Miss Croome went over to Mrs. Tuke’s dressing-table and began re-setting her hair; there was a furtive vanity about the gesture. She was deliberately loosening and pulling down those two thick strands of hair again so that they should show underneath the hat band. The whole posture—the body leaning towards the mirror and the hand raised to the hair—seemed out of keeping with the black dress, the black woollen stockings and heavy, low-heeled shoes. But Mrs. Tuke saw nothing to object to; she was always ready to condone any amount of prinking in a plain woman that she would not for a moment have excused in a pretty one.
Downstairs in the hall John Marco was waiting. It was not a hospitable hall to wait in. The walls were covered with a shiny, oiled paper and the pictures were all either of the Holy Land or of Mr. Tuke. The furniture was limited to a pair of high-back chairs with curving ramifications like the seven branched candlesticks, and an umbrella-stand with a black-enamelled pan underneath to catch the drips. Down the centre ran a long strip of patternless oil-cloth. And when Miss Croome had joined them in her black coat and veil, her new black hand-bag clasped in her black-gloved hand, the natural gloom of the hall seemed suddenly to burst into flower.
But Miss Croome herself seemed to have outgrown her gloom. She was a little red-eyed and her face was still swollen from crying at the graveside. But those signs were the only witnesses to what she had been through. Her present mood had no place for them. She thanked Mrs. Tuke for her kindness and said that she hoped Mr. Tuke would be no worse for having taken the service. Mr. Tuke replied with the kind of smile that can be worn only by men who know that dying for duty is not death at all.
On the walk back, Miss Croome became quite communicative. She spoke of the occasion as though it had been a most ordinary one. It was in a way, as though she were outside it all and looking on.
“When you come to think of it,” she said quietly, “it’s strange that you should have been my uncle’s coffin bearer. You really scarcely knew him.”
“I’d never even spoken to him until the night he died,” said John Marco pointedly.
“That’s what I meant,” Miss Croome continued. “It can’t have been an accident that you were sent to him. These things have a meaning.”
John Marco did not reply, and a moment later, Miss Croome spoke again.
“An hour before the end he had never met you,” she said almost as though talking to herself, “yet in the face of death he trusted you with everything.”
The memory of John Marco’s crime came back to him. He felt his heart pause for an instant and hesitate; then it recovered and resumed its regular beating. Only a faint flush that in the darkness could not be noticed served to show that her remark had affected him.
But Miss Croome had not finished.
“It was his death-bed that brought us together,” she was saying. “We must always remember that.”
John Marco glanced sideways at her as she spoke. But she was apparently taking no notice of him; her face was hidden under the brim of the veiled black hat.
“I’m the only one left,” she said after a pause. “I’m the last.”
“Are . . . are you going to stop here?” John Marco asked.
They had arrived at the faded stucco house as he spoke and John Marco already felt his mind beginning to lighten to think that he would soon be away from it again. He had made this last remark with a note of deliberate unconcern in his voice as though he did not care whether or not he even received the answer.
But Miss Croome’s reply was not casual: it suggested a careful and insidious calculation.
“I shall stop here for the present,” she said. “I’m going to stay in the house until I see what happens.”
“What happens?” John Marco repeated.
He pushed open the iron gate and stood back on the pavement for Miss Croome to pass.
“Yes,” said Miss Croome in the same flat, unrevealing voice. “Until I see what happens.”
She saw that John Marco was still standing on the pavement, not attempting to follow her, and she paused where she was.
“I know that it’s difficult now that I’m alone,” she said, “but I wondered if you would come in. I thought perhaps that you might care to sit with me for a moment.”
“It’s too late,” he answered. “You must be tired. You need all the rest you can get.”
“But I can’t sleep,” Miss Croome answered. “Not after what’s happened.” Then she stopped herself suddenly and held out her hand. “Good-night, Mr. Marco,” she said. “I mustn’t keep you. We shall meet some other time.”
John Marco turned and left her as soon as they had shaken hands. He was shivering; even through her new black kid gloves he had disliked touching her. She and the house, even the road, too, that it stood in, all served to remind him too strongly.
There was a feeling about the whole place that at any moment he might come face to face with Mr. Trackett again; Mr. Trackett searching for what had been his.
Chapter VI
At Twenty Past Twelve they all filed out again; the morning service had lasted from eleven, and the worshippers now emerged, blinking, into the sunlight. They wore the frowning, rather owl-like expression of an audience coming out after a matinée; it was as though they were surprised and a little shamefaced after such high mysteries to discover that ordinary everyday life had been going on outside all the time.
John Marco was among them. He had sidled out of his pew and had contrived to remain there standing in the aisle until Mary Kent and her mother reached him. Then, innocently, as though he had been waiting for no one in particular, he had turned and walked out beside them.
When they reached the porch where Mr. Tuke was standing (hot milk with nearly half a wine glass of rum in it had done its work and his voice was in magnificent timbre again) Mrs. Kent turned to him. Her daughter’s hand was on her arm prompting her.
“We wondered,” she said, “if you’d like to take tea with us to-day. Everything was so upset the last time you came.”
