Читать книгу The Masterfolk - Haldane MacFall - Страница 7

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Wherein it would appear that the most respectable Stucco Architecture may be but a Screen for Gnawing Secrets

The boy Noll shut the door that gave on to the narrow landing from the two large attics which were now his home, pushed back the silk hat on his head, and thrusting his hands into his breeches pockets, and whistling an air, he glanced up at the skylight above him to see whether the weather held.

He tramped slowly down a few steps of the top flight of carpetless stairs that proclaim the attic heights, and halted aimlessly.

It was more than vaguely borne in upon him that a great change had come over his life since, a month ago, he had taken down his prints from the walls of his empty home, and, with them tucked in a bundle under his arm, had walked into the twilight, trudging it on foot after the cart that contained the few pieces of furniture and such belongings as had not been sold, and, at the solemn journey’s end, skipping up three or four whitened steps, had entered the doors of this stucco well-to-do house that was let in apartments, standing, one of a row of like houses, glued together along the length of a long winding street—a “street with a good address,” the advertisement had it.

The cushioned and unthinking ease of childhood was gone, buried in that empty house he had left behind him—the door was shut on that for ever. The rougher, hardier period of boyhood was upon him.

It now came to the boy, who had never even wondered where everything came from, that each such everything had always had to be won by the sweat of toil. He had wondered more than once why that for which he had asked had sometimes been refused. But he now realized that the lucky-bag from which childhood gets all it wants was empty—sold at a tap of the hammer with the other things in that dead house, by an auctioneer fellow—gone—vanished.

He tramped down some half-dozen bare board steps that resounded to his boots, and halted again.

He was beginning to see that the fuel of life was not to be had for the asking. His mother sitting the livelong day and far into the night in that big attic he had just left—the one with his little bed in the corner of it, the large room that served as general sitting-room by day, his bed with coloured covering becoming in the daylight a couch therein—his mother sitting there writing, with absent eyes fixed on her distant purpose, brought into hard reality the harder fact that money had to be earned—that it did not come from Somewhere for the beckoning. His father’s long absences, and his boots muddied with long trudges, were significant and unspoken about, hinting of mysteries he could not wholly fathom—nor was the serious gaze of the handsome face as his father sat at night and stared at the stove less troubling to the boy.

He tramped down another step or two.

It bothered him that he could not help. He knew he must grow into youth before his hand could win this wage that all the world was hurrying after.

He tramped down a few more steps.

For one thing he felt glad. He had thought it a bore when his mother had made out a scheme of reading for him, making him give his morning and a couple of hours of the afternoon to a course of English literature and history, and a promise to keep up his mathematics; but, as a matter of fact, and to his intense surprise, he was enjoying it.

He tramped down a couple of steps.

It was so like the mother to have clung to her books when she sold even her silks and satins!

He tramped down another step.

He wondered why there was no carpet to the attic flight. He wondered who lived in the rooms on each of these four landings below. That Major Modeyne, who lived on this one below them, seemed such a pleasant old fellow—it was a great pity he came in so late and so often the worse for liquor.... But he was mighty funny over it. He wondered if he felt as funny as he looked. It seemed such an odd thing to fill one’s self with strong liquors until one glugged hiccuping and ran over!

He tramped down several steps.

The boy had always thought of himself as being a part of a vague body of people called gentlefolk—a people who were always provided for from some gentlemanly source of livelihood which demanded clean hands and a sense of duty and no manual labour or a shop, quite a species apart from the mere middle-class world, and for whom the working classes provided the comforts of life, cleaning their boots and doing them service. Tradesmen and the labouring class, of course, were bound to earn a livelihood—a thing which he had always felt, without being expressly told so, to be rather a vulgar thing to do; although, of course, it was a very good thing for that sort of people.

As he reached the bottom of the uncarpeted stair, and was about to step on to the drugget of the landing, a door opened, and there came out on to the landing a child of about twelve.

