Part 6

“I know--I know.” The giver was pink with confusion. “But you see, Miss June, your uncle has quite set his heart on it. And I am wondering if you will return it to me, so that I may offer it to him, as a token of my love. No one could have had a better or kinder master. I owe everything to him.” Suddenly, however, the young man was aware of her dismay. “I do hope you will not mind too much,” he said, anxiously. “If you will allow me, I will give you something else.”

June averted her eyes. “You gave me this. And you can’t believe how much it means to me.”

“Yes, I know you have a great feeling for it. To part with it will hurt you, I can see that. But please think of the dear old master’s disappointment if he doesn’t get it.”

“He merely wants it to sell again.”

“You are unjust to yourself, Miss June, in thinking so. Money does not enter into your feeling about this beautiful thing; it doesn’t enter into mine. Why should it enter into the master’s, whose love of art is so intense?”

“Because his love of money is intenser. It’s his ruling passion. Where are your eyes that they can’t see a thing as plain as that?”

She must be as gentle as she could with this absurd fellow, yet she feared that such words must cause a wound. And the wound was wilfully dealt. It was so important that he should be made to see the whole thing as really and truly it was. But her hope was slight that he would ever be brought to do so.

“I beg you,” he said, almost with passion, “to let me have it back, so that I may give it to the dear old master.”

“It is madness,” said June bitterly. “He has no true feeling for the picture at all.”

She saw that her words were unwise. They made her own position worse. But faced by such an appeal she had to do her best on the spur of the moment.

“I know how much it means to you.” Pain was clouding the eyes of this dreamer. “I know your love for it is equal to mine, but that will make our joy in giving it to your uncle so much the greater.”

“But why to Uncle Si--of all people?”

“He wants it.” William’s voice was low and solemn. “At this moment, I believe he wants it more than anything else in the world.”

June said with scorn: “He wants it as much as he wants a thousand pounds. And he doesn’t want it more. I believe money is his god. Think of the fifteen shilling he pays you a week. It makes my blood boil.”

A quick flush sprang to the young man’s cheek. “Money has nothing to do with this, Miss June.”

“It has to do with everything.”

Delicately he ventured to contradict. “Where love is, money doesn’t come in. I simply want to offer this priceless thing to the old master out of a full heart, as you might say.”

“Then you shouldn’t have parted with it.” She hated herself for her words, but she was not in a mood to soften them. “You have already had the pleasure of giving it to me, therefore it is only right that you should now deny yourself the pleasure of giving it to Uncle Si. It is like eating your cake and having it.”

William was not apt in argument, and this was cogent reasoning. He lacked the wit to meet it, yet he stuck tenaciously to his guns. “When you realize what this rare treasure means to the old man, I’m sure you’ll change your mind.”

June shook her head. Secretly, however, she felt like weakening a bit. In the wistful voice was a note that hurt. But she could not afford to yield; there was far too much at stake. “I shall have to think the matter over very carefully,” she temporised. “And, in the meantime, not a word to Uncle Si that the picture’s mine.”

She mustered the force of will to exact a promise. Bewildered, sad, a little incredulous, he gave it.

“_I hope he doesn’t hate me half as much as I hate myself_,” was the swift and sickening thought that annihilated June, as she ran from the studio, having recollected with a pang of dismay that she had not put in the pudding for dinner.

XV

DINNER was a miserable meal. The Yorkshire pudding was light, the roast sirloin was done to a turn, the potatoes were white and floury, the kidney beans were tender, but June could find nothing in the way of appetite. The mere presence of William at the other side of the table was almost more than she could bear. So keen was her sense of a terribly false position that she dare not look at him. What did he think of her? How must she appear to one all high-minded goodness and generosity?

Surely he must know, after what had just passed, that her love of the picture was mere base deceit. Surely he must hold such an opinion of her now that he would never believe or trust her again. And the tragedy of it was that she could not hope to make him see the real motive which lay behind it all.

