Kitabı oku: «The Mark Of Cain», sayfa 7

He filled his pockets with five unpoisoned oranges, and the skin of a sixth, and so crept upstairs. His situation was, perhaps, rather novel. With murder in his remorseless heart, he yet hoped against hope, out of his very poltroonery, that murder had not been done. At the girl’s door he waited and listened, his face horribly agitated and shining wet. All was silent. His heart was sounding hoarsely within him, like a dry pump: he heard it, so noisy and so distinct that he almost feared it might wake the sleeper. If only, after all, she had not touched the fruit!

Then he took the door-handle in his clammy grasp; he had to cover it with a handkerchief to get a firm hold. He turned discreetly, and the door was pushed open in perfect stillness, except for that dreadful husky thumping of his own heart. At this moment the postman’s hard knock at the door nearly made him cry out aloud. Then he entered; a dreadful visitor, had anyone seen him. She did not see him; she was asleep, sound asleep; in the dirty brown twilight of a London winter day, he could make out that much. He did not dare draw close enough to observe her face minutely, or bend down and listen for her breath. And the oranges! Eagerly he looked at them. There were only five of them. Surely – no! a sixth had fallen on the floor, where it was lying. With a great sigh of relief he picked up all the six oranges, put them in his pockets, and, as shrinkingly as he had come-yet shaking his hand at the girl, and cursing his own cowardice under his breath – he stole down stairs, opened the dining-room door, and advanced into the blind, empty dusk.

“Now I’ll settle with you!” came a voice out of the dimness; and the start wrought so wildly on his nerves, excited to the utmost degree as they were, that he gave an inarticulate cry of alarm and despair. Was he trapped, and by whom?

In a moment he saw whence the voice came. It was only Alice Darling, in bonnet and cloak, and with a face flushed with something more than anger, that stood before him.

Not much used to shame, he was yet ashamed of his own alarm, and tried to dissemble it. He sat down at a writing-table facing her, and merely observed:

“Now that you have returned, Alice, will you kindly bring lights? I want to read.”

“What were you doing up-stairs just now?” she snarled. “Why did you send me off to the doctor’s, out of the way?”

“My good girl, I have again and again advised you to turn that invaluable curiosity of yours – curiosity, a quality which Mr. Matthew Arnold so justly views with high esteem – into wider and nobler channels. Disdain the merely personal; accept the calm facts of domestic life as you find them; approach the broader and less irritating problems of Sociology (pardon the term) or Metaphysics.”

It was cruel to see the enjoyment he got out of teasing this woman by an ironical jargon which mystified her into madness. This time he went too far. With an inarticulate snarl of passion she lifted a knife that lay on the dining-room table and made for him. But this time, being prepared, he was not alarmed; nay, he seemed to take leasure in the success of his plan of tormenting. The heavy escritoire at which he sat was a breastwork between him and the angry woman. He coolly opened a drawer; produced a revolver, and remarked:

“No; I did not ask for the carving-knife, Alice. I asked for lights; and you will be good enough to bring them. I am your master, you know, in every sense of the word; and you are aware that you had better both hold your tongue and keep your hands off me – and off drink. Fetch the lamp!”

She left the room cowed, like a beaten dog. She returned, set the lamp silently on the table, and was gone. Then he noticed a letter, which lay on the escritoire, and was addressed to him. It was a rather peculiar letter to look at, or rather the envelope was peculiar; for, though bordered with heavy black, it was stamped, where the seal should have been, with a strange device in gold and colors – a brown bun, in a glory of gilt rays.

“Mrs. St John Deloraine,” he said, taking it up. “How in the world did she find me out? Well, she is indeed a friend that sticketh closer than a brother – a deal closer than Surbiton, anyhow.”

Lord Surbiton was the elder brother of Mr. Cranley, and bore the second title of the family.

“I don’t suppose there is another woman in London,” he thought to himself, “that has not heard all about the row at the Cockpit, and that would write to me.”

