Apples of Gold

by Warwick Deeping

  "A gentleman can't walk the streets these days without some clumsy fool splashing him."

  Jordan was not interested in St. Croix's stockings, though it did occur to him to wonder who paid for them.

  "I met your sister the other day."

  "Oh?" said Maurice, still delicately dabbing.

  "She walked straight past me and refused to speak. You may be able to tell me the reason."

  St. Croix transferred his solicitude to the other leg. He had no wish to reveal to Jordan the truth concerning Douce's aloofness.

  "Did she? The little fool! She is at the gawky age, my dear sir."

  "I don't think your sister is a fool," said Jordan firmly, "and she knew what she was doing. Can you explain it?"

  He was so plainly determined to get some sort of answer that Maurice withdrew some of his attention from his legs.

  "Dash it, man, am I accountable for a girl's likes and dislikes? Besides, after all, we are not very intimate, are we?"

  "No, we are not; but Douce and I used to be very good friends."

  Maurice raised a laugh.

  "I—ought to remember that! But if you really want me to give you a likely reason——"

  "I do."

  "You might ask my father. I'll admit he is a man of very narrow views."

  "So that is it," said Jordan; "I rather thought so. And your sister——"

  "Don't imagine I am being personal, March, but she is quite devoted to my reverend parent. He is all the Law of Moses and the Prophets. I'm sorry, but you must remember the stock we come from."

  Jordan, looking very serious, had his eyes on the red heels of St. Croix's shoes.

  "Not quite—all—the family."

  "I take you," said St. Croix, with a smile; "I'm a little more catholic in my colour."

  So they parted, St. Croix going on to Tom's, where he was learning to lose money at cards and to pay for being allowed to be a hanger-on to various doubtful gentlemen who belonged to the gay world. Jordan was a pretty shrewd judge of a man and his ways, but his thoughts were more fixed upon St. Croix's little Puritan of a sister. He did not call Douce a prude, not being of an age to draw certain distinctions. For Jordan, the sex was divided into women who liked him and into women who did not, and since the great majority of women liked him, and very much so to his face, he was the more challenged by the principal exception. It was a new fact in Jordan's life, that a little girl of sixteen or so disliked him. Yet, was it dislike or mere disapproval? Was she the mirror of old Sylvester's superfine morality, his godly fastidiousness? After all, did it matter?

  He decided that it did not matter. What was Douce to him or he to her? He had a whole bunch of young women to choose from, and since there is safety in numbers, Jordan had chosen no one. He liked his freedom. He was not urgently inspired to imitate the placid happiness of Thomas Nando and Mrs. Mary. And what, after all, was Douce Jeanne St. Croix? A little, red-headed girl whose head came as high as his heart, an austere little person with serious black eyes and a rather too determined mouth! There was nothing of her! She looked like a doll that would break in a man's arms.

  "If she is that way she can stay that way," he reflected. "I don't think I could trouble myself with a cold woman."

  Yet the sand was in his shoe, and he was trying to assure himself that his shoe was as comfortable as it had been for the last year. But it wasn't. He felt vaguely sore about it. His healthy and vigorous zest in life began to betray the suggestion of a limp. A little girl with red hair and eyes very black in a pale face kept walking across his path, her head averted, her lips mute. She was an ever-present figure in the day-dream of his consciousness. She made him restless, and this feeling of restlessness instigated action. He felt moved to do something, to impose himself vigorously on life, and not to sit and think out the problem of how and why life might balk a man until he learned to understand it.

  "Anyhow," he thought, "her brother may be a fop, but he is a better-natured fellow than her father."

  For once in his life Jordan almost liked Maurice St. Croix.

  That young man went home late and somewhat merry. He found Douce sitting by the table with a book on her knees, and the candle close to her elbow. Mr. Sylvester was by the fire, his thin shanks spread, his hands folded over his supper. Douce had been reading to him. They were in the middle of Mr. Milton's "Paradise Lost."

