Short Stories 1895-1926 (6 page)

To the letter then, I determined to obey her, trusting to the Count's genius and the placability of fate for a happier conclusion. And even at that – a young man a good deal incensed with the ridiculous obligations these two elderly victims had thrust upon him found sleep that night very stubborn of attainment.

I had little expected to see my aunt at breakfast next morning; but when the Count came in from the garden, hot and boisterous, she sat waiting for him, and greeted us with her usual cheerful gravity. Only too clearly, however, my new knowledge revealed the tragic truth of her secret of the night before. She leaned forward a little on the table, gazing steadily across it, her hands wandering lightly over the cups, already half endowed with the delicacy at length to come. Never had the Count been so high-spirited, and she answered him jest for jest. Yet not one sign did she vouchsafe to assure me of our compact. She acted her part without a symptom of flinching to the end.

In a rather clumsy fashion, I fear, I at last proposed to the Count a walk over the Heath.

‘An excellent suggestion, Richard,' said my aunt cordially. ‘There, Count put on your hat, and take your stick, and walk off the steam. It's no use looking at
me
. I have business to attend to, so
I
can't come.'

But the Count was exceedingly unwilling to go. The garden held more charm for him, and better company. A faint groping uneasiness, too, showed itself in his features.

But my aunt would heed no scruples, no reluctances. ‘When a woman wants a man out of the way, don't you suppose, Count, that she knows best?' she enquired lightly but firmly. ‘Now where's your stick?'

In her eagerness she stumbled against the doorpost, and the Count caught her impulsively by the arm. Her cheek flushed crimson. For an instant I fancied that fate had indeed intervened. But the next minute the Count and I were hurried out of the house, and bound for the Heath. My aunt had herself shut the door, and, heavy with fears and forebodings, I supposed that this was the end of the matter.

It was a quiet summer morning, the sunshine sweet with the nutty and almond scents of bracken and gorse. At first, in our walk, the Count was inclined to be satirical. He scoffed at every remark I made, and scoffed at his scoffing. But at the bottom of the hollow his mood swerved to the opposite extreme. He walked, bent morosely, without raising his eyes from the grass. His only answer to every little remark I volunteered was a shrug or a grunt. His pace diminished more and more until at last he suddenly stopped, as if some one had spoken to him. And he turned his face towards home.

‘What's wrong?' he said to me.

‘Wrong?' said I.

‘I heard your aunt calling.'

‘Nonsense,' I said; ‘she's two miles distant at least.'

‘“Nonsense”!' said he angrily: ‘I say I
heard
her calling. Am I
all
skin and bone? I'm done with the Heath.'

I remonstrated in vain. It only served to make things worse. At each word the Count's disquietude increased, he was the more obstinately bent on returning.

‘Home, boy, home! I'll not be gainsaid.'

I threatened to go on alone; but the threat, I knew, was futile, and proved me at my last resource.

It was not until we were within a few yards of the house that, on turning a corner, we came in sight of the cab. With a sagacity that almost amounted to divination, the Count jumped at once to the cause of its presence there.

‘What's it mean?' he hoarsely shouted, and waved his stick in the air. ‘What's that cab mean, I say? What's it mean? Have you no answer, eh?' But after that one swift white glance at my face, he said no more. ‘Bring that box into the house, sir,' he bawled to the cabman, ‘and drive your cab to the devil.'

I followed him into the house, and the tempest of his wrath raged through it like a cloud. My aunt was not in the dining-room. Janet had fled away into the kitchen. And I suppose by this time my aunt had heard the uproar of his home-coming, for when the Count assailed her door it was secure, and she was in a stronghold.

‘Mrs Lindsay! what's this mean?' he shouted. ‘What have I done, that you should be leaving my house like this? Am I so far in my dotage that I must be cheated like a child? Is it open with me? You shall not go. You shall not go. I'll burn the cab first. You daren't face me, Mrs Lindsay.'

‘Count, Count,' said I, ‘every word – the neighbours.'

‘The neighbours! the neighbours!' his scorn broke over me. ‘Look to your own pottering milksop business, sir! Now, Mrs Lindsay, now!'

In envious admiration I heard my aunt open her door. For an instant there was no sound in the house.

‘Count,' she said, ‘I will just ask you to go quietly down to your study and remain there for five minutes. By that time I shall be ready to say goodbye to you.'

