by Guy McCrone
At Hill Street he got down and began making his way up into Garnethill. The street was not well lit. He had to peer about in the darkness, seeking the number. Once, thinking he had come up too far, he asked his way of a young woman standing beneath a street lamp. She directed him eagerly, offering, indeed, to come with him. He noted her “English” voice and her too ready laughter, as he protested that he could find his destination very well by himself.
Miss Rennie’s landlady assured him that her young lady was at home, and that, although Miss Rennie had just come back from the country, she was sure she would see him. He stood in the dim little hall, lit by a single gas-jet, which for economy’s sake had been turned down to a peep, while the woman opened the door, went inside and shut it behind her. David was kept waiting for just such time as it takes a self-conscious young woman who has thrown aside her outdoor things to make herself hastily tidy.
II
“David Moorhouse!” Lucy Rennie came forward and gave him both her hands. The landlady closed the door behind them. “I would have known you anywhere, David,” she said, bringing him to a seat by a cheerful fire. “Would you have known me?”
“Of course, Lucy.” David was surprised at himself. In the stress of events it had not somehow occurred to him that he was coming to meet an old friend. She was not much changed after fifteen years. Her face was still round and gay, and her eyes still danced with mischief. Maturity, womanliness and a pleasant, cultivated voice were added. That was all.
They sat, as people in a like situation will, gazing at each other with frank, unaffected curiosity, their thoughts going back to such things as hunting for peewit’s eggs in the high Ayrshire furrows, or standing hand in hand, two frightened little children, as the “otter hunt”—pink coats, baying hounds and yapping terriers—made their alarming way past them as they played by the river.
“You’re a very grand young man now, David!”
“You’re a very grand young woman, Lucy.”
Lucy laughed. “No; not very grand, David. I’ve got to work for my living. I’ve learnt my way about. That’s all.”
David brought out Bel’s letter. While Lucy broke the seal and read it, he sat looking about him. The little sitting-room was warm and comfortable. In addition to its cheerful plush-covered furniture, it was made gay with innumerable knick-knacks, a painted tambourine, feathery pampas grasses dyed in bright colours, painted fans, silk bows on velvet picture-frames; the random decorations of some unselective, feminine mind. There was a silk-fronted piano piled with music. Supper was laid. Lucy must just have come in. Furs and other outdoor things topped by a smart little hat and veil were lying on a chair to one side.
His eyes turned to re-examine the girl who was living thus independently. It was unthinkable that his sister Phœbe should live unchaperoned like this. And yet what was there that was wrong about it? Why should it be unusual for a man to be sitting here, the one visitor in the rooms of a young woman who was, after all, a childhood’s friend?
The vague feeling that in some way he was overstepping propriety, amused and stirred this very conventional young man with new and not unpleasant sensations. Somehow it touched his manhood. Lucy Rennie, he felt, was putting full dependence on his chivalry. The situation was novel. As she bent over Bel’s note, she looked different from the women he was accustomed to. She was plump, and her dark hair was piled up on her head like a Frenchwoman’s. As she looked up, folding the paper at the same time, the expression of her round face was quick and responsive.
“I’m sorry about Mrs. Moorhouse, David. I like her so much, you know.”
David explained about Bel. Earnestly excusing her, hoping that Lucy would understand and forgive, and in the end, daring to hope that when New Year was over, she would still be in Glasgow long enough to make it possible to give her recital of songs.
Lucy understood everything. She would be at home in Ayrshire over the New Year, but thereafter she would try to spend a day or two in Glasgow in order to fulfil her promise. She would write a note to Mrs. Arthur Moorhouse to reassure her. David thanked her and rose to go.
“David! Already? It’s so nice to see you. Must you go away? There was so much I wanted to say to you.” Lucy stood up and put her hand on the bell-rope. “Look, David, I was just going to have supper. I don’t know what there is to eat, but as you’ve dared to penetrate into Bohemia, why don’t you stay and share it with me? I wanted to tell you I had seen your brother Mungo and his wife. I’m just back from Greenhead. And I want to have a look at you just for a little longer.” Her smile had a whimsical appeal in it.
