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He passed through the rooms, turning the light of his lantern this way and that, and ever the darkness withheld more than the light revealed. He knew that thick tapestries hung from the walls, velvet curtains masked the windows; his hand, exploring eagerly, felt the rich carving of chairs and presses; the great beds were hung with silken cloth wrought in gold thread with glimmering strange starry devices. Broad sideboards flashed back to his lantern’s questionings the faint white laugh of silver; the tall cabinets could not, with all their reserve, suppress the confession of wrought gold, and, from the caskets into whose depths he flashed the light, came the trembling avowal of rich jewels. And now, at last, that carved door closed between him and the poignant silence of the deserted corridors, the thief felt a sudden gaiety of heart, a sense of escape, of security. He was alone, yet warmed and companioned. The silence here was no longer a horror, but a consoler, a friend.
And, indeed, now he was not alone. The ample splendours about him, the spoils which long centuries had yielded to the grasp of a noble family – these were companions after his own heart.
He flung open the shade of his lantern and held it high above his head. The room still kept half its secrets. The discretion of the darkness should be broken down. He must see more of this splendour – not in unsatisfying dim detail, but in the lit gorgeous mass of it. The narrow bar of the lantern’s light chafed him. He sprang on to the dining-table, and began to light the half-burnt chandelier. There were a hundred candles, and he lighted all, so that the chandelier swung like a vast living jewel in the centre of the hall. Then, as he turned, all the colour in the room leapt out at him. The purple of the couches, the green gleam of the delicate glass, the blue of the tapestries, and the vivid scarlet of the velvet hangings, and with the colour sprang the gleams of white from the silver, of yellow from the gold, of many-coloured fire from strange inlaid work and jewelled caskets, till the thief stood aghast with rapture in the strange, sudden revelation of this concentrated splendour.
He went along the walls with a lighted candle in his hand – the wax dripped warm over his fingers as he went – lighting one after another, the tapers in the sconces of the silver-framed glasses. In the state bedchamber he drew back suddenly, face to face with a death-white countenance in which black eyes blazed at him with triumph and delight. Then he laughed aloud. He had not known his own face in the strange depths of this mirror. It had no sconces like the others, or he would have known it for what it was. It was framed in Venice glass – wonderful, gleaming, iridescent.
The thief dropped the candle and threw his arms wide with a gesture of supreme longing.
“If I could carry it all away! All, all! Every beautiful thing! To sell some – the less beautiful, and to live with the others all my days!”
And now a madness came over the thief. So little a part of all these things could he bear away with him; yet all were his – his for the taking – even the huge carved presses and the enormous vases of solid silver, too heavy for him to lift – even these were his: had he not found them – he, by his own skill and cunning? He went about in the rooms, touching one after the other the beautiful, rare things. He caressed the gold and the jewels. He threw his arms round the great silver vases; he wound round himself the heavy red velvet of the curtain where the griffins gleamed in embossed gold, and shivered with pleasure at the soft clinging of its embrace. He found, in a tall cupboard, curiously-shaped flasks of wine, such wine as he had never tasted, and he drank of it slowly – in little sips – from a silver goblet and from a green Venice glass, and from a cup of rare pink china, knowing that any one of his drinking vessels was worth enough to keep him in idleness for a long year. For the thief had learnt his trade, and it is a part of a thief’s trade to know the value of things.
He threw himself on the rich couches, sat in the stately carved chairs, leaned his elbows on the ebony tables. He buried his hot face in the chill, smooth linen of the great bed, and wondered to find it still scented delicately as though some sweet woman had lain there but last night. He went hither and thither laughing with pure pleasure, and making to himself an unbridled carnival of the joys of possession.
In this wise the night wore on, and with the night his madness wore away. So presently he went about among the treasures – no more with the eyes of a lover, but with the eyes of a Jew – and he chose those precious stones which he knew for the most precious, and put them in the bag he had brought, and with them some fine-wrought goldsmith’s work and the goblet out of which he had drunk the wine. Though it was but of silver, he would not leave it. The green Venice glass he broke and the cup, for he said: “No man less fortunate than I, to-night, shall ever again drink from them.” But he harmed nothing else of all the beautiful things, because he loved them.
