In the Cage

CHAPTER XXII

Eighteen days elapsed, and she had begun to think it probable she should never see him again.  He too then understood now: he had made out that she had secrets and reasons and impediments, that even a poor girl at the P.O. might have her complications.  With the charm she had cast on him lightened by distance he had suffered a final delicacy to speak to him, had made up his mind that it would be only decent to let her alone.  Never so much as during these latter days had she felt the precariousness of their relation—the happy beautiful untroubled original one, if it could only have been restored—in which the public servant and the casual public only were concerned.  It hung at the best by the merest silken thread, which was at the mercy of any accident and might snap at any minute.  She arrived by the end of the fortnight at the highest sense of actual fitness, never doubting that her decision was now complete.  She would just give him a few days more to come back to her on a proper impersonal basis—for even to an embarrassing representative of the casual public a public servant with a conscience did owe something—and then would signify to Mr. Mudge that she was ready for the little home.  It had been visited, in the further talk she had had with him at Bournemouth, from garret to cellar, and they had especially lingered, with their respectively darkened brows, before the niche into which it was to be broached to her mother that she must find means to fit.

He had put it to her more definitely than before that his calculations had allowed for that dingy presence, and he had thereby marked the greatest impression he had ever made on her.  It was a stroke superior even again to his handling of the drunken soldier.  What she considered that in the face of it she hung on at Cocker’s for was something she could only have described as the common fairness of a last word.  Her actual last word had been, till it should be superseded, that she wouldn’t forsake her other friend, and it stuck to her through thick and thin that she was still at her post and on her honour.  This other friend had shown so much beauty of conduct already that he would surely after all just re-appear long enough to relieve her, to give her something she could take away.  She saw it, caught it, at times, his parting present; and there were moments when she felt herself sitting like a beggar with a hand held out to almsgiver who only fumbled.  She hadn’t taken the sovereigns, but she would take the penny.  She heard, in imagination, on the counter, the ring of the copper.  “Don’t put yourself out any longer,” he would say, “for so bad a case.  You’ve done all there is to be done.  I thank and acquit and release you.  Our lives take us.  I don’t know much—though I’ve really been interested—about yours, but I suppose you’ve got one.  Mine at any rate will take me—and where it will.  Heigh-ho!  Good-bye.”  And then once more, for the sweetest faintest flower of all: “Only, I say—see here!”  She had framed the whole picture with a squareness that included also the image of how again she would decline to “see there,” decline, as she might say, to see anywhere, see anything.  Yet it befell that just in the fury of this escape she saw more than ever.

He came back one night with a rush, near the moment of their closing, and showed her a face so different and new, so upset and anxious, that almost anything seemed to look out of it but clear recognition.  He poked in a telegram very much as if the simple sense of pressure, the distress of extreme haste, had blurred the remembrance of where in particular he was.  But as she met his eyes a light came; it broke indeed on the spot into a positive conscious glare.  That made up for everything, since it was an instant proclamation of the celebrated “danger”; it seemed to pour things out in a flood.  “Oh yes, here it is—it’s upon me at last!  Forget, for God’s sake, my having worried or bored you, and just help me, just save me, by getting this off without the loss of a second!”  Something grave had clearly occurred, a crisis declared itself.  She recognised immediately the person to whom the telegram was addressed—the Miss Dolman of Parade Lodge to whom Lady Bradeen had wired, at Dover, on the last occasion, and whom she had then, with her recollection of previous arrangements, fitted into a particular setting.  Miss Dolman had figured before and not figured since, but she was now the subject of an imperative appeal.  “Absolutely necessary to see you.  Take last train Victoria if you can catch it.  If not, earliest morning, and answer me direct either way.”

“Reply paid?” said the girl.  Mr. Buckton had just departed and the counter-clerk was at the sounder.  There was no other representative of the public, and she had never yet, as it seemed to her, not even in the street or in the Park, been so alone with him.

“Oh yes, reply paid, and as sharp as possible, please.”

She affixed the stamps in a flash.  “She’ll catch the train!” she then declared to him breathlessly, as if she could absolutely guarantee it.

