Mrs. Henry Dudeney

“ The night-rattle of London swung by them as they stood in the shadow of the door poising their fate in their hands. The warm, misty streets were festooned with strings of red and yellow light. Pamela was reminded of those miserable omnibus rides from Portobello Road, when she had watched the words “OX FORCE—NINON SOAP—DUNN’S NOSTRUM” glitter and die on the face of a house.
Edred’s eyes, contracted and brilliant, tried to destroy her will. They were admiring, magnetic. But she was fiercely respectable; she had struggled, had seen the seamy side of life. ”

“ He had sweepingly deemed nearly every other woman a fool. Yet she had simply died for her finery. You couldn’t have a meaner, a more frivolous end. She was only Eve, like all the rest, treasuring her apron of fig leaves. He blamed the inanimate thing of lace and soft wool for everything. He dragged it off the nail and trampled on it.
He went into the garden, at the piteous request of Betty, and played ball. She had on a pink frock, the color of the ragged robins that bloomed in the wood. ”

“ Gainah went round to the front of the house. She had a bed of lilies of the valley beneath the umbrella yew. She stooped down behind the wall of somber green and saw the tender leaves uncurling. One root already had a cluster of snowy buds. Then, as she stooped, she heard a voice—the high, imperious voice of Pamela. Looking through the yew, she saw her standing by the wall with Jethro. She was talking very fast, moving impetuously now and then, throwing out her firm white hands, and pointing eagerly.
“It would be the simplest thing in the world. Oh, you must do it—please. ”

“ Covey’s window—a tiny window, set high in the brown thatch roof; a window with dim, greenish panes and the spectral suggestion of a limp calico curtain.
We heard the slipping, soft sound of feet. The stairs opened out from the sitting room. A beautiful old woman of forty-five or less—work in the fields and so many children make them old long before that—sidled up to the brothers, as they sat heavily in the Windsor chairs by the empty hearth. She was the village layer-out; once she had been the village coquette. Five shillings a corpse, and shillings hard to earn! ”

“ All that she could see was a wall hung with gorgeous flowered paper, a carpet with a green ground and bunches of Provence roses, a round walnut table, and a piano with a closed lid.
It was like coming from December to June at a breath—this transit from the dim ancestral living-room to the parlor with the walnut and velvet suite from the best shop in Liddleshorn. Yet Pamela hardly noticed. The only thing that mattered was the sofa in the bay window. Would that man, that cripple on the sofa, be favorably impressed with her? ”

“ There is a very reprehensible feeling of respectability and decorum about. Most of the fellows have smart young women to clean their rooms. I see them tripping gingerly across the square in the mornings, with loose cotton blouses, curly hair, and artificial flowers in their big hats.
But the good old laundress, all fat and dirt and impudence, contents me. She has a draggled skirt with a deep hem of dried mud, a flat pancake of a bonnet, all melancholy jet and brown ribbon that once was black. She wobbles when she moves; she is a half-set jelly in a greasy bag. ”

“ The long trails of grayish leaves were on the path; the girl trod them down. When she saw the elder woman she made a step forward. She seemed half defiant, half ashamed. Her hat was on one side; it gave her a rakish air of towns. Such a slight thing may imperil a woman’s reputation—in prejudiced eyes. Gainah’s cold eyes contracted, and her brows drew over them a harsh ridge.
Pamela put out her hand—in a new glove. A slim gold bracelet, from which dangled a green charm, swung on her wrist.
“You must be Gainah,” she said in a conciliating way, and smiling. ”

“ He must live. He must spare his flesh—his poor flesh, at which he looked yearningly as it lay against the bed linen, wan and veined.
Once he thought desperately that rather than die [178] he would kill Harrowsmith first—with the last spurt of energy left him. Yes. In any case, when he grew strong, he would certainly kill him as a safeguard; a man could not live in such perpetual terror.
His face to the wall, he reproached himself bitterly with his headlong passion for the cabinet. What was there in old oak to lure a man to such madness? It added nothing to life. ”

“ When the house was quiet and dark Gainah crept out of her room and slipped, in her flat cloth shoes, down the stairs. She had not undressed, had not even taken the band of dusty velvet from the top of her head. She crept down to the lower rooms, where the fires were still burning steadily, and where every article of furniture, new or old, took fantastic shape. She went about lingeringly from one room to the other, moving about slowly and stiffly in the dim circle of light which came from the candle in her quivering hand. ”