‘Lucy, my dear friend,' said the Count – and all the resentment was gone out of his voice – ‘I ask only one thing: you will not treat me like this?'

‘Five minutes, Count, five minutes,' said my aunt.

The Count came downstairs. He paid no heed to me; went into his study and shut the door. The cabman was on the doorstep.

‘Richard,' said my aunt from the loop of the stairs, ‘the cabman will carry out my orders.'

I went up slowly and tapped at my aunt's door. She would not open to me.

‘You have failed, Richard, that is all; a man can't do worse,' she called to me from the other side of the panels.

‘He insisted, aunt,' I pleaded. ‘I almost used force.'

‘I don't doubt it,' she said; ‘you used all the force that was in you. There, leave me now. I have other things to think about.'

‘On my word of honour, believe me or not, Aunt Lucy,' I cried, ‘I have done my best. “I hear her calling” – that's what he kept saying: and home he came. I would have given anything. Let me tell him. I saw his face just now. Aunt Lucy, he's an old man —'

‘Listen, Richard,' she answered, and she was pressing close to the door. ‘Say no more. I spoke hastily. I have thought it out; the day will pass; and all the noise and fret over. But, but – are you there, Richard?' She whispered in so low a voice that I could scarcely catch the words, ‘I go because I'm tired of it all; want liberty, ease: tell him that. “Just like a woman!” say; anything that sounds best to rid him of this – fancy. Do you see? – and not a single word about the eyes. Richard! do you see? You have failed me once. I am trusting you again. That's all.'

So I went down and sat a while with my own thoughts to entertain me, in the little room with the French windows and the stuffed birds. In a few minutes I heard my aunt's footsteps descending the stairs. She was all but groping her way with extreme caution, step by step. Veil or bonnet, I know not what, had added years to her face. I had not heard the Count open his door. But in a flash I caught sight of him, on the threshold, stiff as a mute.

‘Lucy,' he said, ‘listen. For all that I said – for an old man's noise and fury – forgive me! That is past. My dear friend, all that I ask now is this – will you be my wife?'

My aunt's eyebrows were arched above her spectacles. She smoothed her wrinkled forehead with her fingers. ‘What did you say, Count?' she said.

‘I said I am sorry – beyond all words. And oh, my dear, dear lady, will you be my wife?'

‘Ach – nonsense, nonsense, old friend,' said my aunt. ‘And you and me so old and staid! Grey hairs. Withered sticks. From the bottom of my heart I thank you for the honour. But – why, Count, you discommode an – an old woman.' She laughed like a girl.

And she pushed her gloved hand along the wall of the passage, moving very heedfully and slowly. ‘Richard, may I ask you just once more to support my poor gouty knees down these odious steps?' My aunt was speaking in a foreign tongue. The Count strode after us.

‘Is this all?' said he, gazing into her face.

‘God bless the man! – would he stare me out of countenance?' Her hand felt limp and cold beneath her glove. And we went out of the house into the sunlight, and descended slowly to the cab.

And that was the end of the matter. My aunt had divined the truth. Her volatile, fickle, proud, fantastic old friend moped for a while. But soon the intervention of scribbling, projects, books, and dissensions with his neighbours added this one more to many another romantic episode in his charming repertory of memories. Moreover, had my aunt chosen to return, here was a brotherly affection, flavoured with a platonic piquancy, eager to welcome, to serve, and to entertain her.

Not for many a year did I meet my aunt again. I twice ventured to call on her; but she was ‘out' to me. Rumours strayed my way at times of a soured blind old woman, for ever engaged in scandalous contention with the parents of her domestics; but me she altogether ignored. And then for a long time I feared to force myself on her memory. But when the end came, and the Count was speedily sinking, some odd remembrance of her troubled his sleep. He begged me to write to my aunt, to ‘ask her to come and share a last crust with an old, broken, toothless friend.' But my poor old friend died the next evening, and the last stillness had fallen upon the house before she could answer his summons.

On the day following I was sitting in the empty and darkened diningroom, when I heard the sound of wheels, and somehow divining what they portended, I looked out through the Venetian blind.

My aunt had come, as she had gone, in a hackney cab; and, refusing any assistance from the maid who was there with her, she stepped painfully down out of it, and, tapping the ground at her feet with her ebony stick, the wintry sun glinting red upon her blue spectacles as she moved, she began to climb the flight of steps alone, with difficulty, but with a vigorous assurance.

