The Lowest Rung Part 9

The woman had drawn near, and looked over his shoulder.

"Do you know him?" said the man.

For a moment she did not answer, and the pistol which had done its work so well dropped noisily out of her palsied hand.

"He is a stranger to me," she said, looking fixedly at her husband's fading face.

SAINT LUKE'S SUMMER

_IN TWO PARTS_

PART I

When the world's asleep, I awake and weep, Deeply sighing, say, "Come, O break of day, Lead my feet in my beloved's way."

MARGARET L. WOODS.

When first I knew Aunt Emmy I suppose she was about twenty-eight. I was ten, and I thought her old, but still an agreeable companion, infinitely pleasanter than her father and her brother, with whom she lived. She was not my real aunt, but her father was my great-uncle, and I always called her Aunt Emmy. Great-uncle Thomas and Uncle Tom were persons to be avoided, stout, heavy, bullet-headed, bull-necked, throat-clearing men, loud nose-blowers, loud soup-eaters, who reeked of tobacco when it was my horrid duty to kiss them, and who addressed me in jocular terms when they remembered my existence, of which I was always loth to remind them.

With these two horrors, whom she loved, Aunt Emmy lived. She was wrapped up in them. I have actually seen her kiss Uncle Thomas when it was not necessary, when he was asleep; and she admired Uncle Tom very much too, though she seldom kissed him, I believe by his wish. He used to say something about sister's kisses being like cold veal. I don't suppose he invented that himself. He was always picking up things like that out of a rose-coloured paper, and firing them off as his own. Uncle Tom was tall and portly, and a wag out of office hours, with a moustache that, in spite of all his efforts, would not turn up, but insisted on making a melancholy inner semicircle just a size smaller than the rubicund circle of his face. How I hated kindly, vulgar Uncle Tom! I used to pray that he might die before the holidays. But he never did. I see now that Uncle Tom was far, far worse than Uncle Thomas, who had had a stroke, and was a kind of furious invalid who could not speak clearly, or eat anything except things that were bad for him. But when I was a child, and first began to spend my holidays in Pembridge Square, I regarded them both with the same repulsion.

Aunt Emmy was different. I know now that she must have been a remarkably pretty woman, but I did not notice that at the time. But a faint, indefinable fragrance seemed to envelop her. I loved to stroke her soft white hand, and to turn the emerald ring on her third finger, and to lean against her soft shoulder. Aunt Emmy's cheek was very soft too, and so was her full, silky hair, which she wore parted all her life, though it was never the fashion to do so that I can remember, though I am told it is now the _dernier cri_ among the _debutantes_. Aunt Emmy had a beautifully shaped head, and the whitest brow and neck that I have ever seen. And she had a low voice, and was very dignified. I do not think that she was a very wise woman, or that she had ever wrestled with the deeper problems of life, or that the mystery of pain had ever caused her faith to totter. But she was very good to live with. She devoted herself.

She never had her own way in anything that I can remember. The house never represented her. The furniture was leathern and velvet and stout-looking, the kind of furniture which seems to aim at being more or less exact moulds of the forms of middle-aged men. The armchairs were like commodious hip-baths in plush. Aunt Emmy and I were lost in them. I remember once walking as a child through the wilderness of armchairs at Maple's and thinking they all looked like Uncle Tom. A good deal of Utrecht velvet had gone to the upholstering of that house in Pembridge Square. It was comfortable, airless, flowerless, with gravy-coloured walls. As I grew older I wondered why it was all so ugly and dreary. But I found there were less means than I had supposed, and though the cooking remained excellent, flowers and new chintzes were dispensed with as unnecessary. Aunt Emmy opened a window surrept.i.tiously now and then, but Uncle Thomas and Uncle Tom hated draughts, and they did not get off to sleep so quickly after dinner if the drawing-room had been aired during the meal. The dining-room windows were never opened at all, except when Uncle Thomas was too unwell to come in and Uncle Tom was away.

Many men had wished to marry Aunt Emmy; not only sedentary professional men in long frock-coats, full to the brim of the best food, like Uncle Tom; but nice, lean, hungry-looking, open-air men who were majors, or country squires, or something interesting of that kind, whose clothes sat well on them, and who drew up in the Row on little skittish, curveting polo-ponies when Aunt Emmy and I walked there. I once asked her, after a certain good-looking Major Stoddart had ridden on, why she did not marry, but she only said reprovingly, with great dignity:

"You don't understand such matters, my dear, or you would know that I could not possibly leave your Uncle Thomas."

I was silenced. I felt with bitterness that this could not be her whole reason for celibacy, but that, owing to the purely superficial fact that my hair was still in a pigtail, she supposed I was unable to comprehend "lots of things" that I felt I understood perfectly, and on which my mind was already working with an energy which would have surprised her had she guessed it.

By this time I worshipped Aunt Emmy, who represented in my somewhat colourless orphaned existence the beautiful and romantic side of life.

Aunt Emmy looked romantic, and the contrast between her refined, gentle self-effacement and the commonplace egotism of her two men was of the glaring nature which appeals to a young girl's imagination.

