Man and Maid

“Oh Lord!” said he.

He got her hat and veil off – he never knew how, and he wondered afterwards at his own cleverness, for there were many pins, long and short; he fetched the cushion from his armchair and put it under her head; he took off her gloves and rubbed her hands and her forehead with vinegar, but her complexion remained green, and she lay, all in a heap, at the foot of his staircase.

Then he remembered that fainting people should be laid flat and not allowed to lie about in heaps at the foot of stairs, so he very gently and gingerly picked the girl up in his arms and carried her into his sitting-room. Here he laid her on the ground – he had no sofa – and sat beside her on the floor, patiently fanning her with a copy of the Athenæum, and watching the pinched, pallid face for some sign of returning life. It came at last, in a flutter of the eyelids, a long-drawn, gasping breath. The Greek scholar rushed for whisky – brandy he esteemed as a mere adjunct of channel boats – lifted her head and held the glass to her lips. The blood had come back to her face in a rush of carnation; she drank – choked – drank – he laid her head down and her eyes opened. They were large, clear grey eyes – very bewildered-looking just now – but they and the clear red tint in cheeks and lips transformed the face.

“Good gracious,” said he, “she’s pretty! Pretty? she’s beautiful!”

She was. That such beauty should so easily have hidden itself behind a green-tinted mask, with sunken eyelid, seemed a miracle to the ingenuous bookworm.

“You’re better now,” said he with feverish banality. “Give me your hands – so – now can – yes, that’s right – here, this chair is the only comfortable one – ”

She sank into the chair, and waved away the more whisky which he eagerly proffered. He stood looking at her with respectful solicitude.

After a few moments she stretched her arms like a sleepy child, yawned, and then suddenly broke into laughter. It had a strange sound. No one had laughed in that house since the wet night when Mr Brent took possession of it, and he had never been able to bring himself to believe that any one had ever laughed there before.

Then he remembered having heard that women have hysterical fits as well as fainting fits, and he said eagerly: “Oh don’t! It’s all right – you were faint – the heat or something – ”

“Did I faint?” she asked with interest. “I never fainted before. But – oh – yes – I remember. It was rather horrible. The quarry tumbled down almost on me, and I just stopped short – in time – and I came round by this road because the other’s stopped up, and I was so glad when I saw the house. Thank you so much; it must have been an awful bother. I think I had better start soon – ”

“No, you don’t; you’re not fit to ride alone yet,” said he to himself. Aloud he said: “You said something about a puncture – when you are better I’ll mend it. And, look here – have you had any lunch?”

“No,” said she.

“Then – if you’ll allow me.” He left the room, and presently returned with the tray set for his own lunch; then he fetched from the larder everything he could lay hands on: half a cold chicken, some cold meat pudding, a pot of jam, bottled beer. He set these confusedly on the table. “Now,” he said, “come and try to eat.”

“It’s very good of you to bother,” she said, a little surprise in her tone, for she had expected “lunch” to be a set formal meal at which some discreet female relative would preside. “But aren’t you – don’t you – do you live alone, then?”

“Yes, a woman comes in in the mornings. I’m sorry she’s gone: she could have arranged a better lunch for you.”

“Better? why, it’s lovely!” said she, accepting the situation with frank amusement, and she gave a touch or two to the table to set everything in its place.

Then they lunched together. He would have served her standing, as one serves a queen – but she laughed again, and he took the place opposite her. During lunch they talked.

After lunch they mended the punctured tyre, and talked all the while; then it was past three o’clock.

“You won’t go yet,” he said then, daring greatly for what seemed to him a great stake. “Let me make you some tea – I can, I assure you – and let us see if the tyre holds up – ”

“Oh, the tyre is all right, thanks to your cleverness – ”

“Well, then,” said he desperately, “take pity on a poor hermit! I give you my word, I have been here ten months and three days, and I have not in that time spoken a single word to any human being except my bedmaker.”

“But if you want to talk to people why did you begin being a hermit?”

“I thought I didn’t, then.”

“Well – now you know better, why don’t you come back and talk to people in the ordinary way?”

This was the first and last sign she gave that the circumstances in which she found herself with him were anything but ordinary.

“I have a book to finish,” said he. “Would you like to have tea in the wilderness or in here?” He wisely took her consent for granted this time, and his wisdom was justified.

