by Edith Nesbit
To Mr Stanley’s idea it was quite as safe to send a daughter alone to the National Gallery as to send her to church on a week day. The two places seemed to him to be the one as uninteresting as the other, and both of them as absolutely free from possible snares and pitfalls as any convent in the land. ‘I meant to have given you lunch at the “Ship and Turtle,”’ he went on.
‘My dear papa, I’m not greedy. I’m not an alderman.’
‘The aldermen of London are an essential—’
‘An essential part of the British Constitution,’ she interrupted, laughing. ‘Yes, I know, dear, and I’m not an essential -part. That’s just the difference.’
With which she smoothed his hair, arranged his tie, kissed him on both cheeks, and watched him out of sight from the window. Then she went and wrapped herself in a good deal of brown fur, and walked quickly across the square to the hideous casket in which the nation cherishes its gems of art.
She was wandering from one picture to another in a desultory sort of way, and thinking, it must be confessed, more of her own affairs than of the paintings, when she almost ran against Count Litvinoff, who was standing, his hat off and his hands behind him, in rapt contemplation of the Martyrdom of Saint Somebody.
He turned and bowed, with an air of pleased surprise. She bad never seen him look so little English — so very foreign.
‘Ah! this is good fortune,’ he said; ‘your father is with you?’
‘No,’ said Clare. ‘Papa doesn’t care about pictures, except pictures of dead fish and game, and horses and fat cattle; and I don’t care about the City — at least, not the parts of it that he goes to — and this is a sort of paddock where I am allowed to run loose when he is away.’
‘I often spend an hour here; I find pictures help one to think. How do you like this Claude?’
Then the conversation was all picture for a while, and at last they sat down on one of the few seats provided by the munificence of a thoughtful Administration for such lovers of art as care to stay in the Gallery long enough to get tired.
They were silent for a little while.
‘Are you not well, Miss Stanley?’ he said presently.
‘Oh, dear me, yes; I’m very well. Do I look ill? ‘ she asked quite frankly, looking at him with her eyebrows raised.
‘Ah, no; you look—’he hesitated, ‘as you always do,’ he ended, as though that was not what he would have liked to say.
‘Why do you ask, then?’
‘Because I fancied last night that you were in some kind of pain, and I have been uneasy ever since about it.’
‘Last night? You’re very kind: there wasn’t the least ground for your uneasiness.’
‘I was not the only one who thought so.’
‘I am afraid the evening must have been very dull, then, if it gave two people that impression.’
‘Oh, dulness was out of the question to me? he said, with an eloquent look. ‘But I suppose we couldn’t expect Mr Roland to be very cheerful, under the circumstances.’
‘What circumstances?’ questioned Clare, who was beginning to feel rather uncomfortable.
‘He has had what I believe in England is termed a “row” with his brother.’
‘How do you know?’ she asked, quickly. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon.’
‘Never do that; but, indeed, had you not asked me, I was going to tell you, for I am in a difficulty. Although I know your language well, I do not so well know your social customs. Shall we see Mr Richard again, do you think?’
The question was put so innocently, and the Count appeared so really preplexed, that Miss Stanley stifled the evasive answer that first occurred to her, and said simply, —
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Then a great part of my difficulty vanishes. I am ashamed to trouble you about my dilemmas; but I have been wondering whether I ought to know them both, since they have so quarrelled, or whether it is not incumbent on me to take one side or the other.’
‘If you take sides at all,’ said Clare, ‘you should take the side you think right.’
‘I am here amongst Englishmen. Being in Rome I must do as Rome does, and I do not know what is right and wrong to English people.’
‘Right is right all the world over,’ said Clare, adding, as a saving clause, ‘if you can only see which is right. But you are not the only one who is in a dilemma.’ Then, driven by an irresistible desire to know how the quarrel struck him, she asked him directly, —
‘Which do you think is in the wrong?’
‘There are some things which brothers might pardon in each other, but which to other men would be unpardonable.’