Seated at the table, making only a pretence of eating, but listening with growing anger and disgust to the artful change she now detected in the tone of Uncle Si, it was as if the chair in which she sat was poised on the edge of an abyss. William must despise her quite as much as she despised the Old Crocodile, was the thought which turned her heart to stone.

S. Gedge Antiques having had the wit to discover the set of the wind, had begun most successfully to trim his sails. An hour’s careful examination of the picture that morning had convinced him that he had underrated its merits. There was very good work in it, and as a lifelong lover of art--with a devout glance at William--good work always appealed to him. But whether the thing, as a whole, was to be rated as highly as William put it, was decidedly an open question. Still the picture had merit, and personally he should treasure it as much for William’s sake as for its own.

June realized that it was now the turn of this cunning old fox to make love to the Van Roon’s owner. But was he cunninger than she? Yet what concerned her more than anything just now was the plain fact that he had already managed to persuade himself that the treasure was his property.

This was not the hour to disabuse his mind. And no matter when that hour came she foresaw a dire quarrel. She was now involved in a business to strain all the resources of her diplomacy. But William needed help. Cost what it might the task devolved upon her of looking after his affairs.

William, meanwhile, in his own peculiar way, seemed not averse from looking after hers. After dinner her first duty was to clear the table and wash up; and he simply insisted upon bearing a hand. He carried the tray into the back kitchen, and then, almost with defiance, presided at the washing of the crockery, while she had to be content with the humbler office of drying it.

“It’s your hands I’m thinking of, Miss June.”

“My hands are no affair of yours,” was the terse reply.

The lover of beauty shyly declared that such hands were not meant for such a task.

“Nothing to write home about--my hands aren’t.”

Politely sceptical, William drew from his pocket a bit of pumice stone.

“It is to take the soils out of your fingers,” he said, offering this talisman shyly.

June’s face was now a tawny scarlet. She did not know whether to laugh or to be angry. Yet how was it possible to be angry with a creature who was so charmingly absurd?

“May I take them out for you?”

The answer was “no.”

But somehow her face must have said “yes.” For without more ado, the amazing fellow took one of her hands and with nice discretion began to apply the pumice stone.

“There, now,” he said finally.

A stern rebuke trembled upon her lips, yet with the best will in the world it could not find a form of words whereby to get itself uttered.

XVI

A LITTLE later in the day Uncle Si came into the back kitchen where June was at work. It seemed that he had an announcement to make.

“Niece, there’s a piece of news for you. I’ve decided to take Mrs. Runciman back.”

June saw no reason why Mrs. Runciman should not be taken back. Indeed, she would welcome the return of the charwoman. It would certainly reduce the burden of her own labours which was by no means light.

“You and I are not going to hit it off, I can see that. Already there’s been too much of your interference. Next thing you’ll upset that boy. And I wouldn’t have that happen--not for a thousand pounds. So I think the best thing I can do is to take Mrs. Runciman back, and get her to find you a job.”

“For me!” said June slowly. “Mrs. Runciman find a job for me!”

“If she comes you’ll have to go. I can’t afford to keep a couple o’ women eating their heads off. The times don’t run to it.”

“What sort of a job do you expect a charwoman to find for me?” June asked, biting her lip.

“She may know of somebody who wants a domestic help. As far as I can see, you are not fitted for anything else.”

That was true enough, as June felt with a sharp pang. She was a girl without any sort of training except in the tedium of housework. No other career was open to her and she was going to be turned adrift. There came a hot flame to her cheeks, a sting of quick tears to her eyes. She was a proud and ambitious girl; never had she felt so keenly humiliated.

“If you stay here,” said Uncle Si, “you’re sure to upset that boy. And, as I say, rather than that should happen I’d pay a thousand pounds to a hospital.”

June didn’t reply. But in a surge of feeling she went up to her attic, and with rage in her heart flung herself full length on the bed.

The blow was fully expected, yet that hardly made the weight of it less. Soon or late this miser was bound to turn her out of doors; yet coming at such a time “the sack” was in the nature of a calamity.