They had tea in the garden. The wilderness blossomed like a rose, to Maurice’s thinking. In his mind he was saying over and over again: “How bored I must have been all this time! How bored I must have been!”

It seemed to him that his mind was opening, like a flower, and for the first time. He had never talked so well, and he knew it – all the seeds of thought, sown in those long, lonely hours, bore fruit now. She listened, she replied, she argued and debated.

“Beautiful – and sensible,” said Maurice to himself. “What a wonderful woman!” There was, besides, an alertness of mind, a quick brightness of manner that charmed him. Camilla had been languid and dreamy.

Suddenly she rose to her feet.

“I must go,” she said, “but I have enjoyed myself so much. You are an ideal host: thank you a thousand times. Perhaps we shall meet again some day, if you return to the world. Do you know, we’ve been talking and wrangling for hours and hours and never even thought of wondering what each other’s names are – I think we’ve paid each other a very magnificent compliment, don’t you?”

He smiled and said: “My name is Maurice Brent.”

“Mine is Diana Redmayne. If it sounds like somebody in the Family Herald, I can’t help it.” He had wheeled the bicycle into the road, and she had put on hat and gloves and stood ready to mount before she said: “If you come back to the world I shall almost certainly meet you. We seem to know the same people; I’ve heard your name many times.”

“From whom?” said he.

“Among others,” said she, with her foot on the pedal, “from my cousin Camilla. Good-bye.”

And he was left to stare down the road after the swift flying figure.

Then he went back into the lonely little house, and about half-past twelve that night he realised that he had done no work that day, and that those hours which had not been spent talking to Diana Redmayne, had been spent in thinking about her.

“It’s not because she’s pretty and clever,” he said; “and it’s not even because she’s a woman. It’s because she’s the only intelligent human being I’ve spoken to for nearly a year.”

So day after day he went on thinking about her.

It was three weeks later that the bell again creaked and jangled, and again through the spotted glass he saw a woman’s hat. To his infinite disgust and surprise, his heart began to beat violently.

“I grow nervous, living all alone,” he said. “Confound this door! how it does stick – I must have it planed.”

He got the door opened, and found himself face to face with – Camilla.

He stepped back, and bowed gravely.

She looked more beautiful than ever – and he looked at her, and wondered how he could ever have thought her even passably pretty.

“Won’t you ask me in?” she said timidly.

“No,” said he, “I am all alone.”

“I know,” she said. “I have only just heard you’re living here all alone, and I came to say – Maurice – I’m sorry. I didn’t know you cared so much, or – ”

“Don’t,” he said, stopping the confession as a good batsman stops a cricket ball. “Believe me, I’ve not made myself a hermit because of – all that. I had a book to write – that was all. And – and it’s very kind of you to come and look me up, and I wish I could ask you to come in, but – And it’s nice of you to take an interest in an old friend – you said you would, didn’t you, in the letter – and – I’ve taken the advice you gave me.”

“You mean you’ve fallen in love with some one else.”

“You remember what you said in your letter.”

“Some one nicer and worthier, I said,” returned Camilla blankly, “but I never thought – And is she?”

“Of course she seems so to me,” said he, smiling at her to express friendly feeling.

“Then – good-bye – I wish you the best of good fortune.”

“You said that in your letter, too,” said he. “Good-bye.”

“Who is she?”

“I mustn’t tell even you that, until I have told her,” he smiled again.

“Then good-bye,” said Camilla shortly; “forgive me for troubling you so unnecessarily.”

He found himself standing by his door – and Camilla on her bicycle sped down the road, choking with tears of anger and mortification and deep disappointment. Because she knew now that she loved him as much as it was in her to love any one, and because she, who had humbled so many, had now at last humbled herself – and to no purpose.

