Winding Paths Part 34

Then she went off to her theatre, and Hal went home, wishing the next day were Sunday.

CHAPTER XVIII

Dudley hardly new, himself, why he spoke diffidently about his plans for Sunday, and why he did not tell Hal outright that he was taking Doris Hayward to a picnic at Marlow, given by mutual friends of his and theirs - friends of the old vigorous days, when he and Basil Hayward had gone everywhere together, and Hal had still been a boisterous schoolgirl. Perhaps he felt she might seem to have been rather unkindly left out.

As a matter of fact, an invitation to include his sister had been given; but, for reasons he hardly stopped to face, he chose not to mention it. That was after he had learnt from a visit to the little Holloway flat that nothing would persuade Ethel to leave her brother, who had been ailing more than usual of late, and Doris would accompany him alone.

It had been with a curious mixture of feelings he had heard this.

Things were very pitiful up at the little flat, and though his inmost sympathy had gone out generously enough to both girls, with a perversity born of narrow insight he had reserved the deepest of it for Doris.

It seemed to him that she was so young to face such circ.u.mstances, and at such an early age to become saddened by the vicissitudes of life.

In the depths of her wide blue eyes he saw unshed tears, and the little droop of her pretty mouth went straight to his heart. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, and kiss her and pet her till she was again all sunshine and smiles.

Ha was not unaware that Ethel probably suffered more, but her way of showing it, or perhaps hiding it, appealed to him less. Instead of that mute distress of unshed tears, her quiet eyes wore an inscrutable veil. It was as if the anguish behind the veil were something too terrible and too sacred to be looked upon by a workaday world; but Dudley only knew that a wall of reserve was between him and her trouble.

And her firm, strong mouth had no engaging droop at the corners. It was only if anything a little firmer, almost to sternness.

Dudley believed that Basil was dying at last, after his weary martyrdom, and he believed that Ethel knew it; and in some vague way it hurt him that she gave no sign, and refused to be drawn into any speech concerning his increased weakness.

Doris, on the other hand, spoke of it in a faltering, tearful voice, adding a little pitifully that it made it harder for her that Ethel was so distant and unsympathetic.

In a sense the circ.u.mstances nonplussed Dudley altogether. Some inner voice told him that such a depth of wondrous, unselfish devotion as Ethel showed to her invalid brother could not live in the same heart with hardness and want of sympathy; and yet there was the evidence of the swimming, melting eyes and drooping lips of the younger sister left out in the cold.

Perhaps it was unfortunate that on that very evening of Dudley's visit Ethel had come home rather earlier than her wont, to find Doris not yet returned from her daily outing, and, in consequence, the fire out and the sick man shivering with cold. He had looked so dreadfully ill that she had hastened first to get som brandy to revive him, only to find Doris had forgotten her promise to get the empty bottle replaced that morning.

In desperation she had hastened to the other little flat on the same floor, hoping its inmate might chance to have a little to lend.

The tenant was a lonely, harsh-featured spinster, who eked out a precarious living by teaching music. Ethel knew her slightly, as a gaunt woman who usually toiled up the stairs with a sort of scornful weariness of herself and everything else.

She knew that because she was not fashionable, nor striking, nor well-dressed, she taught mostly in rather second-rate schools, and often had to take long journeys to her pupils, coming home tired and worn at night to an empty, comfortless little dwelling, to light her own fire and cook her own evening meal.

She knew, too, that she was a gentlewoman, the daughter of a poor clergyman, left penniless, to fight a hard world alone. Had her own home been happier, she would gladly have asked her to join them sometimes; but the weight of Basil's illness, and her own usual condition of weariness, had left the invitation always unspoken.

"A little brandy," the music-teacher echoed, with a quick note of concern; "yes, I believe I have a drop. Is it your brother? Let me come and see if I can help?"

"Thank you," Ethel had replied, trying not to allow her voice to show how much she would have preferred not to accept the proffered help. "I think I can manage quite well."

But the gaunt spinster followed her across the little landing obstinately. She had seen Doris out half an hour before, and knew that she had not yet returned.