I was seized with dismay at the very sight of her. Something in her very appearance filled me with a sense of my own mere young-manliness and fatuity. I drew sharply back from the window; hesitated – in doubt whether to receive her myself, or to send for Mrs Rodd. I peeped again. She had come on slowly. But now, midway up the steps, she paused, slowly turned herself about, and stretched out her hand towards the house.

‘Cabman, cabman' – her words rang against the stucco walls – ‘is this the house? What's wrong with the house?'

The cabman began to climb down from his box.

‘Agnes, do you hear me?' she cried with a shrill piercing horror in her voice. ‘Agnes, Agnes – is the house
dark
?'

‘The blinds are all down, m'm,' answered the girl looking out of the window.

My aunt turned her head slowly, and I could see her moving eyebrows arched high above her spectacles. And then she began to climb rapidly backwards down the steps in her haste to be gone. It was a ludicrous and yet a poignant and dreadful thing to see. I could refrain myself no longer.

But she was already seated in the cab before I could reach her. ‘Aunt, my dear Aunt Lucy,' I said at the window, peering into the musty gloom. ‘Won't you please come into the house? I have many things – a ring – books – he spoke often —'

She turned and confronted me, speechless entreaty in her blind face – an entreaty not to me, for no earthly help, past all hope of answer, it seemed; and then, with an extraordinary certainty of aim, she began beating my hand that lay upon the narrow window-frame with the handle of her ebony stick.

‘Drive on, drive on!' she cried. ‘God bless the man, why doesn't he drive on?' The jet butterflies in her bonnet trembled above her crimsoned brow. The cabman brandished his whip. And that was quite the end. I never saw my aunt again.

The Looking-Glass

The Looking-Glass

For an hour or two in the afternoon, Miss Lennox had always made it a rule to retire to her own room for a little rest, so that for this brief interval, at any rate, Alice was at liberty to do just what she pleased with herself. The ‘just what she pleased,' no doubt, was a little limited in range; and ‘with herself' was at best no very vast oasis amid its sands.

She might, for example, like Miss Lennox, rest, too, if she pleased. Miss Lennox prided herself on her justice.

But then, Alice could seldom sleep in the afternoon because of her troublesome cough. She might at a pinch write letters, but they would need to be nearly all of them addressed to imaginary correspondents. And not even the most romantic of young human beings can write on indefinitely to one who vouchsafes
no
kind of an answer. The choice in fact merely amounted to that between being ‘in' or ‘out' (in
any
sense), and now that the severity of the winter had abated, Alice much preferred the solitude of the garden to the vacancy of the house.

With rain came an extraordinary beauty to the narrow garden – its trees drenched, refreshed, and glittering at break of evening, its early flowers stooping pale above the darkened earth, the birds that haunted there singing as if out of a cool and happy cloister – the stormcock wildly jubilant. There was one particular thrush on one particular tree which you might say all but yelled messages at Alice, messages which sometimes made her laugh, and sometimes almost ready to cry, with delight.

And yet ever the same vague influence seemed to haunt her young mind. Scarcely so much as a mood; nothing in the nature of a thought; merely an influence – like that of some impressive stranger met – in a dream, say – long ago, and now half-forgotten.

This may have been in part because the low and foundering wall between the empty meadows and her own recess of greenery had always seemed to her like the boundary between two worlds. On the one side freedom, the wild; on this, Miss Lennox, and a sort of captivity. There Reality; here (her ‘duties' almost forgotten) the confines of a kind of waking dream. For this reason, if for no other, she at the same time longed for and yet in a way dreaded the afternoon's regular reprieve.

It had proved, too, both a comfort and a vexation that the old servant belonging to the new family next door had speedily discovered this little habit, and would as often as not lie in wait for her between a bush of lilac and a bright green chestnut that stood up like a dense umbrella midway along the wall that divided Miss Lennox's from its one neighbouring garden. And since apparently it was Alice's destiny in life to be always precariously balanced between extremes, Sarah had also turned out to be a creature of rather peculiar oscillations of temperament.

Their clandestine talks were, therefore, though frequent, seldom particularly enlightening. None the less, merely to see this slovenly ponderous woman enter the garden, self-centred, with a kind of dull arrogance, her louring face as vacant as contempt of the Universe could make it, was an event ever eagerly, though at times vexatiously, looked for, and seldom missed.

