Bar Sinister
Breakfast in Pond Cottage on that Sunday morning proved to be the pleasantest meal that Wolf had yet enjoyed under the Otter roof.
Mrs. Otter, dressed in stiff puce-coloured silk, and happy to have both her sons at the table, spoke at some length to their guest about the morning service in the church to which she and Darnley were presently to go. She explained to him how much she liked the quiet, reverent manner in which Mr. Valley conducted the worship of the parish.
“He makes me sad at other times,” she said. “He’s an unhappy little man; and everyone knows how he drinks. He ought to have a wife to look after him, or at least a housekeeper. He’s got no one in the house. How he gets enough to eat I can’t imagine.”
“Mother thinks no household can get on for a day without a woman in it,” said Darnley.
Jason Otter’s pallid face reddened a little. “Of course, we know he wants to be the only man that any of the village-boys admire. It’s human nature—that’s what it is. These country clergymen are all the same.”
“There are the bells!” cried Mrs. Otter, thankful for the opportunity of staving off discord between the brothers. They all four listened in silence, while the faint notes from the Henry the Seventh tower penetrated the walls of Pond Cottage.
“That means it’s ten o’clock,” said Darnley. “They ring again at half-past, don’t they, Mother?”
Wolf felt an extraordinary sense of peacefulness in the air that morning. The sound of the bells accentuated it; and he wondered vaguely to himself whether he wouldn’t offer to go to church with the mother and the son.
“By the way,” he remarked, “may I ask you people a question, while I think of it?”
They all three awoke from their individual meditations and gave him their undivided attention. Mrs. Otter did this with serene complacency, evidently assuming that the nature of his remark would prove harmless and agreeable. Jason did it with nervous concern, touched with a flicker of what looked like personal fear. Darnley did it with an expression of weary politeness, as much as to say, “Oh, God! Oh, God! Am I not going to have even Sunday free from other people’s problems?”
“It’s a simple enough thing,” Wolf said quickly, realizing that he had made more stir than he intended. “I only wanted to know why this house of yours is called Pond Cottage, when there’s no trace of a pond.”
There was an instantaneous sign of startled agitation all the way round the table.
“The pond is there all right,” said Darnley, quietly. “It’s over that hedge, just outside our gate, the other side of the lane. It’s rather an uncomfortable topic with us, Solent; because at least three times James Redfern thought of drowning himself in it. He may have thought of it more times than that. Jason found him there three times. We don’t like the pond for that reason. That’s all!”
Jason Otter got up from his chair. “I’ll go and put on my boots,” he remarked to Wolf, “and we’ll go and visit the pond. You ought to see it. And there are other things I can show you, too, while mother and Darnley are in church. You’ve got your boots on, I think? Well! I won’t keep you very long.”
He left the room as he spoke and Mrs. Otter looked appealingly at her younger son.
“Don’t worry, Mother dear,” said Darnley, gravely, laying his hand upon her knees.
He turned to Wolf. “You must help us in keeping my brother in good spirits, Solent,” he said. “But I know I can trust you.”
When Wolf and Jason did finally cross the lane together and enter the opposite field—which they achieved by climbing up a steep bank and pushing their way through a gap in the hedge—the sense of peacefulness in the whole air of the place had intensified to a degree that was so enchanting to Wolf that nothing seemed able to disturb his contentment.
The field he found himself in was a very large one, and only a broken, wavering line of willows and poplars at the further end of it gave any indication of the presence of water. The atmosphere was deliciously hushed and misty; no wind was stirring; and the placid morning sun fell upon the grass and the trees with a sort of largeness of indifference, as if it were too happy, in some secretive way of its own, to care whether its warmth gave pleasure or the reverse to the lives that thrived under its influence. It seemed to possess the secret of complete detachment, this sunshine; but it seemed also to possess the secret of projecting the clue to such detachment into the heart of every living existence that its vaporous warmth approached.
Wolf was suddenly aware of a rising to the surface of his mind of that trance-like “mythology” of his. All the little outward things that met his gaze seemed to form so many material moulds into which this magnetic current set itself to run.
He surveyed a patch of sun-dried cattle-dung upon which the abstracted Jason had inadvertently planted his foot and across which was slowly moving with exquisite precaution a brilliantly green beetle. He surveyed a group of small crimson-topped daisies over which a sturdy, flowerless thistle threw a faint and patient shadow. He surveyed the disordered flight of a flock of starlings, heading away from the pond towards the village. But of all these things what arrested him most was the least obvious, the least noticeable. It was, in fact, no more than a certain ridge of rough unevenness in the ground at his feet; a nameless unevenness, which assumed, as the misty sunlight wavered over it, the predominant place in this accidental pattern of impressions.
Jason said nothing at all as they walked together slowly across the field. The man had ostentatiously avoided any approach to Sunday clothes that morning; and, without hat or stick, in a very shabby overcoat, he presented rather a lamentable figure, as he led the way forward towards Lenty Pond.
They reached the willows and poplars at last; and Wolf stared in astonishment at what he saw. He found himself standing on the brink of an expanse of water that was nearly as large as a small lake. The opposite side of it was entirely covered with a bed of thick reeds, among which he could see the little red-and-black shapes of several moorhens moving; but from where he stood, under these willows, right away to the pond’s centre, the water was deep and dark, and even on that placid Sunday a little menacing.
“He could have done it easily if he’d wanted to, couldn’t he?” said Jason, gazing at the water. “The truth is he didn’t want to! Darnley’s a sentimental fool. Redfern didn’t want to drown himself. Not a bit of it. What did he come here for, then? He came to rouse pity, to make people’s minds go crazy with pity.”
“The man must have been thinking of saying just this to me all the way across the field,” thought Wolf. But Jason jerked out now a much more disturbing sentence.
“The boy did upset one person’s mind. He made one person’s mind feel like a weed in this water! And you’d be surprised to hear who that person was.”
But Wolf just then felt it very hard to give him his complete attention. For although the mystical ecstasy he had just experienced had faded, everything about the day had become momentous in his hidden secretive life; and he felt detached, remote, disembodied, for all his Sunday clothes. He could hear the cawing of a couple of rooks high up in the sky; and even when they ceased cawing, the creaking of their wings seemed like the indolence of the very day itself. “A weed in the water,” he echoed mechanically; while his mind, voyaging over those hushed West Country pastures, followed the creaking wings.
“Who was it, Mr. Otter, who was so upset by Redfern?”
The appeal in Jason’s miserable eyes grew still more disturbing. The man’s soul seemed to come waveringly forward, like a grey vapour, out of its eye-sockets, till it formed itself into a shadowy double of the person who stood by Wolf’s side.
