Part 12

He stood behind her in an attitude while Chopin's magnificent chords rolled upward--to Gerald Vincent's books, and down to the gray-haired woman in the chintz-covered chair, before they stole out of the open window into the Dutch garden and the indefinite wood beyond, as if they sought the cathedral.

"Margaret," cried Hannah, hurrying from the kitchen, "close the piano at once. Sunday is no time for playing."

"It's nothing frivolous," said Margaret; "it's a funeral march."

"I'll not have it done," Hannah answered doggedly, always jealous of Margaret's accomplishments. "There's a shake in it, and it's a piece only fit for week-days."

"People used to be buried on Sundays; what harm can there be in a funeral piece?" Mrs. Vincent asked.

"It was played at my request," said Mr. Garratt. "I'll ask for it next time on a week-day, Miss Margaret. I shall be here again soon," he added, in a lower tone.

Hannah went up to the piano, locked it and put the key into her pocket. "Mr. Garratt," she said, turning upon him, "I think you had better make up your mind who it is you come to see week-days or Sundays, then we shall know."

"I've known all along," he said, casting prudence to the winds.

"Well, then, you'd better speak and be done with it."

"It isn't you, Miss Barton; so now you know."

Mrs. Vincent stood up and looked at him, grave and distressed.

"And, pray, who is it?" Hannah asked; it seemed a needless question, but nothing else suggested itself and something had to be said.

"Well, since you want to know, it's Miss Vincent. I've been in love with her from the first moment I set eyes on her, and that's the truth. As for you, Miss Barton, your temper is a little more than I can stand, and I wouldn't be hired to live with you."

"Mr. Garratt--" Mrs. Vincent began.

"Mrs. Vincent," he said, turning round on her sharply, "let me speak. I came here to look after Miss Barton, I frankly confess it; but I wasn't in love with her, I only wanted to be, and I've found out that I can't be. It's no good, her temper is altogether more than I could risk, so now I've said it."

"Hannah, it's not my fault," Margaret said, going towards the door, and feeling that absence would again be the better part of valor.

"Stop, please, Miss Vincent," Mr. Garratt exclaimed. "May I beg you to remain a minute?" He shut the door and stood with his back to it, boldly facing the three women before him: Mrs. Vincent in calm astonishment, Hannah petrified but scarlet with rage and dismay, and Margaret feeling that a crisis had indeed come at last but not able to restrain a little unwilling admiration for Mr. Garratt's courage. "I want you to hear what I have to say," he went on; "Mrs. Vincent, I love Miss Margaret. I think she is the most beautiful girl in the world--the most beautiful young lady she would like me to say, perhaps; but I can't see that what I have heard about her to-day makes any difference, and I told her what I thought of her this morning in the wood before I knew anything about her family--"

"Oh!" came a note of rage from Hannah.

"And I've told her so at every other chance I've had of saying it, which hasn't been very often, for she wouldn't give me any, and Hannah has kept hold of me--as tight as a dog does of a rat. But I love Miss Margaret, I love the ground she walks on, and I'll marry her to-morrow if she'll have me." Mr. Garratt had become vehement.

"I wouldn't--I wouldn't--" Margaret said under her breath, but he took no notice.

"And I'll never give up the hope of her. I'm happy to hear that though she's likely to be the daughter of a lord, she's not likely to have any money, so it can't be thought that I'm looking after that. I don't want a penny with her. I understand that the farm is going to be Miss Barton's, and I hope she'll keep it. I want Margaret, and I want her just as she is and without a penny. I don't care what I do for her, nor how hard I work. I can make her comfortable now--and I'll make her rich some day--"

"Mr. Garratt, it's all impossible!" Margaret broke in.

