by Hugh Walpole
Meanwhile Tony had found Maradick in a deserted corner of the garden and had poured the afternoon’s history into his ears. It was a complete manual on the way to make love, and it came out in a stream of uninterrupted eloquence, with much repetition and a continual impulse to hark back to the central incident of the story.
“And then, at last, I told her!” A small bird in a nest above their heads woke for a moment and felt a little thrill of sympathy. “By heaven, Maradick, old man, I had never lived until then. She and I were swept into Paradise together, and for a moment earth had gone, rolled away, vanished; I can’t talk about it, I can’t really. But there we were on the sand with the sea and the sky! Oh, my word! I can’t make you feel it, only now I am hers always and she is mine. I am her slave, her knight. One always used to think, you know, that all the stuff men and women put about it in books was rot and dreadfully dull at that, but now it all seems different. Poetry, music, all the things that one loved, are different now. They are new, wonderful, divine! and there we were in the boat, you know, just drifting anywhere.”
Maradick played audience to this enthusiasm with a somewhat melancholy patience. He had felt like that once about Mrs. Maradick. How absurd! He saw her as he had seen her last with the bed-clothes gathered about her in a scornful heap and her eyes half closed but flashing fire. She had refused to speak to him! And he had kissed her once and felt like Tony.
“No, but a fellow can’t talk about it. Only, one thing, Maradick, that struck me as awfully funny, the way that she accepted everything. When I told her about my people, of course I expected her to be awfully disappointed. But she seemed to understand at once and accepted it as the natural thing. So that if it comes to running away she is quite prepared.”
“If it comes to running away!” The words at once brought the whole situation to a point, and Maradick’s responsibility hit him in the face like a sudden blow from the dark. For a moment fear caught him by the throat; he wanted, wildly, to fling off the whole thing, to catch the next train back to Epsom, to get away from this strange place that was dragging him, as it were, with a ghostly finger, into a whirlpool, a quagmire; anything was treacherous and dangerous and destructive. And then he knew, in the next instant, that though he might go back to Epsom and his office and all the drudgery of it, he would never be the same man again, he could never be the same man again. He knew now that the only thing in the world worth having was love — this town had shown him that — and that, for it, all the other things must go. This boy had found it and he must help him to keep it. He, Maradick, had found it; there were friends of his here — Tony, Mrs. Lester — and he couldn’t go back to the loneliness of his old life with the memory of these weeks.
“Look here,” he gripped Tony’s arm, “I don’t suppose I ought to have anything to do with it. Any man in his senses would tell your people, and there’d be an end of the whole thing; but I gave you my word before and I’ll go on with it. Besides, I’ve seen the girl. I’d fall in love with her myself, Tony, if I were your age, and I don’t want you to miss it all and make a damned muddle of your life just because you weren’t brave enough or because there wasn’t anyone to help you.”
“By Jove, Maradick, you’re a brick. I can’t tell you how I feel about it, about her and you and everything, a chap hasn’t got words; only, of course, it’s going forward. You see, you couldn’t tell my people after all that you’ve done — you wouldn’t, you know; and as I’d go on whether you left me or no you may just as well help me. And then I’m awfully fond of you; I like you better than I’ve ever liked any man, you’re such an understanding fellow.”
Tony took breath a moment. Then he went on —
“The mater’s really the only thing that matters, and if I wasn’t so jolly sure that she’d like Janet awfully, and really would want me to carry the thing through, I wouldn’t do it at all. But loving Janet as I do has made me know how much the mater is to me. You know, Maradick, it’s jolly odd, but there are little things about one’s mater that stick in one’s mind far more than anything else. Little things . . . but she’s always been just everything, and there are lots of blackguards, I know, feel just the same . . . and so it sort of hurts going on playing this game and not telling her about it. It’s the first thing I’ve not told her . . . but it will be all right when it’s over.”
“There are other people,” said Maradick; “your father — —”
“Oh, the governor! Yes, he’s beginning to smell a rat, and he’s tremendous once he’s on the track, and that all means that it’s got to be done jolly quickly. Besides, there’s Alice Du Cane; she saw us, Janet and me, on the beach this afternoon, and there’s no knowing how long she’ll keep her tongue. No, I’ll go and see Morelli to-morrow and ask him right off. I went back with her to-night, and he was most awfully friendly, although he must have had pretty shrewd suspicions. He likes me.”
“Don’t you be too sure about him,” said Maradick; “I don’t half like it. I don’t trust him a yard. But see here, Tony, come and see me at once to-morrow after you’ve spoken to him, and then we’ll know what to do.”
Tony turned to him and put his hand on his shoulder. “I say. I don’t know why you’re such a brick to me. I’ll never forget it”; and then suddenly he turned up the path and was gone.
Maradick climbed the dark stairs to his room. His wife was in bed, asleep. He undressed quietly; for an instant he looked at her with the candle in his hand. She looked very young with her hair lying in a cloud about the pillow; he half bent down as though he would kiss her. Then he checked himself and blew out the candle.