“Can’t you guess?” murmured Jason Otter. “It was I … I … I … You’re surprised. Well, anyone would be. You wouldn’t have thought of that, though you are Mr. Urquhart’s secretary and have come from a college! But you needn’t look like that; for it’s true! Darnley sentimentalizes about his death, which was unfortunate, of course, but perfectly natural—he died of pneumonia, as any of us might!—but what drove me to distraction was this playing upon a person’s pity. He always did it—from the very first day. Darnley yielded to it at once, though he never liked the boy. I resisted it. I am of iron in these things. I know too much. But by degrees, can’t you understand, though I didn’t yield to it, it began to bother my mind. Pity’s the most cruel trap ever invented. You can see that, I suppose? Take it that there were only one unhappy person left, why, it might spoil all the delight in the world! That is why I’d like to kill pity—why I’d like to make people see what madness it is.”
Wolf drew away from him a step or two, till he stood at the very edge of the pond, and then he remarked abruptly, “Your mother told me that Redfern was one of the most good-looking young men she has ever seen.”
Having flung out these words, he began flicking the dark, brimming water with the end of his stick, watching the ripples which he caused spreading far out towards the centre. Exactly why he made that remark just then he would have found it hard to explain. The wraithlike phantom-soul that had emerged from Jason’s eye-sockets drew back instantaneously, like a puppet pulled by a string; and over the two apertures into which it withdrew there formed a glacial film of guarded suspicion.
“I have seen better-looking ones,” said Jason Otter drily. “He used to help that fool Valley in his High Church services. I don’t know whether the Virgin Mary ever appeared to him; but I know he used to take her flowers, because he used to steal them out of our garden! My mother let him steal because it was—Hullo! What’s up now? Who’s this?”
Wolf swung round and observed to his surprise the tall figure of Roger Monk advancing towards them across the field.
“It’s something for you. It’s something about you,” said Jason, hurriedly. “I think I’ll walk round the pond.”
“Why do that?” protested Wolf. “There’ll be no secret about it, even if it is for me.”
“He’ll like to find you alone best. These servants of these landowners always do,” replied the other. “Besides, Mr. Urquhart hates me. He knows I know what he is. He’s not a common kind of fool. He likes having good meals and good wine, but he’s ready to risk all that for I don’t know what!”
“I tell you I have no secrets with Urquhart,” rejoined Wolf. “There’s absolutely no need for you to leave us.”
“This gardener looked at me very suspiciously yesterday,” whispered Jason. “I saw him through the hedge, in his garden. He was planting something, but he kept looking at the hedge. He must have known I was there. He must have been wondering whether he dared shoot at me with a shotgun. So goodbye! I’m going to walk round the pond very slowly.”
Wolf moved toward Mr. Monk, leaving his companion to shuffle off as he pleased. The gigantic servant looked like a respectable prizefighter in his Sunday clothes. When the two men met he took from his pocket a telegram and handed it to Wolf, touching his hat politely as he did so.
“This came early,” he said. “But there was no one else to send; and I had to tend to things before I could bring it myself. If there’s any answer, ’twill have to go by way of Blacksod, for our office shuts at noon.”
Wolf opened the telegram. It was from his mother, and ran as follows:
“Arrive Ramsgard seven o’clock Sunday night Tradesmen have no sense Could sleep at Lovelace.”
“There’s no answer, Monk,” he said gravely; and then, after prodding the ground thoughtfully with his stick, and looking at the figure of Jason Otter, which was now stationary behind a poplar-tree, “This is from my mother,” he added. “She is coming down from town tonight.”
“Very nice for you, Sir, I’m sure,” murmured the man. “ ’Tain’t every gentleman has got a mother.”
“But the difficulty is, Monk,” Wolf went on, “that my mother wants to stay down here. You don’t happen to know of any cottage or any rooms in a cottage that we could get for a time, do you?”
Roger Monk looked at him thoughtfully. “Not that I knows of, Sir,” he began, his gipsy-like eyes wandering from Wolf’s face to the landscape in front of him, a portion of which landscape included the figure of Mr. Otter, hiding behind the poplar-tree.
“That is to say, Sir, unless by any chance … but that ain’t likely, Sir. …”
“What do you mean, Monk?” enquired the other, eagerly.
“ ’Twere only that I myself live lonesome-like in me own place … and seeing you’re helping Squire with his writings … and Lenty Cottage be neat set up, I were just thinking—”
Wolf swung his stick. “The very thing!” he cried excitedly. In a flash his imagination became abnormally active. He visualized this gardener’s house in all its details. He saw himself, as well as his mother, snugly ensconced there for years and years … perhaps for the rest of their lives!
“But we should be a nuisance to you, Monk, even if the Squire were amenable, shouldn’t we?”
The man shook his head.
“Well, I’ll come straight home with you now, Monk, if I may,” said Wolf impatiently. “Were you going home now?”
“I was.”
“Well, I’ll just run and tell Mr. Otter; and then I’ll come with you.”
He left the man standing where they had been talking, and hurried round the edge of the pond. There was something peculiarly appealing to him in the idea of this cottage. How pleasant it would be, he thought, when he and his mother were living together there some five years hence, if he happened to say to her, as he came in to tea from his Sunday walk, with a bunch of primroses in his hand, “I came past Lenty Pond today, Mother, where I first heard about the chance of our settling here!”
He found Jason sitting on the roots of the poplar, leaning his back against the tree-trunk and holding the tails of his overcoat stretched tightly over his knees, so that he should be entirely concealed from view.
“That man hasn’t gone,” was his greeting to Wolf. “He’s standing there still.”
“I know he is, Otter. He’s brought a telegram for me. My mother’s coming down tonight. Monk says he doesn’t see any reason why she and I shouldn’t take rooms in his cottage.”
Jason looked up at him from where he sat upon the poplar-root, and the whimsical manner in which he hugged his coattails was accentuated by a smile of hobgoblinish merriment.
“You mean to live in it?” he remarked. “You and your mother? I don’t believe old Urquhart would consider such a thing for a moment! These squires like to show off their servants’ quarters. They like to take their guests round and say: ‘That’s where my head-gardener lives. He works at his garden when he’s finished with mine! Those are “Boule de neige” roses!’ But when it comes to honest people lodging in places like that—goodness! Urquhart wouldn’t consider it. But you can try. But my advice to you is to be very careful in this matter. You never know what troubles you’ll have when you deal with people like this Monk. But you can try. There! you’d better go off with him. He’s peeping and spying at this moment. He’s thinking I’m holding you back because of the money you pay us.”
Wolf shook his head and made a movement to be gone, but the other bent forward a little and whispered up at him: “I’ll walk slowly round the pond; then if he looks back he won’t think you ought to wait for me.”
With this complicated and obscure sentence floating on the surface of his mind, Wolf left his companion to his own devices and rejoined Roger Monk.