‘Do you think, then, that Roland Ferrier has done anything unpardonable?’ She had felt intensely annoyed at the turn the conversation had taken, but since it had taken this turn, she was determined to learn as much from it as possible.
‘I don’t think he has done anything the world would not pardon, and we must remember that the greater part of the fault lies in his bringing up.’ He said this with a delicate air of chivalrously making the best of a bad cause.
‘If the world pardons the unpardonable,’ said Clare, feeling that she was skating on very thin ice, and not quite knowing how to get back to the bank again, ‘so much the worse for the world.’
‘I knew you would say that.’
‘And,’ she went on, forgetting how little she had told her companion, ‘ if I could only be sure that all Richard said was true, I would accept no one’s ruling but my own on such a question.’
Litvinoffs eyes gave one little flash at the admission contained in this speech, but he said quite quietly, —
‘Well, no one can possibly know. I presume he must at least believe it.’
‘Yes, he certainly does. This quarrel, as you perhaps know, means ruin to them both.’
‘Ruin! ‘ he cried; ‘ then it must not go on.’
‘You are very good to take such an interest in the Ferriers.’
‘Ah,’ he said sadly, ‘ I have known ruin, and it is hard if the innocent one suffers with the guilty.’
He looked about as little like a ruined man as it was possible to be. His dress was perfect, though it had a certain foreign air that was not to be traced to that too great prominence of shirt collar and prodigality of cuff, that shininess of hat and boot, that exuberant floridity of necktie, which are the signet of the flâneur of the boulevards. Above all, his nails were unexceptionable.
‘Their father left it in his will,’ said Miss Stanley, bluntly, glad to get away from the subject of Roland’s possible laches, ‘that if they quarrelled they lost all their money.’
‘They were ever given to quarrelling, then?’ asked Litvinoff.
‘No, I don’t think so; but Mr Ferrier was old and very funny.’
‘He seems to have been prophetic in this instance; or perhaps he knew what they were likely to quarrel about.’
Clare stroked her muff with her kid-gloved hand, and wondered whether the late Mr Ferrier had thought they were likely to quarrel about her.
‘This affair of the unfortunate girl Alice Hatfield — he was beginning, when Clare rose.
‘It is quite time I went back,’ she said chillingly, and she turned and walked out. He followed her humbly. ‘When they had passed down the steps he said, —
‘I have offended you, but you must forgive me. I am ignorant of English customs. You had talked to me of the misdeed, and it did not seem to be wrong to name the victim. I ought to have recognised the gulf which separates the personal from the impersonal.’
There was a suspicion of irony in his voice, and she did not answer, only quickened her pace a little.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, in a tone low, and one more earnest than any she had yet heard him use. ‘You must forgive me. I would not offend you for all the world, not to gain every end I have ever fought for, to realise every hope I have ever cherished.’
She turned and looked right into his eyes, and in them read nothing
but perfect honesty and sincerity.
‘I have nothing whatever to forgive, Count Litvinoff,’ she said. ‘Pray, let us change the subject;’ but all the ice was gone from her voice, and he at once plunged into a diatribe against the carelessness of omnibus drivers.
He said good-bye to her outside the hotel. At the top of the steps she turned and looked after him, and was not a little vexed with herself for having done so, for he was looking after her with an expression in his eyes which said, to her at least,—’Whatever the ends I have fought for, or the hopes I have cherished, may have been in the past, the object of my every dream and aspiration is now yourself, Clare Stanley.’
CHAPTER XIII. A FAIR MORNING’S WORK.
PETROVITCH waited at the corner for some moments, but as his protégée did not return, he concluded that she had found the house door open, and would be all right, so he turned his face west. The new feeling that had possessed him at the sound of Alice’s surname had, while he waited, only shown itself in a restless movement of his hand over his beard; but now it found vent in the swinging pace at which he walked. He slackened it now and again, to glance with a frown at the heaps of dirty rags that filled the corners of doorways and the embrasures of walls, and hid human flesh and blood: the flesh and blood of your brothers and sisters, my esteemed Royal Commissioners. These doorsteps and archways and out-of-the-way corners are not, of course, to be included in an investigation into the homes of the poor; but perhaps they might be if these royal, noble, and eminent brothers realised that these are the only homes of a large proportion of the poor.
