The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 6

"You funny child," Mrs. Madden said. "When you're older, how you'll laugh at what you think now. Of course, you don't know anything about love yet, mercifully for you. I wish I were richer; I should so like to adopt you."

"Oh, but I wouldn't be adopted," Sylvia quickly interposed. "I can't tell you how glad I am that I belong to n.o.body. And please don't think I'm so innocent, because I'm not. I've seen a great deal of love, you must remember, and I've thought a lot about it, and made up my mind that I'll never be a slave to that sort of thing. Arthur may be stupidly in love with me, but I'm very strict with him and it doesn't do him any harm."

"Come and sing your favorite song," Mrs. Madden laughed. "I'll play your accompaniment."

All the discussions between them ended in music; Sylvia would sing that she was off with the raggle-taggle gipsies--or, stamping with her foot upon the floor of the old house until it shook and crossing her arms with such resolution that Arthur's eyes would grow larger than ever, as if he half expected to see her act upon the words and fling herself out into the December night, regardless of all but a mad demonstration of liberty.

Sylvia would sometimes sing about the gipsies to herself while she was undressing, which generally called forth a protest from Mrs. Gustard, who likened the effect to that of a young volcano let loose.

Another person that was pained by Sylvia's exuberance was Maria, her black cat, so called on account of his color before he was definitely established as a gentleman. He had no ear for music and he disapproved of dancing; nor did he have the least sympathy with the aspirations of the lawless song she sang. Mrs. Gustard considered that he was more artful than what any one would think, but she repudiated as "heathenish" Sylvia's contention that she outwardly resembled Maria.

"Still I do think I'm like a cat," Sylvia argued. "Perhaps not very like a black cat, more like a tabby. One day you'll come up to my room and find me purring on the bed."

Mrs. Gustard exclaimed against such an unnatural event.

Sylvia received one or two letters from Jimmy Monkley during the winter, in which he wrote with considerable optimism of the success of his venture and thought he might be back in Hampstead by February. He came back unexpectedly, however, in the middle of January, and Sylvia was only rather glad to see him; she had grown fond of her life alone and dreaded Jimmy's habit of arranging matters over her head. He was not so amiable as formerly, because the scheme had only been partially successful and he had failed to make enough money to bring the flash gambling-h.e.l.l perceptibly nearer. Sylvia had almost forgotten that project; it seemed to her now a dull project, neither worthy of herself nor of him. She did not attempt, on Jimmy's return, to change her own way of spending the time, and she persisted in taking the long walks with Arthur as usual.

"What the devil you see to admire in that long-legged, saucer-eyed, curly-headed mother's pet I don't know," Jimmy grumbled.

"I don't admire him," Sylvia said. "I don't admire anybody except Joan of Arc. But I like him."

Jimmy scowled; and later on that day Mr. Gustard warned Sylvia that her uncle (as such was Jimmy known in the lodgings) had carried on alarmingly about her friendship with young Artie.

"It's nothing to do with him," Sylvia affirmed, with out-thrust chin.

"Nothing whatever," Mr. Gustard agreed. "But if I was you I wouldn't throw young Artie in his face. I've never had a niece myself, but from what I can make out an uncle feels something like a father; and a father gets very worried about his rights."

"But you've never had any children, and so you can't know any more about the feelings of a father," Sylvia objected.

"Ah, but I've got my own father to look back upon," Mr. Gustard said. "He mostly took a spade to me, I remember, though he wasn't against jabbing me in the ribs with a trowel if there wasn't a spade handy. I reckon it was him as first put the notion of liberty for all into my head. I never set much store by uncles, though. The only uncle I ever had died of croup when he was two years old."

"My father didn't like his aunts," Sylvia added to the condemnation. "He was brought up by two aunts."

"Aunts in general is sour bodies, 'specially when they're in charge and get all the fuss of having children with none of the fun."

"Mr. Monkley isn't really my uncle," Sylvia abruptly proclaimed.

"Go on! you don't mean it?" said Mr. Gustard. "I suppose he's your guardian?"

"He's nothing at all," Sylvia answered.

"He must be something."

"He's absolutely nothing," she insisted. "He used to live with my father, and when my father died he just went on living with me. If I don't want to live with him I needn't."

"But you must live with somebody," said Mr. Gustard. "There's a law about having visible means of support. You couldn't have a lot of kids living on their own."

"Why not?" Sylvia asked, in contemptuous amazement.

"Why not?" Mr. Gustard repeated. "Why because every one would get pestered to death. It's the same with stray dogs. Stray dogs have got to have a home. If they haven't a home of their own, they're taken to the Dogs' Home at Battersea and cremated, which is a painless and mercenary death."

