Part 15

Caston suddenly saw an answer to the question--a queer and a rather attractive answer, especially to a man who had fed for a month on solitude and had grown liable to fancies. He had all through this lonely month been gradually washing from his body and his mind the dust of his own times. He had sought to reproduce the quiet of an older age, and in the seeking had perhaps done more than reproduce. That was his thought. He had, perhaps, by ever so little, penetrated the dark veil which hides from men all days but their own--just enough, say, to catch a glimpse of a hand. He himself was becoming more and more harmonious with his house; the cries of the outer world hardly reached his ears in that little parlour which opened on to the hidden garden. It seemed to him that other times, through some thinning out of the thick curtain of his senses, were becoming actual and real just to him.

"The first month passed," he said to himself. "I was undisturbed; no sign was made. I was still too near to what I had left behind--London and the rest of it. But now I pass more and more over the threshold into that other century. First of all, I was only aware of a movement, a presence; then I was able to see--nothing much, it is true--only a small hand. But tonight I may see her to whom the hand belongs. In a week I may be admitted into her company."

Thus he argued, pretending to himself the while that he was merely playing with his fancy, pursuing it like a ball in a game, and ready to let it fall and lie the moment that he was tired. But the sudden hum of a motor-car upon his drive, and a joyous outcry of voices, soon dispelled the pretence. A party of his friends invaded him, clamouring for luncheon, and in his mind there sprang up a fear so strong that it surprised him. They would thicken the thinning curtain between himself and her whose hand had lain upon the table. They would drag him back into his own century. The whole process of isolation would have to begin again. The talk at luncheon was all of regattas and the tonnage of yachts. Caston sat at the table with his fear increasing. His visitors were friends he would have welcomed five weeks ago, and he would have gaily taken his part in their light talk. Now it was every moment on his lips to cry out:

"Hold your tongues and go!"

They went off at three o'clock, and a lady of the party wisely nodded a dainty head at him as he stood upon the steps, and remarked:

"You hated us visiting you, Mr. Caston. You have someone in that house--someone you won't show to us."

Caston coloured to the roots of his hair.

The lady laughed. "There--I knew I was right! Let me guess who it can be."

Caston raised his head in a quick protest.

"No, there is no one." He tried to laugh easily. "That's my trouble. There is no one, I am afraid."

They had driven his visitor away, without a doubt; and though he sat very still in his arm-chair that night, careful as a hunter by no abrupt movement to scare away his quarry, he sat undisturbed. He waited until the light was grey and the birds singing upon the lawn. He went to bed disappointed as a lover whose mistress had failed to keep her tryst.

On the next day he searched for and found the catalogue of the sale at which he had bought the table. The sale had been held at a house called Bylanes, some five miles from the Beaulieu river, and the furniture was advertised as the property of Geoffrey Trimingham, Esq., deceased, and sold by his young widow. Caston's memory was quickened by these meagre details. He recollected stories which he had heard during the three days of the sale. The Triminghams were a branch of the old Norfolk family of that name, and had settled in the New Forest so far back as the reign of the first George. Geoffrey Trimingham, however, had delayed marriage until well sped in years, and then had committed the common fault of marrying a young woman, who, with no children and no traditions to detain her in a neighbourhood which she considered gloomy, had, as soon as she was free, sold off house and furniture--lock, stock, and barrel--so that she might retire to what she considered the more elegant neighbourhood of Blandford Square.

This was all very well, but it did not bring Harry Gaston very much nearer to the identification of his visitor. She was a Trimingham, probably, but even that was by no means certain; and to what generation of Triminghams she belonged, he knew no more than he knew her Christian name. He searched the house for the keys of the table, but nowhere could he find them. He had never opened the drawers, he had never raised the lid. It seemed to him that he must have bought the table without the keys at all.

He might have broken it open, of course, and from time to time, as the evenings passed in an expectation which was not fulfilled, he was tempted to take a chisel in his hand and set to work. But he resisted. The table was not his. It was _hers_, and in her presence alone it must be opened.

