Kitabı oku: «Between the Dark and the Daylight», sayfa 8

Nelly

CHAPTER I

"Why!" Mr. Gibbs paused. He gave a little gasp. He bent still closer. Then the words came with a rush: "It's Nelly!"

He glanced at the catalogue. "No. 259-'Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!'-Philip Bodenham." It was a small canvas, representing the interior of an ill-furnished apartment in which a woman sat, on a rickety chair, at a rickety table, sewing. The picture was an illustration of "The Song of the Shirt."

Mr. Gibbs gazed at the woman's face depicted on the canvas, with gaping eyes.

"It's Nelly!" he repeated. There was a catch in his voice. "Nelly!"

He tore himself away as if he were loth to leave the woman who sat there sewing. He went to the price list which the Academicians keep in the lobby. He turned the leaves. The picture was unsold. The artist had appraised it at a modest figure. Mr. Gibbs bought it there and then. Then he turned to his catalogue to discover the artist's address. Mr. Bodenham lived in Manresa Road, Chelsea.

Not many minutes after a cab drove up to the Manresa Studios. Mr. Gibbs knocked at a door on the panels of which was inscribed Mr. Bodenham's name.

"Come in!" cried a voice.

Mr. Gibbs entered. An artist stood at his easel.

"Mr. Bodenham?"

"I am Mr. Bodenham."

"I am Mr. Gibbs. I have just purchased your picture at the Academy, 'Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!'" Mr. Bodenham bowed. "I-I wish to make a-a few inquiries about-about the picture."

Mr. Gibbs was as nervous as a schoolboy. He stammered and he blushed. The artist seemed to be amused. He smiled.

"You wish to make a few inquiries about the picture-yes?"

"About the-about the subject of the picture. That is, about-about the model."

Mr. Gibbs became a peony red. The artist's smile grew more pronounced.

"About the model?"

"Yes, about the model. Where does she live?"

Although the day was comparatively cool, Mr. Gibbs was so hot that it became necessary for him to take out his handkerchief to wipe his brow. Mr. Bodenham was a sunny-faced young man. He looked at his visitor with laughter in his eyes.

"You are aware, Mr. Gibbs, that yours is rather an unusual question. I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance, and we artists are not in the habit of giving information about our models to perfect strangers. It would not do. Moreover, how do you know that I painted from a model? The faces in pictures are sometimes creations of the artist's imagination. Perhaps oftener than the public think."

"I know the model in 'Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!'"

"You know her? Then why do you come to me for information?"

"I should have said that I knew her years ago."

Mr. Gibbs looked round the room a little doubtfully. Then he laid his hand on the back of a chair, as if for the support, moral and physical, which it afforded him. He looked at the artist with his big, grave eyes.

"As I say, Mr. Bodenham, I knew her years ago-and I loved her."

There was a catch in his voice. The artist seemed to be growing more and more amused. Mr. Gibbs went on:

"I was a younger man then. She was but a girl. We both of us were poor. We loved each other dearly. We agreed that I should go abroad and make my fortune. When I had made it, I was to come back to her."

The big man paused. His listener was surprised to find how much his visitor's curious earnestness impressed him. "I had hard times of it at first. Now and then I heard from her. At last her letters ceased. About the time her letters ceased, my prospects bettered. Now I'm doing pretty well. So I've come to take her back with me to the other side. Mr. Bodenham, I've looked for her everywhere. As they say, high and low. I've been to her old home, and to mine-I've been just everywhere. But no one seems to know anything about her. She has just clean gone, vanished out of sight. I was thinking that I should have to go back, after all, without her, when I saw your picture in the Academy, and I knew the girl you had painted was Nelly. So I bought your picture-her picture. And now I want you to tell me where she lives."

There was a momentary silence when the big man finished.

"Yours is a very romantic story, Mr. Gibbs. Since you have done me the honour to make of me your confidant, I shall have pleasure in giving you the address of the original of my little picture-the address, that is, at which I last heard of her. I have reason to believe that her address is not infrequently changed. When I last heard of her, she was-what shall I say? – hard up."

