It may be asked how a young bachelor, with private means and a fine salary, living in a district where prices are low and social conventions not costly, could have come to such a pa.s.s. The answer is that Louis had no private means, and that his salary was not fine. The thousand pounds had gradually vanished, as a thousand pounds will, in the refinements of material existence and in the pursuit of happiness.

His bank-account had long been in abeyance. His salary was three pounds a week. Many a member of the liberal professions--many a solicitor, for example--brings up a family on three pounds a week in the provinces. But for a Lieutenant-General's nephew, who had once had a thousand pounds in one lump, three pounds a week was inadequate. As a fact, Louis conceived himself "Art Director" of Horrocleave's, and sincerely thought that as such he was ill-paid. Herein was one of his private excuses for eccentricity with the petty cash. It may also be asked what Louis had to show for his superb expenditure. The answer is, nothing.

With the seventy-three pounds desolatingly clear in his mind, he quitted his desk in order to reconnoitre the outer and larger portion of the counting-house. He went as far as the archway, and saw black smoke being blown downwards from heaven into Friendly Street. A policeman was placidly regarding the smoke as he strolled by. And Louis, though absolutely sure that the officer would not carry out his plain duty of summoning Horrocleave's for committing a smoke-nuisance, did not care for the spectacle of the policeman. He returned to the inner office, and locked the door. The "staff" and the "hands" had all gone, save one or two piece-workers in the painting-shop across the yard.

The night watchman, fresh from bed, was moving fussily about the yard.

He nodded with respect to Louis through the grimy window. Louis lit the gas, and spread a newspaper in front of the window by way of blind. And then he began a series of acts on the petty-cash book. The office clock indicated twenty past six. He knew that time was short, but he had a natural gift for the invention and execution of these acts, and he calculated that under half an hour would suffice for them. But when he next looked at the clock, the acts being accomplished, one hour had elapsed; it had seemed to him more like a quarter of an hour. Yet as blotting-paper cannot safely be employed in such delicate calligraphic feats as those of Louis', even an hour was not excessive for what he had done. An operator clumsier, less cool, less cursory, more cautious than himself might well have spent half a night over the job. He locked up the book, washed his hands and face with remarkable celerity in a filthy lavatory basin, brushed his hair, removed his cuff-shields, changed his coat, and fled at speed, leaving the key of the office with the watchman.

III

"I suppose the old lady was getting anxious?" said he brightly (but in a low tone so that the old lady should not hear), as he shook hands with Rachel in the lobby. He had recognized her in front of him up the lane--had, in fact, nearly overtaken her; and she was standing at the open door when he mounted the steps. She had had just time to prove to Mrs. Maldon, by a "He's coming" thrown through the sitting-room doorway, that she had not waited for Louis Fores and walked up with him.

"Yes," Rachel replied in the same tone, most deceitfully leaving him under the false impression that it was the old lady's anxiety that had sent her out. She had, then, emerged scathless in reputation from the indiscreet adventure!

The house was animated by the arrival of Louis; at once it seemed to live more keenly when he had crossed the threshold. And Louis found pleasure in the house--in the welcoming aspect of its interior, in Rachel's evident excited gladness at seeing him, in her honest and agreeable features, and in her sheer girlishness. A few minutes earlier he had been in the sordid and dreadful office. Now he was in another and a cleaner, prettier world. He yielded instantly and fully to its invitation, for he had the singular faculty of being able to cast off care like a garment. He felt sympathetic towards women, and eager to employ for their contentment all the charm which he knew he possessed. He gave himself, generously, in every gesture and intonation.

"Office, auntie, office!" he exclaimed, elegantly entering the parlour. "Sack-cloth! Ashes! Hallo! where's Julian? Is he late too?"

When he had received the news about Julian Maldon he asked to see the telegram, and searched out its place of origin, and drew forth a pocket time-table, and remarked in a wise way that he hoped Julian would "make the connection" at Derby. Lastly he predicted the precise minute at which Julian "ought" to be knocking at the front door. And both women felt their ignorant, puzzled inferiority in these recondite matters of travel, and the comfort of having an omniscient male in the house.

