She found her path at once made easy. She was pretty, with the prettiness of a child, she gave no trouble, she was fresh, she dressed a drawing-room gracefully, he fitted neatly into her surroundings, she picked up immediately the ways of thought and the jargon of her new companions. In a word, with the remarkable receptivity which was hers, she was very quickly at home in Mrs. Rawson’s house. She became a favourite no less for her modest friendliness than on account of her looks. Mrs. Rawson, who was nearing middle age, but whose love of amusements was not assuaged, rejoiced to have so attractive a companion to take about with her. Millie, for her part, was very glad to be so taken about. She had fallen from the obscure clouds into a bright and wonderful world.
It was at this time that Pamela Mardale first met Millicent Stretton, or rather, one should say, Millicent Rundell, since Rundell was at that time her name. They became friends, although so far as character was concerned they had little in common. It may have been that the difference between them was the actual cause of their friendship. Certainly Millie came rather to lean upon her friend, admired her strength, made her the repository of her confidences, and if she received no confidences in return, she was content to believe that there were none to make. It was at this time too that Millie fell in with Lady Stretton.
Lady Stretton, a tall old woman with the head of a Grenadier, had the characteristic of Sir Anthony Absolute. There was no one so good-tempered so long as she had her own way; and she generally had it.
“Lady Stretton saw that Millie was easily led,” Pamela continued. “She thought, for that reason, she would be a suitable wife for Tony, her son, who was then a subaltern in the Coldstream. So she did all she could to throw them together. She invited Millie up to her house in Scotland, the house Lady Millingham now has, and Mr. Stretton fell in love. He was evidently very fond of Millie, and Millie on her side liked him quite as much as any one else. They were married. Lady Stretton hired them the house I told you of, close to Park Lane, and took a great deal of trouble to see that they were comfortable. You see, they were toys for her. There, that’s all I know. Are you satisfied?”
She leaned back in her chair, smiling at Warrisden’s serious face.
“And what about the old man, Sir John Stretton?” he asked.
“I never met him,” replied Pamela. “He never went out to parties, and I never went to that house.”
As she concluded the sentence, a man looked on to the balcony and, seeing them, withdrew. Pamela rose at once from her chair, and, with a sudden movement of jealousy, Warrisden swung round and looked into the room. The man was well past the middle age, stout of build, and with a heavy careworn face with no pleasure in it at all. He was the man who had been with Pamela when Warrisden had arrived. Warrisden turned back to the girl with a smile of relief.
“You are engaged?”
“Yes, for this dance to Mr. Mudge,” and she indicated the man who was retiring. “But we shall meet again — at Newmarket, at all events. Perhaps in Scotland too.”
She held out her hand to Warrisden, and, as he took it, her voice dropped to a plea.
“Please don’t go away again without telling me first, without talking it over, so that I may know where you are from month to month. Please promise!”
Warrisden promised, and went away from the house with her prayer echoing in his ears. The very sound of her voice was audible to him, and he never doubted the sincerity of its appeal. But if she set such store on what she had, why was she content with just that and nothing more, he asked himself. Why did she not claim a little more and give a little more in return? Why did she come to a halt at friendship, a mere turnpike on the great road, instead of passing through the gate and going on down the appointed way. He did not know that she passed the turnpike once, and that if she refused to venture on that path again, it was because, knowing herself, she dared not.
In the narrows of Berkeley Street Warrisden was shaken out of these reflections. A hansom jingled past him, and by the light of the lamp which hung at the back within it he caught a glimpse of the truants. They were driving home to the dark house in the Square, and they sat side by side silent and with troubled faces. Warrisden’s thoughts went back to what Pamela had told him that night. She had told him the half, but not the perplexing, interesting half of their history. That indeed Pamela could not tell, for she did not know Sir John Stretton, and the old man’s warped and churlish character alone explained it.
It was by his doing that the truants gave up their cheery little house in Deanery Street and came to live in Berkeley Square. The old man was a miser, who during his wife’s existence had not been allowed to gratify his instincts. He made all the more ample amends after she had died. The fine allowance on which the young couple had managed to keep a pair of horses and a little brougham was stripped from them.
“Why should I live alone?” said the old man. “I am old, Tony, and I need some attention. The house is big, much too big for me, and the servants are eating their heads off for the want of something to do.” There were indeed more servants than were needed. Servants were the single luxury Sir John allowed himself. Their liveries were faded, they themselves were insolent and untidy, but they were there, in the great bare dining-room at dinner-time, in the hall when Sir John came home of an afternoon. For the old man went out each day as the clock struck three; he came back each evening at half-past six. He went out alone, he returned alone, and he never went to his club. He took an omnibus from the corner of Berkeley Street and journeyed eastwards as far as Ludgate Hill. There he took a drink in the refreshment bar, and, coming out, struck northwards into Holborn, where he turned westwards, and walking as far as the inn at the corner of the Tottenham Court Road, stepped for an hour into the private bar. Thence he took another omnibus, and finally reached home, where his footmen received him solemnly in the hall. To this home he brought Tony and his wife.