"Hard up, was she? Was she very hard up, Mr. Bodenham?"

"I'm afraid, Mr. Gibbs, that she was as hard up as she could be-and live."

Mr. Gibbs cleared his throat:

"Thank you. Will you give me her address, Mr. Bodenham?"

Mr. Bodenham wrote something on a slip of paper.

"There it is. It is a street behind Chelsea Hospital-about as unsavoury a neighbourhood as you will easily find."

Mr. Gibbs found that the artist's words were justified by facts-it was an unsavoury neighbourhood into which the cabman found his way. No. 20 was the number which Mr. Bodenham had given him. The door of No. 20 stood wide open. Mr. Gibbs knocked with his stick. A dirty woman appeared from a room on the left.

"Does Miss Brock live here?"

"Never heard tell of no such name. Unless it's the young woman what lives at the top of the 'ouse-third floor back. Perhaps it's her you want. Is it a model that you're after? Because, that's what she is-leastways I've heard 'em saying so. Top o' the stairs, first door to your left."

Mr. Gibbs started to ascend.

"Take care of them stairs," cried the woman after him. "They wants knowing."

Mr. Gibbs found that what the woman said was true-they did want knowing. Better light, too would have been an assistant to a better knowledge. He had to strike a match to enable him to ascertain if he had reached the top. A squalid top it was-it smelt! By the light of the flickering match he perceived that there was a door upon his left. He knocked. A voice cried to him, for the second time that day:

"Come in!"

But this voice was a woman's. At the sound of it, the heart in the man's great chest beat, in a sledge-hammer fashion, against his ribs. His hand trembled as he turned the handle, and when he had opened the door, and stood within the room, his heart, which had been beating so tumultuously a moment before, stood still.

The room, which was nothing but a bare attic with raftered ceiling, was imperfectly lighted by a small skylight-a skylight which seemed as though it had not been cleaned for ages, so obscured was the glass by the accumulations of the years. By the light of this skylight Mr. Gibbs could see that a woman was standing in the centre of the room.

"Nelly!" he cried.

The woman shrank back with, as it were, a gesture of repulsion. Mr. Gibbs moved forward. "Nelly! Don't you know me? I am Tom."

"Tom?"

The woman's voice was but an echo.

"Tom! Yes, my own, own darling, I am Tom."

Mr. Gibbs advanced. He held out his arms. He was just in time to catch the woman, or she would have fallen to the floor.

CHAPTER II

"Nelly, don't you know me?" The woman was coming to.

"Haven't you a light?" The woman faintly shook her head.

"See, I have your portrait where you placed it; it has never left me all the time. But when I saw your picture I did not need your portrait to tell me it was you."

"When you saw my picture?"

"Your portrait in Mr. Bodenham's picture at Academy 'Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!'"

"Mr. Bodenham's-I see."

The woman's tone was curiously cold.

"Nelly, you don't seem to be very glad to see me."

"Have you got any money?"

"Any money, Nelly?"

"I am hungry."

"Hungry!"

The woman's words seemed to come to him with the force of revelation.

"Hungry!" She turned her head away. "Oh, my God, Nelly." His voice trembled. "Wa-wait here, I-I sha'n't be a moment. I've a cab at the door."

He was back almost as soon as he went. He brought with him half the contents of a shop-among other things, a packet of candles. These he lighted, standing them, on their own ends, here and there about the room. The woman ate shyly, as if, in spite of her confession of hunger, she had little taste for food. She was fingering the faded photograph of a girl which Mr. Gibbs had taken from his pocket-book.

"Is this my portrait?"

"Nelly! Don't you remember it?"

"How long is it since it was taken?"

"Why, it's more than seven years, isn't it?"

"Do you think I've altered much?"

Mr. Gibbs went to her. He studied her by the light of the candles.