CHAPTER XIII. MORE OF THE ITINERANT OPTIMIST; ALICE DU CANE
ASKS MARADICK A FAVOUR
Maradick awoke very early on the next morning. As he lay in his bed, his mind was still covered with the cobwebs of his dreams, and he saw the room in a fantastic, grotesque shape, so that he was not sure that it was his room at all, but he thought that it might be some sea with the tables and chairs for rocks, or some bare windy moor.
The curtain blew ever so slightly in the wind from the crevice of the door, and he watched it from his bed as it swelled and bulged and shrunk back as though it were longing to break away from the door altogether but had not quite courage enough. But although he was still confused and vague with the lazy bewilderment of sleep, he realised quite definitely in the back of his mind that there was some fact waiting for him until he should be clear-headed enough to recognise it. This certainty of something definite before him that had to be met and considered roused him. He did not, in the least, know what that something was that awaited him, but he tried to pull himself together. The sea receded, the beating of its waves was very faint in his ears, and the rocks resolved into the shining glass of the dressing-table and the solemn chairs with their backs set resolutely against the wall, and their expressions those of self-conscious virtue.
He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes; he knew with absolute certainty that he should not sleep again. The light was trying to pierce the blind and little eyes of colour winked at him from the window, the silver things on the dressing-table stood out, pools of white, against the dark wood.
He got out of bed, and suddenly the fact stared him in the face: it was that he was committed, irrevocably committed, to help Tony. He had, in a way, been committed before, ever since Lady Gale asked him for his help; but there had always been a chance of escaping, the possibility, indeed, of the “thing” never coming off at all. But now it was coming off, and very soon, and he had to help it to come.
He had turned the whole situation over in his mind so very often, and looked at it from so very many points of view, with its absurdities and its tragedies and its moralities, that there was nothing more to be said about the actual thing at all; that was, in all conscience, concrete enough. He saw it, as he sat on the bed swinging his feet, there in front of him, as some actual personality with whom he had pledged himself in league. He had sworn to help two children to elope against ever
ybody’s wishes — he, Maradick, of all people the most law-abiding. What had come over him? However, there it was and there was nothing more to be said about it. It wasn’t to be looked at again at all with any view of its possible difficulties and dangers, it had just to be carried through.
But he knew, as he thought about it, that the issue was really much larger than the actual elopement. It was the effect on him that really mattered, the fact that he could never return to Epsom again with any hope of being able to live the life there that he had lived before.
The whole circle of them would be changed by this; it was the most momentous event in all their lives.
Maradick looked again at the morning. The mists were rising higher in the air, and all the colours, the pale golden sand, the red roofs, the brown bend of the rocks, were gleaming in the sun. He would go and bathe and then search out Punch.
It was a quarter past five as he passed down the stairs; the house was in the most perfect stillness, and only the ticking of innumerable clocks broke the silence. Suddenly a bird called from the garden; a little breath of wind, bringing with it the scent of pinks and roses, trembled through the hall.
When he reached the cove the sea was like glass. He had never bathed early in the morning before, and a few weeks ago he would have laughed at the idea. A man of his age bathing at half-past five in the morning! The water would be terribly cold. But it wasn’t. He thought that he had never known anything so warm and caressing as he lay back in it and looked up through the clear green. There was perfect silence. Things came into his mind, some operas that he had heard, rather reluctantly, that year in London. The opening of the third act of Puccini’s “Tosca,” with the bell-music and the light breaking over the city. He remembered that he had thought that rather fine at the time. The lovers in “Louise” on Montmartre watching the lights burst the flowers below them and saluting “Paris!” He had appreciated that too. A scene in “To Paradise,” with a man somewhere alone in a strange city watching the people hurrying past him and counting the lamps that swung, a golden chain, down the street. Some picture in the Academy of that year, Sim’s “Night Piece to Julia.” He hadn’t understood it or seen anything in it at the time. “One of those new fellows who just stick the paint on anyhow,” he had remarked; but now he seemed to remember a wonderful blue dress and a white peacock in the background!
How funny it was, he thought, as he plunged, dripping, back on to the beach, that the things that a fellow scarcely noticed at all at the time should be just the things that came into his mind afterwards. And on the sand he saw Toby, the dog, gravely watching him. Toby came courteously towards him, sniffed delicately at his socks, and then, having decided apparently that they were the right kind of socks and couldn’t really be improved on, sat down with his head against Maradick’s leg.
Maradick tickled his head and decided that pugs weren’t nearly so ugly as he had thought they were. But then there was a world of difference between Toby and the ordinary pug, the fat pug nestling in cushions on an old lady’s lap, the aristocratic pug staring haughtily from the soft luxury of a lordly brougham, the town pug, over-fed, over-dressed, over-washed. But Toby knew the road, he had seen the world, he was a dog of the drama, a dog of romance; he was also a dog with a sense of humour.