John Marco blushed. He looked hurriedly in Mary Kent’s direction and saw that she was smiling at him.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll walk back with your daughter after Sunday School if I may. It’s very kind of you.”
“Mr. Kent really asked me to apologise,” Mrs. Kent went on. “He was very ashamed over what happened. Only it wasn’t his fault you know. A carbuncle is so very painful.”
But John Marco was not listening to Mrs. Kent; he was looking at her daughter instead. He did not notice that someone was standing just behind him. Mr. Rumcorn, one of the Elders, drew his attention to the fact.
“Mind yourself, Mr. Marco,” he said, “you’re getting in the young lady’s way.”
John Marco stepped back and saw that it was Miss Croome who was standing there. Her dark eyes swept over him, then on to Mary Kent and back to him again. There was something faintly amused and contemptuous about her expression. But she merely apologised for disturbing them and passed on down the steps.
“That’s Mr. Trackett’s niece,” John Marco explained.
Mrs. Kent peered after her with renewed interest: in her deep mourning she looked conspicuously alone amid the rest of the congregation that was filing out and going away home in two’s and families.
“They say she’s got money coming to her,” Mrs. Kent remarked. “She’ll need it too. She’s certainly plain enough.”
And she gave the happy laugh of a mother who has a pretty daughter.
They were already walking down the chapel steps as she spoke. Mary Kent was quite close beside him, and for a moment he dared to let his hand rest in hers. It was a quick, furtive gesture, something that it would not have done for the rest of the worshippers to have seen. But even so it succeeded. For an instant he felt the pressure of her fingers upon his. And then they were both walking down the steps again, sedately and properly, as though they were casual acquaintances who had met by chance. But John Marco’s fingers still seemed alive and
tingling from the touch when they reached the bottom and he raised his hat to bid Mrs. Kent and her daughter good-morning.
Old Mrs. Marco was dressed all ready for Sunday lunch when he got back. She had set a widow’s cap on her head and pinned a large cameo brooch on her bosom. This dressing-up was her ritual, her reply and challenge to the road they lived in. When Mr. Marco had been alive and the little maid, flushed from the heat of the kitchen, had carried in the beef and the vegetables, Mrs. Marco had always been sitting there like that at her own table, her hair smoothed down and a brooch in her bosom. And now, even though she had to cook the meal herself, pottering shakily about that dark back kitchen, she was a lady again by the time she came to eat it.
The moment John Marco had hung his bowler and overcoat upon the hat-peg, Mrs. Marco’s Sunday examination began: she wanted to know about the service. Ever since the cords of arthritis which bound her had been drawn tighter and still tighter, the journey to the Tabernacle had been too much for her. And this method of question and answer, was now, next to her Bible, the chief spiritual consolation of her life.
“What were the lessons?” she asked.
“An angel opposeth Balaam,” and “The centurion’s servant healed,” he told her.
She went straight to her Bible—it was the size of a small suitcase and significantly locked against enquiry—and opened it. She found the place with the effortless precision of a scholar.
“... And when the ass saw the angel of the Lord, she fell under Balaam: and Balaam’s anger was kindled, and he smote the ass with a staff.
“And the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times ?
“And Balaam said unto the ass, Because thou hast mocked me: I would there were a sword in mine hand, for now would I kill thee.
“And the ass said unto Balaam, Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? was I ever wont to do so unto thee? And he said, Nay.
“Then the Lord opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and he bowed down his head, and fell flat on his face. ...”
It was, taken at its face value, a somewhat obscure and puzzling extract from the Scriptures, this lesson of the short-tempered rider and the talking donkey. But it was not the moral of the piece that was exercising Mrs. Marco: it was the words. They ran over her tongue like beads of honey, these rich, thick syllables which came straight out of her infancy. It was always the same: as soon as she began to read the Scriptures, the present, with all its miseries and privations, disappeared; and in its place was left the happy landscape of childhood. As she read about Balaam meeting Balak in the city of Moab she was a young girl seated in the Amosite Meeting House in Dalston; she had only to close her eyes to hear again, though faint and ghost-like after all these years, the loved accents of the Rev. Mr. Cluddock who had taught her.
“Did you see that Mr. Trackett of yours?” she asked suddenly; she still resented that her child should have friends that she had not chosen for him.
“Mr. Trackett’s dead,” he told her.
She nodded her head.
“I remember now,” she said. “Mr. Tuke said something about it.”
There was a pause: then John Marco spoke to her.
“I’m going out to tea this afternoon,” he said.
Mrs. Marco paused; she suddenly saw the whole of her Sunday destroyed by her son’s heartlessness in deserting her.
“Who with?” she asked.
“I’m going to have tea with the Kents,” he said.
“Who?”
“The Kents.”
“You mean the watch-maker?”
John Marco nodded.
“What are you going there for?”
She did not conceal the anxiety that lay behind the question; it seemed to her that her model son was suddenly throwing her over for a host of strange acquaintances of his own.
“I said what are you going there for?” she repeated.
“They asked me,” John Marco replied.
