Miranda of the Balcony Part 4

"Do you mean to tell me--" he blurted out.

"That I ask you to be my good Samaritan? Yes."

The stranger's face became suddenly vindictive. "Vaseline!" he cried.

"A pennyworth," said Charnock, again offering the penny.

The man of the agreeable countenance struck Charnock's hand violently aside, and the penny flew into a gutter. He stood up on the step and thrust his face, which was now inflamed with fury, into the cab.

"I tell you what," he cried, "you are a fair red-hotter, you are. Buy you vaseline! I hope your finger will petrify. I hope you'll just sit in that cab and rot away in your boots, until you have to ante up in kingdom come." He added expletives to his anathema.

"Really," said Charnock, "if I was a lady I don't think that I should like to listen to you any longer."

But before Charnock had finished the sentence, the good Samaritan, who was no Samaritan at all, had flung himself from the cab and was striding up the street.

"After all," thought Charnock, "I might just as well have driven across to the chemist, if I had only thought of it."

This he now did, got his finger free, cashed his draft, and took the train to London.

During this journey the discourteous stranger occupied some part of his thoughts. Between Charnock's eyes and the newspaper, against the red cliffs of Teignmouth, on the green of the home counties, his face obtruded, and for a particular reason. The marks of fear are unmistakable. The man whom he had called, had been scared by the call, nor had his fear quite left him when he had come face to face with Charnock. Set features which strove to conceal, and a brightness of the eye which betrayed emotion, these things Charnock remembered very clearly.

In London he dined alone at his hotel, and over against him the stranger's face bore him company. He went out afterwards into the street, and amidst the myriad ringing feet, was seized with an utter sense of loneliness, more poignant, more complete, than he had ever experienced in the waste places of the world. The lights of a theatre attracted him. He paid his money, took a seat in the stalls, and was at once very worried and perplexed. He turned to his neighbour, who was boisterously laughing.

"Would you mind telling me what this play is?" he asked.

"Oh, it's a musical comedy."

"I see. But what is it about?"

Charnock's neighbour scratched his head thoughtfully.

"I ought to remember," he said, "for I saw the piece early in the run."

Charnock went out, crossed a street, and came to another theatre, where he saw a good half of the tragedy of _Macbeth_. Thence he returned to his hotel and went to bed.

The hotel was one of many balconies, situated upon the Embankment.

From the single window or his bedroom Charnock looked across the river to where the name of a brewery perpetually wrote itself in red brilliant letters which perpetually vanished. It was his habit to sleep not merely with his window open, but with the blinds drawn up and the curtains looped back, and these arrangements he made as usual before he got into bed.

Now, the looking-gla.s.s stood upon a dressing-table in the window, with its back towards the window-panes; and since the night was moonless and dark, this mirror, it should be remembered, reflected nothing of the room or its furniture, but presented only to the view of Charnock, as he lay in bed, a surface of a black sheen.

Charnock recurred to his adventure of the morning, and thus the abusive stranger was in his thoughts when he fell asleep. He figured also in his dreams.

For, after he had fallen asleep, a curtain was raised upon a fantastic _revue_ of the past week. Ha.s.san Akbar strode quickly and noiselessly behind his quarry, tracking him by some inappreciable faculty, not through the muddy Sok, but across the polished floor of the ball-room in the musical comedy. Again Charnock shouted "Look out!" and the Moor with one bound leapt from the ball-room, which was now become a landing-stage, into a felucca. The crew of the felucca, it now appeared, was made up of Charnock, Lady Macbeth, and Ha.s.san Akbar, and by casting lots with counters made of vaseline, Charnock was appointed to hold the tiller. This duty compelled extraordinary care, for the felucca would keep changing its rig and the bulk of its hull swelled and dwindled. At last, to Charnock's intense relief, the boat settled into a Salcombe clipper with the rig of a P. and O., but with immeasurably greater speed, so that within a very few seconds they sailed over a limitless ocean and anch.o.r.ed at Tangier. At once the crew entirely vanished. Charnock was not distressed, because he saw a hansom cab waiting for him at the Customs, though how the hansom was to pa.s.s up those narrow cobbled streets he could not think. That however was the driver's business.

"I hope your horse is good," said Charnock, springing into the cab.

"She comes of the great Red-hotter stock," replied the cabman, and lifting the trap in the roof he showered packets of visiting cards, which fell about Charnock like flakes of snow.

Charnock had not previously noticed that the cabman was Major Wilbraham.

The cab shot up the hill through the tunnel, past the closed shop. A figure sprang from the ground and thrust a face through the window of the cab. The man was in Moorish dress, but the face was the face of the abusive stranger of Plymouth--and all at once Charnock started up on his elbow, and in the smallest fraction of a second was intensely and vividly awake. There was no sound at all within the room. But in the black sheen of the mirror he saw a woman's face.

He saw it quite clearly for perhaps five seconds, the face rising white from the white column of the throat, the dark and weighty coronal of the hair, the curved lips which alone had any colour, the eyes, deep and troubled, which seemed to hint a prayer for help which they disdained to make--for five seconds perhaps the illusion remained, for five seconds the face looked out at him from the black mirror, lit palely, as it seemed, by its own pallor, and so vanished.

Charnock remained propped upon his elbow. A faint twilight from the stars crept timidly through the open window as though deprecating its intrusion. Charnock looked into the dark corners of the room, but nowhere did the darkness move. Nor could he hear any sound. Not even a board of the floor cracked, and outside the door there was no noise of a footstep on the stairs. Then from a great distance the jingle of a cab came through the open window to his ears with a light companionable lilt. Gradually the sound ceased, and again the silence breathed about him. Charnock struck a match and looked at his watch.