Then he tore the chromatic splendors of the device on the envelope, and read the following epistle:

“Early English Bunhouse,

“Chelsea, Friday. “My dear Mr. Cranley,

“Where are you hiding, or yachting, you wandering man? I can hear nothing of you from anyone – nothing good, and you know I never believe anything else. Do come and see me, at the old Bunhouse here, and tell me about yourself”

– (“She has heard,” he muttered)

– “and help me in a little difficulty. Our housekeeper (you know we are strictly blue ribbon – a cordon bleu, I call her) has become engaged to a plumber, and she is leaving us. Can you recommend me another? I know how interested you are (in spite of your wicked jokes) in our little enterprise. And we also want a girl, to be under the housekeeper, and keep the accounts. Surely you will come to see me, whether you can advise me or not.

“Yours very truly,

“Mary St. John Deloraine”

“Idiot!” murmured Mr. Cranley, as he finished reading this document; and then he added, “By Jove! it’s lucky, too. I’ll put these two infernal women off on her, and Alice will soon do for the girl, if she once gets at the drink. She’s dangerous, by Jove, when she has been drinking. Then the Law will do for Alice, and all will be plain sailing in smooth waters.”

CHAPTER IX. – Mrs. St. John Deloraine

Mrs. St. John Deloraine, whose letter to Mr. Cranley we have been privileged to read, was no ordinary widow. As parts of her character and aspects of her conduct were not devoid of the kind of absurdity which is caused by virtues out of place, let it be said that a better, or kinder, or gentler, or merrier soul than that of Mrs. St. John Deloraine has seldom inhabited a very pleasing and pretty tenement of clay, and a house in Cheyne Walk.

The maiden name of this lady was by no means so euphonious as that which she had attained by marriage. Miss Widdicombe, of Chipping Carby, in the county of Somerset, was a very lively, good-hearted and agreeable young woman; but she was by no means favorably looked on by the ladies of the County Families. Now, in the district around Chipping Carby, the County Families are very County indeed, few more so. There is in their demeanor a kind of morgue so funereal and mournful, that it inevitably reminds the observer (who is not County) of an edifice in Paris, designed by Méryon, and celebrated by Mr. Robert Browning. The County Families near Chipping Carby are far, far from gay, and what pleasure they do take, they take entirely in the society of their equals. So determined are they to drink delight of tennis with their peers, and with nobody else, that even the Clergy are excluded, ex officio, and in their degrading capacity of ministers of Religion, from the County Lawn Tennis Club. As we all know how essential young curates fresh from college are to the very being of rural lawn-tennis, no finer proof can be given of the inaccessibility of the County people around Chipping Carby, and of the sacrifices which they are prepared to make to their position.

Now, born in the very purple, and indubitably (despite his profession) one of the gentlest born of men, was, some seven years ago, a certain Mr. St. John Deloraine. He held the sacrosanct position of a squarson, being at once Squire and Parson of the parish of Little Wentley. At the head of the quaint old village street stands, mirrored in a moat, girdled by beautiful gardens, and shadowy with trees, the Manor House and Parsonage (for it is both in one) of Wentley Deloraine.

To this desirable home and opulent share of earth’s good things did Mr. St. John Deloraine succeed in boyhood. He went to Oxford, he travelled a good deal, he was held in great favor and affection by the County matrons and the long-nosed young ladies of the County. Another, dwelling on such heights as he, might have become haughty; but there was in this young man a cheery naturalness and love of mirth which often drove him from the society of his equals, and took him into that of attorneys’ daughters. Fate drew him one day to an archery meeting at Chipping Carby, and there he beheld Miss Widdicombe. With her he paced the level turf, her “points” he counted, and he found that she, at least, could appreciate his somewhat apt quotation from Chastelard:

“Pray heaven, we make good Ends.”

Miss Widdicombe did make good “Ends.” She vanquished Mrs. Struggles, the veteran lady champion of the shaft and bow, a sportswoman who was now on the verge of sixty. Why are ladies, who, almost professionally, “rejoice in arrows,” like the Homeric Artemis – why are they nearly always so well stricken in years? Was Maid Marion forty at least before her performances obtained for her a place in the well-known band of Hood, Tuck, Little John, and Co.?

This, however, is a digression. For our purpose it is enough that the contrast between Miss Widdicombe’s vivacity and the deadly stolidity of the County families, between her youth and the maturity of her vanquished competitors, entirely won the heart of Mr. St John Deloraine. He saw – he loved her – he was laughed at – he proposed – he was accepted – and, oh, shame! the County had to accept, more or less, Miss Widdicombe, the attorney’s daughter, as châtelaine (delightful word, and dear to the author of Guy Livingstone) of Wentley Deloraine.