She turned and stared at him: she had not known him like this before, secretive and non-committal. But it was not John Marco she saw. It was his father, John Augustus Marco whom she saw standing there. In his time he had been the larger man, thick-set and florid. But the line of the shoulders was the same—it was something that had been passed on—and the aggressive angle of the chin. It was all there. And now this duplicity, this deceitfulness, as well; during all the years of her marriage she had never been quite sure of him. Mrs. Marco got up and took hold of the back of her chair to steady herself and came over and peered into his face.
“Is there a Miss Kent?” she asked.
“There is,” he answered.
“What’s she like?” Mrs. Marco pestered him. “How old is she?”
John Marco looked steadily at his mother, his strong eyes meeting her weak upturned ones.
“I shall bring her here sometime,” he said. “You shall meet her.”
Mrs. Marco did not reply for a moment.
“What about the other young woman?” she asked. “What did she want with you?” She caught hold of him by the arm and stood there peering up into his face. “Have you been getting yourself into trouble?” she suddenly asked. “Have you done something you’re ashamed of?”
John Marco felt a shudder of coldness run along his spine. He stepped back a pace so that old Mrs. Marco, her support gone, almost stumbled forward.
“I’ve got myself into no sort of trouble,” he said. “I’ve done nothing I’m ashamed of.”
The sound of the words frightened him as he uttered them; they were too brave. He wondered, in one of those little fits of terror which were now mercifully becoming less frequent and less severe, how long it would be before the whole of Paddington would learn the falseness of them.
But old Mrs. Marco was not thinking of him any longer. She was already on her way back to the kitchen from which was coming the unmistakable and disgraceful smell of good food left too long in the cooking.
ii
He began to get ready half-an-hour before it was time to go out. Upstairs in his bedroom he dressed himself carefully and fastidiously. When he finally left the house he looked more like a young masher idly making his way towards Piccadilly than an Amosite Sunday School teacher on his path to the Tabernacle. Only the book that he was carrying betrayed him: it was the Rev. Samuel Wood’s Bible Questions and Bible Answers.
Despite the book, however, his lesson that afternoon was a bad one. It wandered. Fourteen young Amosites of both sexes who had been sent by their parents to learn all about the marriage in Cana came away knowing no more than when they came in. For John Marco’s mind was not on his task. When he should have been thinking about the miracle before Capernaum, his thoughts instead were fastened upon a small front drawing-room over a watchmaker’s shop in which he would soon be sitting. And he was still further distracted by a Temperance banner that hung on the wall facing him. The banner was a bold, outspoken piece of work; it announced simply and without fear of contradiction: LIQUOR DISPLEASETH THE LORD. The words, printed in letters nearly a foot high, bore down on him: they overpowered him. Before he was halfway through the lesson, he found himself explaining the miracle of the marriage feast away as though it had not really happened.
Mary Kent’s own lesson with the little ones had been almost as disjointed. She was not as intent as she should have been upon Pharaoh’s daughter and the priest of Midian. Ever since that night when John Marco had said that he loved her she had thought of nothing else; he had absorbed her; she now accepted quite naturally the fact that in some obscure way she belonged to him already. Weddings in the Amosite dispensation are rarely the break-neck climax to a whirl-wind engagement; the affair is left to mature slowly, and the banns are read usually nine months to a year after the couple has become betrothed. She knew therefore that there would be
a long, seemingly endless, ordeal of waiting before that night when at last, worn-out with waiting, she could lay her fair head down on the same pillow that supported his dark one. But for a whole week now it had seemed to be the one moment in life worth waiting for.
All the same, his impetuousness, the lack of reticence in his behaviour, rather surprised her. He was actually waiting there ready for her, outside the infants’ room door. For the sake of an extra thirty-seconds of her company he had not gone along to the common room where the teachers, all five of them, left their hats and coats on chairs round the room and Mr. Tuke left his, importantly, on the table. She felt foolish and a little flattered by it all as she went into the common-room beside John Marco and knew that the eyes of the other teachers, Mr. Chirkwell (who was also the organist), Miss Mold, and Mrs. Birdlip were upon them.
And the walk back to the shop with his elbow up against hers had the same quality of delicious unreality about it. She felt so happy that she wondered if the other people they met would notice it; happiness of that kind seemed impossible to conceal. And John Marco himself was different, too. He looked younger. His colour was higher than usual and his eyes were brighter. At Chapel that morning he had looked pale; she had been worried about him. Now, with his jet-black bowler and his neat silk tie he looked as if he could take all earth and heaven in his stride.
It was obvious from the moment they got inside the flat that Mrs. Kent had put herself out for them. She was wearing a brown velvet dress with a high lace collar, supported all round with little props of whalebone. It gave her a rich, ceremonial, presence, like a latter-day Queen Elizabeth. Even Mr. Kent had been made to get up and dress. In his blue serge suit with the high butterfly collar which showed how pathetically thin and wrinkled his neck was, he was striving to make himself a fit consort for Mrs. Kent’s magnificence. It was only the plaster in the middle of his back that thwarted him. When he rose to shake John Marco by the hand he walked with a curious crab-like motion, endeavouring to keep the waist-band of his trousers from rubbing up against the plaster.
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