  Maurice had taken to wearing a sword, and though Mr. Sylvester disapproved of swords, he had nothing to say against Maurice carrying one. He turned in his chair and looked at his son with a cold gleam of affection, while Douce put her book aside and rose to take her brother's hat and surtout.

  "Thanks, Sis. I am afraid I am rather late, sir. Mr. Vane asked me to a little dinner to meet Lord Mulholland."

  He was breezy, affectionate, handsome.

  "That's right. I am glad you let Douce save your eyes. I wish I had as much in my head, sir, as you have, but I was able to cap a Latin quotation of Lord Mulholland's to-night. Quite turned the laugh against him."

  He took Douce's chair and turned it to face the fire, and when Douce returned from the cupboard she had to find herself another chair. Sylvester's goat's face showed a smile that was almost a simper.

  "What was the quotation, Maurice?"

  His son held up an excusatory hand.

  "Sir, quite impossible—before her. Rather broad, too broad, but I flatter myself that I gave his lordship a gentlemanly little snub. He said to me, 'St. Croix, if there had not been so much wit in that couplet of yours I should have called you a pig.' One may have to meet the Devil, sir, but one can hold one's own."

  Sylvester chuckled, and his chuckle was like the creaking of a door.

  "Moral courage, my son, moral courage."

  "Oh, I am not afraid of snubbing the Devil, sir. That reminds me. Douce, too, has been engaged in the snubbing of devils. Haven't you, Douce?"

  He gave her an ironical look, but her eyes met his without flinching.

  "Whom do you mean?"

  "No pretences, my dear! Someone stopped me to-day, and would not let me go until I had given him an explanation of a certain young lady's behaviour."

  He smiled that arch and malicious smile of his.

  "You seem to have annoyed Mr. Jordan, Sis. The fact is that he has been so spoilt by women that he couldn't understand being snubbed by one."

  Douce's lips moved, but before any words came from them Maurice had turned to his father, whose face had grown harshly attentive.

  "I ask you, sir, did I do right? I refuse to be bullied by any man, though he be twice my size and a bully by training. Mr. March wanted an explanation from me, and he asked for it with some roughness. Well, I told him the truth. 'I am not responsible for my sister's likes or dislikes,' I said, 'but I would have you understand that we St. Croix are religious people. We have our own views of men and life. To be frank with you, sir, our world—my father's and sister's world—is not your world, and thank God for it.'"

  Douce winced, yet remained very still, with her eyes watching her father. He had raised himself in his chair, and was sitting very straight and stiff in it, with a look on his face which she had known and feared from her earliest years.

  "I hope you approve, sir, of what I said?"

  "Maurice, every word of it. That a man should be born in sin is his misfortune, but when he wilfully and grossly continues in sin, let him be cast out. He is a child of the Devil."

  His pale grey-blue eyes observed his daughter.

  "When did this man speak to you?"

  "A few days ago, father. It was quite by chance. I think he was going to Mr. Nando's garden."

  "And what did you say to him?"

  "I did not speak. He followed me. I told him that I did not wish to speak to him, and he went away."

  Sylvester's eyes had a hard gleam in them.

  "You were right. A good woman should never speak to a bad man. This young man is living a life of shame and of sin."

  Douce rose and mad
e a grave curtsy to her father.

  "I trust that I shall always be a good daughter to you, sir."

  She kissed him, lingered a moment with her hand on the back of his chair, and then went slowly out of the room without looking at her brother.

  Maurice drew his chair nearer to the fire.

  "One must protect an innocent girl, sir. Women are so easily fooled."

  He smiled at Sylvester with an air of easy and frank respect.

  "I think that Douce is quite a wise young person. If ever she marries——"

  His father stared steadily at the fire.

  "I am very fortunate in my children. I think it is my wish that Douce should not marry. She has duties here which fill her life."

  Maurice had very good reasons for wishing to please his father, and if he made use of Douce in the pleasing of him, what did that matter? Women were to be used.