Petrovitch only stopped once, and that was before a doorstep on which something gleamed brightly, and caught his attention. There was a group there of the usual type — a man and woman, and a child, a little girl, from whose eyes the gleam came. She was sitting up, her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand; a wizened, stunted child of some eight or nine years, with tangled dark hair that fell over her face, and through which her eyes were staring wide and vacant at the clear sky. As he stopped she transferred the gaze to him, but it was still a gaze void of hope and expectation. He did not speak to her, but patted her shoulder, dropped some coppers and a bar of chocolate in her lap, and hurried on, with a muttered curse which the child did not hear.
He stopped no more till he reached a tall house in a quiet street near Portland Road Station. He let himself in with a key, and softly mounted the stairs to the second floor. The room he entered was large, and looked bare until one noticed the shelves on shelves of well-bound, well-kept books, the pigeon-holes full of manuscripts, the brackets supporting good busts and statuettes, the one or two choice prints, the antique writing-table and chairs. There were no curtains to the window, and there was no carpet to the floor; but there was a reading-lamp of uncommon design, with a green shade. It was the luxury of literary asceticism.
Petrovitch turned up the lamp and rekindled his fire. Then he went into the adjoining room, from which presently came the sound of splashing water, followed by hard breathing, as of one wrestling with a rough towel. It was a ghastly hour for tubbing, and many an Englishman who plumes himself on taking a bath at eight or nine in the morning would have shuddered at the idea of thus taking one four or five hours earlier; but it seemed to agree with Petrovitch, for he came back to the fireside glowing, and seeming to have washed from his face the look of mingled weariness and anger which he had brought in with him.
His hand hovered a moment along the line of a certain bookshelf, then he picked out a book, and for the next three hours read steadily, only pausing to make notes.
At seven o’clock he shut his book gently, replaced it carefully on its shelf, very deftly and quickly prepared his breakfast, and, having eaten it, put on his hat and a black coat and went out again.
Now, for the first time, he thought over his night’s adventures, for during the time he had spent in his room he had not allowed himself to think of them. He had the capacity of dismissing utterly from his mind anything about which he did not want to think. It was time enough to think when he could act, and he had known that he could not act till the morning. Now, two minutes’ thought decided the course his action should take.
By half-past eight o’clock he had knocked at the door of 15 Spray’s Buildings, and had been directed to the room of Mrs Fludger. That lady was surrounded by the family linen — some just as it had been discarded by the family, some in the wash-tub, and some hanging on lines slung across the room at a convenient height for dabbing itself wetly in the faces of possible visitors. The room appeared to be furnished chastely and simply with the tub and lines before mentioned, and nothing else whatever; for the remainder of the furniture had been heaped in one corner, in order that the washing might not be impeded, and was not noticeable at the first glance. Mrs Fludger had her arms bared for toil. She wore a dress with no appreciable waist and no distinctive colour. A woollen shawl wound her figure in its embrace, a black bonnet of no particular shape, and of antique appearance, was on the extreme back of her head, where it was supported, by no visible agency, in defiance of the laws of gravitation.
‘Now then, my good man,’ she began, in answer to Petrovitch’s tap at the open door, ‘we don’t want no Scripture reading here. Thank the Lord, I knows my Bible duty, and does it, which wasn’t I up this very morning afore five, which is more than you can say, I’ll go bail. There’s some needs talking to. Why don’t you go after my master an’ teach him the ten commanders if you wants to Bible read?’
‘But I don’t want to Bible read,’ said Petrovitch, as she ended with a snap of her teeth, and recommenced the action of ‘soaping in,’ which her vigorous speech had suspended. ‘I only wish to ask you of a Mrs Litvinoff?’
