Mrs. Lovibond pushed open the door.
"Mr. Maurice," said she, in her deep, silky voice, "here is a pleasant surprise for you," and she undulated back against the doorpost, leaving Douce just room to pass through.
Douce, indeed, had surprised her brother, and she had had one vivid glance of the room and its occupants when Mrs. Lovibond had opened the door. Maurice was sitting by the window, bending forward with his elbows resting on his knees, and his two fists pressed together under his chin. His profile had a sharpness of pain, and his eyes stared. Opposite him but more in the shadow Douce was aware of a neat little man in a bob wig, dressed all in black, with his knees and feet placed precisely, and holding a small book or ledger in one hand. Douce's impression was that her brother and the neat little man were not very happy together.
Maurice rose from his chair, so did the little man in black. Mrs. Lovibond smiled at them all with a smile of infinite capacity, and, closing the door, left them together. Douce noticed that her brother's face looked white and stiff, like a piece of wet linen hanging frozen on a line on a winter morning.
"Mr. Marwick, this is my sister."
The little man had queer, glossy black eyes. He bowed to Douce, and Douce curtsied to him. She had a feeling that her brother wished her to be polite to Mr. Marwick.
"How do you do, sir?"
He smiled, and when he smiled his hard face seemed to crack, as though it were made of porcelain and not of flesh and blood. The corners of his mouth turned upwards into his cheeks; his lips seemed to disappear; his eyes grew brighter. Indeed, they suddenly grew very bright when they looked at Douce, and the red light of her hair kindled a flame in them.
"I am very well. Miss St. Croix, thank you."
She thought him old, but he was not more than five-and-forty, and in his hard, brittle, shrewd way he was not bad-looking. She neither liked him nor disliked him. She knew at once that she was pleasing to Mr. Marwick's eyes, and such knowledge is apt to prejudice a woman.
Maurice stood there with his eyelids half-closed and his hands gripping the back of the chair.
"Mr. Marwick is a very old friend of mine. Well, Sis, what have you got there?"
"Your linen," she said; "I have mended it."
"Excellent," said her brother with dry lips.
Mr. Marwick smiled and brought his chair forward.
"Please," he said.
His voice was sharp but ingratiating. He had the air of reproving the brother by showing courtesy to his sister. Surely she was an admirable young woman to walk all the way with her brother's shirts, and the fellow had not asked her to sit down!
"Miss St. Croix must be tired."
He patted the back of the chair and Douce sat down. She was surprised to find herself obeying the little man as though he were a person in authority. Maurice glanced at them both with a sudden lifting of the eyebrows and the air of a man intrigued and surprised by some idea that had occurred to him.
"And how is our father, Sis?"
Maurice showed a sudden animation. Mr. Marwick had put his little book away in his pocket and taken Maurice's chair, and was looking at Douce attentively as though he had forgotten all about the brother in the presence of his sister. St. Croix perched himself on the oak table behind them. His frozen face had thawed.
"Douce is a most devoted daughter, my dear Marwick."
"I am sure she is," said the lawyer, like a bright-eyed and assenting dog.
Douce looked at her knees.
"Since I was three my brother has always teased me, Mr. Marwick."
"Nonsense, Sis; I mean what I say."
"I'm sure he does, Miss St. Croix."
"Douce works like a little Frenchwoman, sir. She cooks and mends, and makes preserves, and reads to her father, and yet—look at her."
Douce became aware of the fact that Mr. Marwick's eyes were fixed upon her hands. She took great care of her hands, and they were not red and rough in spite of all her work. She could not help smiling at the lawyer.
"Mr. Marwick does not quite believe you, Maurice."
"But I assure you that he does, madam. I may have a quick eye."
"The quickest in the City," said Maurice, with flattering emphasis.