Not more than twenty minutes’ walking brought them to the gardener’s cottage. To Wolf’s great satisfaction the place proved to be quite out of sight of the manor-house on the Ramsgard side of the orchards and the kitchen-gardens. It stood, indeed, in Lenty Lane, a little east of the drive-gates, and turned out to be a solid little cottage, pleasantly coated with white paint, and approached from the lane by a neat gravel-path, on either side of which was a row of carefully whitewashed small round stones. Wolf for some reason didn’t like the look of those white stones. Once more he regarded Lenty Cottage. The idea of its excessive neatness and tidiness, combined with the idea of its being so long empty except for this one man, troubled his nerves in some odd way. What did it suggest to him? Ah, he had it! It suggested the peculiar lonely trimness … so extraordinarily forbidding … of a gaoler’s house outside a prison-gate, or a keeper’s house outside a lunatic-asylum.
“Well, let’s see the inside,” he said, turning to his companion. “Mr. Urquhart might as well have put me up here at first.”
The other gave him one of his equivocal glances. “ ’Twere the matter of meals, I expect, Sir,” he said cautiously. “But if the lady comes, things will be different, no doubt.”
“Then you’d be pleased to have us here?”
This time the gardener’s look was direct and eager.
“I’d be glad enough to have a gent like yourself sleeping under this here roof,” he cried.
They entered the house together and the matter was soon arranged between them. When things were settled, Wolf observed the man rubbing one of his hands up and down the back of a chair. “I’d give a hundred pounds to get a place in them Shires again!” he burst out suddenly.
Wolf looked at him in astonishment. “You don’t like it here, Monk,” he murmured.
“Like it?” The man’s voice sank to a whisper. “ ’Tis easier to enter a gentleman’s service than to leave it, Sir, when that gentleman be the sort of Nebuchadnezzar my master be!”
“You aren’t a Dorset man, then?” enquired Wolf.
“I were born here,” replied the other, “but I left home when I were a kiddie, and worked in they Shires.”
This remark made clear to Wolf a great deal about Roger Monk. The upper layers of the man’s mind were sophisticated by travel. The deeper ones retained their indigenous imprint.
“Well, I must go back to Pond Cottage now,” Wolf said calmly. “Mrs. Otter and Mr. Darnley ought to be back from church by this time, and I must talk to them. We’ll arrange about terms, Monk, after I’ve seen Mr. Urquhart. Do you suppose I should find him at home now, if I looked in on my way to the cottage?”
A frown of concentrated concern clouded the countenance of the man in front of him.
“It certainly would be best,” he remarked, “if it could be done. What he’ll say to it, I don’t know, I’m sure.”
With these words ringing in his ears, Wolf, some fifteen minutes later, found himself admitted to Mr. Urquhart’s presence. He discovered his employer in his study, reading with fascinated interest the book which his new secretary had brought him.
“These Evershots will be the making of our history,” he chuckled, in high glee. “You did well with old Malakite. Five pounds for this? I tell you, it’s worth twenty! You’re a capital ambassador, Mr. Solent! … Eh? What’s that? Your mother coming here? … Monk’s front-rooms?”
He straightened out his legs and smoothed back his glossy hair from each side of that carefully brushed parting. With his great white face drooping a little on one side, with the flabby folds under his eyelids pulsing as if they possessed an independent life of their own, he made an unpleasant impression on Wolf’s mind.
Mr. Urquhart’s study was a small, dingy room, the walls of which were entirely covered by eighteenth-century prints. The Squire sat in a low, leather chair, with the Evershot chronicle on his knees; and as Wolf settled himself opposite him in a similar chair, he began to feel that, after all, he was probably exaggerating the peculiarities of King’s Barton Manor.
“It’s my nervous imagination, I expect,” he said to himself. “Urquhart’s no doubt like hundreds of other eccentric men of leisure. And as for the gardener’s chatter—I suppose servants are always glad to grumble to a stranger.”
“Didn’t my predecessor live in Monk’s house?” he found himself saying.
The squire lifted his hand from the book he held and half raised it to his well-shaven chin. “Redfern? A little while, perhaps. I really forget. Not long, anyway. That drunken individual at Pond Cottage persuaded him to go to them. It was with them he died. They told you that, I suppose?”
Mr. Urquhart’s voice was so placid and casual as he made these remarks that Wolf was seized with a sort of shame for letting his imagination run riot so among all these new acquaintances. “It’s the difference from London! That’s what explains it,” he thought to himself.
Mr. Urquhart now stopped scratching his chin with his delicate fingertips, and, bowing his head a little, fumbled once more with the pages of the book upon his knee. Wolf sank back into his deep armchair and stared at the man’s tweed trousers and shiny patent-leather shoes.
He drew a long breath that was something between a sigh of weariness and a sigh of relief. His recent interviews with Jason and Monk had given him the feeling of being on the edge of a psychic maelstrom of morbid conflicts. The comfort of this remote room and the ease of this leather chair made him at once weary of agitations and glad that he still could feel like a spectator rather than a combatant.
After all, why should he worry himself? As the philosophical Duke of Albany murmured in King Lear: “The event! Well … The event!”
“How will your mother appreciate sharing her kitchen with my man?” said Mr. Urquhart suddenly.
The remark irritated Wolf. What did this easy gentleman know about the shifts of poverty? He was himself so bent upon the arrangement that these little matters seemed quite unimportant.
“Oh, she won’t mind that!” he responded carelessly.
“What put all this into Roger’s great, stupid, silly head?” the squire went on, in his silkiest voice. “Is he tired of my company? Does he want to leave my service and enter your mother’s? What’s up with the man? It isn’t the money. I know that much. Roger cares less for money than any man I’ve ever dealt with. What can he be up to now?”
Wolf remained silent, letting him run on. But in his mind he set himself once more to wonder how far he really had exaggerated the sinister element in his employer’s character.
But Mr. Urquhart leaned forward now and regarded him intently. “You won’t play me a trick, will you, like the other one? But you’re not tricky, Mr. Solent, I can see that! On my soul, I think you’re an honest young man. Your face shows it. It has its faults as a face; but it isn’t tricky. … Well … well … well! … When does your mother arrive? I shall be interested to have the honour of meeting her again. My cousin Carfax was at one time—you know, I suppose?—excessively in love with her. … Not tonight, eh? Well, perhaps that’s as well. Mrs. Martin shall go over there and make everything straight.”
Wolf rose to his feet at this point, anxious to take his leave before the man had time to read him any passages from the Evershot Diary. Once outside the house, he took stock of the situation. He had settled matters with the occupier and with the owner of his new abode. The final arrangement he had to make was with Mrs. Otter. Therefore, off he hurried to Pond Cottage, where he found his hostess just returned from church.
But here he met with nothing but sympathy—whether, in her secret heart she was glad to get rid of him, Wolf could not say. She may have all the while regretted the loss to her eldest son of that chamber whose walls Wolf had so arbitrarily denuded. Well! They could put those pictures back on those walls now! And he mentally resolved to pay as few visits as possible to the bedroom of Mr. Jason Otter. He had no wish to behold the countenance of that “god of rain” again!