Thus Caston passed a week, and then one evening there fell a shadow across the open page of his book. He looked swiftly up. He saw nothing but the empty room, and the flame of the lamp burned bright and steady. She was here, then, and as the conviction grew within him to a veritable exultation, he was aware of rustling of a woman's gown. The sound came from behind him. He turned with a leap of his heart, and saw her--saw her from the crown of her small head, with its thick brown hair, to the hem of her dress--not a shadow, not a vague shape dimly to be apprehended, but as actual as flesh and blood could be. She was dressed in a gown of pale blue satin of an ancient mode, and was slender as a child. Her face, too, was the face of one little more than a child, though pain and trouble had ravaged it.

She stood as though she had just stepped from the garden on to the window-seat, and so to the floor, and in her dark eyes there was a look of the direst urgency. She moved swiftly across the room to the table, pulled at the glass handles, and sought to lift the lid, and all in a feverish haste, with her young and troubled face twitching as though she were at pains to check her tears. Caston watched her eagerly. He noticed that once more her left hand was pressed flat upon the lid, as she tried to open the drawer, and then a flash of gold caught and held his eyes. Young though she was, she wore a wedding-ring. He had barely noticed it, when she turned from the table and came straight towards him. Caston rose from his chair. He heard himself saying once more:

"Can I help?"

But this time he did not laugh upon the words. She stood before him with so pitiful an appeal, her hands clutched together in front of her, her face convulsed. He spoke with the deference due to those who have greatly suffered. Then came to him a whisper in reply, so low that he barely heard it--so low that perhaps he only imagined it.

"Yes."

Caston went across to the table, and, opening his knife, inserted it under the lid. The girl stood at his side, a gleam of hope in her eyes. Caston ran the blade of the knife along to the lock and turned it, prising up the lid. There was a sound of the splitting of wood, and the lock gave. Caston lifted the lid. It rose on hinges, and had upon the under-side a bevelled mirror, and it disclosed, when open, a fixed tray lined with blue velvet. The tray was empty.

But now that the lid was raised in the centre of the table, the side-pieces could be opened too. The girl opened the one at her hand. Caston saw a well, lined, like the rest, with velvet, and filled with the knick-knacks and belongings of a girl. She took them out hurriedly, heaping them together on the tray--a walnut-wood housewife shaped and shut like a large card-case, with scissors, thimble, needle-case, tiny penknife, all complete--for she opened it, as she opened everything in the haste and urgency of her search--a large needle-case of ivory, a walnut-wood egg, which unscrewed and showed within a reel with silk still wound upon it, and a little oval box with a label on the top of it, and the royal arms. Caston read the label:

STRINGER'S CANDY. PREPARED AND SOLD ONLY BY THE PROPRIETOR, R. STRINGER, DRUGGIST TO THE KING.

The top fell from the little box, and a shower of shells rattled out of it. Bags of beads followed, wash-leather bags carefully tied up, and some of them filled with the minutest of beads. It made Caston's eyes ache to think of anyone stringing them together. In the end the well was emptied, and, with a gesture of despair, the girl slipped round to the other side of Caston. She turned back the flap upon this side.

On the other side were the implements of work; here was the finished product. She lifted out two small anti-macassars, completely made up of tiny beads in crystal and turquoise colours, and worked in the most intricate patterns. They were extraordinarily heavy, and must have taken months in the making. Under these were still more beads, in boxes and in bags and coiled in long strings. She heaped them out upon the tray, and looked into the well. Her face flashed into relief. She thrust her hands in; she drew out from the very bottom a faded bundle of letters. She clasped them for a moment close against her heart, then very swiftly, as though she feared to be stopped, she took them over to the fireplace.