“ You should have seen Murphy’s face! A strange silence like a pall settled over the table; to me the news seemed to creep round those silent walls which had reflected Adeline’s shadow so often. It was the effect of Murphy’s frozen expression.
But a man cannot live with a dead woman, especially when she belonged to someone else. I touched Carrie’s foot under the table. She was too young and pretty for a fossil like Murphy. ”

“ She realized, with a joyful thrill, that this was not London—not Beaufort Street. She must write to Barbara, who had been kind; but the bread of dependence, when a woman hands it, is never sweet.
When she was half dressed she threw back the casement and occasionally bobbed out her head to look at the garden. Beneath her stretched the closely-shaven, vividly green grass, the accurately-cut beds, the long, flower-tangled borders. She saw with satisfaction, with a thrill of gratitude to Jethro, that everything had been kept in exactly the order that she wished. ”

“ Harrowsmith shrugged and said, “I shall get a dealer in. Can you recommend one? You’re hand in glove with all those fellows. I hate the thing. It’s too heavy. It dwarfs the room.”
Kinsman with his finger was tracing the panels. He threw a look of desperation, of pleading even, at the oak, as if he thought that a thing which had been so long in the world and had witnessed the perplexities of so many generations was really sentient and could suggest. As he looked, his cheeks flushed, his lips smiled, and his whole attitude became suddenly débonnaire. ”

“ She went across the common in the March sun and wind. Her heart and feet danced, but her face was like the changing sky. Forget! She must forget. She was to marry Jethro. It was so easy to say forget, so difficult to do it. Once she stopped, her eyes strained in the direction of London—far away over moor and hill and sleek pasture. She groaned aloud. She knew that she would give it all—greenhouse, Battlesden, big, fond man with the bulging bag of sovereigns—for one touch on the mouth from one other man. He was still in prison, still only a number behind the high wall. ”

“ Jimmy had crawled up in the sun and dust to the public house, where they had a crazy piano in the bar parlor. The layer-out, the Vulture, as I had grown to call her to myself, came slipping down the stairs again in easy list slippers of drab and green.
“Some dies hard,” she said sententiously to the two sons, twisting the corner of her apron, shaking her wavy white head, and eying me.
“It’s they game feathers she’s a-layin’ on,” she continued. “You can’t die easy on game feathers, and there’s a plenty in the bed. Game feathers! They skeer off Death—but her time’s come, poor love. ”

“ Barbara Clutton, who had listened without one word of comment, started to her feet and dragged back the curtains.
It was broad daylight in the streets outside. She put her arm around Pamela’s shoulders, with a gesture much more eloquently tender and sympathetic than a torrent of words would have been, and drew her to the window.
“Did you ever see such an exquisite flush of pink?” she said, pointing to the sky. “I’ll open the window. There! Such air on one’s cheeks, in one’s thick eyes. We ought to go for a walk while the world is empty.” ”

“ She wore the same old gown of blue—they could not take it from her; her hair bunched out on each side of her chalky face in the absurd bunches of corkscrew curls. The velvet band across her head was tightly strained: it had made a bald spot in the middle of the parting—a spot which was rapidly spreading. Pamela saw her plainly: the restless fingers, distorted by rheumatism, but quite clean and yellow-white, now that she did not do any housework or cooking; the worn, blank face, the constantly moving lips. ”

“ It was Sophia’s voice, and Sophia was the worst tease of them all. He began to clear his throat directly he thought of her. He would not go downstairs to Kinsman. He would wait until he could find him alone. He would go upstairs and get his hat and bag, and put on his boots and be off to Dulwich. It was evening. Augusta—dear, tender little Augusta—would have on her evening gown—red nun’s veiling.
As ill-luck would have it, there was a light under Murphy’s door. And Murphy’s oak was hospitably black, and the inner door with its gleaming brass knocker seemed to wink an invitation. ”

“ Annie Jayne, in her spick and span nursery with her beaming face bent over her baby boy and her lips flowing forth pious reminiscences of her mother, had her own particular charm. To be simple, to be [89] sterling, that was all one wanted; everything else was garish, meretricious. Hearts were better than the flimsy things called brains.
She saw her life roll away year after year, so placid, so uneventful, so comfortable and prosperous. She loved money for her pleasure, not her pocket. She always felt her greatest admiration for Jethro when he hauled out a canvas bag of sovereigns. ”