Until but a few steps separated them, it was one of Sarah's queer habits to make believe, so to speak, that Alice was not there at all. Then, as regularly, from her place of vantage on the other side of the wall, she would slowly and heavily lift her eyes to her face, with a sudden energy which at first considerably alarmed the young girl, and afterwards amused her. For certainly you
are
amused in a sort of fashion when any stranger you might suppose to be a little queer in the head proves perfectly harmless. Alice did not exactly like Sarah. But she could no more resist her advances than the garden could resist the coming on of night.

Miss Lennox, too, it must be confessed, was a rather tedious and fretful companion for wits (like Alice's) always wool-gathering – wool, moreover, of the shimmering kind that decked the Golden Fleece. Her own conception of the present was of a niche in Time from which she was accustomed to look back on the dim, though once apparently garish, panorama of the past; while with Alice, Time had kept promises enough only for a surety of its immense resources – resources illimitable, even though up till now they had been pretty tightly withheld.

Or, if you so preferred, as Alice would say to herself, you could put it that Miss Lennox had all her eggs in a real basket, and that Alice had all hers in a basket that was
not
exactly real – only problematical.

All the more reason, then, for Alice to think it a little queer that it had been Miss Lennox herself and not Sarah who had first given shape and substance to her vaguely bizarre intuitions concerning the garden – a walled-in space in which one might suppose intuition alone could discover anything in the least remarkable.

‘When my cousin, Mary Wilson (the Wilsons of Aberdeen, as I may have told you), when my cousin lived in this house,' she had informed her young companion, one evening over her own milk and oatmeal biscuits, ‘there was a silly talk with the maids that it was haunted.'

‘The house?' Alice had enquired, with a sudden crooked look on a face that Nature, it seemed, had definitely intended to be frequently startled; ‘The house?'

‘I didn't say the
house,
' Miss Lennox testily replied – it always annoyed her to see anything resembling a flush on her young companion's cheek, ‘and even if I did, I certainly
meant
the garden. If I had meant the house, I should have used the word house. I meant the garden. It was quite unnecessary to correct or contradict me; and whether or not, it's all the purest rubbish – just a tale, though, not the only one of the kind in the world, I fancy.'

‘Do you remember any of the other tales?' Alice had enquired, after a rather prolonged pause.

‘No, none'; was the flat reply.

And so it came about that to Sarah (though she could hardly be described as the Serpent of the situation) to Sarah fell the opportunity of enjoying to the full an opening for her fantastic ‘lore'. By insinuation, by silences, now with contemptuous scepticism, now with enormous warmth, she cast her spell, weaving an eager imagination through and through with the rather gaudy threads of superstition.

‘Lor, no,
Crimes,
maybe not, though blood is in the roots for all
I
can say.' She had looked up almost candidly in the warm, rainy wind, her deadish-looking hair blown back from her forehead.

‘Some'll tell you only the old people have eyes to see the mystery; and some, old or young, if so be they're ripe. Nothing to me either way; I'm gone past such things. And
what
it is, 'orror and darkness, or golden like a saint in heaven, or pictures in dreams, or just like dying fireworks in the air, the Lord alone knows, Miss, for I don't. But this I
will
say,' and she edged up her body a little closer to the wall, the raindrops the while dropping softly on bough and grass, ‘May-day's the day, and midnight's the hour, for such as be wakeful and brazen and stoopid enough to watch it out. And what you've got to look for in a manner of speaking is what comes up out of the darkness from behind them trees there!'

She drew back cunningly.

The conversation was just like clockwork. It recurred regularly – except that there was no need to wind anything up. It wound itself up over-night, and with such accuracy that Alice soon knew the complete series of question and answer by heart or by rote – as if she had learned them out of the
Child's Guide to Knowledge,
or the Catechism. Still there were interesting points in it even now.

‘
And what you've got to look for
' — the
you
was so absurdly impersonal when muttered in that thick coarse privy voice. And Alice invariably smiled at this little juncture; and Sarah as invariably looked at her and swallowed.

‘But have
you
looked for – for what you say, you know?' Alice would then enquire, still with face a little averted towards the black low-boughed group of broad-leafed chestnuts, positive candelabra in their own season of wax-like speckled blossom.