Then slightly drawing up his dark blue trousers with an accustomed movement, he carefully sat down on the Chesterfield, and stroked his soft black moustache (which was estimably long for a fellow of twenty-three) and patted his black hair.

"Rachel, you didn't fasten that landing window, after all!" said Mrs.

Maldon, looking over Louis' head at the lady companion, who hesitated modestly near the door. "I've tried, but I couldn't."

"Neither could I, Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel. "I was thinking perhaps Mr. Fores wouldn't mind--"

She did not explain that her failure to fasten the window had been more or less deliberate, since, while actually tugging at the window, she had been visited by the sudden delicious thought: "How nice it would be to ask Louis Fores to do this hard thing for me!"

And now she had asked him.

"Certainly!" Louis jumped to his feet, and off he went upstairs.

Most probably, if the sudden delicious thought had not skipped into Rachel's brain, he would never have made that critical ascent to the first floor.

A gas-jet burned low on the landing.

"Let's have a little light on the subject," he cheerfully muttered to himself, as he turned on the gas to the full.

Then in the noisy blaze of yellow and blue light he went to the window and with a single fierce wrench he succeeded in pulling the catch into position. He was proud of his strength. It pleased him to think of the weakness of women; it pleased him to antic.i.p.ate the impressed thanks of the weak women for this exertion of his power on their behalf.

"Have you managed it so soon?" his aunt would exclaim, and he would answer in a carefully offhand way, "Of course. Why not?"

He was about to descend, but he remembered that he must not leave the gas at full. With his hand on the tap, he glanced perfunctorily around the little landing. The door of Mrs. Maldon's bedroom was in front of him, at right angles to the window. By the door, which was ajar, stood a cane-seated chair. Underneath the chair he perceived a whitish package or roll that seemed to be out of place there on the floor. He stooped and picked it up. And as the paper rustled peculiarly in his hand, he could feel his heart give a swift bound. He opened the roll.

It consisted of nothing whatever but bank-notes. He listened intently, with ear c.o.c.ked and rigid limbs, and he could just catch the soothing murmur of women's voices in the parlour beneath the reverberating, solemn pulse of the lobby clock.

IV

Louis Fores had been intoxicated into a condition of poesy. He was deliciously incapable of any precise thinking; he could not formulate any theory to account for the startling phenomenon of a roll of bank-notes loose under a chair on a first-floor landing of his great-aunt's house; he could not even estimate the value of the roll--he felt only that it was indefinitely prodigious. But he had the most sensitive appreciation of the exquisite beauty of those pieces of paper. They were not merely beautiful because they stood for delight and indulgence, raising lovely visions of hosiers' and jewellers'

shops and the night interiors of clubs and restaurants--raising one clear vision of himself clasping a watch-bracelet on the soft arm of Rachel who had so excitingly smiled upon him a moment ago. They were beautiful in themselves; the aspect and very texture of them were beautiful--surpa.s.sing pictures and fine scenery. They were the most poetic things in the world. They transfigured the narrow, gaslit first-floor landing of his great-aunt's house into a secret and unearthly grove of bliss. He was drunk with quivering emotion.

And then, as he gazed at the divine characters printed in sable on the rustling whiteness, he was aware of a stab of ugly, coa.r.s.e pain. Up to the instant of beholding those bank-notes he had been convinced that his operations upon the petty-cash book would be entirely successful and that the immediate future of Horrocleave's was a.s.sured of tranquillity; he had been blandly certain that Horrocleave held no horrid suspicion against him, and that even if Horrocleave's pate did conceal a dark thought, it would be conjured at once away by the superficial reasonableness of the falsified accounts. But now his mind was terribly and inexplicably changed, and it seemed to him impossible to gull the acute and mighty Horrocleave. Failure, exposure, disgrace, ruin, seemed inevitable--and also intolerable. It was astonishing that he should have deceived himself into an absurd security. The bank-notes, by some magic virtue which they possessed, had opened his eyes to the truth. And they presented themselves as absolutely indispensable to him. They had sprung from naught, they belonged to n.o.body, they existed without a creative cause in the material world--and they were indispensable to him! Could it be conceived that he should lose his high and brilliant position in the town, that two policemen should hustle him into the black van, that the gates of a prison should clang behind him? It could not be conceived. It was monstrously inconceivable.... The bank-notes ... he saw them wavy, as through a layer of hot air.

