Barnaby Part 35

I'll tell you. And you can go back to him and make your bargain."

The girl shut her lips hard. She must listen;--for Barnaby's sake she must listen. The shamed colour ebbed in her cheek.

"I'm not mad, or bad,--at least not to speak of," said Adelaide, "but I'm careless.... Oh, I'll give you your Englishman, child; you needn't look so stricken! I once had a kind of a romance myself. When I was a young thing like you I married myself to a shabby little poet. But I grew tired of him muttering verses and dreaming things upside down; and we had a divorce, and I ran and left him and went on the stage. And all the while that little man kept on writing; and when he'd used up all his poetry, and all the dead kings and queens, he woke up and wrote a play."

A queer pride, not unmixed with tenderness, came into her voice at that.

"What do you think?" she said. "Nothing would move him but that they should find me out and give me the star part. 'I have had her in my mind all these years,' he said, 'and it is she. No one but she shall play it.'--All these years that I had forgotten him, he was building me a ladder--."

She laughed abruptly, banishing sentiment.

"I've done all the talking," she said, "and I must, while you sit there dumb with your big eyes asking me if it's to be the dagger or the bowl.

D'you remember when I was Queen Eleanor, and you were the Rosamond, and the boys nearly shouted the roof down, begging you not to drink? Ah, those times, they were funny. I've shot up since, like a rocket into the sky."

Time was running out. Somewhere in the distance there was a blare of music. She had finished making up, and she must let in her dresser.

"Listen to me," she said. "His people haven't the clues to connect a Phemie Watson they never heard of with Adelaide Fish. You'll have the start of them. Make your terms; make your terms before James and I go to housekeeping again.... I daresay he'd never find it out for himself. About that divorce--it was never fixed. The lawyer wanted to go duck-shooting, and I was gone, and James,--why, they're unbusiness-like, these poets!--he says he had always hugged an inextinguishable spark----"

She paused, looking impatiently at her listener, who was so silent.

"Don't you understand?" she said. "I'm no more Mrs. John Barnabas Hill than you are. If you're wise you'll make him marry you to-morrow."

Susan did not know which way to turn when she was in the street. It seemed much darker; it seemed as if she were lost.

She walked blindly on and on. The people were ghosts that were streaming by; their faces that gleamed and pa.s.sed did not lighten her terrible loneliness. A straw in that human river, she was afraid.

There was a post-office on the other side of the street. She almost ran to it, unconscious of the swift perils of the crossing.

For she must write to Barnaby, and the thought of communicating with him, poignant as it was, had a strange touch of comfort. The bare office became a harbour.

They gave her a letter card, and she wrote at the counter, with the scratching office pen. That was why it was so ill written. It was ridiculous how such a trifle hurt her. Was it not the first and last time she would ever write to him, and did it matter how badly, since it was to tell him that there was no bar between him and Julia? ...

He would be glad to have it....

She held it fast an instant before letting it fall into the yawning slit. She liked holding it in her hand, because it was a link between her and all that lay behind that curtain of loneliness; because it was going to him. In a little while he would touch it, would wonder, perhaps, at the unknown hand, hat poor scribble--! She dropped it in and it went like her own life into the dark.

For awhile she hurried, fighting her choking terror of the emptiness that was left. Why was it worse now than it used to be? She had been in strange cities, she had been friendless.... And somewhere behind in the glitter that mocked the darkness there was still one person who would help her, if she asked help; who would be kind to her lavishly, without understanding. She did not ask herself why it was impossible to turn in her rudderless flight and appeal to the woman from whom she had tried to guard her heart. There was a gulf between her and Adelaide. Little by little the fear driving her seemed to fail, and all other emotions grew indistinct, crushed by an infinite weight of fatigue. At last she could not think, could not suffer. She only wanted to go to sleep.

It was a frost in Leicestershire. There would be no hunting.

That first irrelevant thought struck Susan as she felt the sharpness of the air breathing in on her face. The narrow window above her head had been propped a little way open with a hair-brush, and the curtain that divided her bed from the next was agitated; she had a neighbour who was astir.