“I don’t know—I hope so.  It’s awfully important.  So kind of you.  Awfully sharp, please.”  It was wonderfully innocent now, his oblivion of all but his danger.  Anything else that had ever passed between them was utterly out of it.  Well, she had wanted him to be impersonal!

There was less of the same need therefore, happily, for herself; yet she only took time, before she flew to the sounder, to gasp at him: “You‘re in trouble?”

“Horrid, horrid—there’s a row!”  But they parted, on it, in the next breath; and as she dashed at the sounder, almost pushing, in her violence, the counter-clerk off the stool, she caught the bang with which, at Cocker’s door, in his further precipitation, he closed the apron of the cab into which he had leaped.  As he rebounded to some other precaution suggested by his alarm, his appeal to Miss Dolman flashed straight away.

But she had not, on the morrow, been in the place five minutes before he was with her again, still more discomposed and quite, now, as she said to herself, like a frightened child coming to its mother.  Her companions were there, and she felt it to be remarkable how, in the presence of his agitation, his mere scared exposed nature, she suddenly ceased to mind.  It came to her as it had never come to her before that with absolute directness and assurance they might carry almost anything off.  He had nothing to send—she was sure he had been wiring all over—and yet his business was evidently huge.  There was nothing but that in his eyes—not a glimmer of reference or memory.  He was almost haggard with anxiety and had clearly not slept a wink.  Her pity for him would have given her any courage, and she seemed to know at last why she had been such a fool.  “She didn’t come?” she panted.

“Oh yes, she came; but there has been some mistake.  We want a telegram.”

“A telegram?”

“One that was sent from here ever so long ago.  There was something in it that has to be recovered.  Something very, very important, please—we want it immediately.”

He really spoke to her as if she had been some strange young woman at Knightsbridge or Paddington; but it had no other effect on her than to give her the measure of his tremendous flurry.  Then it was that, above all, she felt how much she had missed in the gaps and blanks and absent answers—how much she had had to dispense with: it was now black darkness save for this little wild red flare.  So much as that she saw, so much her mind dealt with.  One of the lovers was quaking somewhere out of town, and the other was quaking just where he stood.  This was vivid enough, and after an instant she knew it was all she wanted.  She wanted no detail, no fact—she wanted no nearer vision of discovery or shame.  “When was your telegram?  Do you mean you sent it from here?”  She tried to do the young woman at Knightsbridge.

“Oh yes, from here—several weeks ago.  Five, six, seven”—he was confused and impatient—“don’t you remember?”

“Remember?” she could scarcely keep out of her face, at the word, the strangest of smiles.

But the way he didn’t catch what it meant was perhaps even stranger still.  “I mean, don’t you keep the old ones?”

“For a certain time.”

“But how long?”

She thought; she must do the young woman, and she knew exactly what the young woman would say and, still more, wouldn’t.  “Can you give me the date?”

“Oh God, no!  It was some time or other in August—toward the end.  It was to the same address as the one I gave you last night.”

“Oh!” said the girl, knowing at this the deepest thrill she had ever felt.  It came to her there, with her eyes on his face, that she held the whole thing in her hand, held it as she held her pencil, which might have broken at that instant in her tightened grip.  This made her feel like the very fountain of fate, but the emotion was such a flood that she had to press it back with all her force.  That was positively the reason, again, of her flute-like Paddington tone.  “You can’t give us anything a little nearer?”  Her “little” and her “us” came straight from Paddington.  These things were no false note for him—his difficulty absorbed them all.  The eyes with which he pressed her, and in the depths of which she read terror and rage and literal tears, were just the same he would have shown any other prim person.

“I don’t know the date.  I only know the thing went from here, and just about the time I speak of.  It wasn’t delivered, you see.  We’ve got to recover it.”

CHAPTER XXIII

She was as struck with the beauty of his plural pronoun as she had judged he might be with that of her own; but she knew now so well what she was about that she could almost play with him and with her new-born joy.  “You say ‘about the time you speak of.’  But I don’t think you speak of an exact time—do you?”