‘Don’t know the name.’
‘Perhaps I mistake the name; I ask of the young woman who left here yesterday morning.’
‘Oh, her!’ with contemptuous emphasis; ‘bless you, her name ain’t nothing like that; no more nor yours nor mine. Her name’s Hatfield; and she ain’t a missus neither, without she was married yesterday.’
‘I hope she did no wrong here, that you are not angry with her,’ said he, as though feeling Mrs Fludger’s displeasure to be the severest punishment of misdoing.
‘No,’ said Mrs Fludger, a little softened, ‘I’m not angry with her; but will you jest be good enough to say what you want and have done with it, as my washing’s all behind as it is?’
‘I have a quite special reason,’ he said, ‘for wishing to befriend her. I am sure you will be willing to help me to give her help by telling me all you know about her.’
‘Oh, Lord bless the men!’ said Mrs Fludger, with an impatient intonation, dipping a blue-bag into a pail, ‘ I don’t know nothing about the gal. She was here two months or more, and not a soul ever come a-nigh her, and now, afore she’s been gone two days, here’s half a dozen gentlemen comes after her. You ought to be able to do something ‘andsome for her among you all. Why, only yesterday two young swells was a’most a-comin’ to blows over her outside this very door, a-makin’ a perfick inharmonium o’ my stairs, to say nothing o’ the gent as went a-makin’ inquiries o’ the ground-floor front, as was quite the improper person to imply to, not being responsible, and knowin’ nothing about the lodgers.’
‘I am exceedingly sorry to give you any further trouble, madam, but, as I know you are the only person who can inform me, I must ask you why this young woman left.’ He spoke so gravely that Mrs Fludger seemed impressed. She lowered her voice a little as she answered, —
‘She heard something as wasn’t to her liking.’
‘Not from you, I am sure.’
‘Well, no; it warn’t from me, though I should have told her fast enough if I had known myself, and, since you must know the ins and outs of it, she was taken bad on Sunday night, and my Joe went for the doctor, and if you’re curious you’d better ask him, for he’s more time for jaw than me, not having got nine children and a husband as is always in liquor.’ Petrovitc
h thanked her, and asked the address of the lucky doctor whom Fate had spared these inflictions.
Mrs Fludger gave it, squeezing the soapsuds off her lean arms as she spoke.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said; ‘ good-bye,’ and held out his hand as though he had known her for years. This was partly because he thought it was the English thing to do in parting with one’s equals, and partly because he went enough among poor people to know that their troubles are not made lighter by an assumption of superiority on the part of their visitors. It was a matter of course with him, but Mrs Fludger was particularly gratified. She gave him her damp hand, and returned his shake with heartiness.
‘Well, now,’ she said, ‘if I’ve been a bit short, you must set it down to the washin’, and I couldn’t get it out o’ my head that you was one of the religious sort. And I hope the young woman won’t come to no hurt, and I will say as you look more the sort to do her good than them young sparks as come here yesterday, with their cussin’, and swearin’, and yellow kid gloves.’
An opinion in which her hearer concurred.
Dr Moore was not surprised at the inquiries with which Petrovitch called upon him ten minutes later. He had sojourned long enough in the land of the hard-up, and had seen enough of the seamy side of life, to have left off being surprised at the many threads and ties which bind together people whom one would imagine to be the very last to have any concern in each other’s existences.
But before he answered any of the questions, he said, —
‘Excuse me; but may I ask what interest you have in this poor girl? Are you a City missionary?’
The other smiled grimly.
‘Not I; but there must be something very devout in my appearance. Evidently extremes meet in me. I encountered a hostile reception at Spray’s Buildings through being taken for a Bible-reader.’
‘Ah, well, I can’t wonder; they do make themselves disliked. They’re very good people, but they haven’t a nice way with them, somehow, have they? Then, what is your motive for these questions?’