"Well, you might be plumper, and you might look happier, perhaps, but all that we'll quickly alter. For the rest, thank God, you're my old Nelly." He took her in his arms. As he did so she drew a long, deep breath. Holding her at arms-length, he studied her again. "Nelly, I'm afraid you haven't been having the best of times."

She broke from him with sudden passion.

"Don't speak of it! Don't speak of it! The life I've lived-" She paused. All at once her voice became curiously hard. "But through it all I've been good. I swear it. No one knows what the temptation is, to a woman who has lived the life I have, to go wrong. But I never went. Tom" – she laid her hand upon Mr. Gibb's arm as, with marked awkwardness, his name issued from her lips-"say that you believe that I've been good."

His only answer was to take her in his arms again, and to kiss her.

Mr. Gibbs provided his new-found lost love with money. With that money she renewed her wardrobe. He found her other lodgings in a more savoury neighbourhood at Putney. In those lodgings he once more courted her.

He told himself during those courtship days, that, after all, the years had changed her. She was a little hard. He did not remember the Nelly of the old time as being hard. But, then, what had happened during the years which had come between! Father and mother both had died. She had been thrown out into the world without a friend, without a penny! His letters had gone astray. In those early days he had been continually wandering hither and thither. Her letters had strayed as well as his. Struggling for existence, when she saw that no letters reached her, she told herself either that he too had died, or that he had forgotten her. Her heart hardened. It was with her a bitter striving for daily bread. She had tried everything. Teaching, domestic service, chorus singing, needlework, acting as an artist's model-she had failed in everything alike. At the best she had only been able to keep body and soul together. It had come to the worst at last. On the morning on which he found her, she had been two days without food. She had decided that, that night, if things did not mend during the intervening hours-of which she had no hope-that she would seek for better fortune-in the Thames.

She told her story, not all at once, but at different times, and in answer to her lover's urgent solicitations. She herself at first evinced a desire for reticence. The theme seemed too painful a theme for her to dwell upon. But the man's hungry heart poured forth such copious stores of uncritical sympathy that, after a while, it seemed to do her good to pour into his listening ears a particular record of her woes. She certainly had suffered. But now that the days of suffering were ended, it began almost to be a pleasure to recall the sorrows which were past.

In the sunshine of prosperity the woman's heart became young again, and softer. It was not only that she became plumper-which she certainly did-but she became, inwardly and outwardly, more beautiful. Her lover told himself, and her, that she was more beautiful even than she had been as a girl. He declared that she was far prettier than she appeared in the old-time photograph. She smiled, and she charmed him with an infinite charm.

The days drew near to the wedding. Had he had his way he would have married her, off-hand, when he found her in the top attic in that Chelsea slum. But she said no. Then she would not even talk of marriage. To hear her, one would have thought that the trials she had undergone had unfitted her for wedded life. He laughed her out of that-a day was fixed. She postponed it once, and then again. She had it that she needed time to recuperate-that she would not marry with the shadow of that grisly past still haunting her at night. He argued that the royal road to recuperation was in his arms. He declared that she would be troubled by no haunting shadows as his dear wife. And, at last, she yielded. A final date was fixed. That day drew near.

As the day drew near, she grew more tender. On the night before the wedding-day her tenderness reached, as it were, its culminating point. Never before had she been so sweet-so softly caressing. They were but to part for a few short hours. In the morning they were to meet, never, perhaps, to part again. But it seemed as if he could not tear himself away, and as if she could not let him go.

Just before he left her a little dialogue took place between them, which if lover-like, none the less was curious.

"Tom" she said, "suppose, after we are married, you should find out that I have not been so good as you thought, what would you say?"

"Say? – nothing."

"Oh yes, you would, else you would be less than man. Suppose, for instance, that you found out I had deceived you."

"I decline to suppose impossibilities."

She had been circled by his arms. Now she drew herself away from him. She stood where the gaslight fell right on her.

"Tom, look at me carefully! Are you sure you know me?"