With her eyes shut the girl imagined the gra.s.s frozen white, and the branches silver; heard the rapping trot of a string of hunters exercising in the long road beneath the park.

But this was not Leicestershire; it was London, and she was lying in a narrow bed in a small square attic. At the foot stood a washing stand, with a jug and basin, at the head a chest of drawers. There was not room for a chair.

Was it last night she had followed a stranger bearing a candle up flights and flights of uncarpeted wooden stairs? The weariness of that pilgrimage obliterated her stupefied sense of relief when the kind, worn woman had consented to take her in, her absurd inclination to sink down on the chair in the pa.s.sage and fall asleep. She had thought she would never, never cease climbing stairs.

She remembered now.

Lady Henrietta had asked her once, when she and Barnaby had run up for the day to London, to call on an old governess who was ill. "In a sort of lodging-house," she had said. "One of these places where women live in hutches and eat in the bas.e.m.e.nt." And the dreariness of it had haunted her. Somehow she had found her way there again. The old governess was gone, but the manageress recalled her face. They would not have taken her in without luggage at an hotel.

With that came the recollection that she was penniless. The few chance shillings that she had with her she had spent on her railway ticket.

She remembered thinking of that in the train;--she remembered finding Lady Henrietta's battered brooch that she had pinned in her dress to take to the jeweller,--and the diamond star that was the one thing she had to sell. Ah, that was between her and dest.i.tution. She started up. What had she done with it? She had been too utterly weary to think or care.

The draught was beating the dingy dividing curtain that swung on its iron rod; it bulged like a sail over the top of the chest of drawers, sweeping it clear; and it parted, giving a glimpse of a girl beyond with the star in her hands. She started.

"I was just putting it back," she said. "The curtain knocked it off on my side. How it sparkles!"

Susan stretched out her fingers, a little too eagerly.

"You needn't be so sharp," said the girl, disconcerted. "I could buy heaps like it for a shilling apiece at a shop in the Edgware Road," and she threw it back carelessly, and began to whistle to show she was not abashed.

She had a plain, good-humoured, impudent face and dusty hair. On her arms she wore a pair of black stockings with the feet cut off, fastened by safety pins to her under bodice. She was tying her petticoat.

"I want to sell this," said Susan. In her loneliness she was loth to offend a stranger.--"But I hope I shall get more than a shilling for it."

"I'll give you three," said the girl, and then was all at once smitten with awe. "I say--you don't mean to say it's real?"

Her off-hand manner became subdued; she looked curiously but respectfully at Susan.

"You came here unexpectedly, didn't you?" she said. "Did you know you had slept all Sunday? Mrs. White said you were dead tired, and that you were a lady. I'll lend you my brush, if you like;--and a bit of soap."

Susan smiled at this proof of confidence.

"I'll shut the window, shall I?" the girl went on, letting it slam as she withdrew the hair-brush. "I was airing my bed. I always make it before I go down because I'm anaemic, and I've no breath to run up all these flights of stairs after breakfast.--If you want to be private you can pull the curtain."

That was the one thing she would not willingly do for her; with her own hands shut out the view of one so mysterious.

The other sleepers were stirring behind their enshrouding folds, like hidden moths preparing to burst from the chrysalis. In one quarter after another the heavy breathing was cut short by an awaking sigh.

One or two emerged with their jugs and padded barefoot to the hot-water tap on the landing.

"I'll get you a jugful, shall I?" said Susan's friend, and having installed herself as mistress of the ceremonies, returned to the subject of the star.

"Mind you don't try a p.a.w.nbroker," she said. "If you take my advice you'll walk into the swaggerest shop in Bond Street, where they are used to ladies."

"Why?" asked Susan.

The girl a.s.sumed a great air of worldly wisdom, c.o.c.king her head on one side like a London sparrow.

"Oh," she said, "_they_ won't be so likely to lose their heads over you, and perhaps ask you how you got it."

She had not considered that. Her dismayed look gratified the girl, who at once adopted the manner of a protector.

"You'll be all right," she said. "They'll know the difference in the Bond Street shops. It wouldn't do in the City."