And yet I went away with something before me — that call upon Saturday afternoon. Quite unreasonably I fancied I should see her alone. And so when the day came and I stood outside the opening door of the drawing-room, and heard voices and laughter within, I was hurt and aggrieved beyond measure. There was quite a party, and a merry one, assembled, who were playing at some game, as it seemed to me, for I caught sight of Clare whipping off an impromptu bandage from her eyes, and striving by her stiffest air to give the lie to a pair of flushed cheeks. The black-whiskered man was there, and two men of his kind, and a German governess, and a very old lady in a wheel-chair, who was called “grandmamma,” and Miss Guest herself looking, in the prettiest dress of silvery plush, to the full as bright and fair and graceful as I had been picturing her each hour since we parted.
She dropped me a stately courtesy. “Will you play the part of Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, Mr. Herapath, while I act honest Burchell, and say ‘Fudge!’ or will you burn nuts and play games with neighbor Flamborough? You will join us, won’t you? Clare does not so misbehave every day, only it is such a wet afternoon and so cold and wretched, and we did not think there would be any more callers — and tea will be up in five minutes.”
She did not think there would be any more callers! Something in her smile belied the words and taught me that she had thought — she had known — that there would be one more caller — one who would burn nuts and play games with her, though Rome itself were afire, and Tooley Street and the Mile End Road to boot.
It was a simple game enough, and not likely, one would say, to afford much risk of that burning the fingers, which gave a zest to the Vicar of Wakefield’s nuts. One sat in the middle blindfolded, while the rest disguised their own or assumed each other’s voices, and spoke one by one some gibe or quip at his expense. When he succeeded in naming the speaker, the detected satirist put on the poke, and in his turn heard things good — if he had a conceit of himself — for his soul’s health. Now this rôle unhappily soon fell to me, and proved a heavy one, because I was not so familiar with the others’ voices as were the rest; and Miss Guest — whose faintest tones I thought to have known — had a wondrous knack of cheating me, now taking off Clare’s voice, and now — after the door had been opened to admit the tea — her father’s. So I failed again and again to earn my release. But when a voice behind me cried with well-feigned eagerness —
“How nice! Do tell me all about a fire!”
Though no fresh creaking at the door had reached me, nor warning been given of an addition to the players, I had not the smallest doubt who was the speaker; but exclaimed at once, “That is Bab! Now I cry you mercy. I am right this time. That was Bab!”
I looked for a burst of applause and laughter, such as had before attended a good thrust home, but none came. On the contrary, with my words so odd a silence fell upon the room that it was clear that something was wrong, and I pulled off my handkerchief in haste, repeating, “That was Bab, I am sure.”
But if it was, I could not see her. What had come over them all? Jack’s face wore a provoking smile, and his friends were clearly bent upon sniggering. Clare looked horrified, and grandmamma gently titillated, while Miss Guest, who had risen and half turned away towards the windows, seemed to be in a state of proud confusion. What was the matter?
“I beg every one’s pardon by anticipation,” I said, looking round in a bewildered way: “but have I said anything wrong?”
“Oh, dear no,” cried the fellow they called Jack, with a familiarity that was in the worst taste — as if I had meant to apologize to him! “Most natural thing in the world!”
“Jack, how dare you?” exclaimed Miss Guest, stamping her foot.
“Well it seemed all right. It sounded very natural, I am sure.”
“Oh, you are unbearable! Why don’t you say something, Clare?”
“Mr. Herapath, I am sure that you did not know that my name was Barbara.”
“Certainly not,” I cried. “What a strange thing!”
“But it is, and that is why grandmamma is looking so shocked, and Mr. Buchanan is wearing threadbare an old friend’s privilege of being rude. I freely forgive you if you will make allowance for him. And you shall come off the stool of repentance and have your tea first, since you are the greatest stranger. It is a stupid game after all!”
She would hear no apologies from me. And when I would have asked why her sister bore the same name, and thus excused myself, she was intent upon tea-making, and the few moments I could with decency add to my call gave me scant opportunity. I blush to think how I eked them out, by what subservience to Clare, by what a slavish anxiety to help even Jack to muffins — each piece I hoped might choke him. How slow I was to find hat and gloves, calling to mind with terrible vividness, as I turned my back upon the circle, that again and again in my experience, an acquaintance begun by a dinner had ended with the consequent call. And so I should have gone — it might have been so here — but that the door-handle was stiff, and Miss Guest came to my aid, as I fumbled with it. “We are always at home on Saturdays, if you like to call, Mr. Herapath,” she murmured carelessly, not lifting her eyes — and I found myself in the street.