"Nelly!"

"Are you quite sure you are not mistaking me for some one else? Are you quite sure, Tom?"

"My own!"

He took her in his arms again. As he did so, she looked him steadfastly in the face.

"Tom, I think it possible that, some day, you may think less of me than you do now. But" – she put her hand over his mouth to stop his speaking-"whatever you may think of me, I shall always love you" – there was an appreciable pause, and an appreciable catching of her breath-"better than my life."

She kissed him, with unusual abandonment, long and fervently, upon the lips.

The morning of the following day came with the promise of fine weather. Theirs had been an unfashionable courtship-it was to be an unfashionable wedding. Mr. Gibbs was to call for his bride, at her lodgings. They were to drive together, in a single hired brougham, to the church.

Even before the appointed hour, the expectant bridegroom drew up to the door of the house in which his lady-love resided. His knock was answered with an instant readiness which showed that his arrival had been watched and waited for. The landlady herself opened the door, her countenance big with tidings.

"Miss Brock has gone, sir."

"Gone!" Mr. Gibbs was puzzled by the woman's tone. "Gone where? For a walk?"

"No, sir, she's gone away. She's left this letter, sir, for you."

The landlady thrust an envelope into his hand. It was addressed simply, "Thomas Gibbs, Esq." With the envelope in his hand, and an odd something clutching at his heart, he went into the empty sitting-room. He took the letter out of its enclosure, and this is what he read:

"My own, own Tom, – You never were mine, and it is the last time I shall ever call you so. I am going back, I have only too good reason to fear, to the life from which you took me, because-I am not your Nelly."

The words were doubly underlined, they were unmistakable, yet he had to read them over and over again before he was able to grasp their meaning. What did they mean? Had his darling suddenly gone mad? The written sheet swam before his eyes. It was with an effort he read on.

"How you ever came to mistake me for her I cannot understand. The more I have thought of it, the stranger it has seemed. I suppose there must be a resemblance between us-between your Nelly and me. Though I expect the resemblance is more to the face in Mr. Bodenham's picture than it is to mine. I never did think the woman in Mr. Bodenham's picture was like me-though I was his model. I never could have been the original of your photograph of Nelly-it is not in the least like me. I think that you came to England with your heart and mind and eyes so full of Nelly, and so eager for a sight of her, that, in your great hunger of love, you grasped at the first chance resemblance you encountered. That is the only explanation I can think of, Tom, of how you can have mistaken me for her.

"My part is easier to explain. It is quite true, as I told you, that I was starving when you came to me. I was so weak and faint, and sick at heart, that your sudden appearance and strange behaviour-in a perfect stranger, for you were a perfect stranger, Tom-drove from me the few senses I had left. When I recovered I found myself in the arms of a man who seemed to know me, and who spoke to me words of love-words which I had never heard from the lips of a man before. I sent you to buy me food. While you were gone I told myself-wickedly! I know, Tom it was wickedly! – what a chance had come at last, which would save me from the river, at least for a time, and I should be a fool to let it slip. I perceived that you were mistaking me for some one else. I resolved to allow you to continue under your misapprehension. I did not doubt that you would soon discover your mistake. What would happen then I did not pause to think. But events marched quicker than I, in that first moment of mad impulse, had bargained for. You never did discover your mistake. How that was, even now I do not understand. But you began to talk of marriage. That was a prospect I dared not face.