David was tempted. It was pleasant here. For the first time today, he did not feel that all the cares of the world were pressing close about him. This, after all, was an old and harmless friendship. If Lucy’s manner was flattering, if she was intensely feminine—that was how she was made, and it could have no significance.
She saw his hesitation. “David, I believe I am being too unconventional for you! Really! It wouldn’t be the first time we had picnicked together, would it? But perhaps I’ve been a gipsy too long. Perhaps I am forgetting what’s proper. I must leave it to you.”
The landlady was standing by, awaiting orders. It would be churlish, David felt, to walk out—churlish and gauche. He turned gaily to the grey-haired woman. “Will you allow me to have supper with Miss Rennie?”
The woman was surprised at his flushed face, his refinement, his air of innocence. This young man was a gentleman; an unusual type for hereabouts. “I think we might allow that, sir. I’ll bring another cup.”
“I’m so glad, David. I’ll show you where to put your coat.”
The meal was cosy and gay. They told each other what they had done with themselves since they had parted in their teens. David was surprised to find how much more Lucy had seen and done than he had. She spoke French fluently, she told him, having spent some time as a student-governess in Paris. She had sung in many famous London houses. Although she had been only a paid musician, she had been in some kind of contact with many celebrated people, and had used her eyes and her ears. She was able to give him many amusing impressions of them. It was a world beyond the provincial climbings of David Moorhouse.
Presently they talked of the old days, when the little boy from the Laigh Farm had waited at the end of the road for the little girl from Greenhead, and together they had trudged the mile or so to the village school. There had been no great friendship between the families, but the children gave each other companionship and a sense of protection in the winter roads. Lucy, although she was younger, had seemed the elder and more responsible then. As they grew older there had been pranks in which Lucy had always been the leader: getting lost, bird-nesting in some remote wood; bathing together, contrary to injunction, in the innocent indecency of childhood. David spoke of his mother’s death, and his father’s remarriage to the Highland housekeeper who had become Phœbe’s mother. Lucy had been his boyish confidante in these difficult years. He had forgotten that no one knew so much about him. She had taken him back into another world. It was strange to be sitting now in theatrical lodgings in a great town, hearing again so many long-unheard echoes; hearing them from a sophisticated young woman whose mode of life would certainly be open to the criticism of his friends.
“But, David,”—suddenly Lucy stopped—“I quite forgot I read last week that you were engaged to be married!”
David had forgotten, too.
“Tell me about her.”
David told her about Grace. Who she was. How he had come to know her. As he told her, he found himself wondering why Lucy should be putting so many questions, watching him so closely.
“She sounds to me just the very wife for you,” she said at length.
“I must have thought so, too, when I asked her to marry me.” David laughed. Yet the disloyal overtones of his joke seemed wrong somehow.
“She’s a lucky girl, David.”
“Thank you, Lucy.”
“No.
I mean it.”
But the carefree atmosphere of this meeting had changed. It was no more pleasantly intimate, innocently clandestine. She saw that David was ill at ease, and, now that their meal was at an end, she was not surprised that he should remember some duty and plead that he must be gone.
“Of course, David. It was kind of you to stay so long, to talk about old times.” She watched him get himself into his overcoat in the little dim entrance hall, and waved him goodbye as he turned downward out of sight on the gaslit stone staircase.
III
In the two hours or so that David had spent in Lucy’s rooms the weather had grown colder. As he made his way down Hill Street he found himself slipping in ruts of frozen snow. Above him the sky was clear and there were stars.
He wondered now why he had so suddenly invented an excuse to leave Lucy. It had been a queer little visit, he told himself, smiling into the darkness, and one that for all its unusualness had done no one any harm. It had been pleasant to recall the past with someone who had once been a playmate; to laugh at little, long-forgotten things.