When the early death of her husband threw Mrs. St John Deloraine almost alone on the world (for her family had, naturally, been offended by her good fortune), she left the gray old squarsonage, and went to town. In London, Mrs. St John Deloraine did not find people stiff, With a good name, an impulsive manner, a kind heart, a gentle tongue, and plenty of money, she was welcome almost everywhere, except at the big County dinners which the County people of her district give to each other when they come to town.

This lady, like many of us, had turned to charity and philanthropy in the earlier days of her bereavement; but, unlike most of us, her benevolence had not died out with the sharpest pangs of her sorrow. Never, surely, was there such a festive philanthropist as Mrs. St. John Deloraine.

She would go from a garden-party to a mothers’ meeting; she was great at taking children for a day in the country, and had the art of keeping them amused. She was on a dozen charitable committees, belonged to at least three clubs, at which gentlemen as well as ladies of fashion were eligible, and where music and minstrelsy enlivened the after-dinner hours.

So good and unsuspecting, unluckily, was Mrs. St. John Deloraine, that she made bosom friends for life, and contracted vows of eternal sympathy, wherever she went. At Aix, or on the Spanish frontier, she has been seen enjoying herself with acquaintances a little dubious, like Greek texts which, if not absolutely corrupt, yet stand greatly in need of explanation. It is needless to say that gentlemen of fortune, in the old sense – that is, gentlemen in quest of a fortune – pursued hotly or artfully after Mrs. St. John Deloraine. But as she never for a moment suspected their wiles, so these devices were entirely wasted on her, and her least warrantable admirers found that she insisted on accepting them as endowed with all the Christian virtues. Just as some amateurs of music are incapable of conceiving that there breathes a man who has no joy in popular concerts (we shall have popular conic sections next), so Mrs. St John Deloraine persevered in crediting all she met with a passion for virtue. Their speech might bewray them as worldlings of the world, but she insisted on interpreting their talk as a kind of harmless levity, as a mere cynical mask assumed by a tender and pious nature. Thus, no one ever combined a delight in good works with a taste for good things so successfully as Mrs. St John Deloraine.

At this moment the lady’s “favorite vanity,” in the matter of good works, was The Bunhouse. This really serviceable, though quaint, institution was not, in idea, quite unlike Maitland’s enterprise of the philanthropic public-house, the Hit or Miss. In a slum of Chelsea there might have been observed a modest place of entertainment, in the coffee and bun line, with a highly elaborate Chelsea Bun painted on the sign. This piece of art, which gave its name to the establishment, was the work of one of Mrs. St John Deloraine’s friends, an artist of the highest promise, who fell an early victim to arrangements in haschisch and Irish whiskey. In spite of this ill-omened beginning, The Bunhouse did very useful work. It was a kind of unofficial club and home, not for Friendly Girls, nor the comparatively subdued and domesticated slavery of common life, but for the tameless tribes of young women of the metropolis. Those who disdain service, who turn up expressive features at sewing machines, and who decline to stand perpendicularly for fifteen hours a day in shops – all these young female outlaws, not professionally vicious, found in The Bunhouse a kind of charitable shelter and home.

They were amused, they were looked after, they were encouraged not to stand each other drinks, nor to rival the profanity of their brothers and fathers. “Places” were found for them, in the rare instances when they condescended to “places.” Sometimes they breakfasted at The Bunhouse, sometimes went there to supper. Very often they came in a state of artificial cheerfulness, or ready for battle. Then there would arise such a disturbance as civilization seldom sees. Not otherwise than when boys, having tied two cats by the tails, hang them over the handle of a door – they then spit, and shriek, and swear, fur flies, and the clamor goes up to heaven: so did the street resound when the young patrons of The Bunhouse were in a warlike humor. Then the stern housekeeper would intervene, and check these motions of their minds, haec certamina tanta, turning the more persistent combatants into the street. Next day Mrs. St. John Deloraine would come in her carriage, and try to be very severe, and then would weep a little, and all the girls would shed tears, all would have a good cry together, and finally the Lady Mother (Mrs. St John Deloraine) would take a few of them for a drive in the Park. After that there would be peace for a while, and presently disturbances would come again.