"For one thing-forgive me for writing it, but I must write it, now that I am writing to you for the first and for the last time-I began to love you. Not for the man I supposed you to be, but for the man I knew you were. I loved you-and I love you! I shall never cease to love you, with a love of which I did not think I was capable. As I told you, Tom, last night-when I kissed you! – I love you better than my own life. Better, far better, for my life is worthless, and you-you are not worthless, Tom! And I would not-even had I dared! – allow you to marry me; not for myself, but for another; not for the present, but for the past; not for the thing I was, but for the thing which you supposed I had been, once. I would have married you for your own sake; you would not have married me for mine. And so, since I dared not undeceive you-I feared to see the look which would come in your face and your eyes-I am going to steal back, like a thief, to the life from which you took me. I have had a greater happiness than ever I expected. I have enjoyed those stolen kisses which they say are sweetest. Your happiness is still to come. You will find Nelly. Such love as yours will not go unrewarded. I have been but an incident, a chapter in your life, which now is closed. God bless you, Tom! I am yours, although you are not mine-not yours, Nelly Brock-but yours, Helen Reeves."

Mr. Gibbs read this letter once, then twice, and then again. Then he rang the bell. The landlady appeared with a suspicious promptitude which suggested the possibility of her having been a spectator of his proceedings through the keyhole.

"When did Miss Brock go out?"

"Quite early, sir. I'm sure, sir, I was quite taken aback when she said that she was going-on her wedding-day and all."

"Did she say where she was going?"

"Not a word, sir. She said: 'Mrs. Horner, I am going away. Give this letter to Mr. Gibbs when he comes.' That was every word she says, sir; then she goes right out of the front door."

"Did she take any luggage?"

"Just the merest mite of a bag, sir-not another thing."

Mr. Gibbs asked no other questions. He left the room and went out into the street. The driver of the brougham was instructed to drive, not to church, but-to his evident and unconcealed surprise-to that slum in Chelsea. She had written that she was returning to the old life. The old life was connected with that top attic. He thought it might be worth his while to inquire if anything had been seen or heard of her. Nothing had. He left his card, with instructions to write him should any tidings come that way. Then, since it was unadvisable to drive about all day under the ægis of a Jehu, whose button-hole was adorned with a monstrous wedding favour, he dismissed the carriage and sent it home.

He turned into the King's Road. He was walking in the direction of Sloane Square, when a voice addressed him from behind.

"Tom!"

It was a woman's voice. He turned. A woman was standing close behind him, looking and smiling at him-a stout and a dowdy woman. Cheaply and flashily dressed in faded finery-not the sort of woman whose recognition one would be over-anxious to compel. Mr. Gibbs looked at her. There was something in her face and in her voice which struck faintly some forgotten chord in his memory.

"Tom! don't you know me? I am Nelly."

He looked at her intently for some instants. Then it all flashed over him. This was Nelly, the real Nelly, the Nelly of his younger days, the Nelly he had come to find. This dandy sloven, whose shrill voice proclaimed her little vulgar soul-so different from that other Nelly, whose soft, musical tones had not been among the least of her charms. The recognition came on him with the force of a sudden shock. He reeled, so that he had to clutch at a railing to help him stand.

"Tom! what's the matter? Aren't you well? Or is it the joy of seeing me has sent you silly?"

She laughed, the dissonant laughter of the female Cockney of a certain class. Mr. Gibbs recovered his balance and his civility.

"Thank you, I am very well. And you?"

"Oh, I'm all right. There's never much the matter with me. I can't afford the time to be ill." She laughed again. "Well, this is a start my meeting you. Come and have a bit o' dinner along with us."

"Who is us? Your father and your mother?"

"Why, father, he's been dead these five years, and mother, she's been dead these three. I don't want you to have a bit of dinner along with them-not hardly." Again she laughed. "It's my old man I mean. Why, you don't mean to say you don't know I'm married! Why, I'm the mother of five."

He had fallen in at her side. They were walking on together-he like a man in a dream.

"We're doing pretty well considering, we manage to live, you know." She laughed again. She seemed filled with laughter, which was more than Mr. Gibbs was then. "We're fishmongers, that's what we are. William he's got a very tidy trade, as good as any in the road. There, here's our shop!" She paused in front of a fishmonger's shop. "And there's our name" – she pointed up at it. "Nelly Brock I used to be, and now I'm Mrs. William Morgan."

