The Four Corners of the World Part 11

"My dear!" said Mr. Endicott.

Elsie turned to the window and shook hands with two young men who had come to see her off. One of them, whom Mr. Endicott vaguely remembered to have seen at meals in his house, climbed on the footboard.

"You will take care of Miss Endicott, sir," he said firmly. "She has been overdoin' it a bit, dancin', you know, and that sort of thing, while you were at the House of Commons."

Mr. Endicott chuckled.

"I'll tell you something about my daughter," he replied. "She may look like china, but she is pretty solid earthenware really. And if there are any others as anxious about her as you are you might spread the good news."

The train moved off. "So you are in the House of Commons," said the Australian, and he began to talk. "Our great trouble--yours and mine--is----"

"I know it," Mr. Endicott interrupted with a smile of confidence.

"Of course you do," replied the Australian. "It's the overcrowding of the East under the protective rule of the British."

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Endicott blankly.

"We could help a good deal," the Australian continued, "if only our Government had got a ha'porth of common sense. North of the Tropic of Capricorn, there's land and to spare which coloured labour could cultivate and white labour can't."

This was strange talk to Mr. Endicott. He was aware, but not conscious of great dominions and possessions outside the British Islands. He had indeed avoided the whole subject. He was shy of the phrase which described them, as a horse is shy of a newspaper blown about the street. The British Empire! The very words had a post-prandial sound.

Instead of suggesting to him vast territories with myriads of men and women groping amongst enormous problems, they evoked a picture of a flamboyant gentleman in evening dress standing at the head of a table, his face congested with too much dinner, a gla.s.s of wine in his one hand, a fat cigar in the other, and talking vauntingly. This particular sentence of the Australian stuck inconveniently in his mind and smouldered there.

For instance. On the afternoon of their arrival Elsie was arranging his developing dishes and his chemicals on a small rough table in a corner of their one living-room. She put an old basket-chair by the table and set around it a screen which she had discovered in one of the bedrooms upstairs.

"There!" she said. "You can make all your messes here, father, and we can keep the room looking habitable, and I shan't get all my frocks stained."

"Very well, Elsie," said her father absently, and he spoke his own thoughts. "That was a curious fear of the man in the train, Elsie. I think there's no truth in it. No, the danger's here in this country; here's what's to be done to avert it," and he slapped his hand down upon his pile of statistics.

"No doubt, father," said Elsie, and she went on with her work.

The very next evening he returned again to the subject. It was after dinner and about half-past nine o'clock. The blinds had not been lowered and Endicott looked out through the open windows on to a great flank of Scawfell which lay drenched in white moonlight a couple of fields away.

"North of the Tropic of Capricorn," he said, "I wish we had an atlas, Elsie."

"I'll write to London and buy one," said the girl. "We haven't got more than a 'Handy Gazetteer' even at home. It'll be amusing to plan out some long journeys which we can take together when you have pa.s.sed your Bill into law."

Endicott smiled grimly at his daughter.

"I reckon we won't take many journeys together, Elsie. Oh, you needn't look surprised and hurt! I am not taken in by you a bit, my dear. That young spark on the footboard who told me I didn't take enough care of you"--and Elsie gurgled with laughter at the recollection--"threw a dreadful light upon your character and gave me a clue besides to the riddle of your vast correspondence. I hope you are telling them all that my persistent unkindness is not driving you into a decline."

Elsie paused in the act of addressing an envelope--there was a growing pile of letters in front of her--to rea.s.sure her father.

"I tell them all," she replied, "that you neither beat me nor starve me, and that if you weren't so very messy with your chemicals in the corner over there, I should have very little reason to change my home."

"Thank you, my dear," said Mr. Endicott. He was very proud of his daughter and especially of her health. With her dark rebellious hair, the delicate colour in her cheeks, and her starry eyes, she had a quite delusive look of fragility. But she could dance any youth of her acquaintance to a standstill without ruffling her curls, as he very well knew. He gazed at her lowered head with a smile.

"However, all this doesn't help me with the Minimum Wage," he continued, and he turned again to the papers on his desk by the window, while Elsie at the table in the middle of the big low-roofed room, continued to write her letters.

They were still engaged in these pursuits when Mrs. Tyson, their landlady, came into the room to lower the blinds.

"No, please leave them up," said Endicott, in an irritable voice.

"I'll draw them down myself before we go to bed."

Mrs. Tyson accordingly left the blinds alone.

"And you'll be careful of the Crown Derby," she said imperturbably, nodding towards a china tea-set ranged in an open cabinet near to the door. "Gentlemen from London have asked me to sell it over and over.

For it's of great value. But I won't, as I promised my mother. She, poor woman----"

"Yes, yes," interposed Mr. Endicott, "we'll be very careful. You may remember you told us all about it yesterday."

Mrs. Tyson turned down a little lower the one oil lamp which, with the candles upon Endicott's desk, lighted the room, and went back to the inner door.

"Will you be wanting anything more for a little while?" she asked.

"For my girl's away, and I must go down the valley. I am sending some sheep away to market to-morrow morning."