"I don't call that much of a home," Sylvia scoffed. "A place where you're killed."

"That's because we're speaking of dogs. Of course, if the police started in cremating children, there'd be a regular outcry. So the law insists on children having homes."

Sylvia tried hard to convince Mr. Gustard that she was different from other children, and in any case no longer a child; but though the discussion lasted a long time he would not admit the logic of Sylvia's arguments; in the end she decided he did not know what he was talking about.

Monkley so much disliked Sylvia's intimacy with Arthur that he began to talk of moving from Hampstead, whereupon she warned him that if he tried to go away without paying the rent she would make a point of letting Mr. Gustard know where they had gone.

"It strikes me," Monkley said, and when he spoke, Sylvia was reminded of the tone he used when she had protested against his treatment of Maudie Tilt--"it strikes me that since I've been away you've taken things a bit too much into your own hands. That's a trick you'd better drop with me, or we shall quarrel."

Sylvia braced herself to withstand him as she had withstood him before; but she could not help feeling a little apprehensive, so cold were his green eyes, so thin his mouth.

"I don't care if we quarrel or not," she declared. "Because if we quarreled it would mean that I couldn't bear you near me any longer and that I was glad to quarrel. If you make me hate you, Jimmy, you may be sorry, but I shall never be sorry. If you make me hate you, Jimmy, you can't think how dreadfully much I shall hate you."

"Don't try to come the little actress over me," Monkley said. "I've known too many women in my life to be bounced by a kid like you. But that's enough. I can't think why I pay so much attention to you."

"No," Sylvia said. "All the women you've known don't seem to have been able to teach you how to manage a little girl like me. What a pity!"

She laughed and left him alone.

There was a halcyon week that February, and Sylvia spent every day and all day on the Heath with Arthur. People used to turn and stare after them as they walked arm-in-arm over the vivid green gra.s.s.

"I think it's you they stare at," Sylvia said. "You look interesting with your high color and dark curly hair. You look rather foreign. Perhaps people think you're a poet. I read the other day about a poet called Keats who lived in Hampstead and loved a girl called f.a.n.n.y Brawne. I wish I knew what she looked like. It's not a very pretty name. Now I've got rather a pretty name, I think; though I'm not pretty myself."

"You're not exactly pretty," Arthur agreed. "But I think if I saw you I should turn round to look at you. You're like a person in a picture. You seem to stand out and to be the most important figure. In paintings that's because the chief figure is usually so much larger than the others. Well, that's the impression you give me."

Speculation upon Sylvia's personality ceased when they got home; Monkley threatened Arthur in a very abusive way, even going as far as to pick up a stone and fling it through one of the few panes of gla.s.s left in the tumble-down greenhouse in order to ill.u.s.trate the violent methods he proposed to adopt.

The next day, when Sylvia went to fetch Arthur for their usual walk, he made some excuse and was obviously frightened to accompany her.

"What can he do to you?" Sylvia demanded, in scornful displeasure. "The worst he can do is to kill you, and then you'd have died because you wouldn't surrender. Haven't you read about martyrs?"

"Of course I've read about martyrs," said Arthur, rather querulously. "But reading about martyrs is very different from being a martyr yourself. You seem to think everybody can be anything you happen to read about. You wouldn't care to be a martyr, Sylvia."

"That's just where you're wrong," she loftily declared. "I'd much sooner be a martyr than a coward."

Arthur winced at her plain speaking. "You don't care what you say," was his reproach.

"No, and I don't care what I do," Sylvia agreed. "Are you coming out with me? Because if you're not, you shall never be my friend again."

Arthur pulled himself together and braved Monkley's threats. On a quiet green summit he demanded her impatient kisses for a recompense; she, conscious of his weakness and against her will made fonder of him by this very weakness, kissed him less impatiently than was her wont, so that Arthur, under the inspiration of that rare caress, vowed he cared for n.o.body and for nothing, if she would but always treat him thus kindly.

Sylvia, who was determined to make Jimmy pay for his bad behavior, invited herself to tea with Mrs. Madden; afterward, though it was cloudy and ominous, Arthur and she walked out on the Heath once more, until it rained so hard that they were driven home. It was about seven o'clock when Sylvia reached her room, her hair all tangled with moisture, her eyes and cheeks on fire with the exhilaration of that scurry through the rain. She had not stood a moment to regard herself in the gla.s.s when Monkley, following close upon her heels, shut the door behind him and turned the key in the lock. Sylvia looked round in astonishment; by a trick of candle-light his eyes gleamed for an instant, so that she felt a tremor of fear.