He left Pond Cottage soon after lunch, explaining that he would return that night, but would have supper in Ramsgard with his mother. The afternoon proved to be as misty and warm as the earlier hours of the day; and as he retraced the track of Thursday’s drive with Darnley, he did not permit the various agitations into which he had been plunged to destroy his delight in that relaxed and caressing weather. He found that travelling on foot in full daylight revealed to him many tokens of the Spring that he had missed on his evening drive.
Once or twice he descended into the ditches on either side of the road, where the limp whitish-pink stalks of half-hidden primroses drooped above their crinkled leaves, and, with hands and knees embedded in the warm-scented earth, pressed his face against those fragile apparitions.
The sweet, faint odour of these pale flowers made him think of Gerda Torp, and he began worrying his mind a good deal as to the effect of his mother’s arrival upon the progress of his adventure.
Long before he reached the outskirts of Ramsgard he was reminded of his approach to the famous West Country School by the various groups of straw-hatted boys—tall, reserved, disdainful—who seemed exploring, like young Norman invaders, these humble pasture-lands of the West Saxons.
One or two of the boys, as they passed him by, made hesitating half-gestures of respectful recognition. One of them actually lifted his straw-hat. Wolf became a little embarrassed by these encounters. He wondered what kind of a master these polite neophytes—for it must have been the newcomers at the place who blundered in this way—mistook him for! Did he look like a teacher of French? Or did they take him for one of that high, remote, aristocratic company—not masters at all, but Governors of the ancient School?
When he got closer to the town, he had no difficulty in espying both cemetery and workhouse across an expanse of market-gardens and small enclosed fields. The look of these objects, combined, as they were, with outlying sheds and untidy isolated hovels, gave him a sensation that he was always thrilled to receive—the peculiar sensation that is evoked by any transitional ground lying between town and country.
He had never approached any town, however insignificant, across such a margin, without experiencing a queer and quite special sense of romance. Was it that there was aroused in him some subtle memory of all the intangible sensations that his ancestors had felt, each one of them in his day, as, with so much of the unknown before them, they approached or left, in their West Country wandering, any of these historic places? Did, in fact, some floating “emanation” of human regrets and human hopes hover inevitably about such marginal tracts—redolent of so many welcomes and so many farewells?
When he arrived at last in the centre of the town and came to the gate of the Abbey, it was a few minutes to four o’clock. There was a languid afternoon service ebbing to its end in the eastern portion of the dusky nave; and, without entering the building, but lingering in the Norman entrance, Wolf contemplated once more that famous fan-tracery roof.
Those lovely organic lines and curves, up there in the greenish dimness, challenged something in his soul that was hardly ever stirred by any work of art; something that was repelled and rendered actually hostile by the kind of thing he had seen in that bedroom of Jason Otter.
This high fan-tracery roof, into whose creation so much calm, quiet mysticism must have been thrown, seemed to appeal with an almost personal sympathy to Wolf’s deepest mind. Uplifted there, in the immense stillness of that enclosed space, above the dust and stir of all passing transactions, is seemed to fling forth, like some great ancient fountain in a walled garden, eternal arches of enchanted water that sustained, comforted, and healed. The amplitude of the beauty around him had indeed just then a curious and interesting psychic effect. In place of giving him the sensation that his soul had melted into these high-arched shadows, it gave him the feeling that the core of his being was a little, hard, opaque round crystal!
Soothed, beyond all expectation, by this experience, and fortified with a resolute strength by thinking of his soul after this fashion, Wolf had nearly reached Selena Gault’s door, when he remembered that he ought to make sure of a room for his mother at the Lovelace Hotel before he did anything else.
Hurrying round by the station, therefore, where he verified the time of the London train, he entered the office-hall of the famous hostelry. No backwater of rural leisure could have been more pulseless and placid than that mellow interior, with its stuffed fox-heads and mid-Victorian mahogany chairs. But it was with a shock of dismay that he learned from the dignified lady in charge of the hotel-books that owing to the approach of the annual Spring Fair every room in the place was already occupied. Wolf cursed the Fair and those horse-loving magnates. But there was nothing for him but to return to Miss Gault’s; for the smaller Ramsgard Inn was at the further end of the town, and it was now five o’clock.
He crossed the public gardens. He struck St. Aldhelm’s Street just above the bridge and moved westward under the long wall. He pushed open the green door and entered the garden of hyacinths. The mechanical act of opening that little gate, for no other reason than that it was a gate from a street into a private enclosure, brought suddenly into his mind his similar entrance into the Torp yard; and the vein of amorousness in him, like a velvet-padded panther in a blind night, slipped wickedly past all the magic of yesterday’s walk and caused his heart to beat at the imaginary image—for he had never actually seen that provocative picture—of the young girl astride the tombstone!
No sooner had the mute servant admitted him into Selena’s drawing-room and closed the door behind him, than he realized that his hostess was not alone. Not only were all the cats there, but playing wildly with the cats, like a young Bassarid with young tigers, was a curly-headed, passionate little girl, of olive complexion, who, even before Miss Gault had finished uttering the syllables of her name, seized him by both hands and held up an excited, magnetic mouth to be kissed. Off she went again, however, to her play with the cats, which seemed to arouse her to the limit of her nervous endurance, for her cheeks were feverishly vivid and her dark eyes gleamed like two great gems in the handle of a dagger—a dagger that someone keeps furtively moving backwards and forwards between a red flame and a window open to the night.
As she pulled the cats to and fro and tumbled over them and among them, on sofa and hearthrug, she kept up an incessant, excitable chatter; a chatter that struck Wolf’s mind as resembling, in some odd manner, a substance rather than a sound, for it seemed to supply a part of the warm, dusky atmosphere in which she played, and indeed seemed to require no vocal response from the other persons in the room. It was like the swirl of a swollen brook in a picture of Nicolas Poussin, in the foreground of which a young brown goatherd plays forever with his goats.
“Olwen Smith!” broke in Miss Gault, when she and Wolf had seated themselves, after their first exchange of greetings, and he had hurriedly given her a description of Mr. Urquhart and Mr. Urquhart’s library. “Olwen Smith!”
The little girl got up from the floor in a moment, and came and stood by her friend’s knee.
“You mustn’t be noisy when a gentleman’s here; and, besides, you’ve got on your Sunday frock. Tell Mr. Solent your name and where you live. Mr. Solent doesn’t like noisy little girls, or little girls that talk all the time and interrupt people.”
“I live at Number Eighty-Five North Street Ramsgard,” repeated the child hurriedly. “I was eleven last Thursday. Grandfather keeps the school hat-shop. Mother went away when I was born. Miss Gault is my greatest friend. Aunt Mattie is my mother now. I like the white cat best!”