There was more talk of a like complexion, Maurice showing a pleasant animation in applauding Mr. Marwick's surprising attitude towards his sister. Men are caught in strange ways. They may swim the same pond for years, growing old and crusty, to be caught at last by some unexpected bait. Mr. Marwick was a bachelor, but this singleness of his had been part of a singleness of purpose, and for a boy who had begun life by sweeping out Mr. Jardine's rooms he had done very well for himself. It had taken him twenty years to become the dominant partner in the firm of Jardine and Marwick, and through all these years he had not swerved from his path by a hair's breadth to snap up the world's delicacies or to gather its encumbrances. He was a hard and indomitable little man, and many people had good reason to be afraid of him. "What I want I get" had been his motto. And he had not wanted the things that the ordinary, fleshy man desires, and this had been to him a source of strength.
Mr. Sylvester would be waiting for his supper. Douce remembered this, reminded the two gentlemen of it, and rose to take leave of them.
"I'm sorry. Sis," said her brother; "I would have seen you home, but I am expecting a French merchant at Durand's."
Stephen Marwick rose immediately. It was impossible that Miss St. Croix should walk home alone; he could not permit it; he hoped that she would allow him to take her brother's place.
His brisk and quiet self-assurance and his air of shrewd kindness dominated her. She still had a pain at her heart, and the memory of an anger that hurt.
"I am sure I am very much obliged to you, sir; but it is a long way."
Mr. Marwick picked up his hat and cane.
"The greater my privilege," said he.
Maurice showed them out, looking anxiously yet attentively at the little man, who hardly looked at him at all. They went down the stairs, and Maurice crossed to the window and, leaning out, watched them appear on the footwall below. Marwick offered his arm to Douce. She accepted it, and a sudden smile came into her brother's eyes. And then, just as suddenly, the smile changed to a look of anger. His nostrils grew pinched and thin, and, turning, he picked up the chair on which the little man had been sitting and threw it across the room.
Mrs. Lovibond came labouring upstairs to discover what the noise was. She had cause to be troubled about Mr. St. Croix, who had been refusing his food and walking about his room at night.
"My dear, what a fright you gave me!"
"I knocked a chair over, that's all."
Her white face and her breathlessness showed him that her fear had not been assumed. St. Croix looked at her with a mixture of tenderness and loathing. She had been very good to him, and he owed her money.
"Why, it's a great world. Poll! Here is old Marwick making cat's eyes at my sister. Come and kiss me, you great, big buxom thing."
Meanwhile, that problematical couple, flame linked to black steel, progressed through the noisy crowded streets, past gardens and under the shade of trees until the sky was free of tiles and chimney-pots. They did not exchange twenty words. Both of them were people who had learnt to be silent with ease, the girl in that glum house, the man in the grim loneliness of his getting and gaining. Douce did not appear to be troubled by his silence. When they reached the lanes and the cool quiet of the hedgerows she withdrew her arm from his and walked a little apart; but her aloofness pleased the man and did not offend him. He watched her with a kind of keen approval. She was red where he was black, soft where he was hard, and yet she, too, had her hardness. The dark velvet of her eyes hid much, or, at least, he thought so. He liked her little crisp red mouth and fine white chin.
"I have waited ten years to see the wench I want to marry, and here she is!"
That was his reflection, and in the midst of it she surprised him.
"You are a frie
nd of my brother's, sir?"
"I hope so," said he.
"Then—if he is in trouble you will help him to escape from it?"
Mr. Marwick gave a little jerk of the head. There was exultation in the movement, a shrewd and surprised delight in her quick seizing of an opportunity. He wondered how much she knew.
"Mr. Maurice is a little ambitious," he said. "Perhaps he has——"
"No, nothing. But I have felt."
"Ah, you are quick!"
"People who have to watch are quick, Mr. Marwick."
"And wise," he added. "Well, we shall see."