Well, she must face it! Domestic service was the only thing to which she could turn her hand, and that, she foresaw, was likely to prove a form of slavery. A future, hard, confined and miserable, lay in front of her.

Bitterly she regretted now that she had not been able to fit herself for some other way of life. She had had a reasonably good education, as far as it went, in her native town of Blackhampton, where her father at one time had been in a moderately good position. But he had died when she was fourteen. And her mother, with health completely broken several years before her death had been left so badly off that June, perforce, had to give up all thoughts of a wider field. Stifling vague ambitions, she had bravely submitted to the yoke but, in spite of a sense of duty honestly, even nobly done, the sequel was a grim distaste of household drudgery. And this had not been made less by a month under the roof of S. Gedge Antiques.

With a gnawing sense of misery that was like a toothache, June slid off the bed and looked at herself in the cracked mirror which adorned the crazy dressing-table. Her only assets were comprised in her personal appearance. Instinctively she took stock of them. Alas, as she beheld them now, they were pretty much a “washout.”

First to strike her was the tell-tale redness of her eyelids, and that disgusted her to begin with. But, apart from that, she felt in her own mind that her personality was not really attractive. Her education was small, her life had been restricted and narrow; and now there seemed no way out.

Honestly she was not pretty, she was not clever, and she knew next to nothing of the world. Even at Blackhampton, where the supply of smart girls was strictly limited, she had never passed for anything out of the common. She had felt sometimes that her nature was too serious. In a girl a serious nature was a handicap, she had once heard Mr. Boultby, the druggist at the corner of Curzon Street, remark. One “asset,” however, she certainly had. The mop of golden-brown hair had always been her stand-by, and Mr. Boultby, that man of the world, had paid her compliments upon it. An artist would revel in it, he had said. Certainly there was a lot of it, and the colour having aroused comment even in her early days at the High School among her form-mates, it was no doubt rather striking. She was also inclined to be tall and long in the leg, she knew that her shoulders and chest were good, she prided herself upon the neatness of her ankles, yet at the back of her shrewd mind lurked the fear that the general effect must be plainness, not beauty. She had heard Mr. Boultby, always a friend, describe her as “unusual,” but she had felt that it was his polite way of saying she was not so good-looking as she might be.

No, wherever her fortune might lie, it was not in her face. Once or twice, in her romantic Blackhampton phases, which at best were very brief and few, she had thought of the stage. But one month of London had convinced her that it was not her line. Considering her inexperience of life her fund of horse sense was rather remarkable. She was a great believer in the doctrine of “looking facts in the face.” And the fact she had to meet now was that she was not in any way pretty or talented. Unless you were one or the other, and London teemed with girls who were both, the doors of the theatre were locked and barred.

Back on the edge of the bed, she began to consider the question of learning shorthand and typing, so that she might become a clerk in an office. But her means were so scant that the plan was hardly feasible. Really it seemed that no career was open to her, other than the one she loathed. And then the thought of William came. At once, by a strange magic, it eased the pressure. Heart, brain and will were merged in an immediate task; she must stand between this child of nature and the avarice of his master.

The sudden thought of William brought courage, tenacity, fighting power. She knew that at this moment he was the other side the wall. An impelling need urged her to go to him. Forgetful of red and swollen lids she got up at once and went and knocked on the studio door.

A familiar voice said, “Come in!”

William, as usual in that room, was pottering about amid oils, canvasses and varnish. He was in shirt sleeves, he wore a large apron, his shock of fair hair, which gave him the look of a poet, was rumpled, there was a smudge on his cheek, but the absorption of his eyes, their look of intensity, half filled her with awe.

She had really come to tell him that she was going to be sent away. But as soon as she found herself in his presence she was overcome by sheer pride. From the first this young man had treated her with a deference which implied that she was of a clay superior to his own. His bearing towards her always stressed the fact that she was the niece of his good master, and that he was a servant humbly grateful for his fifteen shillings a week.