Then, leaving the low, uneven ends of the candles still alight, he turned to the door by which he had come in. There were two doors, side by side, carved with straight lilies, and between them a panel wrought with the griffin and the seven roses enwreathed. He pressed his finger in the heart of the seventh rose, hardly hoping that the panel would move, and indeed it did not; and he was about to seek for a secret spring among the lilies, when he perceived that one of the doors wrought with these had opened itself a little. So he passed through it and closed it after him.
“I must guard my treasures,” he said. But when he had passed through the door and closed it, and put out his hand to raise the tattered tapestry that covered it from without, his hand met the empty air, and he knew that he had not come out by the door through which he had entered.
When the lantern was lighted, it showed him a vaulted passage, whose floor and whose walls were stone, and there was a damp air and a mouldering scent in it, as of a cellar long unopened. He was cold now, and the room with the wine and the treasures seemed long ago and far away, though but a door and a moment divided him from it, and though some of the wine was in his body, and some of the treasure in his hands. He set about to find the way to the quiet night outside, for this seemed to him a haven and a safeguard since, with the closing of that door, he had shut away warmth, and light, and companionship. He was enclosed in walls once more, and once more menaced by the invading silence that was almost a presence. Once more it seemed to him that he must creep softly, must hold his breath before he ventured to turn a corner – for always he felt that he was not alone, that near him was something, and that its breath, too, was held.
So he went by many passages and stairways, and could find no way out; and after a long time of searching he crept by another way back to come unawares on the door which shut him off from the room where the many lights were, and the wine and the treasure. Then terror leaped out upon him from the dark hush of the place, and he beat on the door with his hands and cried aloud, till the echo of his cry in the groined roof cowed him back into silence.
Again he crept stealthily by strange passages, and again could find no way except, after much wandering, back to the door where he had begun.
And now the fear of death beat in his brain with blows like a hammer. To die here like a rat in a trap, never to see the sun alight again, never to climb in at a window, or see brave jewels shine under his lantern, but to wander, and wander, and wander between these inexorable walls till he died, and the rats, admitting him to their brotherhood, swarmed round the dead body of him.
“I had better have been born a fool,” said the thief.
Then once more he went through the damp and the blackness of the vaulted passages, tremulously searching for some outlet, but in vain.
Only at last, in a corner behind a pillar, he found a very little door and a stair that led down. So he followed it, to wander among other corridors and cellars, with the silence heavy about him, and despair growing thick and cold like a fungus about his heart, and in his brain the fear of death beating like a hammer.
It was quite suddenly in his wanderings, which had grown into an aimless frenzy, having now less of search in it than of flight from the insistent silence, that he saw at last a light – and it was the light of day coming through an open door. He stood at the door and breathed the air of the morning. The sun had risen and touched the tops of the towers of the house with white radiance; the birds were singing loudly. It was morning, then, and he was a free man.
He looked about him for a way to come at the park, and thence to the broken wall and the white road, which he had come by a very long time before. For this door opened on an inner enclosed courtyard, still in damp shadow, though the sun above struck level across it – a courtyard where tall weeds grew thick and dank. The dew of the night was heavy on them.
As he stood and looked, he was aware of a low, buzzing sound that came from the other side of the courtyard. He pushed through the weeds towards it; and the sense of a presence in the silence came upon him more than ever it had done in the darkened house, though now it was day, and the birds sang all gaily, and the good sun shone so bravely overhead.
As he thrust aside the weeds which grew waist-high, he trod on something that seemed to writhe under his feet like a snake. He started back and looked down. It was the long, firm, heavy plait of a woman’s hair. And just beyond lay the green gown of a woman, and a woman’s hands, and her golden head, and her eyes; all about the place where she lay was the thick buzzing of flies, and the black swarming of them.