She said no more, and the cleverness of her silence pleased him. He put it down to cleverness, and having assumed it such, set off on a circuit of false impressions. "O, we shall understand each other," he thought; "we shall understand each other very quickly. This pretty thing is no fool. This is the wench for me." He began to talk to her quite like a debonair little man of the world, and his preciseness fell from him. He became ten years younger.
When they reached the gate he asked to be taken in to be presented to Mr. Sylvester.
"I shall count it an honour, madam."
Douce humoured him. She had begun to realize that it would be wise to humour him, and inwardly she was tired and sick and pitifully resentful. She had been hurt, and she was in a mood that prompted her to play upon the pain of it. She acted wilfully against her instincts.
But the result surprised her. Her father had always been difficult with strangers, and especially with men, but the little man in the black suit and bob wig did not appear to find St. Croix difficult. Both of them were hard men, but with a little hardness which hid much which the world did not wot of.
Douce went to get the supper ready. She was standing by the kitchen window, brooding for a moment, with the evening sunlight on her hands and hair and a little cloud of bitter darkness in her eyes, when she heard her father's voice calling her.
"Child."
She went in to them, and saw Mr. Stephen Marwick with one of her father's books on his knee.
"Child, Mr. Marwick will take supper with us."
She made a movement of the head. She could not explain the feeling that she had; there was something threatening in this sudden friendliness. She went back to the kitchen. The sun was passing behind the elms, and massive shadows fell upon the window.
XXVI
At times there comes to a man a sudden sense of the mystery of things. Perhaps he has seen the face of the woman whom he is to love, or has sat at a window while the grey dawn steals in and death stands waiting beside a bed. Life flashes out poignant and strange. There may be a rush of exultation and of anguish, a sense of light streaming upon things visible and invisible, as it streams from under the edge of a cloud at sunset, lighting up some vivid face, burning deep into the eyes of memory.
It was dusk, and Jordan walked in the streets. Overhead were the lingerings of a flushed sky, and somewhere a bell was throbbing. He did not look at the people whom he passed, but went straight forward with his eyes on the distance like a man walking in the fields. He had been thinking of her all day, and in a few minutes he would see her as he had seen her many times before, and yet he had a most strange feeling that this time it would be different. There was something in him that strove and suffered. He wanted to be nearer to her, not with his body, but in some other more mystical yet intimate way.
The evening was cool and very still. He was not conscious of men, but he was deeply aware of other things, the soft dark outlines of a tree with its swelling cloud of dusk dimmed foliage, the sudden blinking of a star, the smell of flowers in a garden. When he came to the street in which she lived he paused and stood still. It was empty, a street of shadows, with the flicker of candlelight crossing from some of its windows, and somehow he wished that it was quite dark, or that the moon was shining down it. She was not made to live by candlelight. He could picture her on some high hill, with the full moon like a shield behind her, or being carried in a silken litter by slaves under the burning sun of a new world. To Jordan she seemed a woman apart, and unlike any other woman he had ever seen or dreamt of. He could always see her standing a little apart, faintly smiling, richly mysterious, urging a man to accomplish something by that watching look in her eyes. Yes, he felt that he could be happy, that he could accomplish great things if he were watched by her. He would like to fight under her eyes, vanquish some man and then forgive him.
He walked up the street, and it was mysterious as no other street had ever been. He passed her house and repassed it, holding the breath of his soul. There were lights in the lower window, but the window which he knew so well was dark. He paused. He played with his expectancy, lingering over it, half loath to change it for the reality, because in the reality there was something to be feared. His homage had ceased to be impersonal. The "I" had wakened in it, and with it a voice which warned him. "Fencing-master, fool, what can you be to her or she to you?"
And to-night the voice warned him, and at the sound of its inward challenge he turned with a lift of the head and crossed the road towards her door.
"What of it?" was his answer. "If I know—I know."
Even Sambo's shining black face was the face from another world, and a Sambo who said "Good evening, sah," and took Jordan's hat and sword. He was shown into the dining-room on the right of the hall, with its Flemish tapestries all soft blues and golds, its walnut furniture, and its polished floor. Candles were burning on the table, and here Sambo left him alone with his own thoughts.