“ He looked, so she thought, like a patrician who was masquerading in queer clothes. Her idea of masculine raiment was confined to black cloth, with tweeds for the seaside and flannel for tennis.
“I like you,” he said simply. “You are a nice-minded girl. It was a joke with me, too—half a joke. I did it on market day; a fellow gets a bit jolly then, perhaps. I shouldn’t have gone any further with these.” He touched the letters with his free hand, and the touch was enough to scatter them rudely on the floor. “But your name took my fancy. PAMELA CRISP! Now, my mother was a Crisp.” ”

“ There were frozen flakes of snow scattered over the orange silk rug which wrapped her from her chin to the toe-caps of her slippers. Her white face, framed in disheveled, dust-colored hair, was shadowy. They stood together at the door of the barn. At the back of them, the men, each with his lantern, made a patch of light. An evil spirit seemed to stare out of each corner of the vast raftered place—to stare down at the thing under the sacks. ”

“ The woods were in their fullest flush of beauty. The anemones were widely blown, with the quiet watchfulness which comes before death. The heavy heads of the blue-bells were voluptuous. Here and there one caught the deep yellow of the oxlip; snowy stitchwork was a delicate groundwork to every leaf and flower.
No feet but their own disturbed the silence. Jethro was savage on the rights of property, and this was his land. No old woman might pick up sticks, no child gather wild-flowers in his preserves. ”

“ A thatched and plastered cottage stood empty under the shadow of huge oaks. Wide green glades wound into the very heart of a little wood. The turf, inch-deep in moss, yielded like down. It was irresistible. She threw herself flat on her back, settling her skirt smoothly under her, and looked lazily through the wide mesh of the veil at the sky. The heat and the perfect silence almost made her sleep. A trap went by full of gayly-dressed country girls; a young man, hideous in his Sunday clothes, was driving. ”

“ Men did not propose in set words and the conventional attitude nowadays. She would marry Jethro. Her future life stretched out before her—smooth, level, pleasant—like the big tennis lawn at Turle. She thought of all the country houses round where she was sure of a hearty welcome because she was a cousin. They were comfortable, easy people, these Turles and Crisps and Jaynes and Furlongers. She had grown really fond of Nancy, with her simper, her pretty pink face, and her glorious red hair. ”

“ Pamela knew the attitude very well; it usually followed a good dinner. Her heart ached for herself. The little woman fussily put on her gloves, drew down her veil, settled her fluttering ends of pink satin. Then she, too, fell back on the red seat and began to look idly about her, passing audible comments on people whose appearance invited the acid of her tongue.
“And there’s that woman behind,” she said presently, in a distinct whisper. “Just behind me. Look—when she isn’t looking. How silly you are! Always looking the wrong way. ”

“ One gleam of light, narrow and pointed, pierced through the uncurtained window in the corridor and fell on the tumbled bed. She had dragged the sheets up roughly; the blankets were in billows under the cotton quilt, the bolster, in a case of some coarse, dark stuff, was half doubled and partly buried beneath the humped-up coverings. As she gave the last look back before shutting the door she was struck by the oddity of that untidy bed. Quite unwittingly, in her hurried gathering of linen, she had achieved the similitude of a human form. ”

“ She blew the bellows more vigorously, with a fancy that the ruddy light should fall on those two faces near the table—one big and ruddy and restful, the other dark, sallow, full of a guilty, eager brilliance.
She could hardly breathe. Her heart was playing her such mad pranks. At one moment she could feel nothing but the most lawless, unrestrained delight at Edred’s return to her—in any circumstance. At the next she felt a profound pity for her own extraordinary position and the sudden sinister twirl of her fortunes. ”

“ When she had bought them, she led Jethro captive through the Oriental department. He told her carelessly to buy what she chose, and she moved eagerly from one counter to another. She chose some gaudy rugs to toss about the oak floors. She bought brass bowls and trays, a few grotesque ornaments for the shelves, mats, a guitar, a Chinese woman’s shoe, a mandarin’s petticoat to throw over an armchair, a bundle of peacock’s feathers, a few bits of coarsely-printed china, various embroidered table-covers—all the vividly-colored, alluring rubbish that she fancied. ”