She shook back the nut-brown hair from her clear grey eyes and gazed defiantly at Noll:

“You’re a fool!” she said.

Noll took off his hat, sat down on the bottom step, put his chin in his hands, and gazed at her:

“You’re very pretty,” he said.

“I didn’t say you were an impudent fool,” she said hotly—“I meant a common, vulgar tomfool.”

Noll nodded.

The dainty slender girl before him gazed at him sternly:

“It was you that put all the water-cans about the landing, and the water-jugs on the stairs, for my father to fall amongst when”—she hesitated and flushed angrily—“when he came back late last night.”

Noll nodded:

“Yes,” said he—“and he fell amongst them.” He chuckled. “I watched him over the rail. It was moonlight up here. He came crawling up the stairs in the dark, saying Shush! to himself if a board creaked, and carrying his boots in his hand so as not to wake the landlady—and when he got on to this landing he gave a monstrous hiccup that jolly nearly pulled him off his feet, and he tripped up amongst the cans—away went his boots, and fell in the hall below. D’you know, I shall never play a lark on your father again—he’s such a gentleman. Most people would have sworn themselves putrid, but he just rubbed his shins and elbows, sat up in the moonlight, and said with a hiccup: ‘What a prodigious number of stars there are at the north pole! Shakespeare has cracked every nut—when beggars die, says he, there are no comets seen, the heavens themselves blaze forth the fall of the landed gentry.... I did not know all heaven held so many, various, multitudinous, and vast prodigious stars!’”

The girl waited grimly until he had done:

“It was you who made a booby-trap in his bed so that he could not get into it?”

Noll nodded:

“Yes,” said he; “he looked jolly comic under the bed; he got under—he must have slept there.”

“That’s just where you are mistaken,” said the child with a sneer. “I never go to bed until my father is asleep. I got him out.... I suppose you thought you were funny!”

Noll nodded:

“Yes,” he said; “I did, last night. But I don’t now. I think I was a cad.”

“So do I,” she said....

Noll sat for awhile and gazed at her.

He got up and held out his hand sheepishly:

“Shake hands,” said he; “I apologize. It’s my birthday to-day.”

Betty considered.

She hesitated—then put out a delicate thin hand:

“What age are you?” she asked.

“Fourteen,” said Noll.

“I shall be twelve to-morrow,” she said.

“Then let’s keep it now,” said Noll. “I’m going to see a splendid fellow, a friend of mine—he’s a prodigious clever fellow—he’s written a book.”

The child’s eyes glittered:

“Has he?” she asked.

“Yes, rather. Come and see him too.”

“All right,” she said; “but come in and have tea first, and I’ll put on my hat and jacket. We shan’t be very late out, shall we?”

“I’ll bring you back the moment you like,” said Noll. “We only have high tea in the evenings now, so my people don’t mind my being late to an hour or so; they know I’m with Netherby. But we’ll be back sharp, and you can come to tea with us, eh? I’d like to introduce you to my mother.”

The child nodded, and led the way into the Major’s quarters.

Noll, with the boy’s quick vision, took in a first picture of the little lady’s surroundings that never left him.

It was a large and airy room, furnished within the absolute limits of necessity. In a corner by a door stood the child’s little white bed, but it required more imagination than was given to the ordinary to call up the image of a small child that stood every night listening at that other door to hear whether her father’s breathing were heavy enough for sleep; to call up the vision of the slight figure that nightly opened that same door with stealthy care to make sure of the candle being out, and all danger of fire set far from the reach of awkward drunken hands; it demanded a keener ear than his to hear the last sigh of the child as she slipped into her bed in the small hours of the night and lay down to take her long-delayed rest in that sleep that should have sealed her eyes for hours, and had already held the rest of the world for a half of the night.

The dainty little figure that now stood before the mirror, giving to her hat just that touch which makes or mars the adornment of women, showed no peevish rebellion against, nor carping discontent with, the sordid burden of life that had been thrust upon her far too young and sadly thin little shoulders. She might indeed have gone, as she stood, to Court, and withal taught the ladies of fashion there assembled more than something of the queenly attitude.