The child uttered these sentences as if they had been a lesson which she had learned by heart. She stood obediently by Selena Gault’s side; but her dark eyes fixed themselves upon Wolf with an expression that he never afterwards forgot, so wild, so mocking, so rebellious, and yet so appealing did it seem.
“Olwen loves my cats; but not nearly so much as my cats love her,” said Selena Gault tenderly.
The little girl cuddled up to the black-gowned figure and laid her head against the old maid’s sleeve. Her wild spirit seemed to have ebbed away from every portion of her body except her eyes. These refused to remove themselves from those of the visitor; and, as his own mood changed this way and that, these dusky mirrors changed with it, reflecting thoughts that no child’s conscious brain could possibly have understood.
“But you know you love your Aunt Mattie as if she were your mother,” said Selena Gault. “She’s been so good to you that you’d be a very ungrateful little girl if you didn’t love her.”
“I heard grandfather tell Aunt Mattie the other night that she was no more his child than I was her child,” responded Olwen Smith, mechanically stroking Miss Gault’s hand like an affectionate little automaton, while her feverish mocking eyes seemed to say to Wolf, “There, watch the effect of that!”
“Mattie’s mother died about twenty-five years ago, child,” expostulated Miss Gault. “Her name was Lorna. She and your grandfather used to have dreadful quarrels before she died. That’s why Mr. Smith, when he gets angry, says things like that. Of course Mattie is his daughter; and it’s very wrong of him to say such things.”
“Aunt Mattie’s funny,” murmured the little girl.
“Hush, child!”
“But she is, rather! Just a tiny little bit funny, isn’t she, Miss Gault?”
Selena smiled at Wolf—that peculiar hypnotized smile with which older people, who have given their souls into children’s keeping, transform their pets’ worst faults into qualities that are irresistibly engaging.
“Aunt Mattie’s got a nose like yours,” said Olwen Smith.
“Like mine?” murmured Selena Gault, reproachfully. “You mustn’t be rude, Olwen dear. That’s one thing I can’t have in my house.”
The brown head was buried closer in the black silk gown, but the child’s voice sounded clear enough.
“Not like yours, Miss Gault—like his! Exactly like his!”
Selena Gault had occasion at that moment to turn clean away from both her visitors; for the mute servant entered the room carrying the tea-tray. The arrangement of this tray was evidently a matter of meticulous ritual in this house, and Wolf surveyed it with silent satisfaction, especially as the turbulent little girl ran off to play with the cats and left Miss Gault free not only to fill his cup, but also to attend unreservedly to his remarks.
The tea-tray was placed upon a round table at Miss Gault’s side. A black kitchen-kettle—Miss Gault declared that no other kind boiled good water—was placed upon the hearth. The servant herself did not retire, as most servants are wont to do at such a juncture, but remained to assist at the ceremony of “pouring out,” a ceremony which was so deftly accomplished that Wolf soon found all his difficulties and annoyances melting away in the fragrance of the most perfect cup of tea he had ever tasted.
The general effect of Miss Gault’s drawing-room, in the pleasant mingling of twilight and firelight, began to take on for his imagination the particular atmosphere that he was wont, in his own mind, to think of as “the Penn House atmosphere.” This implied that there was something about this room which made him recall that old bow-window in Brunswick Terrace, Weymouth, where in his childhood he used to indulge in those queer, secretive pleasures. There was not a single piece of furniture in this room of Miss Gault’s which did not project some essence of the past, tender and mellow as the smell of potpourri.
He broke the silence now by a reference to his conversation with Darnley in the Blacksod bookshop. “Otter said—” he began.
“Hush!” cried Selena Gault; and then in a completely different tone, addressing the silent child, who was listening intently: “Olwen dear, you can go on playing! You can make as much noise as you like now! We’ve finished our conversation.”
“I don’t want to play any more, Miss Gault. I hate all your cats except this one! I want to hear Mr. Solent tell you what Otter said!”
“I’ll have to send you home, Olwen, if you don’t behave better. It’s rude to interfere with grown-up people’s conversation.”
“I wasn’t interfering; I was listening. I’d never have known about Aunt Mattie not being grandfather’s real daughter if I hadn’t listened. …”
“Be quiet, child!” cried Selena Gault. But the passionate little girl’s shrill voice rose to a defiant shriek as she jumped up from the sofa, flung the cat upon the floor, shook back her tangled curls, and screamed aloud. “And I’d never have known about Aunt Mattie not being my real mother if I hadn’t listened!” …
If Miss Gault had not managed the child with perfect tact before, she rose to the occasion now.
“It’s all right, Olwen dear,” she said in the calmest and most matter-of-fact voice. “I daresay it’s because grown-up people talk such a lot of nonsense that they get so cross when children listen. There! Look! You’ve frightened your own favourite!”
It was when matters were at this point of psychic equilibrium that Wolf decided that no more moments must elapse before he informed his hostess of his mother’s arrival. The nervous electricity with which the air of the room was already vibrating, encouraged rather than deterred him.
“Miss Gault!” he began suddenly when the tall black figure had subsided into some kind of peace in her green chair. “I’ve just had some rather serious news which I’d better tell you at once.”
Like a weary caryatid, sick of the burden of life, but unyielding in her resolution to bear it without reproach and without complaint, Selena Gault leaned forward toward him.
“You needn’t tell me, boy; I can guess it. Ann Haggard’s coming down here.”
He nodded in assent to her words, but a look of irritation crossed his face.
“My mother and I have the same name,” he protested.
“When’s she coming? Oh, what a mistake you’ll make if you let her come! What a mistake you’ll make!”
“I’ve not had much choice,” remarked Wolf drily. “She’s due now in a few minutes.”
“What?” gasped the lady, her deformed lip twitching like some curious aquarium-specimen that has been prodded by a visitor’s stick.
“She’s due at seven o’clock.”
“In Ramsgard again—after twenty-seven years! What a thing! What a thing to happen!” gasped Selena Gault.
“I don’t know where the deuce I’m going to put her! That’s where I want your advice. The Lovelace is all filled up with people come in for the Spring Show.”
Miss Gault’s face was like an ancient amphitheatre full of dusky gladiators. She took firm hold of the arms of her chair to steady herself.
But at that moment a diversion offered itself which distracted the attention of both of them. Olwen Smith, who had been listening with fascinated intensity to what they were saying, now burst in upon them.
“O Mr. Solent!” she cried. “Do let your mother have our front-room for the night. Aunt Mattie takes lodgers, though grandfather does sell the School hats! I know Aunt Mattie would love to have your mother. Wouldn’t she, Miss Gault? Do tell him she must come to us. Do tell him, Miss Gault! He’ll let her come if you’ll only say so!” And with that the child sidled up against their hostess’s knees with such beguiling cajolery that Wolf was surprised at the coldness with which the woman received her appeal.
She made a very faint movement with her two hands, just as if the child had not been at her side at all—a movement as if she were pressing down a load of invisible earth over the roots of an invisible plant.