I never forgot Major Stoddart, and when I was eighteen, and had left school and was living in Pembridge Square, I had the good fortune to come in for the remains of a scene between Aunt Emmy and Uncle Tom--the very day after I had turned up my hair.

It was at luncheon, to which I came in late. Uncle Thomas was in bed with gout, and Uncle Tom did not consider me of enough consequence to matter. He had not realised even _now_ that I was a grown-up woman.

Looking back after all these years, I am not sure that he was not astute enough to hope that I might prove an ally.

"What you have got to do, Emmy, is to think of the future," he was saying, scooping all the visible eggs out of an aspic pie. "It's no manner of use living only in the present. You think this comfortable home will go on for ever, where you have lived in luxury. It won't. It can't. It's not in the nature of things. I saw Blackett yesterday (Blackett was the doctor), and he told me that if the governor's gout rises--and nothing he can do can keep it down--he won't last more than a year at longest. In the nature of things," Uncle Tom continued, bolting half an egg, "I shall then marry. In fact--in short----"

"Has Miss Collett accepted you?" said Aunt Emmy tremulously.

Miss Collett was a person of means, and of somewhat bulged attractions for those who admire size, of whom Uncle Tom had often spoken as a deuced fine woman.

"She has," said Uncle Tom. "I made pretty sure of that before I said anything myself. Nothing immediate, you understand; but eventually--when the old governor goes--I don't want to hurry him, Lord knows; but when the old man does pop off, I shall--bring her here."

I looked round the room. I had seen Miss Collett, and the mahogany and ormolu dining-room, with its great gilt mirrors, seemed a fitting background for her.

"I am very glad, dear Tom," said Aunt Emmy. "I think you and she will be very well suited, and I am sure she is very lucky, though I suppose I should never think any one _quite_ good enough."

"Oh! that's all right," said Uncle Tom. "And as for the luck, it's all on my side."

He did not really think this, I knew, but it was the right thing to say, so he said it.

"But I am not thinking only of myself," he continued. "There is you to be considered."

Aunt Emmy dropped her eyes.

"You mean, where I shall live," she said faintly.

"Just so. Just so. You speak like a sensible woman. We must not forget you." Uncle Tom was becoming visibly uneasy. "And I may as well tell you now, old girl--prepare your mind beforehand, don't you know--that the governor has not been able to leave you as much as he wished, as we _both_ wished. The truth is, what with one thing and another, and nearly all his capital tied up in the business, and this house on a long lease and expensive to keep up, with the best will in the world the poor old pater _can't_ do much for you."

"It will be enough," said Aunt Emmy.

"It will be the interest of seven thousand pounds at three and a half per cent.," said Uncle Tom brutally, because he was uncomfortable, "about two hundred and thirty pounds a year."

"It will be ample," said Aunt Emmy. I knew by the faint colour in her cheeks that the conversation was odious to her. "Dear Tom, let us talk of something else."

"We will," said Uncle Tom, with unexpected mental agility, and with the obvious relief of a man who has got safely round a difficult corner. "We will. Now, how about Colonel Stoddart?"

My heart beat suddenly. I was beginning to see life--at last.

"There is nothing to say about him," said Aunt Emmy.

"A good chap, and a gentlemanly chap," said Uncle Tom urbanely, leaning back in his chair. "Eton, the 'varsity, and all that sort of thing.

Quite one of ourselves. Old family, and a warm man. And suitable in age.

_My_ age. Thirty-nine. (Uncle Tom was really forty-one.) You're no chicken yourself, you know, Emmy. Thirty-eight, though I own you don't look it, my dear. Well, what's the matter with Colonel Stoddart, I should like to know?"

"Nothing."

"Well, I'm glad to hear it, for he tells me you refused him again only last week. Now, look here. One moment, please. Don't speak. I call it Providence, downright Providence," and Uncle Tom rapped the table with a thick finger. "And yet you won't look at him. I don't say marry him out of hand. Of course," Uncle Tom added hurriedly, "you can't leave the old pater while he is above ground. There's no question of that. But I _do_ say, Give the fellow a chance. He's been dangling after you for years.

Tell him that some day----"

Aunt Emmy rose from the table, and laid down her napkin.

"Now, look here, old girl," said Uncle Tom, not unkindly, "don't get your feathers up with me. Think better of it. You know this sort of first-cla.s.s opportunity may not occur again. It really may not. If it isn't Providence, I'm sure I don't know what it is. And I believe your only reason for refusing him is because of Bob Kingston. Now, don't fly in the face of Providence just out of a bit of rotten sentiment which you ought to be ashamed of at your age."

My brain reeled. I had never heard of Bob Kingston. I said "Good G.o.d!"

to myself, not because it was natural to me to use such an expression, but because I felt it was suitable to the occasion and to a person whose hair was done up.

"Tom," said Aunt Emmy, her soft eyes blazing, "I desire that you will never allude to Mr. Kingston again."

She left the room, and I did the same, with what I hope was a withering glance at the open-mouthed Uncle Tom, who for days afterwards interlarded his conversation with the refrain that he was blessed if he could understand women.