  "Her duty is to you, sir. I am sure that her affections will never go elsewhere. A daughter in Douce's position should not wish to marry."

  Sylvester looked pleased.

  "That is my view; I am glad that you share it. Good men are rare. I am sorry for Thomas Nando. Is this fellow March so shamefully ungrateful?"

  Maurice made a great show of being fair.

  "Wild, sir, wild. I believe that the women have got hold of him. They tell me that—already—he has ruined more than one home."

  "Infamous!" said his father. "I thank my God, Maurice, that you are not like that."

  "Well, sir, I have had advantages. I have had a good and religious home, and now that I am out in the world I know the value of clean living. By the way, sir, I ought to tell you that I am thinking of going into lodgings nearer to my work."

  His father made a quick movement of the head.

  "Lodgings! But, my dear Maurice——"

  "I knew that you would not like the idea, sir, any more than I do, but our business is growing, and I do feel that I ought to be nearer to it. Mr. Durand has hinted that he would like to have me nearer. And there is another reason."

  His father waited to hear it.

  "I find myself popular, sir; I go out a good deal into sober society, and I assure you it helps Mr. Durand's business. Why, only last week I obtained two very excellent customers by dining at Mr. Renshaw's, in the City. A man's personality does count, sir, even in the selling of silk."

  Sylvester could not deny it. His unwillingness to deny Maurice anything was the elder man's one weakness.

  "But—lodgings! I should prefer you to be in some religious family."

  "Why, sir, that is just what I wish. I have discovered the very place, rooms over a bookshop in the Strand, kept by a widow who still carries on her husband's business. She was not very eager to let to a young man, but when I told her that my father was a minister she changed her tune."

  "An elderly widow?"

  "O, she must be quite sixty, sir, and she has no children. She lets her rooms mostly to clergymen and old bachelors. Besides, rooms over a bookshop! You know how I love books, sir."

  Sylvester had to agree.

  Douce had gone to her room, the most simple and austere of rooms, with its box-bed on four square legs, its oak hutch, its table and brown basin under the window, and its carpetless floor. The whitewashed walls were full of old beams. There was no chair in the room, only a three-legged stool standing beside the bed. The mirror was a poor thing, for the mercury backing was wearing away, and when she looked at her face in it she saw herself through a blackish, spotted haze. Douce's dresses hung under a shelf, covered by a curtain of coarse cloth.

  She had drawn the linen curtains across the window and was brushing her hair, sitting on the three-legged stool by the bed. Her long hair hung within three inches of the floor, and from the glowing mass of it her little pale face looked out with a white seriousness.

  She was thinking of Jordan. She rather wished that he had not spoken to her brother, for Maurice had an ingenious way of utilizing anything that other people found unpleasant and of converting it into something useful to himself. There were times when her honesty made her distrust her brother. Her intuition divined a meanness in him which she did not understand.

  "I wonder if it is true?"

  She knew in her heart that she wished that it was not true, and yet she could not convince herself that it was false. Her father believed that Jordan was a bad man. He was convinced of it. She supposed that men knew more about these things than women did. A girl may feel very helpless, with nothing to guide her save a sentimental prejudice in favour of the sinner.

  XII

  Tom Nando was still abed, and on the Saturday Jordan walked over to the garden to pay the gardener his wages and to see that the winter work was going on. There was the same red sun, the same grey-blue mist, and when he came to the place where the lanes branched he was touched and turned aside by the impulse of the moment.

  So far as Jordan could remember he had not seen the house of the St. Croix since the day when he had rescued Douce's doll, and been cast out of Eden as a base child of Adam. That was many years ago, and when he came to the gate at the end of the lane the house seemed smaller and the bare elms less momentous and tall. He, too, was taller, and the boy was lost in the man. Yet the memory remained, both bitter and gallant, with Douce's cry challenging her father: "He is not a child of sin." As Jordan looked over the gate he was caught by that memory and moved by it, in that he was constrained to believe that Douce the girl was none other than Douce the child. He had not changed—at least, he thought that he had not changed—and why should she? She was older, she was a woman, but did being a woman make so much difference? Did a girl look at a man with more critical eyes when the woman in her had matured?