Maurice Brent left his door open and wandered down across his five acres, filled with amazement. Camilla herself had not been more deeply astonished at the words he had spoken than he had been. A moment before he had not even thought that he was in love, much less contemplated any confession of it: and now seemingly without his will he stood committed to this statement. Was it true, or had he only said it to defend himself against those advances of hers in which he merely saw a new trap? He had said it in defence – yes – but it was true, for all that; this was the wonderful part of it. And so he walked in the wilderness, lost in wonder; and as he walked he noted the bicycles that passed his door – along his unfrequented road, by ones and twos and threes – for this was a Saturday, and the lower road was still lying cold and hidden under its load of chalk, and none might pass that way. This road was hot and dusty, and folk went along it continually. He strolled to his ugly iron gate and looked over, idly. Perhaps, some day, she would come that way again – she would surely stop – especially if he were at the gate – and perhaps stay and talk a little. As if in mocking answer to the new-born thought came a flash of blue along the road; Diana Redmayne rode by at full speed – bowed coldly – and then at ten yards’ distance turned and waved a white-gloved hand, with a charming smile. Maurice swore softly, and went indoors to think.

His work went but slowly on that day – and in the days that followed. On the next Friday he went over to Rochester, and in the dusk of the evening he walked along the road, about a mile from “The Yews,” and then, going slowly, he cast handfuls of something dark from his hand, and kicked the white dust over it as it lay.

“I feel like the enemy sowing tares,” said he.

Then he went home, full of anxious anticipation. The next day was hot and bright. He took his armchair into the nightmare of a verandah, and sat there reading; only above the top of the book his eyes could follow the curve of the white road. This made it more difficult to follow the text. Presently the bicyclists began to go past, by ones and twos and threes; but a certain percentage was wheeling its machines – others stopped within sight to blow up their tyres. One man sat down under the hedge thirty yards away, and took his machine to pieces; presently he strolled up and asked for water. Brent gave it, in a tin basin, grudgingly, and without opening the gate.

“I overdid it,” he said, “a quarter of a pound would have been enough; yet I don’t know – perhaps it’s well to be on the safe side. Yet three pounds was perhaps excessive.”

Late in the afternoon a pink figure wheeling a bicycle came slowly down the road. He sat still, and tried to read. In a moment he should hear the click of the gate: then he would spring up and be very much astonished. But the gate did not click, and when next he raised his eyes the pink blouse had gone by, and was almost past the end of the five acres. Then he did spring up – and ran.

“Miss Redmayne, can’t I help you? What is it? Have you had a spill?” he said as he overtook her.

“Puncture,” said she laconically.

“You’re very unfortunate. Mayn’t I help you to mend it?”

“I’ll mend it as soon as I get to a shady place.”

“Come into the wilderness. See – here’s the side gate. I’ll fetch some water in a moment.”

She looked at him doubtfully, and then consented. She refused tea, but she stayed and talked till long after the bicycle was mended.

On the following Saturday he walked along the road, and back, and along, and again the place was alive with angry cyclists dealing, each after his fashion, with a punctured tyre. He came upon Miss Redmayne sitting by the ditch mending hers. That was the time when he sat on the roadside and told her all about himself – reserving only those points where his life had touched Camilla’s.

The week after he walked the road again, and this time he overtook Miss Redmayne, who was resolutely wheeling her bicycle back in the way by which she had come.

“Let me wheel it for you,” he said. “Whither bound?”

“I’m going back to Rochester,” she said. “I generally ride over to see my aunts at Felsenden on Saturdays, but I fear I must give it up, or go by train; this road isn’t safe.”

“Not safe?” he said with an agitation which could not escape her notice.

“Not safe,” she repeated. “Mr Brent, there is a very malicious person in this part of the country – a perfectly dreadful person.”

“What do you mean?” he managed to ask.

“These three Saturdays I have come along this road; each time I have had a puncture. And each time I have found embedded in my tyre the evidence of some one’s malice. This is one piece of evidence.” She held out her ungloved hand. On its pink palm lay a good sized tin-tack. “Once might be accident; twice a coincidence; three times is too much. The road’s impossible.”

“Do you think some one did it on purpose?”

“I know it,” she said calmly.

Then he grew desperate.

“Try to forgive me,” he said. “I was so lonely, and I wanted so much – ”

She turned wide eyes on him.

“You!” she cried, and began to laugh.

Her laughter was very pretty, he thought.

“Then you didn’t know it was me?” said the Greek student.

“You!” she said again. “And has it amused you – to see all these poor people in difficulties, and to know that you’ve spoilt their poor little holiday for them – and three times, too.”