He thought of the odd, friendly room where he had found Lucy, and of Lucy herself. The little pinafored girl had turned into a creature of much charm. She had easiness of manners, quickness of wit, tact—all accomplishments that David valued highly. There was something gallant about her independence.
Presently he found himself at the foot of the hill pondering which way he should take. He wondered now that he did not feel tired, as he had done earlier in the evening. It had been a strange day. Lunch with the Dermotts. Robert Dermott’s too generous offer. Grace’s formal visit to Grosvenor Terrace. And then, this unexpected visit to Lucy. Now his day was done. He could go home, write a letter to the girl he was to marry, and rest. But somehow he was restless. As though there were an important question forming itself in the hidden places of his mind. A troublesome question that would sooner or later take shape, rise to the surface, and have to be answered.
The air was crisp and frosty. It was pleasant and refreshing. He would walk about the lighted City to stretch his legs and think. This decision taken, he pushed on hurriedly, noting very little where he went. Now his thoughts were taking him back to his boyhood at the Laigh Farm. He had been the youngest. His sisters had petted him when he was little. They had laughed at his natural gentilities and encouraged him in them for their own amusements. His mother had made as much of him as was possible to a busy farmer’s wife. Childish pictures rose before him—things that had not crossed his mind for years. A secret clearing in the wood that he had called his kingdom. A cave by the river’s edge that he had always hurried past because of the giant who lived there. A pond rimmed with bulrushes and yellow irises, where the prince of all the frogs lived. The imaginings of an ordinary, sensitive child, set alight from the few picture-books that had found their way to the children of the Laigh Farm. He had not told his brothers and sisters about these things. He had shrunk from their laughter. But he had always told the little girl, as together they clattered stockily along the road to school. Lucy was quick in the uptake, and could be depended upon not to laugh in scorn.
Jets were being turned out on the long brass gas-pipes in the shop-windows as David made his way down into the centre of the town. Shutters were going up. In front of one or two shops the pavement was being swept clean of snow, and ashes thrown down. In Renfield Street horses were straining uphill with their loads, clapping their labouring hoofs on the sanded track and puffing jets of steam into the frosty air. On the steeper parts of the hill the brakes of descending tramcars were screaming.
Why this muffled excitement? Was it because he must tell Arthur of Robert Dermott’s offer? Or was it over-sensitive of him to worry lest he should seem ungrateful to the brother who had done so much for him?
David was perplexed. The world had been too good to him. He had nothing to complain of. And now it looked as though by the mere fact of having chosen a gentle and desirable girl to be his wife, a fortune was to be handed to him. Why, then, this inward dispeace? For one strange moment he had an impulse to turn back to Lucy Rennie’s lodging; to ask her as an old friend what was the matter with him. No; that was ridiculous. Whatever she had been to him as a child, she was, to all intents, a stranger to him now.
Without noting what he did, he had come down as far as the Clyde. He was crossing Glasgow Bridge. The lamps on the balustrade on either side stood up like pale jewels, strung out against the glowing darkness. The tide was in. On the right he could distinguish the gilded figurehead of a clipper. In the river further down there were dim shapes of masts, and moving lights. At the far end of the bridge he turned into the Georgian quiet of Carlton Place. Here there was a sudden peace, an absence of traffic.
Was this marriage he was making just an impetuous mistake? Had he rushed into it unnecessarily? He remembered how, not so many weeks ago, he had raged along the night streets on his way home, inflamed by Irving’s Hamlet, thinking excited thoughts even as he was doing now. Was it all a mistake, then? It couldn’t be. What of the feeling of emptiness, of all the sorrow of a young man’s loneliness that he had felt on that night? Was he not far better now?