It was a few minutes after three.

Charnock lay back in his bed wondering. For he had seen that face once, he had once exchanged glances with those eyes, once only, six years ago, and thereafter had entirely forgotten the incident--until this moment. He had stopped for a night at Monte Carlo and had seen--the girl--yes, the _girl_, though it was a woman's face which had gleamed in the depths of his mirror--standing under the green shaded lamps in the big gambling-room. His attention, he now remembered, had been seized by the contrast between her amused indifference and the feverish haste of the gamblers about the table; between her fresh, clear looks and their heated complexions,--even between her frock of lilac silk and their more elaborate toilettes.

The girl was entirely happy then, the red lips smiled, the violet eyes laughed. Why should her face appear to him now, after these years, and paled by this distress?

A queer fancy slipped into his mind--a fancy at the extravagance of which he knew very well he should laugh in the sane light of the morning, though he indulged it now--that somehow, somewhere, this woman needed help, and that it was thus vouchsafed to her, a stranger, to make her appeal to him in this way, which spared her the humiliation of making any appeal at all. Charnock fell asleep convinced that somehow, somewhere, he was destined to meet and know her. As he had foreseen, he laughed at his fancies in the morning, but nevertheless, he did meet her. It had, in fact, already been arranged that he should. For the face which he saw in the mirror was the face of Miranda Warriner.

CHAPTER IV

TREATS OF THE FIRST MEETING BETWEEN CHARNOCK AND MIRANDA

Lady Donnisthorpe, with a sigh of relief, retired from her position at the head of the stairs, and catching Charnock in the interval between two dances:--

"You kept some dances free," she said, "didn't you? I want to introduce you to a cousin of mine, Miranda Warriner, because she lives at Ronda."

"At Ronda. Indeed?"

"Yes." Her ladyship added with a magnificent air of indifference, "She is a widow," and she led Charnock across the ball-room.

Miranda saw them approaching, noticed an indefinable air of expectation in Lady Donnisthorpe's manner, and smiled. A few excessively casual remarks concerning one Mr. Charnock, which Lady Donnisthorpe had dropped during the last few days, had not escaped the notice of Miranda, who was aware of her cousin's particular weakness.

This was undoubtedly Mr. Charnock. She raised her eyes towards him, and had her ladyship been less fluttered, she might have remarked that Miranda's eyes lit up with a momentary sparkle of recognition.

"Mrs. Warriner--Mr. Charnock."

Lady Donnisthorpe effected the momentous introduction and felt immediately damped. She had not indeed expected that her two newest victims would at once and publicly embrace. But at all events she had decked out her ball-room as the sacrificial altar, and had taken care that a fitting company and cheerful music should do credit to the immolation. This tame indifference was less than she deserved.

Miranda, to whom Lady Donnisthorpe was looking, made the perfunctory dip of the head and smiled the perfunctory smile, and Charnock--why in the world did he not move or speak? Lady Donnisthorpe turned her eyes from Miranda to this awkward cavalier, and was restored to a radiant good-humour. "Dazzled," she said to herself, "absolutely dazzled!" For Charnock stood rooted to the ground and tongue-tied with amazement.

It was fortunate for Lady Donnisthorpe that at this point she thought it wise to withdraw. Otherwise she would surely have remarked an unmistakable look of disappointment which grew within Charnock's eyes and spread out over his face. Then the disappointment vanished, and as he compared programmes with Miranda, he recovered his speech.

Four dances must intervene before he could claim her, and Charnock was glad of the interval to get the better of his bewilderment. Here was the woman whom his mirror had shown to him! After all, his nocturnal fancy was fulfilled, or rather part of it, only part or it. He had met her, he was to dance with her. Some miracle had brought them together.

From the corner by the doorway he watched Miranda, he remarked an unaffected friendliness in her manner towards her partners. Candour was written upon her broad white forehead and looked out from her clear eyes. He had no doubt it was fragrant too in her hair. There were heavy ma.s.ses of that hair, as he knew very well from his mirror, but now the ma.s.ses were piled and woven about her head with a cunning art, which to be sure they deserved. There was a ripple in her hair, too, which caught the light--a most taking ripple. Here was a woman divested of a girl's wiles and vanities. Charnock, without a scruple, aspersed all girls up to the age of say twenty-four, that he might give her greater praise.

He fell to wondering, not how it was that her face had appeared to him, nor by what miracle he was now enabled to have knowledge of her, but rather by what miracle of forgetfulness he had allowed her face, after he had seen it that one time six years ago, ever to slip from his thoughts, or her eyes after that one time he had exchanged a glance with them.

The whirl of the dance carried her by his corner. She swung past him with the lightest imaginable step, and he was suddenly struck through and through with a chilling apprehension that by some unconscionable maladroitness he would surely tread upon her toes.

At once he proceeded to count over the dances in which he had borne himself with credit. He had danced with Spanish women, he a.s.sured himself, and they had not objected. He was thus consoling himself when the time came for him to lead her out. And the touch of her hand in his, he remembers, turned him into a babbling idiot.

He recollects that they danced with great celerity; that they pa.s.sed Lady Donnisthorpe, who smiled at him with great encouragement, and that he was dolefully humorous concerning Major Wilbraham and his exchanges of cards, though why Major Wilbraham should have thrust his bald head into the conversation, he was ever at a loss to discover.