Lawrence Clavering Part 23

I set the lamp again upon the table. The old man was right, I thought sadly. There was in that room philosophy which it would indeed profit me to study.

Mr. Curwen returned, rubbing his long, delicate hands one against the other in a flush of triumph.

"I have given orders," he said, and with a gentle accent of conscious pride he repeated the phrase--"I have given orders, Mr. Clavering. You will sleep in my boy's room, and since you are, as I say, very like to him in size----" But his voice trembled, and he turned away and lifted the lamp from the table.

"I will show you the room," he said.

I followed him into the hall, up the staircase, and down a long pa.s.sage to the very end of the house.

A door stood open. Mr. Curwen led me through it The room was warmly furnished, and hung with curtains of a dark green, while a newly-lit fire was crackling in the hearth. A couple of candles were burning on the mantelpiece, and Mary Tyson was arranging the bed. She took no notice of me whatever as I entered, being busy with the bed, as I thought.

"You can go, Mary," said Mr. Curwen, with a timid friendliness plainly intended to appease.

Mary sniffed for an answer, and as she turned to go I saw that she had been crying.

"She was Harry's nurse, poor woman," explained Mr. Curwen. "You must forgive her, Mr. Clavering." And then, "He died at Malplaquet."

He crossed over to the bed, and stood looking down at it silently in a very fixed att.i.tude. Then he took up from it a white silk stocking. I approached him, and saw that a suit of white satin was neatly folded upon the white counterpane.

"It is a fortunate thing," he said, with a smile all the more sad for its effort at cheerfulness, "that you and he are alike;" and he drew the stocking slowly through his fingers. "He died at Malplaquet, and Marlborough--the Marlborough of Malplaquet--spoke to him as he died."

His voice broke on the words, and laying the stocking down, he turned towards a j.a.pan toilette with a "Even a father has no right to ask for more than that." But Harry's shoe-buckles were laid upon the chintz-coverlid, and he took them in his hands one after the other, repeating, "He died at Malplaquet. I have given you this room," he said, "for a reason. See! These two windows point down the valley, and are set high above the ground. But this"--and he crossed over to a smaller window set in the wall near the fireplace--"this looks on to the hillside, and since the ground rises against the house, a man may drop from it and come to no harm. To the left are the stables, or what serves us for stables. We lock no doors at Applegarth, Mr. Clavering, fearing no robbers. You will find a horse in the stables, should there be need for you to flee."

It was some while after Mr. Curwen had left me, before I could make up my mind to don these clothes. I might be like to what Harry Curwen was in size and figure, but there the likeness ended, and the sharpest contrast in the world set in. I unfolded the suit, and spread it out upon the bed. The coat was of white velvet, the waistcoat and breeches of white satin, and all richly laced with an embroidery of silver. A fragrant scent of lavender, which breathed from the dress, coupled with its freshness as of a suit worn but once or twice and so laid aside, lent an added sadness to the thought of young Harry Curwen. I imagined him stripping off these fine clothes in a fumbling excitement one night, in this very room, kicking from his feet those lacquered shoes--these with their soles and red-heels upturned now to the fire for the guest who was so like him! I imagined him pulling on his boots, and riding off from Applegarth with, I know not what, martial visions in his eyes, and hardly a glance, maybe, for the old man and the sister standing in the light of the porch, to join his troop and perish on the plains of Flanders. Well, he had died at Malplaquet, and the great Marlborough--not the huckstering time-server whom we knew--the Marlborough of Malplaquet had spoken to him as he lay a-dying, and no father had a right to look for more than that. I picked up the stockings, and drew them through my fingers as the father had done.

At that, however, I bethought me that the father and his daughter were awaiting me downstairs, and so dressed in a hurry, and combing out my peruke to such neatness as I could, I got me down into the hall.

Supper was already laid out in the dining-room, and Mr. Curwen waiting. In a little I heard a light step upon the stair and the rustle of a dress. Instinctively I turned my face towards the window-curtains, my back to the door. I heard the door open, but I did not hear it shut again.

"Mr. Clavering," said the old man.

I was forced to turn. His daughter stood in the doorway, her lips parted, her eyes startled.

"Mr. Clavering--my daughter Dorothy."

I bowed to her. She drew in her breath, then advanced to me frankly, and held out her hand.

"My father told me you were like," she said, "but since your back was turned, I almost thought I saw him."

I took the hand by the finger-tips.

"He was very dear to you?"

"Very."

"Miss Curwen," said I, gravely, "I would, with all my heart, that you had seen him, and that I had died in his place at Malplaquet."