For this establishment it was that Mrs. St. John Deloraine wanted a housekeeper and an assistant. The former housekeeper, as we have been told, had yielded to love, “which subdues the hearts of all female women, even of the prudent,” according to Homer, and was going to share the home and bear the children of a plumber. With her usual invincible innocence, Mrs. St. John Deloraine had chosen to regard the Hon. Thomas Cranley as a kind good Christian in disguise, and to him she appealed in her need of a housekeeper and assistant.

No application could possibly have suited that gentleman better. He could give his own servant an excellent character; and if once she was left to herself, to her passions, and the society of Margaret, that young lady’s earthly existence would shortly cease to embarrass Mr. Cranley. Probably there was not one other man among the motley herds of Mrs. St. John Deloraine’s acquaintance who would have used her unsuspicious kindness as an instrument in a plot of any sort. But Mr. Cranley had (when there was no personal danger to be run) the courage of his character.

“Shall I go and lunch with her?” he asked himself, as he twisted her note, with its characteristic black border and device of brown, and gold. “I haven’t shown anywhere I was likely to meet anyone I knew, not since – since I came back from Monte Carlo.”

Even to himself he did not like to mention that affair of the Cockpit The man in the story who boasted that he had committed every crime in the calendar withdrew his large words when asked “if he had ever cheated at cards.”

“Well,” Mr. Cranley went on, “I don’t know: I dare say it’s safe enough. She does know some of those Cockpit fellows; confound her, she knows all sorts of fellows. But none of them are likely to be up so early in the day – not up to luncheon anyhow. She says” – and he looked again at the note – “that she’ll be alone; but she won’t. Everyone she sees before lunch she asks to luncheon: everyone she meets before dinner she asks to dinner. I wish I had her money: it would be simpler and safer by a very long way than this kind of business. There really seems no end to it when once you begin. However, here goes,” said Mr. Cranley, sitting down to write a letter at the escritoire which had just served him as a bulwark and breastwork. “I’ll write and accept Probably she’ll have no one with her, but some girl from Chipping Carby, or some missionary from the Solomon Islands who never heard of a heathen like me.”

As a consequence of these reflections, Mr. Cranley arrived, when the clock was pointing to half-past one, at Mrs. St. John Deloraine’s house in Cheyne Walk. He had scarcely entered the drawing-room before that lady, in a costume which agreeably became her pleasant English style of beauty, rushed into the room, tumbling over a favorite Dandie Dinmont terrier, and holding out both her hands.

The terrier howled, and Mrs. St. John Deloraine had scarcely grasped the hand which Mr. Cranley extended with enthusiasm, when she knelt on the carpet and was consoling the Dandie.

“Love in which thy hound has part,” quoted Mr. Cranley. And the lady, rising with her face becomingly flushed beneath her fuzzy brown hair, smiled, and did not remark the sneer.

“Thank you so much for coming, Mr. Cranley,” she said; “and, as I have put off luncheon till two, do tell me that you know someone who will suit me for my dear Bun-house. I know how much you have always been interested in our little project.”

Mr. Cranley assured her that, by a remarkable coincidence, he knew the very kind of people she wanted. Alice he briefly described as a respectable woman of great strength of character, “of body, too, I believe, which will not make her less fit for the position.”

“No,” said Mrs. St. John Deloraine, sadly; “the dear girls are sometimes a little tiresome. On Wednesday, Mrs. Carter, the housekeeper, you know, went to one of the exhibitions with her fiancé, and the girls broke all the windows and almost all the tea-things.”

“The woman whom I am happy to be able to recommend to you will not stand anything of that kind,” answered Mr. Cranley. “She is quiet, but extremely firm, and has been accustomed to deal with a very desperate character. At one time, I mean, she was engaged as the attendant of a person of treacherous and ungovernable disposition.”

This was true enough; and Mr. Cranley then began to give a more or less fanciful history of Margaret She had been left in his charge by her father, an early acquaintance, a man who had known better days, but had bequeathed her nothing, save an excellent schooling and the desire to earn her own livelihood.

So far, he knew he was safe enough; for Margaret was the last girl to tell the real tale of her life, and her desire to avoid Maitland was strong enough to keep her silent, even had she not been naturally proud and indisposed to make confidences.

“There is only one thing I must ask,” said Mr. Cranley, when he had quite persuaded the lady that Margaret would set a splendid example to her young friends. “How soon does your housekeeper leave you, and when do you need the services of the new-comers?”