"You say so now, Miss Margaret," he answered; "but when you come to think it over perhaps you'll feel different. And you'll see that in talking to Hannah I've only been trying to do what I came to do, but I can't go on with it, and there's an end of it. It's no good saying I don't love you, for I do, and I don't see why I shouldn't say it either. I'd do anything in the world to get you, and everything in the world when I had got you. I'm going away now," he said, quickly, suddenly opening the door, "but I'll write to you to-morrow, Miss Margaret, and you'd better think over what I say in the letter. You needn't think you'll be standing in Hannah's way, for I'd rather be roasted on a gridiron than marry her. Good-night, Mrs. Vincent; I hope you'll forgive me. Miss Barton, I wish you a very good-evening. I know the way to the stables, and can put the pony to myself." He stood holding the door to for a moment, then opened it, and with something like real passion in his voice--it swept over his listeners and convinced them--he added: "Miss Margaret, I'm not ashamed of it, I'm proud of it, and I look back to say before every one once more that I love you, more than I ever thought to love anybody in the world, and I'd rather marry you than have ten thousand a year. Good-bye." He shut the door, and a minute later they saw him go slowly past the window on his way to the stable.

As if by common consent they waited and listened for the sound of Mr. Garratt's departing wheels. It seemed to form an accompaniment to Hannah's wrath, which burst forth with his departure.

That night, while Hannah was still testing the bolts below, Margaret went softly into her mother's room.

"Mother, dear," she whispered, "I want to tell you something, and you mustn't be unhappy, you must just trust me, darling; I shall never be in Hannah's way again, for I shall go to London."

"It would break my heart!" Mrs. Vincent said, with almost a sob. "I'm growing old, and am not so strong as I used to be. I couldn't bear to part from you."

"But, mother dear, I cannot stay here any longer." She lifted her mother's hands and kissed her fingers. "I cannot, darling!"

"But where would you go in London?" Mrs. Vincent asked, for she herself felt the impossibility of peace at Woodside Farm while Margaret remained and her husband was absent.

"I shall go to Miss Hunstan first. Sometimes I think I should like to be an actress, too."

"You mustn't, Margaret!" Mrs. Vincent cried in terror. "Hannah would never let you enter the house again, for she says that play-actors come from Satan and go to him again when their day is done."

Hannah came up-stairs and stood in the doorway. Margaret faced her with her arm round her mother's shoulder.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"Leave me alone," Margaret said, gently. "To-morrow I shall go to London."

"And what will you do there? You that never did a day's work in a week, or said a prayer on Sundays, or asked a blessing on a meal, and that belong to those who are ashamed to let people know what they are. Is your head turned because Mr. Garratt has been carried away by your ways and artfulness."

"I'll leave him to you, Hannah, and go away to-morrow."

"I'll take care that you do nothing of the sort. You will stay here till your father comes back and learn to behave yourself."

Margaret made no answer. She pushed her mother gently down into the big chair by the wardrobe and knelt by her and kissed her gray hairs and the thin face and the muslin round her throat and the fringe of the shawl that was about her shoulders.

"Come, get to your bed," Hannah said; "we don't want to be kept here all night."

"Good-bye," Margaret whispered to her mother, kissing her softly once again. Then she rose and slowly walked away. "Good-night," she said to Hannah over her shoulder as she went to her own room.

"I'll lock her up if I have any nonsense with her," she heard Hannah say, as she shut the door.

Margaret sat for a long time thinking. "It will be better to go and be done with it," she said at last. "Hannah might prevent me in the morning; there would be another scene, and it's enough to kill mother--I can't let her bear it any longer."

Wearily she reached the Gladstone bag that her father had given her, down from the shelf at the top of the cupboard in the wall. It was not very large, and luckily it was light; she felt that she could carry it quite well to the station. She put together the things she thought she might want immediately, the bag held them quite easily. Then she drew out a trunk and packed the rest of her clothes into it. At the far end of the room there was a little old-fashioned bureau in which she kept the two quarters' money that had come since her father went away. She took it out and looked at it wonderingly. And at last she sat down to write to her mother. As she opened her blotting-book she saw a sheet of note-paper that she had spoiled on the day she first wrote to Miss Hunstan. It set her thinking of Tom Carringford, and that awful tea at which Mr. Garratt had triumphantly put in his remarks; and suddenly she broke down and cried, for, after all, she was only a girl, and very lonely. Perhaps the tears made her feel better, for she took up her pen, but a little incoherent letter was all she could manage; she gave her mother Miss Hunstan's address, and said she would write again as soon as possible and every Sunday morning, and that she would love her every hour, and be her own girl and worthy of her. When it was done she laid it on the little black mahogany table, put on her every-day cape and hat, and took up her bag, hesitated, and looked round incredulously.