The thief saw, and he turned and he fled back to his doorway, and down the steps and through the maze of vaulted passages – fled in the dark, and empty-handed, because when he had come into the presence that informed that house with silence, he had dropped lantern and treasure, and fled wildly, the horror in his soul driving him before it. Now fear is more wise than cunning, so, whereas he had sought for hours with his lantern and with all his thief’s craft to find the way out, and had sought in vain, he now, in the dark and blindly, without thought or will, without pause or let, found the one way that led to a door, shot back the bolts, and fled through the awakened rose garden and across the dewy park.
He dropped from the wall into the road, and stood there looking eagerly to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, like a twisted ribbon over the great, grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road curved down towards the river. No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There are no travellers on such a road at such an hour.
XI
THE GIRL AT THE TOBACCONIST’S
John Selwyn Selborne cursed for the hundredth time the fool that had bound him captive at the chariot wheels of beauty. That is to say, he cursed the fool he had been to trust himself in the automobile of that Brydges woman. The Brydges woman was pretty, rich, and charming; omniscience was her pose. She knew everything: consequently she knew how to drive a motor-car. She learned the lesson of her own incompetence at the price of a broken ankle and a complete suit of bruises. Selborne paid for his trusting folly with a broken collar-bone and a deep cut on his arm. That was why he could not go to Portsmouth to see the last of his young brother when he left home for the wars.
This was why he cursed. The curse was mild – it was indeed less a curse than an invocation.
“Defend us from women,” he said; “above all from the women who think they know.”
The grey gloom that stood for dawn that day crept through the curtains and made ghosts of the shadows that lingered still in his room. He stretched himself wearily, and groaned as the stretched nerves vibrated to the chord of agony.
“There’s no fool like an old fool,” said John Selwyn Selborne. He had thirty-seven years, and they weighed on him as the forty-seven when their time came would not do.
He had said good-bye to the young brother the night before; here in this country inn, the nearest to the scene of the enlightenment of the Brydges woman. And to-day the boy sailed. John Selborne sighed. Twenty-two, and off to the wars, heart-whole. Whereas he had been invalided at the very beginning of things and now, when he was well and just on the point of rejoining – the motor-car and the Brydges woman! And as for heart-whole … the Brydges woman again.
He fell asleep. When he awoke there was full sunshine and an orchestra of awakened birds in the garden outside. There was tea – there were letters. One was from Sidney – Sidney, who had left him not twelve hours before.
He tore it open, and hurt his shoulder in the movement.
“Dear John,” said the letter, “I wanted to tell you last night, but you seemed so cheap, I thought I’d better not bother you. But it’s just come into my head that perhaps I may get a bullet in my innards, and I want you to know. So here goes. There’s a girl I mean to marry. I know she’ll say Yes, but I can’t ask her till I come back, of course. I don’t want to have any humbug or concealing things from you; you’ve always been so decent to me. I know you hate jaw, so I won’t go on about that. But I must tell you I met her first when she was serving in a tobacconist’s shop. And her mother lets lodgings. You’ll think this means she’s beneath me. Wait till you see her. I want you to see her, and make friends with her while I’m away.”
Here followed some lover’s raptures, and the address of the lady.
John Selborne lay back and groaned.
Susannah Sheepmarsh, tobacconist’s assistant, lodging-house keeper’s daughter, and Sidney Selborne, younger son of a house whose pride was that it had been proud enough to refuse a peerage.
John Selborne thought long and deeply.
“I suppose I must sacrifice myself,” he said. “Little adventuress! ‘How easy to prove to him,’ I said, ‘that an eagle’s the game her pride prefers, though she stoops to a wren instead.’ The boy’ll hate me for a bit, but he’ll thank me later. Yalding? That’s somewhere on the Medway. Fishing? Boating? Convalescence is good enough. Fiction aid us! What would the villain in a book do to come between fond lovers? He would take the lodgings: at least he would try. And one may as well do something.”
So he wrote to Mrs Sheepmarsh – she had rooms to let, he heard. Terms? And Mrs Sheepmarsh wrote back; at least her reply was typewritten, which was a bit of a shock. She had rooms. They were disengaged. And the terms were thus and such.
Behold John Selwyn Selborne then, his baggage neatly labelled with his first and second names, set down on the little platform of Yalding Station. Behold him, waggonette-borne, crossing the old stone bridge and the golden glory of the Leas, flushed with sunset.