The atmosphere of the child it was that took the sense of emptiness from the empty room. The little table that stood before the fireplace, with a napkin spread upon it for tablecloth—it had been washed by her small hands—and the coarse tea-things set out upon it: these things and the kettle that bubbled on the hob had quite evidently been deserted by the child when she marched out to her attack in the passage.

Noll now proceeded to make the tea at her bidding—she giving him orders as she gazed into the mirror, in which she commanded a view of the room.

The lad’s eyes wandered over the walls, which were bare enough to bring his quick attention to rest on the picture of a man in uniform that hungover the mantel—the picture of handsome Cornelius Mauduit Modeyne as he had been when he married the mild beauty with the tragic eyes that dreamed out of the picture hanging pendant to his, and to whom the child bore more than a little likeness. Had the pictures been inspired with the history of these lives, they would have revealed the early death of the brooding beauty in the birth of the small child whose hands were now the only hands that tended these two miniatures with the caressing touch of affection—the man’s picture would have continued the confidence, and told of handsome Corney Modeyne’s seeking relief from loneliness in the mad lees of the bottle—it would have whispered, too, of the meeting of his old comrades in his room to tell him he must slip quietly out of his old regiment—of his retirement with a step of rank—of the two years of his living upon his relations until they grew first weary, then exasperated, then hostile towards him, and the always rather silent child that flushed at all their harsh thrusts at her easy-going father—and of his final collapse as that mysterious personage who is an urgent daily “something in the city.” It would have revealed what was hidden even from the buzzing gossips of the Street with the Good Address—that Major Cornelius Mauduit Modeyne, when he sallied out at the breakfast hour with a swaggering air, in well-groomed attire, polished boots, and shining hat, as soon as he could be got out of bed by the silent child who guarded all his secrets that could be hid, owed his good care to those self-same small hands. As it would also have revealed that, in spite of all shame, the dainty hands that did these things and had these cares, touched everything that had to do with this foolish sinning man with a fierce affection.

Indeed, there is more in noble tradition than in blood. The battle-cry of the ancient Modeynes had been Loyalty.

Modeyne came of old aristocratic Catholic stock, but he had long ceased to attend his church; and the image, a very beautiful image of the Mary and Child, that stood upon his mantel was the sole relic of his old beliefs—even it did not stand there from any vague sentiment towards his church; indeed, it had not gone to the pawnbroker as much from negligence as from religious bias.

The child would sing to herself at times the beautiful lines of the Ave Maria that Gounod has set to Bach’s Fugue, just as she would lilt a nursery rhyme; but the learning of it was an early reminiscence of her father in his cups, moved to song. Her prayers, on going to bed at night, were just a part of her duty in putting off her clothes—it warmed and coloured the child’s imagination, was the full stop to her day, but it was quite aloof from the conduct of the world. From Modeyne the child had inherited remarkable charm of manner as well as much of her dainty delicacy....

The hat and jacket being arranged to her taste, the child went and sat down beside Noll, and presided over the hospitalities. She apologized for the thickness of the bread and butter, but she said it was her last meal of the day, and she was always hungry for it. She remembered she had some cake, and tripped off to the cupboard; but her face fell when she took the fragment out of its carefully enwrapping silver-paper.

“I got it nearly a month ago—for my father’s birthday,” she said simply. “I’m afraid it’s gone dry.”

“I like it all rubbly best,” said Noll—“it tastes so nutty.” He deceived the child into a smile. In any case he was in the caterpillar stage of youth.

They ate it between them.

“It is rather nutty,” she said. “I never noticed that before.”

Childhood takes the world for granted.

As the two went cheerily down the stairs and out into the street, the boy’s heart lightened; the gnawing sense of loneliness that had oppressed him fell from him, and the stucco street turned to a way of palaces in the grey of the twilight.