It was such a strange thing to leave the house in the middle of the night, she could hardly believe that she was awake. She opened the door very cautiously and listened, but all was dark and still, save for the ticking of the old-fashioned clock in the passage below. She went softly down and waited and listened again, but no one had heard her. Along the passage to the back door, for there were not so many bolts to it as to the front one, and it could be opened more gently. The key was hanging on a hook, she took it down, turned it in the lock, drew back the one long bolt, and stepped out. The summer air came soft and cool upon her face, but the sky was clouded. She drew the door to, locked it outside, and slipped the key under it back into the passage, and stood a fugitive in the darkness. She grasped her bag tightly and went softly over the stones that were just outside the back door, and so round to the garden, down the green pathway and through the gate; it closed with a click, and she wondered if Hannah heard it in her sleep; across the field and over the stile--she thought of Mr. Garratt--into the next field, and then suddenly she realized the folly of this headlong departure. She might at least have waited till the morning, for there was no train till six o'clock. She had five or six hours in which to walk as many miles. She sat down on the step of the stile and strained her eyes to see the trees that made her cathedral, but they were only a mass of blackness in the night; she left her bag by the stile, and went back across the field to the garden gate, and looked at the house once more, and at her mother's darkened window, then went back again to the stile. Gradually the natural exultation of youth came over her.

"I'm going to London," she said, breathlessly, "to seek my fortune just as Dick Whittington did, and as Lena Lakeman said I ought to have done."

She stooped and felt the grass--it was quite dry; she used her bag as a pillow, and pulled her cloak round her and stretched herself out to rest for an hour or two on the soft green ground. "Oh, if mother could know that I was lying here in the fields, what would she say? But it's lovely with the cool air coming on my face, and I have a sense of being free already."

But sleep would not come; she was restless and excited, and it seemed as if the shadows of all the people she had known crowded about her. She could feel her mother's hand upon her head, hear Hannah scolding, and see her father holding aloof--till she could bear it no longer. She sat up and looked round; the dawn was beginning; in the dim light she could see the green of the grass.

"Dear land," she said, as she put her head down once more, "when shall I walk over you again towards my mother's house?"

XXII

Margaret's heart beat fast as the hansom stopped at the house in Great College Street. Mrs. Gilman opened the door.

"Miss Hunstan went away on Saturday night, miss," she said; "she's gone to Germany for three weeks."

"Oh yes--to Bayreuth; she said she might go, but I didn't think it would be so soon." Margaret stood dismayed.

"Is there anything I can do, miss? You are the young lady that came that morning with Mr. Carringford, and put out the flowers?"

"Yes--yes! I thought Miss Hunstan would advise me," Margaret answered, desperately. "I have come to London alone this time, not with my father, and I want to live somewhere." For a moment Mrs. Gilman looked at her doubtfully.

"You are very young to be alone," she said.

"Oh yes, I'm very young; but that has nothing to do with it."

"And you have no friends in London?"

"I'm afraid they're all away," Margaret answered. "Mrs. and Miss Lakeman are going to Scotland to-day."

"I know them," Mrs. Gilman said, her face brightening, "and you know Mr. Carringford, too?"

"Oh yes. I stayed at the Langham Hotel with my father," she went on, "but I am afraid to go there now--alone."

"I have a bedroom and sitting-room; perhaps you would like them, miss; they are the drawing-rooms. Miss Hunstan preferred the lower floor because it was easier to come in and out. I don't know if they'd be too expensive?"

"Oh no," said Margaret, "I have plenty of money," for it seemed to her that she had an inexhaustible fortune; and as this was a pleasant statement, Mrs. Gilman invited her in with alacrity. And so in an hour she was installed in two wainscoted rooms--as comfortable, if not as dainty, as Miss Hunstan's beneath, and Mrs. Gilman had explained to Margaret that she had known Miss Hunstan ever since she came to England, and had often gone to the theatre with her or fetched her back. And Margaret had told Mrs. Gilman that she wanted to be an actress, too.