At first this attitude had fed her vanity in a subtle way. But now, in present circumstances, it seemed almost to enrage her. It was quite absurd that a man of such distinguished talent should place her upon a pedestal. The truth of the matter was she was unfit to lace his shoes, and it was amazing that he did not know it.

Upon her entrance William had immediately risen from his stool, and had bowed slightly over the pot of varnish he held in his hand, with a half-humorous air of homage, as some famous chemist might have done when disturbed by a great lady in the midst of his wonderful researches. “I know it’s not me you have come to see,” his gentle manner seemed to say; “it is this marvellous thing on the easel at my elbow.”

All the same it was William she had come to see. She had come to him for countenance and sympathy. And it did not help her at all that she should be treated with a shy reserve. She craved to be told that she had come to mean something to him; she craved to be told that his fastidious concern for her hands, and the regard he had for a beauty in which she herself did not believe was more than mere chivalry towards women in general. Alas, in spite of the eager friendliness of her reception this was not apparent. In the eyes of William she was just the master’s niece, and the incident of the pumice stone was without significance, beyond the fact that he was no more than the least of her servants.

It was very exasperating.

“But if you are wise,” said a voice within, “you will not let this Gaby know that you think so.”

XVII

JUNE spent a worried and disconsolate night. She had very little sleep. Time and again she listened to the melancholy drip-drip of rain on the eaves just over her head. Never in her life had she felt so wretched. She was horribly lonely, without resources or friends. How she was to live through the endless years of servitude and dependence on the will of others that lay ahead she did not know.

To keep on telling oneself to bear up seemed of little use. She had had to do that each hour of each day since her mother’s death. The prospect of being cast upon the world was indeed dispiriting, yet in the end it might turn out better than to sacrifice one’s youth upon the altar of such a Moloch as Uncle Si.

As people who sleep ill are apt to do, she fell into a comfortable doze just about the time she ought to be getting up. Thus, to her dismay, she entered upon the trying institution known as Monday morning at a quarter past seven instead of half past six.

“Uncle Si will be growling for his breakfast in another quarter of an hour,” was the thought that urged her into her clothes with a frantic haste. One twist she gave and no more, without so much as a glance in the glass, at the mane of brown gold hair, and then she flew downstairs, buttoning the front of her dress.

A fire was burning in the kitchen grate, and upon it slices of bacon were sizzling in a frying-pan; the cloth was laid for breakfast; moreover, the parlour was already swept and dusted. In fact, at the precise moment of June’s belated appearance upon the scene, William, with a businesslike air, was returning from a visit to the dustbin.

When they met in the passage by the scullery she came within an ace of rebuking him. “Even if I oversleep myself you’ve no right to be so officious,” was the sharp phrase which rose to her lips. But a saving sense of justice, not always at the service of the female soul, held it back. After all, such kindness and devotion were worthy of respect; he had saved, besides, an unpleasant scene with Uncle Si.

“Oh, thank you, William, ever so much,” she had the grace to murmur, hoping as she hastily disposed of the last button of her dress, that he wouldn’t notice she had come down, “half undone.”

“Please don’t mention it, Miss June,” he said, with the politeness of a courtier, as he returned the empty dustpan to its home beneath the scullery sink. “As you didn’t seem quite yourself last night I was hoping you would not get up at all this morning. I was going to bring your breakfast up to you, and set it outside your door.”

“Oh, but you are much too kind.” A sudden fierce rush of colour made her cheeks burn horribly. He was a very nice fellow, even if he was not so bright in some things as he ought to be.

Uncle Si, by the grace of providence, was a few minutes late for his breakfast. This seldom happened for, as a rule, he was the soul of punctuality. However, he was going down to Newbury by the nine o’clock from Paddington to attend a sale; in consequence, he had bestowed far more pains upon his appearance than was usual at this early hour. He was in a fairly good humour. The fact that the charwoman’s return would enable him “to fire” his niece had cheered him so much that for once he had slept like a just man.