Mrs Sheepmarsh’s house was long and low and white. It had a classic porch, and at one end a French window opened through cascades of jasmine to a long lawn. There were many trees. A middle-aged lady in decent black, with a white cap, and white lace about her neck, greeted him with formal courtesy. “This way,” she said, and moved for him to follow her through a green gate and down a shrubbery that led without disguise or pretence straight away from the house. It led also to a little white building embowered in trees. “Here,” said the lady. She opened the door. “I’ll tell the man to bring your luggage. Good evening – ”
And she left him planted there. He had to bend his head to pass under the low door, and he found himself in a tiny kitchen. Beyond were a sitting-room and two bedchambers. All fitted sparsely, but with old furniture, softly-faded curtains, quiet and pleasant to look upon. There were roses in a jug of Grès de Flandre on the gate-table in the sitting-room.
“What a singular little place!” he said. “So these are the lodgings. I feel like a dog in a kennel. I suppose they will throw me a bone by-and-by – or, at any rate, ask me what kind of bones I prefer.”
He unpacked his clothes and laid his belongings in the drawers and cupboards; it was oddly charming that each shelf or drawer should have its own little muslin bag of grey lavender. Then he took up a book and began to read. The sunset had died away, the daylight seemed to be glowing out of the low window like a tide, leaving bare breadths of darkness behind. He lighted candles. He was growing hungry – it was past eight o’clock.
“I believe the old lady has forgotten my existence,” he said, and therewith opened his cottage door and went out into the lighter twilight of the garden. The shrubbery walks were winding. He took the wrong turning, and found himself entering on the narrow lawn. From the French window among the jasmine came lamplight – and voices.
“No servant, no food? My good mother, you’ve entertained a lunatic unawares.”
“He had references.”
“Man cannot live by references alone. The poor brute must be starving – unless he’s drunk.”
“Celia! I do wish you wouldn’t – ”
John Selborne hastening by, put a period to the conversation by boots crunching heavily and conscientiously on the gravel. Both voices ceased. He presented himself at the lamp-lit oblong of the window.
Within that lamplight glowed on the last remnants of a meal – dinner, by the glasses and the fruit. Also on the lady in the cap, and on a girl – the one, doubtless, who had evolved the lunatic idea. Both faces were turned towards him. Both women rose: there was nothing for it but advance. He murmured something about intrusion – “awfully sorry, the walks wind so,” and turned to go.
But the girl spoke: “Oh, wait a moment. Is this Mr Selwyn, mother?”
“My daughter, Miss Sheepmarsh – Mr Selwyn,” said the mother reluctantly.
“We were just talking about you,” said the girl, “and wondering whether you were ill or anything, or whether your servant hasn’t turned up, or something.”
“Miss Sheepmarsh.” He was still speechless. This the little adventuress, the tobacconist’s assistant? This girl with the glorious hair severely braided, the round face, the proud chin, the most honest eyes in the world? She might be sister to the adventuress – cousin, perhaps? But the room, too – shining mahogany, old china, worn silver, and fine napery – all spoke of a luxury as temperate as refined: the luxury of delicate custom, of habit bred in the bone; no mushroom growth of gross self-indulgence, but the unconscious outcome of generations of clear self-respect.
“Can we send anything over for you?” the elder lady asked. “Of course we – ”
“We didn’t mean by ‘entirely private’ that we would let our tenant starve,” the girl interrupted.
“There is some mistake.” Selborne came to himself suddenly. “I thought I was engaging furnished apartments with er – attendance.”
The girl drew a journal from a heap on the sofa.
“This was the advertisement, wasn’t it?” she asked.
And he read:
“Four-roomed cottage, furnished, in beautiful grounds. Part of these are fenced in for use of tenant of cottage. And in the absence of the family the whole of the grounds are open to tenant. When at home the family wish to be entirely private.”
“I never saw this at all,” said Selborne desperately. “My – I mean I was told it was furnished lodgings. I am very sorry I have no servant and no means of getting one. I will go back to London at once. I am sorry.”