"In time, miss, I suppose," Mrs. Gilman answered, with a motherly smile. Then, when a telegram had been despatched to Chidhurst--for Margaret felt that her mother's heart had been aching all the morning--and when she had had breakfast alone in her own little sitting-room, she felt that she had indeed set out on her way through the world alone. She determined to make no sign to Mr. Farley till the Lakemans had started for Scotland--they were to start at ten o'clock that morning from Euston. To-morrow it would be safe, and she would write and ask if he would let her "walk on" as Miss Hunstan had done once.

But suppose he refused, what then? Suddenly there flashed upon her the remembrance of the dramatic agency in the Strand, that she had seen advertised when she was at the Langham. If Mr. Farley could do nothing for her, the agency might help her; it had said that engagements were guaranteed. A spirit of adventure made her determine to try and find it that very afternoon. It was in the Strand, where her father had bought her the Gladstone bag, and, in the odd way that trifles sometimes lodge in one's memory, the number of the house had remained with her. But now she was tired out with the long excitement and the night beneath the sky. She put her brown head down on a pillow, and in ten minutes was fast asleep.

She asked Mrs. Gilman for the address, and wrote to Miss Hunstan before she went out--a long letter, telling her all she had done and longed to do, and asking for her advice. Then she went in search of the agency, and found it easily. It was on a second floor, up a dirty staircase; she stopped to gather courage, and gave a feeble knock at the door, on which was painted in white letters, "Mr. Baker, Theatrical Agent."

"Come in!" said a voice. She entered and found a large room hung indiscriminately with playbills and advertisements. At a writing-table placed across the window sat a man of forty, with a florid face and a bald head. In an easy-chair by the fireplace was a woman, expensively and rather showily dressed. Her large, gray eyes were bright but expressionless. She had a quantity of fair hair done up elaborately; the color on her cheeks did not vary, she might have been any age between twenty-eight and forty. Leaning against the fireplace was a young man, clean shaven and well-dressed. Margaret heard him say:

"Certainly not, I won't pay a penny; if a manager has no faith in it he can leave it alone."

"You'll never get any one to risk it," the woman said, with a laugh. "Regeneration never pays--" she stopped as Margaret entered, and did not try to disguise the admiration into which she was surprised.

But Margaret felt that it would be impossible to speak before her. "Perhaps I'd better come another time?" she began. The young man by the fireplace looked at her intently, but he took the hint.

"Good-morning, Baker, I'll come round later," he said, and, with another look at Margaret, departed.

The man at the desk turned to her, "Now, madam, what can we do for you? You can speak before Miss Ramsey--in fact, if you've come about an engagement, she might be able to give you some advice." Margaret glanced quickly at the woman and then round the ugly office, and as she did so a little of the glamour of the stage seemed to vanish. Only for a moment; then her courage came back, and hope, which is never fickle long to youth, stood by her. This office was not the stage, not even its threshold, she thought; it was only the little narrow street, dreary and ill-kept, that branched off from the main thoroughfare.

"You look as if you'd come from the country," Miss Ramsey said. Her voice showed a desire to be friendly.

"Yes, I've come from the country," Margaret answered. She turned to Mr. Baker again, "I want to go on the stage," she said, "and understood that you could give help and advice."

"Certainly," he said, in a business-like tone, and opened a book beside him. "We charge one guinea for entering your name."

She looked at him, and a smile came to her lips. "I want to know first what you can do for me," she answered, and Mr. Baker came to the conclusion that she was not such a fool as he had imagined.

"We can do everything for you, my dear young lady, but you must give us a reason for taking an interest in you. We don't give advice gratis--" the door opened and a man entered.

"Can you tell me," he asked, referring to a notebook, "where 'The Ticket of Leave Man' was played last, and whether Miss Josephine de Grey, who came out in the provinces last year, has had any engagements lately?"

Mr. Baker consulted two books from a shelf behind him and answered off-hand, "'Ticket of Leave Man,' Prince of Wales's Theatre, Harrogate, 22d last February, for a week. Miss Josephine de Grey played five nights at the Royalty this March; engagement came to an end in consequence of the non-success of the management."