So carelessly she said it, that with a sudden change of feeling I vowed I would not call. Why should I? Why should I worry myself with the sight of those other fellows parading their favor? With the babble of that society chit-chat, which I had so often scorned, and — and still scorned, and had no part or concern in. They were not people to suit me, or do me good. I would not go, I said, and repeated it firmly on Monday and Tuesday; on Wednesday only so far modified it that I thought at some distant time to leave a card — to avoid discourtesy; — on Friday preferred an earlier date as wiser and more polite, and on Saturday walked shame-faced down the street and knocked and rang, and went upstairs — to taste a pleasant misery. Yes, and on the next Saturday too, and the next, and the next; and that one on which we all went to the theatre, and that other one on which Mr. Guest kept me to dinner. Ay, and on other days that were not Saturdays, among which two stand high out of the waters of forgetfulness — high days indeed — days like twin pillars of Hercules, through which I thought to reach, as did the seamen of old, I knew not what treasures of unknown lands stretching away under the setting sun. First that one on which I found Barbara Guest alone and blurted out that I had the audacity to wish to make her my wife; and then heard, before I had well — or badly — told my tale, the wheels of grandmamma’s chair outside.
“Hush!” the girl said, her face turned from me. “Hush, Mr. Herapath. You don’t know me, indeed. You have seen so little of me. Please say nothing more about it. You are completely under a delusion.”
“It is no delusion that I love you, Barbara!” I cried.
“It is, it is,” she repeated, freeing her hand. “There, if you will not take an answer — come — come at three to-morrow. But mind, I promise you nothing — I promise you nothing,” she added feverishly, and fled from the room, leaving me to talk to grandmamma as best, and escape as quickly as, I might.
I longed for a great fire that evening, and failing one, tired myself by tramping unknown streets of the East-end, striving to teach myself that any trouble to-morrow might bring was but a shadow, a sentiment, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath with the want and toil of which I caught glimpses up each street and lane that opened to right and left. In the main, of course, I failed: but the effort did me good, sending me home tired out, to sleep as soundly as if I were going to be hanged next day, and not — which is a very different thing — to be put upon my trial.
“I will tell Miss Guest you are here, sir,” the man said. I looked at all the little things in the room which I had come to know well — her workbasket, the music upon the piano, the table-easel, her photograph — and wondered if I were to see them no more, or if they were to become a part of my every-day life. Then I heard her come in, and turned quickly, feeling that I should learn my fate from her g
reeting.
“Bab!” The word was rung from me perforce. And then we stood and looked at one another, she with a strange pride and defiance in her eyes, though her cheek was dark with blushes, and I with wonder and perplexity in mine, — wonder and perplexity that quickly grew into a conviction, a certainty that the girl standing before me in the short-skirted brown dress with tangled hair and loose neck-ribbon was the Bab I had known in Norway; and yet that the eyes — I could not mistake them now, no matter what unaccustomed look they might wear — were Barbara Guest’s!
“Miss Guest — Barbara,” I stammered, grappling with the truth, “why have you played this trick upon me?”
“It is Miss Guest and Barbara now,” she cried, with a mocking courtesy. “Do you remember, Mr. Herapath, when it was Bab? When you treated me as a kind of toy, and a plaything, with which you might be as intimate as you liked; and hurt my feelings — yes, it is weak to confess it, I know — day by day, and hour by hour?”
“But surely, that is forgiven now?” I said, dazed by an attack so sudden and so bitter. “It is atonement enough that I am at your feet now, Barbara!”
“You are not,” she retorted hotly. “Don’t say you have offered love to me, who am the same with the child you teased at Breistolen. You have fallen in love with my fine clothes, and my pearls and my maid’s work, not with me. You have fancied the girl you saw other men make much of. But you have not loved the woman who might have prized that which Miss Guest has never learned to value.”
“How old are you?” I said, hoarsely.
“Nineteen!” she snapped out. And then for a moment we were both silent.
“I begin to understand now,” I answered slowly as soon as I could conquer something in my throat. “Long ago when I hardly knew you, I hurt your woman’s pride; and since that you have plotted — —”
“No, you have tricked yourself!”
“And schemed to bring me to your feet that you might have the pleasure of trampling on me. Miss Guest, your triumph is complete, more complete than you are able to understand. I loved you this morning above all the world — as my own life — as every hope I had. See, I tell you this that you may have a moment’s keener pleasure when I am gone.”
“Don’t! Don’t!” she cried, throwing herself into a chair and covering her face.
“You have won a man’s heart and cast it aside to gratify an old pique. You may rest content now, for there is nothing wanting to your vengeance. You have given me as much pain as a woman, the vainest and the most heartless, can give a man. Good-by.”
And with that I was leaving her, fighting my own pain and passion, so that the little hands she raised as though they would ward off my words were nothing to me. I felt a savage delight in seeing that I could hurt her, which deadened my own grief. The victory was not all with her lying there sobbing. Only where was my hat? Let me get my hat and go. Let me escape from this room wherein every trifle upon which my eye rested awoke some memory that was a pang. Let me get away, and have done with it all.
Where was the hat? I had brought it up. I could not go without it. It must be under her chair, by all that was unlucky, for it was nowhere else. I could not stand and wait, and so I had to go up to her, with cold words of apology upon my lips, and being close to her and seeing on her wrist, half hidden by fallen hair, the scar she had brought home from Norway, I don’t know how it was that I fell on my knees by her and cried:
“Oh, Bab, I loved you so! Let us part friends.”
For a moment, silence. Then she whispered, her hand in mine, “Why did you not say Bab to begin? I only told you that Miss Guest had not learned to value your love.”