  He stood at the gate, deliberating. He was aware that the garden looked more cared for than he remembered it as a boy, and the thought occurred to him that it had ceased to be a playground. Douce had outgrown her dolls; her dolls had become real people. He vaguely divined the fact that her new seriousness had shut him out of her playground.

  Jordan asked himself why should he not walk up to that door and have the thing out with Mr. Sylvester? Was he afraid to meet any man with fists or sword? But this moral fencing was different, and he hesitated, and while he was hesitating he saw a girl's head behind the lattice of one of the lower windows. It was as though the red sun had painted a blur of colour there. She was bending over something and not looking towards the gate, and for a moment Jordan stood watching her. The pale flower of her face had a sudden, compelling perfume for him.

  He opened the gate and walked up the path, and as he turned across the grass towards the window his bigness came between it and the red disc of the sun. He threw a shadow upon her. She looked up.

  He was aware of her eyes for a moment, dark, questioning, and startled. She gave him an impression of hesitancy, of pale trembling. Her lips seemed on the edge of a smile. Then her face changed, as a landscape changes when a sudden cloud shuts out the sunlight. It seemed to grow firm and white and austere, even bathed as it was by the glowing softness of her hair. She put up a hand and quickly drew the curtains across the window.

  Jordan felt a fool, and an angry fool, and in no mood to linger in Mr. St. Croix's garden. He got himself out of it, so sternly and with such dispatch that he did not see a corner of one of the curtains lifted. He had reached the gate, and he did not look back.

  "That was about as broad a hint as a man could ask for!" he reflected.

  He went out of the gate and drew it to behind him, feeling that the act was final so far as he was concerned, nor did he hear the door open and Douce come down the path. He was walking hard and fast, and when she reached the gate he was fifty yards away, his broad back squared to her. She looked pained and unhappy. She wanted to call after him, "Jordan, come back!" but she hesitated, and the longer she hesitated the further she was from the will to recall him.

  "I can't and I won't," she said to herself; "a girl should have pride."

  J
ordan was angry, and his anger went deep, but his anger was against himself and not against Douce. If she chose to shut him out of her life, that was her business. She was the child of her father, and as the gentlemanly Maurice had put it: "Your world is not our world." Jordan realized the truth of it, but he realized it with a new bitterness after Douce had drawn that curtain. "It was my own fault. She was perfectly honest with me the other day. What the devil made me go blundering into their garden?" He remembered his talks with Tom Nando on the subject of the many worlds which a man might not enter, but he realized the difference between the barriers a man recognizes resignedly and the sudden shock of an unexpectedly closed door. "Yes, she closed it on me well and hard!" He gave a toss of the head. "Pride, my boy. Pride. Keep to your own world if you don't want doors slammed in your face." He hardened himself. He went into Tom Nando's garden, and discovering Potts, the gardener, diligently drinking ale with two or three cronies when he should have been busy with a spade, he told him certain things which made that round-backed little man stare at him like an astonished fish. There was no smile on Jordan's face. He called a spade a spade, and with such frankness that Potts had it held close to his snub nose.

  When Jordan had gone Potts rubbed his chin, and spat several times into the herb bed. There was no malice in his spitting; it was meditative.

  "What's come to him? Cursed me like a real gentleman! Something must have put him out."

  It was growing dark when Jordan reached the houses and the world that he knew. He went homewards by way of Drury Lane, and at the corner of an alley, where a bracket lamp had been lit, he was spoken to by a very tall wench, who came gliding along the wall. She was all lace and velvet, and her hooped petticoat was the colour of blood. Her eyes looked at him with brittle tenderness from under the brim of her big hat.

  "Good evening, Mr. March."

  Jordan knew her by name and by sight. At "Topladys" she was known as "Spider Doll."

  He gave one glance at her and walked on.