Happening to glance at the table, Jordan saw that places were laid for two, and he was troubled. Mrs. Merris and Aunt Julia! Was it possible that she had not expected him, and that he had presumed too much upon her kindness? Yet it was the day she had chosen for him, and as he stood there feeling challenged by the thought of finding himself an awkward intruder, he heard footsteps on the stairs. They were her footsteps. He would have known them anywhere, and his heart beat faster.
She came in; she was smiling. She was wearing a dress of some golden colour which caught the light of the candles like an amber sheath.
"Forgive me, I am late," she said, "and Sambo had forgotten to light the candles upstairs."
She saw Jordan's eyes rest for a moment upon the table.
"We have been out driving, and Aunt Julia is tired and has a headache. I sent her to bed."
His eyes lifted to hers, and she was aware of the deep shine in them, something of awe and of wonder. "I am to dine with her alone!" he was saying to himself. "I am to spend two—perhaps three—whole hours with her! I can hardly believe it to be true." She smiled. She pointed to a chair with her fan, but he waited for her to seat herself before taking the chair she had chosen for him.
"And how is the house?"
Very gravely he began to tell her about the house, going into all its details with a simplicity that assumed her interest to be unfeigned. She felt that he was not looking at himself while he talked, or choosing what to tell her and what not to tell, or hesitating with the sudden reflection, "All this must seem very dull to her." He had the knack of making things interesting, because he was so intensely interested in them himself, not egotistically, but out of sheer strong singleness of purpose. They were still talking about the house when Sambo served them at dinner, and the black's solemn yet half-smiling face seemed to reflect more than was visible. For to Mrs. Mariana the house was Jordan; she saw him in it and in the building of it, in its simple solidity, its growth, its purposeful suggestiveness.
But there was more in it than this, and she understood it if he did not. His feeling was of being near to her in some strange and wonderful way, as a child draws near to a creature greatly wondered at and loved. She had him by the hand; she shone upon him; she listened. He was still more conscious of the mystery of her kindness when Sambo lighted them to the room above, and they sat there at the window with the shaded candles behind them and soft moonlight falling into the street below. Jordan felt himself open t
o her. He was a world, a house, a human book into which she looked with eyes of curious sympathy.
She made him talk of himself. He half realized it, but the depth of his pleasure in talking to her swallowed up his lesser consciousness.
"That's the strange thing, madam, about this house," he said; "it seems to be part of myself, a new part, something I had not foreseen."
"Perhaps it is," she answered. "Don't you think that we find ourselves in the things we do?"
He pondered these words of hers, and suddenly the whole of him seemed to unfold to her.
"I think it began about a year ago. Till then I saw myself doing nothing but teaching gentlemen to be passable swordsmen. I was quite contented. You see, madam, I ought to be contented."
"And why?" she asked.
His face was in the shadow, with its deep-set eyes and long, firm mouth. She watched him.
"Well, had I not more than a man in my position had any right to expect? I was picked up off a doorstep."
For a moment she seemed to cease to breathe.
"And could you help that?"
He made a slight movement, and then resumed his intent stillness.
"No; but it sets a man his limit. Our lives seem like houses; you cannot live in one that was not built to suit your size. Society is bricks and mortar."
"And you want to break down the walls of your house with a shake of the shoulders and get into a bigger one?"
"That is how I feel sometimes," he said.
"Well, is it wrong?"
He half turned his head.
"It might be. Our own house is never quite our own house, is it? There are pieces of other people's houses in it, other people's lives."
"When did you discover that?" she asked.
"O, quite a long while ago, I think. When two people have been very good to you, and you love them, you cannot build quite as you please. Besides, a man must learn to know his limits."
They were silent for a while, and he felt that her silence was half consenting. And then she asked him a question.
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