A heavy knock on the front door below shook him and the floor and the walls. He heard the hurried feet of Rachel, the opening of the door, and Julian's harsh, hoa.r.s.e voice. Julian, then, was not quite an hour late, after all. The stir in the lobby seemed to be enormous, and very close to him; Mrs. Maldon had come forth from the parlour to greet Julian on his birthday.... Louis stuck the bank-notes into the side pocket of his coat. And as it were automatically his mood underwent a change, violent and complete. "I'll teach the old lady to drop notes all over the place," he said to himself. "I'll just teach her!" And he pictured his triumph as a wise male when, during the course of the feast, his great-aunt should stumble on her loss and yield to senile feminine agitation, and he should remark superiorly, with elaborate calm: "Here is your precious money, auntie. A good thing it was I and not burglars who discovered it. Let this be a lesson to you!... Where was it? It was on the landing carpet, if you please! That's where it was!" And the nice old creature's pathetic relief!

As he went jauntily downstairs there remained nothing of his mood of intoxication except a still thumping heart.

CHAPTER III

THE FEAST

I

The dramatic moment of the birthday feast came nearly at the end of the meal when Mrs. Maldon, having in mysterious silence disappeared for a s.p.a.ce to the room behind, returned with due pomp bearing a parcel in her dignified hands. During her brief absence Louis, Rachel, and Julian--hero of the night--had sat mute and somewhat constrained round the debris of the birthday pudding. The constraint was no doubt due partly to Julian's characteristic and notorious grim temper, and partly to mere antic.i.p.ation of a solemn event.

Julian Maldon in particular was self-conscious. He hated intensely to be self-conscious, and his feeling towards every witness of his self-consciousness partook always of the homicidal. Were it not that civilization has the means to protect itself, Julian might have murdered defenceless aged ladies and innocent young girls for the simple offence of having seen him blush.

He was a perfect specimen of a throw-back to original ancestry. He had been born in London, of an American mother, and had spent the greater part of his life in London. Yet London and his mother seemed to count for absolutely nothing at all in his composition. At the age of seventeen his soul, quitting the exile of London, had come to the Five Towns with a sigh of relief as if at the a.s.suagement of a long nostalgia, and had dropped into the district as into a socket. In three months he was more indigenous than a native. Any experienced observer who now chanced at a week-end to see him board the Manchester express at Euston would have been able to predict from his appearance that he would leave the train at Knype. He was an undersized man, with a combative and suspicious face. He regarded the world with crafty pugnacity from beneath frowning eyebrows. His expression said: "Woe betide the being who tries to get the better of me!" His expression said: "Keep off!" His expression said: "I am that I am. Take me or leave me, but preferably leave me. I loathe fuss, pretence, flourishes--any and every form of d.a.m.ned nonsense."

He had an excellent heart, but his att.i.tude towards it was the att.i.tude of his great-grandmother towards her front parlour--he used it as little as possible, and kept it locked up like a shame. In brief, he was more than a bit of a boor. And boorishness being his chief fault, he was quite naturally proud of it, counted it for the finest of all qualities, and scorned every manifestation of its opposite. To prove his inward sincerity he deemed it right to flout any form of external grace--such as politeness, neatness, elegance, compliments, small-talk, smooth words, and all ceremonial whatever. He would have died in torment sooner than kiss. He was averse even from shaking hands, and when he did shake hands he produced a carpenter's vice, crushed flesh and bone together, and flung the intruding pulp away. His hat was so heavy on his head that only by an exhausting and supreme effort could he raise it to a woman, and after the odious accident he would feel as humiliated as a fox-terrier after a bath. By the kind hazard of fate he had never once encountered his great-aunt in the street. He was superb in enmity--a true hero. He would quarrel with a fellow and say, curtly, "I'll never speak to you again"; and he never would speak to that fellow again. Were the last trump to blow and all the British Isles to be submerged save the summit of Snowdon, and he and that fellow to find themselves alone and safe together on the peak, he could still be relied upon never to speak to that fellow again. Thus would he prove that he was a man of his word and that there was no nonsense about him.