A fire was burning in the grate, for the night was chilly. She dropped the bundle into the flames, and stood there while it was consumed. Caston saw the glare of the flames behind the paper light up here and there a word or a phrase, and then the edges curled over and the sparks ran across the sheets, and the letters changed to white ashes and black flakes. When all was done, she sighed and turned to Caston with a wistful smile of thanks. She moved back to the table, and with a queer orderliness which seemed somehow in keeping with her looks and manner, she replaced the beads, the little boxes, and the paraphernalia of her work carefully in the wells, and shut the table up. She turned again to Caston at the end. Just for a second she stood before him, her face not happy, but cleared of its trouble, and with a smile upon her lips. She stood, surely a living thing. Caston advanced to her. "You will stay now!" he cried, and she was gone.

This is the story as Harry Caston told it to Mrs. Wordingham when he returned to London in the autumn. She ridiculed it gently and with a trifle of anxiety, believing that solitude had bred delusions.

"Thank you," said Harry Caston grimly, and sitting up very erect. Mrs. Wordingham changed her note.

"It's the most wonderful thing to have happened to you," she said. "I should have been frightened out of my life. And you weren't?"

Harry Gaston's face hardly relaxed.

"You don't believe a word of it," he asserted sternly.

"Of course I do," she replied soothingly, "and I quite see that, with us nowhere near you, all your senses became refined, and you penetrated behind the curtain. Yes, I see all that, Harry. But she might, perhaps, have told you a little more, mightn't she? As a story, it almost sounds unfinished."

Harry Caston rose to his feet.

"I tell you what you are doing," he said, standing over her--"you are getting a little of your own back."

"But such a very little, Harry," murmured Mrs. Wordingham; and Harry Caston flung out of the room.

He did not refer to the subject again for some little while. But in the month of December, on one foggy afternoon, he arrived with a new book under his arm. He put it down on the floor beside his chair rather ostentatiously, as one inviting questions. Mrs. Wordingham was serenely unaware of the book.

"Where have you been, Harry?" she asked as she gave him a cup of tea.

"In Norfolk--shooting," he said.

"Many birds?"

"So few that we did not go out on the second day. We motored to a church instead--a very old church with a beautiful clerestory."

Mrs. Wordingham affected an intense interest.

"Old churches are wonderful," she said.

"You care no more about them than I do," said Harry Gaston brutally. "I am not going to tell you about the church."

"Oh, aren't you?" said Mrs. Wordingham.

"No. What I am going to tell you is this. The vicar is a friend of my host, and happened to be in the church when we arrived. He showed us the building himself, and then, taking us into the vestry, got out the parish register. It dates back a good many years. Well, turning over the leaves, I noticed quite carelessly an entry made by the vicar in the year 1786. It was a note of a donation which he had made to the parish as a thanksgiving for his recovery from a severe operation which had been performed upon him in Norwich by a famous surgeon of the day named Twiddy."

"Yes?" said Mrs. Wordingham.

"That little entry occupied my mind much more than the church," continued Caston. "I wondered what the vicar must have felt as he travelled into Norwich in those days of no chloroform, no antiseptics, of sloughing wounds, and hospital fevers. Not much chance of _his_ ever coming back again, eh? And then the revulsion when he did recover--the return home to Frimley-next-the-Sea alive and well! It must all have been pretty wonderful to the vicar in 1786, eh?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Wordingham submissively.

"I couldn't get him out of my head and when I returned to London a couple of days ago, I saw in a bookseller's this book."

Caston picked the volume up from the floor.

"It seems that Twiddy was no end of a swell with his knife, so some one of his devoted descendants has had a life written of him, with all his letters included. He kept up an extensive correspondence, as people did in those days. He had a shrewd eye and a knack of telling a story. There's one here which I wish you to read if you will. No, not now--when I have gone. I have put a slip of paper in at the page. I think it will interest you."

Harry Caston went away. Mrs. Wordingham had her curtains closed and her lamps lit. She drew her chair up to the fire, and she opened "The Life and Letters of Mr. Edmund Twiddy, Surgeon, of Norwich," with a shrug of the shoulders and a little grimace of discontent. But the grimace soon left her face, and when her maid came with a warning that she had accepted an invitation for that night to dinner, she found her mistress with the book still open upon her knees, and her eyes staring with a look of wonder into the fire. For this is what she had read in "The Life and Letters of Mr. Edmund Twiddy."

