Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  CHAPTER III

  TREATS OF A GENTLEMAN WITH AN AGREEABLE COUNTENANCE, AND OF A WOMAN’S FACE IN A MIRROR

  MAJOR AMBROSE WILBRAHAM had embarked at Marseilles, and before the boat reached Gibraltar he had made the acquaintance of everyone on board, and had managed to exchange cards with a good many. The steamer was still within sight of Gibraltar when he introduced himself to Charnock with a manner of effusive jocularity to which Charnock did not respond. The Major was tall and about forty years of age. A thin crop of black hair was plastered upon his head; he wore a moustache which was turning grey; his eyebrows were so faultlessly regular that they seemed to have been stencilled on his forehead, and underneath them a pair of cold beady eyes counterfeited friendliness. Charnock could not call to mind that he had ever met a man on whom geniality sat with so ill a grace, or one whose acquaintance he less desired to improve.

  Major Wilbraham, however, was not easily rebuffed, and he walked the deck by Charnock’s side, talkative and unabashed.

  Off the coast of Portugal the boat made bad weather, and she laboured through the cross-seas of the Bay under a strong south-westerly wind. Off Ushant she picked up a brigantine which Charnock watched from the hurricane deck without premonition, and indeed without more than a passing curiosity.

  “Fine lines, eh, Charnock old fellow!” said a voice at his elbow.

  The brigantine dipped her head into a roller, lifted it, and shook the water off her decks in a cascade of snow.

  “I have seen none finer,” answered Charnock, “except on a racing-yacht or a destroyer.”

  “She’s almost familiar to me,” speculated the Major.

  “She reminds me of some boats I saw once at the West Indies,” returned Charnock, “built for the fruit-trade, and so built for speed. Only they were schooners — from Salcombe, I believe. The Salcombe clippers they were called.”

  “Indeed!” said the Major, with a sharp interest, and he leaned forward over the rail. “Now I wonder what her name is.”

  Charnock held a pair of binoculars in his hand. He gave them to the Major. Wilbraham raised them to his eyes while the P. and O. closed upon the sailing-boat. The brigantine slid down the slope of a wave and hoisted her stern.

  “The ‘Tarifa,’” said the Major, and he shut up the binoculars. “What is her tonnage, do you think?”

  “About three hundred, I should say.”

  “My notion precisely. Would it be of any advantage to alter her rig, supposing that she was one of the Salcombe schooners?”

  “I should hardly think so,” replied Charnock. “I rather understood that the schooners were noted boats.”

  “Ah, that’s interesting,” said Wilbraham, and he returned the binoculars. The steamer was now abreast of the brigantine, and in a little it drew ahead.

  “By the way, Charnock, I shall hope to see more of you,” resumed Major Wilbraham. “I haven’t given you a card, have I?”

  He produced a well-worn card-case.

  “It’s very kind of you,” said Charnock, as he twirled the card between his forefinger and his thumb. “Don’t you,” he added, “find cards rather a heavy item in your expenses?”

  Major Wilbraham laughed noisily.

  “I take you, dear friend,” he exclaimed, “I take you. But a friend in this world, sir, is a golden thread in a very dusty cobweb.”

  “But the friendship is rather a one-sided arrangement,” rejoined Charnock. “For instance, the cards you give, Major Wilbraham, bear no address, the cards you receive, do.” And while showing the card to his companion, he inadvertently dropped it into the sea.

  Major Wilbraham blamed the negligence of a rascally printer, and made his way to the smoking-room.

  The P. and O. boat touched at Plymouth the next morning, and landed both Major Wilbraham and Charnock. The latter remained in Plymouth for two days, and on the morning of the third day hired a hansom cab, and so met with the last of those incidents which were to link him in such close, strange ties with the fortunes of men and women who even in name were then utterly unknown to him.

  A yellow handbill had led Charnock across the Straits to Tangier, and now it was nothing more serious than a draft upon Lloyd’s bank which took him in a hansom cab through the streets of Plymouth. Spring was in the air; Charnock felt exceedingly light-hearted and cheerful. On the way he unconsciously worked his little finger into the eye of the brass bracket which juts inwards on each side of the front window at the level of the shoulder; and when the cab stopped in front of the bank he discovered that his finger was securely jammed.

