Miranda of the Balcony Part 19

Charnock's dominant feeling, indeed, was one of elation. The message of his mirror was being fulfilled. He had the glove in his pocket to a.s.sure him of that, and the feel of the glove, of its delicate kid between his strong fingers, pleased him beyond measure. For it seemed appropriate and expressive of her, and he hoped that the strength of his fingers was expressive of himself. But beyond that, it was a call, a challenge to his chivalry, which up till now, through all his years, had never once been called upon and challenged; and therein lay the true cause of his elation.

The train swept out of the cork forest, and the great gra.s.s slopes stretched upwards at the side of the track, dotted with white villages, seamed with rocks. Charnock fell to marvelling at the apt moment of the summons. Just when his work was done, when his mind and his body were free, the glove had come to him. If it had come by a later post on that same day, he would have been on his way to England.

But it had not; it had come confederate with the hour of its coming.

The train pa.s.sed into the gorge of tunnels, climbing towards Ronda. He was not forgetful that he was summoned to help Miranda out of a danger perhaps, certainly out of a great misfortune. But he had never had a doubt that the misfortune from some quarter, and at some time, would fall. She had allowed him on the balcony in St. James's Park to understand that she herself expected it. He knew, too, that it must be some quite unusual misfortune. For had she not herself said, with a complete comprehension of what she said, "If I have troubles I must fight them through myself"? He had been prepared then for the troubles, and he was rejoiced that after all they were of a kind wherein his service could be of use.

At the head of the gorge he caught his first view of Ronda, balanced aloft upon its dark pinnacle of rock. It was mid-day, and the sun tinged with gold the white Spanish houses and the old brown mansions of the Moors; and over all was a blue arch of sky, brilliant and cloudless. At that distance and in that clear light, Ronda seemed one piece of ivory, exquisitely carved and tinted, and then exquisitely mounted on a black pedestal. Charnock was not troubled with any of Lady Donnisthorpe's perplexities as to why Miranda persisted in making that town her home. To him it seemed the only place where she could live, since it alone could fitly enshrine her.

The train wound up the incline at the back of the town and steamed into the station. Charnock drove thence to the hotel in the square near the bull-ring, lunched, and asked his way to Mrs. Warriner's house. He stood for a while looking at the blank yellow wall which gave on to the street, and the heavy door of walnut wood.

For the first time he began to ponder what was the nature of the peril in which Miranda stood. His speculations were of no particular value, but the fact that he speculated at this spot, opposite the house, opposite the door, was. For, quite unconsciously, his eyes took an impression of the geometrical arrangement of the copper nails with which it was encrusted, or rather sought to take such an impression.

For the geometrical figures were so intricate in their involutions that the eyes were continually baffled and continually provoked.

Charnock was thus absently searching for the key to their inter-twistings when he walked across the road and knocked. He was conducted through the patio. He was shown into the small dark-panelled parlour which overlooked the valley. The door was closed upon him; the room was empty. A book lay open upon the table before the window.

Charnock stood in front of this table looking out of the window across to the sierras; so that the book was just beneath his nose. He had but to drop his eyes and he would have read the t.i.tle, and known the subject-matter, of the book, and perhaps taken note or some pencil lines scored in the margin against a pa.s.sage here and there, for the book had been much in Miranda's hands these last few days. But he did not, for he heard a light step cross the patio outside and pause on the threshold of the door.

Charnock turned expectantly away from the table. The door, however, did not open, nor on the other hand were the footsteps heard to retreat. A woman then was standing, quite silent and quite motionless, on the other side of that shut door; and that woman, no doubt, was Miranda. Charnock was puzzled; he, too, stood silent and motionless, looking towards the door and wondering why she paused there and in what att.i.tude she stood. For the seconds pa.s.sed, and there must have been a lapse of quite two minutes between the moment when the footsteps ceased and the moment when the door was flung open.

For the door was flung open, noisily, violently, and with a great bustle of petticoats an unknown woman danced into the room humming a tune. She stopped with all the signs of amazement when she saw Charnock. "Oh!" she exclaimed, "why didn't they tell me?" She cast backwards over her shoulder that glance of the startled fawn which befits a solitary maid in the presence of a devouring man. Then she advanced timidly, lowered her eyes, and said: "So you have come to Ronda, then?"

This unknown woman had paused outside the door, yet she had swung into the room as though in a great hurry, and had been much surprised to see her visitor. Charnock was perplexed. Moreover, the unknown woman wore the semblance of Miranda. She was dressed in a white frock very elaborate with lace, he noticed; there was a shimmer of satin at her throat and waist, and to him who had not seen her for these months past, and who had thought of her as of one draped in black,--since thus only he had seen her,--she gleamed against the dark panels of the room, silvered and wonderful.

"So you have come to Ronda?" said she.

"Of course."

She held out her hand with a gingerly manner of timidity, and pressed his fingers when they touched hers, as though she could not help herself, and then hastily drew her hand away, as if she was ashamed and alarmed at her forwardness. Charnock could not but remember a frank, honest hand-clasp, with which she had bidden him goodbye in London.

"Is this your first visit to Ronda?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Sure?" She looked at him with her eyebrows raised and an arch glance of provocation. "Sure you have not come up once or twice just to see in what corner of the world I lived?"

"No; I have been busy."

Miranda shrugged her shoulders.

"I had no right to expect you would." She pushed out a foot in a polished shoe beyond the hem of her dress, contemplated it with great interest, and suddenly withdrew it with much circ.u.mstance of modesty.