"I have lately had a curious case under my charge, which has given me more trouble than I care to confess. For sentiment is no part of the equipment of a surgeon. It perplexed as well as troubled me, and some clue to the explanation was only afforded me yesterday. Three months ago my servant brought me word one evening that there was a lady very urgent to see me, of the name of Mrs. Braxfield. I replied that my work was done, and she must return at a more seasonable time. But while I was giving this message the door was pushed open, and already she stood in front of me. She was a slip of a girl, very pretty to look at, and shrinking with alarm at her own audacity. Yet she held her ground.

"'Mrs. Braxfield,' I cried, 'you have no right to be married--you are much too young! Young girls hooked at your age ought to be put back.'

"'I am ill,' she said, and I nodded to the servant to leave us.

"'Very well,' I said. 'What's the matter?'

"'My throat,' said she.

"I looked at it. There was trouble, but the trouble was not so very serious, though I recognised that at some time treatment would be advisable.

"'There's no hurry at all about it,' I said, when my examination was concluded, 'but, on the whole, you are right to get it looked to soon.' I spoke roughly, for I shrank a little from having this tender bit of a girl under my knife. 'Where's your husband?'

"'He is in Spain,' she replied.

"'Oh, indeed!' said I with some surprise. 'Well, when he returns, we can talk about it.'

"Mrs. Braxfield shook her head.

"'No, I want it done now, while he's away,' she said, and nothing that I could say would shake her from her purpose. I fathered her, and bullied her, and lectured her, but she stood her ground. Her lips trembled; she was afraid of me, and still more desperately afraid of what waited for her. I could see her catch her breath and turn pale as she thought upon the ordeal. But the same sort of timid courage which had made her push into my room before I could refuse to see her, sustained her now. I raised my hands at last in despair.

"'Very well,' I said. 'Give me your husband's address. I will send a letter to him, and if he consents, we will not wait for his return.'

"'No,' she insisted stubbornly, 'I do not want him to know anything about it. But if you will not attend me, no doubt someone else will.'

"That was my trouble. The throat, look at it how you will, is a ticklish affair. If she went away from me, Heaven knows into whose hands she might fall. She had some money and was well dressed. Some quack would have used his blundering knife. I could have shaken her for her obstinacy, and would have, if I had had a hope that I would shake it out of her. But she had screwed herself up to a pitch of determination almost unbelievable in her. I could make her cry; I could not make her draw back from her resolve. Nor, on the other hand, could I allow her to go out of my house and hand herself over to be butchered by any Tom, Dick, or Harry of a barber on the look-out for a fat fee. So I gave in.

"I got her a lodging in this town, and a woman to look after her, and I did what needed to be done with as little pain as might be.

"'You won't hurt me more than you can help,' she said in a sort of childish wail. And then she shut her eyes and bore it with an extraordinary fortitude; while, for my part, I never worked more neatly or more quickly in my life, and in a few days she was quite comfortable again.

"But here she began to perplex me. For though the wound healed, and there was no fever, she did not mend. She lay from day to day in an increasing weakness, for which I could not account. I drew a chair up to her bed one morning and took my seat.

"'My dear,' I said, 'a good many of us are father-confessors as well as doctors. We needs must be at times if our patients are to get well and do us credit. You are lying here surely with a great trouble on your mind. It shall be sacred to me, but I must know it if I am to cure you.'

"The girl looked at me with a poor little smile.

"'No, there's nothing at all,' she said; and even while she spoke she lifted her head from the pillow, and a light dawned in her eyes.

"'Listen!' she said.

"I heard a step coming nearer and nearer along the pavement outside. As it grew louder, she raised herself upon her elbow, and when the footsteps ceased outside the door, her whole soul leapt into her face.

"'There will be a letter for me!' she cried, with a joyous clapping of her hands.