“And Bab?” I murmured, my brain in a whirl.
“Learned long ago, poor girl!”
And the fair, tear-stained face of my tyrant looked into mine for a moment, and then came quite naturally to its resting place.
“Now,” she said, when I was leaving, “you may have your hat, sir.”
“I believe,” I replied, “that you sat upon this chair on purpose.”
And Bab blushed. I believe she did.
A Strange Invitation
I have friends who tell me that they seldom walk the streets of London without wondering what is passing behind the house-fronts; without picturing a comedy here, a love-scene there, and behind the dingy cane blinds a something ill-defined, a something odd and bizarre. They experience — if you believe them — a sense of loneliness out in the street, an impatience of the sameness of all these many houses, their dull bricks and discreet windows, and a longing that some one would step out and ask them to enter and see the play.
Well, I have never felt any of these things; but as I was passing through Fitzhardinge Square about half-past ten o’clock one evening in last July, after dining, if I remember rightly, in Baker Street, something happened to me which I fancy may be of interest to such people.
I was passing through the square from north to south, and to avoid a small crowd, which some reception had drawn together, I left the pavement and struck across the road to the path round the oval garden; which, by the way, contains a few of the finest trees in London. This part was in deep shadow, so that when I presently emerged from it and recrossed the road to the pavement near the top of Fitzhardinge Street, I had an advantage over any persons on the pavement. They were under the lamps, while I, coming from beneath the trees, was almost invisible.
The door of the house immediately in front of me as I crossed was open, and an elderly manservant out of livery was standing at it, looking up and down the pavement by turns. It was his air of furtive anxiety that drew my attention to him. He was not like a man looking for a cab, or waiting for his sweetheart; and I had my eye upon him as I stepped upon the pavement before him. But my surprise was great when he uttered a low exclamation of dismay at sight of me and made as if he would escape; while his face, in the full glare of the light, grew so pale and terror-stricken that he might before have been completely at his ease. I was astonished and instinctively stood still returning his gaze; for perhaps twenty seconds we remained so, he speechless, and his hands fallen by his side. Then, before I could move on, as I was in the act of doing, he cried, “Oh! Mr. George! Oh! Mr. George!” in a tone that rang out in the stillness rather as a wail than an ordinary cry.
My name, my surname I mean, is George. For a moment I took the address to myself, forgetting that the man was a stranger, and my heart began to beat more quickly with fear of what might have happened. “What is it?” I exclaimed. “What is it?” and I shook back from the lower part of my face the silk muffler I was wearing. The evening was close, but I had been suffering from a sore throat.
He came nearer and peered more closely at me, and I dismissed my fear; for I thought that I could see the discovery of his mistake dawning upon him. His pallid face, on which the pallor was the more noticeable as his plump features were those of a man with whom the world as a rule went well, regained some of its lost color, and a sigh of relief passed his lips. But this feeling was only momentary. The joy of escape from whatever blow he had thought imminent gave place at once to his previous state of miserable expectancy of something or other.
“You took me for another person,” I said, preparing to pass on. At that moment I could have sworn — I would have given one hundred to one twice over — that he was going to say Yes. To my intense astonishment, he did not. With a very visible effort he said, “No!”
“Eh! What?” I exclaimed. I had taken a step or two.
“No, sir.”
“Then what is it?” I said. “What do you want, my good fellow?”
Watching his shuffling, indeterminate manner, I wondered if he were sane. His next answer reassured me on that point. There was an almost desperate deliberation about its manner. “My master wishes to see you, sir, if you will kindly walk in for five minutes,” was what he said.
I should have replied, “Who is your master?” if I had been wise; or cried, “Nonsense!” and gone my way
. But the mind when it is spurred by a sudden emergency often overruns the more obvious course to adopt a worse. It was possible that one of my intimates had taken the house, and said in his butler’s presence that he wished to see me. Thinking of that I answered, “Are you sure of this? Have you not made a mistake, my man?”
With an obstinate sullenness that was new in him he said, No, he had not. Would I please to walk in? He stepped briskly forward as he spoke, and induced me by a kind of gentle urgency to enter the house, taking from me with the ease of a trained servant my hat, coat, and muffler. Finding himself in the course of his duties he gained more composure; while I, being thus treated, lost my sense of the strangeness of the proceeding, and only awoke to a full consciousness of my position when he had softly shut the door behind us and was in the act of putting up the chain.
Then I confess I looked round a little alarmed at my precipitancy. But I found the hall spacious, lofty, and dark-panelled, the ordinary hall of an old London house. The big fireplace was filled with plants in flower. There were rugs on the floor and a number of chairs with painted crests on the backs, and in a corner was an old sedan chair, its poles upright against the wall.
No other servants were visible, it is true. But apart from this all was in order, all was quiet, and any idea of violence was manifestly absurd.
At the same time the affair seemed of the strangest. Why should the butler in charge of a well-arranged and handsome house — the house of an ordinary wealthy gentleman — why should he loiter about the open doorway as if anxious to feel the presence of his kind? Why should he show such nervous excitement and terror as I had witnessed? Why should he introduce a stranger?
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 329