“Hush, child!” she said irritably. “You mustn’t interrupt us like that. I’ve told you so often you mustn’t. I’m sure your Aunt Mattie wouldn’t wish to have a guest for only one night. No one likes an arrangement of that sort.”
But the child, who had been watching her face with intense scrutiny till this moment, now flung herself down upon the floor and burst into furious crying. “I—want—her—to—come—to us!” she wailed. “I want her to come! It’s always like this when anything nice happens. You’re unkind, Miss Gault! You’re very unkind!”
And then quite suddenly her tears stopped, her sobs ceased; and, very solemnly, sitting upon the floor, hugging her knees, looking up at the figure above her with a tragic, lamentable face, “You are prejudiced against me!” she said.
The word “prejudiced” sounded so unexpected and so queer out of her mouth that it charmed away the old maid’s agitation. “It’s all right, my dear,” she murmured, stooping down and lifting her up, and covering her hot forehead with kisses. “It’s all right, Olwen. Mr. Solent shall bring his mother to your house.”
She fell into a deep reverie, staring into vacancy. Past the child’s curly head, which she held pressed against her, she stared, past the puzzled and rather sulky profile of Wolf, past the thick green curtains bordered with red-and-gold braid, out into the gathering night, out into many nights lost and gone.
Wolf now rather impatiently looked at his watch and compared it with the clock upon the mantelpiece.
“It’s half-past six,” he said brusquely, interrupting Miss Gault’s thoughts.
The lady nodded gravely, and rising to her feet with the child’s hand still in hers, “I’ll tell Emma to take Olwen home,” she said, “and then she can tell Mattie Smith to expect you. Say goodbye to Mr. Solent, little one.”
Olwen held out her hand with one of the most complicated looks he had ever seen on a child’s face. It was repentant, and yet it was triumphant. It was mocking and mischievous, and yet it was, in a queer way, appealing and wistful.
“Well, I’ll see you again,” said Wolf, stooping down and kissing the child’s feverishly hot little fingers, “unless they send you off to bed before we get to the house.”
Olwen was obviously immensely relieved that he had refrained from hugging her or kissing her face.
Very sedate and dignified was the curtsey she now gave him, turning round to manoeuvre it as Miss Gault opened the door; and he was left with that honourable glow of satisfaction with which clumsy people are sometimes rewarded who have been self-controlled enough to respect the nervous individuality of a child.
When Miss Gault returned and had closed the door, she stood for a space regarding her visitor with the sort of grave, concentrated look, not unmixed with misgiving, that a commander in an involved campaign might give to a trusty but over-impetuous subordinate whose limitations of mind prohibit complete confidence.
“It will be awkward for her to go straight to these Smiths, you know. But she’d have to meet them, I suppose, sooner or later; and it may be all right. It’s like taking the bull by the horns, anyway; which is what Ann always did.”
Wolf was silent. He was watching the hands of the clock.
“Why did you let her come down here?” the old maid broke out. “Are you her shadow? Are you tied to her apron-strings? Can’t you see what it means to me, and to others who remember him, to have to see her, to have to speak to her? Haven’t you felt yourself that this is his country, his corner of the world, his possession? Haven’t you felt that? And yet you let his enemy, his vindictive enemy, invade his very burying-ground!” …
Wolf’s only retort to this impassioned speech was to snatch at the lady’s hand and give it a hurried kiss. “You mustn’t take it too seriously,” were his parting words.
When he reached the station, he was met by the news that the train was to be about an hour late.
“This will worry our little Olwen!” he thought in dismay. “They’ll send her to bed for a certainty. They’ll think we’re not coming at all. They’ll think we’ve changed our minds. And where shall we get supper when we are there? Damn these teasing problems! I wish Mother had waited till tomorrow.”
The station was not a very pleasant place to spend an hour in; so Wolf mounted the hill which rose behind the parallel tracks of the railroad and the river. Here there was a sort of terrace-road, perched high above the town and itself overshadowed by the grassy eminence known as “The Slopes,” beyond the summit of which lay the wide-stretching deer-park of the lord of the manor.
Feeling sure that, if the train came sooner than it was expected, he would hear it in time, as soon as he reached the terrace-road below “The Slopes” he began pacing to and fro along its level security, gazing down on the lights of the town as they twinkled intermittently through the darkened valley beneath him. The sky was overcast; so that these scattered points of light resembled the phantasmal reproduction of a sidereal firmament that had already ceased to exist. Mists that in the darkness were only waftures of chillier air rose up from the muddy banks of the Lunt and brought to his nostrils on this Spring night odours that suggested the Autumn. As he paced that terrace, inhaling these damp airs, his mind seemed to detach itself from the realistic actualities he was experiencing. It seemed to float off and away on a dark stream of something that was neither air nor water. What he desired at that moment, as he had never desired it before, was a support in which he could lose himself completely—lose himself without obligation or effort! He, the mortal creation of Chance, craved for some immortal creation of Chance, such as he could worship, wilfully, capriciously, blindly. But he stretched out his arms into that darkness in vain. His voice might have been the voice of a belated rook on its way to Babylon Hill, or the scraping of one alder-branch against another above the waters of the Lunt, or the faint infinitesimal slide of tiny grains of gravel, as some minute earthworm in the midst of the empty little path at the top of “The Slopes” came forth to inhale the Spring night! A bubble of airy vibration, his appeal was lost as absolutely as any single drop of water that rolled at that moment down the green back of a frog emerging from the cold surface of Lenty Pond.
He kept visualizing the mud-scented darkness in which he seemed to be floating as a vast banked-up aqueduct composed of granite slabs covered with slippery black moss. Out of the spiritual tide that carried him along, there whirled up, in spurts of phosphorescent illumination, various distorted physical aspects of the people he had met these last few days. But these aspects were all ill-assorted, incongruous, maladjusted. … All these morbid evocations culminated finally in the thought of his mother; for what dispersed them and shook them indeed into nothingness now, with an abrupt materialistic shock, was the clear, sharp sound of the clattering gates of the level-crossing.
Wolf slid with a jerk into the normal world as he heard this sound, like a man falling plumb-down from a skylight upon a creaking floor.
He grasped his stick firmly by its handle, digging it into the ground at every step, and hurried with long strides down the little descent.
Nothing in the world seemed important to him now but to see his mother’s face and hear her high-pitched familiar voice. …
Standing on the platform, before the train drew in, he found that his heart was beating with excitement.
“I’m simply at an impasse,” he thought to himself, “about what I feel for Mother. I don’t really want her down here … interfering with Gerda … interfering with everything. … It’s odd … it’s funny … it’s just like the spouting up of a great white whale … spouting up, when no one’s thinking of whales … when everyone’s thinking of the course of the ship!”
When the train actually came in, and he held her at arm’s length with both his hands, clutching her wrists almost fiercely, looking her up and down almost irritably, he recognized in a flash that existence without her, however adventurous it might be, would always be half-real … just as those famous Ramsgard “Slopes” up there had seemed half-real a few minutes ago!
