Читать книгу The Dean's Elbow - A.E.W. Mason - Страница 5

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Mona Lightfoot had left Liverpool at eight o'clock in the morning of the first day of her month's holiday. She was twenty-three years old and her position was that of typist, secretary and sole clerk to Mr. Henry Perriton, an accountant of that city in a small way of business. Mr. Perriton, indeed, even at this early hour was on the platform to see his secretary off—an attention which she received with some inward irritation. He was a sandy, insignificant man, ten years older than Mona; and when he raised his hat she noticed for the hundredth time how thin the hair was growing upon his scalp. He raised his hat awkwardly, not really because he wore it in his office and was unaccustomed to take it off, but because he held in one hand a packet of chocolate, in the other a bunch of flowers.

"For me?" cried Mona without achieving any high expression of enthusiasm.

"For you, my dear."

He laid them on the seat of the third class carriage in front of her.

"I shall miss you terribly," he continued. "I never thought when you came to me in January that—well—it would be like this. If only you could have chosen New Brighton for your holiday, or Morecambe, I could have run out week-ends and seen a little of you."

"Yes, but of course it had to be Bexhill."

She was gently indulgent, forgiving him for his ignorance that it must be Bexhill, and not explaining to him that it had to be Bexhill, because since Bexhill was on the south coast, it was necessary to pass through London to reach it.

"I suppose it had," Mr. Perriton answered despondently, and the train moved out of the station.

Mona Lightfoot tried honestly to feel remorse as she contemplated Mr. Perriton's offerings on the seat opposite, but she could not. She was gripped by an excitement of her own. She too knew despondency as the train swept through the Black Country, but she swung out of it into the high spheres of hope. She asked for half an hour, an hour at the most to pay for the last bleak eight months. It wasn't much. She wasn't presumptuous in praying for it. Surely so tiny a prayer would be granted to her.

She had certainly made her plans. As soon as the train stopped at Euston she was out of the carriage with a suit-case in each hand. She climbed into a hansom cab and gave an address in Bloomsbury.

"Miss Tipper wrote to me that I might use her room," she explained to the landlady.

"Yes, miss."

Mary Tipper had been Mona's friend and senior on the staff of the firm of Mardyke and Campion until last December, when William Mardyke, now the entire firm, had in a panic reduced his expenditure by twenty-five per cent.

In Mary Tipper's bedroom Mona washed off the dust of her journey, arrayed herself in her best summer frock, a cunningly simple affair of dark blue silk, with a blue hat to match, put on her tan shoes and stockings, and took into her hand a pair of long tan gloves. She left a note for Mary Tipper saying that she would come back for tea and, stepping up into an omnibus, travelled eastwards to High Holborn.

Where the vast Prudential House now glows in all its assurance over High Holborn, in those days stood Furnival's Inn. A red house, too, but comely and modest and mellowed to a sober russet on which the eyes rested with pleasure. It was built about a quadrangle, with a wall and iron gates upon the street. The traveller could put up there for the night, the resident take chambers by the year. Opposite Furnival's Inn Mona Lightfoot descended and, crossing the road through the crowded traffic of drays, omnibuses, growlers and jingling hansoms, she reached the point where under a long facade of projecting eaves a gate way opened into a court paved with stone and planted with trees. Staple Inn. She walked beneath a second arch and so came, one half of her mind eager with expectation, the other half assured of disappointment, into a lovely corner of Tudor London, hidden away in a wilderness of yellow brick. A little square of oblong windows through which one had glimpses of panelled walls; a pavement of stone flags; a round lily pond where the great flowers floated, their golden hearts like fruit upon their delicate platters which here were white as the breast of a swan, there took on about their edges tender colours of pink and mauve; a tiny garden; a fountain cooling the air; on one side a little hall with stained glass windows, like the hall of a college reduced to a toy; a cupola with a bell above the hall roof and a great clock in the miniature of a tower; on the other side a stone arbour with a couple of steps down to the lily-pond; and everywhere peace, everywhere quiet, as though the lilies had dreamed there in an enchanted sleep ever since Queen Elizabeth had ridden by with her halberdiers and her torch-bearers to St. Paul's Church or Gresham's Exchange. The inner court of Staple Inn; and it was empty as Mona Lightfoot entered it.

She looked at the clock. Well it was barely one. She would wait five, ten minutes. She sat down upon the round stone coping of the pond; and as the hands of the clock crept forward, a sense of desolation crept over her.

"He will have left the office...Perhaps he doesn't come here any more...Five more minutes...I came to London for this...an experiment may be detaining him..." Thus her thoughts ran, and she heard his footsteps on the stone flags behind her, almost before they sounded there at all. She bent forward towards her own reflection in the pond with the colour rosy in her cheeks. She heard him approach, she knew that he stood beside her, almost touching her, quite unaware of her. A little pang of disappointment—she acknowledged it to be quite un reasonable after all these months—mingled with her pleasure. She raised her eyes at last.

"Mark!"

His eyes came slowly down to meet hers.

"Mona!"

There was surprise, there was friendliness in his voice. Mona Lightfoot had been bred in a world where it was wisdom to face facts at once. There was no leap of the heart in Mark's pronunciation of her name.

"I should have known you," he said. "But I was wondering for the thousandth time..."