"The footsteps moved on and became fainter and more faint. The girl remained propped up, with her eyes fixed upon the door. But no one came.

"'It has been left in the hall,' she said, turning wistfully to me.

"'I will send it up if it is there,' said I.

"I went downstairs rather heavy at heart. Here was the reason why she did not mend. Here it was, and I saw no cure for it. There was no letter in the hall, nor did I expect to find one. I sent for the woman who waited upon her. 'Does she always expect a letter?'

"The woman nodded.

"'She knows the postman's step, sir, even when he is a long way off. She singles it out from all other sounds. If he stops at the door, I must run down upon the instant. But whether he stops or not, it is always the same thing--there is no letter for her.'

"I went upstairs again and into her room. The girl was lying upon her side, with her faced pressed into the pillow, and crying. I patted her shoulder.

"'Come, Mrs. Braxfield, you must tell me what the trouble is, and we will put our heads together and discover a remedy.'

"But she drew away from me. 'There is nothing,' she repeated. 'I am weak--that is all.'

"I could get no more from her, and the next day I besought her to tell me where I might find her husband. But upon that point, too, she was silent. Then came a night, about a week later, when she fell into a delirium, and I sat by her side and wrestled with death for her. I fought hard with what resources I had, for there was no reason why she should die but the extreme weakness into which she had fallen.

"I sat by the bed, thinking that now at last I should learn the secret which ravaged her. But there was no coherency in what she said. She talked chiefly, I remember, of a work-table and of something hidden there which she must destroy. She was continually, in her delirium, searching its drawers, opening the lid and diving amongst her embroidery and beads, as though she could not die and let the thing be found.

"So till the grey of the morning, when she came out of her delirium, turned very wistfully to me with a feeble motion of her hands, and said:

"'You have been very good to me, doctor.'

"She lay thus for a few moments, and then she cried in a low sad voice: 'Oh, Arthur, Arthur!' And with that name upon her lips she died.

"She carried her secret with her, leaving me in the dark as to who she was and how I was to lay my hands upon one of her relations. I buried the poor girl here, and I advertised for her husband in _The London Newsletter_, and I made inquiries of our ambassador in Spain. A week ago Mr. Braxfield appeared at my house. He was a man of sixty years of age, and his Christian name was Robert.

"He gave me some few details about his marriage, and from them I am able to put together the rest of the story. Mr. Braxfield is a Spanish merchant of means, and the girl, a Trimingham of that branch of the family which moved a long while since into Hampshire, was, no doubt, pressed into marriage with him owing to the straitened position of her parents. Mr. Braxfield and his young wife took up their residence in Soho Square, in London, until, at the beginning of this year, business called him once more to Spain for some months.

"His wife thereupon elected to return to her home, and there Mr. Braxfield believed her to be, until chance threw one of my advertisements in his way. Her own parents, for their part, understood that she had returned to her house in Soho Square. To me, then, the story is clear. Having married without love, she had given her heart to someone, probably after her return to her own home--someone called Arthur. Whether he had treated her ill, I cannot say. But I take it that he had grown cold, and she had looked upon this trouble with her throat as her opportunity to hold him. The risk, the suffering--these things, one can imagine her believing, must make their appeal. She had pretended to return to London. She had travelled, instead, to Norwich, letting him and him alone know what she was about. The great experiment failed. She looked for some letter; no letter came. But had letters passed? Are these letters locked up amongst the embroidery and the beads in that work-table, I wonder? Let us hope that, if they are, they trouble her no longer."

PEIFFER

PEIFFER

For a moment I was surprised to see the stout and rubicund Slingsby in Lisbon. He was drinking a vermouth and seltzer at five o'clock in the afternoon at a café close to the big hotel. But at that time Portugal was still a neutral country and a happy hunting ground for a good many thousand Germans. Slingsby was lolling in his chair with such exceeding indolence that I could not doubt his business was pressing and serious. I accordingly passed him by as if I had never seen him in my life before. But he called out to me. So I took a seat at his table.