He was in the traffic again, crossing the Stockwell Bridge. The river stood full and high beneath it, sending up slow, zigzag reflections from its black, glassy surface. Now he was in the bright rabble of the Stockwell itself. Even on this cold night there were barefoot children. There was laughter and drunkenness, misery and rough good cheer. There were barrows with flares set above them. By one of these a powerful Irishwoman with raven hair, gipsy ear-rings and harsh, weatherbeaten good looks, called, “Rosy apples”. She picked up an apple, breathed upon it, and quickly rubbing it on her apron, held it out to David. Hungry urchins stood gazing up, their faces white in the light of her flare. Further on, a second woman, leading a donkey-cart, was calling, “Caller herring”. A cold trade on such a night. An old man standing at the kerb kept muttering quickly, “A penny, a penny,” to no one in particular. David saw that he was selling cotton pocket-handkerchiefs. The doorman, in splendid gold braid, was ordering ragged, half-grown boys from the lighted entrance of the Scotia Music Hall. They were shouting back obscene impertinence. A locomotive on the viaduct overhead puffed out a fountain of steam and red ashes, making a display of fireworks against the night.
David found himself making in the direction of home; pounding along, his feet crackling the frozen snow as he went. He had some distance to go, but he did not think of this. There was bright moonlight now. That made it easy to cut quickly through quiet sidestreets.
What was this, then, that had taken hold of him? What did he expect of himself? Was he to go to Grace and tell her that, after all, their engagement had been hasty and foolish? That was unthinkable; an idea that could not be taken seriously. And yet, here he was, striding along as though this very thought had taken upon itself a horrid shape and was following in the darkness behind him. Everything within him shrank away from the pain that such an avowal must cause. To say such a thing to Grace? Never!
The mere thought of that had, for a time, quickened still more his pace, but now at length he began to feel exhausted. He looked about him. In ten minutes more he would be home. Since he had left Lucy Rennie’s rooms he had tramped down the hill, made a circle of the inner City, then walked some miles west without noticing. This was senseless. He must not let himself become so overwrought.
He took out his latch-key at the top of his stairs and let himself in. His sitting-room had been warmed by the fire that was now burning low. He held a taper to the gas, then looked about him. Here was a bleak, bachelor sort of room. There were none of the absurd, frivolous knick-knacks that made Lucy Rennie’s lodging so cheerful. He threw off his overcoat and drew a chair to the fire. His feet were beginning to ache. He pulled off his boots slowly and held out the soles of his feet, one after the other, to the fire. The familiar surroundings were beginning to calm him. After a little while he even felt drowsy. The cl
ock on his mantelshelf struck eleven. He had no idea it was so late. Better go to bed. Surely, after all this walking he would get some sleep.
Chapter Twelve
GRACE DERMOTT had put the Moorhouse clan in her pocket. That a daughter of success should at once command the respect of a homely family in this city, where material prosperity was the common yardstick, is not, perhaps, a matter for wonder. Grace had gained everything by her engagement to David. She was beginning to have a life of her own. Hitherto she had spent her time as a pleasant, timid absorber of shocks. Between the personalities of her parents, when their strong wills threatened to clash together. Between her mother and the members of her mother’s committees. Between her parents and the servants. Between one servant and another. Spasmodically, she had made the pretence of having interests of her own—working in Berlin wool; painting on china; and even, once, going the length of taking lessons on the guitar. But too often she had felt in her heart, as many a rich young woman of her time felt, that her days were gapingly, needlessly empty.
Now all this was changed. David and his family were everything. Before many mornings she was back in the carriage at Grosvenor Terrace to see how Bel’s cold was getting on, ladened with conservatory grapes and flowers. She had just dropped in on her way to town, she said. Taken unawares and informally, Bel’s conventionality had no choice but to break down. Grace was quite simple and direct. It was plain she had come back so soon because she liked everybody, and was making haste to know them better. She got to know Bel’s children, and offered to take the two elder ones, Arthur and Isabel, to Hengler’s Circus. She promised little Thomas, who was scarcely four, and who showed immediate displeasure at being left out of the party, that she would take him to Aladdin’s Cavern at the Argyle House, where Aladdin would give him a toy all to himself.