“I never thought about them,” he said; “it was you I wanted to see. Try to forgive me; you don’t know how much I wanted you.” Something in his voice kept her silent. “And don’t laugh,” he went on. “I feel as if I wanted nothing in the world but you. Let me come to see you – let me try to make you care too.”

“You’re talking nonsense,” she said, for he stopped on a note that demanded an answer. “Why, you told Camilla – ”

“Yes – but you – but I meant you. I thought I cared about her once – but I never cared really with all my heart and soul for any one but you.”

She looked at him calmly and earnestly.

“I’m going to forget all this,” she said; “but I like you very much, and if you want to come and see me, you may. I will introduce you to my aunts at Felsenden as – as a friend of Camilla’s. And I will be friends with you; but nothing else ever. Do you care to know my aunts?”

Maurice had inspirations of sense sometimes. One came to him now, and he said: “I care very much.”

“Then help me to mend my bicycle, and you can call there to-morrow. It’s ‘The Grange’ – you can’t miss it. No, not another word of nonsense, please, or we can’t possibly be friends.”

He helped her to mend the bicycle, and they talked of the beauty of spring and of modern poetry.

It was at “The Grange,” Felsenden, that Maurice next saw Miss Redmayne – and it was from “The Grange,” Felsenden, that, in September, he married her.

“And why did you say you would never, never be anything but a friend?” he asked her on the day when that marriage was arranged. “Oh! you nearly made me believe you! Why did you say it?”

“One must say something!” she answered. “Besides, you’d never have respected me if I’d said ‘yes’ at once.”

“Could you have said it? Did you like me then?”

She looked at him, and her look was an answer. He stooped and gravely kissed her.

“And you really cared, even then? I wish you had been braver,” he said a little sadly.

“Ah, but,” she said, “I didn’t know you then – you must try to forgive me, dear. Think how much there was at stake! Suppose I had lost you!”

VII

THE AUNT AND THE EDITOR

Aunt Kate was the great comfort of Kitty’s existence. Always kindly, helpful, sympathetic, no girlish trouble was too slight, no girlish question too difficult for her tender heart – her delicate insight. How different from grim Aunt Eliza, with whom it was Kitty’s fate to live. Aunt Eliza was severe, methodical, energetic. In household matters she spared neither herself nor her niece. Kitty could darn and mend and bake and dust and sweep in a way which might have turned the parents of the bluest Girtonian green with envy. She had read a great deal, too – the really solid works that are such a nuisance to get through, and that leave a mark on one’s mind like the track of a steamroller. That was Aunt Eliza’s doing. Kitty ought to have been grateful – but she wasn’t. She didn’t want to be improved with solid books. She wanted to write books herself. She did write little tales when her aunt was out on business, which was often, and she dreamed of the day when she should write beautiful books, poems, romances. These Aunt Eliza classed roughly as “stuff and nonsense”; and one day, when she found Kitty reading the Girls’ Very Own Friend, she tore that harmless little weekly across and across and flung it into the fire. Then she faced Kitty with flushed face and angry eyes.

“If I ever catch you bringing such rubbish into the house again, I’ll – I’ll stop your music lessons.”

This was a horrible threat. Kitty went twice a week to the Guildhall School of Music. She had no musical talent whatever, but the journey to London and back was her one glimpse of the world’s tide that flowed outside the neat, gloomy, ordered house at Streatham. Therefore Kitty was careful that Aunt Eliza should not again “catch her bringing such rubbish into the house.” But she went on reading the paper all the same, just as she went on writing her little stories. And presently she got one of her little stories typewritten, and sent it to the Girls’ Very Own Friend. It was a silly little story – the heroine was svelte, I am sorry to say, and had red-gold hair and a soft, trainante voice – and the hero was a “frank-looking young Englishman, with a bronzed face and honest blue eyes.” The plot was that with which I firmly believe every career of fiction begins – the girl who throws over her lover because he has jilted her friend. Then she finds out that it was not her lover, but his brother or cousin. We have all written this story in our time, and Kitty wrote it much worse than many, but not nearly so badly as most of us.

And the Girls’ Very Own Friend accepted the story and printed it, and in its columns notified to “George Thompson” that the price, a whole guinea, was lying idle at the office till he should send his address. For, of course, Kitty had taken a man’s name for her pen-name, and almost equally, of course, had called herself “George.” George Sand began it, and it is a fashion which young authors seem quite unable to keep themselves from following.