"Thank you," the man said, put down a fee, and departed. The incident had its effect on Margaret.

"I will pay the guinea," she said. "Would you tell me how I am to begin?"

He took up the book once more--"Margaret Vincent--really your own name, is it?--tall, graceful, good-looking. Shall we say nineteen? Would you like to play boys' parts?"

"Certainly not."

"Burlesque or singing parts?"

"No, I want to act, or learn to act, in real plays. Some day I want to play in Shakespeare's;" she felt that it was sacrilege to mention his name in these surroundings. "Of course I know I must play very small parts at first."

"Any one to back you with money?"

"No."

"Any friends among the aristocracy or the press?"

"No."

"She'll soon have them," said Miss Ramsey, with a laugh, which Mr. Baker echoed in a manner that Margaret found particularly offensive.

"I quite agree," he said. "And you don't know any one in the profession?" he asked her.

"I know Mr. Dawson Farley, and Miss Hunstan a little."

His manner changed altogether. "My dear young lady, what could be better? They are at the top of the profession." He closed the book as if he wanted time for reflection. "Our fee for appearance without salary is two guineas; with salary, ten per cent. I think you said Great College Street, Westminster--secluded and near the Abbey--very nice indeed," writing down the address. "You might call again, Miss Vincent, or you shall hear from us," and he closed the book.

Margaret turned quickly to the door, giving Miss Ramsey and Mr. Baker a little haughty nod between them.

"I don't think much of the young lady's manner," Mr. Baker said, after she had gone, "but her face ought to be a fortune. I wonder if she really knows Farley?"

Miss Ramsey got up and looked at herself in the fly-blown glass and at the dirty cards stuck in its frame. "Wish I were as young as that girl; I'm tired of playing in rubbish," she said.

"Why don't you ask Farley to give you something?"

"No good. I can't stand his patronizing ways."

"Make Murray write you a part."

"Bosh! He read me an act of one of his plays, long-winded talk and nothing to do, too much poetry, and not enough--not enough bigness for me. I want something to move about with in a play. Besides, he won't risk any money even on his own stuff; too platonic for that--platonics are always economical. Ta-ta."

"Have a whiskey and soda?"

"No, thank you," and she, too, disappeared down the dirty staircase that Margaret had taken a few minutes before.

XXIII

It was five o'clock when Margaret knocked at the street door in Great College Street again.

"There's a lady waiting for you," Mrs. Gilman said, as she let her in.

"A lady!" Margaret exclaimed, and hurried up-stairs. In the drawing-room sat Hannah. She wore her blue alpaca frock and black straw hat with the upstanding bow on one side; she had thrown aside her cape, and the moment she saw Margaret she took off her hat as if to prepare herself for the fray.

"Well," she said, "this is a pretty thing to do, isn't it? You'll just come home with me this very moment."

Margaret stood with her back to the door. "It's very kind of you to come up, Hannah, but I'm going to stay here," she answered.

"You'll do nothing of the sort."

The determination in Hannah's voice put the bit between Margaret's teeth. "I am going to stay here," she repeated.

"Either you come home this minute," replied Hannah, who had made up her mind that a firm policy was the right one to use with Margaret, "or you don't come at all."

"Then I don't come at all--till my father returns."

"And that won't be for another year, if then. There was a letter this morning which showed it plain enough."

"Then I'll come back when you are married, to take care of our mother."

Hannah turned pale with rage. "Now look here, Margaret," she said, "and understand that I don't want any taunts from you. You've taken good care to put an end to all that forever. It's my belief that you think Mr. Garratt is going to follow you up to London." At which Margaret raised her head quickly, but she only half convinced Hannah.

"I don't want Mr. Garratt," she said, "and I won't let him know where I am, I promise you that, and if he finds out he shall not enter the house. He lost his temper yesterday, but he didn't mean any of the things he said, and now that I'm away he'll come back to you."

"I'll take good care he never enters the place," said Hannah. "Perhaps you don't know that he's written you a letter? I could tell his handwriting on the envelope, though he has tried to alter it."