He looked splendidly helpless.  “That’s just what I want to find out.  Don’t you keep the old ones?—can’t you look it up?”

Our young lady—still at Paddington—turned the question over.  “It wasn’t delivered?”

“Yes, it was; yet, at the same time, don’t you know? it wasn’t.”  He just hung back, but he brought it out.  “I mean it was intercepted, don’t you know? and there was something in it.”  He paused again and, as if to further his quest and woo and supplicate success and recovery, even smiled with an effort at the agreeable that was almost ghastly and that turned the knife in her tenderness.  What must be the pain of it all, of the open gulf and the throbbing fever, when this was the mere hot breath?  “We want to get what was in it—to know what it was.”

“I see—I see.”  She managed just the accent they had at Paddington when they stared like dead fish.  “And you have no clue?”

“Not at all—I’ve the clue I’ve just given you.”

“Oh the last of August?”  If she kept it up long enough she would make him really angry.

“Yes, and the address, as I’ve said.”

“Oh the same as last night?”

He visibly quivered, as with a gleam of hope; but it only poured oil on her quietude, and she was still deliberate.  She ranged some papers.  “Won’t you look?” he went on.

“I remember your coming,” she replied.

He blinked with a new uneasiness; it might have begun to come to him, through her difference, that he was somehow different himself.  “You were much quicker then, you know!”

“So were you—you must do me that justice,” she answered with a smile.  “But let me see.  Wasn’t it Dover?”

“Yes, Miss Dolman—”

“Parade Lodge, Parade Terrace?”

“Exactly—thank you so awfully much!”  He began to hope again.  “Then you have it—the other one?”

She hesitated afresh; she quite dangled him.  “It was brought by a lady?”

“Yes; and she put in by mistake something wrong.  That’s what we’ve got to get hold of!”  Heavens, what was he going to say?—flooding poor Paddington with wild betrayals!  She couldn’t too much, for her joy, dangle him, yet she couldn’t either, for his dignity, warn or control or check him.  What she found herself doing was just to treat herself to the middle way.  “It was intercepted?”

“It fell into the wrong hands.  But there’s something in it,” he continued to blurt out, “that may be all right.  That is, if it’s wrong, don’t you know?  It’s all right if it’s wrong,” he remarkably explained.

What was he, on earth, going to say?  Mr. Buckton and the counter-clerk were already interested; no one would have the decency to come in; and she was divided between her particular terror for him and her general curiosity.  Yet she already saw with what brilliancy she could add, to carry the thing off, a little false knowledge to all her real.  “I quite understand,” she said with benevolent, with almost patronising quickness.  “The lady has forgotten what she did put.”

“Forgotten most wretchedly, and it’s an immense inconvenience.  It has only just been found that it didn’t get there; so that if we could immediately have it—”

“Immediately?”

“Every minute counts.  You have,” he pleaded, “surely got them on file?”

“So that you can see it on the spot?”

“Yes, please—this very minute.”  The counter rang with his knuckles, with the knob of his stick, with his panic of alarm.  “Do, do hunt it up!” he repeated.

“I dare say we could get it for you,” the girl weetly returned.

“Get it?”—he looked aghast.  “When?”

“Probably by to-morrow.”

“Then it isn’t here?”—his face was pitiful.

She caught only the uncovered gleams that peeped out of the blackness, and she wondered what complication, even among the most supposable, the very worst, could be bad enough to account for the degree of his terror.  There were twists and turns, there were places where the screw drew blood, that she couldn’t guess.  She was more and more glad she didn’t want to.  “It has been sent on.”

“But how do you know if you don’t look?”

She gave him a smile that was meant to be, in the absolute irony of its propriety, quite divine.  “It was August 23rd, and we’ve nothing later here than August 27th.”

Something leaped into his face.  “27th—23rd?  Then you’re sure?  You know?”

