He went towards the other young creature in the house. The old one lay above, in a different world remote and foreign. He and Rachel had the ground floor and all its nocturnal enchantment to themselves.

III

Mechanically, as he went into the kitchen, he drew his cigarette-case from his pocket. It was the proper gesture of a man in any minor crisis. He was not a frequenter of kitchens, and this visit, even more than the brief first one, seemed to him to be adventurous.

Mrs. Maldon's kitchen--or rather Rachel's--was small, warm (though the fire was nearly out), and agreeable to the eye. On the left wall was a deal dresser full of crockery, and on the right, under the low window, a narrow deal table. In front, opposite the door, gleamed the range, and on either side of the range were cupboards with oak-grained doors. There was a bright steel fender before the range, and then a hearth-rug on which stood an oak rocking-chair. The floor was a friendly chequer of red and black tiles. On the high mantelpiece were canisters and an alarm-clock and utensils; sundry other utensils hung on the walls, among the coloured images of sweet girls and Norse-like men offered by grocers and butchers under the guise of almanacs; and cupboard doors ajar dimly disclosed other utensils still, so that the kitchen had the effect of a novel, comfortable kind of workshop; which effect was helped by the clothes-drier that hung on pulley-ropes from the ceiling, next to the gas-pendant and to a stalact.i.te of onions.

The uncurtained window, instead of showing black, gave on another interior, whitewashed, and well illuminated by the kitchen gas. This other interior had, under a previous tenant of the property, been a lean-to greenhouse, but Mrs. Maldon esteeming a scullery before a greenhouse, it had been modified into a scullery. There it was that Julian Maldon had preferred to make his toilet. One had to pa.s.s through the scullery in order to get from the kitchen into the yard.

And the light of day had to pa.s.s through the imperfectly transparent gla.s.s roof of the scullery in order to reach the window of the unused room behind the parlour; and herein lay the reason why that room was unused, it being seldom much brighter than a crypt.

At the table stood Rachel, in her immense pinafore-ap.r.o.n, busy with knives and forks and spoons, and an enamel basin from which steam rose gently. Louis looked upon Rachel, and for the first time in his life liked an ap.r.o.n! It struck him as an exceedingly piquant addition to the young woman's garments. It suited her; it set off the tints of her notable hair; and it suited the kitchen. Without delaying her work, Rachel made the protector of the house very welcome. Obviously she was in a high state of agitation. For an instant Louis feared that the agitation was due to anxiety on account of Mrs. Maldon.

"Nothing serious up with the old lady, is there?" he asked, pinching the cigarette to regularize the tobacco in it.

"Oh, _no_!"

The exclamation in its absolute sincerity dissipated every trace of his apprehension. He felt gay, calmly happy, and yet excited too. He was sure, then, that Rachel's agitation was a pleasurable agitation.

It was caused solely by his entrance into the kitchen, by the compliment he was paying to her kitchen! Her eyes glittered; her face shone; her little movements were electric; she was intensely conscious of herself--all because he had come into her kitchen! She could not conceal--perhaps she did not wish to conceal--the joy that his near presence inspired. Louis had had few adventures, very few, and this experience was exquisite and wondrous to him. It roused, not the fatuous c.o.xcomb, nor the Lothario, but that in him which was honest and high-spirited. A touch of the male's vanity, not surprising, was to be excused.

"Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel, "had an idea that it was _me_ who suggested your staying all night instead of your cousin." She raised her chin, and peered at nothing through the window as she rubbed away at a spoon.

"But when?" Louis demanded, moving towards the fire. It appeared to him that the conversation had taken a most interesting turn.

"When?... When you brought the tray in here for me, I suppose."

"And I suppose you explained to her that I had the idea all out of my own little head?"

"I told her that I should never have dreamed of asking such a thing!"

The susceptible and proud young creature indicated that the suggestion was one of Mrs. Maldon's rare social errors, and that Mrs. Maldon had had a narrow escape of being snubbed for it by the woman of the world now washing silver. "I'm no more afraid of burglars than you are,"

Rachel added. "I should just like to catch a burglar here--that I should!"

Louis indulgently doubted the reality of this courage. He had been too hastily concluding that what Rachel resented was an insinuation of undue interest in himself, whereas she now made it seem that she was objecting merely to any reflection upon her valour: which was much less exciting to him. Still, he thought that both causes might have contributed to her delightful indignation.

"Why was she so keen about having one of us to sleep here to-night?"

Louis inquired.

"Well, I don't know that she was," answered Rachel. "If you hadn't said anything--"

"Oh, but do you know what she said to me upstairs?"

"No."

"She didn't want me even to go back to my digs for my things.

Evidently she doesn't care for the house to be left even for half an hour."

"Well, of course old people are apt to get nervous, you know--especially when they're not well."

"Funny, isn't it?"

There was perfect unanimity between them as to the irrational singularity and sad weakness of aged persons.

Louis remarked--

"She said you would make everything right for me upstairs."

"I have done--I hope," said Rachel.

"Thanks awfully!"

One part of the table was covered with newspaper. Suddenly Rachel tore a strip off the newspaper, folded the strip into a spill, and, lighting it at the gas, tendered it to Louis' unlit cigarette.

The climax of the movement was so quick and unexpected as almost to astound Louis. For he had been standing behind her, and she had not turned her head before making the spill. Perhaps there was a faint reflection of himself in the window. Or perhaps she had eyes in her hair. Beyond doubt she was a strange, rare, angelic girl. The gesture with which she modestly offered the spill was angelic; it was divine; it was one of those phenomena which persist in a man's memory for decades. At the very instant of its happening he knew that he should never forget it.

The man of fashion blushed as he inhaled the first smoke created by her fire.

Rachel dropped the heavenly emblem, all burning, into the ash-bin of the range, and resumed her work.

Louis coughed. "Any law against sitting down?" he asked.

"You're very welcome," she replied primly.

"I didn't know I might smoke," he said.

She made no answer at first, but just as Louis had ceased to expect an answer, she said--

"I should think if you can smoke in the sitting-room you can smoke in the kitchen--shouldn't you?"

"I should," said he.

There was silence, but silence not disagreeable. Louis, lolling in the chair, and slightly rocking it, watched Rachel at her task. She completely immersed spoons and forks in the warm water, and then rubbed them with a brush like a large nail-brush, giving particular attention to the inside edges of the p.r.o.ngs of the forks; and then she laid them all wet on a thick cloth to the right of the basin. But of the knives she immersed only the blades, and took the most meticulous care that no drop of water should reach the handles.

"I never knew knives and forks and things were washed like that,"

observed Louis.

"They generally aren't," said Rachel. "But they ought to be. I leave all the other washing-up for the charwoman in the morning, but I wouldn't trust these to her." (The charwoman had been washing up cutlery since before Rachel was born.) "They're all alike," said Rachel.

Louis acquiesced sagely in this broad generalization as to charwomen.

"Why don't you wash the handles of the knives?" he queried.

"It makes them come loose."

"Really?"

"Do you mean to say you didn't know that water, especially warm water with soda in it, loosens the handles?" She showed astonishment, but her gaze never left the table in front of her.

"Not me!"