  Across the road he noticed a chemist’s shop, and descending the steps of the bank a fair-haired gentleman of an agreeable countenance, who, quite appropriately in that town of sailors, had something of a nautical aspect.

  “Sir,” began Charnock, politely, as he leaned out of the window, “I shall be much obliged—”

  To Charnock’s surprise the good-natured gentleman precipitately sprang down the steps and began to walk rapidly away. Charnock was sufficiently human and therefore sufficiently perverse to become at once convinced that although there were others passing, this reluctant man was the only person in the world who could and must help him from his predicament.

  So he leaned yet farther out of the cab.

  “Hi, you sir!” he shouted, “you who are running away!”

  The words had an electrical effect. The man of the agreeable countenance stopped suddenly, and so stood with his back towards Charnock while gently and thoughtfully he nodded his head. It seemed to Charnock that he might perhaps be counting over the voices with which he was familiar.

  “Well,” cried Charnock, who was becoming exasperated, “my dear sir, am I to wait for you all day?”

  The street was populous with the morning traffic of a business quarter. Curious people stopped and attracted others. In a very few moments a small crowd would have formed. The stranger thereupon came slowly back to the hansom, showing a face which was no longer agreeable. He set a foot upon the step of the cab, and fixed a blue and watchful eye upon Charnock.

  “I am afraid,” said the latter, with severity, “that my first impression of you was wrong.”

  An indescribable relief was expressed by the other, but he spoke with surliness.

  “You mistook me for someone else?”

  “I mistook your disposition for something else,” Charnock affably corrected. “I expected to find you a person of great good-nature.”

  “You hardly made such a point of summoning a perfect stranger,” and here the blue eyes became very wary, “for no other reason than to tell him that.”

  “Certainly not,” returned Charnock; “I would not trespass upon your time, which seems to be extremely valuable, without a better reason. But my finger is fixed, as you can see, in this brass ring, and I cannot withdraw it. So if you would kindly cross over to the chemist and buy me a pennyworth of vaseline, I shall be more than obliged.” And with the hand which was free he felt in his pocket for a penny and held it out.

  A look of utter incredulity showed upon the listener’s face.

  “Do you mean to tell me—” he blurted out.

  “That I ask you to be my good Samaritan? Yes.”

  The stranger’s face became suddenly vindictive. “Vaseline!” he cried.

  “A pennyworth,” said Charnock, again offering the penny.

  The man of the agreeable countenance struck Charnock’s hand violently aside, and the penny flew into a gutter. He stood up on the step and thrust his face, which was now inflamed with fury, into the cab.

  “I tell you what,” he cried, “you are a fair red-hotter, you are. Buy you vaseline! I hope your finger will petrify. I hope you’ll just sit in that cab and rot away in your boots, until you have to ante up in kingdom come.” He added expletives to his anathema.

  “Really,” said Charnock, “if I was a lady I don’t think that I should like to listen to you any longer.”

  But before Charnock had finished t
he sentence, the good Samaritan, who was no Samaritan at all, had flung himself from the cab and was striding up the street.

  “After all,” thought Charnock, “I might just as well have driven across to the chemist, if I had only thought of it.”

  This he now did, got his finger free, cashed his draft, and took the train to London.

  During this journey the discourteous stranger occupied some part of his thoughts. Between Charnock’s eyes and the newspaper, against the red cliffs of Teignmouth, on the green of the home counties, his face obtruded, and for a particular reason. The marks of fear are unmistakable. The man whom he had called, had been scared by the call, nor had his fear quite left him when he had come face to face with Charnock. Set features which strove to conceal, and a brightness of the eye which betrayed emotion, these things Charnock remembered very clearly.

  In London he dined alone at his hotel, and over against him the stranger’s face bore him company. He went out afterwards into the street, and amidst the myriad ringing feet, was seized with an utter sense of loneliness, more poignant, more complete, than he had ever experienced in the waste places of the world. The lights of a theatre attracted him. He paid his money, took a seat in the stalls, and was at once very worried and perplexed. He turned to his neighbour, who was boisterously laughing.