“Well, the plumber is rather in a hurry. He really is a good man, and I like him better for it, though it seems rather selfish of him to want to rob me of Joan. He is; determined to be married before next Bank Holiday – in a fortnight that is – and then they will go on their honeymoon of three days to Yarmouth.”

Mr. Cranley blessed the luck that had not made the plumber a yet more impetuous wooer.

“No laggard in love,” he said, smiling. “Well, in a fortnight the two women will be quite ready for their new place. But I must ask you to remember that the younger is somewhat delicate, and has by no means recovered from the shock of her father’s sudden death – a very sad affair,” added Mr. Cranley, in a sympathetic voice.

“Poor dear girl!” cried Mrs. St. John Deloraine, with the ready tears in her eyes; for this lady spontaneously acted on the injunction to weep with those who weep, and also laugh with those who laugh.

Mr. Cranley, who was beginning to feel hungry, led her thoughts off to the latest farce in which Mr. Toole had amused the town; and when Mrs. St. John Deloraine had giggled till she wept again over her memories of this entertainment, she suddenly looked at her watch.

“Why, he’s very late,” she said; “and yet it is not far to come from the Hit or Miss.”

“From the Hit or Miss!” cried Mr. Cranley, much louder than he was aware.

“Yes; you may well wonder, if you don’t know about it, that I should have asked a gentleman from a public-house to meet you. But you will be quite in love with him; he is such a very good young man. Not handsome, nor very amusing; but people think a great deal too much of amusingness now. He is very, very good, and spends almost all his time among the poor. He is a Fellow of his College at Oxford.”

During this discourse Mr. Cranley was pretending to play with the terrier; but, stoop as he might, his face was livid, and he knew it.

“Did I tell you his name?” Mrs. St. John Deloraine ran on. “He is a – ”

Here the door was opened, and the servant announced “Mr. Maitland.”

When Mrs. St. John Deloraine had welcomed her new guest, she turned, and found that Mr. Cranley was looking out of the window.

His position was indeed agonizing, and, in the circumstances, a stronger heart might have blanched at the encounter.

When Cranley last met Maitland, he had been the guest of that philanthropist, and he had gone from his table to swindle his fellow-revellers. What other things he had done – things in which Maitland was concerned – the reader knows, or at least suspects. But it was not these deeds which troubled Mr. Cranley, for these he knew were undetected. It was that affair of the baccarat which unmanned him.

There was nothing for it but to face Maitland and the situation.

“Let me introduce you – ” said Mrs. St. John Deloraine.

“There is no need,” interrupted Maitland. “Mr. Cranley and I have known each other for some time. I don’t think we have met,” he added, looking at Cranley, “since you dined with me at the Olympic, and we are not likely to meet again, I’m afraid; for to-morrow, as I have come to tell Mrs. Si John Deloraine, I go to Paris on business of importance.”

Mr. Cranley breathed again; it was obvious that Maitland, living out of the world as he did, and concerned (as Cranley well knew him to be) with private affairs of an urgent character, had never been told of the trouble at the Cockpit, or had, in his absent fashion, never attended to what he might have heard with the hearing of the ear. As to Paris, he had the best reason for guessing why Maitland was bound thither, as he was the secret source of the information on which Maitland proposed to act.

At luncheon – which, like the dinner described by the American guest, was “luscious and abundant” – Mr. Cranley was more sparkling than the champagne, and made even Maitland laugh. He recounted little philanthropic misadventures of his own – cases in which he had been humorously misled by the Captain Wraggs of this world, or beguiled by the authors of that polite correspondence – begging letters.

When luncheon was over, and when Maitland was obliged, reluctantly, to go (for he liked Mrs. St. John Deloraine’s company very much), Cranley, who had determined to see him out, shook hands in a very cordial way with the Fellow of St. Gatien’s.

“And when are we likely to meet again?” he asked.

“I really don’t know,” said Maitland. “I have business in Paris, and I cannot say how long I may be detained on the Continent.”

“No more can I,” said Mr. Cranley to himself; “but I hope you won’t return in time to bother me with your blundering inquiries, if ever you have the luck to return at all.”

But while he said this to himself, to Maitland he only wished a good voyage, and particularly recommended to him a comedy (and a comédienne) at the Palais Royal.