She felt she scarce knew what—as if she might soon be pounced upon for some lurid connexion with a scandal.  It was the queerest of all sensations, for she had heard, she had read, of these things, and the wealth of her intimacy with them at Cocker’s might be supposed to have schooled and seasoned her.  This particular one that she had really quite lived with was, after all, an old story; yet what it had been before was dim and distant beside the touch under which she now winced.  Scandal?—it had never been but a silly word.  Now it was a great tense surface, and the surface was somehow Captain Everard’s wonderful face.  Deep down in his eyes a picture, a scene—a great place like a chamber of justice, where, before a watching crowd, a poor girl, exposed but heroic, swore with a quavering voice to a document, proved an alibi, supplied a link.  In this picture she bravely took her place.  “It was the 23rd.”

“Then can’t you get it this morning—or some time to-day?”

She considered, still holding him with her look, which she then turned on her two companions, who were by this time unreservedly enlisted.  She didn’t care—not a scrap, and she glanced about for a piece of paper.  With this she had to recognise the rigour of official thrift—a morsel of blackened blotter was the only loose paper to be seen.  “Have you got a card?” she said to her visitor.  He was quite away from Paddington now, and the next instant, pocket-book in hand, he had whipped a card out.  She gave no glance at the name on it—only turned it to the other side.  She continued to hold him, she felt at present, as she had never held him; and her command of her colleagues was for the moment not less marked.  She wrote something on the back of the card and pushed it across to him.

He fairly glared at it.  “Seven, nine, four—”

“Nine, six, one”—she obligingly completed the number.  “Is it right?” she smiled.

He took the whole thing in with a flushed intensity; then there broke out in him a visibility of relief that was simply a tremendous exposure.  He shone at them all like a tall lighthouse, embracing even, for sympathy, the blinking young men.  “By all the powers—it’s wrong!”  And without another look, without a word of thanks, without time for anything or anybody, he turned on them the broad back of his great stature, straightened his triumphant shoulders, and strode out of the place.

She was left confronted with her habitual critics.  “‘If it’s wrong it’s all right!’” she extravagantly quoted to them.

The counter-clerk was really awe-stricken.  “But how did you know, dear?”

“I remembered, love!”

Mr. Buckton, on the contrary, was rude.  “And what game is that, miss?”

No happiness she had ever known came within miles of it, and some minutes elapsed before she could recall herself sufficiently to reply that it was none of his business.

CHAPTER XXIV

If life at Cocker’s, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost something of its savour, she had not been slow to infer that a heavier blight had fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs. Jordan.

With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, with the blinds down on all the homes of luxury, this ingenious woman might well have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands.  She bore up, however, in a way that began by exciting much of her young friend’s esteem; they perhaps even more frequently met as the wine of life flowed less free from other sources, and each, in the lack of better diversion, carried on with more mystification for the other an intercourse that consisted not a little in peeping out and drawing back.  Each waited for the other to commit herself, each profusely curtained for the other the limits of low horizons.  Mrs. Jordan was indeed probably the more reckless skirmisher; nothing could exceed her frequent incoherence unless it was indeed her occasional bursts of confidence.  Her account of her private affairs rose and fell like a flame in the wind—sometimes the bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful of ashes.  This our young woman took to be an effect of the position, at one moment and another, of the famous door of the great world.  She had been struck in one of her ha’penny volumes with the translation of a French proverb according to which such a door, any door, had to be either open or shut; and it seemed part of the precariousness of Mrs. Jordan’s life that hers mostly managed to be neither.  There had been occasions when it appeared to gape wide—fairly to woo her across its threshold; there had been others, of an order distinctly disconcerting, when it was all but banged in her face.  On the whole, however, she had evidently not lost heart; these still belonged to the class of things in spite of which she looked well.  She intimated that the profits of her trade had swollen so as to float her through any state of the tide, and she had, besides this, a hundred profundities and explanations.