  “Would you mind telling me what this play is?” he asked.

  “Oh, it’s a musical comedy.”

  “I see. But what is it about?”

  Charnock’s neighbour scratched his head thoughtfully.

  “I ought to remember,” he said, “for I saw the piece early in the run.”

  Charnock went out, crossed a street, and came to another theatre, where he saw a good half of the tragedy of Macbeth. Thence he returned to his hotel and went to bed.

  The hotel was one of many balconies, situated upon the Embankment. From the single window or his bedroom Charnock looked across the river to where the name of a brewery perpetually wrote itself in red brilliant letters which perpetually vanished. It was his habit to sleep not merely with his window open, but with the blinds drawn up and the curtains looped back, and these arrangements he made as usual before he got into bed.

  Now, the looking-glass stood upon a dressing-table in the window, with its back towards the window-panes; and since the night was moonless and dark, this mirror, it should be remembered, reflected nothing of the room or its furniture, but presented only to the view of Charnock, as he lay in bed, a surface of a black sheen.

  Charnock recurred to his adventure of the morning, and thus the abusive stranger was in his thoughts when he fell asleep. He figured also in his dreams.

  For, after he had fallen asleep, a curtain was raised upon a fantastic revue of the past week. Hassan Akbar strode quickly and noiselessly behind his quarry, tracking him by some inappreciable faculty, not through the muddy Sôk, but across the polished floor of the ball-room in the musical comedy. Again Charnock shouted “Look out!” and the Moor with one bound leapt from the ball-room, which was now become a landing-stage, into a felucca. The crew of the felucca, it now appeared, was made up of Charnock, Lady Macbeth, and Hassan Akbar, and by casting lots with counters made of vaseline, Charnock was appointed to hold the tiller. This duty compelled extraordinary care, for the felucca would keep changing its rig and the bulk of its hull swelled and dwindled. At last, to Charnock’s intense relief, the boat settled into a Salcombe clipper with the rig of a P. and O., but with immeasurably greater speed, so that within a very few seconds they sailed over a limitless ocean and anchored at Tangier. At once the crew entirely vanished. Charnock was not distressed, because he saw a hansom cab waiting for him at the Customs, though how the hansom was to pass up those narrow cobbled streets he could not think. That however was the driver’s business.

  “I hope your horse is good,” said Charnock, springing into the cab.

  “She comes of the great Red-hotter stock,” replied the cabman, and lifting the trap in the roof he showered packets of visiting cards, which fell about Charnock like flakes of snow.

  Charnock had not previously noticed that the cabman was Major Wilbraham.

  The cab shot up the hill through the tunnel, past the closed shop. A figure sprang from the ground and thrust a face through the window of the cab. The man was in Moorish dress, but the face was the face of the abusive stranger of Plymouth — and all at once Charnock started up on his elbow, and in the smallest fraction of a second was intensely and vividly awake. There was no sound at all within the room. But in the black sheen of the mirror he saw a woman’s face.

  He saw it quite clearly for perhaps five seconds, the face rising white from the white column of the throat, the dark and weighty coronal of the hair, the curved lips which alone had any colour, the eyes, deep and troubled, which seemed to hint a prayer for help which they disdained to make — for five seconds perhaps the illusion remained, for five seconds the face looked out at him from the black mirror, lit palely, as it seemed, by its own pallor, and so vanished.

  Charnock remained propped upon his elbow. A faint twilight from the stars crept timidly through the open window as though deprecating its intrusion. Charnock looked into the dark corners of the room, but nowhere did the darkness move. Nor could he hear any sound. Not even a board of the floor cracked, and outside the door there was no noise of a footstep on the stairs. Then from a great distance the jingle of a cab came through the open window to his ears with a light companionable lilt. Gradually the sound ceased, and again the silence breathed about him. Charnock struck a match and looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after three.