‘Me?
Me?
I was old before my time, they used to say. Why, besides my poor sister up in Yorkshire there, there's not a mouth utters my name.' Her large flushed face smiled in triumphant irony. ‘Besides my bed-rid mistress there, and my old what they call feeble-minded sister, Jane Mary, in Yorkshire, I'm as good as in my grave. I may be dull and hot in the head at times, but I stand
alone
– eat alone, sit alone, sleep alone, think alone. There's never been such a lonely person before. Now, what should such a lonely person as me, Miss, I ask you, or what should you either for that matter, be meddling with your Maydays and your haunted gardens for?' She broke off and stared with angry confusion around her, and, lifting up her open hand a little, she, added hotly, Them birds! – My God, I drats 'em for their squealin' !'

‘But, why?' said Alice, frowning slightly.

‘The Lord only knows, Miss; I hate the sight of 'em! If I had what they call a blunderbuss in me hand I'd blow 'em to ribbings.'

And Alice never could quite understand why it was that the normal pronunciation of the word would have suggested a less complete dismemberment of the victims.

It was on a bleak day in March that Alice first heard really explicitly the conditions of the quest.

‘Your hows and whys! What I say is I'm sick of it all. Not so much of you, Miss, which is all greens to me, but of the rest of it all! Anyhow,
fast
you must, like the Cartholics, and you with a frightful hacking cough and all. Come like a new-begotten bride you must in a white gown, and a wreath of lillies or rorringe-blossom in your hair, same pretty much as I made for my mother's coffin this twenty years ago, and which I wouldn't do now not for respectability even. And me and my mother, let me tell you, were as close as hens in a roost … But I'm off me subject. There you sits, even if the snow itself comes sailing in on your face, and alone you must be, neither book nor candle, and the house behind you shut up black abed and asleep. But, there; you so wan and sickly a young lady. What ghost would come to you, I'd like to know. You want some fine dark loveyer for a ghost – that's your ghost. Oo-ay! There's not a want in the world but's dust and ashes. That's my bit of schooling.'

She gazed on impenetrably at Alice's slender fingers. And without raising her eyes she leaned her large hands on the wall, ‘Meself, Miss, meself's
my
ghost, as they say. Why, bless me! it's all thro' the place now, like smoke.'

What was all through the place now like smoke Alice perceived to be the peculiar clarity of the air discernible in the garden at times. The clearness as it were of glass, of a looking-glass, which conceals all behind and beyond it, returning only the looker's wonder, or simply her vanity, or even her gaiety. Why, for the matter of that, thought Alice smiling, there are people who look into looking-glasses, actually see themselves there, and yet never turn a hair.

There
wasn't
any glass, of course. Its sort of mirage sprang only out of the desire of her eyes, out of a restless hunger of the mind – just to possess her soul in patience till the first favourable May evening came along and then once and for all to set everything at rest. It was a thought which fascinated her so completely, that it influenced her habits, her words, her actions. She even began to long for the afternoon solely to be alone with it; and in the midst of the reverie it charmed into her mind, she would glance up as startled as a Dryad to see the ‘cook-general's' dark face fixing its still cold gaze on her from over the moss-greened wall. As for Miss Lennox, she became testier and more ‘rational' than ever as she narrowly watched the day approaching when her need for a new companion would become extreme.

Who, however, the lover might be, and where the trysting-place, was unknown even to Alice, though, maybe, not absolutely unsurmised by her, and with a kind of cunning perspicacity perceived only by Sarah.

‘I see my old tales have tickled you up, Miss,' she said one day, lifting her eyes from the clothes-line she was carrying to the girl's alert and mobile face. ‘What they call old wives' tales I fancy, too.'

‘Oh, I don't think so,' Alice answered. ‘I can hardly tell, Sarah. I am only at peace
here,
I know that. I get out of bed at night to look down from the window and wish myself here. When I'm reading, just as if it were a painted illustration – in the book, you know – the scene of it all floats in between me and the print. Besides, I can do just what I like with it. In my mind, I mean. I just imagine; and there it all is. So you see I could not bear
now
to go away.'

‘There's no cause to worry your head about that,' said the woman darkly, ‘and as for picking and choosing I never saw much of it for them that's under of a thumb. Why, when I was young, I couldn't have borne to live as I do now with just meself wandering to and fro. Muttering I catch meself, too. And, to be sure, surrounded in the air by shapes, and shadows, and noises, and winds, so as sometimes I can neither see nor hear. It's true, God's gospel, Miss – the body's like a clump of wood, it's that dull. And you can't get t'other side, so to speak.'