“Don’t expect me until supper time,” he said to June, as he put on his high felt hat and his macintosh, and grasped the knobbed stick, as ugly as himself, which invariably accompanied his travels. “And my advice to you, my girl, is to think over very carefully what I said to you last night.”

With an air of quiet satisfaction, S. Gedge Antiques stepped briskly forth into a soft autumn day where the sun as yet could not quite make up its mind to greet him.

It was to be a day of great events. And the first of these began to materialise shortly before eleven when June chanced to enter the shop. William, just at that moment, was fathoms deep in conversation with a customer. The customer was very tall, she was strikingly distinguished and, in the opinion of June, she was dressed exquisitely. Soft silk and faint blue Chinese embroidery clothed her with a dangerous beauty. But it was the coquetry of her hat, an artful straw wreathed wonderfully in flowers of many a subtle shade that gave the crowning touch.

The hat it was, no doubt, that completed William’s overthrow. There was a look of rapture in the eyes with which the vain fellow regarded its wearer, for which June could have found it in her heart to slay him on the spot.

That tell-tale look was really a little too much. June could not help lingering on the threshold to watch these two. So shamelessly was William engrossed with this vision of pure beauty that there was not a chance of his eyes straying to look at her. And she would not have cared if they had. Such an irrational surge of jealousy was now in her heart that she would have welcomed his seeing what she thought of his gazing like that, even upon the grandest young woman in the land.

“So nice of you to take so much trouble,” the fair customer said in a voice of such melody that June had to own that the celebrated Miss Banks, the daughter of Blackhampton’s chief physician, whose charm of manner had ever remained in her mind as the high-water mark of human amenity, would now have to take second place.

“Not at all, madam,” said William, in the William way. Even June had to admit that such fine courtesy, a little excessive, no doubt, was far removed from mere sycophancy. Had he not practised on her? For that reason she had a perfect right to feel furious; William’s homage was far too inclusive. At the same time, there was no gainsaying that in this case he had every excuse. Regarded as the mirror of fashion and the mould of form, Miss Banks of Blackhampton was now a back number.

“The friend I sent it to liked it very much indeed,” said the Super-girl. “It was so exactly what she wanted. And if by chance you are able to match it, I shall be most grateful.”

William, with that divine air of his, promised quite simply and sincerely to do his best.

“The price, too, was very moderate,” said the Super-girl with the geniality of one who owns a province. Then suddenly she half turned, and her merry glance, assisted by a Miss Banksian stick-eyeglass was trained full upon the Hoodoo. “What a delicious monster!” The voice had quite a Brahms trill in it, not that June had ever heard of Brahms. “It reminds one of Edgar Allan Poe or the Grand Guignol.”

Unabashed by culture, William stood to his full height. June could only marvel at his coolness.

“So Oriental. So grotesque. Makes one think of Ali Baba and the Cave of the Forty Robbers. Very valuable, of course?”

“No, I wouldn’t exactly call it valuable.” June hardly knew whether to admire or to deplore this candour. “And it takes up a lot of room, and absorbs a lot of light. Almost needs the British Museum, as you might say, to show it to advantage.”

Again the Brahms trill, as the eye of the Super-girl travelled from the Hoodoo to William. “Those fearful eyes and those grinning jaws studded with crocodile’s teeth make it look absolutely alive. And it’s so perfectly hideous that one feels sure there must be a curse on it.”

“Mr. Gedge declares there is.”

“Really?” The eyes, the blue eyes of the Super-girl grew round and merry. “I’d love to have a thing with a curse on it--if it’s a real one?”

“Mr. Gedge would part with it for a very reasonable sum I feel sure,” said William, with a judicious air that June admired the more for being hardly able to credit it in him.

With the casual air so becoming to riches, the young woman asked the price.

“Twenty pounds would buy it,” she was informed.

“Curse and all?”

“Curse and all, madam.” William had a nice sense of humour, which June had discovered before she had known him an hour, but in this big moment he did not relax a muscle.