"You've come back at last, have you?" he began in a slow voice, so deliberate and gentle in its utterance that Sylvia might not have grasped the extent of his agitation, had not one of his legs, affected by a nervous twitch, drummed upon the floor a sinister accompaniment. "You shameless little b----h, I thought I forbade you to go out with him again. You've been careering over the Heath. You've been encouraging him to make love to you. Look at your hair--it's in a regular tangle! and your cheeks--they're like fire. Well, if you can let that nancified milksop mess you about, you can put up with me. I've wanted to long enough, G.o.d knows; and this is the reward I get for leaving you alone. You give yourself to the first b----y boy that comes along."

Before Sylvia had time to reply, Monkley had leaped across the room and crushed her to him.

"Kiss me, d.a.m.n you, kiss me! Put your arms round me."

Sylvia would not scream, because she could not have endured that anybody should behold her in such an ignominious plight. Therefore she only kicked and fought, and whispered all the while, with savage intensity! "You frog! you frog! You look like a frog! Leave me alone!"

Monkley held her more closely and forced her mouth against his own, but Sylvia bit through his under lip till her teeth met. The pain caused him to start back and tread on Maria, who, searching in a panic for better cover than the bed afforded, had run between his legs. The cat, uttering one of those unimaginable wails with which only cats have power so horribly to surprise, retired to a corner, where he hissed and growled. In another corner Sylvia spat forth the unclean blood and wiped from her lips the soilure of the kisses.

Monkley had had enough for the present. The pain and sudden noise had shaken his nerves. When the blood ran down his chin, bedabbling his tie, he unlocked the door and retired, crying out almost in a whimper for something to stop a bad razor cut. Mrs. Gustard went to the wood-shed for cobwebs; but Monkley soon shouted down that he had found some cotton wool, and Sylvia heard a cork being drawn. She made up her mind to kill him that night, but she was perplexed by the absence of a suitable weapon, and gradually it was borne in upon her mind that if she killed Monkley she would have to pay the penalty, which did not seem to her a satisfactory kind of revenge. She gave up the notion of killing him and decided to run away with Arthur instead.

For a long time Sylvia sat in her bedroom, thinking over her plan; then she went next door and asked Arthur to come out and talk to her about something important. They stood whispering in the wet garden, while she bewitched him into offering to share her future. He was dazed by the rapidity with which she disposed of every objection he brought forward. She knew how to get enough money for them to start with. She knew how to escape from the house, and because the creeper beneath Arthur's window was not strong enough to bear his weight, he must tie his sheets together. He must not bring much luggage; she would only bring a small valise, and Maria could travel in her work-basket.

"Maria?" echoed Arthur, in dismay.

"Of course! it was Maria who saved me," said Sylvia. "I shall wait till Monkley is asleep. I expect he'll be asleep early, because he's drinking brandy hard now; then I shall whistle the last line of the raggle-taggle gipsies and slither down from my window by the ivy."

She stuffed Arthur's reeling brain with further details, and, catching him to her heart, she kissed him with as much enthusiasm as might have been mistaken for pa.s.sion. In the end, between coaxing and frightening him, threatening and inspiring him, Sylvia made Arthur agree to everything, and danced back indoors.

"Anybody would think you were glad because your guardian angel's gone and sliced a rasher off of his mouth," Mr. Gustard observed.

By ten o'clock all was quiet in the house. Sylvia chose with the greatest care her equipment for the adventure. She had recently bought a tartan frock, which, not having yet been worn, she felt would excellently become the occasion; this she put on, and plaited her tangled hair in a long pigtail. The result was unsatisfactory, for it made her look too prim for a heroine; she therefore undid the pigtail and tied her hair loosely back with a nut-brown bow. It was still impossibly early for an escape, so Sylvia sat down on the edge of her bed and composed herself to read the escape of Fabrizio from the Sforza tower in Parma. The book in which she read this was not one that she had been able to read through without a great deal of skipping; but this escape which she had only come across a day or two before seemed a divine omen to approve her decision. Sylvia regretted the absence of the armed men at the foot of the tower, but said to herself that, after all, she was escaping with her lover, whereas Fabrizio had been compelled to leave Clelia Conti behind. The night wore away; at half past eleven Sylvia dropped her valise from the window and whistled that she was off with the raggle-taggle gipsies--oh. Then she waited until a ghostly snake was uncoiled from Arthur's window.

"My dearest boy, you're an angel," she trilled, in an ecstasy, when she saw him slide safely down into the garden.

"Catch Maria," she whispered. "I'm coming myself in a moment."