  Charnock lay back in his bed wondering. For he had seen that face once, he had once exchanged glances with those eyes, once only, six years ago, and thereafter had entirely forgotten the incident — until this moment. He had stopped for a night at Monte Carlo and had seen — the girl — yes, the girl, though it was a woman’s face which had gleamed in the depths of his mirror — standing under the green shaded lamps in the big gambling-room. His attention, he now remembered, had been seized by the contrast between her amused indifference and the feverish haste of the gamblers about the table; between her fresh, clear looks and their heated complexions, — even between her frock of lilac silk and their more elaborate toilettes. The girl was entirely happy then, the red lips smiled, the violet eyes laughed. Why should her face appear to him now, after these years, and paled by this distress?

  A queer fancy slipped into his mind — a fancy at the extravagance of which he knew very well he should laugh in the sane light of the morning, though he indulged it now — that somehow, somewhere, this woman needed help, and that it was thus vouchsafed to her, a stranger, to make her appeal to him in this way, which spared her the humiliation of making any appeal at all. Charnock fell asleep convinced that somehow, somewhere, he was destined to meet and know her. As he had foreseen, he laughed at his fancies in the morning, but nevertheless, he did meet her. It had, in fact, already been arranged that he should. For the face which he saw in the mirror was the face of Miranda Warriner.

  CHAPTER IV

  TREATS OF THE FIRST MEETING BETWEEN CHARNOCK AND MIRANDA

  LADY DONNISTHORPE, WITH a sigh of relief, retired from her position at the head of the stairs, and catching Charnock in the interval between two dances: —

  “You kept some dances free,” she said, “didn’t you? I want to introduce you to a cousin of mine, Miranda Warriner, because she lives at Ronda.”

  “At Ronda. Indeed?”

  “Yes.” Her ladyship added with a magnificent air of indifference, “She is a widow,” and she led Charnock across the ball-room.

  Miranda saw them approaching, noticed an indefinable air of expectation in Lady Donnisthorpe’s manner, and smiled. A few excessively casual remarks concerning one Mr. Charnock, which Lady Donnisthorpe had dropped during the last few days, had not escaped the notice of Miranda, who was aware of her cousin’s particular weakness. This was undoubtedly Mr. Charnock. She raised
her eyes towards him, and had her ladyship been less fluttered, she might have remarked that Miranda’s eyes lit up with a momentary sparkle of recognition.

  “Mrs. Warriner — Mr. Charnock.”

  Lady Donnisthorpe effected the momentous introduction and felt immediately damped. She had not indeed expected that her two newest victims would at once and publicly embrace. But at all events she had decked out her ball-room as the sacrificial altar, and had taken care that a fitting company and cheerful music should do credit to the immolation. This tame indifference was less than she deserved.

  Miranda, to whom Lady Donnisthorpe was looking, made the perfunctory dip of the head and smiled the perfunctory smile, and Charnock — why in the world did he not move or speak? Lady Donnisthorpe turned her eyes from Miranda to this awkward cavalier, and was restored to a radiant good-humour. “Dazzled,” she said to herself, “absolutely dazzled!” For Charnock stood rooted to the ground and tongue-tied with amazement.

  It was fortunate for Lady Donnisthorpe that at this point she thought it wise to withdraw. Otherwise she would surely have remarked an unmistakable look of disappointment which grew within Charnock’s eyes and spread out over his face. Then the disappointment vanished, and as he compared programmes with Miranda, he recovered his speech.

  Four dances must intervene before he could claim her, and Charnock was glad of the interval to get the better of his bewilderment. Here was the woman whom his mirror had shown to him! After all, his nocturnal fancy was fulfilled, or rather part of it, only part or it. He had met her, he was to dance with her. Some miracle had brought them together. From the corner by the doorway he watched Miranda, he remarked an unaffected friendliness in her manner towards her partners. Candour was written upon her broad white forehead and looked out from her clear eyes. He had no doubt it was fragrant too in her hair. There were heavy masses of that hair, as he knew very well from his mirror, but now the masses were piled and woven about her head with a cunning art, which to be sure they deserved. There was a ripple in her hair, too, which caught the light — a most taking ripple. Here was a woman divested of a girl’s wiles and vanities. Charnock, without a scruple, aspersed all girls up to the age of say twenty-four, that he might give her greater praise.