Then with an involuntary gesture of repugnance which Charnock did not understand, she went over to the window and stood looking out from it.

From that position too she spoke.

"You promised that night, if you have not forgotten, at Lady Donnisthorpe's, on the balcony, to tell me about yourself, about those years you spent in Westminster." And Charnock broke in upon her speech in a voice of relief.

"I understand," said he.

"What?"

"You," he replied simply.

"Oh, I hope not," she returned; "for when a woman becomes intelligible to a man, he loses all--liking for her," and she spoke the word "liking" with extreme shyness as though there were a bolder word with which he might replace it if he chose. "Is not that the creed?"

"A false creed," said he, and her eyes fell upon the open book. She uttered a startled exclamation, threw a quick glance at Charnock, closed the book and covered it with a newspaper.

"Let us go into the garden," said she; "and you shall talk to me of those years in which I am most interested."

"That I can understand," said he, and she glanced at him sharply, suspiciously, but there was no sarcasm in his accent. He had hit upon an explanation of the change in her. She stood in peril, she needed help, and very likely help of a kind which implied resource, which involved danger. She knew nothing of him, nothing of his capacity. It was no more than natural that he should require to know and that she should sound his years for the knowledge, before she laid him under the obligation of doing her a service.

He sat down on the chair in which M. Fournier had sat only yesterday.

"It will sound very unfamiliar to you," he said with a laugh. "My father was vicar of a moorland parish on the hills above Brighouse in Yorkshire. There I lived until I was twelve, until my father died. He had nothing but the living, which was poor--the village schoolmaster, what with capitation grants, was a good deal better off--so that when he died, he died penniless. I was adopted by a maiden aunt who took me to her home, a little villa in the south suburbs of London of which the shutters had never been taken down from the front windows since she had come to live there three years before."

"Why?" asked Miranda, in surprise.

"She was eccentric," explained Charnock, with a smile, and he resumed.

"Nor had the front door ever been opened. My aunt was afraid that visitors might call, and, as she truly said, the house was not yet in order. The furniture, partly unpacked, with wisps of straw about the legs of the chairs, was piled up in the uncarpeted rooms. For there was only a carpet down in one room, the room in which we lived, and since the room was in the front and the shutters were up, we lived in a perpetual twilight."

"But did the servants do nothing?" exclaimed Miranda.

"There were no servants," returned Charnock. "My aunt said that they hampered her independence. Consequently of course we made our meals of tinned meat and bottled stout, which we ate standing up by the kitchen table in the garden if it was fine. But wet or fine the kitchen table always stood in the garden."

Here Miranda began to laugh and Charnock joined with her.

"It was a quaint sort of life," said he, "but rather ghostly to a boy of twelve."

"But you went to school?"

"No, my schooldays were over. I just lived in the twilight of that house, and through the c.h.i.n.ks of the shutters watched people pa.s.sing in the street, and lay awake at night listening to the creak of the bare boards. The house was in a terrace, and since we went to bed as soon as it grew dark to save the gas, I could hear through the wall the sounds of people laughing and talking, sometimes too the voices of boys of my own age playing while I lay in bed. I used to like the noise at times; it was companionable and told me fairy stories of blazing firesides. At times, however, I hated it beyond words, and hated the boys who laughed and shouted while I lay in the dark amongst the ghostly piles of furniture."

Miranda was now quite serious, and Charnock, as he watched her, recognised in the woman who was listening, the woman he had talked with on the balcony over St. James's Park, and not the woman he had talked with five minutes since.

"Only to think of it," she exclaimed. "I was living then amongst the Suffolk meadows, and the great whispering elms of the Park, and I never knew." She spoke almost in a tone of self-reproach as she clasped her hands together on her knees. "I never knew!"

"Oh, but we had our dissipations," returned Charnock. "We dug potatoes in the garden, and sometimes we paid a visit to Marshall and Snelgrove."

"Marshall and Snelgrove!"

"Yes, those were gala days. My aunt would buy the best ready-made bodice in the shop, which she carried away with her. From Marshall and Snelgrove's we used to go to Verrey's restaurant, where we dined amongst mirrors and much gilding, and about nine o'clock we would travel back to our suburb, creep into the dark house by the back door, and go to bed without a light. Imagine that if you can, Mrs. Warriner.

The clatter, the noise, the flowers, the lights, of the restaurant, men and women in evening dress, and just about the time when they were driving up to their theatres, these people, in whose company we had dined, we were creeping into the dark, close-shuttered villa of the bare boards, and groping our way through the pa.s.sage without a light.

I used to imagine that every room had a man hiding behind the door, and all night long I heard men in my room breathing stealthily. It was after one such night that I ran away."

"You ran away?"

"Yes, and hid myself in London. I picked up a living one way and another. It doesn't cost much to live when you are put to it. I sold newspapers. I ran errands--"

"You didn't carry a sandwich-board?" exclaimed Miranda, eagerly. "Say you didn't do that!"

"I didn't," replied Charnock, with some surprise at her eagerness.

"They wouldn't have given a nipper like me a sandwich-board," and Miranda drew an unaccountable breath of relief. "Finally I became an office boy, and I was allowed by my employer to sleep in an empty house in one of the small streets at the back of Westminster Abbey.

There weren't any carpets either in that house, but I was independent, you see, and I saved my lodging. I wasn't unhappy during those three years. I understood that very well, when I heard the big clock strike twelve again on Lady Donnisthorpe's balcony. It was the first time I had heard it since I lived in the empty house, and heard it every night, and the sound of it was very pleasant and friendly."