Arthur caught her work-basket, and a faint protesting mew floated away on the darkness. Sylvia wrapped herself up, and then very cautiously, candle in hand, walked across to the door of Monkley's room and listened. He was snoring loudly. She pushed open the door and beheld him fast asleep, a red-and-white beard of cotton wool upon his chin. Then risking all in an impulse to be quick, though she was almost stifled by fear, she hurried across the room to his trunk. He kept all his money in a tin box. How she hoped there was enough to make him rue her flight. Monkley never stirred; the box was safe in her m.u.f.f. She stole back to her room, blew out the candle, flung the m.u.f.f down to Arthur, held her breath when the coins rattled, put one leg over the sill, and scrambled down by the ivy.

"I wish it had been higher," she whispered, when Arthur clasped her with affectionate solicitude where she stood in the sodden vegetation.

"I'm jolly glad it wasn't," he said. "Now what are we going to do?"

"Why, find a 'bus, of course!" Sylvia said. "And get as far from Hampstead as possible."

"But it's after twelve o'clock," Arthur objected. "There won't be any 'buses now. I don't know what we're going to do. We can't look for rooms at this time of night."

"We must just walk as far as we can away from Hampstead," said Sylvia, cheerfully.

"And carry our luggage? Supposing a policeman asks us where we're going?"

"Oh, bother policemen! Come along. You don't seem to be enjoying yourself nearly as much as I am. I care for n.o.body. I'm off with the raggle-taggle gipsies--oh," she lightly sang.

Maria mewed at the sound of his mistress's voice.

"You're as bad as Maria," she went on, reproachfully. "Look how nice the lamp-posts look. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, I can see. Let's bet how many lamp-posts we pa.s.s before we're safe in our own house."

They set out for London by the road along the Heath. At first trees overhung the path, and they pa.s.sed pool after pool of checkered lamplight that quivered in the wet road. Followed a s.p.a.ce of open country where they heard the last whispers of a slight and desultory wind. Soon they were inclosed by mute and unillumined houses on either side, until they found themselves on the top of Haverstock Hill, faced by the tawny glow of the London sky, and stretching before them a double row of lamp-posts innumerable and pale that converged to a dim point in the heart of the city below.

"I think I'm rather frightened," Sylvia said. "Or perhaps I'm a little tired."

"Shall we go back?" Arthur suggested.

"No, no. We'll just rest a moment or two, and I'll be all right." They sat down on their bags, and she stroked Maria pensively.

Sylvia was relieved when the silence was interrupted by a policeman. She felt the need of opposition to drive away the doubts that took advantage of that first fatigue to shake her purpose.

"Now then, what are you doing?" he demanded, gruffly.

"We're sitting down," Sylvia informed him.

"Loitering isn't allowed here," the policeman said.

"Where is it allowed, please?" she asked, sweetly.

"Loitering isn't allowed nowhere," the policeman declared.

"Well, why did you say it wasn't allowed here?" she continued. "I thought you were going to tell us of a place where it was allowed."

Arthur jogged Sylvia's elbow and whispered to her not to annoy the policeman.

"Come along, now, move on," the policeman commanded. In order to emphasize his authority he flashed his bull's-eye in Sylvia's face. "Where do you live?" he asked, after the scrutiny.

"Lillie Road, Fulham. We missed the last train from Hampstead, and we're walking home. I never heard of any rule against sitting on one's own luggage in the middle of the night. I think you'd better take us to the police station. We must rest somewhere."

The policeman looked puzzled.

"What did you want to miss your train for?" he asked.

"We didn't want to miss it," Sylvia gently explained. "We were very angry when we missed it. Come on, Arthur, I don't feel tired any longer."

She got up and started off down Haverstock Hill, followed by Arthur.

"I'm sorry you can't recommend any proper loitering-places on the road," said Sylvia, turning round, "because we shall probably have to loiter about thirty-six times before we get to Lillie Road. Good night. If we meet any burglars we'll give them your love and say there's a nice policeman living on Haverstock Hill who'd like a chat."

"Suppose he had run us in?" Arthur said, when they had left the policeman behind them.

"I wanted him to at first," Sylvia replied. "But afterward I thought it might be awkward on account of Monkley's cash-box. I wish we could open it now and see how much there is inside, but perhaps it would look funny at this time of night."

They had nearly reached the bottom of Haverstock Hill, and there were signs of life in the squalid streets they were approaching.

"I don't think we ought to hang about here," Arthur said. "These are slums. We ought to be careful; I think we ought to have waited till the morning."

"You wouldn't have come, if we'd waited," Sylvia maintained. "You'd have been too worried about leaving your mother."

"I'm still worried about that," said Arthur, gloomily.

"Why? You can send a post-card to say that you're all right. Knowing where you are won't make up for your being away. In any case, you'd have had to go away soon. You couldn't have spent your whole life in that house at Hampstead."

"Well, I think this running away will bring us bad luck."

Sylvia made a dramatic pause and dropped her valise on the pavement.