"I know. Whether you would ever reproduce those delicate colours," she took him up with a laugh, as she pointed to the outspread petals of the lilies.

Mark Thewliss nodded, and laughed in unison. A sudden exhilaration lifted his spirits.

"You are back in London, then?" he cried.

There would be someone once more to whom he could relate his difficulties and ambitions, who by the mere act of listening with all her sympathies in her eyes would smooth out the one and help forward the other, and sometimes by some swift stroke of insight give there and then first-aid.

But Mona shook her head.

"I am only passing through London on my holiday."

"Where to?"

There was a distinct note of disappointment in his voice.

"Bexhill."

"Alone?"

"Yes."

"It sounds—dullish."

Mona shrugged her shoulders.

"It will do as well as anywhere else."

She leaned forward again, looking at her reflection in the pond, and for a few moments Mark Thewliss did not speak or move. The girl's heart began to beat with a suffocating violence, though she could give no reason for its action. She had a premonition that in the silence and sunlight of the court, beside the lovely lily-pond, something tremendous was being born into the world; so that Mark Thewliss' next words fairly startled her by their imbecility.

"What a stroke of luck that you should come to see this old place again just at this hour!"

Mona swung round and stared at him. What absolute idiots even men of genius could be! She turned away again hurriedly; but Mark Thewliss had some powers of perception in human affairs if they were sufficiently emphasised and under lined.

"Oh, I see," he murmured awkwardly.

"Yes—colours," she added resentfully. "Colours by daylight, colours by lamplight—" and he broke in upon her joyously:

"That's where you're wrong, Mona. I'll tell you about it."

Yes, he would tell her about it; and she would listen, and he would go away appeased and confident, and she would go away with her heart drooping and with a feeling that he had annexed all her strength and taken it from her into himself.

"Very well! Tell me!"

"Not here!"

He looked down at her, and again she was conscious that something big had come into being during these few minutes.

"Let's lunch together!" he added.

Mona nodded her head.

"Where shall we go?"

"To the old place."

"Frascati's?"

"Yes."

To both of them Frascati's Restaurant in Oxford Street, with its plush curtains, its gilded hall and its orchestra, was the very symbol of luxury and opulence. Thither the pair of them, both rather lonely people, had gone on rare occasions to celebrate some great public event or some small triumph which touched their own lives. They frankly admired it. They liked its rattle and clatter. They were flattered by being there, a couple out of the throng of Londoners, enjoying themselves in a rather lofty way selecting dishes from a carte du jour and having music played for them whilst they ate.

"But you won't have time," Mona exclaimed regretfully, looking at the clock. "It's half-past one now."

"Time means nothing to me," said Mark Thewliss. "My holiday, too, began at one. Will you come up to my rooms whilst I change?"

Mona rose and followed him through the two courts into Holborn. The unceremonious dress of a later day was not looked upon with favour by the heads of important firms in the city of London; Mark Thewliss wore the high silk hat, the black tail coat and the striped trousers of his period. They crossed the street, entered the quadrangle of Furnival's Inn and climbed the uncarpeted stairway to the top floor.

"You hate my quarters, I know," said Thewliss, as he opened the door into the sitting-room.

Mona stopped upon the threshold and looked around her with disapproval.

"Yes," she declared emphatically.

It was not that the room was slovenly; nor was the furniture broken, nor the carpet threadbare. What offended her was that it was absolutely without character and embellishment. Men no less than women gather trifles about them, the photographs of their friends and first loves, little ornaments picked up in by-ways, favourite books, engravings. Here there was nothing but an inexpensive and drab formality. Not a picture decorated the grey wash upon the walls; and Mark Thewliss had a fastidious and almost feminine appreciation of colour. For the casual visitor there was nothing to be learnt from the aspect of the room about its inhabitant.

But for Mona Lightfoot the mere absence of indications was the surest indication of all. He had used a true word to describe his chambers in Furnival's Inn. They were quarters—the quarters of a man on the march, billeted here for an unimportant night or two during the great advance. She tried and always had tried honestly to be glad of the unsleeping purpose which she divined in him. She was fond of him because of it; the very beginning of her love for him was to be found in it. But she made no pretence to consistency or logic. She wanted him none the less to remain in reach of her—and for young men on the march, women like herself were too heavy a load. The Colonel can do as he will. His baggage goes along in the wagon; but the young soldier carries it on his back.

"I won't keep you five minutes," said Thewliss with a laugh. "You must put up with the place for that time," and he went by a communicating door into his bedroom.

Mona Lightfoot crossed the room to one of the two windows and looked down upon the few yards of gravel which she had seen often enough hundreds of miles away in her little ante-room of an office in Liverpool. She was amazed to find how vividly the scene, dreary enough in all conscience, had been stamped upon her memory. On the right the narrow thoroughfare of Leather Lane. At her feet the scrubby oblong of dusty earth known as Brooke's Market, with its two rows of stunted sycamores set out as if to assure you that the market was a true geometrical figure. And on the other side of the market the long building of grey brick where she had served for two years under Mary Tipper; and whence from time to time she had emerged to dine at Frascati's with Mark Thewliss who was to be afterwards known as the first Baron Thewliss of Kyrle House, Grosvenor Square and Upper Theign in the county of Berkshire.