It was she alone who could give the bittersweet tang of reality to his phantasmal life and make the ground under his feet firm.
Her coming, now, as of old, had done, at this moment, just this very thing!
As he looked upon her now—that gallant, ruddy, handsome face, those proud lips, those strong, white teeth, that wavy mass of splendid, grey hair—he felt that, though he might love other persons for other reasons, it was she alone who made the world he lived in solid and resistant to the touch. He felt that without her the whole thing might split and tear—as if it had been made of thin paper!
“Oh, it was awful, my dabchick!” the lady cried, kissing him on both cheeks in an exaggerated foreign manner. “They were all down on us. I never knew what wretches tradesmen could be! They’ll be nicely fooled when they find the house shut up. But they deserved it. They behaved abominably. …” She caught herself up with a gasp, and turned, full of despotic abruptness, towards the patient Ramsgard porter. “Those are all mine! Three big ones and three little ones! You can come back for the other people’s when you’ve taken mine out! Is that bus there? It always used to be.”
Wolf took from her a basket she carried, which appeared full of the oddest assortment of objects; and they both followed the loaded little truck, pushed by the docile porter to the front of the station.
“There it is,” cried Mrs. Solent, “the old Ramsgard bus! Put them in … carefully now! Carefully now!”
The porter retired, recompensed by a shilling, which Wolf hurriedly produced from his pocket while his mother was opening her purse. When he had helped her into the interior of the stuffy little vehicle, he gave his order to the man on the box.
“Number Eighty-Five North Street!”
“Where are you taking me?” Mrs. Solent asked, as the bus rumbled off.
“To a room in the town for one night, Mother. The Lovelace was full. But I’ve got a lovely cottage for us at King’s Barton, near Mr. Urquhart’s drive-gate.”
“Where is this room? I remember every house in North Street.”
“It’s at Mr. Smith’s, the hatter’s.”
Mrs. Solent’s dark-brown eyes glowed like the eyes of some excited wood-animal.
“That man! Not that house, of all houses. You don’t mean—” She broke off and stared at him intently, while an indescribable smile began to touch the corners of her mouth.
Then she leaned forward and rubbed her gloved hands together, while her cheeks glowed with mischief.
“Has the good man by any chance got a daughter called Mattie?”
“Aunt Mattie?” murmured Wolf, feeling as if he were struggling to catch two ropes, which, at the same time, dangled before him. “That is what the child called her.”
“The child?” It was his mother’s turn to look puzzled now.
“Little Olwen Smith.”
Mrs. Solent’s smile died away.
“It can’t be the same,” she said. “Unless Lorna’s child’s got married.”
“It’s the same, all right, Mother. It’s your man, all right. He was the hatter, wasn’t he?”
She nodded.
“Well! It’s the same, Mother.”
Her inscrutable smile began to return and she leaned back with a sigh.
“To go straight to Albert’s house—But it’ll be fun. It’ll be sport! I’m not going to take it seriously. … Aunt Mattie? … little Olwen? … goodness! But they must have come down in the world, if he lets out rooms to visitors … or did he invite me? Am I destined to be Albert Smith’s guest the first night I set foot in this place?”
“Did you and Father know him well?” enquired Wolf, as the bus swung round the corner by the ancient conduit.
“Your father knew Lorna well—Albert’s minx of a wife. Lorna was even sillier about him than that idiot Selena.”
“What happened, Mother?”
“Never mind now, Wolf! I’m in a mood to be amused by everything. Don’t look so sulky! I tell you I’m going to amuse myself here. You don’t seem to realize that I lived in this town for ten years.”
“Listen, Mother,” said Wolf hurriedly, “I know what you mean when you talk of ‘amusing’ yourself. Now look here, Mother, I won’t have you getting into any rows down here! I’ve got my job here; and you’ve got to be nice to everybody. Do you understand?” In his excitement he laid his heavy hand upon her knee. “You’ve got to be nice to everybody—to everybody!”
The flickering oil-lamp which lit the inside of the bus shone down upon those shining wood-animal eyes. They glowed with excitement. They positively gleamed as the jolting of the vehicle jogged both mother and son up and down on their seats.
“Your father taught me to be unconventional,” she said. “And I’m not going to be all sugar-and-spice in my old haunts.”
The rambling old conveyance was drawing up now outside Number Eighty-Five.
“Mother, you must be good, and let bygones be bygones.”
She turned upon him then, while the busman ran up the steps of the house to ring the bell.
“Your father never gave up his amusement for me, and I’m not going to give up my amusement for you! I’m going to be just myself with all our old acquaintances. I’m going to begin with Albert! There! Don’t be silly! Get out and help me out. We can’t go anywhere else now. … Who’s that at the door? Is that Lorna’s child? …”
Just half-an-hour later Wolf and his mother were seated at a massive mahogany table in the hatter’s dining-room, sharing the Smiths’ Sunday supper. Olwen was not in bed. With feverish cheeks and enormous dark eyes she stood at the elbow of her grandfather, listening to every word of the talk and scanning every detail of Mrs. Solent’s appearance.
“I would never have believed it possible,” the grey-haired lady was saying with radiant glances at them all, “that you should have changed so much, Albert, and that Lorna should have come to life in Mattie. You’re not so pretty as your mother, my dear. Of course, we must allow that! But goodness! You’ve got her figure and her look. How does it feel to be so like someone else? It must be queer—almost as if you inherited their feelings, their troubles, everything! But I am glad to see you, Mattie. It gives me—even me—a rather queer feeling. No, you’re not as pretty as your mother; but Albert mustn’t be hurt if I say I think you’re much nicer! You needn’t scowl at me, Wolf. Mattie doesn’t mind, do you? And Albert knows me too well to be surprised at anything I say.”
“Times change, Mrs. Solent—times change!” murmured the master of the house, in a low voice. “I was all shaky when little Olwen said you were coming. It seemed like the dead coming to life. But I feel all right now, as I set eyes upon you.” And he helped himself to a lingering sip of the glass of mild whiskey-and-water that stood in front of him.
He was a sad, lean, commonplace little man, with a deprecatory bend of the head and a mingling of rustic cunning and weary obsequiousness in his watery, spectacled eyes. He looked as if he had been spending the day in long Low Church services. The smell of hassocks and stuffy vestries hung about his clothes, and the furtive unction of an official who had collected many threepenny bits in an embroidered bag weighed upon his stooping shoulders.
While Mrs. Solent ate her cold mutton and hot caper-sauce with hungry relish and rallied the nervous churchwarden, Wolf took the opportunity of studying in quiet self-effacement the expressive countenance of Mr. Smith’s daughter. Mattie turned out to be a girl with a fine figure, but an unappealing face. She looked about twenty-five. She was not pretty in any sense at all, in spite of what Mrs. Solent had said. Her thick, prominent nose was out of all proportion to the rest of her face. Her chin, her forehead, her eyes, were all rendered insignificant by the size of this dominant and uncomely feature.
