Sinister Street

Underneath this he now saw that there was another entrance, evidently to the kitchen. Two fairly large trees were planted in the gra.s.s that ran up to the house on either side of the balcony.

"Those are my mulberries," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "This is called Mulberry Cottage. I've been meaning to have the name painted on the outside door for nearly forty years, but I always forget. There's a character to give myself. Ah, dear me! The Captain loved his mulberries.

But you ought to see this in the springtime. Well, my flowers are really remarkable. But there, it's not to be wondered at. M' father was a nursery gardener."

She looked round at Michael and winked broadly. He could not think why.

Possibly it was a comic a.s.sociation in her mind with the behavior of the Captain in carrying her off from such a home.

"The Duke of Fulham to see you, girls," she wheezed at the door of the sitting-room, and, giving Michael a push, retreated with volleys of bronchial laughter. The girls were sitting in front of the fire. Lily was pretending to trim a hat: Sylvia was reading, but she flung her book down as Michael entered. He had the curiosity to look at the t.i.tle, and found it was the Contes Drolatiques of Balzac. An unusual girl, he thought: but his eyes were all for Lily, and because he could not kiss her, he felt shy and stupid. However, the shoes, which he now restored, supplied an immediate topic, and he was soon perfectly at ease again.

Presently the girls left him to get ready to go out, and he sat thinking of Lily, while the canary chirped in the bra.s.s cage. The silence here was very like the country. London was a thousand miles away, and he could hear Lily and Sylvia moving about overhead. Less and less did he think there could be anything wrong with Mulberry Cottage. Yet the apparent security was going to make it rather difficult to take Lily away. Certainly he could ask her to marry him at once; but she might not want to marry him at once. The discovery of her in this pleasant house with a jolly friend was spoiling the grand swoop of rescue which he had planned. She would not presumably be escaping from a situation she abhorred. It was difficult to approach Lily here. Was it Sylvia who was making it difficult? He must talk to Sylvia and explain that he had no predatory intentions. She would surely be glad that he wanted to marry Lily. Or would she not? Michael jumped up and tinkled the l.u.s.ters on the mantelshelf. "Sweet," said the canary in the bra.s.s cage: the rain sizzled without. Faintly pervading this small square room was the malaise of someone's jealousy. The tentative solution that was propounding itself did not come from his own impression of Sylvia, but it seemed positively to be an emanation from the four walls of the room which in the stillness was able to force its reality upon him. "Sweet,"

said the canary: the l.u.s.ters stopped their tinkling: the rain sizzled steadily outside.

Lunch at Kettner's was a great success. At least Michael thought it was a great success, because Lily looked exquisite against the bronzy walls, and her hair on this dull day seemed not to lack sunlight, but rather to give to the atmosphere a thought of the sun, the rare and wintry sun.

Sylvia talked a great deal in her deep voice, and he was conscious that the other people in the restaurant were turning round to envy their table.

The longer that Michael was in the company of Lily and Sylvia, the less he was able to ask the direct questions that would have been comparatively easy at the beginning. Sylvia, by the capacity she displayed of appreciating worldliness without ever appearing worldly herself, made it impossible for him to risk her contempt by a stupid question. She was not on the stage; so much he had discovered. She and Lily had apparently a number of men friends. That fact would have been disquieting, but that Sylvia talked of them with such a really tomboyish zest as made it impossible to suppose they represented more than what they were superficially, the companions of jolly days on the river and at race-meetings, of jolly evenings at theaters and b.a.l.l.s.

Quite definitely Michael was able to a.s.sure himself that out of the host of allusions there was not one which pointed to any man favored above the rest. He was able to be positive that Lily and Sylvia were independent. Yet Lily had no private allowance or means. It must be Sylvia who was helping her. Perhaps Sylvia was always strict, and perhaps all these friends were by her held at arm's length from Lily, as he felt himself being held now. Her att.i.tude might have nothing to do

For a fortnight Michael came every day to Tinderbox Lane and took the girls out; but for the whole of that fortnight he never managed to be alone with Lily. Then one day Sylvia was not there when he called. To find Lily like this after a tantalizing fortnight was like being in a room heavily perfumed with flowers. It seemed to stifle his initiative, so that for a few minutes he sat coldly and awkwardly by the window.

"We're alone," he managed to say at last.

"Sylvia's gone to Brighton. She didn't want to go a bit."

"Bother Sylvia! Lily, we haven't kissed for five years."

He stumbled across to take her in his arms; and as he held her to him, it was a rose falling to pieces, so did she melt upon his pa.s.sion. He heard her sigh; a coal slipped in the grate; the canary hopped from perch to perch. These small sounds but wrapped him more closely in the trance of silence.

"Lily, you will marry me, won't you? Very soon? At once?"

Michael was kneeling beside her chair, and she was looking down at him from clouded eyes still pa.s.sionate. Marriage was an intrusion upon the remoteness where they brooded; and he, ravished by their flamy blue relucency, could not care whether she answered him or not. This was such a contentment of desire that the future with the visible shapes of action it tried to display was unheeded, while now she stirred in his arms. She was his, and so for an hour she stayed, immortal, and yet most poignantly the prisoner of time. Michael, with all that he had dreaded at the back of his mind he would have to face in her condition, scarcely knew how to celebrate this reward of his tenacity. This tranquillity of caresses, this slow fondling of her wrist were a lullaby to his fears.

