Winding Paths Part 57

"Yes. It was very formal and very dull, and I was tired."

He glanced up with questioning eyes. It was something new for Hal not to stay untill the last moment at a festivity. He thought she looked a little paler than usual, and there were shadows about her eyes, but she interrupted any comment he might make by an inquiry after Doris.

"She is very well."

He stopped short rather suddenly, and seemed thoughtful. He had been urging Doris to fix the date of their wedding, and let him see about taking a house or a flat, but she had seemed to avoid the subject lately, and he was a little troubled.

"I suppose poor Basil is much the same?"

"Yes. He and Ethel were both asking what had become of you. They said you hadn't been up for a long time."

"I haven't. I'll go to-morrow. Good-night," and she kissed him, and went upstairs.

In her own room she sat on the bed, and read the evening paper.

Yes, it was there sure enough, but it was only given as a rumour. "We understand there is a rumour..." How well she knew the phrase, with its dangerous suggestiveness, and safe retreat. She wondered who had started the rumour, and how the paper had got it.

But, again, insistently she a.s.serted it could not be true. If it had not been for last Sat.u.r.day she might have believed it. But after that... no, he could not be so base. She put the thought away from her, and tried to sleep, but her eyes would look out into the blackness, and her brain ask questions.

"What if it were true?" She clenched her hands and fought the question. It could not be true; why worry? Yet he had never made the slightest suggestion of marrying her. She remembered that, but scorned it.

Why should he? There had been nothing lover-like between them until the previous Sat.u.r.day; and of course had there been any one else, it would have been so easy to go on the same and make no change that particular afternoon.

Finding what comfort she could out of these thoughts, she fell at last into a troubled sleep.

The following afternoon, in fulfilment of her promise, she went up to Holloway from the office. Doris was out, and Ethel not home yet, but the door was opened to her by a gaunt stranger, who said:

"Come in. This is one of my days. I'm in charge this afternoon."

Hal looked into the angular face, which appeared to her as if it had been roughly hewn with a chisel, by some one who was a mere amateur, and she could not repress a little smile.

"I don't think I've met you before. Are you - are you - a friend of Mr. Hayward's?"

"Well, he's a friend of mine, if that will do as well. I'm generally know here as G. The letter isn't stamped on my face, but it's on the door of my flat, and that's much the same."

She stood aside for Hal to pa.s.s down the pa.s.sage, adding grimly as Hal loitered, with rather an amused, engaging expression:

"I don't stand for much more than a door, with a G on it, as I often tell Mr. Hayward, but I suppose it's all right."

"A little more occasionally," suggested Hal. "A door wouldn't be much use to Mr. Hayward, anyhow."

"That's what he says. Won't you go down to his room?"

"What are you going to do?"

"Get the tea. It's one of the few things I can do pa.s.sably well."

"Let me come and help. It won't take long. I'm interested in that door. You see, I'm not even G; and I don't possess a front door."

The music-teacher looked searchingly into her face, and was evidently pleased with what she saw, for she adopted a friendly note, and seemed ready to chat. Hal followed her into the little kitchen, and commenced to take off her hat.

"I'm an old friend," she volunteered, "and I often leave my hat in here. Are both Mr. Hayward's sisters out?"

"Miss Hayward will be late to-night, and her sister is uncertain. It depends somewhat upon which young man she is out with," in acid tones.

Hal glanced up in astonishment, but her companion was busy with the cups and saucers, and did not notice the look.

"All I can say is, I'm sorry for that nice gentleman who is fool enough to think of marrying her. Lord! he'd be safer with some one with a face like a door-knocker, such as mine. But there, they're all the same; and the nicest of them are generally the biggest fools."

Hal grasped the situation at once, and instead of enlightening her concerning her own ident.i.ty, said casually:

"There's another young man as well, is there?"

"There is so. A p.a.w.nbroker I should take him to be, who wears the jewellery left in his care on his person for safety. As a matter of fact, I believe he is a South African millionaire. He brought her home one day, and Blakde - that's the housekeeper's husband down below - recognised him. He was out in South Africa in the war, and he saw him then."

Hal drummed on the table with her fingers to a.s.sume nonchalance.

"Does Miss Hayward know?"

'Know? Of course she doesn't. How should she know, particularly if that artful monkey did not want her to? I don't know where the poor sick man would be now but for me. She's always off somewhere - that minx - and I rush back from my music pupils, because I can't rest for the thought of him here all alone. I've given one up, who wanted a lesson at half-past four every day. That's the time he needs his tea."

"Why do you do all this for him?" Hal found herself asking, a little unaccountably. "He is nothing to you, is he - no relation, I mean?"

"Nothing to me!... Oh, isn't he though! I'd like to know what is anything, if he's nothing?"

She rattled the cups and saucers a little restlessly, and Hal, with growing interest, waited for her to go on.

"Before I knew him, I was nothing in the world but a door with a letter on it, as I've just told you. That's all I stood for, a mere letter of the alphabet who paid a monthly rent. I told him so, when I first came across, and he said, 'Well, I'm very glad they didn't leave G out of the alphabet.' That's all."

"But I'm his slave now. n.o.body cared whether there was a G or not before. It isn't pleasant to feel you're a mere cypher, with no particular meaning to any one; just shot in haphazard to fill up a blank - a mere creature, useful to teach exercises and scales to odious children one only longs to slap.

"Fancy being expected to keep yourself alive in a dingy little flat, for ever alone, just to do that!" The cups rattled more restively still. "I say, the universe is the grimmest jester there ever was. Me to teach music to keep life in a body that doesn't want it! If I'd been employed laying out corpses in their grave-clothes there'd have been some sense in it. I'm not much more that a figurehead of an old hulk myself. But music!... music!... Oh Lord, and I haven't one real note of it in my whole composition."

Hal seated herself on the table. With her quick intuition she perceived at once entertainment of an original kind was before her, and she promptly laid herself out to obtain all she could.

"Why do you teach music? I don't think you do quite suggest a musician?"

"Of course I don't."

The gaunt spinster was cutting some bread-and-b.u.t.ter now with a savage air.

"Do I suggest anything, except perhaps a butcher or an undertaker? Yet I can only keep myself alive with music. That's the jest of the Arch Humorist. My father was a clergyman. He droned out services for fifty years in a hamlet, with a little square church like a wooden money-box.

I was taught music so that I could - well - make the tin-pot organ groan, I used to call it. I had twenty-five years of that, with never a break. I got so that, to keep myself from turning into a stone gargoyle on the organ seat, I must have my little jest too.

"One way I had it was by making the organ groan dismallest at weddings and christenings, and squeak hilariously at funerals. Father never noticed, he'd already turned gargoyle, you see, and as for the village people! well, it suited them, because they always wept at weddings, and overate themselves at funerals."

"And then?..." Hal was so thoroughly enjoying herself now, she had almost forgotten the invalid.

"Well, then the gargoyle died, or ran down, or something. I should think he got tired of sing-song the tender mercies of G.o.d to the devout people, and His judgments on the wicked. It always seemed to me the good folks got the nastiest knocks; and the wicked, well, they fairly left the green bay tree behind.

"Anyhow, I'd been devout enough, as far as sinning goes, for forty years. I wasn't even blessed with the chance to be anything else.

Then a new parson came, an underdone young man with new fal-da-dal ideas. I wonder how soon _he'd_ become a gargoyle? I defy him to stand out long against the cast-iron nonent.i.ty of that village. But he didn't take kindly either to me or my music. Hadn't any sens of humour at all. I don't know what I ever knew a clergyman who had. Perhaps a man couldn't very well go on being a clergyman if he possessed such a trait.