"No, we want nothing at all," said Elsie, without paying much attention to what the woman was saying. Mrs. Tyson was obviously inclined to fuss, and would have to be suppressed. But she went out now without another word. There were two doors to the room at opposite ends, the inner one leading to a small hall, the kitchen and the staircase, the other, and outer door, opening directly close by the window on to a tiny garden with a flagged pathway. At the end of the path there was a gate, and a low garden wall. Beyond the gate a narrow lane and a brook separated the house from the fields and the great flank of fell.

The night was hot, and Endicott, unable to concentrate his attention upon his chosen theme, had the despairing sensation that he had lost grip of it altogether: his eyes wandered from his papers so continually to the hillside asleep in the bright moonlight. Here a great boulder threw a long motionless shadow down the slope, like a house; there a sharp rock-ridge cropping out of the hill, raised against the sky a line of black pinnacles like a file of soldiers.

"I can't work to-night, Elsie, and that's the truth," cried Endicott pa.s.sionately, "though this is just the night when one ought to be most alive to the millions of men cooped in hot cities and living wretchedly. I'll go out of doors. Will you come?"

Elsie hesitated. Mr. Endicott was to carry that poignant recollection to his death. One word of persuasion and she would have come with him.

But he did not speak it, and Elsie bent her head again to her work.

"No, thanks, father," she said. "I'll finish these letters. They must go off to-morrow morning."

Endicott blew out his candles, lit his pipe, and took up his cap. He was still smiling over her important air as of someone with great and urgent business. He went out into the garden. Elsie heard the latch of the gate click. He walked across the little bridge over the brook and at once his mood changed. He wandered across the fields and up the hillside, sorely discontented with himself. He had lost interest in the Minimum Wage. So much he admitted. The surroundings which were to inspire him had, on the contrary, merely provoked a disinclination to do any work whatever. The reaction after the strain of the Session was making itself felt. The question in his mind was "Why bother?" High up the hill he sat down upon a boulder to have it out with himself.

The sound of the stream dropping from pool to pool of rock on its way down the valley rose in a continuous thunder to his ears. He looked down at the little farm-house beneath him, and the golden light of the lamp within the windows of the sitting-room.

As he looked the light moved. Then it diminished; then it vanished altogether. Endicott chuckled and lit a second pipe, holding the lighted match in the hollow of his hands and bending his head close over it, because of a whisper of air. Elsie had finished her letters to the youths who besieged her and was off to bed. Only the moonlight blazed upon the windows now and turned them into mirrors of burnished silver.

Endicott smoked a third pipe whilst he wrestled with himself upon the hillside. To-morrow he would get up very early, bathe in the big deep pool, transparent to the lowest of its thirty feet of water, and then spend a long morning with the wage-lists of the chain-making industry.

That was settled. Nothing should change his plan. Meanwhile it was very pleasant up here under the cool sky of moonlight and faint stars.

He dragged himself up reluctantly from his seat, and went down towards the farm. There was a little stone bridge to cross over one of the many mountain streams which went to the making of the small river on the other side of the house. Then came the lane and the garden-gate.

He closed the door behind him when he had gone in. Although there was no lamp burning, the room was not dark. A twilight, vaporous and silvery, crept into it, darkening towards the inner part and filling the corners with mystery; while the floor by the window was chequered with great panels of light precise and bright as day.

On the hillside Endicott had seen the light go out in the room, and he crossed over to the big table for the lamp. But it was no longer there. Elsie had taken it, no doubt, into the hall with her letters for the morning post and had not brought it back. He moved to his own table where the candles stood; and with a shock he perceived that he was not alone in that unlighted room. A movement amongst the shadows by the inner door caught and held his eyes.

He swung round and faced the spot. He saw against the wall near the screen which hid his photographic paraphernalia, a man standing, straight, upright and very still. The figure was vague and blurred, but Endicott could see that his legs were clothed in white, and that he wore some bulky and outlandish gear upon his head. Endicott quickly struck a match. At the scratch and spurt of flame, the man in the shadow ran forward towards the door with extraordinary swiftness. But his shoulder caught the case in which Mrs. Tyson's Crown Derby china was standing, and brought it with a crash of broken crockery to the floor. Before the intruder could recover, Endicott set his back against the door and held the burning match above his head. He was amazed by what he saw.

The intruder was an Asiatic with the conventional hawk-nose of the Jew in the shape of his face; a brown man wearing a coloured turban upon his head, an old tweed jacket on his shoulders, and a pair of dirty white linen trousers on his legs, narrowing until they fitted closely round his ankles. He wore neither shoes nor stockings. And he stood very still watching Endicott with alert, bright eyes. Endicott, without moving from the door, reached out and lit the candles upon the table.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded curiously. He had no personal fear, and he was not much troubled by the man's hiding in the room.

Elsie, whom the fellow might have frightened, had long since gone to bed, and there was nothing of value, except the Crown Derby, which he could have stolen. On the other hand Endicott was immensely puzzled by the presence of an Asiastic at all in this inland and lonely valley far from railways and towns, at half-past ten of the night.

"I pa.s.s the house," the man answered in English which was astonishingly good. "I think you give me one piece opium to go on with."