“There choose your own rooms, Tony,” he said magnanimously. “What’s that? Money? But what for? You’ll have it soon enough.”
Tony Stretton suggested that it was hardly possible for any man, however careful, to retain a commission in the Coldstream without an allowance. Sir John, a tall thin man, with high bald forehead, and a prim puritanical face, looked at his son with a righteous severity.
“A very expensive regiment. Leave it, Tony! And live quietly at home. Look after your father, my boy, and you won’t need money,” and he stalked upstairs leaving Tony aghast in the hall. Tony had to sit down and think it over before he could quite realise the fate which had over-taken him. Here he was, twenty-six years old brought up to spend what he wanted and to ask for more when that was ended, and he was to live quietly on nothing at all. He had no longer any profession, he was not clever enough to enter upon a new one without some sort of start and in addition he had a wife. His wife, it was true, had a few thousands; they had remained untouched ever since the marriage and Tony shrank from touching them now. He sat on one of the hall-chairs, twisting his moustache and staring with his blank blue eyes at the opposite wall. What in the world was he to do? Old Sir John was quite aware of those few thousands. They might just as well be used now he thought, and save him expense. Tony could pay them back after his father was dead. Such was Sir John’s plan and Tony had to fall in with it. The horses and the brougham and all the furniture, the prints, the pictures and the mirrors which had decked out so gaily the little house in Deanery Street went to the hammer. Tony paid off his debts and found himself with a hundred pounds in hand at the end; and when that was gone he was forced to come to his wife.
“Of course,” said she, “we’ll share what I have, Tony.”
“Yes, but we must go carefully,” he replied. “Heaven knows how long we will have to drag on like this.”
So the money question was settled, but that was in reality the least of their troubles. Sir John, for the first time in his life, was master in fact as well as in name. He had been no match for his wife, but he was more than a match for his s
on. He was the fifth baronet of his name, and yet there was no landed property. He was rich, and all the money was safely tucked away in the public funds, and he could bequeath it as he willed. He was in a position to put the screw on Tony and his wife, and he did not let the opportunity slip. The love of authority grew upon him. He became exacting and portentously severe. In his black, shabby coat, with his long thin figure, and his narrow face, he had the look of a cold self-righteous fanatic. You would have believed that he was mortifying his son for the sake of his son’s soul, unless perchance you had peeped into that private bar in the Tottenham Court Road and had seen him drinking gloomily alone.
He laid down rules to which the unfortunate couple must needs conform. They had to dine with him every night and to sit with him every evening until he went to bed. It followed that they lost sight of their friends, and every month isolated them more completely. The mere humiliation of the position in which they stood caused them to shrink more and more into their privacy. When they walked out in the afternoon they kept away from the Park; when they played truant in the evening, at the Savoy, they chose a little table in an obscure corner. This was the real history of the truants with whose fortunes those of Warrisden and Pamela were to be so closely intermingled. For that life in the dark house was not to last. Even as Warrisden passed them in Berkeley Street, Tony Stretton was saying over and over again in his inactive mind —
“It can’t go on. It can’t go on!”
In the after times, when the yapping of dogs in the street at night would wake Tony from his sleep, and set him on dreaming of tent villages in a wild country of flowers, or when the wind in the trees would recall to him a little ship labouring on short steep seas in a mist of spray, he always looked back to this night as that on which the venture of his wife’s fortunes and his own began.
CHAPTER IV
TONY STRETTON MAKES A PROPOSAL
REGULAR AS WARRISDEN had declared the lives of the truants to be, on the night following the dance at Lady Millingham’s there came a break in the monotony of their habits. For once in a way they did not leave the house in their search for light and colour as soon as they were free. They stayed on in their own sitting-room. But it seemed that they had nothing to speak about. Millie Stretton sat at the table, staring at the wall in front of her, moody and despairing. Tony Stretton leaned against the embrasure of the window, now and then glancing remorsefully at his wife, now and then looking angrily up to the ceiling where the heavy footsteps of a man treading up and down the room above sounded measured and unceasing.
Tony lifted a corner of the blind and looked out.
“There’s a party next door,” he said, “there was another at Lady Millingham’s last night. You should have been at both, Millie, and you were at neither. Upon my word, it’s rough.”
He dropped the blind and came over to her side. He knew quite well what parties and entertainments meant to her. She loved them, and it seemed to him natural and right that she should. Light, admiration, laughter and gaiety, and fine frocks — these things she was born to enjoy, and he himself had in the old days taken a great pride in watching her enjoyment. But it was not merely the feeling that she had been stripped of what was her due through him which troubled him to-night. Other and deeper thoughts were vaguely stirring in his mind.
“We have quarrelled again to-night, Millie,” he continued remorsefully. “Here we are cooped up together with just ourselves to rely upon to pull through these bad years, and we have quarrelled again.”
Millie shrugged her shoulders.
“How did it begin?” he asked. “Upon my word I don’t remember. Oh yes, I — —” and Millie interrupted him.
“What does it matter, Tony, how the quarrel began? It did begin, and another will begin to-morrow. We can’t help ourselves, and you have given the reason. Here we are cooped up by ourselves with nothing else to do.”