It was the very rhapsody of his intention to kneel beside her, murmuring huskily the little words of love. He would have married her wherever and whatever he found her, but the relief was overwhelming. He had thought of a beautiful thing ruined; he had foreshadowed glooms and tragic colloquies; he had desperately hoped his devotion might be granted at least the virtue of a balm. Instead, he found this ivory girl, this loveliness of rose and coral within his arms. So many times she had eluded him in dreams upon the midway of the night, and so often in dreams he had held her for kisses that were robbed from him by the sunlight of the morning, that he scarcely could believe he held her now, now when her hair was thistledown upon his cheeks, when her mouth was a b.u.t.terfly. He shuddered to think how soon this airy beauty must have perished; and even now what was she? A shred of goldleaf on his open hand, pliant, but fugitive at a breath, and destructible in a moment of adversity.

Always in their youth, when they had sat imparadised, Michael had been aware of the vulgar Haden household in the background. Now, here she was placed in exactly the room where he would have wished to find her, though he would scarcely desire to maintain her in such a setting. He could picture her at not so distant a time in wonderful rooms, about whose slim furniture she would move in delicate and languorous promenades. This room pleased him, because it was the one from which he would have wished to take her into the misty grandeurs he imagined for her lodging. It was a room he would always regard with affection, thinking of the canary in the bra.s.s cage and the Christmas roses blowing in the garden and the low sounds of Mrs. Gainsborough busy in her kitchen underneath. Tinderbox Lane! It was an epithalamium in itself; and as for Mulberry Cottage, it had been carried here by the fat pink loves painted on the ceiling of that Cremorne arbor in which the Captain had first imagined his gift.

So with fantastic thoughts and perfect kisses, perfect but yet ineffably vain because they expressed so little of what Michael would have had them express, the hour pa.s.sed.

"We must talk of practical things," he declared, rising from his knees.

"You always want to talk," Lily pouted.

"I want to marry you. Do you want to marry me?"

"Yes; but it's so difficult to do things quickly."

"We'll be married in a month. We'll be married on Saint Valentine's Day," Michael announced.

"It's so wet now to think of weddings." She looked peevishly out of the window.

"You haven't got to think about it. You've got to do it."

"And it's so dull," she objected. "Sylvia says it's appallingly dull.

And she's been married."

"What has Sylvia got to do with it?" he demanded.

"Oh, well, she's been awfully sweet to me. And after all, when mother died, what was I to do? I couldn't bear Doris any more. She always gets on my nerves. Anyway, don't let's talk about marriage now. In the summer I shall feel more cheerful. I hate this weather."

"But look here," he persisted. "Are you in love with me?"

She nodded, yet too doubtfully to please him.

"Well, if you're not in love with me...."

"Oh, I am, I am! Don't shout so, Michael. If I wasn't awfully fond of you, I shouldn't have made Sylvia ask you to come back. She hates men coming here."

"Are you Sylvia's servant?" said Michael, in exasperation.

"Don't be stupid. Of course not."

"It's ridiculous," he grumbled, "to quote her with every sentence."

"Why you couldn't have stayed where you were," said Lily fretfully, "I don't know. It was lovely sitting by the fire and being kissed. If you're so much in love with me, I wonder you wanted to get up."

"So, we're not to talk any more about marriage?"

After all, he told himself, it was unreasonable of him to suppose that Lily was likely to be as impulsive as himself. Her temperament was not the same. She did not mean to discourage him.

"Don't let's talk about anything," said Lily. He could not stand aloof from the arms she held wide open.

Sylvia would not be coming back for at least three days, and Michael spent all his time with Lily. He thought that Mrs. Gainsborough looked approvingly upon their love; at any rate, she never worried them. The weather was steadily unpleasant, and though he took Lily out to lunch, it never seemed worth while to stay away from Tinderbox Lane very long.

One night, however, they went to the Palace, and afterward, when he asked her where she would like to go, she suggested Verrey's. Michael had never been there before, and he was rather jealous that Lily should seem to know it so well. However, he liked to see her sitting in what he told himself was the only cafe in London which had escaped the cheapening of popularity and had kept its old air of the Third Empire.

As Lily was stirring her lemon-squash, her languid forearm looked very white swaying from the somber m.u.f.flings of her cloak. Something in her self-possession, a momentary hardness and disdain, made Michael suddenly suspicious.

"Do you enjoy Covent Garden b.a.l.l.s?" he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It depends who we go with. Often I don't care for them much. And the girls you see there are frightfully common."

He could not bring himself to ask her straight out what he feared. If it were so, let it rest unrevealed. The knowledge would make no difference to his resolution. People began to come into the cafe, shaking the wet from their shoulders; and the noise of the rain was audible above the conversation.

"I wish we could have had one fine day together," said Michael regretfully. "Do you remember when we used to go for long walks in the winter?"

"I must have been very fond of you," Lily laughed. "I don't think you could make me walk like that now."

"Aren't you so fond of me now?" he asked reproachfully.

"You ought to know," she whispered.