Strange though it may appear to the thoughtless, he was not disliked--much less ostracised. Codes differ. He conformed to one which suited the instincts of some thirty thousand other adult males in the Five Towns. Two strapping girls in the warehouse of his manufactory at Knype quarrelled over him in secret as the Prince Charming of those parts. Yet he had never addressed them except to inform them that if they didn't mind their p's and q's he would have them flung off the "bank" [manufactory]. Rachel herself had not yet begun to be prejudiced against him.

This monster of irascible cruelty regarded himself as a middle-aged person. But he was only twenty-five that day, and he did not look more, either, despite a stiff, strong moustache. He too, like Louis and Rachel, had the gestures of youth--the unconsidered, lithe movements of limb, the wistful, unteachable pride of his age, the touching self-confidence. Old Mrs. Maldon was indeed old among them.

II

She sat down in all her benevolent stateliness and with a slightly irritating deliberation undid the parcel, displaying a flattish leather case about seven inches by four, which she handed formally to Julian Maldon, saying as she did so--

"From your old auntie, my dear boy, with her loving wishes. You have now lived just a quarter of a century."

And as Julian, awkwardly grinning, fumbled with the spring-catch of the case, she was aware of having accomplished a great and n.o.ble act of surrender. She hoped the best from it. In particular, she hoped that she had saved the honour of her party and put it at last on a secure footing of urbane convivial success. For that a party of hers should fail in giving pleasure to every member of it was a menace to her legitimate pride. And so far fate had not been propitious. The money in the house had been, and was, on her mind. Then the lateness of the guests had disturbed her. And then Julian had aggrieved her by a piece of obstinacy very like himself. Arriving straight from a train journey, he had wanted to wash. But he would not go to the specially prepared bedroom, where a perfect apparatus awaited him. No, he must needs take off his jacket in the back room and roll up his sleeves and stamp into the scullery and there splash and rub like a stableman, and wipe himself on the common rough roller-towel. He said he preferred the "sink." (Offensive word! He would not even say "slop-stone," which was the proper word. He said "sink," and again "sink.")

And then, when the meal finally did begin Mrs. Maldon's serviette and silver serviette-ring had vanished. Impossible to find them! Mr.

Batchgrew had of course horribly disarranged the table, and in the upset the serviette and ring might have fallen unnoticed into the darkness beneath the table. But no search could discover them. Had the serviette and ring ever been on the table at all? Had Rachael perchance forgotten them? Rachael was certain that she had put them on the table. She remembered casting away a soiled serviette and replacing it with a clean one in accordance with Mrs. Maldon's command for the high occasion. She produced the soiled serviette in proof.

Moreover, the ring was not in the serviette drawer of the sideboard.

Renewed search was equally sterile.... At one moment Mrs. Maldon thought that she herself had seen the serviette and ring on the table early in the evening; but at the next she thought she had not.

Conceivably Mr. Batchgrew had taken them in mistake. Yes, a.s.suredly, he had taken them in mistake--somehow! And yet it was inconceivable that he had taken a serviette and ring in mistake. In mistake for what? No!...

Mystery! Excessively disconcerting for an old lady! In the end Rachel provided another clean serviette, and the meal commenced. But Mrs.

Maldon had not been able to "settle down" in an instant. The wise, pitying creatures in their twenties considered that it was absurd for her to worry herself about such a trifle. But was it a trifle? It was rather a denial of natural laws, a sinister miracle. Serviette-rings cannot walk, nor fly, nor be annihilated. And further, she had used that serviette-ring for more than twenty years. However, the hostess in her soon triumphed over the foolish old lady, and taken the head of the board with aplomb.