Her face clouded for an instant, and she drew her hand quickly away, taking my speech, no doubt, for nothing more than an awkward and ill-timed compliment. But compliment it was not, being, indeed, the truth and summary of my recent thoughts quickened into speech against my will. She was of a slender figure, with a rosebud face, delicate as her father's. Her hair was drawn simply back from a broad, white forehead, and in colour was nut-brown, gleaming where it took the light as though powdered with gold-dust. She was dressed in the simplest gown of white, set off here and there with a warm ribbon. But I took little note of her dress, beyond remarking that no other could so well become her. From the pure oval of her face, her eyes big and grey looked out at me, each like a quiet pool with a lanthorn lighted somewhere in its depths, and she seemed to me her voice incarnate. She was unlike to her father in the proportion of her height, for she was not tall--and like to him again in a certain wilfulness which the set of her lips betokened, and again unlike in the masterful firmness of her rounded chin; so that she could put off and on, with the quickest change of humours, the gravity of a woman and the sunny petulance of a child.

"It is our homely fashion," said Mr. Curwen, "to wait upon ourselves."

And we sat down to the table.

It was a fashion, however, which the guest, much to his discomfort, was not that night allowed to follow. For father and daughter alike joined to show him courtesy. The daughter would have waited on me, even as Lady Derwent.w.a.ter had done, and began, like her, to fill my gla.s.s. But this time I could not permit it.

"Madam," I cried hoa.r.s.ely, "you must not Your kindness hurts me."

"Hurts you?" she asked, and from her tone I knew it was she who was hurt.

"You do not know. If you did, your kindness would turn to the bitterest contempt."

I spoke without thought and barely with knowledge of what I said, but in a pa.s.sion of self-reproach.

"Mr. Clavering," she replied very gently, "you are overwrought, and I do not wonder. Else would you know that it must honour any woman to serve any man who has so served his King."

I dropped my head into my hands. My very soul rose against this praise.

"If I had served my King," I exclaimed in a despairing remorse, "I should have been in France this many a week back."

"France!" repeated Mr. Curwen, suddenly looking up. "You take the delay too much to heart. For it need be nothing more than a delay, and a brief one besides." He spoke with some significance in his tone.

"Lord Derwent.w.a.ter mentioned in his letter that he would discover a means to set you across in France, but perhaps"--and his voice became almost sly--"perhaps we may find a more expeditious way." He checked himself abruptly, like one that has said too much, and shot a timid glance towards his daughter. I noticed that her face grew a trifle grave, but she did not explain or comment on his words, and Mr. Curwen diverted his talk to indifferent topics. I fear me that I must have proved the dullest auditor, for I gave little heed to what he said, my thoughts being occupied in a quite other fashion. For since his daughter sat over against me at the table, since each time that I lifted my eyes, they must needs encounter hers; since each time that she spoke, the mere sound of her voice was as a stern rebuke; I fell from depth to depth of shame and humiliation. I was sheltering there under the same roof with her, to all seeming an honourable refugee, in very truth an impostor, and bound, moreover, to continue in his imposition. The very clothes which I was wearing forced the truth upon me. I had, indeed, but one thought wherewith to comfort me, and though the comfort was of the coldest, I yet clung to it as my only solace.

The thought was this: that I had already determined, at whatsoever cost to me, whether of liberty or life, to repair, so far as a man could, the consequence of my misdoing. It was not that I took any credit from the resolve--I was not, thank G.o.d, so far fallen as that--but what comforted me was that I had come to the resolve up there on the hillside between Brandreth and Grey Knotts before I had descended into Ennerdale, before I had set foot within Applegarth; before, in a word, I had heard Dorothy Curwen sing or looked into her eyes. I did not explain to myself the comfort which the thought gave me; I was merely sensible of it. "It was before," I said to myself; and over and over again I gladly repeated the thought.

However, a word which Mr. Curwen spoke, finally aroused my attention, for he made mention of the garden of Blackladies. I suppose that I must by some movement have shown my distaste for the subject, and--

"You do not admire it," he said.

"It is very quaint and ingenious, no doubt," I replied, "but the ingenuity seems misplaced there."

Miss Curwen nodded.

"It is like a fine French ribbon on a homespun gown," said she.

I remembered on the instant something which Lord Derwent.w.a.ter had said to me concerning Dorothy Curwen.

"You know Blackladies?" I inquired, and perhaps with some anxiety.

"Very well," said she, with a smile of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"So I thought," said I.

"Yes," she continued, "my father was very familiar with Sir John Rookley;" and her eyes rested quietly upon mine.

"A hard man, people said, Mr. Clavering," interrupted Mr. Curwen, "but a just man and to my liking. If he was hard, G.o.d knows he had enough in Jervas to make him so."

I glanced at the daughter. She was regarding the beams which roofed the room, with supreme unconsciousness, but the very moment that I looked at her she dropped her eyes to the level of mine.

"You lack something, Mr. Clavering," said she with great politeness.

"Indeed!" said my host, rising from his chair in the excess of his hospitality.