"Ah, you have no fire," she said, in her somewhat grating voice; "if you will let me I will light it," and without more ado she had procured coals and wood for herself, and was down on her knees before the empty grate.

Ethel turned away with a sick, helpless feeling over Doris'

selfishness, and after administering a few drops of brandy, chafed the sick man's hands and feet. When Basil felt better he glanced up curiously at the strange, dried-up-looking female who had just succeeded in persuading a cheerful blaze to brighten the room. She looked back into his face frankly.

"You needn't mind me," she informed him; "I'm only the music-teacher from the opposite flat."

"You seem to be rather a kind sort of music-teacher," he said, with his winsome smile, "even if you do only come from the opposite flat."

The hard face relaxed a very little, and she shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh, well, it isn't easy to be kind," she answered, "when you don't stand for much else in the universe but a letter of the alphabet." She turned back to her grate and commenced sweeping up the ashes.

Basil roused himself a little further and looked interested.

"What letter do you stand for?"

"Just G." She gave a low, harsh laugh. "G is the letter that distinguishes my flat from the others, and it is all I stand for to G.o.d or man."

"I see." His white, pain wrung face looked extraordinarily kind.

"Well, G, I'm very deeply grateful to you for coming across to light my fire; and I'm glad there happened to be a G in the universe this afternoon."

She turned her head away sharply, that neither of them might see the sudden, swift mist that dimmed her eyes, but she only answered:

"All the same, if there had been no G, and no you, the universe would have had an atom less pain in it, and no one have been any the worse."

"That's where you're wrong," he told her, "because Ethel couldn't have done without me, and if you put your head in at my door occasionally, and just remark to F that G is across the pa.s.sage, F will be glad the universe didn't decide to leave G out of the alphabet."

The woman looked at him a moment with a curious expression in her eyes.

Then she said:

"Well, if _you_ can take the insult of a maimed, or joyless, or cursed life like that, it oughtn't to be so very hard for me to be glad I happened to be able to come over and light your fire."

"Nor so very hard to come again."

"Ah!..." she hesitated, then said to him, looking half-defiantly towards Ethel: "Time after time, when I thought you were alone, I've wanted to just look in and see if you were all right. But I didn't like to. People don't take to me as a rule, and I'm... I'm... well, I'm not an ingratiating sort of person, and I guessed, probably, you'd all rather do without any help I had to give."

"It was kind of you to think of us at all," Ethel said, not quite sure whether Basil would like her to come in or not.

"You guessed wrong," was his answer. "_I_ think it would be very nice of you to look in occasionally. It certainly seems rather absurd for you to be all alone there, and I all alone here, when we both want a little company. I'm sure the alphabet was not meant to be so unsociable."

"It just depends."

She got up from her keneeling posture on the hearth, and stood, a grotesque apparition enough, looking at him with her greenish, nondescript eyes. Her hay-coloured hair was tightly drawn back from a high, bulging forehead, her eyebrows were so light they scarcely showed at all, while her nose, which started in a nice straight line, had failed her at the last moment by suddenly taking an upward turn in an utterly incongruous fashion. She had high cheek-bones, a parchment skin, and a mouth that was not much more than a slit; the grotesque effect of the whole being heightened by a long, thin neck, which she made no effort to cover with a neat high collar, but accentuated by a half-and-half untidily loose one.

She wore a cheap, ready-made blouse, with absurd little bows tacked on down the front, which Ethel longed to abolish with one sweep, and her skirt, which had shrunk considerably in front, sagged in a dejected fashion behind.

Yet to Basil's kindly eyes, there was something behind it all that was attractive. Fore one thing, she was so eminently sincere. One felt she had no delusions whatever, concerning her appearance or her oddities; and though she looked out upon life with that scornful, resentful air, she had yet a keener sense of humour and a clearer brain than most women. Under different circ.u.mstances she might have been a success.

As it was, she appeared to have got into a wrong groove altogether, and, unable to extricate herself, to have merely become an oddity.

Basil, from his couch, looked up at her with friendly eyes, and she finished:

"One may want a little company, without wanting just any company."

"You think you will find me even duller than nothing?" and his eyes twinkled.