He licked Maradick’s bare leg with a very warm tongue and then put a paw on to his arm. They were friends. He ratified the contract by rolling over several times on the sand; he then lay on his back with his four paws suspended rigidly in the air, and then, catching sight of his master, turned rapidly over and went to meet him.
Punch expressed no surprise at finding Maradick there at that hour of the morning. It was the most natural thing in the world. People who came to Treliss were always doing things like that, and they generally spent the rest of their lives in trying to forget that they had done them.
“I’ve been wanting to see you, Mr. Maradick, sir,” he said, “and I’m mighty glad to find you here when there’s nothing to catch our words save the sea, and that never tells tales.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, Garrick,” said Maradick, “I came down after you. I meant to have gone up to your rooms after bathing, but as you are here it’s all the better. I badly want to talk to you.”
Punch sat down on the sand and looked quite absurdly like his dog.
“I want to talk to you about Morelli, Garrick.” Maradick hesitated a moment. It was very difficult to put into words exactly what he wanted to say. “We have talked about the man before, and I shouldn’t bother you about it again were it not that I’m very fond of young Tony Gale, and he, as you know, has fallen in love with Morelli’s daughter. It’s all a long story, but the main point is, that I want to know as much about the man as you can tell me. Nobody here seems to know very much about him except yourself.”
Punch’s brow had clouded at the mention of Morelli’s name.
“I don’t rightly know,” he said, “as I can say anything very definite, and that being so perhaps one oughtn’t to say anything at all; but if young Gale’s going to take that girl away, then I’m glad. He’s a good fellow, and she’s on my mind.”
“Why?” said Maradick.
“Well, perhaps after all it’s best to tell what I know.” Punch took out a pipe and slowly filled it. “Mind you, it’s all damned uncertain, a lot of little things that don’t mean anything when taken by themselves. I first met the man in ‘89, twenty years ago. I was a young chap, twenty-one or so. A kind of travelling blacksmith I used to be then, with Pendragon up the coast as a kind o’ centre. It was at Pendragon I saw him. He used to live there then as he lives in Treliss now; it was a very different kind o’ place then to what it is now — just a sleepy, dreamy little town, with bad lights, bad roads and the rest, and old tumbled down ‘ouses. Old Sir Jeremy Trojan ‘ad the run of it then, him that’s father of the present Sir Henry, and you wouldn’t have found a quieter place, or a wilder in some ways.”
“Wild?” said Maradick. “It’s anything but wild now.”
“Yes, they’ve changed it with their trams and things, and they’ve pulled down the cove; but the fisher-folk were a fierce lot and they wouldn’t stand anyone from outside. Morelli lived there with his wife and little girl. ’Is wife was only a young thing, but beautiful, with great eyes like the sea on a blue day and with some foreign blood in ‘er, dark and pale.
“’E wasn’t liked there any more than ’e is here. They told funny tales about him even then, and said ’e did things to his wife, they used to hear her crying. And they said that ‘e’d always been there, years back, just the same, never looking any different, and it’s true enough he looks just the same now as he did then. It isn’t natural for a man never to grow any older.”
“No,” said Maradick, “it isn’t.”
“There were other things that the men down there didn’t like about ’im, and the women hated ’im. But whenever you saw ’im he was charming — nice as ’e could be to me and all of ’em. And he was clever, could do things with his ‘ands, and make birds and beasts do anything at all.”
“That’s strange,” said Maradick. “Tony said something of the same sort the other day.”
“Well, that ain’t canny,” said David, “more especially as I’ve seen other animals simply shake with fear when he comes near them. Well, I was telling you, they didn’t like ’im down in the cove, and they’d say nothing to ’im and leave ’im alone. And then one night” — Punch’s mouth grew set and hard— “they found Mrs. Morelli up on the moor lying by the Four Stones, dead.”
“Dead!” said Maradick, startled.
“Yes; it was winter time and the snow blowing in great sheets across the moor and drifting about her dress, with the moon, like a yellow candle, hanging over ‘er. But that weren’t all. She’d been killed, murdered. There were marks on her face and hands, as though teeth had torn her. Poor creature!” Punch paused.
“Well,” said Maradick excitedly, “what was the end of it all?”
“Well,” said Maradick, laughing, “so far it isn’t very definite. That might have happened to any man.” But it was, nevertheless, curiously in keeping with the picture that he had in his mind.
“Yes,” said Punch, “I told you already that I ‘adn’t got anything very definite. I don’t say as ’e did it or had anything to do with it, but it’s all of a piece in a way. Thing got ‘ot against ’im in Pendragon after that and ’e ‘ad to go, and ’e came ’ere with ’is girl. But they say that ‘e’s been seen there since, and in other places too. And then I’ve seen ’im do other things. Kill rabbits and birds like a devil. ‘E’s cruel, and then again ‘e’s kind, just like a child will pull flies to bits. ’E is just like a child, and so ’e isn’t to be trusted. ‘E’s wild, like Nature. ’E likes to have young things about ’im. That’s why ‘e’s taken to young Gale, and ’e loves that girl in a way, although I know ‘e’s cruel — —”