“The last train’s gone,” said Miss Sheepmarsh. “Mother, ask Mr Selborne to come in, and I’ll get him something to eat.”
“My dear,” said the mother, “surely Mary – ”
“My dear mother,” said the girl, “you know Mary is having her supper.”
The bewildered Selborne presently found himself seated at the white-spread, silver-sparkling table, served with food and drink by this Hebe with the honest eyes. He exerted himself to talk with the mother – not of the difference between a lodger and a tenant, but of music, art, and the life of the great world.
It was the girl who brought the conversation down from the gossip of Courts and concert-rooms to the tenant’s immediate needs.
“If you mean to stay, you could have a woman in from the village,” said she.
“But wouldn’t you rather I went?” he said.
“Why should we? We want to let the cottage, or we shouldn’t have advertised it. I’ll get you some one to-morrow. Mrs Bates would be the very thing, mother. And you’ll like her, Mr Selwyn. She’s a great dear – ”
Sure enough, the next morning brought a gentle, middle-aged woman to “do for” Mr Selwyn. And she did excellently. And three slow days passed. He got a boat and pulled up and down the green willow-fringed river. He tried to fish; he read somewhat, and he thought more. And he went in and out of his cottage, which had its own private path debouching on the highway. Many times a day he went in and out, but he saw no more the red hair, the round face, and the honest eyes.
On the fourth day he had nursed his interest in the girl to a strong, well-grown sentiment of curiosity and attraction. Coming in at his own gate, he saw the mother leaving hers, with sunshade and cardcase – an afternoon of calls evidently setting in.
Now or never! The swift impulse took him, and before he had time to recall the terms of that advertisement, he had passed the green fence of division, and his feet were on the wandering ways of the shrubbery. He felt, as he went, a glow of gratitude to the fate which was rewarding his care of his brother’s future with an interest like this. The adventuress? – the tobacconist’s assistant? – he could deal with her later.
Through the garden’s green a gleam of white guided – even, it seemed, beckoned.
He found the girl with the red hair and the honest eyes in a hammock swung between two cedars.
“Have pity on me,” he said abruptly.
She raised her eyes from her book.
“Oh, it’s you!” she said. “I am so glad. Get a chair from under the weeping ash, and sit down and talk.”
“This turf is good enough for me,” said he; “but are you sure I’m not trespassing?”
“You mean the advertisement? Oh, that was just because we had some rather awful people last year, and we couldn’t get away from them, and mother wanted to be quite safe; but, of course, you’re different. We like you very much, what we’ve seen of you.” This straightforward compliment somehow pleased him less than it might have done. “The other people were – well, he was a butterman. I believe he called himself an artist.”
“Do you mean that you do not like persons who are in trade,” he asked, thinking of the tobacconist’s assistant.
“Of course I don’t mean that,” she said; “why, I’m a Socialist! Butterman just means a person without manners or ideals. But I do like working people better than shoppy people, though I know it’s wrong.”
“How can an involuntary liking or disliking be wrong?” he asked.
“It’s snobbish, don’t you think? We ought to like people for what they are, not for what they have, or what they work at.”
“If you weren’t so pretty, and hadn’t that delightful air of having just embraced the Social Gospel, you’d be a prig,” he said to himself. To her he said: “Roughly speaking, don’t you think the conventional classifications correspond fairly well with the real ones?”
“No,” she answered roundly.
And when the mother returned, weary from her calls, she found her tenant and her daughter still discussing the problems of good and evil, of heredity and environment, of social inequalities and the injustice of the world. The girl fought for her views, and she fought fairly, if fiercely. It was the first of many such fights. When he had gone the mother protested.
“Dearest,” said the girl, “I can’t help it! I must live my own life, as people say in plays. After all, I’m twenty-six. I’ve always talked to people if I liked them – even strangers in railway carriages. And people aren’t wild beasts, you know: everything is always all right. And this man can talk; he knows about things. And he’s a gentleman. That ought to satisfy you – that and his references. Don’t worry, there’s a darling. Just be nice to him yourself. He’s simply a godsend in a place like this.”
“He’ll fall in love with you, Celia,” said the mother warningly.