But though Aunt Mattie’s eyes were small and of a colour that varied between grey and green, they possessed a certain formidable power. A person gazing into them for the second or third time found himself looking hastily away, as if he had been caught trespassing in a very rigidly preserved estate.
Wolf was surprised how completely at ease the girl showed herself. He had expected her to be extremely disconcerted by this intrusion. But not at all. She replied calmly and with quite the appropriate nuance of humour to his mother’s rather exaggerated badinage; and with himself she seemed perfectly natural and unaffected. All this was astonishing to him; though why it should have been so, he would have been ashamed to explain. Perhaps he had expected the Smith family to display social tendencies at variance with those of the upper middle-class to which he himself belonged. If so, he was certainly guilty of unjustifiable snobbishness. For though the hatter of Ramsgard School did not behave like a nobleman, he behaved with quite as much dignity and ease as most of the professional gentlemen with whom Wolf was acquainted! This unpremeditated supper-party in that dingy high-ceilinged dining-room, with its great cut-glass chandelier hanging over their heads and its gold-framed picture of some ancestral Mr. Smith gazing down upon them, was neither awkward nor embarrassed. Mrs. Solent’s evident recklessness found no rocks or reefs in the behaviour of the others upon which its mischief could lash itself into foam!
Before the evening was over and it was time for him to start for his night-walk back to King’s Barton, Wolf had begged more than once for a definite promise from Mattie Smith that she would bring Olwen over to see them when they were established in their new abode at Lenty Cottage. The girl was complaisant and gracious over this invitation, to which the child responded breathlessly; but Wolf knew enough of the ways of women to know that there were subtle withdrawings and qualifications under that heavy, benevolent mask, into which it would have been unwise to probe.
“Which day does the Spring Fair begin, Father?” Mattie said suddenly to the old gentleman.
“The Fair, my dear?” responded the hatter. “Tomorrow, I believe; and it lasts till the end of the week; but someone told me after church—no! it was before church—that Thursday is the horse-show.”
“Oh, that completes it all!” cried Mrs. Solent. “That’s the one last touch. Don’t I remember the Fair! I’d like to go tomorrow, the moment the gates are open! I’d like to go every day.”
“We’ll go on Thursday, Mother,” said Wolf. “Everyone will be there then and you’ll be able to see how many of ’em remember you.”
“The horse-show is the great day,” said Mattie Smith acquiescingly.
“I haven’t changed very much, then, Albert?” murmured Mrs. Solent in response to a furtive appraising glance from the discreet churchwarden.
Mr. Smith looked a little embarrassed at having been caught observing her.
“No, you haven’t changed! You haven’t changed!” sighed the weary little man; and the tone in which he uttered these plaintive words seemed drawn from a vast warehouse of accumulated school-hats—shelves upon shelves of hats—the burden of which seemed weighing him down in a Dead Sea of diurnal desolation.
“Your mother is your real mother, isn’t she?” interrupted Olwen in a shrill voice, gazing at Wolf from the protection of Mattie’s knees.
Providence came to his rescue with an answer that was really quite an inspiration.
“Mothers are as mothers do,” he responded.
But he caught, all the same, a reddening of Mattie’s cheeks and a hurried turning away of the churchwarden’s eyes. Mr. Albert Smith kept pouring out whiskey for himself and for Wolf; but though Mrs. Solent drank only a little coffee, she was the one who held the evening together by her high spirits. Wolf watched Mattie whispering to the child about going to bed; but as he knew well enough that Olwen wouldn’t go to bed till the party broke up, he began to look from one to another, waiting till a lapse in the conversation should give him a chance to bid them good night and start on his walk home.
But Mrs. Solent’s excitement was unsubduable; and there seemed something about this unusual supper-party that made him reluctant to bring it to an end. The dark old furniture, the dark old wallpaper, the dark old great-grandfather in his heavy frame, projected some kind of hypnotism upon the sliding moments, that made it as hard for him to move as if he were under a spell.
No sound came from the street outside. No sound came from the rest of the house. Like a group of enchanted people they continued to sit there, facing one another across the table, listening to Mrs. Solent’s rich, voluble voice.
Wolf had long begun, in his insatiable manner, to drink up every peculiarity of the room in which they sat—of the furniture upon which the heavily-globed gas-jets of the candelabra shed so mellow a glow. As he grew tired of smoking cigarettes, he became aware of a faint scent of apples. Where this scent originated he could not detect. It seemed to proceed equally from every portion of the apartment. And as he gave himself up to it, it brought to his mind a kind of distilled essence of all the fruit and the flowers that had ever been spread out upon that massive brown table; spread out upon former editions of The Western Gazette; editions old enough to contain news of the death of Queen Adelaide or of Queen Charlotte!
“I must go now,” he thought. “I must go now.” And he began to suspect that what really held him back from making a start upon his walk was not any attraction in the Smith ménage, but simply the great invisible struggle that had already begun between that dead man in the cemetery and this woman who was so extraordinarily alive!
She had come prepared to avenge herself in her own magnificent way—not basely, but still with formidable success. She had not come to Ramsgard to efface herself. And now, being here, being encamped, as Miss Gault said, on the very edge of his burying-ground, she could not refrain, just out of pure, suppressed high spirits, from stirring up the mud of the ambiguous past. Well! The event must work itself out. In no sense was he responsible. …
He did manage to rise at last and to kiss his mother good night. He would have kissed Olwen, too, but she impatiently drew away. His final appeal to Mattie to come over and see them, “any day but Thursday, when we’ll all be at the horse-show,” was received with more warmth and cordiality than this girl had yet displayed.
What were the thoughts, day after day, year after year, that beat about in the secretive brain behind that heavily-featured face? What was this queer attraction which he felt for her, so different from the interest excited in him by her father and by the little girl?
Wolf couldn’t help pondering on these things as he made his way out of the silent town, accompanied by hardly any mortal sound except the creak of his own heavy boots and the thud of his own heavy stick.
It was not until he was clear of the last houses of Ramsgard, clear of both workhouse and cemetery, that the Smith house, the Smith daughter, the Smith granddaughter, faded from his brain.
Then, as the grass-scented mists grew cooler against his face, rolling up towards the arable lands from the hushed Blackmore meadows, the old serpent of lecherous desire lifted once more its head in that spacious night. Once more his mind reverted to Gerda Torp—not to Gerda as she was when she sent her bird-call so far over Poll’s Camp, but to Gerda as she was to his wicked imagination when he listened to the lewd whisperings of Lobbie Torp and Bob Weevil, to the Gerda he had never seen and perhaps would never see—the Gerda who used a tombstone for a hobbyhorse in that littered monument-yard in Chequers Street!