Kitty longed to tell some one of her success – to ask admiration and advice; but Aunt Eliza was more severe and less approachable than usual that week. She was busy writing letters. She had always a sheaf of dull-looking letters to answer, so Kitty could only tell Mary in the kitchen under vows of secrecy, and Mary in the kitchen only said: “Well, to be sure, Miss, it’s beautiful! I suppose you wrote the story down out of some book?”

Therefore Kitty felt that it was vain to apply to her for intellectual sympathy.

“I will write to Aunt Kate,” said she, “she will understand. Oh, how I wish I could see her! She must be a dear, soft, pussy, cuddly sort of person. Why shouldn’t I go and see her? I will.”

And on this desperate resolve she acted.

Now I find it quite impossible any longer to conceal from the intelligent reader that the reason why Kitty had never seen Aunt Kate was that “Aunt Kate” was merely the screen which sheltered from a vulgar publicity the gifted person who wrote the “Answers to Correspondents” for the Girls’ Very Own Friend.

In fear and trembling, and a disguised hand-writing; with a feigned name and a quickly-beating heart, Kitty, months before, had written to this mysterious and gracious being. In the following week’s number had appeared these memorable lines:

“Sweet Nancy.– So pleased, dear, with your little letter. Write to me quite freely. I love to help my girls.”

So Kitty wrote quite freely, and as honestly as any girl of eighteen ever writes: her hopes and fears, her household troubles, her literary ambitions. And in the columns of the Girls’ Very Own Friend Aunt Kate replied with all the tender grace and delightful warmth that characterised her utterances.

The idea of calling on Aunt Kate occurred to Kitty as she was “putting on her things” to go to the Guildhall. She instantly threw the plain “everyday” hat from her, and pulled her best hat from its tissue-paper nest in the black bandbox. She put on her best blouse – the cream-coloured one with the browny lace on it, and her best brown silk skirt. She recklessly added her best brown shoes and gloves, and the lace pussy-boa. (I don’t know what the milliner’s name for the thing is. It goes round the neck, and hangs its soft and fluffy ends down nearly to one’s knees.) Then she looked at herself in the glass, gave a few last touches to her hair and veil, and nodded to herself.

“You’ll do, my dear,” said Kitty.

Aunt Eliza was providentially absent at Bath nursing a sick friend, and the black-bugled duenna, hastily imported from Tunbridge Wells, could not be expected to know which was Kitty’s best frock, and which the gloves that ought only to have been worn at church.

When Kitty’s music lesson was over, she stood for a moment on the steps of the Guildhall School, looking down towards the river. Then she shrugged her pretty shoulders.

“I don’t care. I’m going to,” she said, and turned resolutely towards Tudor Street. Kitty had been to a high school: therefore she was not obviously shy. She asked her way frankly and easily of carman, or clerk, or errand-boy; and though, at the door of the dingy office in a little court off Fleet Street, her heart beat thickly as she read the blue-enamelled words, Girls’ Very Own Friend, her manner as she walked into the office betrayed no nervousness, and, indeed, struck the grinning idle office boy as that of “a bloomin’ duchess.”

“I want to see – ” she began; and then suddenly the awkwardness of her position struck her. She did not know Aunt Kate’s surname. Abruptly to ask this grinning lout for “Aunt Kate” seemed absolutely indecorous. “I want to see the editor,” she ended.

She waited in the grimy office while the boy disappeared through an inner door, marked in dingy white letters with the magic words, “Editor – Private.” A low buzz of voices came to her through the door. She looked at the pigeon-holes where heaps of back numbers of the Girls’ Very Own lay in a dusty retirement. She looked at the insurance company’s tasteless almanack that hung all awry on the wall, and still the buzz went on. Then suddenly some one laughed inside, and the laugh did not please Kitty. The next moment the boy returned, grinning more repulsively than ever, and said: “Walk this way.”

She walked that way, past the boy; the door fell to behind her, and she found herself in a cloud of tobacco smoke, compressed into a small room – a very dusty, untidy room – in which stood three young men. Their faces were grave and serious, but Kate could not forget that one of them had laughed, and laughed like that. Her chin went up about a quarter of an inch further.