She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest admirers; gentlemen from the City in especial—as to whom she was full of information about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the elements of her charming commerce.  The City men did in short go in for flowers.  There was a certain type of awfully smart stockbroker—Lord Rye called them Jews and bounders, but she didn’t care—whose extravagance, she more than once threw out, had really, if one had any conscience, to be forcibly restrained.  It was not perhaps a pure love of beauty: it was a matter of vanity and a sign of business; they wished to crush their rivals, and that was one of their weapons.  Mrs. Jordan’s shrewdness was extreme; she knew in any case her customer—she dealt, as she said, with all sorts; and it was at the worst a race for her—a race even in the dull months—from one set of chambers to another.  And then, after all, there were also still the ladies; the ladies of stockbroking circles were perpetually up and down.  They were not quite perhaps Mrs. Bubb or Lady Ventnor; but you couldn’t tell the difference unless you quarrelled with them, and then you knew it only by their making-up sooner.  These ladies formed the branch of her subject on which she most swayed in the breeze; to that degree that her confidant had ended with an inference or two tending to banish regret for opportunities not embraced.  There were indeed tea-gowns that Mrs. Jordan described—but tea-gowns were not the whole of respectability, and it was odd that a clergyman’s widow should sometimes speak as if she almost thought so.  She came back, it was true, unfailingly to Lord Rye, never, evidently, quite losing sight of him even on the longest excursions.  That he was kindness itself had become in fact the very moral it all pointed—pointed in strange flashes of the poor woman’s nearsighted eyes.  She launched at her young friend portentous looks, solemn heralds of some extraordinary communication.  The communication itself, from week to week, hung fire; but it was to the facts over which it hovered that she owed her power of going on.  “They are, in one way and another,” she often emphasised, “a tower of strength”; and as the allusion was to the aristocracy the girl could quite wonder why, if they were so in “one way,” they should require to be so in two.  She thoroughly knew, however, how many ways Mrs. Jordan counted in.  It all meant simply that her fate was pressing her close.  If that fate was to be sealed at the matrimonial altar it was perhaps not remarkable that she shouldn’t come all at once to the scratch of overwhelming a mere telegraphist.  It would necessarily present to such a person a prospect of regretful sacrifice.  Lord Rye—if it was Lord Rye—wouldn’t be “kind” to a nonentity of that sort, even though people quite as good had been.

One Sunday afternoon in November they went, by arrangement, to church together; after which—on the inspiration of the moment the arrangement had not included it—they proceeded to Mrs. Jordan’s lodging in the region of Maida Vale.  She had raved to her friend about her service of predilection; she was excessively “high,” and had more than once wished to introduce the girl to the same comfort and privilege.  There was a thick brown fog and Maida Vale tasted of acrid smoke; but they had been sitting among chants and incense and wonderful music, during which, though the effect of such things on her mind was great, our young lady had indulged in a series of reflexions but indirectly related to them.  One of these was the result of Mrs. Jordan’s having said to her on the way, and with a certain fine significance, that Lord Rye had been for some time in town.  She had spoken as if it were a circumstance to which little required to be added—as if the bearing of such an item on her life might easily be grasped.  Perhaps it was the wonder of whether Lord Rye wished to marry her that made her guest, with thoughts straying to that quarter, quite determine that some other nuptials also should take place at Saint Julian’s.  Mr. Mudge was still an attendant at his Wesleyan chapel, but this was the least of her worries—it had never even vexed her enough for her to so much as name it to Mrs. Jordan.  Mr. Mudge’s form of worship was one of several things—they made up in superiority and beauty for what they wanted in number—that she had long ago settled he should take from her, and she had now moreover for the first time definitely established her own.  Its principal feature was that it was to be the same as that of Mrs. Jordan and Lord Rye; which was indeed very much what she said to her hostess as they sat together later on.  The brown fog was in this hostess’s little parlour, where it acted as a postponement of the question of there being, besides, anything else than the teacups and a pewter pot and a very black little fire and a paraffin lamp without a shade.  There was at any rate no sign of a flower; it was not for herself Mrs. Jordan gathered sweets.  The girl waited till they had had a cup of tea—waited for the announcement that she fairly believed her friend had, this time, possessed herself of her formally at last to make; but nothing came, after the interval, save a little poke at the fire, which was like the clearing of a throat for a speech.