Tony pulled thoughtfully at his moustache.
“And we swore off quarrelling, too. When was that?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday!” exclaimed Tony, with a start of surprise. “By George, so it was. Only yesterday.”
Millie looked up at him, and the trouble upon his face brought a smile to hers. She laid a hand upon his arm.
“It’s no use swearing off, Tony,” she said. “We are both of us living all the time in a state of exasperation. I just — tingle with it, there’s no other word. And the least, smallest thing which goes wrong sets us quarrelling. I don’t think either of us is to blame. The house alone gets on our nerves, doesn’t it? These great empty, silent, dingy rooms, with their tarnished furniture. Oh! they are horrible! I wander through them sometimes and it always seems to me that, a long time ago, people lived here who suddenly felt one morning that they couldn’t stand it for a single moment longer, and ran out and locked the street door behind them; and I have almost done it myself. The very sunlight comes through the windows timidly, as if it knew it had no right here at all.”
She leaned back in her chair, looking at Tony with eyes that were hopeless and almost haggard. As Tony listened to her outburst the remorse deepened on his face.
“If I could have foreseen all this, I would have spared you it, Millie,” he said. “I would, upon my word.” He drew up a chair to the table, and, sitting down, said in a more cheerful voice, “Let’s talk it over, and see if we can’t find a remedy.”
Millie shook her head.
“We talked it over yesterday.”
“Yes, so we did.”
“And quarrelled an hour after we had talked it over.”
“We did that too,” Tony agreed, despondently. His little spark of hopefulness was put out and he sat in silence. His wife, too, did not speak, and in a short while it occurred to him that the silence was more complete than it had been a few minutes ago. It seemed that a noise had ceased, and a noise which, unnoticed before, had become noticeable by its cessation. He looked up to the ceiling. The heavy footsteps no longer dragged upon the floor overhead. Tony sprang up.
“There! He is in bed,” he exclaimed. “Shall we go out?”
“Not to-night,” replied Millie.
He could make no proposal that night which was welcomed, and as he walked over to the mantelshelf and filled his pipe, there was something in his attitude and bearing which showed to Millie that the quick rebuff had hurt.
“I can’t pretend to-night, Tony, and that’s the truth,” she added in a kinder voice. “For, after all, I do only pretend nowadays that I find the Savoy amusing.”
Tony turned slowly round with the lighted match in his hand and stared at his wife. He was a man slow in thought, and when his thoughts compelled expression, laborious in words. The deeper thoughts which had begun of late to take shape in his mind stirred again at her words.
“You have owned it,” he said.
“It had been pretence with you too, then?” she asked, looking up in surprise.
Tony puffed at his pipe.
“Of late, yes,” he replied. “Perhaps chiefly since I saw that you were pretending.”
He came back to her side and looked for a long time steadily at her while he thought. It was a surprise to Millie that he had noticed her pretence, as much of a surprise as that he had been pretending too. For she knew him to be at once slow to notice any change in others and quick to betray it in himself. But she was not aware how wide a place she filled in all his thoughts, partly because her own nature with its facile emotions made her unable to conceive a devotion which was engrossing, and partly because Tony himself had no aptitude for expressing such a devotion, and indeed would have shrunk from its expression had the aptitude been his. But she did fill that wide place. Very slowly he had begun to watch her, very slowly and dimly certain convictions were taking shape, very gradually he was drawing nearer and nearer to a knowledge that a great risk must be taken and a great sacrifice made partly by him, partly too by her. Some part of his trouble he now spoke to her.
“It
wasn’t pretence a year ago, Millie,” he said wistfully. “That’s what bothers me. We enjoyed slipping away quietly when the house was quiet, and snatching some of the light, some of the laughter the others have any time they want it. It made up for the days, it was fun then, Millie, wasn’t it? Upon my word, I believe we enjoyed our life, yes, even this life, a year ago. Do you remember how we used to drive home, laughing over what we had seen, talking about the few people we had spoken to? It wasn’t until we had turned the latch-key in the door, and crept into the hall — —”
“And passed the library door,” Millie interrupted, with a little shiver.
Tony Stretton stopped for a moment. Then he resumed in a lower voice, “Yes, it wasn’t until we had passed the library door that the gloom settled down again. But now the fun’s all over, at the latest when the lights go down in the supper room, and often before we have got to them at all. We were happy last year” — and he shook her affectionately by the arm— “that’s what bothers me.”
His wife responded to the gentleness of his voice and action.
“Never mind, Tony,” she said. “Some day we shall look back on all of it — this house and the empty rooms and the quarrels” — she hesitated for a second— “Yes, and the library door; we shall look back on it all and laugh.”
“Shall we?” said Tony, suddenly. His face was most serious, his voice most doubtful.
“Why, what do you mean?” asked Millie. Then she added reassuringly, “It must end some time. Oh yes, it can’t last for ever.”
“No,” replied Tony; “but it can last just long enough.”
“Long enough for what?”
“Long enough to spoil both our lives altogether.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 395