She laughed again. She led the way through the shop to a little room beyond. A man was seated on the table, reading a newspaper, a man without a coat on, and with a blue apron tied about his waist.

"William, who do you think I've brought to see you? You'll never guess in a month of Sundays. This is Tom Gibbs, of whom you've heard me speak dozens of times."

Mr. Morgan wiped his hand upon his apron.

Then he held it out to Mr. Gibbs. Mr. Gibbs was conscious, as he grasped it, that it reeked of fish.

"How are you, Gibbs? Glad to see you!" Mr. Morgan turned to his wife. "Where's that George? There's a pair of soles got to be sent up to Sydney Street, and there's not a soul about the place to take 'em."

"That George is a dratted nuisance, that's what he is. He never is anywhere to be found when you want him. You remember, William, me telling you about Tom Gibbs? My old sweetheart, you know, he was. He went away to make his fortune, and I was to wait for him till he came back, and I daresay I should have waited if you hadn't just happened to come along."

"I wish I hadn't just happened, then. I wish she'd waited for you, Gibbs. It'd have been better for me, and worse for you, old man."

"That's what they all say, you know, after a time."

Mrs. Morgan laughed. But Mr. Morgan did not seem to be in a particularly jovial frame of mind.

"It's all very well for you to talk, you know, but I don't like the way things are managed in this house, and so I tell you. There's your new lodger come while you've been out, and her room's like a regular pig-sty, and I had to show her upstairs myself, with the shop chock-full of customers." Mr. Morgan drew his hand across his nose. "See you directly, Gibbs; some one must attend to business."

Mr. Morgan withdrew to the shop. Mr. Gibbs and his old love were left alone.

"Never you mind, William. He's all right; but he's a bit huffy-men will get huffy when things don't go just as they want 'em. I'll just run upstairs and send the lodger down here, while I tidy up her room. The children slept in it last night. I never expected her till this afternoon; she's took me unawares. You wait here; I shan't be half a minute. Then we'll have a bit of dinner."

Mr. Gibbs, left alone, sat in a sort of waking dream. Could this be Nelly-the Nelly of whom he had dreamed, for whom he had striven, whom he had come to find-this mother of five? Why, she must have begun to play him false almost as soon as his back was turned. She must have already been almost standing at the altar steps with William Morgan while writing the last of her letters to him. And had his imagination, or his memory, tricked him? Had youth, or distance, lent enchantment to the view? Had she gone back, or had he advanced? Could she have been the vulgar drab which she now appeared to be, in the days of long ago?

As he sat there, endeavouring to resolve these riddles which had been so suddenly presented for solution, the door opened and some one entered.

"I beg your pardon," said the voice of the intruder, on perceiving that the room was already provided with an occupant.

Mr. Gibbs glanced up. The voice fell like the voice of a magician on his ear. He rose to his feet, all trembling. In the doorway was standing the other Nelly-the false, and yet the true one. The Nelly of his imagination. The Nelly to whom he was to have been married that day. He went to her with a sudden cry.

"Nelly!"

"Tom!" She shrank away. But in spite of her shrinking, he took her in his arms.

"My own, own darling."

"Tom," she moaned, "don't you understand-I'm not Nelly!"

"I know it, and I thank God, my darling, you are not."

"Tom! What do you mean?"

"I mean that I have found Nelly, and I mean that, thank Heaven! I have found you too-never, my darling, please Heaven! to lose sight of you again."

They had only just time to withdraw from a too suspicious neighbourhood, before the door opened again to admit Mrs. Morgan.

"Tom, this is our new lodger. I just asked her if she'd mind stepping downstairs while I tidied up her room a bit. Miss Reeves, this is an old sweetheart of mine-Mr. Gibbs."

Mr. Gibbs turned to the "new lodger."

"Miss Reeves and I are already acquainted. Miss Reeves, you have heard me speak of Mrs. Morgan, though not by that name. This is Nelly."

Miss Reeves turned and looked at Mrs. Morgan, and as she looked-she gasped.