was so obvious from her appearance that she could be far otherwise) flattered Mrs. Slater's sense of power. No, she could not now bear to let Mrs. Carter go.
She said, therefore, nothing to her friend about the whisky, and on that evening Mrs. Carter did take the "veriest sip." But the cold continued—it continued in a marvellous and terrible manner. It seemed "to 'ave taken right 'old of 'er system."
After a few evenings it was part of the ceremonies that the bottle should be produced; the kettle was boiling happily on the fire, there was lemon, there was a lump of sugar.... On a certain wet and depressing evening Mrs. Slater herself had a glass "just to see that she didn't get a cold like Mrs. Carter's."
IV
Henry's bed-time was somewhere between the hours of eight and nine, but his mother did not care to leave Mrs. Carter (dear friend, though she was) quite alone downstairs with the bottom half of the house unguarded (although, of course, the doors were locked), therefore, Mrs. Carter came upstairs with her friend to see the little fellow put to bed; "and a hangel he looks, if ever I see one," declared the lady enthusiastically.
When the two were gone and the house was still, Henry would sit up in bed and listen; then, moving quietly, he would creep out and listen again.
There, in the passage, it seemed to him that he could hear the whole house talking—first one sound and then another would come, the wheeze of some straining floor, the creak of some whispering board, the shudder of a door. "Look out! Look out! Look out!" and then, above that murmur, some louder voice: "Watch! there's danger in the place!" Then, shivering with cold and his sense of evil, he would creep down into a lower passage and stand listening again; now the voices of the house were deafening, rising on every side of him, like the running of little streams suddenly heard on the turning of the corner of a hill. The dim light shrouded with fantasy the walls; along the wide passage and cabinets, high china jars, the hollow scoop of the window at the far-distant end, were all alive and moving. And, in strange contradiction to the moving voices within the house, came the blurred echo of the London life, whirring, buzzing, like a cloud of gnats at the window-pane. "Look out! Look out! Look out!" the house cried, and Henry, with chattering teeth, was on guard.
There came an evening when standing thus, shivering in his little shirt, he was aware that the terror, so long anticipated, was upon him. It seemed to him, on this evening, that the house was suddenly still; it was as though all the sounds, as of running water, that passed up and down the rooms and passages, were, in a flashing second, frozen. The house was holding its breath.
He had to wait for a breathless, agonising interval before he heard the next sound, very faint and stifled breathing coming up to him out of the darkness in little uncertain gusts. He heard the breathings pause, then recommence again in quicker and louder succession. Henry, stirred simply, perhaps, by the terror of his anticipation, moved back into the darker shadows in the nook of the cabinet, and stayed there with his shirt pressed against his little trembling knees.
Then followed, after a long time, a half yellow circle of light that touched the top steps of the stairs and a square of the wall; behind the light was the stealthy figure of Mrs. Carter. She stood there for a moment, one hand with a candle raised, the other pressed against her breast; from one finger of this hand a bunch of heavy keys dangled. She stood there, with her wide, staring eyes, like glass in the candle-light, staring about her, her red cheeks rising and falling with her agitation, her body seeming enormous, her shadow on the wall huge in the flickering light. At the sight of his enemy Henry's terror was so frantic that his hands beat with little spasmodic movements against the wall.
He did not see Mrs. Carter at all, but he saw rather the movement through the air and darkness of the house of something that would bring down upon him the full naked force of the Terror that he had all his life anticipated. He had always known that the awful hour would arrive when the Terror would grip him; again and again he had seen its eyes, felt its breath, heard its movements, and these movements had been forewarnings of some future day. That day had arrived.
There was only one thing that he could do; his Friend alone in all the world could help him. With his soul dizzy and faint from fear, he prayed for his Friend; had he been less frightened he would have screamed aloud for him to come and help him.
The boy's breath came hot into his throat and stuck there, and his heart beat like a high, unresting hammer.
Mrs. Carter, with the candle raised to throw light in front of her, moved forward very cautiously and softly. She passed down the passage, and then paused very near to the boy. She looked at the keys, and stole like some heavy, stealthy animal to the door of the long drawing-room. He watched her as she tried one key after another, making little dissatisfied noises as they refused to fit; then at last one turned the lock and she pushed back the door.
It was certainly impossible for him, in the dim world of his mind, to realise what it was that she intended to do, but he knew, through some strange channel of knowledge, that his mother was concerned in this, and that something more than the immediate peril of himself was involved. He had also, lost in the dim mazes of his mind, a consciousness that there were treasures in the house, and that his mother was placed there to guard them, and even that he himself shared her duty.
It did not come to him that Mrs. Carter was in pursuit of these treasures, but he did realise that her presence there amongst them brought peril to his mother. Moved then by some desperate urgency which had at its heart his sense that to be left alone in the black passage was worse than the actual lighted vision of his Terror, he crept with trembling knees across the passage and through the door.